An Eye-opening Island Ride
Wednesday - September 16, 2009
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Del.icio.usIt’s a good idea to occasionally get out of your neighborhood and your home-work-home driving rut to see how others live and what’s going on with creeping development and commercialization.
Hard to do in a car. That’s why I periodically take a slow ride on my moped to Ewa Beach and Kapolei, or to Waimanalo and Kailua via the ocean road. You get a new perspective when you cruise the back roads of Ewa Beach or Waimanalo. You see what a neat new community Iroquois Point has become, and what a fantastic camping area has been created at Waimanalo Bay Beach Park.
I also came to think that if any government planners entertain proposals to build anything out by the Queen’s Beach (aka Ka Iwi) shoreline area, they should be examined for signs of insanity. It’s so strikingly gorgeous in its natural state that somebody other than the powerless GOP state Rep. Gene Ward should be moving to designate it a protected place in perpetuity.
Of course “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” as Margaret Wolfe Hungerford wrote in her 1878 Molly Bawn. I’m sure someone else sees Queen’s Beach as a waste of good building space.
Still, I cannot imagine anyone not finding Queen’s Beach/Ka Iwi to be inherently beautiful, sparking in us that “ahhhh” that Greek philosophers suspected to be an aesthetic sense that we’re born with.
Yes, I wish it were not marred by parked cars and trucks. But let’s leave it alone, shall we? Perhaps keep all vehicles at the Koko Head end by Sandy’s. Yes, you can walk a few hundred yards. No, you don’t need your coolers. Cold water and a sandwich in a backpack and a beach chair will do.
For once, at least, Gov. Lingle gets it right. We must pare back government. We can’t afford those 19 pages of small type in the phone book of state services.
My ‘60s liberal colleagues (and now Mayor Mufi) want more taxes to keep all state employees employed. Sorry, but government isn’t meant to be a guarantor of employment. And where it is has been a disaster. Government guarantees police and fire protection, education, water, health and sanitation. All else is rightfully up for cutbacks and furloughs - the latter a governor’s prerogative in states not strangled by public worker unions.
I’m 100 percent in agreement with the Associated Press decision to offer newspapers that photo of a mortally wounded Marine in Afghanistan. We’re seeing far too few photos of the reality of that war.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates says “your (AP’s) lack of compassion and common sense in choosing to put this image ... on the front page of multiple newspapers is appalling.” What baloney!
It was great reporting and photography by an AP team in the firefight. We need to read and see more of this unending, dirty little war.
I am not MidWeek’s restaurant critic, but I am one of its great foodies, and so I’d like to amend my Best Chefs column and move Le Bistro’s Alan Takasaki into a tie with Top of Waikiki and Mala Wharf.
Le Bistro’s has unbeatable wait help, and the food: the onion soup, the caramelized tangerine salad, the short ribs slow-cooked in a reduced wine sauce, and the crisp apple tart! OK, they ran out of mint for mojitos one night, but how many diners order a mojito? Maybe just me.
It’s in Niu Valley Shopping Center, which is a misnomer since Times Supermarket moved out and a church moved in.
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