HOME |
RSS | 
Seventy years ago today, the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor Naval Base brought the U.S. into World War II. Franklin Roosevelt announced a declaration of war on Japan the next day. Wired has a synopsis of what happened. Link
Today, about 120 survivors of that attack have returned to Pearl Harbor in Hawaii for a commemoration service, including a moment of silence at 7:55AM local time. In previous years, thousands of veterans attended such events. Fewer veterans remain each year, and age has caused many to forgo the trip. Link
You can also read more about the attack on Pearl Harbor in the Neatorama archives:
Dustbin of History: The Pearl Harbor Spy
The following is an article from the newest volume of the Bathroom Reader series, Uncle John’s 24-Karat Bathroom Reader.
If you’ve ever visited the Hawaiian islands, you may already know that one of them, Niihau, west of Kauai, is off-limits to outsiders. Here’s the story of how that came to be, and what life on the island is like today.
In 1863 Eliza McHutchison Sinclair, the wealthy 63-year-old widow of a Scottish sea captain, set sail with her children and grandchildren from New Zealand for Vancouver Island off the southwest coast of Canada. There she hoped to buy a ranch large enough to support the dozen family members who were traveling with her, but after arriving in Canada, she decided the country was too rough for a ranch to be successful. Someone suggested she try her luck in the kingdom of Hawaii, 2,400 miles west of North America in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. On September 17, 1863, she and her family sailed into Honolulu harbor, and quickly became friends with King Kamehameha IV.
The Sinclairs toured the islands looking for suitable ranch property. They turned down an opportunity to buy much of what is now downtown Honolulu and Waikiki beach, and they passed on a chance to buy much of the land in and around Pearl Harbor. “After some months of looking,” Eliza’s daughter Anne recalled years later, “we gave up and decided to leave for California. When King Kamehameha heard of this he told us that if we would stay in Hawaii he would sell us a whole island.”
(Image credit: Polihale at en.wikipedia)
SALE PENDING
The island was Niihau (pronounced NEE-ee-HAH-oo), a 72-square-mile island 18 miles off the southwest coast of Kauai. Population: about three hundred natives. Anne’s brothers, Francis and James Sinclair, had a look and liked what they saw. They offered King Kamehameha $6,000 in gold; the King countered with $10,000 (about $1.5 million in today’s money). Sold! Kamehameha IV died before the sale could be completed, but his successor, King Kamehameha V, honored the deal. In 1864 the Sinclairs ponied up about 68 pounds of gold, and Niihau has been the family’s private property ever since.
CAVEAT EMPTOR
Eliza Sinclair
History (including Hawaiian history) is filled with examples of indigenous peoples being cheated out of their land by unscrupulous outsiders, but this may be a case where the natives pulled one over on the foreigners. When the Sinclair brothers first laid eyes on Niihau, the island was lush and green, seemingly the perfect place to set up a ranch. What Kamehameha apparently did not tell them was that the island was coming off of two years of unusually wet weather. Normally it was semi-arid, almost a desert. Niihau sits in the “rain shadow” of Kauai and receives just 25 inches of rain a year, compared to more than 450 inches on the wettest parts of Kauai. Droughts on Niihau are so severe that it was common for the Niihauans to abandon their island for years on end until the rains returned. If they didn’t leave, they starved.
Indeed, the only reason the island was available for sale—and the reason Kamehameha was so eager to unload it—was because it was so barren. After the Great Mahele (“division”) of 1848, when the monarchy made land available for purchase by native Hawaiians for the first time, the Niihauans had tried to buy the island themselves. They’d hoped to pay for it with crops and animals raised on the island, but the land wasn’t productive enough for them to do it, not even when the price of the land was just a few pennies an acre. They ended up having to lease the island from the King instead, at an even lower price. By the time the Sinclairs sailed into Honolulu harbor in September 1863, the Niihauans had fallen so far behind on even these meager payments that Kamehameha IV was ready to sell the island to someone else.
HEDGING HER BETS
The Sinclair/Robinson Family
After the sale went through, the Sinclairs built a large house on the west coast of Niihau and set up their ranch. But the dry weather returned, and it became evident that the operation might never be successful. Luckily, Eliza Sinclair still had plenty of gold left, and in the 1870s she bought 21,000 acres of land on Kauai that the family developed into a sugarcane plantation. It, too, remains in the family to this day. (In 1902 Eliza’s grandson bought the island of Lanai at a property auction, making the family sole owners of two of the eight inhabited Hawaiian Islands…but only for a time. They sold Lanai to the Hawaiian Pineapple Company—now part of Dole—in 1922.)
