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[{"type":"text","text":"It really doesn't get more terrifying than this..."}]

Smile 26 3 14

<title>Daily Smile: Saturday, March 14, 2026</title>

It really doesn't get more terrifying than this...

Daily Smile: Saturday, March 14, 2026

 It really doesn&#039;t get more terrifying than this...

Christian Shimabuku Headshot

Christian Shimabuku

Sports

MĀNOA — During Tuesday afternoon's sweat-soaked practice in the post-

 humidity, there was no denying that morale was low for the University of Hawaii football team, losers of two straight to begin its highly anticipated 2026 campaign. 

"You can tell when we win, there's definitely a cheerful, upbeat feel from our staff to our players. In this case, you're 0-2. The mood is what it is," head coach Timmy Chang said. "We're finding ways to get better right now, and so a lot of the understanding and talk is how do we get better? And those are tough conversations."

Entering the season, the team's high hopes hinged on star quarterback 

, who in 2026 has thrown for just 448 yards, completing his passes at a 52.2% clip (48-for-92). 

On Tuesday, Alejado was sidelined for practice with a heavily taped left calf as backup Bjorn Jurgensen took all the first-team reps, though Chang says it was for precautionary reasons in order to get Alejado additional rest. 

"Tough two games for Micah and just resting the body. He's ready to go Saturday," Chang said. "Bjorn continues to grow. Every rep he can get is just going to really help him and help us."

Contributing to Alejado's struggles in 2026 is an offensive line that appears out of sync. Alejado has already been sacked seven times in the young season and has resorted to scrambling within moments of receiving the snap dozens of times. 

"It's tough," senior center Ethan Spencer said. "It's a really tough time to go 0-2, but I think as a team and especially as a unit, I think we know that we got the guys that we need on this team. I think it's just putting pieces together and really coming together as a whole, especially on the O-line. . ... Making sure everybody can jell together, and making sure that us as the whole line can do what we gotta do to make sure we give our team a better chance."

's unit has kept the Rainbow Warriors in both games, but Stanford and UNLV both pulled away in the fourth quarter. 

"We could do better because if they didn't score 21 points, we would have won," linebacker Jamih Otis said in the team's 

 last Saturday. "I think that's just the way we look at it."

In its first two games, Hawai‘i has not has a single takeaway on defense, something that the unit understands swings momentum heavily in games. 

"The first two games we didn't have any turnovers. Definitely a goal each game is to get a turnover, and we got to practice that during this week and make it be intentional with how we practice and trying to get turnovers," safety Matagi Thompson said. 

Prior to its first bye week of the season, the Rainbow Warriors will take on New Mexico State (1-1) at the Clarence T.C. Ching Athletics Complex. Kickoff is set for 6 p.m. The Aggies, who began their season with a 34-17 loss at Florida State, are coming off a 51-14 rout over Mercyhurst. 

"New Mexico State's a really good team," Chang said. "They're coming off a big win, and they're veterans. They have a lot of experience, and so for us we have to get ready to play four quarters, put together good stretches on all three phases, and find a way to go out there and get a first win. 

"Just execution, really. At the end of the day, it comes down to our three phases: offense, defense, and special teams. Really executing. For us, as an offense, we want to get going faster and more consistently. That's really been a focus for us."

Hawaii football 090926

<title>Hawai‘i looks for first win of 2026 season against New Mexico State</title>

The Rainbow Warriors are 0-2 heading into Saturday's matchup against the Aggies.

Hawai‘i looks for first win of 2026 season against New Mexico State

Ray Tsuchiyama

Real Estate

Columnists

 on property stewardship, I received emails about the family conflicts that happen after parents pass away. This column is a direct response to your stories.

On a recent Sunday I strolled along the water at Magic Island, Ala Moana Beach Park. I smiled at splashing toddlers, did the shaka to sweating fathers with tongs over the hibachi, and waved at mothers carrying macaroni salad containers. Memories of my parents flood my mind. I thought my parents would live forever — but that, as we know, is not life.

Watching the happy families at the beach, I felt fortunate: After my parents' passing, my sister and I have remained close, and as I have grown older, that closeness has become one of the real joys of my life — not something I take for granted. Whatever spared my sister and me the fate of the families in this column was not luck alone. It was trust, built slowly, over years, long before there was ever anything at stake to divide.

Then came readers' emails, and unexpectedly, almost all shared one theme: my writing on capital stewardship (in Hawaiʻi: land and properties) triggered emotional responses of family dysfunction — in short, they ended up not speaking to each other.

