PICK BARBARA!

UPDATE: The links to the video now work. But if something goes wrong again, just go to islandreefjob.com and then click "all applicants," and then click the drop-down menu and select "American Samoa." Browse through all one of the videos and select Barbara's

There seems to be some kind of tradition going on with this blog: Every time that I say exactly what I'm going to be blogging about next time, I end up writing about something else. So I'll write about riding around on the buses...soon.

So anyhow, I helped my friend Barbara make this awesome video for her application to The Best Job In the World, the job of being the caretaker of a tiny island on the Great Barrier Reef where she would get paid $100,000 to live in a giant house on the Reef and blog about diving, hiking, snorkeling, and generally adventuring* on the island for six months.

So anyway, please go here and watch the video. Then rate it five stars. Then share it with all of your friends, relatives, and casual acquaintances and tell them to do the same. Then rate it five stars again on your school or work computer. Then go to your local library, log on to every computer, then rate the video five stars each time. Then drive to the next town, sign up for another library card, and do the same thing again.

Did I mention that if she wins, a lot of people will see that video that I helped make? And that I will get to be one of her guests on the island? Oh. They will. And I will.

Even if she doesn't win, Barbara, who is originally from Italy, will continue adventuring** like she has been doing for the last ten years. Her contract as a Marine Biologist here has ended, and she will be leaving us soon. And by soon, I mean that while typing this, I looked out the window and saw the plane that will take her off of the island come in for a landing. While leaving the going-away party for her and someone that I didn't really know last night, she spoke some great words of wisdom: "You only leave once!" Later on, I realied that sometimes her accent is a little heavy sometimes, and that she actually said "You only live once." That makes a lot more sense.

Next, she plans on visiting friends in San Francisco, then mountain climbing in Oregon while visiting other friends there, then possibly heading up to Alaska to meet more friends during the Idiot A-Rod Iditarod. Presumably not as a contestant. You can follow her further adventures on her blog, which is on the list of blogs to the right. I think that she's really shown us the value of making lots of friends along the road of life. That's something we should all be doing for a very good reason:

To get more people to watch and rate the video!


*It's a real word! No, really!
**Even Firefox's spellchecker says that it's a real word!

Lake Mormon

So a week ago it was raining hard. Really hard. Imagine the hardest rain you've ever been in. Now throw that image out of your head completely because it's nothing like the intensity that goes on here in tropical rainforest areas. While leaving church and then going to lunch, I took some pictures:



This was actually taking the long way around, because there was an even bigger puddle in the way of my normal route. But on the way back, I decided that I was being silly, and that I could certainly wake* it through the big puddle in front of the Mormon church, known as the Great Salt Lake and Lake Mormon.



"See, there was no need to drive all the way around town just to avoid this puddle!"

*Car dies*

"AW, DAMMIT!"

Some Samoans who saw me jump out and wade through water that was just beneath the floorboards of my car were nice enough to help me push it out of the water. Refer to the picture at the top of the post, taken three hours later. One of them told me to come back in a few hours and try to start it again, so I went home and learned about how my engine may have been destroyed through the magic of hydro-locking. A few hours later, it didn't start. I almost called a tow truck that night, but at the advice of my friend Barbara, who's blog can now be found to the right, decided to wait until the next morning so I can have this Indian she knows come and look at it for much cheaper.

I come outside the next morning to leave the key for the mechanic. Joey is with me, ready to give me a ride to work. Just for the hell of it, I start up my engine and...IT WORKS! I drive it all the way to work without any problem but a clacking noise from the engine and a chugging at very low speeds. I drive it for the entire next few days without any more problems, save for when I drive it up a steep hill and can here a boiling sound coming from the engine after I stop the car.

Yeah, I'm getting it looked at.

I'm expecting to get it back in the middle of next week.

Next time: My wacky adventures of riding the agia buses around this weekend.



*This was an actual typo that I made, but I think it was more of a Freudian slip.

MOAR PITCHERS!

