Happy Mothers' Day!

...and who could show appreciation for mothers everywhere better than...Mr. T?

No one, that's who.



I like how he doesn't care that the kids are being so rude to one another until the subject of moms is brought up.

The Flag Day Parade and Some Less Depressing Things

OK, picking up where I left off with Flag Day: There really isn't much more to tell besides what I saw on TV. I saw the rest of the fautasi races on the TV that was running in the background while I was working, and um, a boat won. A fast one. Full of Samoans. From a village around here somewhere. Yeah. You know which one I'm talking about.

After that, KVZK-TV switched to coverage of the Flag Day Parade, which is sort of like the Christmas Parade back in Mooresville, but celebrating Flag Day instead of Christmas, with a lot more marching and dancing instead of floats, and with most of the floats groups of people representing government departments instead of local independent businesses, because that's who the main employers here are. I didn't watch most of it, because it was just on in the background while I was working, and as soon as one of my Samoan coworkers asked me "Are you really watching that?" I knew that it wasn't a big deal to anyone who wasn't already there and realized that I no longer had any reason to watch. Also, she told me that the last fautasi race ended a few hours ago.

But what I saw was...awkward at best. The parade looked like it was going around the track at one of the high school football stadiums. The cameras were mostly situated around the home grandstands, with the Governor and his wife sitting front and center. Each governmental department went by or did a brief show based on there theme, which lead to some really awkward things like a Department of Agriculture show.

At one point, I turned back to the TV and saw the unun-watchable. (That is, there are things that you cannot "un-see" no matter how hard you try. This was one of those things.) A large group was doing a big song-and-dance number about domestic abuse. A line of about ten men sat in chairs, chugged beers in unison, spun around, and pretended to smack their wives, who fell back in agony, all in a perfectly synced chorus line.

What.

the.

hell?

Obviously, they were trying to raise awareness of the very serious and important issue of domestic abuse that probably goes on all the time here. They just decided to do it via an awkward dance number in the middle of a happy, celebratory parade with lots of little kids watching. I was originally going to describe such an astounding display of accidental bad taste as "indescribable." Then I remembered a quote from, of all people, Harry Shearer, on the notorious unreleased Jerry Lewis holocaust film The Day the Clown Cried that described this pretty well:

"The closest I can come to describing the effect is if you flew down to Tijuana and suddenly saw a painting on black velvet of Auschwitz. You'd just think, 'My God, wait a minute! It's not funny (or in this case, entertaining), and it's not good, and somebody's trying too hard in the wrong direction to convey this strongly held feeling."

I realize now that not everyone is going to think this was as messed-up as I did, but oh well.

After this, the Sunshine Happiness Parade did a tribute to the territory's war dead, complete with a cardboard tombstone, mourners dressed in black placing flowers, and someone playing "Taps" on a really cheap keyboard that sounded like the one I had when I was about six that ran on four AA batteries. But I still don't think this was as bad as the domestic abuse thing.

Then they went back to things like people parading by in nurses' uniforms and waving cheerily at the onlookers. Then came the part where someone asked me why I was watching. For the record, the war memorial thing was probably done by the Veterans and Military Affairs Office, and the domestic abuse thing could have been done by any of at least three different governmental departments on this list.

So that's all for Flag Day 2009. But of course, just for me. That sort of thing is the staple of KVZK's daytime programming that will most likely continue to run for decades, if not longer.

But more importantly, the next day, a Saturday, I had to come back to the office to finish up a project. While the DVD was burning, I drove my car over to Fagasā Bay (yes, I figured out how to type all those special characters) and took some great pictures. I actually thought it was Massacre Bay, but it wasn't. So forget I ever said that.

The view from the top of the mountain road. I took a lot more when I went up there a different time (but turned around due to my gas light coming on). I'll post those to Facebook at some point. Or maybe even here sometime.


Ah yes, THESE kids. I have a couple dozen pictures of them because they kept yelling "One more! One more!" Pretty soon I was just pretending to take them as I drove by. It was a lot less entertaining after a local girl told me that those kids were drunk.


