A Hawaiian word meaning “foreigner”; this term, which predates Captain James Cook’s 1778 arrival in Hawaii, has also come to refer more generally to Caucasians; another Hawaiian nickname for white people—especially tourists—is “shahkbait”; you don’t want to be called shahkbait; some time ago, I found myself in Maui—with my father; we spent a few days at a hotel called Mama’s Fish House, by the beach in Paia (a laid-back town that’s home to Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson); my dad enjoyed himself in Paia; he ate; “I appreciate any culture that makes Spam a staple,” said my dad; I tried to keep dad from ordering dessert after every meal—pineapple upside down cake, coconut pie, haupia—but in my heart, I knew it wasn’t a battle worth fighting; rather, I knew I couldn’t win; my dad has a big personality—and Type 2 Diabetes; on our last day in Maui, we woke up at dawn to drive the winding Hana Highway; we visited a famous break called “Jaws” and watched local surfers from the safety of the shore along with other oglers; a Rastafarian with a longboard gave us the finger and called us “shahkbait”; road signs were, mostly, missing (supposedly yanked down by locals to discourage adventurous haoles—like us); we stopped at a wayside park called Kaumahina, which had a stunning view—and a prominent sign reading “no soliciting”—but dad and I were more interested in the family of feral cats that comingled with a band of aggressive, wild chickens; I fed the chickens bits of my apple core; dad gave them Hershey’s kisses; the next day, we drove to the airport in Kahului; with an hour to kill, we went to a shopping center with a Borders and a Starbucks; my father and I got into a fight when he ordered an Iced Caffe Mocha and an Old Fashioned; I asked him not to eat so much dessert—at least in front of me; he reminded me that he’s my father, that I can become patronizing and idiotic, and then he proceeded to order a second Old Fashioned; I couldn’t watch; I went to Borders and looked at a picture book about large jungle cats; two hours later, my father and I boarded different flights; on the plane, I kept mentally replaying the incident in Starbucks, and I became upset for being so controlling; my father likes doughnuts, it’s that simple; he’s 63; I should’ve let him eat his Starbucks doughnuts in peace; at one point in Hawaii, the last day of the school year was known as “Kill Haole Day”; Kill Haole Day seems to be a tropical cousin of “Beat Up a White Kid Day,” which coincides with May 1^st—May Day; Beat Up a White Kid Day has been a long-standing tradition in Cleveland public schools; seriously; while I am no supporter of random violence, this seems to be a fascinating inversion of traditional race/power dynamics; in “Maximum City,” Suketu Mehta’s analysis of Hindu-Muslim violence in Mumbai, he writes eloquently about “the powerful wish of minorities all over the world to be the oppressor rather than the oppressed”; for me, this is a troubling, cynical thought; I’d prefer an alternate path, one where—as Will Oldham (aka Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy) sings: “You do what you want/And I will do what I want/I’m now free of master and everyone/servant of all and servant of none”; that being said, I’m not one to speak: my father and I recently had a two-hour-long quarrel about a box of Thin Mints.

Continuing with our series on writing intentionally bad query letters, there’s no cure for rejection as satisfying as making anonymous threats toward those people who rejected you.

Como fazia tempo que não viamos o surfista argentino em aguas brasileiras, fomos procurá-lo no litoral argentino e…….

………..lá estava ele com seu longboard:

E na valinha menor, na praia ao lado, seu filho aprendendo a “manobra” do pai.

Aeeeeee Carioca, sabe por que que eu não tenho medo do transito pra ir pra praia no feriadão?

Porque o surf está no quintal de casa……..

Abraço Silvinho!!!

Olha o título, o vídeo e tire alguma conclusão…

Título: locals only (this is what happens if you show up to our spot with an attitude. YOU GET BOOOOED!!)

A onda não precisa ser grande para chacoalhar…

As vezes uma onda pequena, machuca mais que uma grande…

Precisa comentar???

Dois Surfistas argentinos resolvem pular do Quebra Mar em Cabedelo, mas Cabedelo tem quebra mar?

Não preciso nem comentar…

Olha esse vídeo …

Piores momento do surf em Jacarecica!

Acho que em Jacarecica a galera não surfa tão bem…e é o paraíso dos bodyboards…

Onde fica Jacarecica?

Vcs acham que só aí no sul tem surfista argentino?

Otro dia apareceu um aqui dos bão…

DISCLAIMER: The following is a work of fiction. I think. It includes language and images that some persons may find to be objectionable or disturbing. This is not exactly accidental.

* * * * *

The scientist was on his bicycle, riding to work on a hot August morning, heading to Honolulu.

He was in no hurry. The air conditioning to his windowless lab had broken down, a casualty of his employer’s deferred-maintenance program (he thought it was around $500 million’s worth by now), and the temperature in the lab had risen to 90 degrees Fahrenheit.