CHANGES, CHANGES, EVERYWHERE
When King Kamehameha V signed ownership of the island over to the Sinclairs, he told them, “Niihau is yours. But the day may come when Hawaiians are not as strong in Hawaii as they are now. When that day comes, please do what you can to help them.” The Sinclairs, it turned out, were more than just the owners of an island—they were also the rulers of the Hawaiians who lived on Niihau…at least those who chose to stay on the island after it changed hands. Having their land sold out from under them was a bitter blow to the Niihauans, and many moved off the island. By 1866 the native population of Niihau was half of what it had been in 1860.
Those Niihauans who moved away soon discovered that change was coming to all the islands, not just to Niihau. And few of the changes would be to their benefit. In 1887 a group of armed American and European landowners forced King Kalakaua to sign what has become known as the Bayonet Constitution, which stripped the king of much of his power and denied many native Hawaiians the right to vote. According to the new constitution, foreign-born landowners were allowed to vote, even if they weren’t Hawaiian citizens.
Kalakaua died in 1891, and his sister Liliuokalani became Queen. In 1893 she tried to replace the Bayonet Constitution with one that restored the power of the monarch, but her attempts had the opposite effect and she was overthrown in a coup organized by the foreign landowners. The Republic of Hawaii was declared in 1894, and in 1898 Hawaii was annexed by the United States.
MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE RANCH
more …
Immediately after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, US officials were worried about a Japanese invasion and occupation of those islands. One particular concern was the disposition of US currency in banks in Hawaii. They could not allow that money to fall into Japanese hands. So the military governor of Hawaii found a clever solution:
In January of 1942, the military governor of Hawaii (the territory was under the military’s control after the Pearl Harbor bombing) recalled most of the currency in the future state, with some allowances as to not pull all of the cash out of the islands’ economy. Five months later, bills like the one pictured — called “Hawaii overprint notes” — were issued. The theory was simple: if Hawaii fell into Japanese hands, these bills would no longer be legal tender in the United States. This contingency plan never came into play.
In total, over 65 million Hawaii overprint notes were created (totalling over $300 million), in four denominations — $1, $5, $10, and $20, with the $5 note pictured above the rarest of the quartet. On October 21, 1944, ten months before Victory over Japan Day, the required use of these bills ceased.
It’s a pity that they didn’t put Lincoln in a Hawaiian shirt. He always looked good in Hawaiian shirts.
Link | Image: Coins & Banknotes
Comments Off
Believe it or not, the First Lady of mystery and the Big Kahuna had something in common-they were both innovators in the sport of surfing! Agatha Christie, as it turns out, was one of the first Britons to stand up on a surfboard, and she sharpened her wave riding skills in South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Hawaii as early as 1922. Oh what a sight she must have been braving the waves of Waikiki!
Comments Off The footage is from a webcam mounted outside the CFHT astronomical observatory in Hawaii (another view of it from a different webcam can be found here; sadly, both webcams are on Mauna Kea, not Haleakala). You see some stars and the horizon, then suddenly an ethereal pale arc pops into view. It rapidly expands into a thin circular shell, then fades away as it fills the view. The whole thing takes a few minutes to expand; you can see the stars moving during the event (some of the pixels on the webcam are very sensitive and make stationary “hot spots” in the field of view).
So what is it? Is it a trans-dimensional portal into the future, some wormhole from the Pegasus galaxy, or two alien spaceships battling it out?
Dr. Phil Plait followed forum discussions of the event and explains how online astronomy geeks figured out the source of the sight. Link
Rick Hill of Lunenburg, Massachusetts went on vacation to Hawaii and took an unplanned visit to Waikiki Beach. There he met resident Joe Parker, who went on an unplanned errand to the beach as part of his job. Parker recognized Hill’s accent and made an offhand remark that led them to a discussion about how they both grew up in the same area of Massachusetts.
And then the name game began. Parker threw out several, including Dickie Halligan. Hill responded, “That’s my father!’’
Standing in the glistening white sand, Parker lowered his sunglasses, squinted at Hill, and declared, “That’s my dad, too!’’
A flood of emotion hit everyone like the high-arching waves crashing nearby, they said. Tears flowed down Howe’s cheeks as the two men studied each other’s face and hugged.
“I can’t really put it into words,’’ Parker said yesterday in a telephone interview from Hawaii, describing the feeling of meeting his half brother for the first time, some 6,000 miles from where they grew up. “If I had to, I would say it was chilling, paralyzing, and an out-of-body experience all at once.’’