There are actually quite a bit more that I'd like to post, but I'm hella tired and I haven't quite figured out this "real world sleep schedule" thing yet, so I'ma gonna sleep now.

Flag Day

No, not the mainland American holiday that you mark entirely by flying your flag and have a 50-50 chance of forgetting entirely, or the name given to holidays in a lot of lesser countries listed here. I'm talking about the REAL Flag Day, commemorating the day that Tutuila became a US territory and when the American flag was first raised here in 1900. This is a day celebrated with low-budget parades and fautasi races.

This is a fautasi:


Except that that image doesn't begin to do it justice. It's a bit bigger than that. THIS is what a fautasi really looks like (plus, that one has been sitting there long enough to have grass grown out of the dirt that's collected in the edges):


So now that we've got that cleared up, let's start with my experience of Flag Day. On Wednesday evening, I was enjoying beverages of a refreshing nature with Bob Wehie of MYD Samoa, who has lived here for quite some time. He told me that I ABSOLUTELY MUST be out there at 5:30 the next morning to see the aincent Samoan rituals surronding the warmup to the preliminary Fautasi races, because it's ABSOLUTELY AMAZING and will COMPLETLY CHANGE THE WAY I SEE THE ISLAND!!! He also taught me some intresting factiods about fautasi races, such as how fautasi means "village war," and how in aincent times, fautasis were the way of getting from village to village or island to island, especially for war-related purposes.

So the next day I woke up at a brain-damagingly early 4:15 AM and dragged myslef to the fautasi storage building by 5:30 to find that no one was there.

But at 5:45, the entire school buses came and let off the fautasi team. This team was called Satani (after a village somewhere, I think), and they had a chosen the obvious mascot, and done a good job with it:

Did I see any ancient Samoan warrior rituals that would ABSOLUTELY BLOW ME AWAY!? No, but it was certainly worth getting up early to see, at least once. In fact, aside from a few things, it was mostly the same as watching a high school football team warm up before a big game. A prayer, a pep talk, a run to the other side of the harbor and back, and not a whole lot else. Easily, the best part was seeing them lift up, flip over, and carry the gigantic fautasi from it's storage hut to the water as a team. And, lucky you, my digital camera has a video function. And lucky for you, I obsessivley photograph or film everything unique that I can. And even luckier for you, they had two fautasis, so I got two chances to get it right. My, isn't this your lucky day?

Here's the first one, which more than anything else gives you an appreciation for how massive a fautasi is. As it passes by, I'm reminded of the comically lengthy spaceship in the opening scene of Spaceballs. I practically expect the back of the fautasi to have a bumper sticker reading "we brake for nobody."



Here's the second one, which I think looks a lot better. This time, you get to see the massive fautasi being flipped over, which is no easy task.



And being out there so early gave me the chance to get some amazing sunrise photos.

These are the Hawiian-style canoes that I do most of my Paddling Club paddling in.

Also, I'd like to thank Blogger for sucking most of the amazing sunrise color out of a lot of these photos. I guess you'll have to see them in their full splendor when I upload them to a Facebook album, which at the current rate, should be some time in August.

So after this, the racers took off in their fautasis, and I sat around for quite a while with all the other spectators (with hours still to go before work began), wondering what was next. The voice of Island 92FM's Tonka Man came excitedly from a nearby radio, only it sounded like it was coming through a drive-thru speaker that was underwater. I later learned that he was actually announcing via a cell phone that they had placed next to the microphone. Yeah. There were several times when I wasn't sure if he and his co-announcer were speaking in English or Samoan.

As it turned out, the thing that was next was the actual first heat of the fautasi race. But it's definetly not one of those sports to watch live the first time you see it. I sat there for about 30 minutes seeing nothing, then saw about ten minutes of the fautasis racing off in the distance before they vanished around another part of the coastline that jutted into the water.

This is seriously what I could see. And I've enhanced the image so that the fautasis show up better.

I then went off to work a bit early and watched the remainder of the race on TV, which was a lot more fun to watch, thanks to multiple cameras, a few of which were following them in boats, and zoom lenses.

