City Council, hurry up already with that moratorium on so-called “monster houses.” A final vote is slated for Feb. 13. But by then more than three months will have passed since neighborhood complaints about the jumbo-sized housing trend started making front-page news headlines.

City officials have acknowledged a practice of approving even suspicious home construction and conversion plans because their bureaucratic hands are tied by regulations that do not set limits on the number of bedrooms allowed. In a recent two-month period the city received more than one dozen building permit applications for homes with eight or more bedrooms. Don’t let the monsters multiply.

California’s high-speed train could cost more, too

Oh, boo-hoo. Californians have discovered they can’t build their touted high-speed rail project as cheaply as they’d hoped.

The final system is meant to link San Jose with the Central Valley region, but just the 119-mile section across farm country will cost upwards of $10.6 billion, instead of the hoped-for $6 billion.

Sound familiar? Oh yes, but in the case of Oahu, that $10 billion figure has arisen as a worst-case-scenario cost — for only 20 miles of rail. And it won’t be a “bullet train,” though critics have taken aim, hoping to dispatch the project with lethal finality.