From No Confidence:

America has just experienced a catastrophic event. An event that makes September 11th look like a lost library book. A major American city is gone. GONE. New Orleans as an inhabitable area is no more..

Now…explain to me how the Dow closes UP today. Damn near close to triple digit range. Somebody please explain this to me, because I can’t decide whether to be amazed, or dumbfounded, or repulsed by it.

I wish I had an answer. New Orleans is quite literally a toilet bowl right now. All we can do is pray and hope things get better.

Unbelievable.

No other word can describe what happened on the Gulf Coast.

Destruction not even Osama bin Laden could pull off even in his wildest dreams.

In New Orleans, the city that in life invited its visitors to laissez les bons temps rouler, it’s ironic that most of the damage that was caused by Hurricane Katrina was caused not by the wind as the storm passed through, but by the sheer amount of water that was left behind. Then, when the levee keeping Lake Pontchartrain from the city gave way…

A close friend of mine who lives just one block from Kawainui Marsh had her house flooded out back in the 1988 New Year’s Flood, which also overran a levee. And just this October a couple of church members who were renting out our church’s parsonage got caught in the Manoa flood. Mud and water everywhere, so we heard. Messes that you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy. No wonder God chose to flood the earth as punishment, rather than subject it to fire or high winds.

Which is why, thinking that over 80% of a city that once held nearly half a million people is now under water…

Les bons temps ne roulent pas maintenant.

Perhaps New Orleans should now be called Atlantis. Mind boggling. The Louisiana Superdome, sans a few pieces of roof, withstood the wind and debris, but it was no match for millions of gallons of Lake Pontchartrain.

Now there is a mandatory evacuation for the city, even from the refuges that were there. New Orleans, for all intents and purposes, has become a ghost town.

Donate to the Red Cross to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina.

Alchera Project, Project 36, Option 2. Do a little bit of research on the year you were born–find out things like inventions, popular movies and entertainers, important events, et cetera–and write a poem dedicated to your birth and include things you learned about your year of birth.

Nixon visits China red,
Munich games, Israelis dead,
Argentines choose Juan Peron,
Airports are a gun-free zone.

Fischer dominates in chess,
Vietnam’s an awful mess,
U.S. troops are pulling back,
On Kitty Hawk fight white and black.

Agnes’ fury hits the beach
Feminists extend their reach,
Wallace falls at point-blank range,
All in all, a year of change.

Nixon tops McGovern’s vote,
Setting stage for old Deep Throat.
Crazy world is tossed and torn.
In this tumult, I was born.

(thanks to Wikipedia)

And we thought it was ridiculous when an Army general in Iraq decided to clamp down on the “shaka” sign between Hawaii soldiers.

Apparently our brothers down under are dealing with similar circumstances. Say the word “Australia” and what probably comes to mind is the word, “mate.” It’s so much a part of Australian national identity, and the main part of exported Australian culture.

So you can imagine the uproar when security guards at the Australian parliament were prohibited from using “mate” when greeting visitors. Apparently that didn’t sit well with the Prime Minister, who had the order rescinded.

What’s next? Banning Southerners from saying, “y’all”?

Sorry I haven’t been keeping up here, but I’ve been putting some time and energy into jump starting my TNT blog.

In any case…most of us know that chemotherapy is a staple in cancer treatment. But do you know when it was first administered? The answer, and what they first used back then, may surprise you.

Makes you think about how far medical science has advanced.

Base training is going well…I’m up to 9 miles on my long run. This past week felt pretty good going from Kapiolani Park to Kahala Mall and back. Still gotta work on those hills, but it’ll come.

However, I’m about to do something that’s sure to get me committed to a sanitarium somewhere. As if the brutality of marathon training weren’t enough (and I know how tough it is), I’m also going to add on the challenge of raising money for charity.

In particular, I’m going to take part in the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society’s Team In Training program. It’s one of their major fundraising initiatives, and has become the largest endurance sport training program in the world.

As a member of TnT, I’ll be getting coaching, training advice, and support every step along the way, while in return I raise money for the Society’s work.

Please make a donation, and help bring blood-related cancers to an end and improve the lives of people who suffer from them.

I’ve also set up a sister blog for regular updates on my training and fundraising.

Thanks for your support!

Goodbye, Peter. We’ll miss you.

My friend is a technical director at KITV News, so I’m sure he feels a sort of kinship with the anchorman that precedes his 6:00 newscast. And maybe the kinship I feel was the fact that we share a birthday.

What I remember about Peter Jennings is his demeanor. His warm Canadian accent projecting a feeling of calm, cool, collected.
(more…)

Lately I’ve been a late adopter of new technology. Just a year ago, I had an old Pentium III computer with a dial-up modem. Since then, I’ve gotten DSL and retired the old P3 in favor of a new Pentium D Media Center.

Recently, I talked about digital downloads and my feelings about them. I said then I hadn’t used them very much because, well, I didn’t have the state-of-the-art apparatus needed to really appreciate them. I’ve had a four-year old 128MB Rio back when MP3s were pioneering technology. Then came Apple and its iPod, which has become the killer peripheral for digital music.

Most of my friends have jumped on the iPod bandwagon, but back then my friends would give me heat for being a person working in IT who only had dial-up. Never mind about digital music. I still had misgivings about digital music, and as I say in a previous entry, I still do.
(more…)

…Kamehameha Schools is in the news yet again. This out of San Francisco and the 9th Circuit:

A federal appeals court ruled today that Kamehameha Schools’ Hawaiians-only admission policy is based on race, overturning a federal judge’s ruling allowing the school to refuse to admit a non-Hawaiian student.

Ouch. That’s gotta hurt, but not as much as the firestorm that will most certainly come. Film at 10.

UPDATE 10:59am HST: A link to the court’s opinion (Adobe Reader required). Via the Legal Reader.

I’ve been falling behind on my blog lately, but it’s really good to read something that provides some much needed perspective on blogging. (Via Linkmeister)