what a difference a thingy makes.

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dateline: kat's hideout

19 july 1996 10:41 p.m.

A very quiet Aloha Friday. Must have everyone on different drugs or something. Tim, another psych assistant who had to help tackle the Hulk on Sunday, said he was bored. I, meanwhile, droned through twenty inches of paperwork. One of my e-mail pen pals wrote, "Why do you spell Hawai`i the way you do?" Of course, he's wondering what's with the extra punctuation, when everyone's maps (except CNN's weather map, which doesn't even have this state on it) spells it simply as Hawaii. Here's the deal. That reverse apostrophe -- also known as an open single quote -- is an `okina. Notice that even the word `okina has an `okina. There are sixteen letters in the Hawaiian alphabet, and the `okina counts as one of them. How important is the `okina? What's with this little mark that a local exasperated politician once referred to as "that little thingy"? After all, it's costing the state thousands of dollars to slowly replace our street signs so that Hawaiian street names are spelled right. Here's a good story for the lunchroom tomorrow. Kahea `Ai is the name of the main Marriott cafeteria at UH. The name means, "A call to eat." For the longest time, however, the sign read, Kahea Ai. That means "A call for sex." I guess they'll do anything to trick us into eating their food. I'm only a few chapters into "Masters of Deception," but it's a really swift read. More than you ever needed to know about telephone switches, and the C-64 parts -- with Fast Hack'Em and "Summer Games" are like a trip down memory lane. Can't figure why, but it sounds like there weren't any girl hackers. Not that I was interested. I was still running from brats who wanted to wipe their boogers on me at the time, so I couldn't be bothered with MODs, LODs or philes.