Pithy Tee-Shirts

The people who write tee-shirt copy are just so clever. They have a knack of summing up our innermost thoughts or the state of the world quite succinctly, using just a few words.

Take for example the tee-shirt I saw at the “Made in Hawaii” Festival last weekend:

Not only is it good advertising (anyone who’s been to a Big Dogs store knows that canine), it makes a statement on the economy AND on marriage. Don’t you just love the sentiment?

Seeing that shirt reminded me of another one I saw on a guy who was walking around the Royal Hawaiian Shopping Center last week when I went on my monkey safari. His shirt said: Jus’ Fish. No Fight. I agree. Forget what’s bothering you and just go fishing, which, as true fishermen know, isn’t so much about catching fish, as it is … just going fishing.

And then, there’s the one I saw on a man waiting for a blood test at Diagnostic Laboratories two weeks ago when I had to drive the bunch of us for our quarterly blood-letting. His tee-shirt read: You’re Prettier When Your Mouth Is Closed. I called the wife’s attention to this one. The scratches are healing quite nicely, thank you.

Getting back to my monkey safari and my wanders around the International Market Place, I came across quite a few gift shops with tee-shirts galore. Here are a couple of my favorites:

· Don’t Steal. The Government Hates Competition

· If I Agree With You, We’d Both Be Wrong

· I Don’t Have A.D.D. It’s Just That … Oh Look! A Squirrel!

Finally, back at the “Made in Hawaii” Festival, I saw THIS one hanging on a rack, just begging to be taken home and worn:

Tee-shirts are like bumper stickers … they don’t take up much space and they can make you laugh when you least expect to.

Obama Kitsch

Kitsch … do you know what it is? It’s “excessively garish or sentimental art, usually considered in bad taste” (Princeton University).

When President Barack Obama was inaugurated, Obama kitsch erupted onto the scene like a Hawaiian volcano spewing hot lava. For you see, Mr. Obama went to school here and the people of Hawaii have claimed him as their own favorite son.

And so … they paid tribute. Heck, even I got into the game, publishing special souvenir envelopes that sold out at a collectors show last year.

But y’know, enough already. The stuff is still being made. Or at least, it’s still hanging around in the cheap-o gift shops that pepper the shopping landscape in tourist-oriented Waikiki. You can see Obama kitsch all over the place there.

I talked to the person at the store where I saw these Hawaii-themed Obama dolls, and asked if they were moving off the shelves. “Only when I dust them,” was her reply.

Apparently, store owners overestimated his popularity and stocked up on the Obama kitch. But the demand was never that great, and with the President’s popularity at a historic low, the gift shops are now stuck with lots of inventory.

Still, one of the side principles of collecting/investing is to buy what nobody wants, at cheap prices, and hope that the demand eventually goes up. Plus, if YOU like it, that’s all that counts, right?

(Giggle)

The Made in Hawaii Festival

Yesterday I did something I haven’t done in a decade and a half. I went to the Made in Hawaii Festival, the first one I’ve been to since 1995. It continues today and tomorrow, so you haven't missed it ... yet.

I vaguely remember the inaugural festival, and I have to say it sure has grown. This year, they filled up the Blaisdell Arena and the Blaisdell Exhibition Hall, leaving ample wiggle room in the aisles for lots of people.

And boy, were there a lot of people. They said in their publicity that they expected upwards of 35,000 people (mostly likely more) who are willing to shell out a miniscule admission fee of only $3. Why, the food samples alone are worth double that amount.

I’ve taken to attending events such as this in the past couple of years, since my retirement and since I’ve been blogging. It gives me something to write about – it’s fertile ground for blog post ideas.

I didn’t stay for any of the entertainment and/or cooking demonstrations, but it still took me more than an hour and a half just to navigate through the exhibits – wiggling here, side-skipping there, stopping for several minutes, detouring at times, and generally trying hard not to get stepped on.

Going to an exhibition like this one isn’t easy on the feet or the stamina. If there was a wheelchair or baby stroller in the aisle, I was the one right behind it. Good thing there were samples of all sorts of carbohydrates being offered or I would have fainted from low blood sugar. And thank God for the girls on the concourse who were giving melon samples that were cold and as refreshing as a cup of soda.

I usually stop and chat with people in booths, but at some point I was feeling woozy (all the oxygen was being sucked up by the crowd) and just wanted to get out of there.

However, when I was on my way back out, trying to negotiate my way behind some very elderly women, I heard my name being called. It was Beryl, one of my high school classmates! Hadn’t seen her since a couple of reunions ago. So we started chatting (causing a traffic jam on our side of the aisle, I’m sure), when who should appear but Iris, another classmate.

