Schmap?

Schmap? Yep. It's a website. A travel website. They asked my permission to include my picture of a sign reading "Magnet Therapy Here" which was taken at the Hilo Farmer's Market. I agreed.

Here's the picture as it appeared on Flickr and Schmap (What is happening to our poor language in the name of business names which do not provoke lawsuits?)


Here's the direct link to Schmap's Hilo page. Apparently they use Flickr to find travel photos. Cheaper than hiring a professional travel photographer. They gave me credit and linked to my picture on Flickr. Thanks, Mr. & Ms. Schmap!

Confession: I Photoshopped this picture heavily. You can see why if you look at the original unretouched (but reduced in size) photo. The sun was shining through the sign and it isn't really advertising "Magnet Therapy" - although I'm guessing it once did. It really says "Parking $1" on the other side. (Click any pic to enlarge of course.)


MORE HAWAII PICTURES ON FLICKR !!!

And by the way, I've recently uploaded even more pictures I took in Hawaii to Flickr. Click here for the whole darn collection. They run the gamut; you don't know what to expect. I might add yet a few more as time goes by, but basically in my mind, this project is finished.

MORE PICTURES OF THE HILO FARMERS MARKET !!!

These will give you a better idea of what it was like. One side was fruits and vegetables, many of them familiar to me. The other side was filled with tourist crap. You'll have to imagine the intense heat and humidity on your own.




I wish I had gotten a picture of the guys dressed in full Scottish regalia (um, like, kilts) -selling traditional musical instruments of the British Isles. Click here or here for who it might have been. Maybe.



Rambutan? Thank you, no. I didn't care for them.

Visiting Hilo? We enjoyed our stay at the Bay House B & B in Hilo and dinner at Cafe Pesto.

RambuTags: Hilo Hawaii. . . Hilo Farmers Market. . . Schmap. . . Rambutan

Days of Infamy

December 7 ("a date which will live in infamy") has to move over to make room for new days of infamy. Click here for a Google search to see how the term is being used. Clearly 9/11 is in second place in the Day of Infamy pantheon. The day Gene Robinson was consecrated an Episcopal bishop is gaining ground. Clearly it's getting easier to make a day infamous than it used to be.


News reminders about the anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor reminded me that I had visited Ford Island in the middle of Pearl Harbor on our trip to Hawaii in September 2007. The NOAA ship (the Oscar Elton Sette) that Leslie traveled on was docked there. Her equipment needed to get on board. I went along as a schlepper.


Here are two composite panorama shots. The top one is looking west into Pearl Harbor from the NOAA ship. Here is a page about the attacks that happened on this side of the island. (The Arizona was on the other side.)

Below is the lab in which Leslie worked. You can see NOAA diver Amy Hall with Leslie behind her. The two panorama pictures are the same size but the harbor is big and open while the lab is small and cramped.


Ford Island is usually off-limits to the public - not that there's much to see. Visitors are ferried out to the Arizona Memorial by boat. Here's the Memorial.


Here are some of the historic buildings on Ford Island. There is a plan to restore these buildings (they need it) and make them a Pacific center for NOAA. (Click here.)





All the pictures get bigger when you click them - especially the panorama shots. Many of the pictures were taken from a moving truck.

Infamy Tags: Pearl Harbor. . . Ford Island. . . NOAA. . . Day of Infarmy

Hawaii - Buildings and Decay

I continue to post pictures from our Hawaii trip over at Flickr. Here's a link to all of them.

There's a set of panorama shots - mostly from Kiluaea volcano - stitched together with a program bundled with my new camera..

And here's a set of pictures of buildings - both from Hilo and Honolulu.


Hilo seemed like a bizarre combination of small Iowa city and lush tropical paradise. My first visual impression was of rust. The climate causes things to decay in a fashion unfamiliar to someone who has lived in an artificially irrigated desert since 1974.


Although Hilo is having a drought, an average month of rainfall there is still more than the total precipitation in Los Angeles for all of last year. When I mentioned to a local gentleman that this seemed like a good place to be in the roofing business he said "Termites are even better."

In Honolulu we stayed in just another of a zillion large tall hotels. Although I'm sure my first impression was of bluer water and whiter sand, my lasting impression of Waikiki will be of tall monotonous architecture.


