Labor Day Holiday

No post today

On Vacation

No post today.

Strike Too

It is a bit ironic, so close to a day celebrating unions, that two unions that are very important to Hawaii's economy, are set to go on strike. I'm referring here to the International Longshore & Warehouse Union (ILWU - the dock workers that load and unload ships) and the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Local 5 (HERE - the folks that clean the rooms, prepare and serve the food, and other support services in hotels and restaurants).

Why are they especially important to our state? Almost all of the goods sold here are transported via ship. But if the dock workers don't load and unload the ships, nothing comes to or leaves here. In our era of just in time manufacturing, where very little is kept in warehouses until just before it is needed, having a shipping strike, on top of the already slow economy, is just going to make life that much more difficult and expensive.

Shortages in almost everything occurs in less than a week or two. Things such as food in general, but especially fresh vegetables, fruits, meats, and milk disappear. Then supplies of paper (including toilet paper!) run out. One hopes the two sides can come to agreement before that occurs.

As to the hotel workers, our state economy is largely based on the visitor industry. So if the hotel workers go on strike, people who can cancel in time, will do so. People planning to come here, knowing of a possible strike, will go somewhere else. Those that do come, will find an especially unsatisfying time here and probably not come back. As above, one hopes the two side can begin talks in which the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth is exchanged.

Cook of Note

A specialist, working for Bonhams Auction House, while cataloging the contents of Brancaster Hall in the UK, found a framed bill of supplies from a sea captain to the Treasury. Why would anyone frame a handwritten bill? Because it was written by famed British explorer James Cook in the 1700s. But what was of even more interest was found on the back of the frame, a letter written by Cook to the Admiralty reporting of his findings of his first visit to Australia. See the story from the auction house here.

By the way, Cook is generally listed in the history books as the "discoverer" of what he named the Sandwich Isles. My ancestors even had him over for dinner.

Magnetic Personality

One of the marvels of modern medicine is the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) system (see one history of it here and a slightly shorter explanation here).

One of its many uses is in the diagnosis of tumors of the pituitary gland in the brain. From your high school Biology 101, you may remember that the pituitary is sometimes called the "master gland" because it controls the other endocrine glands and some physical processes (see more here).

After my class tonight, I get to go to the local Kaiser Medical Center and have an MRI to check on how my pituitary looks. I apparently have very elevated levels of the cortisol hormone, which may or may not be caused by a problem in the pituitary gland. CT scans seem to have ruled out other sources of this hormone, so unless it is purely psychological, which is possible, this could be the source. I guess I will know in a few days after the results are analyzed. Stay tuned.

Aloha!

The Good News for Modern Man - A Parable

In life there are competitors and then there are everyone else. If you are the former, you live, breathe, and eat focused on one goal - winning.

Keoki was a competitor. His instrument of choice, the solo paddleboard. For the last fifteen years, Keoki trained for and entered in long distance ocean races, including the grueling 32-mile (51.5m) Kaiwi Channel. Six times. Only one of two people to have accomplished that.

For Keoki, there is only one way to train and compete - all out. In the off-season, he surfed, ran, and biked. One of his competitors described it this way: "Every training day is a race day for him. It's brutal to train with the guy, it really is."

This past Sunday, Keoki was where he usually was, on the ocean competing. In this case, it was the "Haleiwa Joe's Paddleboard Race" on the North Shore of O'ahu. About 10 minutes into the race, Keoki decided to take a more outside track, farther from the shore than the others. He doesn't know why he took that route that day, but he did.

So, while all the other competitors took the inside, near to the shore, Keoki is about half-a-mile out paddling strong and true off Waimea Bay. In fact, he thinks he's in first place at that point.

But it's here that he sees something off in the distance. At first he can't make it out as the waves reveal and then hide whatever it is. All his training is telling him to focus, ignore it, and keep paddling because he's in first and he is a competitor.

But whatever it is, it looks familiar. All of a sudden he recognizes the object as a hand weakly waving to him. The hand of a diver in trouble. A diver so weakened by fighting the strong currents that she can barely lift her hand.

Keoki immediately forgets the race, changes direction and charges towards the woman, churning the sea with the power of his strokes. As he gets near she whispers; "Help. Help me please." And then falls silent, too exhausted to say more. Keoki dives into the water and is immediately buffeted by the waves. But it doesn't matter, because Keoki is a competitor, and he is focused on one thing. He swiftly reaches her and gently lifts the almost lifeless body out of the water and onto his board, while staying in the ocean himself to steady the board.

There he stays, watching wistfully as his competitors go on past, until life guards, who had been searching for the diver, came upon them and took her to shore. With the stricken diver in good hands, Keoki returns to finish the race. Which he does, coming in the middle of the pack, having been so far ahead of anyone else in the beginning.

Competitors always finish what they start, even if they have to take a detour every once in awhile. But it's good to know that there are people, like Keoki, who know some things are more important that competitions.

