Usually the first home game of the football season is something to celebrate.

Fans get decked out in home colors and face paint, stadium parking lots transform from oleaginous wastelands into social epicenters, and the air is invigorated with the smell of barbeque and the collective hope that this is the beginning of something good. It’s the kind of mindless fun that’s also an essential human experience.

This was the atmosphere at schools like Virginia Tech and the University of Wisconsin-Madison last weekend. Clips of packed stadiums at both campuses went viral, providing jarring contrasts to the University of Hawaii’s first home game of the season.

While thousands of Hokie fans in Lane Stadium erupted off to never-never land and a sea of Badger fans turned Camp Randall Stadium into a massive House of Pain, the Rainbow Warriors were cheered by artificial crowd noise at Ching Field in front of a few dozen media members…

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Jonathan Swanz’ attraction to glass blowing had little to do with the alluring glow of the furnace.

“There was an attraction to fire, don’t think there wasn’t,” the O‘ahu artist says. “But initially what was so seductive was that I wasn’t working with just my hands. The whole body is engaged.”

When you see Swanz in person, you might mistake him for a different kind of artist. His sinewy musculature and casual facial stubble suggest the aged experience and youthful energy of a lead guitarist in a rock band.

“People ask me if I’m a musician,” he admits, to which he playfully responds that he’s actually a dancer. Indeed, the manipulation of molten glass involves choreographed movements and patterns that resemble dance…

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The Department of Education announced last week that it will be delaying the start of fall sports and requiring all student-athletes, athletic staff and volunteers to be vaccinated. The announcement came as students began full in-person learning for the first time in 18 months, and the number of daily COVID-19 cases continued to surge.

The decision sparked the usual backlash blend of genuine disappointment, exhausted frustration and reactionary outrage. It’s much easier to sympathize with the first two.

Competition is an important experience for a lot of people, and I don’t trivialize how truly life-changing it can be. Sports can push us to our physical and mental limits; you tend to learn a lot about yourself when your heart is pounding and your legs are burning and a team, school or community is investing their hopes in you. You learn to be aware of how your actions can impact others around you, a lesson that is in dire need right now.

For most people, high school is the highest level of competitive athletics they’ll get to participate in. After local athletes had their final seasons cut short last school year — and the school year before that, if they played spring season sports — it’s not hard to understand and commiserate with the impatience and anxiety a lot of people feel.

Then there’s the reactionary posturing, which thrives online and takes the form of all the usual bad faith arguments: “A vaccine mandate is an infringement on my rights” or “vaccines are just as dangerous as COVID-19.” Let’s investigate those claims…

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As soon as the final bell sounded in the main event bout between T.J. Dillashaw and Cory Sandhagen last weekend, I knew the scorecards were going to be strange. My hunch, which turned out to be correct, was that the final verdict would either be a split decision or a majority draw. When you’ve watched enough close fights, you know that the only thing more dynamic and unpredictable than the fights themselves is how they are judged.

Calling the fight “close” isn’t entirely accurate, though. It was in one sense, but in another it really wasn’t close at all. If the purpose of a fight is to inflict more damage than you receive — which is the intuitive understanding of how fights work — then Sandhagen was the clear and obvious winner. He hit Dillashaw with more and harder shots throughout the fight, slicing and bruising the former champ’s face into a bloody mess. Sandhagen, however, ended the fight relatively unscathed. If the fight happened anywhere but in the Octagon, there would be no doubt in anyone’s mind who won.

But the fight did take place in the Octagon, and it was judged in five minute intervals, not in entirety…

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