He was going to have to get used to it. With programs being slashed to ribbons and only a court case preventing salaries from being slashed with them (for the moment), repairs were nowhere on the horizon. Not even the institution’s extortionate new parking policies would pay for them – not least, because those policies were a major reason why he was riding that bicycle. The last thing he needed was to arrive at work already overheated.

Besides. The traffic light ahead had gone to yellow. He, along with the three lanes full of cars and trucks to his left, prepared to stop.

Without any sort of warning, two guys on road racing bicycles and wearing store-bought team cycling gear raced by on his left – a few inches of wiggle on their part or his, and the scientist would have been sent sprawling onto the curb. They charged ahead, clearly intending to run the red light and expecting the crowd of cars to look out for them.

The lead car in the left-turn lane of the facing traffic had other ideas. The second its light turned green, or perhaps just an instant before, it charged into the intersection, tires squealing, and went straight for the cyclists, sending them sprawling onto the curb. They sprang up immediately (to the scientist’s not-unqualified relief) and marched toward the offending vehicle, which had screeched to a stop, blocking the highway. Its driver was standing by the door.

“Hey, asshole! Watch where you’re going!”

“Hey, fucking haoles. Next time, you stop at the light!”

“The hell with the light. You tryin’ to get somebody hurt?“

“You don’t stop at the light, next time I ain’t stoppin’ neither. Two less haoles to fuck up Hawai‘i. You piss me off any more, I take care of it now.”

“You try it, bastard!” The two bicyclists made to rush the driver.

And found themselves staring down the barrel of an automatic weapon.

The driver’s voice was calm, not the screaming fury of before, but it carried from Koko Head to Waikiki.

“Get the fuck out of the road. Now. Before I change my mind.”

The cyclists backed up slowly until they reached their mangled rides at the curbside, hauled them up onto the grassy bank on the other side of the sidewalk, and stood beside them, mute, still, glassy-eyed.

The driver threw the machine gun into the front passenger’s seat, got into the car, and drove sedately down the highway, Ewa-bound.

For what seemed like an eternity, nobody moved. There was no sound but the idling of the engines of the cars piled up at the intersection.

Then, the traffic signal for the main highway turned from green to yellow.

And there was a mad dash to beat the light.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

Essa, na minha opinião, é a melhor onda do Ceará.

Crowd e localismo pesados!!

Não precisa nem falar o que aconteceu…

Enquanto o Surfista Argentino pegava suas ondas…

Pra que vc vai num secret sem onda e com crowd?

Só o surfista argentino mesmo…

Se vc olhar bem, ele está lá no meio…

o Surfista Argentino descobriu um secret com altas ollas, fingiu que era mexicano e local do pico  e foi surfar sozinho…

Pico conhecido pelo forte localismo, em cima de uma bancada afiada e com espaço pra um só em cada onda…

Cabo Blanco, Peru, em vários tamanhos:

O Duro não é o tamanho da onda e nem a má qualidade do vídeo, mas sim o nome do vídeo:

Surfe Radical…

whew! today, class was tough. after the well anticipated mid-term exam and given scores, everyone took a break for lunch. me, being strapped on a budget, had left-over vegetarian garlic fried-rice for lunch from the night prior. it was ono! “ono” means delicious in hawaiian. which brings me to the topic of my blog for today. hawaiian words being interpreted as racial slang.

after lunch break, class resumed with lectures for the remaining of the day. the instructor and well, most of the class, is of some white or caucasian ethnicity, if not the majority. the occupation has always been dominated by caucasian males. i am just giving you the scene scenario here.

i am not justifying myself for the word that i used while addressing a concern of another student in class, but i will offer my “interpretation” of the word, considering i am of native hawaiian ancestry and have been a resident of hawaii for my entire life. i used the word “haole” and i used it in a sentence to some degree of saying “because that is how the haole’s say it, not us hawaiians. shortly after i had made that comment, another individual referred to me as Beth, the wife of Dog Chapman, from the tv reality show, The Dog: Bounty Hunter because i said it in a racial way. in quote, “you remind me of Beth Chapman because of the way she would have said it”. heck NO! hello? isn’t Beth of white-colored skin? why would she be using the term if it’s meant to be racial? and sorry but the way that the Chapman’s use those hawaiian slang words is inappropriate and just outright, dumb.

i dont know about any of the other locals in hawaii nor am i speaking on any other person’s behalf, but when i was referred to as Beth from The Dog, my heart sank and my blood pressure began to rise. i do not have anything against the woman and i find her to be a very outspoken and independent gal. power to you sista! however, there are a few things that i would not say or wear on national television while pursuing crack heads (methamphetamine addicts) and felons. so being compared to her was devastating for me.

