Take a Hawaii Vacation and Get Away From Your Local News!

In Philadelphia, a former state senator was convicted on 137 different counts in a federal corruption case.

In New York, a suspect who has admitted killing a lady psychiatrist with a cleaver believes that he is the Messiah, that the burglary suspect a few cells down is the devil and that DNA tests will someday prove he’s the son of still another of his fellow inmates, who he believes is God himself.

In Chicago, A man robbed a Chicago currency exchange Sunday by duping a teller into letting him walk away with $90,000.

In Miami, a proposal to build a new baseball stadium for the Florida Marlins has been blocked by a county attorney who says he cannot approve the stadium deal, or allow it to come up for a vote, because the Marlins signed a contract promising 15 percent of the construction work to black-owned businesses.

Those were front-page newspaper stories in those cities on Monday, March 16th.

The other cities get all the neat stuff. Here in Honolulu (and even more so on the outer islands), the headlines and news tend to be a little on the bland side.

Monday’s top stories in the Honolulu dailies were these:

• The state gave approval for a new hospital on West Maui
• A car crashed into a private home. Nobody was hurt.
• Some tickets are still available for the Sheryl Crow concert.
• The University of Hawaii baseball team center fielder hit three home runs in a win over Loyola Marymount.
• A geothermal company says it expects to boost the amount of electricity being produced at its Big Island plant by the end of the year, expanding its generating capacity by more than a quarter.

Pretty exciting, huh? Makes you want to dash out and buy a paper first thing every morning.

Both of our dailies lost their superb, incisive editorial cartoonists this year. One died, the other retired. But the dailies print most of the major national and world stories, run h3 editorials and cover all the local news. Coverage is not the problem. It’s just that this is Hawaii. Not a whole lot happens here – certainly not at the level of the amazing things that happen in most of the larger mainland markets. If you’re a sports fan and like to read the box scores, we get em. If you like to see yesterday’s closing market prices, we get em.

But we don’t get much in the way of blood n’ guts, juicy gossip or shocking scandals. (When we DO get em, we bleed them for weeks!)

So look at it this way: When you vacation in Hawaii, you’re also on vacation from all that awful news at home!