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20 Images that changed the world.

1/12/2020

5 Comments

 
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The first photograph that we know of was taken around 1826 or 1827 in the Burgundy region of France, when Joseph Nicéphore Niépce documented the scenery from a window at Niépce's estate using a paper coated with silver chloride, that became dark in the places where it was exposed to light. 

Since then, humankind's ability to capture real life on film - and now, digitally - has changed our world.

These days, smart phones are omniscient and easily document what we see around us in real-time. Thanks to the popularity of social media platforms like Instagram, we took more photos last year than in the entire course of history before combined! Let that sink in! 

But that wasn't always the case. One iconic photograph splashed across our morning newspapers, nightly newscasts, or on the cover of National Geographic, as the case may be, had a profound impact on how we perceived our lives and drew meaning.

I wanted to share some of the most iconic and world-changing photographs in the modern era, whether they illuminated seminal world events, the dawn of a new age, phenomenon the world had never seen before, or just exposed our humanity.

Enjoy these 20 images that changed the world!
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"Tank Man" protester in Tienamen Square, Beijing,China
This 1989 photo by journalist Jeff Widener captures one lone, unidentified civilian protestor standing his ground in front of a column of tanks.  He was never seen again, but this image remains as the perfect symbol of human bravery in the face of the technological war machine.

​"Tank Man" protester in Tienamen Square, Beijing China.  This 1989 photo by journalist Jeff Widener captures one lone, unidentified civilian protestor standing his ground in front of a column of tanks.  He was never seen again, but this image remains as the perfect symbol of human bravery in the face of the technological war machine.


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Brave student barred from entering high school amid segregation
This iconic photo captures 15-year-old Elizabeth Eckford, an African American student in Arkansas, trying to enter Little Rock's Central High in 1957 while fellow students scream and harass her.

Eckford was one of the "Little Rock Nine," the first black students to attend a racially segregated (white) high school after the Supreme Court case, Brown v. Board of Education constitutionally guaranteed integration in schools, ruling against "separate but equal" segregation practices.

On this day of September 4th,, Eckford was denied access to the school by the Arkansas National Guard in defiance of a Supreme Court ruling. In fact, the actual pig-headed Governor of Arkansas blocked her entry into the school that morning.


When she was turned away, Eckford had to make her way through an angry mob of white students and protestors who threatened to lynch her. To escape the mob, the girl ran into a bus stop, where she broke down and couldn't stop crying.

A sympathetic reporter named Benjamin Fine, thinking about his own 15-year-old daughter, sat next to Elizabeth and comforted her, telling her not to let them see her cry. Another white woman, Grace Lorch, also offered Elizabeth protection and escorted her safely onto a city bus.

For the next two weeks, the Arkansas Nine studied at home. Even after President Eisenhower requested the students be granted access, they were blocked by the Governor, National Guard, and thousands of protestors.

Finally, President Eisenhower assumed control of the National Guard and set up a military escort to accompany the students into the building. On September 23, 1957, Eckford and the Arkansa Nine finale were able to enter the high school.
 
It wasn't easy, and the Central High actually shut down the next year, but Eckford did graduate high school and went on to earn a BS in History from Central State University in Ohio. She was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal for her courage and significant moment in history.



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​Second plane hits the Towers on 9/11
American Airlines flight 11 crashes into the North Tower of the World Trade Center the morning of September 11, 2001, confirming for a terrified public that the first airplane collision was not an accident, but a terrorist attack.

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​Migrant Mother, 1936.  
This photo of a 32-year old California farmworker, taken by Dorothea Lange, is considered to show the face of the Great Depression.  This mother of 7 children had just sold her tent and the tires off her broken down car for food, as the whole family was living on foraged vegetables and wild birds. 

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The world is introduced to Apple
A 1977 advertisement for the Apple II personal computer, which revolutionized the concept of aesthetics and ease of use in computers that sparked the personal computing phenomenon.  

These innovations in computing and eventually, music tech and smart phones, changed our world by ushering in the dawn of the Digital Age.



