Sunday, April 15, 2007
This must have been a tough headline to write...
Of all weeks for this to happen...
Don Ho, Hawaiian Musician, Dies at 76
6 Comments:
By 
, at
Sun Apr 15, 02:04:00 PM:
His grand-daughter, Jo Ho, was at Bryn Mawr when I attended Haverford. She famously took on our student owned and operated Pizzaria - "Skeeters" - over our pinapple and ham offering which was named for the 50th state, an asociation which she found insulting to Hawaiians. We briefly flirted with renaming it "confrontation pie" but eventually just went back to flipping dough. I remember Jo Ho played a raging acoustic guitar, too, but never heard her cover "tiny bubbles."
By , at
Sun Apr 15, 03:03:00 PM:
The true Hawaiian pizza is not ham and pineapple, but Spam and pineapple.
chsw
By 
Escort81, at
Sun Apr 15, 03:09:00 PM:
GT -
There are any number of good pizza places on the Main Line, but I infer you are talking about the on campus pizza maker, which at Princeton would be called an "agency" -- the administration's term for the granting of monopolistic power on campus for a specific niche (I always wondered why a seemingly progressive administration would do that -- grant monopolies to students to sell to other students -- but perhaps that is where a centrally planned economy ends up in the long run).
Can you recall what Jo Ho's specific objection to "Hawaiian pizza" was? How did she think it was insulting? Because pizza is not a native Hawaiian dish? Is there some sensitivity we are generally not aware of that Hawaiians are not fond of being associated with pineapples (still a major agricultural export of the islands) in the way that it is clearly racist to associate African-Americans with watermelons and, in a different way (and a more gallows humor way, given the 19th century famine), the Irish with the potato (setting aside that it is a vegetable, not a fruit).
This is the first I have ever heard of pizza name sensitivity. Are there any problems with this menu?
If I understand the intent of the pun in the posting, and the bigger than normal font size, it is the last name of the iconic musician as linked to the Imus conflagration. May I point out that no such pun would be possible if we had a public school system, reinforced by thoughtful home environments, that encouraged the pronunciation of every vowel and consonant in a word. What are the chances of that? Fuggedabouit.
By , at
Sun Apr 15, 07:08:00 PM:
Haverford was a funny place. A student actually got student council funding to start and operate a "for profit" pizzaria in ther basement of one of the dorms, which devolved to the school when he graduated. Lord knows how it passed health code regulations, but "Skeeters" was indeed a student-owned outfit when I was at the 'Ford and I was one of its managers during my senior year. I used to order pizza's delivered to my customary barstool at "Roaches", a Mainline mainstay for cheap beer and good cheer. But I digress.
The objection was the association of pineapples with native Hawai'ians and Hawai'ian culture. Hawai'ian pizza was an offessive offering in the same way that Escort81 surmises.
PJ O'Rourke observed in "Holidays in Hell" that "earnestness is just stupidity sent to college" and this incident was something of a tempest in a teapot. Still, the Bryn Mawr/Haverford community took time out to confront the possibility that a standard menu offering in countless pizzaria's might yet be deemed insulting and rascist, and if you can't be self-reflective in college, where can you be?
By , at
Sun Apr 15, 09:44:00 PM:
Was this a hard headline to write because of the herculean effort required to refrain from describing the now-room-temperature singer as "nappy headed"?
By , at
Mon Apr 16, 10:37:00 AM:
His song TINY BUBBLES was is big time hit and his moniker song and very popular in hawaii
