Good bread for everybody

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Lots of people are posting fond memories of Jose Krall, the baker and pastry cook at Maui Bake Shop & Deli, who is missing since his plane crashed Saturday. Here is our favorite.

Jose’s productions were first-rate and priced accordingly. A strawberry dressed up in a tuxedo made of dark and white chocolate, for example, cost about $3. The exception was his baguettes, the bread that is the staff of life for the French.

When a sort of imitation baguette was available at local supermarkets for $3 or so, a genuine, crusty, hard baguette from Jose cost just $1.25. I once asked him why his baguettes were so cheap when his other loaves were priced around $6. I cannot recall his exact words, but the gist was:

“Everyone should be able to afford to eat good bread.”

In his old shop, before his brief retirement, he had a poster that read, in French, “In his (the baker’s) hands, the essence of good bread.” Jose Krall was a master baker who took his craft seriously. He walked the walk.

Jose Krall, picture from The Maui News

 

The beginning of the end for Mount Trashmore?

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According to The Maui News. the county is issuing a request for trash-to-power proposals in order to divert a lot of opala from the Central Maui Landfill.

It will be interesting to see who applies and what technologies are offered. The county put on an all-day seminar 20-some years ago when trashpower was a hot item, but the then-director of  public works preferred to bury garbage. That got expensive in the ’90s when EPA began requiring environmental safeguards on dumps.

Oahu went ahead with H-POWER, against a lot of skeptics, but it seems to have been successful enough. At least, Honolulu is expanding it in a big way.

A question for Maui will be, do we generate enough trash? When plastic recycling was attempted, there just wasn’t enough plastic garbage.

By definition, garbage has low unit value, so you need a lot of it in order to make money, or to justify the considerable overhead of a biggish power plant. Unlike wind or solar, though, trash is firm power, available anytime.

Trash can have unusual properties. In Virginia Beach, Virginia, which is a flat as the back of your hand, the city piled up trash several hundred feet, covered it with dirt and grass and turned it into a park, called Mount Trashmore. (The city officials didn’t like that but the name stuck.)

Once they had a hill a couple hundred feet high, the city could finally have a Soapbox Derby competition. Before, it was too flat for the cars to roll.

Pawn 101: Check under the hood

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Here’s a story that every pawn shop operator can give

personal testimony about.

A man brought us a book to see what it was worth.

It was volume 2 of a 2-volume edition of one of

Charles Darwin’s books. Ordinarily, volume 2 is

worth more than volume 1, because 2’s tend to get lost

more often. In this case, however, and on Maui, the

book was virtually worthless.

That’s because a complete set, in excellent condition,

can be had on the Internet for about $50. Given

shipping costs from Maui, and considering how

unlikely it would be to find a volume 1 here; and that

it’s a heavy book, it would cost more to marry volume 2

 up with a volume 1 on the Mainland than it’s worth.

However, while the owner was talking about where he

got the book, our assistant was flipping pages. “It’s

worth at least $20,” he told the owner.

Because someone had stuck a $20 Silver Certificate

between the pages.

At last August’s pawnbrokers’ convention, a Mainland

broker told about how a good customer whose husband

had died brought him a fancy hunting knife, hoping

she could get $300 to pay bills.

“I looked under the cotton in the knife box and there

were four one-hundred dollar bills.”

 

Things you’d rather do on Lanai

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Wrecked yacht from Inside Bay Area

Wrecked yacht from Inside Bay Area

Get dumped in the ocean when your $8-million America’s Cup sailboat crashes.

However, it did happen in San Francisco Bay. Brrrr.

Well, that’s another reason Lanai island owner Larry Ellison won’t be having his Oracle yacht team practicing off Lanai. No boat.

This isn’t the first time one of Ellison’s boats has crashed. In 2011, it happened off San Diego.

Bloomberg News has video of what $8 million worth of highest-tech sailboat looks like after it stumbles:

http://www.bloomberg.com/video/-8m-oracle-yacht-meets-disaster-again-near-san-fran-vKOYYntaQAiI9qvexax08Q.html

Boat captain Jimmy Spithill said, ” There’s no question this is a setback.”

D’ja think?

A bad recipe for our reefs

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The Maui News http://mauinews.com/page/content.detail/id/565706/Task-force-s-plan-in-place-to-save–mend-coral-reefs.html?nav=10reports that after a lot of work, a local group in alliance with NOAA has come up with a summary of what is causing decline of West Maui’s reefs.

Unfortunately, diligence is no substitute for knowledge, and the West Maui Watershed and Coastal Management task force blew it. While some of their conclusions are valid, the big, expensive one is baloney. The Maui News says:

The county’s Lahaina Wastewater Reclamation Facility role involves pouring 3.5 million to 5 million gallons a day of nutrient-rich treated water underground using injection wells, Hood said. These nutrients have been blamed, at least in part, for killing coral and feeding algae blooms that strangle it.

The truth is, the treated wastewater is not rich in nutrients. It is very low in nutrients. If it weren’t for the yuuck factor and the slight possibility of disease organisms, you could drink the stuff. Hundreds of millions of people drink water a lot worse that what goes down the injection wells.

