Jobs’ Apple can speak Hawaiian

If Hawaii harbors a little extra bit of aloha for Apple computers and its late visionary Steve Jobs, there are probably lots of reasons. One is linguistic. For example, many of the students who have studied Hawaiian language, in immersion programs and elsewhere, tend to favor the Mac over PC Windows platforms. That’s because early on, it was the Mac that enabled the proper display of the language’s diacritical markings.

Not that Jobs himself had anything to do with it, but there are a lot of people in Hawaiian language education circles who are Apple zealots (as only Mac users can be) and who may have marked his death on Wednesday with a "Mahalo piha, e Steve Jobs" or some such expression of sentiment. No diacriticals needed there.

Some have been tracking Jobs’ affection for Hawaii as a vacation spot, though he seemed to make his escape here in low-key style. That means he probably wasn’t wearing his trademark black turtleneck.

Feud won’t help Chinatown

For those who have been delighted with the progress of efforts to reclaim the Chinatown-Fort Street area in the past decade, it’s more than a little distressing to see the spitting match going on over the First Friday festivals in the arts district.

A dispute is raging over block parties organized by Indigo Restaurant and Kapua Productions and how they interfere with First Friday celebrations at bars and galleries elsewhere. To make a long and convoluted story short, off-duty police were not hired to control traffic, which produced safety hazards in a busy traffic area.

It wasn’t so long ago that this was a zone to be avoided after hours. We can hope that warring parties can come to terms before things deteriorate back into that sad state.