The two men spent a week becoming acquainted. Link -via reddit
Double Moonbow! What does it mean? It means that photographer Ethan Tweedie, after trying for quite some time, captured rare images Thursday in Kamuela, Hawaii. A moonbow {wiki} is a rainbow created by the light reflected off the moon. In this instance, there was enough moonlight for two of them! Link -via Fark
Comments Off 
You know about the Roman gods our planets are named for, and their earlier Greek counterparts, but how much do you know about Hawaiian mythology? For example, there’s Kamoho, the leader of the shark gods.
Kamoho was the brother of the fire goddess Pele and was considered the guardian god of the Hawaiian Islands. He alone of all Pele’s relatives tried to aid her when she was seeking to avoid her marriage to the boar god Kamapua’a. Kamoho also ruled over the shark-men, or “were-sharks” as I call them. These beings were greedy humans cursed by Kamoho to periodically transform into sharks. They could be recognized by the large shark tattoos that Kamoho branded onto their backs.
Read about the other ten at Balladeer’s Blog. Link -Thanks, Ed!
Comments Off 
These are the Ha’iku Stairs on the island of Oahu in Hawaii. They were first built as a ladder to reach the top of the ridge during World War II, when a radio transmitter was installed on the top of the hill. Later the wood was replaced with metal steps, 3,922 of them! The stairs are now closed to the public, but hikers still risk trespassing charges to try them out. See more pictures at Atlas Obscura. Link
Michael LaFosse and Richard Alexander have got one of the best shops EVAR: it’s all about origamis! Guy Kawasaki of Alltop visited Origamido Studio in Honolulu, Hawaii, and snapped some awesome photos: Link (My favorite is the mathematical origamis above) | More at Origamido’s website
Comments Off 
Even the Dark Side takes a break every now and then, and Darth Vader’s choice of getaway is Hawai’i! Jill Ulander caught a series of photographs of the Dark Lord kicking back on the Big Island. Link -via Buzzfeed
Richard Sullivan posted this lovely color footage from August 14, 1945.
65 Years Ago my Dad shot this film along Kalakaua Ave. in Waikiki capturing spontaneous celebrations that broke out upon first hearing news of the Japanese surrender. Kodachrome 16mm film: God Bless Kodachrome, right?
There is more information about the film in the comments at the vimeo link. -Thanks, Duke!
What’s not to love about Hawaii? Well, no place is perfect, but knowing the seamier side of the state is not likely to cause you to cancel your dream vacation.
Gangster’s Paradise
Hawaii can proudly claim more scientific observatories and and pineapples than any other state in the union. Somewhat less proudly, it claims more Japanese gangsters, too. Also known as the Yakuza, these mobsters have made the island state a major way station for Asian drugs and American guns being smuggled across borders. But why Hawaii? Besides being relatively close to Japan, the state’s diverse ethnic makeup and regular influx of Japanese tourists make it easy for the Yakuza to blend in-at least on the surface. Many Yakuza hide full body tattoos under their high-collar long-sleeve shirts. Some are even missing a finger, which are sometimes cut off and offered as penance to mob bosses. Image credit: Flickr user localjapantimes.
Island of the Lepers
One of Hawaii’s most famous historical figures wasn’t Hawaiian at all. Flemish missionary Father Damien was one of many European settlers who descended on the sunny island chain in the 19th century and brought with them new technologies, new ways of life, and, of course, new germs. The resulting public health crisis necessitated the creation of a fortress-like leper colony on the island of Molokai, also known as “the colony of death”. Damien was the only priest to volunteer for what many considered a suicide mission. He spent 16 years making the colonists as comfortable (and Christian) as possible before he succumbed to the disease himself in 1889. Since then, he’s gained quite a reputation. Mahatma Gandhi considered him a personal hero; Pope John Paul II beatified him in 1995; and the Flemish media voted him “Greatest Belgian of All Time” in 2005.
Squeaky Beaches
Enjoy quiet walks on the beach? Don’t go to the island of Kauai. There, on Barking Sands Beach, dry sand grains emit an eerie sound when rubbed together or poked with bare feet. Various accounts claim the sand sings, whistles, roars, booms, squeaks, or-as the beach’s name suggests-barks like a dog.
Having Your Cook (and Eating Him, Too)
After circumnavigating the globe and logging three epic expeditions to the Pacific, the famously intrepid explorer James Cook seemed to be running out of new things to discover. Perhaps as a result, he also seemed to be losing his mind. According to his crew, Cook’s bouts of irrational behavior came to a head when a Hawaiian native stole a pair of blacksmith’s tongs. He insisted on chasing the thief ashore, whereupon he picked a fight with local villagers. The Hawaiians quickly gained the upper hand, however, and Cook was killed in the skirmish. When the crew of the H.M.B. Endeavour finally got Cook’s body back, his flesh had been roasted from his bones. Had he been eaten? No one knows for sure, but it would seem a fitting end for a man who helped cannibalize (er, colonize) much of the South Pacific.