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First flight
​The Wright Brothers first in flight, 1903.  On December 17 in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, two bicycle mechanic brothers changed history by going airborne for 12 seconds. 
 
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​Earthrise
Taken from the moon on Christmas Eve of 1968, either by Frank Borman or Bill Anders of the Apollo 8 mission.  It was called “the most influential environmental photograph ever taken,” by adventure photographer Galen Rowell.  

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Buddhist monk sets himself on fire in protest, Vietnam.  
In 1963, Thich Quang Duc, a Buddhist priest in Southern Vietnam, doused himself with gasoline and set himself on fire to protest the government's abuse and torture of priests.  He never made a move or uttered a sound as he burned to death.

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​I want my MTV
Music Television's first on-screen logo, signifying a musical renaissance in which culture and art would drive the innovation of technology, not the other way around.  


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DNA strands finally photographed
​DNA has been depicted with renderings and images nice 1953, when James Watson and Francis Crick first mapped DNA's famous double helix formation.  

​But not until very recently has technology allowed is to take an actual photo of DNA, this image, thanks to Enzo di Fabrizio, a researcher at the University of Genoa in Italy. He found a way to photograph strands of DNA through an electron microscope.  

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The US proves to the world that Cuba has Soviet missiles, 1962​
The Cuban Missile Crisis comes to a heated standoff in the United Nations session, October 22, 1962.  

​In this photo U.S. ambassador Adlai Stevenson points to a photo of Soviet missile sites in Cuba, offering incontrovertible proof that they existed.  The U.S. and Soviet Union narrowly avoided a full scale nuclear war.



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​How Life Begins, 1965.
This was the first time an embryo was photographed inside the human body, taken by Lennart Nilsson with the endescope.  

It led to a firestorm of controversy over the origins of life and abortion that still rages on today.
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​The US drops The Bomb and ends the war
A-bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan in 1945, as taken by the U.S. air force.  

The mushroom cloud-producing atomic bomb killed 80,000 people and forced the surrender of the Japanese military, ending WWII in the Pacific Theater.  

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​"The Afghan Girl."
A portrait of a 12-year old Afghan refugee living in Pakistan during the Soviet occupation, taken by Steve McCurry, appearing on the famous 1985 cover of National Geographic Magazine.  

​She was identified in 2002 as Sharbat Gula and became the face of struggle of refugees all over the world, and this photo was often called the "Afghan Mona Lisa." 
 
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Execution of VietCong soldier
​The Vietnam war was the first military action in U.S. history where journalists had direct access to soldiers and combat, often traveling around with soldiers and killed in action, themselves.  

The results was shocking images like this, taken by Eddie Adams February 1, 1968 when a police captain summarily executes a captured VietCong soldier on the street by shooting him in the head.  The photo made the front page of the New York Times, and created an outrage against the senselessness of the war that sparked protests.  

After Vietnam, journalists were placed on restrictions where they could go and what they could photograph in combat.

​
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​Young JFK Jr. plays under his father's desk
This famous photo, taken in 1962 by Alan Stanley Tretick of Life Magazine, depicts President John F Kennedy at work at the Resolute desk in the Oval Office of the White House, while his son, Jon Jr. plays underneath.  

JFK Jr. was the first child born to an active President, but his father was assassinated less than a year after this photo was taken. 

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The Berlin Wall falls
On November 11, 1989, East German border guards demolished a section of the Berlin Wall to create a crossing point between east and west. West Berliners started tearing down the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, signifying the end of Soviet Bloc in Europe and soon the fall of communism.  

​The wall, also called the Iron Curtain, divided free West Germany from oppressed East Germany for 28 years, since August 13, 1961.

​
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Raise a fist for Black Power at the Olympics
It was a far different time in America, but so much was the same. 1968 at the Mexico City Olympics, US athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos stood during the medal ceremony after winning gold and silver, respectively.

