Also known as Pancake Day, but in Hawaii, we eat malasadas.
Showing posts with label holidays. Show all posts
Showing posts with label holidays. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 28, 2017
Friday, January 06, 2017
Monday, May 30, 2016
Friday, April 22, 2016
Saturday, March 26, 2016
Happy Easter!
I'll be busy today and tomorrow preparing for and celebrating Easter.
Easter Dates from 1600 to 2099.
Easter parade.
Easter Dates from 1600 to 2099.
Easter parade.
Friday, January 01, 2016
Happy New Year!
Last night's New Year's party: lots of firecrackers and watching lots of aerial fireworks. I went home at 12:45, went to bed at 1:30, and awoke at 8:30. More later.
Thursday, December 31, 2015
Saturday, November 28, 2015
Post-Thanksgiving
Yesterday I visited with a friend who lives down the road. She has cleared the living room in preparation for Christmas. She's been going through papers, etc. and it's far from finished. Likewise, I plan to go through my stuff, like books, and dispose of things. There's a great used-book store off Kanoelehua that takes books, CDs, and DVDs for store credit. This will be a continuing process which I'll start in earnest after the New Year.
Thanksgiving itself was relatively quiet and low-key. I dozed off mid-afternoon for a few hours, in part because the house was warmed up with the roasting of the turkey.
Thanksgiving itself was relatively quiet and low-key. I dozed off mid-afternoon for a few hours, in part because the house was warmed up with the roasting of the turkey.
Wednesday, November 25, 2015
Happy Thanksgiving
So much to do and ponder. For today and tomorrow, it's about Thanksgiving. Happy Thanksgiving to you, your family, and friends. One thing I'm thankful for is the respite from rain we've enjoyed the past two days. And the rainfall we've had this year to date (120.98 inches as of 1 p.m. yesterday) comes up short to the 200-plus inches we had twenty-five years ago. I'm also thankful I went to college when and where I did.
Friday, October 30, 2015
Sunday, May 10, 2015
Happy Mother's Day
An interview with Samuel Fussell, author of Muscle, and son of Paul.
I'm trying to find two poems on mothers, one by Audre Lorde and the other by Juliet Kono.
I'm trying to find two poems on mothers, one by Audre Lorde and the other by Juliet Kono.
Wednesday, December 31, 2014
Happy New Year
A headline and lead of an article I saw online, with the names redacted:
[Young female celebrity] Rocks Skimpy Bikini in Dubai with [another young female celebrity] and [another yfc or socialite I've never heard of]
Oh, to be on this A-list New Year's vacation! [YFC] is currently in Dubai, where's she set to ring in the New Year ...
No thanks. I'm at home watching the free preview of NGN (Nippon Golden Network), which our cable company offers every New Year's. I had some maki sushi and tempura from Kawamoto's. Later, I'll watch more NGN, and maybe the New Year's celebration from Times Square.
[Young female celebrity] Rocks Skimpy Bikini in Dubai with [another young female celebrity] and [another yfc or socialite I've never heard of]
Oh, to be on this A-list New Year's vacation! [YFC] is currently in Dubai, where's she set to ring in the New Year ...
No thanks. I'm at home watching the free preview of NGN (Nippon Golden Network), which our cable company offers every New Year's. I had some maki sushi and tempura from Kawamoto's. Later, I'll watch more NGN, and maybe the New Year's celebration from Times Square.
Thursday, July 03, 2014
Monday, March 17, 2014
Monday, December 02, 2013
Saturday, May 04, 2013
A Belated Acknowledgment of May Day (a.k.a Lei Day)
May Day is observed the world over in various ways. In Hawaii it's known as Lei Day and was celebrated with pageants. I don't know if schools observe it the same way they did when I went to school, but it was a huge deal, particularly in elementary school (e.g., Keaukaha in the early-to-mid-1980s).
Here's an article on a Lei Day pageant held in Hilo a few years ago.
General busyness and an illness in the family have precluded me from actually observing May Day this year (no lei, no wearing an aloha shirt), but I must acknowledge it, and sometime I plan to look for photos of old May Days, and share them.
Here's an article on a Lei Day pageant held in Hilo a few years ago.
General busyness and an illness in the family have precluded me from actually observing May Day this year (no lei, no wearing an aloha shirt), but I must acknowledge it, and sometime I plan to look for photos of old May Days, and share them.
Tuesday, January 08, 2013
Monday, December 24, 2012
Kunstler: In the Shadow of Christmas
http://kunstler.com/blog/2012/12/in-the-shadow-of-christmas.html
In the Shadow of Christmas
By James Howard Kunstler
on December 24, 2012 9:05 AM
Do you know why scenes or even just shots of freeways so seldom appear in the movies we watch? Because they are so depressing that nobody can stand to see them. The jolts of terror that you get in a horror movie at least inform you that you're alive, but the sight of a freeway only reminds you of what it's like to be dead.
By extension, the true condition of the USA is too depressing to think about, and that's largely the reason for our political paralysis. The "fiscal cliff" is only one step on a stairway to a different disposition of things, a world made by hand, in which we will no longer be prisoners of the freeway or hostages of the WalMart corporation, and I'm in favor of hastening the journey to get there rather than waste what remains of our wealth and spirits in futile rear-guard actions to stay where we are. There may be fewer frenzied days of Christmas shopping in that future world, but the company will be better, and the music will include the sound of your own voice.