So, after reading the previous entry, Joey filled me in with the following detail about the AFN feed:

The feed of the Super Bowl came from AFN, which carries no commercials. AFN instead airs military announcements in place of commercials. These are of a sensitive military natures and are not allowed on civilian airwaves. Therefore, KVZK played alternate programming during the AFM program breaks.

Also, there's another album of pictures up on Facebook for those of you who haven't seen it yet. And for those of you who went through the whole thing before I had a chance to write all the captions, it now has all of the proper captions.

And for those of you who have seen it since I finished writing the captions almost a week ago, I've started working on the next one, so that'll be up eventually.

The Super Bowl, Samoan Style

I just watched the Super Bowl for the first time since arriving here. It was...ah...different.

But first, the runup to the Big Game. American Samoans LOVE American football, so it's a big deal here. Due to their size and athletic ability, there are quite a few Samoans in the NFL. And of course, the locals favor any team with a Samoan player. A lot of Samoans claimed to be "HUGE Steelers fans," but have never even heard of the world-famous Terrible Towel. The real truth is that they're fans of California-born safety Troy Polamalu, a Samoan.

I was also interested to learn that one of the players for the Carolina Panthers is a Tongan. Which really gave everyone here a reaction of "Oh." Turns out the Samoans and Tongans don't get along very well. Possibly due to centuries of war between them.

I ended up watching it in Taps Sports Bar, because our radio station had a live braodcast there, and I figured I might as well watch it with the people I know best (and where they have $2 Heinekens). The live broadcast ended about 10 minutes before the game started, and half of the people with the station left at that. But the rest of them stayed, and I was pretty nicely settled in (had just started a beer) so I stayed. I had a couple of nachos and some "Chile fries," according to the menu. I had no idea that Taps had such international cuisine.

It's incredibly weird to see a Super Bowl in the middle of the day. For almost the entire first half, it felt like just an ordinary football game on a Sunday afternoon. Plus, all the excellent Super Bowl commercials are gone.

See, since my station is set to become the NBC affiliate and already kinda/sorta is, we had the rights to the game. But Joey wanted our small sales staff to focus on getting long-term sponsors for the station, rather than just a few short-term sponsors for the game. Plus, it would be a lot of work to get ready for, and we're still only available on cable in a place where only about 5,000 homes have it. And it would suck to have to cram your giant Samoan agia (extended family) into the house of the one guy you know that has cable (as rival station/fake Fox affiliate Malama forced them to do last year). So we gave the game to government-owned station KVZK.

All live sports get here via the Armed Forces Network satellite feed. But for whatever reason, the AFN doesn't want the Samoan populace watching their commercials (I guess the website for info on how to get the most out of your GI Bill money is a closely guarded military secret), so they have to be covered up with something. Presumably because we gave them the game, we didn't let them air any commercials. So KVZK instead used footage of some kind of candlelight vigil for the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. And something else that appeared to be a funeral for a Samoan soldier killed in action. They also cut out almost all of the speakers and hymns from both of these things, so the first five commercial breaks were literally just people walking up and putting candles on an altar.


















Yeah.

It's like they decided to air the most depressing thing that I couldn't possibly make fun of.

Anyhow, watching the game went really well. Except that the captions on the TV were set with all of our Spanish-speaking Samoan friends in mind.















I tried to help them fix this during the "commercial" break, but the controls for that were only on the remote, which had been lost. Turns out it's one of those TVs where they used up all the buttons on the set for things that 99% of people are afraid to touch, lest they find themselves watching everything in black and white with a permanently squished horizontal picture and all of the captions in Tongan.

The Best Films on the Island!

I really mean what I say in that title, because aside from a lot of endlessly repeated footage on KVZK of Flag Day 1997 and a single movie theater that is currently only playing a second-run copy of "Hotel for Dogs," there aren't a lot of other places to get your motion-picture fix on the island.* So here are some of the best things available here. And by that, I mean the latest batch of things that I made for work.

No newly-filmed stuff; it's all animations and such this time.



This is from our new thing, Samoa on the Web. We find funny or otherwise entertaining clips of Samoans on the Internet and air them in five-minute blocks. What you see in this video is the awesome intro, a quick sample of the kind of thing we found, and the awesome outro. The echoy effect of the voice over isn't in the actual intro and outro. I have no idea how it got like that.



