lines of flight

this was an amazing sunset

(enlarge)

Fun yet futile: trying to capture it on the Motorola Droid. Too bad I have such limited Photoshop skills, or I would have stitched this together better.

Anyway you had to be there. :~j

Honolulu is under a smoggy, gray haze again. Only it is not smog, or haze. It’s vog. This picture was taken today around noon.

Whether arriving via airplane or cruise ship (both pictured above) or living la vida local, these noxious natural fumes fill the lungs. There is no daily vog index popularly reported. Who is studying vog? Is enough being done to warn people of potential dangers?

Here is what our view towards Diamond Head looked like at noon today:

How is it possible that the Air Quality Index for Honolulu today is “good” when it looks like this?!

In comparison, see how clear the horizon is in this sunset video from the same vantage? Even as night falls, you can see a striking difference.

=_=

This three minute, 50 second video was featured as a web extra to accompany a story about seahorses in the January 2009 issue of Mālamalama online.

My job was to coordinate the production, do the interviews, edit the spoken audio and when we didn’t have all of what we needed, to do some narrative voice-over. The decision to add the voice-over was last-minute and it ended up being recorded in an empty office with leftover fake Xmas snow used as sound insulation(?!).

This web extra has had over 400 views on Vimeo so far; that’s the version embedded into the story, but you have to go to Vimeo to see the glorious HD version. We used Vimeo because we were having some problems uploading to our Mālamalama YouTube channel. Now YouTube is cooperating, so I’ve embedded the HD version here.

Splitting our views between different video hosts is obviously not ideal. YouTube is less elegant than Vimeo, but it has a *much* larger community. Vimeo looks awesome, and for a small fee, we’d be allowed to embed HD video on our site, but no decision has been made yet.

I welcome any feedback and opinions on the issue of video hosting and playback.

Double rainbow at dawn on New Year’s Day in Honolulu, 2009.

Can you take a bad picture of a rainbow? I wanted to share this, but I could not for the life of me figure out which of these photos is best.

there are rainbows

12 Photos

So I’m adding them all but justifying the lack of editorial eye by using this as a chance to play with the NextGEN photo gallery plugin (again).

This time it needs to be a sidebar with a thumbnail that launches the whole photo gallery, from alongside a larger story. This is a functionality that has been requested at Mālamalama, just testing it here.

By the way if anyone else is just getting started with NextGEN Gallery plugin, there are some helpful instructions available from this guy.

UPDATE January 12, 2009

Doing this all kinds of wrong, ugh. Using the compact view album instead of a link to a gallery that has it’s own page(!!). Makes a lot more sense… I think? Only thing is, I can’t have words wrap around this because if I put it in a narrow div then the gallery and slideshow try to open within it.

Now to figure out why the captions don’t show in the slideshow…

NASA called it a “spectacular conjunction.”

Taken Nov. 30, 2008, off an Oahu lanai with a pocket camera that doesn’t begin to capture the color and texture of this beautiful evening.

According to the tv news, tonight was supposedly the best night for this biyearly phenomenon, but it was cloudy where we stood and only the crescent moon managed to break through, for a short time. Maybe tomorrow will be good.

Yesterday there were two serious accidents involving bicyclists on Oʻahu, both before dawn, one a fatal hit and run. With bikes sales increasing as people try to work around the laughable rise in gas prices, this is definitely a cause for concern and perhaps the start of a disturbing new trend.

Last year, I gave up my parking pass and have been biking to and from work. I live about 10 minutes away from my job so it’s not like a Herculean feat, tho I do sometimes do it in a skirt and heels. And then it starts to rain! But for the most part, I think it’s actually easier than driving. Plus it’s fun, good exercise and there is no sticker shock at the pump, cuz air is still free. But commuting by bike has given me a perspective on how bike-unfriendly the city can be.

For example, the ridiculous bike lanes that put cyclists in glass-strewn gutters alongside cars rushing on and off the freeway, like on University Ave. going up to UH. I don’t go that route. It sucks. The lower part of University is better, but even still, a line on the ground demarcating a narrow path between a row of parked cars on one side and careless drivers on the other is kinda sketchy. Luckily I don’t have to go that way too often; day to day I ride side streets instead.

The problem there is that some drivers don’t seem to think that the rules of the road apply between them and bicyclists. They often don’t bother to signal, and if it is a narrow street where two cars would have to squeeze to get by, they just stay right in the middle if I’m coming towards them on a bike. Not cool!

There are definitely more people of all ages biking around town these days. Yes, some of them are inconsiderate and stupid. But in the end, more bikes = less cars on the road. We all agree that’s a good thing, right?