shortly after, hawaii and our native language was being scrutinized. the entire class got onto this subject that the word “haole” is a racial term and shouldn’t be used. one student even confronted a roommate of his (via text on his phone), that happens to be hawaiian, and she confirmed its a racial word. i almost wanted to get her address and debate her and also to see if she was anymore hawaiian than i was. 

so, i being hawaiian, felt that i needed to define the term correctly and explain why someone would feel as that this is so. i began by introducing the old (but not out-dated) method of greeting another native hawaiian in the islands. the indigenous people of hawaii would greet other polynesians with the “ha”, or breath. our foreheads and nose would meet with the other’s and we would breath in the other’s “mana” or spirit. this was an tradition and custom that polynesia used up til even today. if an individual was to visit a lo’i, or taro patch, or another village and was confronted by another native, he or she would be greeted with the “ha” as i was when i volunteered to clean a lo’i some months back. a lot of cultural practitioners use this throughout the islands today. again, its custom.

eventually as the settlers and missionaries began exploring the islands, they encountered polynesia and its indigenous people. due to their lack of knowledge of hawaii’s people and our “culture”, they were not accustomed to our way of greeting another individual. therefore, hawaiians commonly referred to missionaries as “haole” or a name given for “foreigner” because they did not know of this “ha” that the hawaiians used to greet one another with. other kupuna’s will say that the hawaiians referred foreigners to haole because of their skin being pale- and that hawaiians felt the settlers lacked the ”mana” or spirit that the hawaiians were consumed of or having “no breath” as us hawaiians did. still not referring to skin color in racial terms but due to spiritual and cultural reasons.

and so, i can understand why another student or individual would consider the word “haole” as a racial slang word but i must say that if they understood the origin of the word and the tradition and customs behind it, they would also understand that it was never meant to be interpreted as a racial remark but rather a description of ones spirit or “mana” not being present or a foreign custom that was never learned appropriately. this would be commonly referred to as being naive. the hawaiian word for naive is “punihei”.

so, i’m off to the Big Island in the morning for a 10-day jaunt with Erin. We are starting the trip in a late-80s VW camper bus (not quite as cool as Bussy, but pretty rad nonetheless) and trekking around the island — checking out beaches, volcanoes, locals, tourists, organic hippie communes (seriously), longboarding spots (skateboarding, that is), disc golf courses, etc.

then we end our trip with a five-day stay at a resort — complete with tacky tourists in flowered shirts, a luau/pig roast, surfing lessons (i’m gonna be a 28-year-old-grom!), and general lounging and sunning my skinny-ass.

We aren’t bringing a laptop, but i’ll be posting pics from the phone now and then as well as (hopefully) nightly updates (which, will be way early morning for you mainlanders…. which really helps my ‘post every morning’ thing in check). I’ve also started a new category (titled: MY VACATION (is better than your life)).

anyway, enjoy… and hold things down stateside for me. I’ll be checking in on phish setlists FOR SURE, and expect my good friends over at http://phishcoventry.blogspot.com to have plenty of tasty show mp3 links up by the time I get back. watch out for wookies, friends.

until later… aloha bishes!

*update: Erin has a way of cramming more things into a situation than it really requires (or at least, more than I think it requires. I’m often wrong, though.. what do I know)

Take, for example, packing for Hawaii… now, I get that women pack differently than men (it took me two hours and a bowl of pot to decide what I needed and how to fit it in one simple backpack), and that she has been a lot busier than I have lately (she actually has a REAL job)… but it’s 11:20 – exactly 12 hours before we fly out – and she is unpacking closets full of clothes she hasn’t seen since last year and trying everying on from her ‘summer wardrobe’.

Now, on top of that… she asks me to print out the rebate from the city water department for the super-duper-mega-efficient washer we purchased in March. All 8 pages of it. Now, this type of thing can wait 10 days until we get back – but it won’t.

Meanwhile, my bed is covered in her clothes… I ate like 6 miligrams of thorazine and some sort of cookie for my flight anxiety and am pretty much in this weird lucid dream state whereby I feel like I’m flying.

And now I have to move the bathroom vanity that is currently in our entryway so she can get in a closet – likely for something she won’t take with us anyway. Did I mention we are three weeks into a six week master bathroom remodel and are leaving town? Yeah. Stress levels are HIGH.

11:50. not much noise up there… as in, not much packing going on. I luckily set up the bed in the basement the other day for a nap in the cool dankness that is a Denver basement in May… might have to take that over…..

I just stared at the blinking cursor until my screen saver came on.

Holy shit, I’ve sure got some powerful pills.

**update (11:55) — we have progress, a lot is in the bag. she’s almost near go to bed time. damn. just showed her the blog. “are you talking about me on there?” yes. it makes for decent copy. or, at least decent to me at this point in time.

entertaining at least.

Aloha.  The power, the love, the magic of this word is eternal.  But aloha is not just in Hawai‘i.   You carry it with you everywhere you go and you can connect to aloha, any time, anywhwere.

