ITEM: Governor Ben Cayetano wants the state to build a $70 million aquarium in Honolulu to give Hawai’i another reason for visitors to come here. COMMENT: Granted, it wouldn’t hurt to have some other attractions in Hawai’i to go along
ITEM: Governor Ben Cayetano wants the state to build a $70 million aquarium in Honolulu to give Hawai’i another reason for visitors to come here.
COMMENT: Granted, it wouldn’t hurt to have some other attractions in Hawai’i to go along with outdoors pursuits, both for tourists and residents. Of the latter, people living on the same island as the aquarium would likely visit the facility with any regularity. Kauaians who, either for financial reasons or an unwillingness to leave their own island even for the short flight to Honolulu, can reasonably ask what good the aquarium would do them. Statewide tourism? A new reason to be proud of their state? Whether either of those answers from Cayetano are accurate for Kaua’i won’ t be known unless the aquarium is built. In the meantime, the state should think about giving Hawai’i residents a free pass to the aquarium for its first few months as a way to build public support for a project that sounds good but is just an expensive dream so far.
ITEM: Kilauea Theater shows “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” to hundreds of children for free on Christmas Day.
COMMENT: What a great idea, not to mention a generous act on the part of the theater’s owner. The story we told last Saturday in advance of the holiday treat would have been even more interesting if, in the interest of protecting the small local theater from possible legal problems with the movie’s studio, we could also have reported in full that a certain actor in the film was on Kaua’i last week and anonymously helped promote the special screenings.
ITEM: Les Murakami, University of Hawaii’s baseball coach, has been released from the hospital where he’d been since suffering a stroke Nov. 2.
COMMENT: The news isn’t all good. Murakami, 64, now is undergoing extensive rehabilitation and is not taking telephone calls or accepting visitors. He’d planned to retire after next season, and obviously now his availability for that final campaign is questionable. But his return to the diamond is less important than knowing that the coaching icon of Hawaiian college sports – 30 years as the UH skipper – is putting up a fight against the effects of his stroke.
ITEM: It’s not news, really, but some of our TV-watching readers (hey, if you’re watching the tube, how can you be reading the paper?) keep asking us why the heck the weeklong TV listings in our Kaua’i Times section starts with Sunday, the day the Sunday-through-Saturday listings are published. It bugs them, they say, that they can’t plan their Sunday morning viewing sooner.
COMMENT: If you can’t wait until the next morning, look in Saturday’s TGI. In that issue, we publish Sunday-a.m.’s televised offerings. As usual, we’re not responsible for any late changes in programming or the quality of it. Same goes in reverse for the TV networks and stations.
It’s not their fault if our Kaua’i Times format falls short of satisfying some TV-watching habits.
TGI Editor Pat Jenkins can be reached at 245-3681, Ext. 227 or e-mail, pjenkins@pulitzer.net.