Queen – Bicycle Race

The Cool Kids – Black Mags

The afternoon sun was an unnatural-looking orange smudge in the sky when I got off work yesterday. The city was covered in a blanket of gray. I honestly thought there was huge fire somewhere. Nope, just the vog back again.

These were taken the today, looking into Manoa valley.

9 a.m.

6:30 p.m.

Mel breaks down the vog phenomenon, for those unfamiliar.

Weather people say it should clear by the end of the weekend when the winds change. One TV newscast reports that the most noxious of the sulfurous fumes dont travel too far from the eruption. *cross fingers* Tho the Big Island gets the worst of it, vog is causing health problems across the islands and apparently economic ones, too.

My contacts feel like plastic wrap on my eyeballs; sinuses and throat are itchy. I think I’m building up an immunity tho, last month I was sneezing and sniffling like crazy. Meh.

More info:

• Vog Safety Tips [Honolulu Advertiser]
• Volcanic Emissions Cover State [KITV]
• Vog in Hawaii: Information and Resources [Virtual Scratchpad]

It’s a pet peeve of mine how bag-happy the local grocery stores can be. Does the 12-pack of soda–with the handle–really need to be double-plastic-bagged?? I think not. Sheesh. My theory is they use as many bags as possible so you feel like your $80 worth of groceries got you something, but canvas, mesh and reusable plastic bags tell the truth, well, at least, they hold more and don’t require double-bagging.

A few years ago, I was too shy to bust out my own bag at the store. I didn’t want to be that granola chick holding up the line at Long’s offering a funky net bag or tote bag to the cashier. But when I got three of these bags for Christmas, I figured I’d at least use em at Kokua Market where the organic-loving clientele wouldn’t blink. Now I’m so used to carrying them around, I have no shame to bust em out at Safeway or the corner liquor store. Sometimes the clerk even thanks me.

Apparently normal plastic bags take like 1,000 years to degrade (or a few decades, depending on the source) and require obscene quantities of crude oil to make. When you combine that with the huge number we go through and the damage they can do in marine environments, it def becomes a problem–but a solvable one. You can easily find out more, it’s a trendy topic right now. Regarding that last link, I personally don’t see the need to make a fashion statement out of a shopping bag, I think it kind of misses the point that if you only have a few things to carry, any old bag will usually do, messenger, backpack, tote bag, whatever, but yea, whatever.

At the same time, banning plastic bags outright doesn’t seem totally necessary. They’ve recently done this in San Francisco and are discussing it in Hawaii and in a number of cities elsewhere. I think charging for (biodegradable) plastic bags would be fair and offering recycling for plastic bags seems like a great idea.

Of course if a store choses to ban them, more power to to them. But paper isn’t really environmentally that much better and there are a lot of ways to reuse plastic bags, from garbage to lunches, and my lil sis tells me that they’re essential for picking up dog poo. Or even these crazy lil craft projects that I’ll never do.

Global food prices have risen dramatically, adding a new level of danger to the crisis of world hunger…. In the United States there has been a 41 percent surge in prices for wheat, corn, rice and other cereals over the past six months.

This according to Amy Goodman on Democracy Now, as part of an interview where she introduces the author of Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System,” Raj Patel.

Patel outlines a perfect storm of conditions that are causing food shortages and riots globally, including:

• bad harvests, possibly related to climate change
• biofuels and ethanol driving up the price of commodities like sugar, corn, wheat
• increasing demand for meat leading to an increasing demand for grain to feed livestock, not people, and driving up the price of grain
• rising price of oil

Other stories in the news talk about how jobs are leaving and inflation is hitting everyone. Those stories scare me, even tho it hasn’t gotten to riot levels in the United States.

I see my grocery bill creeping higher and higher for the same amount of groceries. But I’m also becoming more savvy about wholesome, cheap meals and I feel like blogging about that :~j

I think of myself as a vegetarian with omnivore tendencies–I’d eat anything if I HAD to, most likely, or if it would be especially rude not to, or if I’m just curious about the dish. But I prefer not to for the most part. Officially I’m an ovo-lacto-pescatarian, meaning I will happily consume eggs, dairy and seafood in addition to starches, veggies, fruits and grains. I prefer simple foods.

Says one of the University of Hawai’i researchers who captured this footage: "It’s not the biggest shark ever seen, nor is it a new species. It captures a moment when an experienced pro meets that kid he was when he started out so many years ago."

The clouds came in after we saw a brilliant, full, manapua moon get ate by the shadow of the earth. We experienced the “totality” but missed the orange effect. It was still amazing, really hypnotic. And thanks to this (mostly) steady-handed youtube user, we got an idea of what we missed.