Ocean Film Fest

This past Friday and Saturday, the Hilo Palace Theater hosted the first annual Ocean Film Festival. They showed 8 documentaries, all related to environmental issues that affect our oceans. Along with a friend, I got an all-day pass on Saturday, and spent about 8 hours watching movies. I realize everyone doesn't have this kind of free time to spend watching documentaries, so I'd like to share some of what I learned yesterday with you. Maybe something will catch your eye, too.

First, a brief summary of what we missed. On Friday, the festival kicked off with:

• The End of the Line - If you like sushi, you might want to pay attention. By some current predictions, virtually all of the world's seafood will be gone in 40 years. Here's the strategy this film proposes:


• Control fishing by reducing the number of fishing boats across the world
• Protect large areas of the ocean through a network of marine reserves off-limits to fishing
• Educate consumers that they have a choice by purchasing fish from independently certified sustainable fisheries
  
  
• A Sea Change - The human industrial production of carbon dioxide is causing the world's oceans to become more acidic. This process occurs subtly, on such a monumental scale that if it tips over and destabilizes marine ecosystems, we'll be forced to watch helplessly as the world (as we know it) falls apart. The solution is to limit CO₂ emissions and overfishing, around the world.
  
  
• Addicted to Plastic (watch it online) - I think plastics are a fascinating subject. And probably the most challenging aspect of plastics is that we're making an enormous mess with them. Eventually, somebody's going to have to clean it up.

Saturday brought more movies, and several of them were quite good.

• Requiem (watch online) - A documentary made by a lady in Kona, about how much she loves filming sharks. I didn't really get this one, but it's not bad.
  
  
• Where Have All the Dolphins Gone (1990) - Looking back, I guess this movie provides an early modern example of the ruthless, brutal greed of commercial fishing. It focuses on the way the tuna industry in the eastern Pacific targeted dolphins because schools of tuna swam with them. Thanks to a public outcry and the "dolphin-safe tuna" certification, this practice has stopped, since there's no longer a market for the product. This movie desperately needed an update on what's happened in the last 20 years.
  
  
• Sharkwater - This movie has beautiful cinematography, a surprising message, and a passionate, pretty self-absorbed narrator. It's incredible to me, totally unbelievable, that the entire world population of shark species are in danger because shark fin soup is such a popular luxury dish in China that fishermen and poachers will catch hundreds of sharks in a day, chop off their dorsal fin, and toss the mutilated body back in the sea. The surprise twist is that if we kill off the 400-million-year-old apex predator of the sea, ocean herbivore populations will explode, devastating the ocean plant population, which produces the majority of the oxygen we breathe. The film also features Captain Paul Watson and the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, who are so passionate about saving whales (and sharks) that they ram illegal fishing boats. Great stuff.
  
  
• A Life Among Whales - A very touching, powerful movie with beautiful footage of whales. It focuses on the life of Dr. Roger Payne, and the sad truth that despite 25 years of international protection for cetaceans, Japan (and Norway and Iceland) continues hunting many species of whales and dolphins (under the guise of "research"), and has been bribing poor countries to support their plan to increase whaling operations. For more information, see Save the Whales Again! It's a lovely movie though, probably my favorite of the day.
  
  
• The Cove - This movie, which the Palace also showed back in the fall, was the climax of the festival. It's been nominated for an Oscar, and the producer was on hand to talk with the audience after the film. It's been trying to raise awareness that the captive bottlenose dolphin trade (serving dolphinariums like SeaWorld) incidentally funds the secret slaughter of 20,000 dolphins a year in Taiji, Japan. The rejected dolphins are killed for their meat, which has such dangerously high levels of mercury that the dolphins are called "toxic waste sites". The fishermen in Taiji have suspended operations for now, but whaling (including many small whales, like dolphins) continues.

I recommend the last 3 movies; they were all quite good. The ones from Friday look interesting, and I'll have to try to find some way to watch them.

Home again

So I'm back home, after nearly a month away. I saw lots of family on the mainland, and then took a lovely little vacation to Kaua'i.

For those of you who like this sort of thing, I took some pictures in Virginia. They're mostly pictures of family and scenery. And if old clichés are true, this post is up to about 52,000 words, so I'm done.

Seriously though, I'll write more later.

Thank you everybody

If you're reading this, thanks. You're probably one of the people that makes me feel lucky and loved and all warm and fuzzy on days like today. Everyone's welcome in my heart today - family, friends, curious acquaintances, random visitors, even creepy stalkers. Come in! Let's bask in the warm intoxicating glow of love. Mmm, that's nice.

Did I mention that I live in Hawai'i? I usually only think of things to complain about, but it's a pretty great place to live. It has the most beautiful skies I've ever seen. People are warm-hearted and generous. The Big Island is like a laid-back microcosm of the world, with a little bit of everything. Hilo town is so small and cozy that I frequently run into people I know wherever I go. Work doesn't even feel like work, my house is great, and my roommates are the best.