More hugs, more chatting. Good thing I didn’t decide to leave five minutes earlier or I would have missed them altogether.

Now, it would be nice to say that my car was parked nearby and I could just jump in and drive away, but I wasn’t even parked there. When I had arrived about an hour after the festival opened, the parking lot was full, and there wasn’t even any street parking for blocks.

What I had to do was drive home and ask the wife to drop me off, then come pick me up when I’d had enough and called her. And that’s what we did.

I snapped a few dozen pictures, and it wasn’t until I got back outside that I noticed a sign prohibiting photography inside the festival. Oops! I messed up, didn’t I?

Anyway, here are a few of the totally "illegal" pictures I took. At least I am able to share them with you, all made in Hawaii (products AND my photography):

Beautiful Photography

Hand-Crafted Jewelry

Beauty Products

Maui Jams and Jellies

Cupcakes, Cupcakes, Cupcakes

Spam-Flavored Macadamia Nuts

Gorgeous Colorful Lamps

People, People, and MORE People

Well, there it is. My feet hurt, my eyes are blurry, I got sunstroke waiting to be picked up afterwards, and I needed a drink of iced water badly. But I sure had fun!

(I think I’ll skip it next year.)

Early Christmas Display

I saw my first Christmas display of the year yesterday, in of all places, a hospital gift shop. Guess it’s never too early to get into the Christmas spirit.

I thought the Christmas trimming and decoration displays I saw at Sears in San Jose were up early last year (the first week in November), but this new one has that beat by a whole season. It’s still summer, and Christmas isn’t until winter, right?

The yuletide stuff is already on sale at the Kuakini Hospital gift shop. And, according to the lady there, they’ve been up for a week already. So tell me, if you have insight or a theory, why would a hospital gift shop put Christmas items up for sale so early?

Let’s see … I saw them on August 19 and if they’ve been up a week, then they’ve been there since August 12.

Holy Toledo! Or should I say, O Holy Night?

A Different Waikiki

It’s been years since I spent a half-day wandering around Waikiki, so my monkey safari yesterday was an eye-opener in more ways than one.

Summer in Honolulu is pretty hot – not so much the temperature, which was close to 90, but because it’s pretty humid (we do live in the middle of an ocean, y’know). It’s a good thing the trade winds were blowing in from the northwest or it would have been unbearable. Believe me, three hours in Waikiki takes a lot out of you.

The Royal Hawaiian Shopping Center has changed a lot. There used to be a plethora of smaller stores that carried specialty or unusual items. I bought a lot of monkey figurines in a small shop at the Diamond Head end of the center many, many moons ago.

It’s no longer there. Not surprising. But the character of the center has changed a lot. Now all you find are the high-end couture stores that you can find in any high-end cluster of shopping havens.

When I walked past the Moana Surfrider Hotel, a bedraggled tourist-looking guy with a wrinkled aloha shirt and ragged shorts stopped me and asked if he could use my cell phone.

What the hell? I told him no, and pointed to the Waikiki police substation, indicating that he could ask the cops. He didn’t like that, and walked away in a huff. Which told me he didn’t really want to just use my phone; he wanted something else as well.

The International Market Place is still there; that area hasn’t changed much, with dozens of kiosks and small gift/curio/aloha wear shops hawking stuff to the tourists. I had a good time there, chatting with the sales people and getting some first-hand commentary on how the tourism economy is doing these days.

The old Waikiki Theater – where my dorm-mates and I used to take in the first-run blockbuster movies in the mid-60s – was closed many years ago, and has been converted into commercial use.

No longer can tourists sit in the huge air-conditioned cavern before a large screen and contemplate the coconut and banana trees that adorned the sides of the auditorium.

Ah well … the more things change, the more today will seem like tomorrow’s yesterday.

(Oh, the monkeys … I found two.)

On Reading

During the past few weeks, I’ve gotten back into the habit of reading regularly, at least an hour each afternoon sitting outside in the shade.

Back in the day, reading trashy horror novels and contemporary Cold War spy and war stories were a regular part of my routine. Then I got interested in other stuff and reading took a back seat.

Recently, however, I’ve been seriously chopping into my dusty collection of unread paperbacks, as well as hard covers that I’ve bought at huge discounts over the past couple of years. I still haven’t cracked open my Tolkien Lord of the Rings Trilogy to re-read yet, but I’m working up to it.

