Chie!

Remember this? That was in May.




This is from August.






Jack & Chie are doing well; this month we had some fleas & Chie had tapeworms, but that's been handled. Not too bad. I also don't know what happened to the font option on this editor but whatever.

I continue to hate on Yelp.

Recently I got an earful from a friend who felt I was unwise to post this. Believe it or not, it actually wasn't Darren. But while my friend had good points, my beef with Yelp remains.

Nothing further has resulted from Yelp's enabling, but the very principle that this company is based on just bothers me.

Recently I joined Yelp Sucks, which is basically a bunch of business owners & employees who want to vent about how Yelp wronged them. After reading various entries, I realized that here was a bunch of people who basically wouldn't even be here if their accounts on Yelp hadn't been deleted for one reason or another. "Please take me back, Yelp; please let me post on your site," was what the site topics (Yanked Account, Deleted Reviews) seemed to say.

And here I thought I was going to meet other people who want to destroy Yelp.

So much for that.

Here's my beef:

1. No accountability=chickenshit free-for-all. Yelp! is a website where people can create an account & then write reviews about various businesses. They are identified by their first name & last initial, which means basically nothing accountability-wise.

In the case of Mary M, one of these reviewers was able to post criticism of me, identifying me by name, in a review for the bar I work in, which made obvious where I worked. Luckily for me, Mary was so unique that I immediately knew who she was from reading her "review," & frankly, the bad press was desirable to me.

I immediately told Mary I knew who she was. Faced with the unexpected accountability, Mary cordially contacted me & apologized, editing out her bad review. To be honest, I wanted her review to remain the way it was, but the fact of the matter is if Yelp! users actually had to own up to whatever they said, they might not be saying it.

I don't support the Enabling Of Chickenshitness. That's what Yelp! does.

2. Momma's skirts for the attackers, prohibition of defense from the victims. In spite of reviews which not only publicly identify employees & (obviously) their location, defense responses are not allowed. My post responding to Mary was removed for "personal attack" (heh, irony).

When I responded, I knew that any reader would know who I was & could even show up at the bar when I worked to harrass me if so desired. I have no problem with accountability, & I have no problem with being accused of "personal attack." I do have a problem with an anonymous user being protected while attacking me. That's just --- you know --- not fair.

I should be allowed to hit back.

3. How Yelp! makes money. This is what really causes me anger. After providing the common man (or stalker or fat chick, whatever) with a weapon to attack businesses with, with the other hand Yelp! offers the attack victims defense tools... for a price.

It turns out that Yelp! does allow businesses to respond publicly to these kinds of attacks... if businesses pay them. For $150/month, businesses can post responses to reviews. In the comments at this article, a business owner said that Yelp! customer service offered him the ability to remove one bad review every 6 months... for $350/month.

No doubt I'm going to get another earful for posting this, but it's one of the prices of speaking one's mind. While there are those who dislike me for it, you can't say it's not fair. There's my picture there on the right. It was taken where I work & where you'll be able to find me tonight should you care to discuss anything with me.

You can also anonymously post your grievances with anything I've said in the comments below. Personal attacks are more than welcome.

You Hungry?

The mention of You Hungry brings up tasty visions of fresh corned beef & cabbage, succulent kalua pig, & steaming shoyu chicken, all in mom-style portions with big scoops of rice. I also recall it being on the corner of Atkinson & Kapiolani, where we'd wait patiently for a parking stall because the reward would be worth it.

You Hungry has since continued the tradition of good, real food under the new ownership of Joel Cabais (son of Jay Cabais, Honolulu steak plate pioneer), his brother Donovan, & cousin Jason of Ono Hawaiian Steak. Recently You Hungry went to the streets, winning Honolulu Magazine's Best Lunch Wagon for 2008. With the help of David Hayashi, they are now implementing plans for world domination.

Seriously. You gotta try their sauces.