Aloha!

Short Shrift Mode

I have an early morning meeting today, class this afternoon, and a bunch of work in between so I gotta go. I'll leave you with this:

Why did the chicken cross the road?

Plato

For the greater good.

Karl Marx

It was a historical inevitability.

Machiavelli

So that its subjects will view it with admiration, as a chicken which has the daring and courage to boldly cross the road, but also with fear, for whom among them has the strength to contend with such a paragon of avian virtue? In such a manner is the princely chicken's dominion maintained.

Hippocrates

Because of an excess of light pink gooey stuff in its pancreas.

Jacques Derrida

Any number of contending discourses may be discovered within the act of the chicken crossing the road, and each interpretation is equally valid as the authorial intent can never be discerned, because structuralism is dead.

Noam Chomsky

The chicken didn't exactly cross the road. As of 1994, something like 99.8% of all US chickens reaching maturity that year had spent 82% of their lives in confinement. The living conditions in most chicken coops break every international law ever written, and some, particularly the ones for chickens bound for slaughter, border on inhumane. My point is, they had no chance to cross the road (unless you count the ride to the supermarket). Even if one or two have crossed roads for whatever reason, most never get a chance. Of course, this is not what we are told. Instead, we see chickens happily dancing around on Sesame Street and Foster Farms commercials where chickens are not only crossing roads, but driving trucks (incidentally, Foster Farms is owned by the same people who own the Foster Freeze chain, a subsidiary of the dairy industry). Anyway, ... (Chomsky continues for 32 pages. For the full text of his answer, contact Odonian Press)

Thomas de Torquemada

Give me ten minutes with the chicken and I'll find out.

Timothy Leary

Because that's the only kind of trip the Establishment would let it take.

Douglas Adams

Forty-two.

Nietzsche

Because if you gaze too long across the road, the road gazes also across you.

Oliver North

National Security was at stake.

B.F. Skinner

Because the external influences which had pervaded its sensorium from birth had caused it to develop in such a fashion that it would tend to cross roads, even while believing these actions to be of its own free will.

Carl Jung

The confluence of events in the cultural gestalt necessitated that individual chickens cross roads at this historical juncture, and therefore synchronicitously brought such occurrences into being.

Jean-Paul Sartre

In order to act in good faith and be true to itself, the chicken found it necessary to cross the road.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

The possibility of crossing was encoded into the objects chicken and road, and circumstances came into being which caused the actualization of this potential occurrence.

Albert Einstein

Whether the chicken crossed the road or the road crossed the chicken depends upon your frame of reference.

Aristotle

To actualize its potential.

Buddha

If you ask this question, you deny your own chicken-nature.

Howard Cosell

It may very well have been one of the most astonishing events to grace the annals of history. An historic, unprecedented avian biped with the temerity to attempt such an Herculean achievement formerly relegated to homo sapien pedestrians is truly a remarkable occurrence.

Salvador Dali

The Fish.

Darwin

It was the logical next step after coming down from the trees.

Emily Dickinson

Because it could not stop for death.

Epicurus

For fun.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

It didn't cross the road; it transcended it.

Johann Friedrich von Goethe

The eternal hen-principle made it do it.

Ernest Hemingway

To die. In the rain.

Werner Heisenberg

We are not sure which side of the road the chicken was on, but it was moving very fast.

David Hume

Out of custom and habit.

Saddam Hussein

This was an unprovoked act of rebellion and we were quite justified in dropping 50 tons of nerve gas on it.

Jack Nicholson

'Cause it (censored) wanted to. That's the (censored) reason.

Pyrrho the Skeptic

What road?

Ronald Reagan

I forget.

John Sununu

The Air Force was only too happy to provide the transportation, so quite understandably the chicken availed himself of the opportunity.

The Sphinx

You tell me.

Henry David Thoreau

To live deliberately ... and suck all the marrow out of life.

Mark Twain

The news of its crossing has been greatly exaggerated.

Katherine McKinnon

Because, in this patriarchal state, for the last four centuries, men have applied their principles of justice in determining how chickens should be cared for, their language has demeaned the identity of the chicken, their technology and trucks have decided how and where chickens will be distributed, their science has become the basis for what chickens eat, their sense of humor has provided the framework for this joke, their art and film have given us our perception of chicken life, their lust for flesh has has made the chicken the most consumed animal in the US, and their legal system has left the chicken with no other recourse.

Stephen Jay Gould

It is possible that there is a sociobiological explanation for it, but we have been deluged in recent years with sociobiological stories despite the fact that we have little direct evidence about the genetics of behavior, and we do not know how to obtain it for the specific behaviors that figure most prominently in sociobiological speculation.

Joseph Stalin

I don't care. Catch it. I need its eggs to make my omlette.

Malcolm X

It was coming home to roost.

Have a Great Weekend Everyone - Aloha!