Trust is not something a family can suddenly create after a parent's passing, when grief is raw and old roles — the one who stayed, the one who left, the one who managed everything — resurface all at once. It has to be practiced earlier, long before a house is on the table. A family that talks with each other about hard things finds a way to talk about a house, too. A family that has not will find that the house becomes the place where every unspoken grievance finally has somewhere to land.

If there is a lesson in my own life, the trust that makes an inheritance survivable is not built during probate. It is built at a Liliha dinner table or Sundays at Magic Island, before anyone imagines it will ever be tested.

But trust like that is rare — my inbox tells me so.

From one Neighbor Island reader, she said that she had an agreement with her brother regarding their parents' house after their passing – but the brother went his own way. She ended up with what she had planned for — but spent months agonizing over it, while grieving her parents at the same time.

There is a brother from Nu‘uanu who returned from Las Vegas upon his mother's passing and found he had been cut out of the parents' house sale by his two sisters. When he pointed out that he shared family DNA, the sisters pulled out an Excel spreadsheet of all their visits and expenses when their mother was cared for by the two sisters — in rotation. They are fighting in court now.

Finally, one reader from California who "married into a big Hawaiian Kailua family” witnessed the disintegration of the siblings' relationships from his wife's point of view — all about the parents' properties.

Why does it always seem to come back to the 

In Hawaiʻi real estate becomes the battlefield not because families here love each other less than families elsewhere, but because of a few structural realities almost unique to our islands.

First, for many local families, the house 

 the estate. There is no diversified portfolio, no second property on the Mainland, no stock account — just one appreciated, illiquid asset that cannot simply be cut into thirds.

Second, decades of land scarcity and appreciation mean that a home purchased for tens of thousands of dollars in the 1960s or ’70s can now be worth millions — turning a modest family house into the single largest financial event of an adult child's life.

Third, there is the caregiving imbalance that so often goes unspoken. One sibling stays — cares for aging parents, drives them to doctors' appointments, pays the HECO bill — while others build careers and families elsewhere, on the Mainland. That caregiving is real and it is costly, in both time and money. But it is rarely discussed as its own form of compensation while parents are alive. Instead, it resurfaces later, sometimes literally as a spreadsheet, as evidence in a courtroom about what is "fair."

Fourth, we have a cultural reluctance to raise estate questions with living parents. It can feel disrespectful to ask a parent what they want done with the house after they are gone. One friend's mother responded 

 So, the conversation gets deferred, year after year, until it can no longer be deferred at all.

Put together, these forces mean that in Hawaiʻi, the house does not just hold financial value. It holds every unresolved conversation a family did not have time, or the will, to finish.

When I walk on Sundays at Magic Island, watching those young families, I know they are not thinking about wills or houses. They should not have to, not yet. But someday, quietly and without warning, they will.

If I could sit down at one of those picnic tables — a kupuna intruding on a young family's Sunday beach picnic, I would not talk to them about real estate. I would tell them this: Talk to each other 

, while it costs nothing and means everything. Talk to your parents while they can still answer. Talk to your siblings while there is nothing yet to divide, and the conversation is just conversation, not negotiation. Because by the time the house is what is left to talk about, the thing that actually needed saying has usually already gone unsaid for years.

That, more than any property, is the inheritance worth passing down — and it is the one so many Hawaiʻi families do not realize we are either building or losing, one Magic Island Sunday at a time.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":" "}]

ay Tsuchiyama’s series explores one central question: How does Hawai‘i use the wealth and land it already has to create its next economic future? He can be reached at 

Firefly Gemini Flash funny illustration of a Hawaii family arguing over a house theyve inherited make th 379744

<title>Why Hawaiʻi families stop speaking over a house</title>

The wealth that most people in Hawai‘i stand to inherit is typically real estate — quite often the very homes we grew up in, which are now million-dollar assets. ASD columnist Ray Tsuchiyama has advice for how kama‘āina can avoid the pain of fighting over the house when their parents are gone.

Why Hawaiʻi families stop speaking over a house

Kelli Shiroma Braiotta Headshot

Kelli Shiroma Braiotta

Food & Dining

 just opened in Sam Sung Plaza. The new tonkatsu restaurant is located in the former space of Sushi ii, which closed in July.

The eatery features a variety of tonkatsu sets; sets include rice, shredded cabbage, and miso soup. Customers can enjoy free refills of miso soup and cabbage.

The pork loin tonkatsu ($21 for 130 grams, $25 for 180 grams) and pork tenderloin tonkatsu ($25 for four pieces) come highly recommended.