When my brother told me he was taking me to lunch at a lunchwagon, I was a little skeptical. My experience with lunchwagons is pretty noobish. I remember visiting one by the boats near Ala Moana Beach Park perhaps 13 years ago, a lunchwagon outside Queens Physicians Office Building with my dad & I think I've gone to Tsukenjo's once. I'm a drive thru girl when it comes to lunch, mostly due to laziness.

Still, I trust my brother.

Around 12:30 (lunchtime) we found street parking on South Street practically in front of our lunch destination, in front of which there was already a line of 5-6 people, & a few others who had already ordered, or were perhaps just bathing in the enticing smell of hot food.

Lunchwagon menu boards intimidate me. I always think I want something, & then at the last minute I decide I want something else, but I'm not entirely sold on that something else & I can't really be 100% sure that's what I actually want, but I'm already at the front of the line & everyone is looking at me expectantly. So then I order what I'd decided on initially that I wanted to change my mind about. And then after I pay I figure out what it was that I actually wanted to order. But it's too late.

Maybe that's why I go to drive thrus. Anyway.

There were already a number of items already sold out on the lunchwagon menu board. Naturally, I immediately found something I'd like to eat amongst the sold out stuff (fresh corned beef!!).

We were moving ahead in line pretty fast & I had to make a decision.

My brother informed me he was going to order the Fried Ahi Poke, reassuring me he wouldn't be able to finish the whole thing.

And so there I was, & there was only one person left in front of us in line. My brother had already decided what he was going to order, but I still didn't know.

I considered the Roast Pork with gravy, but thought that might be too flagrantly unhealthy --- I'd have to come back here alone to order that. The Garlic Chicken sounded tempting, but I wasn't in a real chicken mood, & Crab Stuffed Salmon felt a little too adventurous.

I looked again, forlornly, at the bottom of the menu board where "Fresh Corned Beef w/ Cabbage" sported a little note saying "OUT." I thought of a few reasons why I didn't need to have Corned Beef for lunch today.

And then we were at the front of the line & the guy in the lunchwagon was looking at me.

My brother had ordered his Fried Ahi Poke, & was looking at me.

My mind went completely blank. I didn't know what I felt like eating. Everything sounded good. They were out of fresh corned beef. Ooh, Pork Adobo.

"I'll have the Hamburger Steak please," I said. "All rice. Brown rice. Thank you." Sheesh, I'm such a dork. I didn't even let him tell me I could have toss, but if I'd been a lunchwagon connoisseur I'd have known that tossed greens is a common plate lunch option.

Well, I handled that well.

Our plates came & we set up on the picnic table next to the wagon.

My brother had gotten me a small sample of You Hungry's secret recipe Sweet Wasabi sauce. Whoa.

I've had wasabi/mayo dressings that went well on burgers & wasabi/miso dips that added color to seafood, but this sauce was pure happiness just by itself. As I've said in other blogs, I'm not the huge sauce person; I like my food plain with minimal seasoning.

But this sauce tasted winz just on the tip of my finger. I was too busy enjoying the bright, expansive flavors to even try to deconstruct what I was tasting.

You could put this stuff on anything. Ok, maybe not ice cream. Worth a try anyway, though. It was good.

My brother's Fried Ahi Poke looked & smelled so good that I immediately felt like a loser. The chunks of ahi were soft & perfectly cooked, seasoned with some enchanting citrus flavor. If only I could order this by the bucket & take it to the bar!

Obviously my brother had been here before!

Resignedly I turned to my panic-ordered hamburger steak.

As I lifted the condensation-drenched lid I was greeted with the smell of rich, homemade brown gravy & beef. My hamburger steak was tender, meaty, & swimming in delicious gravy. I'm proud to say that I didn't make it through the rice. But that hamburger steak disappeared in its entirety.

That was really good. I made a good choice after all.

Either that, or there are no bad choices.

Monday thru Friday, 10am-1:30pm
Two locations: South & Halekauila, Alakea & Beretania.

Obake Story: Benizuru/Kagami's

Hey, this is going to be a firsthand ghost story so if it's late at night & you get spooked easily, save it for tomorrow. I'm talking to you, Keith. See also the Scary Stuff Disclaimer.

