Honolulu Lite
‘Miscellany Monday’
clears the decksI should start officially calling this day's column "Miscellany Monday" since it seems to be the day that I clear my desk of all the random news clips, notes scribbled on cocktail napkins, wayward e-mails and other scraps of intellectual impedimenta that accumulate throughout the previous week. These are things I want to write about that can't quite carry an entire column.
For instance, I have here an e-mail from someone named "Andy, a fair dinkum Aussie" telling me that ostriches live in Africa, not Australia. Why Andy feels I need to know this I cannot guess. I suspect that I must have written something sometime back suggesting that ostriches come from Australia, but I have no idea why I would do that. And anyone familiar with my expertise in both geography and ornithology would take anything I say regarding birds and their homelands with a grain of salt.
I was chastised by a reader once for saying that there were penguins in the Arctic. It turns out that they only live in the Antarctic, which to me seems just wrong. Cold is cold. Penguins are fully capable of living in the Arctic if they want to. I'll bet it has something to do with transportation costs.
As far as ostriches go, if they don't live in Australia, they should. Australia's the land of weird-looking animals like koalabats and kinkabears and platypups and wompweasles. Ostriches belong there, if only to keep the emus on their toes, or claws or whatever the hell birds the size of refrigerators have on the end of their legs.
>> I keep ripping out the letters to the editors and news stories concerning the controversy over how to measure the height of a wave. When it comes to wave heights, there really are only two: fun size and scary. But surfers and oceanographers are battling to come up with a standard way of determining the size of a surging mass of water that, depending on the contour of the ocean floor, can be 5 feet one second and lurch up to 10 feet high a second later.
Hawaii surfers always say waves are smaller than they are. That's because Hawaii surfers have a history of being, what's the word? Oh yeah, "argumentative." Some people measure a wave from the back instead of the size of its face. That seems just silly. That's like measuring the backside of an avalanche. Who cares how big the back of an avalanche is? It's the front part that's going to kill you. Ditto waves. If you have to paddle up 15 feet of vertical water to save your butt from being smashed into a reef, that's a 15-foot wave, brah. I don't care how big it looks to the guy safely on the backside.
>> One last post-election observation: Want to know which losing candidate is not planning to ever run again for office? It's whoever doesn't go around the island and pick up all of his or her signs. It's also a handy way to know whom to charge with littering.
Charles Memminger, winner of National Society of Newspaper Columnists awards, appears Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. E-mail cmemminger@starbulletin.com