Good morning and greetings, weather fans. Today we are going to go back to my roots. No, I’m not talking my blonde-haired days as a young child growing up in New Jersey but rather what inspired me to create this site-shooting spectacular sunrises over the Pacific Ocean. And today I’ve got a fabulous one for you. This early morning magnificence is from a few years back in late November. As you can see from photo #5, my dog Summer also enjoyed the experience and insisted I call this shot “Golden Dreams.” I’m so fond of photo #3 that I’m using in this year’s calendar for Open Studios. One word describes this morning-epic!

Over the next week or so I’ll be hitting the archives and showcasing a few more feature presentations from Lighthouse Point, starring Dawn Skies, Its Beach and a cast of waves that have traveled thousands of miles to appear in these moments. So stayed tuned because the color and the drama of Santa Cruz’s world class sunrises are coming your way.

Speaking of magical moments, good news for those of you planning that dream vacation in North Korea. This much talked about country, located to the north of the DMZ, is home to a phantom hotel that is stirring back to life. Once dubbed by Esquire magazine as “the worst building in the history of mankind,” the 105-story Ryugyong Hotel is back under construction after a 16-year lull in the capital of one of the world’s most reclusive and destitute countries. They’re literally starving for tourists.

According to foreign residents in Pyongyang, North Korea, Egypt’s Orascom group has recently begun refurbishing the top floors of the three-sided pyramid-shaped hotel whose frame dominates the Pyongyang skyline the same way I used to dominate Mr. Universe contests. The firm has put glass panels into the concrete shell and installed telecommunications antennas, even though the North forbids its citizens to own mobile phones, ham radios or Batman decoder rings.

The hotel consists of three wings, a couple of thighs and a drumstick, rising at 75 degree angles capped by several floors arranged in rings that are supposed to hold five revolving restaurants, an observation deck and a miniature golf course. A building crane has for years sat unused at the top of the 3,000-room hotel in a city where tourists are only occasionally allowed to visit but are forbidden to buy souvenirs, post cards and infants.

“It is not a beautiful design. It carries little iconic or monumental significance, but (much like myself) is a sheer muscular and massive presence,” said Lee Sang Jun, a professor of architecture at Yonsei University in Seoul. The communist North started construction in 1987, in a possible fit of jealousy at South Korea, which was about to host the 1988 Summer Olympics. They apparently wanted to show off to the world the success of its rapidly developing economy and its many different recipes for braising short ribs.

A concrete shell built by North Korean architects emerged over the next few years. This proud country put a likeness of the hotel on postage stamps and packs of baseball cards and boasted about the structure in official media. According to intelligence sources, then North Korean leader Kim Il-sung saw the hotel as a symbol of his big dreams for the state he founded, while his son and current leader Kim Jong-il was a driving force in its construction and choice of movies in the hotel’s pay-per-view.

Speaking of Kim Jong-il, or as he likes to be referred to as, the “Dear Leader,” I find something very charming about a diminutive (5’2″,) platform shoe wearing, bouffant hair-styled dictator whose draconian economic policies have caused the starvation of MILLIONS of his people. He is also the commander of the 4th largest standing army in the world and major film buff who is a lover of fast cars, gourmet foods and fine liquors, which are tough to procure north of the 38th Parallel. The Korean people worship this little Napoleon like he is God, but we all know there’s only one God and that was Michael Jordan.

By 1992, work on this non-Holiday Inn was halted. The North’s main benefactor, the Soviet Union had dissolved a year earlier and funding for the hotel had vanished like the San Francisco Giant’s hope for a pennant this year. For a time, the North airbrushed images of the Ryugyong Hotel and centerfolds from photographs. As the North’s economy took a deeper turn for the worse in the 1990s the empty shell became a symbol of the country’s failure, earning nicknames “Hotel of Doom,” “Phantom Hotel” and “Hotel California.”

Yonsei’s Lee, Sara Lee, Bruce Lee and other architects said there were questions raised about whether the hotel was structurally sound and a few believed completing the structure could cause it to collapse. It would cost up to $2 billion to finish the Ryugyong Hotel and make it safe for room service, according to estimates in South Korean media. That is equivalent to about 10 percent of the North’s annual economic output or what a washed-up Shaq earns per season.

Bruno Giberti (no relation,) associate head of California Polytechnic State University’s Department of Architecture, said the project was typical of what has been produced recently in many cities trying to show their emerging wealth by constructing gigantic edifices that were not related in scale to anything else around them. “If this is the worst building in the world, the runners up are in Las Vegas, Shanghai and Fort Lee, New Jersey,” said Giberti.

