Another season of Survivor, my favorite television show, has run its course. In a surprise to me and most of the fans of the show, the conniving and brilliant tactician Russell Hantz won everything but the game, being defeated in a lopsided vote to Natalie White (link). I guess that Survivor can be like chess, in that you can be a brilliant tactician, but if your strategy is flawed then even being up in material and position, you can still be mated.  For more about my strange obsession with this show, I refer you to my last post with the topic here.

In honor of another great season I thought I’d update my Survivor tribal color swatches for the Adobe Creative Suite, they are in the Adobe Swatch Exchange format (.ase). They are now updated and include the tribal colors for the previous two seasons of Survivor, Tocantins & Samoa .

Click here to download the free color swatches.

Also, today is the winter solstice and is officially the first day of winter here in the Northern Hemisphere. In Seattle the rain has been pouring for weeks if not months already. However, thanks to Survivor and Herman Melville I have been transported to the lush and mysterious islands of the South Pacific.  I have begun reading a classic in the field of popularizing and mythologizing (for good and ill) the world  of Polynesia, Typee: A Romance of the South Seas by Herman Melville (for some reason I’ve also seen it subtitled in some editions as A Peep at Polynesian Life).

Long before Melville had his readers chase a great white whale, he marooned them on more temperate shores. This book is a highly fictionalized account of some of the true adventures Melville had as a young sailor when he jumped ship and lived with the natives of Marquesas Islands for three weeks in 1842. Coincidentally , the Marquesas played host to a season of Survivor (Season 4).

Scholarship is divided on the merits of Typee as a work of literature and especially his portrayal of the native islanders. I find it interesting that even though Melville is now known primarily for Moby Dick, this was by far his most successful work during his life time.  I think that is because this book is at its heart an adventure story of escape in a lush and mysterious land. Which is the underlying mythology of the western view of the South Seas, something that Survivor and Polynesian Pop has coursing through their bloodstream. To end here is a quote from Typee that sums this mythology perfectly:

‘Hurra, my lads! It’s a settled thing; next week we shape our course to the Marquesas!’ The Marquesas! What strange visions of outlandish things does the very name spirit up! Naked houris—cannibal banquets—groves of cocoanut—coral reefs—tattooed chiefs—and bamboo temples; sunny valleys planted with bread-fruit-trees—carved canoes dancing on the flashing blue waters—savage woodlands guarded by horrible idols—HEATHENISH RITES AND HUMAN SACRIFICES.

For more information

Online Versions of Typee:

• Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/1900
• Libravox.org audio book: http://librivox.org/typee-by-herman-melville/

More about Typee:

• Wikipedia Entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typee
• Sparks Notes (no cheating, just reference… read the book!) http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/typee/

More about Herman Melville & some of his other works:

• Wikipedia Entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Melville
• http://www.melville.org/
• http://www.mobydick.org/

Survivor:

• http://www.cbs.com/primetime/survivor

More about Adobe .ase format:

• http://blog.gilbertconsulting.com/2007/04/adobe-swatch-exchange-ase-files.html
• http://kuler.adobe.com/links/kuler_help.html