An Orange County man agreed to plead guilty to trying to sell a Hawaiian skull over the Internet.
Blogosphere buzzing over Apple new product announcements.
I was tuned into a couple of people who were blogging Steve Job’s keynote at Macworld. There is a lot to be excited about – the iPod Shuffle, Mac Mini, and the improvements in iLife ’05. I’m most interested in iWork, the AppleWorks replacement. AppleWorks was getting long in the tooth, and was not even a Coca app – shameful for an Apple product in this day and age. While it was not streamed live, the keynote is now available for viewing. I heard that Jobs did crash an application during the demo, but was quickly able to force-quit and…
A hui hou e Alana…
I did my last regular appearance on Alana I Kai Hikina last night, but may return periodically as a guest or part-time DJ. Alana founder Makela Bruno-Kidani has returned from a few months off, allowing me to enjoy my Sunday evenings at home again. I’ll miss the comradery, though.
3rd Annual Hawai’i International Conference On Arts & Humanities.
I’ll be presenting at this conference on Thursday with my colleague Kiele Akana-Gooch. We’ll be discussing the development of the Ulukau Hawaiian Language Digital Library project, which seems to grow each day in breadth and depth.
One of the Idiot-Cowards has been arrested.
See below
Idiots and cowards, to boot.
Honolulu Police are looking for the person(s) responsible for setting off an improvised explosive device on New Year’s evening that severely injured an 11-year old girl. The suspects in the case have hired lawyers and refused to cooperate with police. I saw a TV interview with the girl and it was heart-wrenching.
And I used to like John McCain.
He says that he will oppose legislation that would allow Native Hawaiians to seek federal recognition, and claims that “when Hawai’i became a state there was an implicit agreement at that time that Native Hawaiians would not receive the same status as Native Americans.” Bullshit. Did Native Hawaiians agree to that? How exactly was it implied to them, Senator? Was it also implied to native Alaskans when Alaska was admitted as a state, just prior to Hawai’i?
iTunes Music Store Gets Its Irish Up.
If they’d just get some more Irish music in there. Actually there is a considerable amount of Irish music there, but some some of my favorites, including Paul Brady and Sean Keane, are no where to be found. Cost is .99 Euro per song, currently approximately $1.30 US at the currently exchange rates.
Geoffrey K. Pullum makes an interesting post on the the future of Cornish on Language Log.
A timely follow up to our earlier discussion. I’m sure Scott won’t like this news. “Cornish is dead, stone dead” and Irish “will be dead in thirty years.” Thankfully there are people who will continue to fight for their survival. We can only hope that it is not in vain, because most of us won’t live long enough to see what happens one way or another. I can relate to his observation of that “almost every story they (“The Economist”) do on language is goofy.” I’ve done very few newspaper and magazine interviews on any subject, from Hawaiian language to…
Can you really acquire perfect pitch?
David Lucas Burge claims that you can. I’ve seen his ads in music magazines for years. He tells a story from his youth where, frustrated by a classmate’s seemingly God-given ability to discern pitches, he figured out on his own how to identify pitches without using a reference pitch (known as “relative pitch”). I never bought his course, though always lamented what I believed were my sub-par listening skills. I have not played much over the twelve or so years since I last gigged, and struggled mightily in transcribing the music for my MA thesis. Once I figured out a…