HOLIDAY LEFTOVERS: Arriving home after a pre-Christmas board meeting, Waikiki Community Center exec director Mike Lee realized that in his haste he had scraped decorations for a buche de noel, the French name for a cake shaped like a fireplace log, into the trash along with cake leftovers after board members had their fill. Mike made the cake and wanted to save the decorations that included two chickadee replicas. A red glass that was given to him along with the little chickadees was also accidentally trashed.

So Mike drove back to the center. “At the corner of Building A in full view of all passersby, I opened the garbage can lid, turned on my flashlight, and dug into the trash,” Mike said. “Just then a car passed by, someone rolled down his window and roared, ‘Get out the garbage can, you bum!’ I just kept my head buried in the trash can, found my treasures and headed home.” Mike added that after all the trespass citations the center has been forced to issue and the homeless the staff has dealt with on campus, he experienced “empathy for those among us who survive only because of what they find in our trash or the hundreds we serve here through the emergency food bank” …

THE FAIRMONT Kea Lani Hotel and its employees celebrated 20 years on Maui by giving back to the community with a substantial donation of rice to the Maui Food Bank. The rice drive kicked off Dec. 1 when each hotel employee was encouraged to donate a 20-pound bag of rice. The goal was to collect 2,000 pounds. However, by Dec. 16, when employees gathered at the annual holiday celebration, 278 bags of rice had been collected. A few days later, Maui Food Bank trucked off 5,560 pounds of brown and white rice, just in time for the holidays … It wasn’t a crystal ball, but the Kahala Hotel brightened its New Year’s celebration by dropping a 6-foot-wide, 16-foot-high pineapple made out of aluminum with LED lights from atop the resort …

ADD SUPERSTAR Bette Midler, born and raised here, to the anti-rail list. Bette, a Radford High grad who attended the University of Hawaii, made her opinion quite clear in a letter to the editor of the Star-Advertiser that ran Sunday. She wrote that as a New Yorker she can “testify to the noise and ugliness these elevated trains bring to every community through which they pass.” She added, “That this project is going to be so small, cost so much and have such a terrible impact on the environment is dreadful. The very idea that the state would sacrifice the most important amenity it has to offer the world, the beauty of its environment, is beyond belief” …

AWARD-WINNING filmmaker Stephanie J. Castillo, a former Star-Bulletin reporter, started teaching digital filmmaking Tuesday at Kauai Community College. Stephanie wrote and produced film documentaries as an independent filmmaker for 30 years on Oahu before moving her work base to Kauai in 2010. She won a regional Emmy for her first documentary, “Simple Courage,” in 1993. It told the story of Hawaii’s leprosy epidemic and Father Damien’s intervention. It was a co-production with Hawaii Public Television. Father Damien achieved sainthood in October 2009 …

SINGER-MUSICIAN Owana Salazar and pianist Kit Ebersbach have a Thursday night gig at the Modern Lobby Bar … Duke’s Waikiki marks its 19th anniversary next Friday …