In 2002 my then-husband (Dean) & I opened a small bar in Kaimuki called Pub Kagami. This was the same spot which Dean & I had frequented for years before we became the new owners; back then it was Benizuru, run by husband & wife team Derek & Rika. I had commented to Dean how nice it would be to have a bar just like this one, & when a few years later Derek & Rika moved out, we jumped at the chance to move in. We (well, Dean) spent 5 months remodeling the entire interior, opening in March 2002 with great hopes & a bit of exhaustion.

I was there every day, the happy bar owner, as early as 2pm, & often while I sat in the bar doing paperwork late afternoons I would see a young man with brown hair standing in a certain spot of the bar, just in front of the hallway leading to the restrooms. He simply stood there; he never looked at me or moved, although he would be gone once I blinked.

He didn't bother me, so I never thought much of it.

In 2003 Dean & I split up, amicably, & I left my marriage & my bar, taking only the Playstation with me (I had just bought Qbert). I did come back, after a year, to help out once a week, & that was when Dean told me about the Glass O' Beer tradition. Apparently the bar had a paranormal visitor who could make the tvs & speakers go crazy, who, according to the janitor, made regular rounds to the other businesses in the building. As had been suggested to him, Dean would pour a glass of beer & set it in the corner of the bar, & amazingly (it had been witnessed by others as well), that seemed to calm the electronics down.

I was skeptical, not because I don't believe in ghosts, but mainly because I don't believe in people. But I humored the new bar tradition. I ended up leaving again, but when I came back in 2006 to help the new owners who had bought the bar from Dean out, I was informed that the Glass O' Beer was still observed, although sporadically.

Although I never saw my young man of the afternoons (my shift started at 8; that might be why), I did see shadows in the bar that appeared to be more than ocular spectres in a dark room, mostly in the area of the dartboards, which were a few feet from my young man's spot. I never bothered with them much until one night I had 3 sightings, which I thought unusual, & when I asked my boss if he had set out the Glass O' Beer recently he didn't know. I checked & found it moldy. I poured a new one.

However, the spirit(s) seemed to only get bolder. In the bar one night playing megatouch I was tapped, rather briskly, twice. Both times I turned around to see that no one in the bar was anywhere near me. I found that annoying. Even more annoying was hearing my name shouted on busy nights, & having to stop whatever I was doing to scan the faces in the room for whoever was trying to get my attention.

One night in the kitchen I was startled by a large, dark-skinned man who stood by the entrance glaring at me. I went back to washing dishes, & looked up to see him again. And then again. While ghosts of themselves don't bother me a whole lot, the glaring did. A couple of customers glanced through the kitchen door at me when I said "Dammit!" the 3rd time. I finally hissed to the empty air, "Stop it!!" & marched out of the kitchen. I never saw him again.

My sister mentioned to me that she had funny feelings, like she was being watched, in the women's restroom. My friend Joy also had a minor scary moment when the restroom lights went off & wouldn't go back on for her. When I went to investigate they turned right on. Dancing Frog action.

I ran into Derek & Rika at Sorabol one night. I didn't want to sound like a neurotic little girl but I had to ask them if they had ever had any obakes in the bar.

"Oh yeah," Rika immediately said. She looked at Derek. "Remember? The young man." She also mentioned an old man who frequented the main seating area (which would have been re-modeled as our dartboard area) & a big man with "scary eyes." I told her about the shoulder tapping & she said that female customers had reported that to them during Benizuru's reign. Apparently the male ghosts in the bar enjoyed having women around. Made sense.

Last year the 808Ghosts team came by to see if they could find anything to document; recording-wise it was rather fruitless but their occult specialist/psychic had a lot of observations, including a confirmation of a presence in the women's restroom. I ended up joining their team, although since deleting my MySpace I've been out of the loop. And... I just checked out the new site; looks like I'm off the team. Meh, easy come easy go. =)

Since then it's been pretty quiet except for a few incidents that are probably coincidences. Maybe the obakes didn't like being outed. The building is still active, though... a couple of months ago I saw mounds of rock salt in the doorway of one of the other businesses.