In an act of solidarity for the Black Power movement and civil rights strife in their home country, these men raised their fists skyward for all the world to see.
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​V-J Day in Times Square, August 14, 1945
When Japan surrendered and World War II was won, Americans were ready to celebrate. On that very day, photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt captured a Navy sailor kissing a woman in a white dress in the middle of Times Square in New York City, which became the symbol for post-war jubilance and hope.



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The Beatles' Abbey Road album cover, 1969
This iconic image of the band crossing Abbey Road in London would guild their 11th studio album, and last recording before disbanding in 1970, the end of the British Invasion.  

The album, their top-selling ever, was met with critical acclaim and swirled in controversy, some people theorizing that it was a big staged metaphor for Paul McCartney's death.   

None the less, the image of the four Beatles crossing the road over a piano key-like crosswalk has been one of the most replicated and imitated album covers ever.

 
 

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The Last Wave: Mike Boyum's final days in Siargao, the Philippines

12/10/2019

4 Comments

 
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This is part 3 of a 3-part series on the life and legend of surfer Mike Boyum.

You can read part one and part two here.
***
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​One morning in late 1988, as islanders hung Christmas decorations in the village square, a wild-eyed American strolled into General Luna carrying a battered surfboard. 
 
He, introduced himself as “Max Walker.” 
 
The late Mayor Jaime Rusillion remembers it well since there weren’t many foreigners and surfing was nonexistent. Mayor Rusillon even started calling the man “Mad Max” after the popular Mel Gibson flick, and the name stuck. 
 
Mad Max asked the mayor’s permission to make camp on a palm-lined outcropping of beach called Tuason Point in the Catangnan region.
 
There were no stores, eateries, electricity, or, even other people around Mad Max’s new home, and it was a good 3-kilometer hike just to get to the dusty fishing village of General Luna.
 
But the solitude was just fine for Mad Max, as he preferred to stay out of sight. The man who called himself Max Walker also had different motivation for living on Tuason Point: it was only steps away from the best reef break he’d ever seen.

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By some accounts, he was the first person to ever surf in that spot, which would later be dubbed “Cloud Nine” and achieve world fame among surfers and travelers alike. However, I read somewhere that he first heard of the surf break from Tony Arruza and Steve Jones, American and Aussie surfers who first found Siargao in 1980 and called it "Jacking Horse."

But the old school Siargao expats I talked to never heard those names, and claim that Max Walker identified first the reef break from marine charts, as he was apt to do. 

Either way, Cloud Nine is a “hollow and heavy right-hand barrel; for experience riders only.” (I put that in quotes because I’m not a surfer and don’t know jack-shit above waves except that they’re wet and I like jumping in them!) 

I do know that it’s located on the southeastern coast of the Philippines island of Siargao, where I now live. In fact, my little green house on Purok 1 (Road 1) is probably only a hundred meters from where the solo, mysterious American surfer first made his presence known.

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The island of Siargao is on the eastern-most edge of the Philippines’ 7,600+ islands (making it the second-largest archipalego in the world). Due east of Siargao you’ll find the Philippine Deep in the Marianna Trench, the lowest point on earth; a 34,000 under-sea chasm that is deeper than Mount Everest is tall. This seemingly-bottomless trench leads to unique wave conditions where they gain energy and blast right for the coast, colliding with off-shore reefs to create perfect, impossibly long barrels.

In fact, Cloud Nine is now considered one of the five toughest reef breaks in the world and Surf Magazine named it as one of the ten best waves in the world. (It’s also called ‘Crowd Nine’ because of its touristy appeal.)
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Although he probably “discovered” Cloud Nine from a surf perspective, he arrived at the start of the worst period for surfing Siargao’s waves, as January to April bring consistent onshore winds from the northeast, enveloping the island in monsoon rains.
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Tasked with filling his long, lonely days with more than surfing, Mad Max turned introspective. He was already an avid fitness fanatic, maintaining a macrobiotic diet and regularly fasting. Settled into his secluded hut while rain poured around him for weeks, he underwent another such fast that was supposed to last 40 days. 
 
He’d completed 40-day fasts before, so took the necessary safety precautions. Max arranged for a well-respected local to come check on him periodically, making sure he was ok and providing water or a squeeze of lemon juice. 
 
