In the last few months, we’ve had Digital Underground and Mos Def, two great acts that in a more financially blessed year I’d never have missed, but you see what I mean? Pass on Public Enemy, and it’s not unreasonable to expect that in a few months, I’d get a chance to make up for it when they announce A Tribe Called Quest or someone like that. Pass on Testament, and there’s no telling when I’ll get my next metal fix.

This is all complicated by the fact that tickets just went on sale for Elvis Costello with the Honolulu Symphony Orchestra. Sure, it’s next spring, but I want to go to both Elvis shows and I want good seats.

I wonder if there’s something around here I can sell, or someone around here I can sue…I gotta get me those Elvis tickets and either PE or Testament.

You know why that is? Because Kailua Beach sucks. There are only three kinds of people who love Kailua Beach: People who move to Hawaii from somewhere else, people who have grown up in Kailua, and people who own dogs who love the water.

Sure, it’s lovely to look at, and the tourist-resident ratio is decidedly in our favor, and the water seems especially clean (when the wastewater treatment plant is working okay), and there are lots of nice, friendly dogs cavorting in the surf. I’ll give Kailua that much. But you know what? It’s not worth it. It’s just too dang windy.

The wind. It blows constantly. The trades that keep us cool through most of the year, blowing in from the Northwest off the Pacific, up over the Ko`olau Mountains, across the populated valleys, and finally over the Waianae Mountains and down toward who-knows-where seem to originate right there, just a few hundred yards off the Kailua shoreline, whipping, fresh-faced and eager, right into that coast. Something about the mountains must mellow those winds out, because they don’t seem so insistent anywhere else. At Kailua, though, they are constant, and demanding, and just a gigantic distraction and pain in the rear. The whoosh in your ears caused by all that wind is never-ending, and it’s nothing like the peaceful, relaxing image we all have of lying on the warm, sandy beach.

For over eight hours I withstood that irritating wind. I don’t know how the trees out there can take it. If I were one of the ironwood pines out there, I’d pick up my roots and move to Waikiki. Sure, the neighborhood’s not as nice, but at least I wouldn’t be forever leaning, squinting, brushing hair from my eyes, and yelling to be heard all the time.

But then I’d be a tree, and I wouldn’t have hair, eyes, or a voice. I hate it when my metaphors do that.

There were tables set up for kids’ activities, including this one, but besides the Bertie Botts’ Everyflavor Beans, this table looked more like a promo booth for the new Johnny Depp movie, which happened to have opened that day. I felt ripped.


One of the cool things was the special menu at the Borders Cafe, which was mostly special drinks given Harry-themed names.

This guy didn’t do much more than borrow a friend’s Master’s regalia. I give the guy props for participating, but come on. At least put some kind of insignia on there or maybe trim the thing in Ravenclaw colors!

I think this guy was a Borders employee. As you can see, his is not an elaborate costume, but it certainly has the look and feel of a good Harry. See, this guy paid attention to a few of the details, and details make all the difference in costuming.

Now, here’s a guy who pays attention to details, right down to the footrests on the broom! I don’t know whether to admire this or laugh at it, so I’ll admire it. This guy got on the news, after all, and all I did was take pictures.

Now, here’s what I really want to talk about. I went with my friends Jenn and Grace to the release event; it was the third HP release I attended with Grace, who is the friend who turned me on to Harry in the first place. While I was hanging out there, though, I thought to myself, “I am such an idiot! Why am I coming to this thing with a platonic female friend?” I looked around me and saw all these geeky female book-fiends; it was like a little meet-and-greet of exactly the kind of gal I’m looking for, and here I was with someone. No wonder I’m such a loser! “Hey, your new Harry Potter book would look great on my night-table, don’t you think?” “Would you like to see my wand?” “I think you’ve wingardium leviosa’d my heart!”

Well. I’d never say anything like that, but, you know. I’ve got my charms, and worst-case scenario, I go home alone with my six hundred pages of Rowling, and that’s not bad. The woman wearing the Marauder’s Map t-shirt above was with someone anyway.

Wait for it . . . wait for it . . . wait for it . . .

“You know, as something to fall back on,” he says.

Fall. Back. On.

Now, I’m a teacher, so I’m used to hearing the F-phrase on a regular basis, mostly from students who disdain the very career that’s going to enable them to earn their business, medical, law, and engineering degrees and make more in a month than I earn in a year. I am not, however, used to hearing it from the head of a school.

Flash forward now, to this past weekend, when I am privileged to have lunch with a former holder of elected office. Very high office. He wants to know why high schoolers nowadays can’t write as well as they could when he was a public school student in the fifties or sixties. I present a few theories which I shan’t go into here, but it’s clear he doesn’t really want to hear what I have to say.

He goes on to explain his theory. Teaching is traditionally a woman’s career (true) at a time when not very many professional doors were open to women, so the best and brightest of them were nurses and teachers. Now that women are free to become engineers, doctors, lawyers, and businesspeople, what you end up with is the lower one-third of the educated class–men and women–taking jobs as teachers, and they’re just not as good at the job.

