I was thrilled when I stumbled upon The Little Travelers, a series of DVDs by a southern California woman talented in video production who homeschools her two little girls and travels extensively with them.

I sometimes do what people call “spring cleaning” at the end of a year, when I get a hankering to straighten up the place — to get rid of some of the clutter that inevitably creeps into our house over the months, clean, and make room for a fresh, clean new year and its possibilities.
It was in the middle of my current purging of no-longer-needed papers from file cabinets and taking no-longer-worn clothes to Goodwill that I stumbled across a project by the photographer Michael Wolf.
Wolf is a German photographer who …

Oh my, how fun to read.
From the New York Times:
Poetry in Motion
By DANNY HEITMAN
Published: August 15, 2009

Baton Rouge, La.
IT seems that we’ve done just about everything to get the American auto industry out of the doldrums. We’ve forced bankruptcies. We’ve exchanged cash for clunkers. But have we tried poetry?
The question is brought to mind by the story of Marianne Moore, the famous American writer, who served for a brief season as the Ford Motor Company’s unofficial poet laureate…. (Read the rest here.)
Imagine, Ford Motor Company called up the poet Marianne …

Aunty Dottie Thompson and George Na‘ope, together credited with starting Hilo, Hawai‘i’s Merrie Monarch Festival 46 years ago, are both looking frail this year, and both attended the festival briefly on the final night in wheelchairs.
Still, one can always count on Uncle George to look absolutely resplendent.

Re·splen·dent   (rĭ-splĕn‘dənt)
adj.
Splendid or dazzling in appearance; brilliant.
[Middle English, from Old French, from Latin resplendēns, resplendent-, present participle of resplendēre, to shine brightly : re-, re- + splendēre, to shine.]
Splendid. Dazzling. Brilliant. He definitely still shines.
 

Damon Tucker just posted about an interesting video interview with Sig Zane. Sig is the well-known clothing and fabric designer in Hilo whose clothes are absolutely da kine. And I’m sure Merrie Monarch week must be his busiest time of the year, because all the hula enthusiasts swarm to his shop. He has the loveliest clothes.
Sig Zane’s shop (even the shop is beautiful) is at 122 Kamehameha Ave Hilo, HI 96720. Phone (808) 935-7077.

Sig is married to Nalani Kanaka‘ole, one of the kumu hula of Halau O Kekuhi*, and is a member of …

I want to be clear that the person in the video is not me. I know somebody will miss that! It’s not. This is a post about someone else whose name is Leslie Lang.
The other day I wrote about a standup comic who lives in San Jose and has the same name as me, and then she saw the post and emailed me! 
And she sent me a link to her comedy act on YouTube, which is, indeed, funny. I enjoyed it.
I like her and we’ve been emailing back and forth and it’s WEIRD. …

I have a Google Alert set up for my name (do you?) and today I got an alert about how great I was when I did my comedy improv act in San Jose recently. 
I, um, don’t do comedy improv (maybe some occasional, unintentional slapstick), nor do I frequent San Jose. But I’m glad to hear it was enjoyable.
Isn’t it strange to find other people with YOUR name? Maybe somebody named Steve Smith is used to it. But I don’t think my name is all that common, so when I occasionally …

Macario is publishing a new online magazine and you should have a look. Wow. It’s eye-popping.

His photography is always great, and in this new magazine, called Macario’s Big Island, he combines his photos, interviews and commentary to illuminate some of the Big Island’s most interesting people in the world of arts, food, music and more.
He just put up what is only his third post there. It’s a feature on the Waimea architect Clemson Lam, and in a stunning turn of events - I’ve just now been able to get my jaw …

We are about to announce the winners at our On The Cheap websites. We had several contests — 14 in all — to celebrate our big launch. Did you enter?
Andy Bumatai is choosing names out of a hat for the Honolulu On The Cheap contests, and he’s doing it live and on the air today. Watch it at 1 p.m. HST; it will also be posted on The Andy Bumatai Show’s website after it airs.
Tomorrow our good friends at Hilo’s ‘Imiloa Astronomy Center are going to pick winners for our Big …

I have an essay on the last page of Hawaii magazine’s August issue. It’s about living here in this beautiful place.
My husband Macario is a professional photographer who, among other jobs, shoots a lot of Big Island photos for the PacificBasin Communications magazines. So they called him to photograph me for the article. (How convenient is that?!)
And so we went down to a nearby river and we both stood in it, pretty much. And here’s the side of the photo shoot you don’t usually see — because the set-up for a …