I’ve discovered something. It gets more and more difficult to concentrate on the story when there are distractions – like the wife jabbering away about something obviously important to her that she wants to get off her chest, but which is absolutely of no interest to me.

Also, I’ve noticed that many times I’ll read a paragraph with no clear understanding of what I just read. My scholarly observation about this is: You know you’re getting old when your reading is too fast for your remembering.

Laugh of the Day

Regis Philbin hit the “On” switch of my giggle box this morning when he asked his guest co-host Jayde Donovan, “Do you have a text machine?”

Hey Regis, it’s called a “mobile phone.”

Dumb, Dumb, Dumb!

Imagine this.

You work at a bank and you get a phone call that goes something like this: “You dirdy rats, rippin’ off people with stinkin’ high interest! Who ya think you are anyway? We’re coming over in about 10 minutes and you’d better have a bag of money waiting for us – $100,000 in large bills, and NO DYE PACK! Ya hear me? NO DYE PACK!”

Well, you’d call the police, right? Right!

Albert Bailey, 27, and his 16-year-old buddy arrived at the People’s United Bank in Fairfield, Connecticut, where a teller gave them the money sack. When they got back outside, the police were waiting for them and arrested the two dorks in the parking lot.

Bailey dropped the bag and guess what? There WAS a dye pack inside and it exploded. And, to add another insult, the bag only contained $900, not the $100,000 they had demanded.

The dumb duo was charged with first-degree robbery. That’s a double-dip for Bailey, who was on probation for a previous bank heist.

According to Fairfield Police Sgt. James Perez, the suspects were “not too bright.” Really? I never would-a guessed.

I kid you not!

Shirokiya’s Food Court

Whenever we’re at Ala Moana Center, we usually check out Shirokiya department store's food court.

Without question, it’s the busiest area there, offering everything from fresh vegetables flown in from Japan to kitchen implements, a wide variety of tsukemono (pickled vegetables), deep-fried tempura, bread products, castellan cakes and other pastries, even local products.

They sell sushi, sweet potatoes, musubi (rice balls), chicken prepared in a variety of ways, noodles, mocha ice cream, Korean foods (e.g. kim chee, bentos), Chinese bentos, cookies and desserts.

Prepackaged snacks from Japan stack the shelves to the left of the escalator, along with Japanese serving dishes, sake sets and sweets.

Here’s a sampling:

Kim Chee

Packaged Vegetables

Vegetable and Shrimp Tempura

Picked Vegetables

Japanese/Chinese Bentos

Tea Pots

Imported Sake

Now … all I need is a bowl of steaming hot rice, some hot green tea, and a pair of chopsticks (all of which you can find at Shirokiya, by the way).

And no, they’re not paying me to post this. I just like going there.

A Triple Grumpy Day

You know how some days you just feel grumpy from the moment you wake up? That’s today. It’s a triple grumpy day for me.

First: I’m sick and tired of people who are making a hero of Steven Slater. You know, the flight attendant who lost his cool, swore over the intercom on a Jet Blue flight, grabbed two beers, deployed the emergency slide and beat a hasty retreat?

Yeah. That kook. Maybe he deserved to flip his lid that way, but that doesn’t make him a hero. Maybe what he did touched an “I’m mad as hell and I’m not taking it anymore” nerve inside some of us.

So what? He’s a terrible employee. Well, ex-employee. And you know what? He has the chutzpah to want his job back.

Second: President Obama just came out in support of the planned mosque near Ground Zero. He says it’s the American way, and that constitutionally, they have a right to do that. Freedom of religion and all that.

Fine. They have a right to build there. Nothing illegal about that.

But … just because you have the right to do something, doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do. Religious freedom does not mean clambering all over injured parties’ feelings. It’s just plain insensitive.

Third: I had plans for today, to finally get off by myself and do something. But now I can’t because of “duties.”

The wife … she keeps me grounded. Just this morning, she said … “You’re grounded.”

Does that add up to three? Yep. I am so looking forward to my week away from it all later this mornth.

Interesting Hairdo

Far be it from me to make fun of a person’s hair.

In my day I went from greasy side-swept back duck-tail in my teens to semi-bouffant long sideburns in my early professional life. Then when I got back to Hawaii, my hair curled at the back of my neck. Today, it’s a “1½” all around. As a friend calls it, a “basketball head.”

But I gotta say, the hairdo being sported by this young man working at the cash register of a local Jamba Juice really caught my eye. So I had to take a pic of it.

If I squint my eyes, his visor and hair kind of blend together and look like the silhouette profile of a … rooster. Bless his little heart.

Don’tcha think?