St. Patrick’s  Day Day 77 of 2010 288 days left in this year

YESTERDAY: Mayor’s Budget Furloughs County Workers - Maui Mayor Charmaine Tavares released her 2011 budget Monday instituting the county’s first-ever furlough days for nearly all its roughly 2,500 employees. Tavares announced a $530 million fiscal year 2011 budget proposal, which begins July 1 and is $33 million less than the current budget. More >

March 17, 2009: The Hawaii Superferry Ends Service – The Hawaii Supreme Court ruled the previous day  that Act 2, passed in special session of the state Legislature in 2007 to allow the Hawaii Superferry to operate, was a special law and therefore unconstitutional. The law had allowed the Superferry exemption from state environmental standards and was challenged successfully in court by Maui Environmental groups. The Superferry has not provided service since then and the boat has left Hawaii. Read more > …

TODAY: St. Patrick’s Day. Saint Patrick’s Day, colloquially St. Paddy’s Day or Paddy’s Day, is an annual feast day which celebrates Saint Patrick (circa 385–461), one of the patron saints of Ireland, and is generally celebrated on March 17. The day is the national holiday of Ireland. It is a bank holiday in Northern Ireland, and a public holiday in the Republic of Ireland, Montserrat, and the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador. In the rest of Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, the United States and New Zealand, it is widely celebrated but is not an official holiday. Read more >…

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Nat’l Nutrition Month Day 76 of 2010 289 days left in this year

March 13, 1989: Tim Berners-Lee, working at Cern in Geneva, came up with the concept that became the worldwide web. On that day, Berners-Lee presented his visionary paper on a simple mechanism for allowing the particle physics research community to share documents, based on a simplified form of Standard Generalised Markup Language (SGML). View Tim Berners-Lee TED video >… Read the rest…

The Ides of March Day 75 of 2010 290 days left in this year

TODAY: Zeitgeist Day: “Social problems result from scarcity. When a few nations control most of the world’s resources, there are going to be international disputes no matter how many laws or treaties are signed. If we wish to end war, crime, hunger, poverty, territorial disputes, and nationalism, we must work toward a future in which all resources are accepted as the common heritage of all people.” More >

March 15, 1925: Church-goers Press Their Luck. On this date on Maui – and statewide – in 1925, churches protested a bill in the state legislature that would allow motion pictures to be shown on Sundays. Giddy after their win over the defeat of the Sunday store hours bill, church-goers picket the state house. They lose. It seems you can mess with the soda parlor hours, but you can’t touch the flicks.

March 15, 1918: The very first recorded flight between two Hawaiian islands took place today. Major Harold M. Clark of the Fort Kamehameha Aero Squadron (formed for World War I) flew his bi-plane from Oahu to Molokai. We’re guessing macadamia nuts were served.

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Int’l PI Day Day 74 of 2008 292 days left in this year

March 14th, 2008:

March 14, 1911: The 5th Horse of the Apocalypse Arrives. Not much to report in history on this date. Oh, one small thing. Someone in 1911 had the bright idea of opening a tourist agency on Fort St. on Oahu, to help people with deciding to come to Hawaii and what to do.  Bastards….

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by Raphael O’Suna

Large numbers are meaningless. The average person cannot grasp them. A light-year is almost 6 trillion miles.

When one reads that billions of galaxies, holding trillions of stars, spread out over billions of light-years, one draws a blank. We are too small or it is too large. Space is so large that distance merges with time. Galaxies are not noted as being so many miles away, but as being so many light-years away.

I suspect our inner worlds are also unfathomable. Here too one seems to come up against the magnitude or geometry of light. As anyone knows, who has contacted the source of light within, beyond this phenomena of light one finds darkness.

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Good Samaritan Day Day 73 of 2010 293 days left in this year

March 13th, 1933:  Maui Money Changes – On this date in 1933, people on Maui could go to their banks again, the federal government having reopened them after FDR closed them to stem the tide of the bank failures. In place of money, banks hand out certificates representing money, in denominations of $1, $5, and $10. It was a neat trick: since most people wanted money, and FDR had promised them that the federal government would back up all banks, most people refused the certificates and let their money sit – which of course is what FDR wanted. It’s all good.

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Commonwealth Day Day 72 of 2010 294 days left in this year

1905: At least four churches on Maui join dozens of others throughout the state in holding meetings to organize protesters. The reason? The state legislature began considering a bill which would allow some stores that sold food to be open for a few hours on Sunday, along with some restaurants and – interestingly – soda parlors. The legislature hears the religious cries and defeats the bill. Sunday hours remain anathema until World War II, when businesses protest blackout and curfew hours. The state allows stores to open Sundays to make up for lost sale hours.
1959: The U.S. House passes the Hawaii statehood bill 323 to 89, again with most of the negative votes coming from Southern representatives fearing dark-skinned Senate and House members from Hawaii would help to pass civil rights legislation. They were right.
1966: Kahului receives the first DC9 from Oahu, the first such aircraft ever used for interisland flights. Read the rest…

Worship of Tools  Day Day 71 of 2010 294 days left in this year

One interesting perspective on this is the 15 negative votes for Hawaiian statehood. Just about every one of them came from senators from southern states. Why? Well, no surprise there, the Southerners were racists. Several complained that a significant portion of the territory’s population was of “mixed race” and an awful lot of people’s skin was dark. The horrors!

Furthermore, the racists feared that the state would put into the senate two pro-civil rights senators, which might give civil rights legislation (which was perennially popping up in the Congress those days) the crucial extra votes it needed to pass.

Thus the link was simple: give Hawaii statehood, and the next thing you know, the darkies in Alabama will finally be able to vote. Funny thing, they were right to fear. Hawaii Senators Hiram Fong and Daniel Inouye voted for passage of the 1964 Civil Rights act.  It’s also interesting to note some of those who voted against statehood, and later, civil rights: Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, Robert Byrd of West Virginia, J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, Sam Irvin of North Carolina, and Albert Gore Sr. of Tennessee.

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