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Hawaii homeless man given plane ticket to Calif.

By Associated Press

POSTED: 07:46 a.m. HST, Oct 27, 2010

A Hawaii legislator is giving $100 to help fly a homeless man back to his wife in California.

Rep. John Mizuno, a Democrat representing Kalihi, donated his personal money to supplement the $274 cost for George Vonner's one-way ticket to Ontario, Calif.

Mizuno said Vonner could only afford $180 for the ticket.

Vonner, whose flight leaves Thursday, came to Hawaii seeking employment with the understanding he could live with his cousin.

But the housing arrangement fell through, and Vonner became homeless last month.

Mizuno is promoting legislative proposals to reunify the homeless with their families while reducing costs to taxpayers.

In July, he gave $100 to fly another homeless man home to Seattle.

 

A Hawaii legislator is giving $100 to help fly a homeless man back to his wife in California.

Rep. John Mizuno, a Democrat representing Kalihi, donated his personal money to supplement the $274 cost for George Vonner's one-way ticket to Ontario, Calif.

Mizuno said Vonner could only afford $180 for the ticket.

Vonner, whose flight leaves Thursday, came to Hawaii seeking employment with the understanding he could live with his cousin.

But the housing arrangement fell through, and Vonner became homeless last month.

Mizuno is promoting legislative proposals to reunify the homeless with their families while reducing costs to taxpayers.

In July, he gave $100 to fly another homeless man home to Seattle.

 Print   Email   Comment | View Comments   Most Popular   Save   Post   

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I guess this is one way to deal with homeless folks. But how does California feel about it?

Then also, are there states sending their homeless folks to Hawaii?

A couple months ago I won this 1st place award for cover design from the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies. The award really should have gone to the other art director who won 2nd place Chris Skiles, at the Mauitime he’s a way better designer then me. Chris and I started talking and sending each other the weekly papers we make.

He was getting married around the time I was going on vacation to Maui, so he asked if I wanted to fill in for him and do a cover while I was there. YES!!! I really wanted to see how their office worked anyways. And now I know it works great because of the people who work there, I swear every one of those people do the jobs of three normal employees.

The cover story was about the top ten unreported news stories of 2010 put out by Project Censored. So my challenge was to take these global stories and make them relevant to the island of Maui. The idea I came up with was that these pieces of news washed up on the beach.

After publisher Tommy Russo (who totally rules!) took me to his house (he has pet chickens and ducks in his yard!!) and let me dig around his scrap wood pile (one block from the beach!!!) I cut out shapes, or icons, that symbolized what each of those top ten stories where about. After painting them, I teamed up with local photographer Naomi Sheikin to do a quick shoot on the beach. Working on the beach like that is something I could get used to for sure. The sand there was like Grape Nuts cereal.

It was so much fun to travel to tropical paradise and sit on someone else’s workbench for a change, but after the paper went to print I was glad to be on vacation and get some surfing done on some luxury waves.

So blessed to have an AAN award winning cover designer visiting on island and designing for MauiTime. He describes his experience in a post on his blog scrapperstown.com.

Ko Sasaki for The International Herald Tribune

As I’ve become more aware of the urgent need to eat more sustainable seafood, I’ve been reaching for squid, clams, sardines, and especialy mackerel whenever a fishy hunger strikes.
 
Mackerel is a good fish that’s gotten a bad rap, something I wrote about in my column yesterday. Many cooks have sworn off it, saying it’s too heavy, too oily. And when it comes to the canned stuff, they’re right. But mackerel can be mild and buttery, especially when very fresh. But, more importantly to me, it’s the oiliness of mackerel that imparts its uniquely briney flavor. When cooked just so, mackerel is a fish you can love to serve as well as eat. And it’s also relatively inexpensive.
 
Check out these links from the Monterey Bay Aquarium and The Guardian about mackerel sustainability.
 
Recipes:

Teas Smoked Mackerel 
Nigel Slater’s Crumbled Mackerel
Mackerel with Red Onion Marmalade
Mackerel Pate
Pan-Fried Mackerel with Bretonne Sauce

I will be looking for more mackerel. I already love the pickeled versions which I had recently at Nate & Al's in Beverly Hills. 
This article from Melissa Clark at dinersjournal.blogs.nytimes.com says its a good thing. 

Flickr user Gary Soup

xiao long bao

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Update: Mayor Huang, possibly still nursing dumpling-related wounds, resigned from the San Gabriel city council this morning, stating that the "unwanted media attention has greatly affected [his] family.'' Which would seem to be an understatement, but we'll give him the benefit of the doubt. According to the Alhambra Source, Huang swore his reputation would be restored.

Then again, also according to the Source, his XLB-flinging companion reportedly owns one of the area's many, many foot-massage parlors, and a group of local businessmen, most of them former business partners of Huang, have apparently banded together to sue the now-ex-mayor on a separate civil matter. When the bao breaks, apparently it breaks hard.

The original story, published yesterday afternoon, after the jump...

When we heard that the mayor of San Gabriel had been arrested on Valley Boulevard late Thursday night, our thoughts predictably lingered less on the details of the alleged crime - purse-snatching and assault, apparently - than they did on the identity of the restaurant where he had been eating. If there was a place good enough for Mayor Albert Y.M. Huang to eat at 1:30 in the morning, we wanted to know where it was.

The first reports said only that the restaurant was on the 300 block of West Valley, which narrowed it down to, like, a million - that stretch is probably home to more Chinese malls than all of Shanxi province - and the police report said that the incident occurred at a cafe called Dumpling House, which didn't narrow it down much more. The mall at 301 W. Valley, the U.S. epicenter of the soup dumplings called xiao long bao, has no fewer than three or four places that might answer to that name, including Chowhound-favorite J&J, plus the dumpling-intensive Shangainese restaurant Mei Long Village, which may have the best XLB in town. Early betting was on Happy Kitchen, which stays open late. I was kind of thinking it was pan-Chinese newcomer New Taste Dumpling House, a guess that turned out to be correct.

"Police confirmed.'' tweeted my friend Daniela Gerson, who runs the hyperlocal news site AlhambraSource.org "I think this investigation will need to involve some dumplings for lunch.'' New Taste was soon crawling with reporters, who were drawn to a story involving dumplings -- and a mayor out with a woman, not his wife, at 1 a.m. -- the way that beat cops might be to a doughnut-shop robbery.

The alleged crimes themselves were non-trivial: Mayor Huang is said to have grabbed his companion's purse and keys after an argument, jumped into his SUV, and sped off up Prospect Avenue at 45 miles an hour while the woman clung to the side of his car. But the incidents leading up to the event, as New Taste owner Bao Gang Li told Alhambra Source reporter Tina Zeng, were like something out of a Chinese soap opera: She hit the mayor with a full steamer of xiao long bao. He sloshed a dish of black vinegar back at her. For a brief, lovely moment, I like to think, at least one soup dumpling met the arc of vinegar midair, becoming briefly but miraculously seasoned before joining its sisters on the floor. Huang was released Friday on $100,000 bail.

Tags:

AlhambraSource.org, Jonathan Gold, Mei Long Village, New Taste Dumpling House, San Gabriel mayor

Having just got back from the San Gabriel Valley and L.A. area, this was big in the news. I love the way Jonathan Gold combines food and politics in his own brilliant fashion.