Oct
31
Let me plant a seed with you
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Because I rise at about 2 a.m., and want to be with my bride in the evening, I sleep in two shifts: from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m., and the next afternoon from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. It’s actually more complicated than that — if I don’t get enough in the afternoon I might turn in sooner at night, for example, and I also find that when you sleep in shifts you can get by on fewer than eight full hours most of the time — but you get the idea.
That’s not the real topic of this post but I’m getting to it.
The thing about sleeping in the afternoon is that the heat of the sun zaps through my south-facing bedroom window and can make the room too hot for sleeping.
Now we’re getting really close to the true topic of the post. But let’s go first to a fellow who appeared on “Sunrise” this morning.
Jason Sickmiller has a great job. He’s an arborist with Hawaiian Electric. HECO has 15 crews of people who care for trees that stand near power lines, pruning them so they don’t endanger the lines (which would lead to their being cut down altogether, of course.)
These men and women also play a role in the company’s annual Arbor Day Tree Giveaway, which is this coming weekend.
HECO and its partners will give away 2,600 native and exotic trees and shrubs this year at six sites on Oahu. Experts are on hand to tell how to care for the free plants.
It happens Saturday. Visit http://www.arbordayhawaii.org for locations and more information. If you’re going, go early. They usually run out of trees in two hours.
“Strategic placement of trees and shrubs along the sunny sides of a house will help cool the home and will reduce air conditioning costs,” HECO’s Janet Crawford said.
There it is: the true topic. One of the simplest ways to reduce your electric bill is to put something in the way of the afternoon sun before its beams reach your windows.
Living on the 33rd floor, I don’t have the shade tree option. So I’m curious — have you had a good experience with that plastic tinting you can put on windows?
Oct
30
Alex the Chief Loyalty Officer isn’t burying his face in his paws, but other executives at Central Pacific Bank must be wondering what they did to offend the banking gods.
They made a perfectly sensible strategic decision to both expand and diversify their bank by doing more lending outside Hawaii, specifically in California. Part of their thinking, one assumes, was that if the Hawaii economy went into a slump, any local financial setbacks would be mitigated by business on the mainland.
Only what happened was the opposite.
The Hawaii economy held up very nicely, thank-you very much, while California turned out to be one of the states hardest hit by the subprime mortgage default crisis.
That’s why, just days after glowing reports of Hawaii profits logged by Bank of Hawaii and First Hawaiian Bank, Central Pacific reported Tuesday that its third quarter profit was only about $9 million, half of what Wall Street expected.
Even this isn’t as bad as it sounds: profits fell because the bank made a multimillion-dollar provision for losses, not because of actual losses of that magnitude. In other words, they took a lot of money that in better times would have been profit, and set it aside just in case a lot more loans go south. It’s what banks do.
I’m going to interview CEO Clint Arnoldus on my public television show in a couple weeks and I fully expect him to say that if you broke out the Hawaii operations separately the bottom line would have been somewhat better.
First Hawaiian, by reporting its own operating results, is effectively doing that, since it’s owned by BancWest, which also owns the way bigger Bank of the West and thus has most of its operations on the mainland; and BancWest is in turn owned by Paris-based BNP Paribas, which has its own issues from time to time that don’t even involve the same currency we use.
If you saw my report on Friday’s KGMB9 News at 5, you know where I’m going with this — the Hawaii economy is currently (and often) very different from the mainland economy.
Mainland consumers warmed, probably warmed too much, to adjustable rate mortgages, even subprimes. Many people were aggressively sold mortgages they could never afford. These notes often began with low payments that they could make, but then ballooned to unpayably high rates. A crisis-load of these notes balloon at the end of the year and the mainland economy will be both shaken and stirred by this unless most of these people get serious credit counseling help, and I mean now.
It happened here, too — hundreds of people got into mortgages they can’t afford. But the total percentage of such loans is very small compared to the mainland, because Hawaii consumers, like Hawaii bankers, are more conservative and more suspicious of anything where the price leaps heavenward later.
So far the crisis may actually have been a net benefit to Hawaii. It doesn’t seem to have affected California tourist traffic to Hawaii in any appreciable way. And financial uncertainty has led to lower mortgage rates, perhaps propping up Hawaii home sales by keeping some homes from breaking through the affordability ceiling.
By the way, if you don’t follow stocks or banking closely, Central Pacific Bank is still in good health. All the local banks are.
Oct
29
A Day at the Races
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If the mere name Hugo Z. Hackenbush makes you smile, chances are, you’re a fan of the Marx Brothers.
I revisited their hit movie “A Day at the Races” last night and refreshed my view that these are some of the best comedies ever made.
Groucho plays a veterinarian masquerading as a doctor to help the heroine save her sanitarium (the term used in those days for a health spa) with the “assistance” of Chico, who drives the sanitarium van when he’s not conning people at the race track, and Harpo, a jockey who has been beaten by the bad guy for not throwing a race.
“Marry me and I’ll never look at another horse!” Groucho says to professional dowager Margaret Dumont, whom he earlier diagnoses as having “double blood pressure” — high blood pressure on one side and low blood pressure on another. At another point Groucho tries to take Harpo’s pulse and says, “Either he’s dead or my watch has stopped.”
The fourth Marx Brother, Zeppo, who played the romantic lead in the first five movies (”The Cocoanuts,” sic, “Horse Feathers,” “Animal Crackers,” “Monkey Business” and “Duck Soup,” though I may have the order wrong), agreed with the general view that he wasn’t as talented as his brothers and quit to become an agent. Allen Jones, who sang “The Donkey Serenade” and fathered “Love Boat” theme singer Jack Jones, replaced him for “A Night at the Opera” and “A Day at the Races,” and was far better than Zeppo, but ironically all of the leading men who succeeded him were so bad that even Zeppo would have been an improvement.
The first movies were based on the Marx Brothers’ hit shows on Broadway, and were dense with gags because the brothers adlibbed to keep from getting bored, then kept any new stage business that worked. George S. Kauffman, the playwright, famously stood at the back of the house and murmured to his musical collaborator one night, “I could have sworn I just heard one of the original lines.” But “A Day at the Races” and “A Night at the Opera” were written especially for the movies. They were still very funny but had better story lines, music and choreography. Subsequent movies by the brothers, such as “Go West,” “The Big Store,” and “At the Circus,” failed to live up to the high standard, though they were still funnier than most other people’s best work.
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