Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Rain

"And Dr. Macphail watched the rain. It was beginning to get on his nerves. It was not like our soft English rain that drops gently on the earth; it was unmerciful and somehow terrible; you felt in it the malignancy of the primitive powers of nature. It did not pour, it flowed. It was like a deluge from heaven, and it rattled on the roof of corrugated iron with a steady persistence that was maddening. It seemed to have a fury of its own."- From Rain by W. Somerset Maugham

So I've been noticing a lot of people on the mainland complaining about how much it's been raining there lately. Allow me to show you what real rain looks like¹



Note that this clip is from last April, which is why everything in Pago looks relatively nice and not all tsunami-ravaged. I would have uploaded a higher-quality version, but it would have taken about 33 hours. Really. So try to imagine it coming down in sheets when I'm facing the mountain.

For most of this week there was a large trough over the island, which means there were some really big barnyard animals feeding here. And they were slobbering constatnly, so there were almost nonstop heavy rains overhead. Today we didn't have to worry about the trough...because we had a brush with Tropical Cyclone² Nisha. What fun we're having here!

¹As opposed to imaginary rain, which is what the rest of the world has.
²Really a hurricane, pretty much

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Because some of you haven't heard yet...

The Territorial Immigration Office was raided last week by the FBI and two other law enforcement agencies. Hilarity is ensuing. Seems that human trafficking has been afoot. Read all about it here, with a quote 93KHJ's own Monica Miller, who happens to be awesome.

And if you have a few more minutes to spend deciphering high school-level newswriting (with as many unnecessary parentheses as this blog), you can read a more detailed version on the Samoa News website. (That said, I'm really glad they're covering it. I'm sure there are plenty of people that would rather they didn't).

I'll give you a hand for the beginning of the article:

One of the places named in the second article is KS Mart, which is easily one of the most popular stores on the entire island. After giving the what is considered on this island to be the appropriate level of advance notice,
² they were closed all day today for an all-out document shredding session company party. VERY interesting, as this place doesn't even close on Christmas.

And this is not only being covered by the local press. It's getting attention from the international media as well. Since it was picked up by the Associated Press, the story easily appeared in the LA Times, The Seattle Times, The Honolulu Advertiser,
Radio Australia News, the two sources that I've already linked to, and a bunch of other places that I can't be bothered to look.


¹They never explain who OTICIDE is. It's the Office Of Territorial And International Criminal Intelligence And Drug Enforcement. Knowing that makes

²A couple of fliers at the cash registers, put there the evening before. Not even our newsteam knew about them until today.

Saturday, January 2, 2010

A Flashback

A lifetime ago, on the evening of December 31st, 1999, the Town of Mooresville held a Millennium celebration downtown to ring in the year 2000. One of the many things to do was write down a message in a book that would be opened and read in ten years' time. In my infinite middle-school wisdom and maturity, I put down:

T
Th
Thi
This
This is
This is t
This is to
This is to t
This is to ta
This is to tak
This is to take
This is to take u
This is to take up
This is to take up s
This is to take up sp
This is to take up spa
This is to take up spac
This is to take up space
This is to take up space.

And signed my full name.

The best part about that is that I may have actually used a variation that took up even more space. The more I thought about it over the following years, the more I wanted to be as far away as possible when that book was reopened on January 1st, 2010.

Mission accomplished.