I don't even want to get out of bed today, I just want to lie here and feel grateful for being alive and comfortable.

Actually, now I'm starting to get hungry, and coffee is sounding pretty good. I think I'm going to go feel thankful that food is so delicious. Then maybe I'll feel thankful for showers.

Halloween

Once again, I carved papaya jack-o-lanterns for Halloween this year. It's my favorite part of the holiday.

I managed to spread it out over a few days, and got several other people to join in and help.

They turned out great as always. I've become more of a crafty than an artsy person, so most of my designs are pretty basic.

I kinda like them better without eyebrows or noses, actually. Gives them a kinda creepy skull-like appearance. Very appropriate.

Along with the hanai nephews, we carved up a bunch on Halloween-eve and put them on the mailbox, out by the road.

One actually went inside the mailbox. Since there weren't any fire hazards nearby, I left them out there all night. The next day, the mailman pulled into the driveway and gently reminded me that he couldn't deliver the mail with papayas in the box.


My friend and roommate S. says he actually saw he saw a sign reading "Aloha-ween" at a local school. It's pretty common everywhere, I guess, to see those kinds of signs around major holidays, often involving bad puns.

From a linguistic perspective, it's interesting that people choose "-ween" as a suffix for these playful compounds. The original morphology comes from "(all) Hallow's eve", and the phonological changes are fairly straightforward: the /s/ phoneme was deleted, and /v/ -> /n/. I'm not sure why a fricative would have changed to a nasal actually, that's a little odd.

Anyway, going by the original morphology, people should choose, say, "Aloha-een", since the /w/ belonged to the "hallow" morpheme. But human languages usually prefer the CV syllable structure, so we use epenthesis to "fix" them. Basically, it just "sounds better" to have a consonant in there.


Several of my jack-o-lanterns were made possible through the kind donations of others.


The three you see to the right were made possible by a grant from Hilo Sharks Coffee. For those of you who aren't familiar with them, the angry little guy on the far right isn't a pumpkin, it's a kabocha, a winter squash.

You might also notice the brilliant crenellation-kinda-things on the lid of the center one. That one was carved by Jill, who went to art school.


I also carved several pineapple jack-o-lanterns. They turned out much better than I expected. You can see one in the pics up at the top of the page, and two others to the right here. All these pineapples were generously provided by my friends at Kaiwiki Farms. They grow organic white pineapples, easily the best pineapples I've ever eaten.

If you're thinking about carving a pineapple jack-o-lantern yourself, here's a few pointers:

• The trickiest part about hollowing a pineapple is the woody core. Generally, my technique was to cut off the top, then slash around inside with a knife, and scoop out the resulting pulp.
  
• You'll probably have a hard time removing the last little bit of the core when you get down to the bottom. It's just an awkward angle for a knife. Wait until you carve the face, then go in through the mouth to level out a spot for the candle.
• You don't really need a vent hole at the top like you do with papayas. These guys are so tall, the eye holes work pretty well to let the smoke and heat out.
  
• These things only last one or two days. After that they'll be totally swarming with fruit flies.
  

Finally, I spent the end of Halloween over at a friend's house playing Japanese Mahjong. At one point, I had a pretty good hand going. I was 2 tiles from having it when Shinsuke started muttering "sugoi!" under his breath. His hand was worth 84,000 points, and pretty much ended the game. Still, fun times.

I carved one last papaya lantern while playing, but forgot to take a picture.

Hoʻolauleʻa

(lilikoi / passionfruit flower in my yard)

Well, the summer is over. A few weeks ago, I had the dubious privilege of leading the service at church for the second time. I learned two things from the experience. The first is that I am spectacularly awful at leading a group in singing. I'm actually a little proud of how terrible I am. It's hard to participate in something so awkward and discordant without laughing.

The second thing I became aware of is the significance of this time of year. It was Rosh Hashanah, Id al-Fitr, and the Fall Equinox (for the northern hemisphere). It's harvest time, something we easily forget with the modern conveniences of global shipping, greenhouses, and supermarkets. Closer to the equator, the rainy season is starting. Daylight is dwindling; summer is over.

So it's time to party! Harvest-time festivals are a great tradition. The U.S. Thanksgiving was originally celebrated in September or early October, before Lincoln moved it to November. But here on the Big Island of Hawai'i, the beginning of the rainy season is marked by the annual KWXX Hoʻolauleʻa in Hilo. I just stopped by for an hour or so, long enough to grab some tamales, a cup of iced coffee, and some poi balls. It always rains at Hoʻolauleʻa, but it hadn't started by the time I left.

