billso.com

I just opened up my June 2007 copy of the University of Georgia alumni magazine and, on page 34, I received a pleasant surprise: Danger Mouse, otherwise known as Brian Burton or one half of Gnarls Barkley, earned his undergraduate degree in music at UGA in 2000. Wikipedia confirms this.

The Grey Album was one of my favorite downloads of 2005, and I do enjoy Gnarls Barkley’s music a lot.

On Sunday, Boing Boing posted a link to Bad Copy, Good Copy, a Danish documentary about copyright law and the media. It features an interview with Danger Mouse, along with snippets of his music. The video can be viewed for free at the web site, or downloaded for free in XviD format via BitTorrent. It’s a fun hour of viewing pleasure.

Both the Honolulu Star-Bulletin and the Honolulu Advertiser ran stories this morning about the proposed mass transit plan for Oahu. The environmental impact study will consider three routes, according to this scoping plan posted by the Advertiser. This map from the Advertiser lays out the route alternatives:

1. (in solid red) the City Council’s plan, which diverted the line through Salt Lake to get councilman Romy Cachola’s swing vote;
2. (in dashed red) the council’s plan with a loop through Honolulu International Airport; and
3. (in dashed blue) the plan that some city council members really wanted, going through the airport and bypassing Salt Lake.

Council chair Ann Kobayashi is still angry that the mayor is focusing on rail. However, the scoping study indicated that several modes will be evaluated, including “light rail, rapid rail, rubber-tired guided vehicles, and magnetic levitation and monorail systems”.

Neither newspaper mentioned that Kobayashi, along with Donovan Delz Cruz, Todd Apo, and Cachola, had announced in March that they would visit Amsterdam and Paris to visit high-speed bus lines built by Phileas Advanced Public Transport System of France. Their trip would be paid for by Phileas, and the plans were announced on the City Council’s web site and mentioned in the Honolulu Weekly.

UH-Manoa professor emeritus Tom Dinell wrote a good commentary about the rubber-tire bus alternative in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin on February 4. Bus routes would be easier to reconfigure than a train, and the high-speed buses could also go into areas like Waianae and Mililani. Of course, these buses would need dedicated lanes in town, and the city must ban other vehicles from these lanes in order for the system to work well. The fixed guideway bus system should not become an “emergency lane” for city vehicles.

As much as I like the idea of trains, high-speed buses may be easier to install, use and maintain on this island. As Dinell pointed out, it’s much easier to replace a bus than a train when the technology improves.

Dkosopedia has an excellent summary of the Honolulu transit struggle in the 21st century, for readers who want to learn more.