Well, I know this post was entitled "Flag Day" and I'm still up to the preliminary races that took place the day before Flag Day, but I'm really at a good stopping point in terms of post legnth and time of night (almost 11! :0 Shocking!), so, I'll just have to end this with, as we say in television,

"TO BE CONTINUED..."

Happy Easter!

Hey everyone, let's have an Easter Egg hunt! If you can find the hidden link in this post, you can see my latest album of pictures on the Island, complete with captions! And just like a real kids' Easter Egg hunt, the prize is extremely easy to find!

That's how I Roll!

After clearing it with Joey, I made special arrangements to air this video on the Island Music Channel almost every hour on the hour today. Check it out, it's awesome!

Fa'fafine Fashion Show She-nanigans

Once in a while there is something that cannot be fully expressed with words, but a well-captioned picture of a dog tends to do the trick. One of these things is the Fa'fafine Fashion Show, which is best described as:

It was held last weekend out by the pool of the Tradewinds Hotel, one of the swankiest hotels on the island. A few months ago, it played host to Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean on his tour of all the US states and territories. But that night, it was a fundraiser for the American Samoa National Olympic Team (yes, I'm fully aware that this is not a real country, but territories are often allowed their own teams). I arrived there to find that I was a bit early, that almost everyone I knew on the island was there, and that I couldn't see anything from where they were. I grabbed a seat a bit closer and prepared for...whatever was to come.

It was definitely funny. The site of transvestites dancing, strutting their stuff, and occasionally doing flips and other gymnast-like moves on a stage makes you laugh and feel slightly uncomfortable at the same time, and then the uncomfortableness makes you laugh even more. It was a wild night. Plus, the hosts were the owner of rival TV channel Malama TV and a fa'fafine who kept flirting with him as he became increasingly uncomfortable.

I actually took quite a few pictures, but most of them didn't come out very well, because of how my camera is generally afraid of the dark, how I was still seated sort of far back, and how the torrential rain came at one point and turned it into a show where both clothes and umbrellas were modeled, and where excess Mascara no doubt created giant purple puddles on the ground. But here's a few of the better ones anyway.



I think that in an alternate universe, that one may have been a football star.


This one is from the sports uniform-themed outfits.


Joey's band, normally Kathy & the Kindhearts, didn't have Kathy for this gig, so they went by "Three-Legged Dog" for the evening.


After I had almost all the bad pictures I needed, I moved back to the other tent-covered area to chill with my peeps, yo. Then a um...memorable fa'fafine came up to the bar, and I took this picture with Jeremy.


It wasn't until later that I noticed the bonus fa'fafine in the background.

We met some tourist guys who had learned all about how much the local dogs can bite. They went with us to Tap's bar after the show, and that's where the "good" pictures begin. Obviously, it's the kind of bar with a dance floor and that some of the fashion show participants also went.


From some of the pictures I took later, I can tell that that one actually wanted to dance to a slow, intimate song with me at one point. I'm really glad I didn't, even in the kind of non-serious way that I might have if it had been a faster song. Turns out that a lot of people here consider two people dancing to be something serious. Kinda like my middle school dances.

Later on I got to dance with a friend of a friend who was leaving on the flight the next evening. She may have been...erm...Samoan-sized, but I was really just glad to dance with a legitimate female.

The dance floor comes alive:


But none of these can compare to THE PHOTO...


Just get a load of the look on that fa'fafine's eyes. Or better yet, don't. I was actually going to end with a series of photos zooming in on that face, but it takes ten minutes to upload each photo, and it's getting late. Consider yourselves lucky. Instead, I'll close with this other great picture. Look for a familiar face in the background.

Okaaay...

A flight originating in Apia, the capital of The Independent State of Samoa™ has gained a bit of international attention.

And I have to say, some people will do anything to avoid buying two tickets.

_______________________________________________________________

UPDATE: In other news, two inmates escaped from Tafuna Correctional Facility, one of which is a murder suspect who has already escaped twice. Wonderful.