Stop whatever you are doing right now and do this exercise with me.  Take a full deep breath in through your nose.  As you do so, think to yourself  “Aaaaalooooo”.  This breath should take about 4-5 seconds on the inhale.  Next breath out through your mouth with an exagerrated “HAAAAAAA”.   Make this sound noisily and it should last about twice as long as the inhale.

So when you head out holiday shopping and the parking lot at the mall is bumper to bumper:  Stop and take that full breath through the nose, exahale through your mouth with a loud “HA”, it will reconnect you to the aloha.

Are your kids bouncing off the roof because winter break is here?  You are trying to figure out when you have time for getting the decorations up, cooking for relatives and still working 40 hours a week?  Inhale deep through your nose, exhale through the mouth with a loud “HA”, connecting you once again to the aloha.

Is it time for end of year reviews, you have to see your boss who seems to be in a bad mood all the time and you are nervous about how he is going to be today:  Inhale through your nose and breathe out through your mouth, “HAAAAAA”.  You will calm as you connect to the aloha.

No matter where you are, no matter what you are doing, you can connect to the aloha that resides within you always.  Breath in through your nose… “aaaaloooo”, breath out through your mouth… “HAAAAAA”.  Wherever you go you can build energy through connecting with the life force of aloha within you.

The Hawaiians named the first white visitors to the islands “Haole” – Ha, meaning “breath” and Ole, meaning “lacking.  Prior to chants or prayer or any statement, Hawaiians breath deeply.  The white visitors did not, thus the name haole.

Don’t be haole.  Stop right now and do the Alo-Ha breath for the next several minutes.  In through the nose, “aaaloooo”, out through the mouth “HAAAA”.  Relax and just let the aloha fill your life energy.  Let yourself be at one with aloha.

Ke aloha wale, ka mahalo wale

Alika

Since we moved to Hawaii, Paul has really gotten into Spearfishing. Who says deafness has to be barrier? Paul used his deafness and fluency in ASL with his dive buddies above and under the water. In circumstances like this (read below)… would YOU want to be caught without language under the water? Paul gives a couple of examples in his story below…. but nothing here really needs a detailed explanation.

Haole Tourist Diving/Watching on the North Shore! Not For the Weak
So I was bored yesterday…

Decided to go on a Haole Tourist Dive.

hao·le (hou’lē, -lā)
n. Hawaii
A white person.

tour·ist /ˈtʊərɪst/ Pronunciation Key – Show Spelled Pronunciation[toor-ist]
noun
a person who is traveling, esp. for pleasure.

How often does one get to view these unique creatures outside of a major tourist area? It was difficult to find a boat willing to take me out to the area I wanted to for the purposes I wanted to. They kept saying it was too crazy and dangerous.

But money talks as everybody knows.

A small, leaky inflatable boat owner agreed to take us out when the offering price got high enough.

Three of us ventured forth, all of us armed with under water cameras and a video camcorder.

As the captain steered us miles out to sea, his face was easy to read. He did not like this job and was scared.

I was all smiles though.

After a quick lesson in how to use the military-spec tourniquets in case we were attacked by the haole tourists while in the water…

It was time to hit the water. I was the first overboard, and promptly lost my mask. Everybody on the boat looked at me in concern as I fumbled for my mask and put it back on. Then I looked all around in the water.

WHEW! No haole tourists to be seen! I flashed the okay sign, and indicated “zero” with my hand so the others knew it was safe to enter the water.

A few minutes later after chumming the water with sharks, we found them! Yes, the crazy haole tourists!

Savages the lot of them. No wonder they had to be kept in a metal cage with bullet-proof windows on the sides. They were staring at me with crazed eyes while blubbering on the surface. They also appeared to constantly be trying to break apart the bars as evidenced by how often they held on to the bars and even used their legs on the bars too. See below photo.
I was wary at first, but as I watched their unsuccessful attempts at escaping from their cage, I felt more confident and got a bit closer. I even observed some intelligence in these creatures. They actually took pictures of me taking pictures of them. However, I wrote this off as just imitation after I observed them waving back at me when I waved at them. They’re just like monkeys at the zoo.

See Video clip:

We got bored with those three and we kept looking for other haole tourists. We didn’t find any others, sadly.

How big? Use photo below for size reference.

Aku Tuna (skipjack) – I shot one of these but…

A bunch of sharks promptly charged me and my fish, ripped my fish away without biting me and tore up my shooting line. I couldn’t even try again since they also took my shaft away. Bastards.

I had to settle for hitching free rides on the back of these apex predators each time they cruised by instead of doing more hunting shoulder-to-shoulder.

See Video Clip

We heard from the boat that was chumming and landing the akus that a Great White was just a few blocks away from us. We made a bee-line to the area but didn’t see it. Just more sharks…

Good times. Scary tourists.

-Paul