Day 83 of the Lower Puna Eruption, and the USGS says this activity could last for months and years more. Basically, they're guessing. No one predicted that 3January1983 initial eruption at Puu Oo would still be continuing today. In summary:
- 700 homes destroyed.
- This current phase is five days short of the 1955's 88 days.
- There is a 5+ earthquake at the summit approximately every 30 hours.
- The lava delta into Kapoho Bay now is up to 740 acres, extending half a mile past the coastline.
- There is uncertainty exactly where breaches could occur in the fissure 8 river of lava.
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This is one of those days when I wake-up and have no particular subject in mind:
- I was leaning towards the Blue Revolution, mentioned a couple of days ago in my posting on Our Best Hope for a Progressive Humanity of Planet Earth, which is looming more and more as my next book.
- Then, I thought about neutrinos, for there are a billion times more of them than all the protons and electrons making up what we are and see. 100 trillion of them pass through your body every second.
- But that 106 F heat wave in Japan where 65 have already died caught my attention, for in exactly two years, 24 July 2020, the Tokyo Summer Olympics begin. With global warming, it could get worse.
However, this is the middle of summer, and I had retired from my ten-year run of this blog site on May 1, when the Lower Puna Eruption began, and I felt compelled to report on this disaster. So today I'll focus on golf. Yes, golf.
I try to walk 18 holes at the Ala Wai Golf Course two or three times/week. It's agonizing, and I hate it. But I do this so that I can eat and drink whatever I want.
By my rough estimation, I have golfed a thousand times, 75% of them at Ala Wai. I pay $90/month for a seniors' card, which gets me ten rounds. Thus my weight control cost is $10/18-holes.
Where do I begin? What about Scotland and Japan, and Tadashi Matsunaga and Grant Burgess? Golf is hardly about playing the game itself. It is all about who you're with and where...or my diet. If you clicked on that link just above, you would have learned that Edinburgh has the largest arts festival in the world, scotch, Royal Dublin and the 2018 World Cruise, which has now been delayed until 2020. Tells of our back-to-back rounds at St. Andrews and Carnoustie. Best of all, you would have read about the funniest golf experience I had, mostly written by Grant. We were planning to submit this bit to a golf magazine, but never got around to it. So I borrowed the story in my SIMPLE SOLUTIONS for Humanity.
I should mention that Tadashi has paid for a lot my golf in Japan, so much so that I had membership at the original Koolau and Royal Hawaiian Golf Courses, just to return the favor to visiting colleagues. Both courses (had??...they're now owned by a church and a charitable organization) an onsen in the clubhouse. Took Matsunaga and his father to Koolau once and they each lost a dozen balls...on the first hole. So recently, Tadashi and I golfed at Ala Wai and went to dinner at Vintage Cave.
Also at the international level, there would be no Pacific International Center for High Technology Research (PICHTR) if not for golf. It broke the ice, opening the way to $8 million from the Japanese government, and success with the open cycle OTEC experiment at the Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii Authority. This is primarily why I am contemplating a book on the Blue Revolution, which could well be the breakthrough for a cornucopia of marine products, while remediating global warming and preventing the formation of hurricanes.
I took the head of a Japanese consortium golfing at Koolau, and he got a hole in one. That led to my joining his board which managed the government funds to build Kansai Airport. Not only was there a monthly stipend, but our team developed the mass transit plan for Osaka Bay, which could have made this region the next world center. Unfortunately, the Great Hanshin Earthquake of 1995 destroyed this plan. I tried to sell this concept to Oahu, and if I had succeeded, this now troubled $10 billion system would have long been in operation for almost no cost to the state, and Honolulu would have become this extraordinary world headquarters.
These golf friendships also led to Rainbow Pearls International, a company I reported on a decade ago to culture and market colored pearls. Chinese Red, Kelly Green...you name it, and we could, theoretically, create it. My talk to MENSA a year ago stimulated some interest, but if you would like to take the lead to do this, let me know.
Pacific Geospas is a company started by golf partners, Donald Okahara (president of his engineering consultant company), Ronald Kunimitsu (head of his architectural firm) and Harry Olsen, the Spark Matsunaga Scholar at the University of Hawaii. We got very close, but came the bursting of the Japanese economic bubble in 1992 and financial interest evaporated. With what is happening in Lower Puna, I'm glad we failed, for our operations, which included a golf course, would have been overrun by lava.
I can go on and on, but I'll end with a golf outing that continues from my anecdote about Kee Hyong Kim of South Korea. As I indicated, this fiasco of a dinner turned out well, for Kee and I became close friends. He arranged a lunch with the billionaire head of a Korean company--who seemed proud of stealing the formula of those Japanese energy drinks--at his golf club in Seoul. At this meal was Ron Hays, who was the former commander in chief of the Pacific, and then-president of PICHTR (story above), Kenji Sumida (who went on to become president of the East-West Center) and Kee. I should mention the name of this billionaire, but that's not important. He asked if we wanted to join him for golf that afternoon? We said we didn't have any clothing for that. So he said go to the golf shop and buy whatever we needed and he would pay for it. We did, and this is one of those plush courses with women caddies, where you stop every three holes in a fancy teahouse, with a range of drinks and eats. After the 18 holes, we had dinner. What came of this golf interaction? Well, nothing. But a good story, anyway.
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