Try beer, guys.

The Sitemeter Internet Explorer Blogger Crash!!

Today I attempted to visit this blog so that I could then jump to the various reads in my blogroll since, like any intelligent person, I use my blog's blogroll to archive links instead of my Favorites or Bookmarks. Yeah, shut up.

But then I couldn't; Internet Explorer shut me down every time I tried. A quick visit to Blogger's Help Group revealed the issue: if you employ Sitemeter at Blogger you will not be able to view your blog via Internet Explorer. Neither will anyone else.

Sitemeter's about to launch a multi-server upgrade & so that's probably why it's all glitchy. Whatever. Anyway.

Most support forums you visit will immediately advise you to avail yourself of their SEARCH feature to find relevant topics to help yourself with. It's kind of like reminding your incontinent grandmother to use the restroom before getting into the car for the cross-country road trip. Keeping all relevant discussion about a specific issue in the same thread is actually pretty important to the effectiveness of a support section. As was demonstrated by the dozens of threads --- sometimes up to 5 in a row --- at Blogger's Help Group (in fact, in 3 different sections of the Help Group), all about the same thing.

I was pretty impressed with the misuse of question marks: HOW did you remove it...SITEMETER or Blogger won't let me on..always get the IE message???? YIKES.... Deby Were people really this panicked? And how many sentences did Deby connect together with the little dots? Her username is "yesipray." Well, I guess He doesn't mind her grammar so who cares.

The other thing I noticed is that a lot of bloggers can't spell. One blogger wrote:
I to am having the same problem, I thought someone hacked my site through comments... so it definatly is a blogspot issue?

Yikes. I wanna go check out this guy's blog!! I bet it has all kinds of cool information about clubs & stuff.

Since I checked the Blogger Help Group this afternoon the piles & piles of threads about the same issue have grown into dozens of pages. It's amazing that people don't see the blue lines saying "Internet Explorer Can't Open My Blog" "Cannot Get To My Blogs" "Internet Explorer Cannot Open The Internet Site" while they are scrolling down to the Post Your Question button at the bottom of the page. How can they miss all this?

My only solace is that I did see a lot of posts in which there were no spelling or grammatical errors. There were actually a lot of literate people there on Blogger. That means there are actually a lot of literate people out there in the world.

But not enough, probably.

Incidentally, I removed Sitemeter from my page & now it's all good.

The end.

Scary Stuff: The Disclaimer

Over the next few months I'm going to start posting a series of firsthand obake stories, maybe a few secondhand ones. Only some of them are actually scary, but the label will be "Scary Stuff."

From the hovering purplish thing in my room when I was 4 & the "thing" in the neighbor's mango tree when I was 7 to the voices calling my name in 2008 I've never really taken these things that seriously (Well, I might take these voices seriously because it's screwing up my sleep; anyone know any good exorcists?). They made interesting stories, & that's all these will be: interesting stories.

Recently a friend & I sat down & traded ghost stories, & I found that I had difficulty remembering some details that had never eluded me before. Now, due to various aspects of my past, I acknowledge large chunks of my life have been sucked into the void of senility (I'd list them but I can't remember their existence, much less their names.). Let's not let this happen to the fun stories!

Since childhood I believed in ghosts. My imaginary friend, Hermaine (pronouced Herman) was a ghost, & he was great company. I couldn't tell you what he looked like, but my grandmother's favorite story is how I made her move because she was "sitting on Hermaine."

So I started life out with good experiences.

I also believe that there are a lot of coincidences. And on top of that I acknowledge that I probably can't differentiate the 2 accurately 100% of the time.

These are just stories. What's cool is that they actually happened to me, or to the person who related them to me. I'm just writing them down because, since Alzheimers runs in my family, I should probably write them down somewhere.

Lions & Tigers

Holy crap.