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Coconut Wireless
This Week in Review
WEDNESDAY, March 22
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March 30, 2006
Angus McKelvey is running for the 10th District
state representative seat, which lords over the Westside. As a
Democrat. And why shouldn't he? After all, he's a contributing writer
at the Lahaina News. And he's married to Democrat Greta McKelvey, who
got badly beaten by political virgin Kam Tanaka in the 2004 race for
the 10th District seat. And his mother is Joan McKelvey, Lahaina News
founder and former campaign manager to Republican Brian Blundell, who
served a number of years as 10th District Representative until his 2004
arrest for his "inappropriate touching" of an undercover vice cop in a
Honolulu park men's room. He's running against Kay Ghean—former chair
of the Maui County Republican Party—but with credentials like that, how
can McKelvey lose?
THURSDAY, March 23
Oh boy! The Simon Cowell-produced American Inventor debuted tonight
on ABC! Think American Idol, only more interesting. Instead of singing
before a panel of judges the people go on stage and peddle their
inventions to four "experts." Get it? Good. Anyway, the first—the very,
very first—of what should be long line of inventors to take the stage
tonight was none other than Hawai'i's own Brian Conant, inventor of the
Flatulence Deodorizer, known throughout the civilized world—and certain
counties of Alabama—as the Flat D. Reviewed by fearless reporter
Christy Miles in Maui Time's March 13, 2003 issue, The Flat D is a thin
pad that fits inside your underwear and takes away pretty much all the
odor that accompanies flatulence. It truly is American genius at its
best—yet all four judges rejected it! And not because—as Miles
discovered—girls who wish to use it have to wear granny panties instead
of their breezier thongs. Rather, the judges felt that it's the sound
of flatulence, rather than its scent, that provokes the most
embarrassment. And on that point they're correct. Still, it's hard to
turn your nose up at a device that does indeed keep your farts from
smelling.
FRIDAY, March 24
Today The Maui News runs a classic story on how Lt. Governor James
"Duke" Aiona wants anti-drug forces to stop focusing so much on Ice and
meth and return to combating so-called "gateway drugs" like "alcohol
and marijuana." The paper seems to swallow this whole and provides no
context as to whether Aiona knows what he's talking about. To be
honest, this is one of those issues where medical studies are
ambiguous. But in a brief, completely casual bit of research, I was
able to find this sentence from a Dec. 4, 2002 article on WebMD.com:
"Approximately 70 million Americans have tried marijuana, and nearly
nine in 10 never go on to use cocaine or other drugs, according to
federal statistics." Granted, that's from three years ago, but still—if
the reefer is a "gateway," then very few people who get to it end up
walking through.
SATURDAY, March 25
So Thursday night I'm having a beer with some friends and someone
says they've just announced a Tornado Watch for Maui. That spurs a huge
argument—the details I'll spare you—about whether a Watch is worse than
a Warning, or vice versa. Anyway, after a tornado never hit either my
friends, hang-out or me, I forgot about the whole thing—until this
morning, when I read in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin that a tornado
slammed into a construction office trailer and some power lines on the
island of Lanai at approximately 9:35 p.m. Thursday. The tornado only
ranked zero on the Fujita Scale of zero to five so it only did about
$50,000 worth of damage. But it was sufficient to get retired LC Board
of Adjudication member, future Liquor Commissioner and Lanai resident
Ron McOmber's name in the paper describing the damage wrought by the
twister. "It just destroyed it and scattered it all over the place," he
told the Star-Bulletin. Yeah, they'll do that.
SUNDAY, March 26
Tornadoes everywhere. Go figure.
MONDAY, March 27
Wheeling, West Virginia-based Ogden Newspaper Group, a right-wing
company that owns every paper on Maui except us—The Maui News, Maui
Weekly, Lahaina News and Haleakala Times—has made yet another ethically
appalling decision to pay money to someone it's covering. Most
newspapers just cover events that are newsworthy. They don't go out and
pay subjects to create events that they then write about. Most
journalists consider that blatantly unethical, but Ogden's different.
Back in August, 2005, The Maui News foot the bill when former Iraqi
prisoner of war Jessica Lynch and two of her girlfriends visited Maui,
then published an embarrassingly lavish story on her (see Maui Time's
"Outside the Boundaries," Aug. 25, 2005 for more on why this was
journalistically unethical). But that was nothing compared to what the
home office can do. On March 22 of this year, Ogden helped pay
President George W. Bush's expenses when he visited Wheeling to press
the flesh and hold one of his town hall meetings. "We are extremely
pleased to have the president in Wheeling again, and we are pleased to
help underwrite the expenses." Ogden president and CEO Robert Nutting
said in one of the numerous stories glorifying the visit that appeared
in the Ogden-owned Wheeling News-Register. The mind naturally
gravitates to a single question: why the hell does the President of the
United States of America need Ogden to help pay his expenses while,
ostensibly, just performing his duties as president? Not surprisingly,
one nationally recognized media expert has already condemned Ogden's
outrageous behavior. "What a journalistic blunder," Washington Post
media critic Howard Kurtz said in an online chat this morning. "Why
compromise yourself in that fashion when it's a big local story that
your reporters will have to cover?"
TUESDAY, March 28
So pro-immigration forces are now beating on U.S. Congressman and
Senate candidate Ed Case (D, Technically) for his support of a
draconian House of Representatives bill that would hammer every illegal
immigrant, including "undocumented alien workers." Isn't it beautiful
when haoles in Hawai'i complain about "illegal" immigration?
Anthony Pignataro was falling down on basketball courts and crying
like a little girl when Gonzaga forward Adam Morrison was still in
diapers. MTW
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