However, during his final fast here in Siargao, the man who was supposed to come to check on Max couldn’t get there until the 46th day because of a big storm.
 
By then, Max Walker had grown so weak that his body just gave out. They say he passed away on June 14, 1989 – his 43rd birthday and the 43rd day of the fast. 
 
Of course, John Michael “Mike” Boyum also died on June 14, 1989, as the two men were one in the same. ​

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​But the locals, including Mayor Ramillio, only found out Boyum’s true identity upon his death. Ramillo was smart enough to know that “Max Walker” was an alias (it was actually the name of a popular cartoon character at the time).

​He probably also realized why Boyum was on the run and hiding out in Siargao, as the Hawaiian authorities (and, more importantly, the Maui Mob) were still looking for him. 

But General Luna’s mayor also wasn’t one to pry in the young American’s affairs, and genuinely considered the man a friend. ​​

​(Mayor Rusillon passed away on April 26, 2019, considered a beloved hero and "The Godfather of Philippines Surfing.")

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However, Mayor Ramillio had no idea just how famous (and notorious) Boyum was until surfers and fans started showing up in Siargao, too, paying tribute to the surf icon’s death…and also riding the waves that were fast becoming legendary.
 
Tuason Point continued to gain attention – both as a shrine to Boyum/Walker and an epic surf break. 
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​A few years later, Surf Magazine came to do an expose on Siargao along with pro surfers like Taylor Know and Evan Slater. One of their photographers, an American named John S, Callahan, thought the waves there looked like the Cloud Nine chocolate bar that is still popular in the Philippines. 
 
“I named the break after the local no-melt chocolate bars,” says Callahan. “Going into town after lunch for a warm Coke and a Cloud 9 was the highlight of our day.
 
When the Surf Magazine piece was released, the secret was out: “Cloud Nine” was a new mecca for surfers around the world. 
 
Today, it’s still a surf haven, and rapidly becoming one of the coolest (in my estimation) and best (according to various travel magazines) islands in the world, yet alone Southeast Asia. 
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​And what of Mike Boyum?
 
Passing away while on a self-imposed fast was just one version of his death. 
 
Another account puts his death in April of that year. Still another says he drowned while surfing right out in front of his home on Tuason Point, his surfboard washing up but his body never recovered. Still more people suspect that the Hawaiian mob finally caught up to him, extracting revenge before leaving him for dead somewhere deep in Siargao’s mangrove swamps.
 
Then again, we can’t give much credence to those rumors, as spreading gossip, or chismis, is an artform in the Philippines. 
 
I’ve even heard whispers that Boyum carefully staged his own death to throw off the mob, and is still alive and hiding out on Siargao somewhere, doing his business on the outskirts of General Luna before disappearing back into the jungle.

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But to indulge that fantasy would be irresponsible. People who were friendly with Boyum confirm that he did pass away from a fast. One local source says that he saw Boyum’s body buried in an unmarked cemetary plot, right along where Tourist Road stands today, thousands of surfers and vacationers passing by every year, unaware that they’re on hallowed ground.
 
No matter which version you believe (or want to believe), Mike Boyum’s death was never made official and no death certificate exists. 
 
I guess some legends never die.

-Norm  :-)

P.S. An abridged version of this perspective on Mike Boyum's final days in Siargao will be published in BeSiargao Magazine.

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Cocaine Surfboards & Maui Mafia: The legend of Mike Boyum continues

11/10/2019

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In part one of this three-part series documenting the made-for-Hollywood life of surfer Mike Boyum, we left Mike struggling to keep his G-Land surf camp in Indonesia. Now, we’ll continue with his legendary story.
 
***
 
No one can ride a single wave forever. Most surfers last little more than 10-20 seconds on their board. In fact, out of an hour on the water, the average surfer is paddling for more than 35 minutes of that time and waiting in the lineup for another 20 minutes or so. Therefore, only about 8% of their time is spent actually surfing a wave – about 290 seconds, even on a good day.
 