The eatery also offers a miso pork loin tonkatsu set, which is topped with the restaurant’s special miso sauce. Other options include chicken katsu sets ($21), fried shrimp set (five pieces for $25), chicken katsu-don ($23), pork katsu sandwich ($13) and fried oysters ($15). The fried oysters are one of Tonkatsu Sakazaki’s featured appetizers.

[{"type":"text","text":"Customers can upgrade their miso soup to pork soup for an additional $5."}]

The eatery’s opening special is a $9.99 pork loin cutlet rice bowl (regular price $19). The bowl comes with rice topped with pork cutlet simmered in a savory, dashi-based sauce with onions. This discounted price will be available for about three weeks.

Tonkatsu Sakazaki is also the sister restaurant of Ramen Nakamura, located in Waikīkī. Tonkatsu Sakazaki is offering a special Nakamura oxtail curry ($14) — which features a soup-style broth instead of a thicker texture — that features Ramen Nakamura’s oxtail soup. Customers can enjoy the oxtail curry on its own, dip their katsu in it, or pour the curry over rice.

The eatery will be open for lunch from 11 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. and for dinner from 5 to 9 p.m.

Open from 11 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. for lunch, 5 to 9 p.m. for dinner

Tonkatsu Sakazaki plates 090426

<title>Tonkatsu Sakazaki is now open in Honolulu</title>

The tonkatsu eatery just opened in Sam Sung Plaza. Customers can take advantage of a grand opening special — discounted $9.99 pork loin cutlet rice bowls (regular price $19) — for about three weeks. The restaurant specializes in tonkatsu, ranging from pork tenderloin to chicken katsu.

Tonkatsu Sakazaki is now open in Honolulu

[{"type":"text","text":"Let's see if they can figure it out......"}]

Smile 26 9 9

<title>Daily Smile: Wednesday, Sep. 9, 2026</title>

Let's see if they can figure it out......

Daily Smile: Wednesday, Sep. 9, 2026

Higa headshot white shirt square

Sterling Higa

Crime & Courts

On the last day of August, a woman pulled two kitchen knives from a shopping bag on Seventh Avenue in Manhattan and used them on two people, 20 seconds apart.

One was a 68-year-old man coming up from the subway at 41st Street with his wife. He survived. The other, a block north, was Erin Piacenti, a young mother on her first day back at work from maternity leave. She died.

Pamela Cisneros walked on toward a police substation with the knives still in her hands. For four minutes officers told her to drop them. She would not. Then she was dead, shot by police.

By evening, everyone who read the news knew why. Cisneros was mentally ill. Her family said so, her old Facebook posts said so, police sources said so, and the newspapers said so with a kind of relief, because it meant the event had an explanation.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"I want to look at that explanation."}]

Cisneros had written on Facebook last November that the end times had come. Among her signs, the 

 reported, she listed “the diminished love of people to the point of stabbing others for no reason.”

She wrote that Satan, knowing his time is short, wants to take as many souls to hell as possible. That’s why some people hear voices telling them to kill.

Nine months later she stabbed two strangers. I am not going to diagnose her from her posts; enough people are doing that. But she showed concern about hearing voices, and she wrote that those voices come from the devil.

In Plymouth, Massachusetts, a jury spent seven days deliberating over Lindsay Clancy, the Duxbury nurse who strangled her three small children in January 2023 and then tried to end her own life. Her lawyers said she suffered postpartum psychosis and that a voice told her to do it. On Friday the judge 

. Eleven jurors were ready to acquit. One was not.

The public debate is over whether hearing that voice excuses her. What strikes me is how little fight there is over the premise. The pundits agree that mental illness produced the voice. The only question is whether Clancy is responsible for heeding its instruction.

But if she did hear a voice, was it caused by mental illness?

Every human culture before 1800 had a name for a voice that tells you to kill your children, and the name was not “symptom.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"The Gospels are almost casual about this."}]

When the crowds came to Jesus at Capernaum, Mark says they “brought to him all who were sick or oppressed by demons,” and he healed the one and cast out the other.

Casting out demons was not the exclusive province of Christians. Outsiders also got into the trade. In Ephesus, seven sons of a Jewish priest named Sceva went about expelling spirits in the name of “the Jesus whom Paul proclaims,” having seen that the method worked. One spirit answered them: “Jesus I know, and Paul I recognize, but who are you?” Then it beat all seven of them out of the house, leaving them naked and wounded. Nobody in Ephesus was arguing about neurotransmitters.

And once, the disciples failed. A father brought his son, seized since childhood by a demon that threw him into fire and water, and men who had cast out demons before could not cast out this one. Jesus told them why. “This kind cannot be driven out by anything but prayer.” And then Jesus commanded the spirit to leave. It did.

