"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
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.
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.
Note: I was originally going to make this an entry entirely about what I really thought of each show, but then I realized that talking about how much I liked most of them made for a really boring entry. So I decided to make the whole entry about a single show that a lot of you are not cool enough to have seen have never even seen. I made the opinions on the shows into a seperate entry that you can find right below this one.
As a few of you may know, we at Island Television¹ will no longer be showing any syndicated programming after this week, and will be switching to mostly locally-based programming. The one exception is SAW Wrestling, because they let us air that² for free.
So thus ends my favorite part of the job: Getting to sit back and just watch the shows, the way nature intended. One of the shows that I'll miss the most is The A-Team. There just aren't enough shows that are so awesomely good and awesomely bad all at the same time. Nothing combined so much great action, memorable characters and theme music while simultaneously being awesomely dumb and the most formulaic show on TV since Scooby Doo. Seriously, one time we were preparing to shoot thehosted segments that go in-between the commercials and the pieces of episodes, and the following exchange occured:
Larry: What's the plot for this week's A-Team? Me: (Reading) "A mob kingpin threatens a restaurant owner to sell out to him or be destroyed." Larry: Wasn't that last week's episode? Me: Nope, last week it was a coffee shop.
And it's even educational! Here are just a few things that I learned from watching it:
Once a stolen plane has left the ground, there is absolutely no way of pursuing it further, and everyone chasing it will give up.
If the mafia or a band of thugs is harassing you and your business, don't bother going to the police, just go directly to a group of people wanted for war crimes.
If you're finally captured after escaping from prison, years of resisting arrest, firing at military police and destroying things in order to get away, you will only be in trouble for your original crime.
An attacker who is knocked into water is absolutely, positively incapacitated and will not attempt to get back out and take another shot at you.
Mercenaries on the lam can allow reporters to tag along with them for months at a time and continually publish stories about them without fear of being captured. Also, the military will never think to find said reporters where they work and trace said mercenaries from there.
Even if you're wanted by the military for war crimes, nearly all of the public will automatically be on your side. This includes large corporate entities that have to keep up a pristine public image, like Carnival Cruise Lines.
And those are just the points that I picked up myself. You can find a much more complete list of valuable lessons from the A-Team here. Teachers take note!
Another great thing about this show is that after watching as many episodes as I have, I feel like I can write entire episodes by myself. All it needs is:
- An evil person of power such as a mob kingpin, drug lord or corrupt devloper attempting to extort the owners of a small business.
- The victims being screened by a disguised Hannibal.
- Murdock getting under B.A.'s skin.
- A good-looking woman who is in some way related to the victim. There will be chemistry between her and Face that will ultimately go nowhere.
- Lots of bullets will being fired, but no one ever getting hurt. Bad guys thrown through windows or out of helicopters conveniently fall into dumpsters or into the ocean.
- The A-Team disguising themselves to get inside the villain's lair and learn that there is actually a more nefarious reason behind their plot.
- Their cover blown, the heroes get locked inside a room that happens to include a blowtorch and a ton of metal objects that can be used as weapons.
- Hannibal extolling the virtues of a plan coming together.
See? What am I doing here? I should be in Hollywood writing episodes for major network shows!
I'm giving A-Team a pretty good sendoff; I had Joey and Larry extend its run to Friday (we were going to end all syndicated shows on the 31st), so I could show an episode that is considered one of the best. So yeah, if you happen to be living on the island, you should stay in Friday night and watch TV this week. This one actually breaks nearly every rule I've listed above. Shocking, I know.
Finally, you should watch this, because it's the most relevant, awesome, and nerdy thing you will see all day:
So I'm finally free to say what I really think of all the shows that I've been getting paid to watch for over a year now. However, my predecessor sometimes got way ahead on certain shows, so I barely ever got to watch them. But without further ado, here is my personal, thundering, take-no-prisoners, industry-insider's critique of every show that we aired:
Roseanne: Eh, it's OK.
Will & Grace:"Your shoes are ugly!" *Laughtrack* "Not as ugly as yours!" *More laughtrack, Repeat for 22 minutes* Bleh.
Baywatch: It kept having multi-part "dramatic" episodes where someone would get injured and have to summon the courage to get through rehab. I think one of the producers didn't understand why people watched this show.
The West Wing: I've actually been on the set of this show (no, really). Outside the studio, they had a sign listing all of the awards it had won. It was ten feet tall. They deserved every one. Too bad I didn't get to see more than a few episodes.
My Name is Earl: Funny, funny show. Works even better if you grew up around white trash in the South or elsewhere. And there's an episode that mentions American Samoa. Be sure to go back and watch every single episode until you've found it.
The Office: One of my current favorite shows on TV, and the only one we showed that's still making new episodes.
Everybody Loves Raymond: I actually almost never watched this show because my predecessor had ripped EVERY SINGLE EPISODE. It has nine seasons, we show them in order, and we're not going to get past season three. Yeah. She really liked that show.
Northern Exposure: Awesome, strange show. When someone moved here from New York City, my first reaction was to ask him if he had seen this show.
The A-Team: See most of this article.
MacGyver: I've been told that this one is even more awesomely cheesy than The A-Team. Tragically, it was one of the ones that my predecessor liked a lot and I only got to see a few episodes of. Oh well. At least you have this.
Walker, Texas Ranger: You know, after you get past the whole joke thing with the famous Chuck Norris Facts, this is actually a fairly dum-*POW!*
I filmed,² edited, and uploaded³ it all myself. And there's 6 more clips of it here on the station's YouTube channel. Don't say I never worked way too hard to give you something for Christmas.
¹The island's power company.
²Pretty difficult, considering that the whole display was about three shots wide, and that I never knew which section was going to light up next. I think that's why all the good Christmas light shows on YouTube can fit into a single static shot.
³As anyone living here can tell you, this was easily the hardest part, since the Internet connection is powered entirely by a single hamster wheel. And they couldn't find a hamster, so they used a gecko. And geckos don't move very much without motivation.
Those of you old enough to remember when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, or maybe just that remake of The Prisoner last month will know that in the TV business we have something called a "miniseries." It's when a TV show, instead of having a full-length run of several years, is intentionally made with the short lifespan of a few episodes that shows get in lesser countries.
Here's a link to a blog miniseries of the wacky adventures of a few researchers who came here in 2005 to try and install stations for studying earthquakes or some other silly potentially lifesaving nonsense. At least one of them happens to be from a university that I totally visited once. I'm sure at least one of you has heard of that school.
Be sure to read the entry on Mt. Alava, which I finally got to hike this past weekend.
This should keep everyone happy while I work on another long blog entry talking about the aftermath of the tsunami. Not as long as the one on when the tsunami hit, but longer than those lousy entries where I just write a little bit and leave everyone a link.