For language nerds, Hoʻolauleʻa can be roughly translated as "festival". Literally, it comes from hoʻo, lau, and leʻa. Hoʻo is a prefix that changes the meaning of a word with the idea of "making-it-happen". (Hoʻoilo means the rainy season; ilo means sprouting or early growth.) The most common meaning of lau is leaves (as in lau kī or lāʻī, ti leaves), but in this case it means "much, many, numerous". And the primary meaning of leʻa is "joy, pleasure, happiness, merriment". So altogether, we get "making-much-merriment-happen".
(Sources: wehewehe.org and one of the pukui/elbert dictionaries)

The next day I went with some friends down to the Ahalanui hot pond down in Kalapana. I hadn't been there in a long time. The water was pretty warm actually.


I like ʻohia trees. Some friends who live in Puna have nice tall ones in their yard.

Well, that's all for now. Have a good fall!

Update

Hi everybody!

It's been a long time, but I haven't really felt like I had anything to say. You know how it gets, probably... weeks go by, and nothing really important seems to happen, and then before you know it, it's been months and you have a hard time thinking of any major changes in your life.

Well, I graduated with a B.A. in Linguistics and a minor in Computer Science back in May, as many of you already know. The university's calculation process is confusing, but I think I graduated with highest honors, which is a bit mollifying. I won't know until I get the diploma, I guess. Anyway, I don't feel much different, but people assure me that it's an important life change, or something. My wonderful mom and aunt came out to watch me do the little ceremony thing, and I took them on a whirlwind 3-day tour of the island afterwards. It was surprisingly fun, actually, playing tour guide. We had a great time.

Plans for the future? Hmm. Well, what I tell everyone is that I'm "looking at grad schools". I want to do work with artificial intelligence, and a lot of the interesting stuff requires at least a master's degree. I'm aiming at starting next fall, though, so that's still a little ways away. In the meantime, I'm staying here for now. I have a part-time job that pays the bills, and in this economy that's nothing to sneeze at. I've been thinking that I might come back to the mainland in the spring to visit some schools, but we'll see.

Hmm, not an awful lot else I can think of... I shaved off the last of my beard for the summer, so the last pictures you've seen of me are probably out of date. I've been doing some web design work on the side, which I don't really enjoy that much anymore, but it's a service that lots of people need.

Well, that's about all, I guess. If I can think of anything later, I'll try to post more updates.

The Many Faces of Me

Some of you (the ones I haven't seen since January, at least) might not have heard about my attempt at growing a beard. Sometime last year, I was thinking to myself, "Why, I've never grown a beard. I wonder if I would like it?"

Or something like that. When it got around to being New Years, I realized that I couldn't think of a single New Years resolution that I'd ever kept. I couldn't remember ever making one, either. If anything, I may have once resolved not to make New Years resolutions, just to maintain my nonconformist reputation.

Well, times change. This year I resolved to do something different: make a New Years resolution. Easiest resolution ever! I immediately followed through by resolving to grow a beard until the end of the spring semester.

You can see the results here. Pretty impressive, right? This is even after trimming it back twice. People asked me pretty frequently why I had decided to grow a beard. I got tired of explaining the true reason (I was bored), so I made up some ridiculous ones.

"I'm actually a wanted fugitive."
"I realized that my face was too handsome, so I covered part of it up."
"I'm growing this beard to raise awareness for all the people in the world who can't grow facial hair."
...and so on.

Well, eventually May rolled around, and I finished exams and went to a wedding. When I got back home, I started to remove the beard. My friend Laura had suggested that I shave off one part at a time, and I liked the idea. I'd seen other people do it before on the internet, and it looked like fun.



The first experiment was probably my favorite. This one got called "general burnside", "king kalākaua", "early presidential", and a lot of other comments.


One of my roommates put a copy of this picture on the refrigerator.














More ridiculous glamour shots. This stage was also pretty good. Apparently this particular facial hair style is known as the "friendly muttonchops". Or maybe the one above this was the friendly chops. I'm still unclear, and the internet disagrees too.

Really, this was just a transitional stage between the first style and the next. Not my favorite, although I do love these pics.













I like to think of this one as "the Hogan", but I guess there are other names for this style. One of my friends claims that I look like some kind of sleazy drug lord in this picture. I liked this one.






I'm not as fond of this one. At least, I don't like this picture, but it's the only one I have of "the handlebar".

I had a lot of fun twirling the ends of my moustache while talking to people, and curling the tips up to look like a musketeer or something.

I still this this picture is awful.




And at last: back to a smooth, clean-cut face.

This montage was taken at the end of the road in Hāwī, up near the northern end of the island. There's a trail down to the beach (and beyond), marked with several very large warning signs, but we didn't have time to hike down to check it out. Maybe another time.

(The last picture, btw, is "You're a kitten!")

Anyway, I'm pretty happy without the facial hair for now. It's summer, and it's hot, so I don't miss it. But winter will be coming up again soon enough, and I've been thinking I might do this again, especially now that I know it only takes a couple months for me to grow a respectable little beard. Certainly enough to play around with.

Well, I hope you enjoyed the show, and that you're all doing at least as great as I am. Email me if you want better quality copies of any of these pictures.