It’s a good thing I don’t carry my SAT scores in my wallet (heck, I don’t even carry a wallet), because I would have whipped them out, stuck them in front of his face, and said, “Excuse me, sir, but do these look like the scores of the lower third?”

I’m baffled and discouraged. Here’s a guy, the son of immigrants, who worked his butt off for everything he has (including a huge house in the most expensive neighborhood on the island) and became the first person of his ethnicity IN THE NATION to be elected to the office he once held, educated to the gills, just putting a steel-toed boot right in the gut of the profession that helped him to get all this.

When our own educated, elected officials and heads of schools don’t appreciate the office I hold, I know I can’t win. Meanwhile, as I continue to educate this state’s future doctors, lawyers, engineers, and businessmen, I struggle every day not to look at the garbage collectors, bus drivers, custodians, traffic-cone-layers, engineers, doctors, lawyers, and businessmen and be reminded that each one of them makes more money than me.

I don’t want the world; I just want to be paid what I’m worth.

Screwing up the language in a very public, very preventable manner, though, I find unacceptable. If what you’re trying to communicate is important enough (not to mention expensive enough) to put on a sign, for example, you’ve got to have someone proofread your work. Two someones, if possible! That’s why I have an ongoing project with my students in which they collect very public, grammatically incorrect sign and share them with classmates.

I’ve seen some doozies, but this one nearly gave me a heart-attack:


Now, I checked a couple of Spanish dictionaries just to be sure this wasn’t some ethnic spelling, like “ristorante,” and I can’t find it anywhere except on some web-pages that also seem to be misspelling “cuisine.”

I’m almost numb to the misused apostrophe, which I’ll bet is abused more in Hawaii than in any other state, but this one, in combination with that misspelling, is just shameful.

I don’t expect everyone to get everything perfect–but the people who made the sign make signs every day! Didn’t they see something wrong here? And if they didn’t, why not? You’d think they’d hire someone who knew where to put an apostrophe, wouldn’t you? Doesn’t their business depend on producing quality work?

I need to lie down.

I live in America and I’m an American. I happen to have black hair, narrow brown eyes, dark skin, and one of those Asian noses that doesn’t seem to have a nosebridge. There’s no reason for me to think this is unusual, because at least half of the Americans I see every day have similar features.

Half of the Americans I see in everyday life, that is. If I should happen to pick up a magazine or to turn on the television, that fraction quickly drops to well below the national norm. You’d never guess by reading a magazine or watching prime-time television that ten percent of Americans is of Asian descent.

It’s better today than it was when I was a kid, though. My mom, a naturalized citizen from Japan, mopped floors, but none of the women hawking Pine-Sol on TV looked anything like my mom. My friends ate M&Ms, but none of the kids in the M&Ms commercials looked anything like them, either. You know who we had? Arnold from Happy Days and he was replaced by Al after one season. If I weren’t also twelve-and-a-quarter percent Italian, I’d have boycotted.

Before you go mentioning George Takei on Star Trek, I’ll remind you how absolutely boring Star Trek is to a seven-year-old kid. I didn’t discover the coolness of Mr. Sulu until I was well into high school.

That’s just it, though. You could probably keep saying, “But what about–?” and name an Asian here or an Asian there, and that’s weird, because there are a heck of a lot more Nakamuras in my community than there are Smiths, so mainstream national media has never looked anything like real life to me.

That made sense to me, even as a kid, and yet the coloring books we worked on featured kids who looked nothing like me, and the drawings we drew of teachers and doctors and astronauts didn’t look anything like us, either.

We all sucked.

There’s this sign, though, that I saw while taking a walk yesterday. That’s gotta be a good sign, right?

It’s not a good picture, but it is a hand-written sign (on what looks like the inside of a cigarette carton, but I couldn’t be sure) saying, “Caution: Baby on Board.”

What the heck? Somebody’s driving a child around with this much of the rear window obstructed with a sign asking others to be careful? I always thought those Baby On Board signs were stupid, but I take it back. This is stupid.


While I had the cam-phone handy, I took this picture of a sign I’ve always wondered about, just a little further down the block. Is it an Irish-owned business, or is it a Korean-owned business? I suppose it could be both–I’m Japanese and Irish, after all, but if I owned a garage, I don’t think I’d call it McKawahara’s, ‘though I have been called Dwyer-san, so maybe it’s not that weird.

This was a month ago, but since some OML Alumni crawled out of the woodwork on my last math-related entry, I thought I’d give a little summary of this year’s Math Bowl.

The twenty-seventh Hawaii State Mathematics Championships were on May 7 this year at the campus of Brigham Young University Hawaii. Twenty-five schools from around the state showed up in Laie for an intense eight rounds of arcs, slopes, and roots.

The arena floor, an hour before the madness begins.