So if you’re looking for a place to rest your head in North Korea, I hope today’s post has been helpful. I’d like to welcome some new people to today’s blog who I met on Sunday at the Art, er, Wind on the Wharf festival. So enjoy my second favorite Santa Cruz sunrise, these waning days of July and we’ll catch you on Friday. Aloha, summer league fans.

Greetings and welcome to the light side, photo lovers. Santa Cruz, California is known for its world class sunsets. But being an early riser, I’m partial to its world class sunrises, which are not quite as popular and seen but just a lucky few. That’s where this site steps up to the plate. I’ve been photo blogging since last August but have been digitally involved since 2005. So I think it’s only right that we sometimes go back into the time tunnel and take a look at some pasterpieces that have never seen the light of the blog day.

This little jewel is a sunrise from back in 2006. It was a spectacular morning with an incredible array of colors down at Lighthouse Point. As you can see from the first shot, my dog dug this early morning light show and insisted I name this shot “Golden Dreams.” Much like my Freudian therapist, once she gets her mind set on something there’s no changing it. Anyway, throughout the summer (no pun intended) we’ll be revisiting the past to check on the magic and magnificence of yester year. Or to quote Ralph Kramden of
“The Honeymooners” to his wife Alice, “You can’t put your arm around a memory.” Replied Alice, “I can’t even put my arm around you.”

Now Ralph Kramden was a guy who liked to eat. Which brings us to our subject du jour. According to a government study, Americans today waste an astounding 27 percent of food available for consumption. It happens at the supermarket, in restaurants, taco bars, vegan buffets and in very own kitchen. A federal study found that 96.4 billion pounds of edible food was wasted by U.S. retailers, food service businesses, consumers and Hollywood caterers in 1995. That’s about 1 pound of waste per day for every adult, child and sumo wrestler in the nation. And that doesn’t count food lost on farms, by processors, wholesalers or in my Scooby Doo lunch box.

Grocery stores discard products because of spoilage, minor blemishes and dedicated shoplifters. Restaurants throw out what they don’t use. And consumers toss out everything from bananas that have turned brown to Chinese leftovers to that brie cheese that’s turning moldier than Napoleon’s troops at Waterloo. In 1997, in one of the few studies of food waste, the Department of Agriculture said that 96.4 billion pounds of the 356 billion pounds of edible food in the United States was never eaten. Fresh produce, milk, grain products, sweeteners and Pringles make up two-thirds of the waste. Dick Cheney and Halliburton make up the rest.

The study didn’t account for the explosion of ready-to-eat foods now available in supermarkets. We’re talking rotisserie chickens, macaroni and cheese and potato wedges the size of Gary Coleman. A more recent study by the Environmental Protection Agency estimated that Americans generate roughly 39 million tons of waste each year. This is about 12 percent of the total waste stream where ironically I do most of my fly fishing. All but 2 percent of the food ends up in landfills. This rotting food produces methane, a major source of greenhouse gas that is giving carbon dioxide a run for the money at the pump.

America’s Second Harvest, the Nation’s Food Bank Network, reports that donations of food are down 9 percent but the number of people showing up has increased by 20 percent. In England, a recent study revealed that Britons toss away a third of the food they purchase. This includes more than 4 million apples, 1.2 millions sausages, 2.8 million tomatoes and a 7.5 million English muffins. In Sweden, families with small children threw out about a quarter of the food they bought not including Swedish pancakes, Swedish
meatballs and an assortment of Danish.

Eliminating food waste won’t solve the problem of world hunger, greenhouse gas pollution or the lack of quality sitcoms on network TV. But the Department of Agriculture estimated that recovering just 5 percent of that food that is wasted could feed four million people a day. Recovering 25 percent would feed 20 million people. That’s a lot of hungry people and there is nothing funny about hunger. Now the country of Hungary, that’s a different story.

There are efforts to cut down on the amount of food people pile on their plates. A handful of restaurants are offering smaller portions on bigger plates. And a growing number of college cafeterias, after viewing the John Belushi led food fight in “Animal House,” have eliminated trays, meaning students have to carry their food to the table rather than loading up a tray. Next to go are knives, forks and straws. The biggest problem for people fighting the food waste problem is the attitude, “Why should I care? I paid for it.” I believe the rising prices of food are the answer to that. Then again, obesity doesn’t grow on trees.

So that’s it for another Wednesday experience. Tune in again on Friday for our Father’s Day tribute. So enjoy the color and remember to think about what you might be able to do to help make this world be a less hungry place. And congratulations to Kobe Bryant and the Lakers for beating the Celtics on Tuesday night and hopefully turning the NBA Finals into an event worth watching, or at least TiVoing. Good night and good luck, Yankee fans.