If these stories seem fantastical, it is because we live in a disenchanted world. Nearly every culture has made room for the supernatural, but ours prefers to reduce everything to chemistry. We hold to this explanation with a faith that would shame a monk. The chemistry cannot be seen. And the cures built on it do not reliably work. But we persist.

Consider the pills for depression. A whole class of drugs works by tinkering with serotonin, a chemical in the brain. These SSRIs help many people, modestly. They also carry a federal warning that they can increase suicidal thinking.

 that psychiatric drugs are among the leading causes of death for the elderly across the West. His critics say he overstates the case, but there is a case.

The drugs are a gamble, and everyone involved knows it. So their television commercials end with a voice reading from a long list of side effects. The list includes 

: the drug may “increase suicidal thoughts or actions in some people 24 years of age and younger, especially within the first few months of treatment or when the dose is changed.”

A drug that can either cure depression or cause suicide is like a ball dropped into a spinning roulette wheel. Parents who place their faith in such drugs and the doctors prescribing them are gambling with their children’s lives.

Lindsay Clancy and her former husband are both suing the professionals who treated her for depression in the years before she killed her children. Insurance companies will likely push the defendants to settle out of court. And whenever the courts are done with Clancy, everyone will go back to business as usual.

But she claims she heard a voice, and I believe her.

Her mistake was to obey that voice, and she should bear the consequence of her heinous crimes. Scripture never once lets the tempter assume the guilt of the tempted.

Christians have erred in two directions. Many stopped believing in demons a generation before the psychiatrists did, and now define “mental health” exactly as the world does. Others tell a bipolar woman to pour her lithium down the sink and come to the Wednesday deliverance service instead.

None of this is an argument against medicine. In some cases of mental illness there is a real chemical issue. A person is deficient in some vitamin or mineral, and a supplement fixes the problem. Sometimes a neurotransmitter runs high or low, a receptor stops answering, and the mind begins to hear things. Some medicine works. But not all cases respond to medical treatment.

The trouble comes with the diversity of human response. Not everyone whose brain misfires hears a voice. Not everyone who hears a voice hears it say 

Chemistry alone cannot account for these differences. And a focus on invisible brain chemistry leads us to ignore what’s right before our eyes.

Human sinfulness is enough to account for mothers who murder their children. But this does not mean the devil is absent. Scripture says that he “prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.”

Blaming the devil would not be accepted as a defense in court, but blaming neurotransmitters is. That tells us where our superstitions lie.

Getty Images 2292483717 16x9

<title>Pamela Cisneros, Lindsay Clancy, and the voice that said ‘kill’</title>

A woman pulled two kitchen knives from a shopping bag on Seventh Avenue and used them on two strangers. By nightfall everyone knew why, and no one argued. ASD opinion columnist Sterling Higa on the explanation for mental illness that every culture but ours took for granted.

Pamela Cisneros, Lindsay Clancy, and the voice that said ‘kill’

WEB square crop Hayley Lehman Headshot RGZ1636

Haley Lehman

Aloha Spirit

Mike Shiroma’s neighborhood in the Pālolo Valley sounds different than it did when he was a kid, all because of the invasive coqui frog.

The quarter-sized tree frog native to Puerto Rico calls from dusk to dawn. They are one of the loudest frogs in the world, with calls reaching up to 100 decibels, similar to a lawnmower or motorcycle. They hitchhiked to Hawaiʻi Island in 1988 and have since set up colonies on Oʻahu in Pālolo Valley, Waimānalo and the Kuliʻouʻou summit.

Shiroma said he’s witnessed the number of frogs grow from a handful to dozens to thousands, and now estimates that there are 15,000-20,000 coqui frogs in Pālolo Valley.

Shiroma described the coqui frog noise as a “permanent, audio graffiti.”

“They're changing the environment forever,” he said.

Sidney Lynch called the noise deafening. She noticed the occassional frog washing down the Waiʻōmaʻo Stream and would call the Department of Agriculture to catch it. She offered to help after she noticed more and more frogs washing down the stream in 2025.

She co-founded Pālolo Coqui, a group of volunteers that meets multiple times a week to catch and kill coqui in the Pālolo Valley. Volunteers have caught 6,085 since they started in March.

“Even though it’s only concentrated in a five street area, it’s getting much noisier and they can spread,” Lynch said. “At this point, if there’s the chance to eradicate them, we may as well try.”