Yeah, it's a beautiful view. And in an effort to share the view with as many people as they can, developers seem to have told their architects to produce lots of ticky-tacky thereby cheapening the view. Touch the sky with a grid of balconies.

I spent one morning wandering a maze of Japanese-tourist-fueled Rodeo Drives, photographing an endless geometric progression of minimalist skyscrapers. And new buildings are still going up - so the post-minimalist period may not have yet begun.


These and other pictures are in my Buildings and Decay set at Flickr.
A few of my favorites were a rusty corrugated roof at the Hilo Jail and some deco buildings in Honolulu.


Meanwhile, this trip was the first time I've traveled with an iPod. I found the experience largely wonderful. On long solitary walks (while Leslie slept or shopped or shipped out), on long airline flights with lousy movies, during interminable airport waits, or just about any other time I was alone, having a choice of my own "hand picked music" was "priceless".

I listened repeatedly to two albums which consistently fit any situation and amplified my good moods: Terry Riley's A Rainbow in Curved Air and Glenn Gould playing English Suites by J.S. Bach. Scarlatti sonatas deserve an honorable mention for breakfasting by the bay in Hilo. Music by Nancarrow and Feldman however struck out big time and have been banished from my little red Nano.

Ticky Tacky Tags: Hawaii. . . Waikiki. . . Honolulu. . . rust. . . ticky tacky. . . hotels. . . Glenn Gould. . . iPod. . . Terry Riley. . . decay. . . architectural pictures. . . high rise

Every Mixed Meters post about our trip to Hawaii.
Click picture = see it larger.

30 Second Spots - Three Pieces In The Shape Of Chowderhead's Genitalia

At least two of Mixed Meters' three readers think I'm unnaturally fixated on our dog Chowderhead's recent emasculation. (Read all about it.) My response to this criticism is ... yeah, probably.

However MM's third reader (our man at Oxford) wrote to suggest that there ought to be a Symphony for Chowderhead's Testicles. Leslie extended the suggestion: "It should be bouncy."


So, always sensitive to requests from the readership, while I was in Hawaii I wrote three 30 Second Spots intended to form a larger piece. I entitled them

Three Pieces In The Shape of Chowderhead's Genitalia.

Not a good title. (It refers to this. Another link.)

The three pieces are entitled:

1. Left Ball
2. Penis
3. Right Ball

You'll hear all three by clicking on this little MOG widget.

Meanwhile I've uploaded more of my 3000 Hawaii pictures to Flickr. Click here. They are forming themselves into thematic groups. This group contains pictures of all different varieties of signs and sculptures. For example, here are two sculptures of women:




An explanation of 30 Second Spots Be sure to read my update comment.

Dog Tags: 30 Second Spots. . . David Ocker. . . Chowderhead. . . dog balls. . . Hawaii. . . sculpture

Going To Hawaii

I read an article (like this one) about medical research showing that people who take regular vacations are healthier and live longer than people (like me) who don't. "Let's go on a vacation." I said to Leslie afterwards.

We decided to spend a week in Hawaii. Afterwards Leslie would join a cruise on the Oscar Elton Sette, a NOAA ship, and I would return home to the cats and the dog and the music copying.

The primary purpose of the cruise is to collect trash - mostly loose drift nets - from the ocean near the Northwest Hawaiian Islands Monument. Leslie was asked to go along to identify little sea critters.


Much of my vacation time involves taking pictures with my new camera. The other travelling pictures are on Flickr here. As I cull my favorite shots I'll be posting them to this page at Flickr in various categories. Check it out. I'll also post a few here as teasers.

So far I've posted pictures from the first day. It began at Los Angeles International Airport, a strange place where toilets flush themselves, bars are open all day and bookstores are crowded at 7 in the morning.

After much sitting and waiting and sitting we arrived in Hilo, Hawaii, a different sort of strange place on the Big Island. We ended the day looking east over the Pacific Ocean.

Someone (like me) who has only seen the Pacific Ocean from California might be surprised to discover himself sitting right in the middle of it looking at it from the wrong direction. They tell me that's a good reason for taking a vacation - to get a new point of view.



Travel Tags: travel. . . LAX. . . Hawaii. . . NOAA. . . Northwest Hawaiian Islands