No matter how epic the ride or high the thrill, nothing lasts forever. And the tide had gone out for Mike Boyum in Indonesia. 


His larger-than-life reputation as G-Land’s founder had grown quickly as surfers from all over the world came to spend time at his camp – and fork over a hefty fee to do so.

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​But success attracts a lot of the wrong kind of attention in developing countries, and soon, the local officials who once gladly granted him use of the abandoned beach demanded a bigger piece of the pie. (As well as quite a few shakedowns and threats by locals and police alike, if my experience is accurate.) ​

Burning down his camp’s nipa huts and tree houses, Boyum was forced to relinquish control of his G-Land surf camp (eventually, an Indo local surfer took over and it’s still thriving today). ​
​

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However, there was another pressing reason to flee G-Land, as became the target of numerous drug investigations by Indonesian authorities.
 
In the late 1960s, drugs were synonymous with the exploding counter-culture movement, including the music scene with festivals like Woodstock, protesting the Vietnam War, and, yes, surfing.
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Marijuana was everywhere, hundreds of thousands of young, shell-shocked troops came back from Vietnam addicted to heroin and opium, and psychedelics were on every college campus, with Timothy Leary encouraging the youth to "Turn on, tune in, and drop out.”

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Hell, it was the CIA who first started experimenting with LSD in an attempt to make “super” soldiers, and it wasn’t even illegal until 1968 and considered a Schedule I controlled substance until the 1970s.

Surfers were no exception, and one notable LSD smuggling operation out of Orange County, California included rainbow surfboards as the smuggling vessel of choice.

The big backlash came around 1969, when local police and federal law enforcement alike cracked down on the rampant drug use and looked to tame the long haired “hippies” that threatened the decent way of life.

Anyways, a few of these surfers ended up in Indonesia, as I mentioned, and guys like Peter McCabe, Jeff Chitty, ad Gerry Lopez were nearly as essential to establishing G-Land as Mike Boyum. Some of them funded their nomadic surf lifestyles by hollowing out the fins of their surfboards and filling them with plastic bags filled with heroin, hash, or Bolivian cocaine before sealing them up again.
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Mike Boyum was disillusioned and heartbroken from his experience in Indonesia. Every penny (Indo money) he’d earned over the year stolen from him; he was forced to leave G-Land with nothing but the shirt on his back.

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At rock bottom, Mike started riding that dark wave and smuggling drugs, something that would come to define – and doom – his remaining days.

However, this is where fact takes a detour from the simple narrative again. 
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A friend of Mike’s I interviewed for this article told me that Mike never smuggled drugs until he’d been forced out of his surf camp. In fact, Mike had been relatively anti-drug, as he saw heroin addiction mess up a lot of his fellow surfer friends and snuff out otherwise promising lives. Boyum even used G-Land as a place to help addicted and strung-out surfers and others, as they could exercise, eat healthy, and be at one with nature while detoxing. 
 
Mike “just wasn’t good at it [smuggling],” his old friend suggests, memories playing in his head like home movies, his cautious words revealing that he wished people knew the generous, always smiling, larger-than-life Mike that he was cool with.
 
It seems that while just about everything Mike touched turned to gold with legitimate business ventures, the criminal underworld just wasn’t for him.

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The beginning of his very long end may have come on one such illicit operation in 1984. It was then that Mike Boyum was arrested Noumea, New Caledonia (a French-colonized island east of Australia) along with Peter MCCabe and Jeff Chitty, as the three tried to smuggle half a kilo of Bolivian Marching Powder into Australia. 
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Boyum and Chitty managed to smuggle two kilos of coke from Brazil to Jakarta in a suitcase. Then, about half a kilo of the cocaine was packed into condoms that Chitty swallowed before boarding his flight to Noumea, where McCabe and Boyum were waiting for him. ​

It was there they planned on recovering the cocaine from Chitty and packing it into hollowed-out surfboard fins before someone else took the boards to Australia. 

However, they didn’t get that far.

