Shirley Temple found love here

Fascinating bits of trivia come to light in obituaries, all the more so when the person had an altogether fascinating life, as Shirley Temple Black certainly did. Not many child stars become ambassadors and build an entire second career in public service.

While vacationing in Honolulu in 1950, she met her husband-to-be, Charles Alden Black, at a party thrown in her honor. Black was assistant to the president of Hawaiian Pineapple Co., the precursor to Dole Food Co.

Black also was an avid surfer who indulged that passion after work every evening. He liked to say he likely wouldn’t have bothered to come to the party had the waves been calling to him. Having met the legendary Duke Kahanamoku on a 1935 trip to Hawaii, Shir-ley Temple probably was clear on the "surf’s up" concept and wasn’t offended by that.

Snowden found easy pickings here

Edward Snowden, the former Hawaii-based employee of the federal contractor Booz Allen Hamil- ton, has caused an international stir over the release of government files he accessed there.

But here’s something that’s no secret: Hawaii is apparently not the center of the national tight-security universe. The New York Times reported last week that Snowden used low-cost "web crawler" software to "scrape" the documents. There are ways to detect unusual activity from within the organization, officials said, but Hawaii was one of the outposts that didn’thave the software update.

"Some place had to be last," an unnamed official told the Times.

Yes, but does it always have to be Hawaii?