Another day, I drank too much wine while watching "The Imitation Game" and I think I switched to something else, which was still on the screen when I got up around 3 in the afternoon. At least I practiced some first.
News is more of the usual. Israel goofed and took out a handful of aid workers which sucks, I think it was 7 of them. That's allllll over the news, meanwhile the Arabs have likely killed that many Jews and are doing so daily and that's not worth putting on the news.
And the fat orange idiot continues his antics. Someone on Reddit commented that he gets so many second chances he could sail on the Titanic and he'd come through fine.
This is the problem. Hitler should have gotten the death penalty for his failed coup attempt. But he got out of that after a few months in an almost-resort prison, wrote his stupid book, and had a fine old time. Was allowed to hold one of his famous rants at the judge and jury at his sentencing, instead of, you know, being clubbed senseless by bailiffs, dragged back to the holding cell, and the judge saying "Hang the fucker".
The same goes for Putin. He was allowed to invade Crimea in 2014, actually started his war on Ukraine then, and I seem to remember something in Ossetia earlier than that. Now Europe is in real danger because the bully wasn't smacked down promptly.
And the same thing's been ongoing with the Arabs too. You don't make peace with people whose whole reason to be on this Earth, they're raised to believe, is to wipe out the Jews. We didn't make peace with the Nazis, we applied force and plenty of it.
In other news, I hope the machine shop a couple doors down didn't want the pallet racking they had stacked by their dumpster enclosure because I'm pretty sure it's all gone now. I heard clanking outside, and it was some tattooed scumbag type with, surprisingly, an SUV, which he stuffed with as much metal as he could, then took off fast, no doubt to one of the scrap metal buyers, then came back for another load.
Those guys are useful for getting rid of stuff, but they can and will take just about anything. Hanging out with Tom last night, we talked about James and his case, for stealing that statute which was in fact bolted down. Tom thinks it'll amount to nothing. Sad to say, I think he may be right. I've learned that James really is a scumbag, and the (Israeli) artist has learned a lesson about living in America.
I think there's a reason stealing is so poorly thought of in traditional cultures. At one point last night I related to Tom an incident that illustrates my difficulties in Hawaii as a hated haole of modest means. I'd gone to a meeting of the Honolulu Amateur Radio Club, ol' HARC. Other than a few old, rather wealthy haoles and myself, it was all Asian of course. We went to a coffee shop afterward and someone had given me a printed list of all the repeaters and their frequencies - a precious thing! At the end of the meal everyone put tips on the table. (I think I may have not eaten at all, due to being so damned skint.)
We all went to the front to pay, and I realized I'd forgotten my precious list on the table so I darted back in to get it. It was gone, and so were the tips. I came back out, disappointed, and someone else darted in. They'd found the tips gone and they thought I'd taken them - I was told this later. Thinking right now, I wonder if they said something about the tips to the waitress, like, "Did you get the tips?" and the waitress, not missing a chance to perhaps get a 2nd set of sympathy tips and to do a disfavor to a haole, may have said something like "Oh, no, that damn haole took 'em!".
When I was told this was thought about me, I said in astonishment that I'd not taken the tips but had just dashed in to get the list I'd been given, but I got the impression I was not believed, perhaps by the guy who told me, being a fellow haole, but not by the members that matter, the Asian ones. And if the waitress had done as I now theorize, well then it'd be an ironclad, closed, case. The word of a haole being nearly worthless.
It's a very small incident, but HARC being "the" amateur radio club it meant I'd be forever under a black cloud and possibly never be able to become an actual member. In the way that wealthy black people are OK here on the mainland but poor ones are not OK, older, established, wealthy haoles were OK but someone like me, about as poor as one could be in Hawaii, would always be assumed to be a thief.
This is why, I explained, I'm throwing some money around in my being involved in activities at the synagogue. For instance, the Passover seder is subsidized if you're poor. I'd likely qualify. But instead I paid for my own and an additional $30 to round it up to $100 to help someone else. I see it as paying for half of someone else's too. And the light sticks, they don't know I got them for free, plus handing them out rather than selling them on Craig's List or something. And buying something from the book store each week. Sooner or later they'll figure out I get around by bike and get by on $20k a year, but by that time I'll have established a reputation of being financially solid.
Besides, how are they to know for sure, if my being able to be free with money is due to good budgeting, or some inheritance or something I have stashed away? That was a big assumption back in Hawaii. That somehow, as a haole, I could not really be poor. That I had gold bars stashed under my bed or something, and was just getting college financial aid as some kind of a scam.
So I want to avoid this sort of thing and frankly, I was kind of astonished that that one lady, Mrs. Z., had been so enthusiastic about thrift stores. But maybe older ladies who go on birding trips to India are simply good at budgeting too.
Another "interesting" incident from my life in Hawaii: This was when I was 17 or so, and we were living with my father in an apartment in Hawaii Kai. It was 9 in the morning or so, and I heard a dragging noise outside, and it was an old man, dragging a suitcase - the kind that would have little feet on the bottom, maybe, certainly not wheels. Hence the loud sound. He was not doing well, shuffling along and dragging this suitcase. Presently he fell, and the sound of his head hitting the concrete sounded just like when we'd crack a coconut but throwing it on a concrete surface.
So the guy's laying there, on his back, and starts snoring. I knew what to do and called 911. Living with my father, a speaker of very clean California by way of the Ivy League English, we'd all fallen into the habit of speaking in this way also - Dad would correct us otherwise. So it is with this sort of voice that I talked with the 911 operator, who wanted to know my name and all sorts of things, and I was also trying to stay very calm as I knew one should in a situation like this.
The long and short of it is that the 911 operator was on the phone with me forever, and there was no hurry, no hurry at all, to help this guy. Over the course of what was probably an honest half-hour, the guy died while I watched. Of course because race is all-important, I'd had to tell them the guy's race and probably mine also. The fire station was just up the street - I know Hawaii Kai very well and it's right next to the library that's across from the (now quite large; I watched it grow) Koko Kai Shopping Center. Maybe a 20-minute walk, and a few minutes for a fire truck.
The guy's head and neck turned a deep blue and the snoring had stopped. Eventually some ambulance people showed up to cart him off. In 1979 police/fire/ambulance people were 99.9% local which meant no haoles. They could just let this guy die and nothing would be done - and nothing was - because who's gonna go looking for a haole?
Even my friend Pat advises, "Just talk about how you grew up here all the time". Here in California I've never had to even mention that I was born here or the time I've spent here. I'd kind of forgotten that back in Hawaii, I'd have the job of constantly justifying myself, explaining why it's actually kind of OK that I exist.
Oh, and something interesting. It turns out that that "World Central Kitchen" whatever it was thing where the Israelis killed 7 people that's all over the news, it turns out one of that group or unit is an armed Hamas terrorist, who was supposed to go with their group on the road that day, but for some reason the armed guy had stayed back at the warehouse. So this wasn't exactly Food Not Bombs here. It was food *with* bombs...
I mean, honestly, how can you run a decent food kitchen without at least one armed Hamas member? I ask you?
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