When volunteers came to Shiroma’s door with a flyer earlier this year, they joined forces to fight the invasion, going from what Shiroma called an “army of one” to a team. Shiroma has been hunting coqui frogs for years, and said he’s getting burned out and discouraged.

Volunteers wear long-sleeve neon shirts, long pants, headlamps and sturdy shoes, and carry plastic tubes, UV flashlights, citric acid solution and radios, and head out into the protected state land bordering the neighborhood to search for frogs.

Here’s how it works: Volunteers listen for the distinct “ko-KEE” call, approach the frog and place a long plastic tube on the frog. The frog jumps up and into the tube, and volunteers put the frog into a small bottle full of a citric acid solution where it is killed.

The male frogs like to hang out on logs and smooth leaves, such as monstera, pothos and heliconia. The “ko” of the coqui’s call asserts their territory and the “kee” calls for females.

Shiroma read scientific papers that said certain amphibians floresce under UV light. He tried it out, and found that certain UV light makes the coqui appear black and their eyes glow, allowing volunteers to look for frogs with UV flashlights when they are not calling.

“To me, this is the game changer. There’s no better discovery than this,” Shiroma said.

The coqui frog is one of 15 high priority pests that the 

 is monitoring. OISC is a project under the University of Hawaiʻi Pacific Cooperative Studies Unit that coordinates between communities, the Department of Agriculture and Biosecurity and the Department of Land and Natural Resources. OISC first got involved with coqui frogs in Pālolo Valley in September 2024.

Robbie Snyder, a community engagement liaison with OISC, detailed the negative impacts coqui frogs can have on Hawaiʻi.

Coqui frogs have no natural predators on Hawaiʻi, so they get more dense than they would in their home country. Snyder said that one acre of land on Oʻahu can be home to 36,000 coqui.

The noise changes the soundscape of Oʻahu’s forests, Snyder said. Lynch said that the noise impacts resident’s quality of life.

Homeowners are required to disclose if there’s a coqui frog infestation on or near their property, which can drive down home prices.

Coqui frogs eat invertebrates, which damages Oʻahu’s native plants and can harm native plants when those plants aren’t being pollinated.

“Those insects also play vital pollinating services to our native plants, so when the frogs eat the native insects, we then lose things that can pollinate our native plants, and that has a cascading affect through the ecosystem,” Snyder said.

If snakes were introduced in Hawaiʻi, coqui frogs would provide a “massive food source” and aid their spread.

According to Snyder, the current goal is to contain coqui frogs until the state has the resources or better tools to eradicate them.

“With the resources we have right now, site level eradication of coqui is not possible,” Snyder said. “There isn’t enough funding, there’s not enough people, there’s not enough resources, and that’s even with the incredible community volunteers that we have, but we need more and we need a years-long commitment to funding.”

Snyder said that hand capture alone isn’t enough at this point to eradicate an infestation.

“There are small enough local populations that they haven’t become widespread. Hope is not lost with coqui frogs,” Snyder said.

OISC and state agencies spray a liquid combination of citric acid and water in an attempt to contain coqui frogs. Citric acid, which is found in citrus, some soft drinks and some candies, poses little risk to people and the environment, but is lethal to amphibians because they respirate through their skin.

OISC has been spraying 400 gallons of citric acid month in the Pālolo Valley for about two years and increased to spray twice monthly starting in August.

When coqui frogs infested Wahiawā in 2003, the Hawaiʻi Department of Agriculture and Biodiversity, the Oʻahu Army Natural Resources Program, the Department of Land and Natural Resources and OISC teamed up and eradicated the coqui infestation with a mix of citric spray and hand captures by 2007.

The volunteers in Pālolo have mixed opinions about the use of citric acid spray. Lynch believes citric acid spray is an effective tool and Shiroma believes it’s not as effective as hand capturing the frogs.

Shiroma called it an “agency failure” that the Department of Agriculture hasn’t dedicated more resources to preventing the spread of coqui.

“You guys are using the same broken playbook that’s not working and hasn’t worked for decades. This is not a new problem.” Shiroma. He advocated for the Department of Agriculture to make a dedicated team that works at night.

While the coqui frogs keep calling, Pālolo Valley neighbors will continue donning neon shirts and heading into the forest to stop them.

Coqui in Pālolo

<title>Volunteers battle coqui frog infestation in Pālolo Valley</title>

The Pālolo Coqui volunteer group is working alongside the Oʻahu Invasive Species Committee and state agencies to contain a coqui frog infestation in their neighborhood.

Daily Smile: Saturday, March 14, 2026

ASD Staff

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Daily Smile: Saturday, March 14, 2026

Authors

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