For years now, and notwithstanding the EPA spent a million dollars back in the early ’90s trying to convict the wells and failed, a band of environmental zealots have been running a campaign against the effluent. If they had merely visited the Central Laboratory and observed the testing of the effluent (done daily), they’d know better. It’s not too late. The lab operates every day of the year.coral reef

There’s a lot of bogus “information” out there about the oceans. The same Sunday The Maui News helped publicize the wrongheaded West Maui report, the Los Angeles Times ran a http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-acidic-oceans-20121007,0,7494056.storystory about the dangers of an acid ocean:

Rising acidity doesn’t just imperil the West Coast’s $110-million oyster industry. It ultimately will threaten other marine animals, the seafood industry and even the health of humans who eat affected shellfish, scientists say.

Not worry though. The ocean is not turning acid, if you go swimming, your suit won’t dissolve. The ocean has been alkaline for billions of years and it will continue to be alkaline until the sun expands and burns us to a crisp.

The ocean is about as alkaline as a glass of Alka-Seltzer.

Pawn 101: You can take me to the fair

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The Joy Zone (photo by Forest & Kim Starr)

(with apologies to Lerner & Lowe)

The Friday afternoon of Maui Fair week is always busy at Kamaaina Loan. The reason offers insight into what pawnshops really mean to their communities, rather than what the common opinion is.

If you went to the fair, no doubt you saw some slightly harassed looking guys herding 8, 9, 10 or so kids through the Joy Zone and the food booths. These were good guys — uncles maybe — seeing to it that the neighbor keiki had a good, safe time.

When you start thinking about filling up 10 growing boys and girls with chili and rice, though, the cash outlay can be daunting. Quite a few people turn to the pawnshop for ready cash.

This contradicts the view that pawnshops attract the desperate, the unemployed and the near-destitute. In fact, pawnshops are able to help people in those categories, but as bank economist John Caskey was surprised to find (in a study done in the early ’90s for the Russell Sage Foundation, published as “Fringe Banking: Check-Cashing Outlets, Pawnshops and the Poor”), pawnshops reach a much wider clientele.

Most customers are employed, although many in jobs that feature periods of temporary layoffs. Caskey went to pawnshops and interviewed customers to see who they were and what they depended on the pawn lender to do for them.

He was surprised to find that a substantial part of the business came from ordinary folks who took out pawn loans for a night or weekend on the town.

Not everybody has an ATM card, and if you are contemplating spending a couple hundred dollars at the Maui Fair, there might not be that much in your bank account anyway.

A fast pawn loan could be the answer.

It is for many people.

This was the first year that Kamaaina Loan advertised its pawn loans direct to fairgoers. If you had a good time at the fair with our help, we’re gratified.

The photograph of the Joy Zone comes from the invaluable photographic archive of Maui life being added to by Forest & Kim Starr. Mahalo to Forest and Kim.

He shoulda texted

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You may have missed a  funny story in Friday’s Maui News, because it was buried at the end of an unfunny story about a pedophile.

According to police, Damien Black failed as an armed robber because the employee couldn’t read his demand letter . . . Police said previously that, because of poor penmanship, the employee was unable to read the note. The suspect became frustrated and ran off, police said.

It is not clear from the report whether he was trying to get drugs or money, but either way, it was a bad idea, badly executed.

If you need fast cash, much easier to bring your stuff down to Kamaaina Loan, where a friendly pawnbroker will help you. And you won’t have to write anything except your name certifying that the stuff isn’t stolen and that you agree to the contract.

 

Pawn 101: Lucky we pawn on Maui

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Not needed at our pawn shop

This past week’s episode of “Hard Core Pawn,” the reality show shot in Detroit featured this http://cleverrealitytv.com/2012/09/16/hardcore-pawn-94-news-flash-pawn-shops-sell-your-stuff-les-finds-a-ruby-in-the-rough-a-muscular-woman-rock-em-sock-em-robots-and-crazy-comes-in-all-colors-in-detroit/incident:

A guy then went up to Rich’s window complaining about a generator he bought less than 12 hours ago from the shop. Rich said the thing was ‘as-is’ and there was nothing he could do about it. The guy was very big and loud. Rich was arguing with the guy and Les was watching the confrontation. Rich was pissed off more than usual at this guy and he went to go out front. The customer ripped off he jacket and got ready to maul Rich and his goatee of death. The big security guards were holding the customer back. Les went outside to talk to the guy to try and help. Les said he would check out the generator and then had a repair man fix it. The guy was happy with the end result.

(From the Clever Reality website.)

To be clear, that was Detroit Rich, not Big Rich of Market Street.

Kamaaina Loan doesn’t even have security guards. No need on North Market Street.

The “as-is” sale policy is the same everywhere among the nation’s 13,000-plus pawnshops. That applies to items coming in as well as going out.

If you  bring in, say, a computer or a cellphone, to sell or to get a loan on, you’ll  be asked to turn it on, and, if necessary, enter your password.

You’d be surprised, maybe, how many people bring in a dead cellphone without a charger and expect to get money for it.

Charge ’em up at home or bring your charger with you. (And why can’t you just plug it in to the USB port on the computer on the counter? Because that’s a good way to infect our system with computer viruses.)

 

 

Real-life drama in Wailuku

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While we were busy getting ready for, shooting and then following up on the Kamaaina Loan reality TV show, a different real-life drama was working itself out around the corner:

http://www.mauitime.com/Articles-Cover-Story-i-2012-09-13-76963.113117-Mismanagement-Allegations-May-Doom-The-Wailuku-Main-Street-Association-And-Change-Our-Small-Towns-But-That-Might-Be-A-Good-Thing.html