I watched this morbidly obese guy with no helmut riding a rather small moped down Kapahulu today.  Oh yeah, he was talking on a cell phone.  I thought it was sadly funny.

Hawaii is different from what we call the mainland.  Many things are different.

Weather.  We only have one kind.  It’s ‘nice’.  It’s either really nice, or nice.  Sometimes it rains hard.  So what.  It is still warm out.  Anyway the air is different here.  It’s nice too.

You don’t see semis on the roads.  Once in a while you will see a big truck, but it is rare.

No billboards.  I think that’s cool.  There is actually some group or society to keep billboards out.  You can’t just sneak ‘em in in the middle of the night either…..

It’s OK here (and only here) to ride around in the back of trucks.  No seats, no seat-belts of course, and no safety.  Some states seem to allow dogs (also unsafe) but here we compromise the safety of people too.  The deal does not even get mentioned-ever.  You can tell the seasoned back-of-the-truck people.  They have this smug, defiant "I’m not comfortable, but I won’t let on no matter what" look.

You’d think perhaps that it was because of the great numbers of underpaid farm workers, but no.  As more and more subdivisons gobble up the available farmland on Oahu, we see that it is for all types of people.  Young, old, even kids on dates…..

No pro sports teams play here.  Bummer.  I mean the Lakers practice here for about a month, but that’s as close as it gets.  No one seems to mind.  We DO have the Pro Bowl, for at least one more year.

Anyway there are too many differences to tell in just one blog,     Rick Emmerich