Commute adds time for personal grooming

Add another one to your list of distractions some drivers engage in as they tool along. On Tuesday as I drove along Kamehameha Highway during the morning rush hour, and for a distance of about two miles, including passing Hawaiian Memorial Park, the guy behind me was aggressively brushing his teeth. I guess that when he becomes a resident at the cemetery, he wants to have a fresh taste in his mouth.

We parted ways on our separate journeys after passing the cemetery, thankfully.

Girls' skimpy dress reveals slipping values

I can't say I am shocked to see the school dress code become such a hot-button issue (Star-Bulletin, Jan. 2). Every time I come back to visit (Punahou, Class of '94), I am struck at how revealing teen and pre-teen dress has become.

Fashions in Texas, where I have lived for the last 10 years, are much more demure, in part because we do not have the beach culture. If we did, it would be on par with Hawaii.

I drive past a middle school with a dress code every day. I don't like it. I think it is a Band-Aid over a larger problem: the deterioration of values in the home. Society has teenage girls' dress being a bit more overtly sexual: Britney Spears can be thanked for that. But there are girls in the media dressed much more appropriately and less revealing. Look at television's "The O.C." The girls wear designer duds, but they are not the "hoochie" clothes mentioned in the article.

The most important thing to remember in enforcing a dress code is that it must be thorough. You can't mandate certain clothing without also addressing hair and piercings. All of these things go together.

Bottle deposit law must be improved

While the deposit beverage container law is a great idea, the way it is written and being carried out seem to spell failure.

As a boy growing up in Oregon, one of my favorite summer activities was scouring fields and roadsides for discarded cans and bottles. Most of them were crushed, flattened or barely recognizable, but I collected all I could carry, brought them to the neighborhood grocery store and collected my reward.

Hawaii's law cannot accommodate such environmental stewards since containers must be in mint condition. Wasn't one of the goals of the law to help keep our aina clean? Unfortunately, all our cans discarded on the go are doomed to stay litter.

Redemption centers are few and far between. The redemption center nearest my home is only open from 9 a.m. to noon, Tuesday through Saturday. That's only 15 hours a week, all but three of them in the heart of the weekday. Who can manage to get there with those hours?

If our container law is going to be a success, it needs an emergent improvement. Any container with a legible HI-5 label must be accepted. The public must have access to redemption centers near or at major retail locations during standard retail hours.

The state says the bill is good for us and good for the aina. I say the law is a bill for us and a blight on the aina.

Bandleader ignored musicians' complaints

Mayor Mufi Hannemann made a positive change when he chose to replace Aaron Mahi as the bandleader of the Royal Hawaiian Band. More then half of the band members who are members of the Hawaii Government Employees Association union petitioned to have Mahi replaced.

They have for years filed grievances and made complaints to the city administration about Mahi's lack of leadership and his inability to handle personnel and administrative issues properly. Nothing was done. On many occasions they have met and conferred with Mahi on these very same issues and he did nothing.

Hannemann did the right thing. Whomever he picks to be the next bandleader will be the best qualified individual regardless of his or her ethnicity.

Tsunami-hit nations seem ungrateful

I'm writing in regard to the Jan. 12 article about the Thai government criticizing the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center for not giving them enough notice about the disastrous undersea earthquake that caused horrific damage.

This criticism upsets me because this office did everything it could to warn the affected governmental agencies. Thailand, Malaysia and India dropped the ball by not responding to the alert when it was first transmitted.

I don't understand why Southeast Asian officials expect the United States to pay and build their tsunami warning system. They want our money, our military and technological expertise, yet they blame us when they are to blame for not protecting their people.

Southeast Asian governments, take responsibility. If you continue to attack us when we're helping you, maybe we should pull out the billions in aid that we pledged, our military and our technology!

Iraq did attack U.S. for years before war

I have to disagree with Keith Haugen's letter of Jan. 9, regarding the Iraqi threat to the United States. Haugen states that we were not attacked by Iraq prior to the war.

In fact, we were being attacked by Iraq virtually every day for several years prior to the invasion. Iraqi forces were firing on U.S. and other allied nations' aircraft enforcing U.N. sanctions and the no-fly zones. These attacks included anti-aircraft artillery, surface-to-air missiles and fighter aircraft. The no-fly zones were established in support of U.N. Security Council resolutions to protect the Kurdish minorities in the north and the Shia minorities in the south.