The nature of this competition is quite different from the usual Oahu Mathematics League format. Rather than teams of ten, with each student competing alone in three events, the Math Bowl competitors are teams of three students from each school, working collaboratively on problems that get more difficult as the meet progresses. An OML event is usually as specific as “Algebra II: Radical Expressions,” while a Math Bowl round can feature a problem from just about any math from Alg I to Pre-Calculus. The unpredictable nature of the problem-sets combined with the only-your-best-three-competitors setup means that just about anything can happen at the math bowl.

A strange tradition at the Math Bowl is the display on a long row of projection screens the congratulatory letters sent by such prominent figures as the governor, the mayor of Honolulu, and all four Hawaii delegates to Congress.

My team met at six in the morning that Saturday morning; it’s a long drive to Laie, and you never know what might happen on the way. About a mile outside Punalu`u, our bus slowed to a halt. A pickup truck had hit a utility pole and a power line hung over the road, high enough for most cars to pass beneath, but low enough to keep buses waiting.

There were already police officers on the scene, waving cars through while the buses lined up on the shoulder. “Great,” I said to myself even while assuring my team that everything would be fine. I got on my cellular phone and called coaches at another school, telling them that if they hadn’t left yet, they’d probably want to get going. They had packed students into cars instead of getting school buses, so I figured that when they came along, we could squeeze in with them and get to the Math Bowl in time.

Our host, Dr. David Furuto of BYU-H, welcomes us to Math Bowl XXVII.

The traffic-directing cop figured out that the line wasn’t dangerous, and after only a twenty-minute delay, he’d snapped the line in two with bolt-cutters, and we were on our way. It turned out that I’d gotten the check-in time wrong, so we were still more than an hour early.

The opening ceremonies dragged on a bit, as Waiakea and Maryknoll had called to say they were running behind, but once everyone was in place, the games began. The format looked like this:

Round 1 (10 minutes, 15 points): Three problems, one worth 4 pts, one worth 5, and one worth 6.
Round 2 (5 minutes, 5 points): One problem.
Round 3 (6 minutes, 6 points): One problem.
Round 4 (7 minutes, 7 points): One problem.
Round 5 (8 minutes, 18 points): Three problems, 6 points each.
Halftime (short break)
Round 6 (9 minutes, 9 points): One problem.
Round 7 (15 minutes, 20 points): Three problems, 4, 6, and 10 points.
Round 8 (10 minutes, 10 points): One problem.

The post-competition lunch: Everyone’s favorite part of the competition.

Iolani jumped out to an early lead and never looked back. Several customarily strong schools seemed to struggle early; one theory espoused by the coaches in the correcting room was that this particular Saturday probably hit several teams hard–Saturdays in May are usually crammed with end-of-year activities such as proms, fairs, awards banquets, and SATs. Indeed, as happy as I was with my own team, six of the original six students I invited to participate in the Math Bowl were also athletes and four of them had already committed to attending the school’s athletics banquet.

When the eraser-dust settled after eight rounds and one tie-breaker (for second place), it was Iolani taking first in the large-schools division (for the seventh time in the last ten years), followed by Kamehameha and Roosevelt. In the small-schools division, Maryknoll took first, followed by St. Andrew’s and Sacred Hearts. My own team tied for second-to-last in the small-schools division, but scored a respectable 33–good enough to beat two schools in the large-schools division.

Note the grapical use of a vertical perpendicular and a parabolic curve!

The competition was followed by a quite-good buffet lunch, catered by Mariott and funded largely by the corporate sponsors, including two local banks, one public utility, and one of the major daily newspapers. I savored my team’s strong showing much more than the meal, though, as I’d had trouble sleeping the night before, unable to keep images of being shut-out from invading my thoughts. We accomplished our team goal of not finishing in last, but standings notwithstanding, I was enormously proud of this team’s ability to hang in there with veteran competitors in this, our first year of participation. We were right in it until the last couple of rounds!

We took advantage of our earliness and our proximity to the trophy table to snap this impressive-looking picture.

If you’d like to see what this year’s problems looked like, I’ll post a link to sample PDF files from the Math Bowl later this week.

Dinner was heavenly, especially the salads. There was this crab salad that had me almost in tears, and I don’t even like crab. The hosts were gracious and welcoming. The service was attentive but unobtrusive. Guests at the parents’ table included State House Speaker Calvin Say and the general manager of the Halekulani. At other tables nearby were well-known lawyers, businessmen, physicians, and even an entertainer or two. The line for desserts was long, with an ice-cream sundae bar, plus amaretto cheesecake and poha-berry bread-pudding.

It was a nice party. I try not to be bitter about the fact that I make in a year what some of these people make in a month or even a week. I mean, if it’s so important that this person graduated from high school, why do the teachers who make it possible get paid the pittance they do? Unfair.

But this isn’t about that. For one night, I got to hang out with these people in this setting, and that was pretty cool.