It's not that hard to imagine where history is taking us, if you accept the fact that it means a very different shape and texture of daily life. For instance: the jobs problem. We seem disappointed that none of our policy dodges -- money-printing, stimulus packages, bailouts, wars -- can bring back the working-stiff paradise of 1965 in which assembly line workers made as much money as tenured college professors and a year at the State U cost $500.
I don't happen to be a political conservative in the standard sense, but the right-wingers have a point when they say there are a lot of idle people out there who can't be supported forever by transfer payments. A lot of positions will be opening up in agriculture, but not in the way it is practiced today. The Agri-biz model of food production is not going to be operating much longer. We're on the verge of a world food crisis that will provoke a complete revolution in farming, from the giant scale to the small and local scale, from industry to husbandry, from automation to loving care. The transition might not be a smooth one, since it entails questions of land ownership that, historically, get settled by political upheavals. But eventually we'll get to that place of social re-set and there will be plenty of work for even the partially able-bodied. Hard to imagine, I know.
The future is quite the opposite of the robotic wet dream currently being sold out of the corporate propaganda mills. It's much more likely that human labor (and human attention!) will be needed in millions of local economic niches, since rebuilding local economies is at the heart of that future. This will be true in the activities that support local agriculture, but also in rebuilding Main Street commercial networks, the physical reconstruction of towns and neighborhoods to replace failed suburbs and failed giant metroplex cities, in transportation, education, and medicine, and in running households that are organized differently than today's familiar McHouses.
Right now the political process is resisting any effort to imagine that future, the aforementioned right-wingers most of all, despite their recognition of the transfer payment trap. More disturbing, though, is the likely apprehension by those in authority that the current arrangement of things is dangerously fragile. They are hostages to their own unwillingness to imagine living differently. So, doing nothing to upset the current system of organized complexity seems like the only safe option.
These implacable forces of history cannot be held back forever and will only move toward greater criticality in 2013. My annual forecast on these questions will come out next week in this space. Meantime, find whatever joy you can in the frantic exertions of Christmas, as practiced today, mostly on the freeway, coming and going to and from the WalMart or Target or TJ Max -- and if you happen to be on the path to living differently tell us what your Christmas is like in the comments roll.
In the Shadow of Christmas
By James Howard Kunstler
on December 24, 2012 9:05 AM
Do you know why scenes or even just shots of freeways so seldom appear in the movies we watch? Because they are so depressing that nobody can stand to see them. The jolts of terror that you get in a horror movie at least inform you that you're alive, but the sight of a freeway only reminds you of what it's like to be dead.
By extension, the true condition of the USA is too depressing to think about, and that's largely the reason for our political paralysis. The "fiscal cliff" is only one step on a stairway to a different disposition of things, a world made by hand, in which we will no longer be prisoners of the freeway or hostages of the WalMart corporation, and I'm in favor of hastening the journey to get there rather than waste what remains of our wealth and spirits in futile rear-guard actions to stay where we are. There may be fewer frenzied days of Christmas shopping in that future world, but the company will be better, and the music will include the sound of your own voice.
It's not that hard to imagine where history is taking us, if you accept the fact that it means a very different shape and texture of daily life. For instance: the jobs problem. We seem disappointed that none of our policy dodges -- money-printing, stimulus packages, bailouts, wars -- can bring back the working-stiff paradise of 1965 in which assembly line workers made as much money as tenured college professors and a year at the State U cost $500.
I don't happen to be a political conservative in the standard sense, but the right-wingers have a point when they say there are a lot of idle people out there who can't be supported forever by transfer payments. A lot of positions will be opening up in agriculture, but not in the way it is practiced today. The Agri-biz model of food production is not going to be operating much longer. We're on the verge of a world food crisis that will provoke a complete revolution in farming, from the giant scale to the small and local scale, from industry to husbandry, from automation to loving care. The transition might not be a smooth one, since it entails questions of land ownership that, historically, get settled by political upheavals. But eventually we'll get to that place of social re-set and there will be plenty of work for even the partially able-bodied. Hard to imagine, I know.
The future is quite the opposite of the robotic wet dream currently being sold out of the corporate propaganda mills. It's much more likely that human labor (and human attention!) will be needed in millions of local economic niches, since rebuilding local economies is at the heart of that future. This will be true in the activities that support local agriculture, but also in rebuilding Main Street commercial networks, the physical reconstruction of towns and neighborhoods to replace failed suburbs and failed giant metroplex cities, in transportation, education, and medicine, and in running households that are organized differently than today's familiar McHouses.
Right now the political process is resisting any effort to imagine that future, the aforementioned right-wingers most of all, despite their recognition of the transfer payment trap. More disturbing, though, is the likely apprehension by those in authority that the current arrangement of things is dangerously fragile. They are hostages to their own unwillingness to imagine living differently. So, doing nothing to upset the current system of organized complexity seems like the only safe option.
These implacable forces of history cannot be held back forever and will only move toward greater criticality in 2013. My annual forecast on these questions will come out next week in this space. Meantime, find whatever joy you can in the frantic exertions of Christmas, as practiced today, mostly on the freeway, coming and going to and from the WalMart or Target or TJ Max -- and if you happen to be on the path to living differently tell us what your Christmas is like in the comments roll.
Wednesday, December 12, 2012
Friday, November 23, 2012
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