As I pointed out in a recent item, my article on "Astounding Honolulu" is the cover story this month in Honolulu Magazine. If it's not on the shelves now it should be soon. It's also online. But since I want you to go out and buy the magazine, I'm not going to tell where to find it online. (A clever reader probably could guess it's located at honolulumagazine.com or something.)

Anyway, in the piece I point out that in order to collect the large number of weird and little known facts about Honolulu, I had to use a lot of different sources and depend on the kindness of a lot of good people. As I put it, "A project of this scope is necessarily subjective, elective, derivative and certainly not definitive."

But I do think some of the contributors deserve your attention, especially Bob Sigall, whose books "The Companies We Keep" and "The Companies We Keep 2" and his suggestions were a great help to me. The books contain amazing things about just about every local company in Honolulu like why Lex Brodie says "Thank you very much" in his TV commercials (hint: it has something to do with a rude boy to whom Lex once gave a bumper sticker of his caveman making a stone wheel) and how Tripler Hospital came to be painted pink. The books were the result of a graduate level marketing class Sigall taught at Hawaii Pacific University in which he used something like 150 students and contributors to do the research on all the companies in the books. It was an amazing effort and the books are an important - and entertaining - piece of Hawaii history. You can buy the books at Sigall's website (click ) "The Companies We Keep" or on Amazon.com.

While I'm thanking people, I should thank KSSK radio jock Michael W. Perry for putting me in touch with Bob Sigall; Michael Van Dorn, who contributed the story about and a photo of John Walbert, the first guy to hang glide off the Waimanalo cliffs; the Hawaiian Humane Society, which offered some amusing animal tales; HPD officer Eddie Croom, who runs the HPD Police Museum which holds some very cool stuff; legendary surfer Gerry Lopez who told me about his first surfing experience at 10 years old;  Federal Judge Sam King, who shared with me an interesting tale of one of his most unique trials (can  something be "most unique"?); and Nedra Chung, a colorful Realtor with great stories of Honolulu.

I thank them all and all the ones I'm probably leaving out. Get the magazine.

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E-mail  Charles Memminger at cmemminger@hawaii.rr.com

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you'll be, well, astounded.