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Chitty was confronted by customs agents upon landing in Noumea, who suspected him of carrying drugs internally (we’ll never know if they were just singling him out because he was a hippy surfer, or they actually had a tip because someone dropped dime on him). 

Pressed by the aggressive agents, Chitty tried to keep his cool, but he knew he was fucked when they said they were taking him to the hospital to be x-rayed. But, improbably, they suddenly decided to let him go, telling him to “get your English arse out of here.”

Sweating and rattled, Chitty couldn’t believe his luck, but he was free to go. He recounted the whole story when he met up with McCabe and Boyum in their hotel. To celebrate their good fortune (and, coming monetary fortune), the three wild-men hit the town for a night out drinking. 

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When they got back to their hotel at 3am, they were snorting lines of their own product when police knocked on their door.

Note: I assume the police let Chitty go just so they could follow him to find the source or his buyers, but I have no evidence of this.

The police kicked in the door and arrested McCabe and Chitty on the spot. Boyum, however, scrambled out the hotel’s bathroom window before they could get him. Despite a massive manhunt conducted by local police and military, he evaded capture for a whole two weeks, hiding in the jungle and living off the land!

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Quickly ingratiated into the dark underbelly of the local surf scene, Mike got tight with members of the Maui mafia, presumably doing some sort of deals with them.

But he made an epically-fatal choice when he made off with one million dollars of their money, as it’s widely reported – a shit-ton of dough back in the 1980s.

Ripping off the Maui mob is bad for your health, and Boyum was now running out of options – or places to hide. By then, he’d been red flagged by just about every airline and international agency, so he didn’t stand a chance when he tried to extend his career as a drug smuggler posing as a surfer.

I’m told he kept getting arrested, evading capture, fleeing, and hopping from country to country to try and evade arrest again. He got back to Asia and we do know he spent time in Thailand, but that was probably too obvious to his Hawaiian mobster friends. 
​
On the run, without friends he could trust, looking over his shoulder with every unfamiliar face and jumping at every backfiring motorcycle, the life on the lam didn’t suit Boyum. 

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They only finally caught him by dropping a net on him from a helicopter, it’s reported. However, according to a friend of his who served as a source for this article, a more accurate version of events was that Mike was just exhausted so he stopped running one day so it could all be over.

McCabe did 18 months in a New Caledonian jail for that one after being sentenced to three years; Chitty got the same sentence. Boyum was slapped with a four-year prison sentence because he also eluded police, according to my information, and did all four years in jail, roughly account for the years between 1984 and 1988.

However, I couldn’t find any account of his time in prison or any details of his life during those years.

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It’s also worth mentioning that Chitty and McCabe continued with the drug trafficking vocation, eventually serving 8 and 14 years in Australian prisons, respectively.
​
Following his spotty post-jail timeline, we do know that Mike Boyum headed back stateside once he was free to leave New Caledonia. There’s a story that places him in New York City, too, where he was hanging out with old school surfer and friend, Ricky Rasmussen. 

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Unfortunately, Rasmussen’s heroin problem had grown from bad to worse and he was a full-on junkie by then.

​Sitting in the back of a taxi cab, the driver turned around and shot him in the head, as the story goes – perhaps retribution for a heroin deal gone south. 
​

After that, Boyum didn’t last long in New York, and we hear about him living in Hawaii, where he got into even bigger trouble.

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Soon ingratiated into the dark underbelly of the local surf scene, Mike got tight with members of the Maui mafia, presumably doing some sort of deal with them. But, he made an epically-fatal choice when he made off with one million dollars of their money, as it’s commonly reported – a shit-ton of dough back in the 1980s.

Sometimes referred to as The Company or The Syndicate, no matter what you call them, ripping off  Maui heavy-hitters is bad for your health. And Boyum was now running out of options – or places to hide.

​By then, he’d been red flagged by just about every airline and international agency, so he didn’t stand a chance when he tried to extend his career as a drug smuggler posing as a surfer.

I’m told he kept getting arrested, evading capture, fleeing, and hopping from country to country to try and evade arrest again. He got back to Asia and we do know he spent time in Thailand, but that was probably too obvious to his Hawaiian mobster friends. 

