Honolulu Lite
Humane Society’s logic
doggone oddAlo-Ha Friday
After you've basked in the light of world attention, leading an effort to save a little dog lost at sea on an abandoned ship, it's apparently hard to focus on the mundane problems of home-grown barking dogs.The Hawaiian Humane Society has announced it will refer all barking-dog nuisance calls to the police because the city did not give it the $80,000 it wanted (on top of its $1.6 million yearly allotment) to continue handling hundreds of barking-dog complaints.
The Humane Society spent $50,000 in donations to hunt for the dog stranded at sea on the Chinese tanker just months ago. Fifty grand. One dog.
The message seems to be that unless any of those hundreds of barking dogs complained of are on a boat, they're just not that important.
Now the news:
Exhibit comes up short
BRUSSELS (Reuters) >> An exhibit featuring singing and dancing pygmies in a small Belgian town has enraged African immigrants. Ten pygmies were flown from Cameroon by a man claiming he is only trying to raise people's awareness of the plight of pygmies.(The plight of pygmies appears to be that they are plucked from their villages and then be made to sing and dance in small Belgian towns.)
A matinee of manatees
MIAMI (Reuters) >> Six endangered manatees beached themselves in Florida, but wildlife agents assured would-be rescuers the sea cows were not stranded, but just relaxing on the shore.(We, too, often have a difficult time at the beach. Every time we attempt to sun in the sand, people push us back into the water.)
Guns and God don't mix
GODLEY, Texas (Reuters) >> An argument over who was going to heaven and who was going to hell ended with one Texas man shooting another to death with a shotgun.The men had spent the night bar-hopping together before returning to the trailer park where they lived and the argument over religion began. One man said he would settle the argument and put the barrel of the gun into his own mouth. The other man said "If you have to shoot someone, shoot me." The gunman did.
(We don't know if this proved anything about heaven and hell, but it was an interesting display of evolution in action.)
'Honolulu Lite' on Sunday:
Democratic Gov. Ben Cayetano, using findings prepared by his department heads, says GOP candidate for governor Linda Lingle's plan to save the state economy won't work. Hey, these guys ought to know. They've had decades of practice making things not work.Quote Me on This:
"Dog scientists, hoping to make life better for their species, struggle to understand the principle of the doorknob." -- Gary Larson
Charles Memminger, winner of National Society of Newspaper Columnists awards, appears Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. E-mail cmemminger@starbulletin.com