Today is the leap day of the leap year, and I was tempted to treat it as a day that didn’t exist and use it for some serious goofing off.

But as usual, there was an abundance of news that amused and confused in Hawai’i’s week that was and I couldn’t turn away:

• Gov. Linda Lingle was invited to a meeting at the White House with her GOP ally President Bush on the final day of a national governors meeting. Lame duck canapés were served.

• Two months after Lingle proposed that the state buy the 880-acre Turtle Bay Resort to preserve it as open space, she’ll finally get together with owners next month to discuss what they want for the property. I’m guessing they’ll favor cash over beads.

• Incredibly, the governor and the Board of Education are still fighting over who will pay for drug tests for public school teachers mandated in their latest labor contract. How about tests to see if the battling politicians are taking their Ritalin?

• Sen. Daniel Inouye apologized for dissing Punahou as “not a school for the impoverished” in a dig at Buffanblu alum Barack Obama’s localness. Inouye might have stuck to his guns if he’d noticed the story that Punahou is increasing its annual tuition to $16,675.

• The Department of Education is getting rid of 266,000 pounds of recalled ground beef purchased for school lunches. We should keep it handy for the next time one of the Honolulu Zoo’s tigers gets out of its cage.

• The City Council deferred a bill that would have required homebuilders to make their structures more environmentally friendly. Members decided that green smiley faces on the roofs wouldn’t really accomplish much.

• Experts hired by the city recommended that Honolulu’s $3.7 billion transit system from Kapolei to Ala Moana use steel wheels on steel rails. No big surprise. I predicted a year ago that roller-coasters would turn out to be the best technology for this project.

• The Hannemann administration told the City Council it’s in no rush to put recycling bins in city parks, touting “passive recycling” in which residents scavenge through the trash for redeemable cans and bottles. We’ll be the first city to feature dumpster diving in our sustainability plan.

• The city is trying to determine if the Koko Crater hiking trail and a nearby shooting range can coexist. Only if hikers don antlers at the trailhead.

• Honolulu police are putting video cameras on their Tasers to film incidents in which unruly suspects are zapped with 50,000 volts of electricity. Talk about fright flicks that will make your hair stand on end.

And the quote of the week …

… from Jim Barahal of the Honolulu Marathon on the difficulty of identifying finishing runners and their times after a computer broke down:

“We had to find the found before we could find the missing.”

I’m a little concerned that this actually made as much sense as anything else I heard this week.

Happy Leap Year.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 29th, 2008 at 3:00 am and is filed under Volcanic Ash. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.