On the run, without friends he could trust, looking over his shoulder with every unfamiliar face and jumping at every backfiring motorcycle, the life on the lam didn’t suit Boyum. 


Still a surfer at heart; perhaps longing for those simpler, pure days when he first discovered G-Land with his brother, Boyum needed to find a place that was virtually unknown, where he could really hide out.

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It was then that Mike Boyum took out a ripped and faded world map, scanning for the ideal place for someone who wanted to get lost, his finger stopping on a little-known country called The Philippines.

And it’s there that his story takes an even more unpredictable turn…and comes to its tragic last act.  

-Norm  :-)
​
***
Subscribe to this blog and stay tuned for part 3 of Mike Boyum’s life story coming next month.

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From G-Land to Siargao: The Legend of Surfer Mike Boyum

10/23/2019

6 Comments

 
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From G-Land to Siargao: The Legend of Surfer Mike Boyum

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As the twin-prop plane buzzed and swooped low over the Indonesian coastline, Mike Boyum sat with his face nearly pressed against the glass. But he wasn’t just looking for nice white beaches or majestic jungle vistas like most travelers. No, he was carefully analyzing every reef, wave, and break along the coastline from a thousand feet in the air.
 
Then, he spotted it – an impossibly long, smooth left breaking wave far below, a surfer’s paradise like nothing he’d ever seen. Bill frantically asked everyone sitting around him as well as the stewardess, and he was told they were somewhere over a bay and village called Grajagan in West Java, Indonesia.
 
He told his brother about it once they reunited on the ground in Kuta, and got Mike excited enough to take a journey out to try and find the epic wave. After an arduous journey, they arrived at the Plengkung Beachheadland across the bay from Grajagan village just in time to witness a majestic sunset over the Indian Ocean, as well as one of the most perfect barrels human eyes had ever seen. 

​That’s one version of how they discovered Grajagan, or G-Land, as they started calling it. And while it may have been romanticized over the decades of retelling, like much of Mike Boyum’s life story, it may not be entirely accurate.
 
Another account is that his brother, Bill, already knew about the place, and enlisted younger brother Mike’s help to get there and start surfing once he arrived in Indonesia with surf boards, as they were impossible to get locally.
 
Together with a friend named Bob Laverty, they traveled out to G-Land for the first time to show Mike before returning back to Kuta. 
 
(Tragically, a day after they came back from that first G-Land excursion, Laverty drowned while surfing, his board – but never his body – washing up on shore.)
 
***
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G-Land
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​Mike Boyum grew up in the United States in the 1950s, the son of a disciplinarian Navy Pilot. Perhaps that planted the seed for both his rebellious spirit and his love of traveling to exotic places for daring adventures, two things that would come to define his life.
 
“My brother Mike and I spent our youth traveling because of our father’s Navy career,” writes Bill Boyum in his 2002 ‘Letter from G-Land.’ “Our focus in life became finding a place we could call home, or a ‘power spot’ as my brother’s favorite author, Carlos Castaneda wrote in his novels.” 
 
The Boyums lived the typical transitory life of a military family, as Bill Boyum muses in ‘Letter from G-Land’: 
“Join the Navy and see the world.” 
“You were in the Navy?”  
“Nope.  But the Navy is in me.”   
 
The family was stationed in Southern California in the early 1960s – the perfect time to be a surfer, as the wave-riding sport was just burgeoning in Hawaii and Cali and the iconic surf movie Endless Summer exposed a wide world of undiscovered waves,
 
It was also the time for The Summer of Love, teenage rebellion, and books like Jack Kerouac’s On the Road that challenged societal norms, encouraging youth to question authority and make their own way in the world. It was also the time for drugs – a whole lot of them, and that went hand-in-hand with surfing and being a youth at the time.
 
After dropping out of college in the mid 1960s, Boyum, traveling all the way across the world to bop around Tahiti, Fiji, Australia, and New Zealand, surfing whenever he could. By 1969, he followed his brother, Mike, to Bali, Indonesia, and that’s where his story really starts.
 
