It is true. Barack Obama was my student

I taught him Hawaiian History. No wonder he tried to classify Hawaiians as an Indian tribe.

WTF is Target Thinking?

Target is running these weird xmas ads depicting awkward situations.

A guy gives a girl a pearl necklace and she says " I didn't think we were there yet."

A woman gets her family a cool tv and her husband gripes about spending too much money.

Really off brand if you ask me. Is Target nuts? Or am I so old that I don't get that it is totally cool to be uncomfortable at Christmas?

Best Product Introduction of 21st Century

No kidding! As a lifelong fan of "real" mashed potatoes, I have tried shortcutting through dried potatoes at Costco, prepared potatoes at Safeway & Foodland, and even considered my friend K's love affair with Kentucky Fried Chicken mashed potatoes -- in search of a fake real potato. Nothing matched up -- and I always dreaded peeling bags of potatoes for Thanksgiving -- til I discovered OreIda Steam & Mash. A little butter, and a little milk (cream), and you have delicious mashed potatoes. Two bags of Steam and Mash fed 12 hungry people ... and they went back for more.

Local Commercials

Worst Local Commercials: Always, always hard-to-beat in the super sucky category are Oceanic Time Warner's local television spots. The national ones aren't so bad.

Runner up: HEMIC

Best adaptation of a national commercial: Kaiser Permanente's "Ha" (breath of life) version of the thrive campaign. Riveting. And it doesn't get old.

Could use some editing: Hawaii Meth Project's commercials need some local people. Great media buy, but by watching,you'd think only haole kids did meth.

Good comeback: Hawaiian Telcom's reminder that they go where no one else will.

Book Review

Stephen Levitt's latest book, Superfreakonomics is out and he is making the rounds.

We've read the book. It's not as startling as his first, nor as well written as Gladwell's Outliers, but the conversational tone makes it an easy page turner, and there are some interesting ideas...

Like ex-Microsoft billionaire's Nathan Mhyrvold's super simple idea for cooling down surface water temperatures, thereby undermining a hurricane's ability to build to a super freaky force.

Or the fact that if suicide bombers bought life insurance, they'd be harder to track.

Apparently a lot of liberal tree huggers are mad because Levitt and Dubner ask us to remove our moralistic angst about global warming (or not) and look for simpler solutions.

We're reading Gladwell's "What the Dog Saw" next.