This is an animation I made for The Phrase that Pays (in case you didn't read the title). They gave me the radio version of the ad and told me to make it into a TV ad. The result is...ah...this. I personally think it's awesome.



This is basically a way better way of saying "ad time available!" I designed this one to be sleek. The thing that appears around the question mark is a conference table, if you can't figure that out. Joey saw it four times before he knew what it was.

*Okay, except for the Phantom cable channels, CNN international, and movies on DVD.

Wheely Cheap (Yuk, yuk!)

Well, I am officially now with 100% more car.

After several weeks of looking for cars, the sales guy at Haleck Motors finally offered me a good price on a Nissan with a cracked windshield that they had been trying to sell me for almost my entire car-search. It was the best price I had seen on-island (with the exception of some mopeds, including one that would have to have the entire brake lines replaced) and the lowest mileage, so I bought it. A bit of shifting money from different accounts around, a bit of having Joey use his mad connections to get the bank to skip the ten-day holding period on all checks from off-island accounts, and the car was mine.

I also got them to fix the power windows, the power mirrors, the wiper blades, and take a look at the stereo volume knob (it was stuck at "sixteen year old with a new speaker system" during the test drive). But there was nothing that I could do about the crack in the windshield, the eroding paint job, the lack of hubcaps, or the door to the gas cap that doesn't close all the way. And their solution to the volume knob thing was to push it gently to the right while turning it. Somehow, it works this way. A nice steering wheel cover took care of that feeling that the rubber covering on the steering wheel was disintegrating.*

Despite all that, it runs great. Unlike most of the cars I've been in on the island, it's not squeaking randomly, the "Check engine" light is not permanently on, and it has far less than 100,000 miles. It gets me from Point A to Point B without a problem, and the exterior doesn't look bad at all when it's nighttime.

The tags already on it expired sometime in 2007, so I have to get those replaced before I get pulled over. But before registrating it, I had to have insurance. Typically, busineses on the island are open from 8 or 9 AM until about 5 in the evening weekdays and until noon on Saturdays. I called two different places on Saturday to get a quote and got no answer at either.

After my parents wisely convinced me to stop driving around uninsured ASAP, I just stopped at one of the places that sold insurance and got it on the way to work today along with some groceries and a new pair of sandals.** But before leaving, I called Joey to tell him that I was going to be in a bit later because I was getting car insurance.

I then went out and tried to get my car registered, but I couldn't find the OMG OMV, which is what the DMV is called here. I went to the place where the woman at the insurance company said it would be, but the building that most closely fit her description was most definitely the Office of Elections, a really huge and new building for a department that only really relevant about once every four years. The guy at that office told me that the OMV was at the giant Governmental center in Utulei, which happens to be about 30 minutes away, but on the way to work. I drove all the way there, and after looking all over the complex for the OMV because the guy at what I assume was the Information Table was asleep, I asked the guy sitting behind him, who was pretty certain that it was in Tafuna, where I just was. He took me to a map of the building we were in, and sure enough, it wasn't there. After telling it all to Joey at work, he explained that the OMV was crammed into a small group of governmental buildings that I had gone right past, drove around, and then turned around in the parking lot of, in Tafuna. Of course, there was probably no sign in front of it at all.

Telling stories like this to people that have been here a while are usually replied to with the phrase "Welcome to the island."

P.S. It's pretty difficult to get stamps without driving all the way up to the post office in Pago Pago,*** but I was able to buy a not-quite-full sheet of them from the lobby of the nearby Tradewinds Hotel. They had a really small selection (just the one semi-sheet) and I didn't look at them before they were swiping my credit card, so it looks like everyone that I send mail to will be wished a Happy Hanukkah for a few months.

*All of this paragraph is true.
**Not really.
***Which I attempted anyway on Saturday, only to find that they close an hour and a half sooner than the USPS website says they do.

PITCHERS!

It's been a while since I've updated this blog...because I've been putting this awesome photo album together!*

*And watching the last two months of my TV shows online.