July 18, 2006 - Aloha Ed

Last Friday, the dedicated staff of edhat.com was at De La Guerra Plaza for the New-Press employee press conference. The big crowd was not aware of the drama that was about to unfold. They had no idea that the newspaper employees were going to come out dressed in black and place duct tape over their mouths. Today, there is another noontime rally planned at the Plaza. Members of the community are planning this one. The theme is “restoring the News-Press”. Edhat will be on hand, timing the speeches.

While we were waiting for the show on Friday, our wandering eyes took in the crowd. We looked for the usual stuff like, whether woman carried purses, whether men wore shorts, if people were talking on cell phones, and how many had hats. With tally counters running in our heads we found the crowd to be similar to the crowds we have counted walking down State Street, hanging out at coffee shops, and driving in cars.

Similar, we thought, except for one thing – there seemed to be an awful lot of men wearing Hawaiian shirts. And, as it turns out, many of them were attorneys – lawyers gone native. Ah, only in Santa Barbara do the lawyers wear Hawaiian shirts and the reporters wear duct tape. No wonder everyone wants to move here, especially the lawyers.

Yesterday, the dedicated staff woke up early to count the number of men in Hawaiian shirts heading back to their little grass shack offices. The reason we were up and counting so early was so we would only count men on their way to work. You know - the nine to five-o crowd who work for the Big Kahuna.

As you may remember, yesterday was Monday, the most hated day of the week. And, in retrospect, it’s probably not the day to find a big wave of Hawaiian shirts. Certainly on casual Friday, the day of the News-Press rally, there would have been more. But, as Ed always says, “you can’t settle for more until you’ve settled for less”. So, counting shirts we did.

On our way to count we walked up lower State and saw that the flowering trees lining the street were dropping their bounty on the sidewalk below. The sidewalk was a yellow river of blossoms. We stopped and smelled the flowers. We took some pictures - yellow journalism you might say. We took a picture of a worker at the Holiday Inn Express. He was juggling.

When we arrived at the mid-State area by the courthouse. We started counting. We looked at 100 men on their way to work. We saw ties - some stripes - even a plaid. We also saw seven Mauna Loas wearing shirts with island designs. One, we recognized as a dedicated Edhat subscriber. :-)

Yesterday, twelve Edhat subscribers guessed 7 shirts. They were lpotter, art1939, BLT, john_monika, jegoffin, Wag, diamonddzell, garyes, cuttooth, typo33, quercusrosa, and Elvis. We assigned each subscriber a number, and sat the Edhat Dog in front of a globe in the Edhat office. The Dog sat patiently as we spun the globe around in front of her. When the globe stopped, Japan was right in front of the dog’s nose. A quick check on the Internet determined that it was 11PM in Tokyo. Eleven o’clock – number 11. We gave the dog a treat and declared Typo33 as the winner of the Edhat t-shirt.

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