__________________________
The article above is reprinted from Scatterbrained section of the May- June 2007 issue of mental_floss magazine.
Be sure to visit mental_floss‘ website and blog for more fun stuff!
Lost fans have marked May 23rd as the ending of an era, when the final episode of the TV series will air. Executive producer Jean Higgins took some time to reveal some secrets -no, not how the show will end, but a behind-the-scenes look at what it was like to film the series in Hawaii and how they recreated other settings in the island paradise. There’s even some travel tips in this interview at National Geographic Adventure. Link
(Photographs courtesy of ABC, Jean Higgins)
Jim Rawlinson was riding the waves at Hanalei Bay, Kauai, Hawaii on Monday when a tiger shark attacked his surfboard.
As he slid backwards what happened next is as frightening as it is unimaginable. Rawlinson ended up on the back of the ocean’s most feared predator.
“I was onto the shark’s back…anywhere from about five to ten seconds. It was so strange that everything was so slow and yet again so fast.”
Rawlinson credits his escape from the large, toothy fish on his ability to stay calm. As he straddled the fish, he released his surf leash from around his leg and slowly slid off.
From the bite marks left on the surfboard, Rawlinson and marine biologist Terry Lilley, who was shooting video underwater nearby, estimate the shark was around 14 feet long. Link -via Fark
Underwater caterpillars don’t turn into butterflies or moths, because they are dead, right? Not so for twelve species of caterpillars that live in Hawaii. Evolutionary biologist Daniel Rubinoff, who has been studying moth genus Hyposmocoma for seven years, said he couldn’t believe it the first time he spotted a caterpillar living underwater.
They usually eat algae or lichen, and build silk cases — which one species even adorns with bird feathers — for shelter and camouflage. They spin silk drag lines to withstand the high pressure of fast floodwaters.
Unlike other amphibious creatures that can survive underwater on stored oxygen but must come back up for air, these caterpillars can spend several weeks without ever breaking the surface, according to the paper, which was published online on Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
It isn’t yet clear how the insects do it. Rubinoff and co-worker Patrick Schmitz of the University of Hawaii did not find any water-blocking stopper over the caterpillars’ tracheae or evidence of gills. The animals drowned quickly when kept in standing water, so they seem to need the higher levels of oxygen present in running water, and probably absorb it directly through pores in their body, the scientists said.
A moonbow is a rainbow that appears in moonlight. Light from the moon must be refracted through a mist of water in order for us to see the effect. Photographer Wally Pacholka captured this effect at the edge of Haleakala crater on the island of Maui. The large “star” in the picture is Mars. Link to story. Link to Pacholka’s website. -via Arbroath
PS: There’s a state park near my hometown that has a moonbow every month if the weather is clear. Link
The U.S. Geological Survey has an extensive database of lava-related events in Hawaii. One hundred of the best images have been assembled on a web page and placed on a DVD. These were…
…selected from the collections of the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory as enduring favorites of the staff, researchers, media, designers, and the public over time. They represent photographs of a variety of geological phenomena and eruptive events, chosen for their content, quality of exposure, and aesthetic appeal. The number was kept to 100 to maintain the high resolution desirable.
In the photo above a pair of “concerned scientists” decide to run from a “…surging ‘a‘a flow in Royal Gardens. The top of an ‘a‘a flow rides on the underlying mass and rolls over it like a tractor’s tread, advancing to the front of the flow.”
Link, via. Photo by J.D. Griggs, 7/2/83, JG2514 (click to enlarge).
Curt Carish of Kaua‘i, Hawaii was at Port Allen beach when he spotted a fish swimming awkwardly. He grabbed a bamboo pole and beat the fish until it went limp. Carish put the fish in his cooler. When a friend opened the cooler and looked at the fish, it had a gold watch hanging out of its mouth!
“And the funniest thing is that the watch was on time and still ticking,” Carish said.
Carish, who often hangs out at the private Port Allen Club with many other members, said in all of his 30 years on Kaua‘i he has never encountered anything this bizarre.
After Clark stepped away from the incredible thrill of going big at Waimea, he realized that he longed to be back in his element. Clark has returned ot various North Shore shorebreaks to capture the beauty and power of these monstrous waves from the inside out. What he has achieved through the lens of his camera are images never seen by those who reside on land.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by waxwendy.
From the Upcoming Queue, submitted by 