Bill only knew that he could find his brother in a remote fishing village called Kuta outside Bali. It was there the elder Boyum had settled, followed rumors of a place with perfect white-sand beaches, temperate waters, consistent offshore wind every day, and great, cheap food – all perquisites for any true surfer. 

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Unique geographic and marine conditions make for the perfect waves at G-Land.
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But, although the conditions were perfect, there was one thing that Mike was missing: a surfboard. In fact, there were none available in Bali, as the locals didn’t surf yet and the fraternity of surfers trotting the globe was few. So, Mike asked if Bill could bring a few surf boards along on his flight, so he gladly wrapped them up and threw them on the plane’s cargo hold. 
 
***
Whichever version of events you believe about how Mike and Bill came onto G-Land, they definitely resolved to start surfing those waves. 
 
Just getting there was no easy feat, as they had to ride their motorbikes for nearly two days to the entrance of the Natural Reserve of Alas Purwo. There, they ditched the bikes and go on foot, hiking for two days through jungle that is rumored to be vexed with spirits and demons, as well as plenty of real-life Java tigers, wild boar, Komodo dragon, and a whole lot of poisonous snakes. 
 
When they wanted to return to G-Land, the Boyums and friends took local buses and hitchhiked until they arrived at Grajagan Village where the river met the ocean, and then they had to walk about 20 km up the beach carrying their surfboards, food, and all of their supplies. They even had to bring in their own fresh water supplies, and they set out old sails to catch more water when it rained.
 
It was well worth it, as G-Land is now considered the best left wave in the world. Although it’s in tropical Java, the waves from the Indian Ocean there actually originate with swirling low pressure systems in Antarctica, thousands of kilometers away. 
 
Of course, back then, the different sections of the beach and reef breaks didn’t have well-known names like “Money-Trees,” “Kongs,” and the legendary “Speedies,” with up to 20-foot wave faces (Hawaiian scale) and single barrels they could ride for up to several hundred meters. The Boyums and friends didn’t realize at first that G-Land was best surf at high tide so the week after a full moon was insane, or that there was a “key-hole” within the shallow and unforgiving reef where it was easiest to paddle out. But they would learn that all – and much more – over the ensuing years surfing G-Land.

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A view of the G-Land break
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The reef at G-Land is pretty inhospitable and the waves are definitely not for beginning surfers!
​To speed up the long journey out there and make it easier to bring supplies, they soon commandeered an old motorboat. One by one, other famous surfers like Peter McCabe and the legendary Gerry Lopez were invited and became G-Land stalwarts.

At first, they set up a makeshift camp, but soon, could stay for weeks and even months thanks to elevated bamboo tree houses (so the snakes, boars, and tigers couldn’t get ‘em at night), a cooking shack, and latrines dug in the bush. They had the whole beach to themselves, with not a single human being in sight other than some local kids to help them out, they caught fish, ate fruit, and traded for whatever else they needed, burning what little trash they had and surfing to their heart’s content.

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Mike and the guys hanging out at G-Land
When the pouring rains came down ceaselessly during monsoon season, they knew their surfing was done for the year, and they packed up and headed back to “civilization” in Bali. ​​

Eagerly coming back after a few months when the rains had stopped and the winds were offshore again, their camp was still intact, like it was frozen in time.

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Bamboo platforms built into the trees to keep critters and animals away. They were all burnt down at the end of every season so the rats would't nest and infest them, and rebuilding the structures was actually one of the smallest costs to run G-Land.
They kept living and surfing at G-Land for three more years. The smooth-talking and big-thinking Mike Boyum even talked the local Indonesian authorities into granting him permission to open a more formal surf station there, starting with a few tree house and nipa huts that they rented out to others for $10-$15 per night.

The legend of G-Land grew among surfers from all over the world, and the camp became quite a commercial endeavor. By the end of 1977, surfers from around the world came and paid an astronomical $50-$100 per night or even $1,000 per week to stay there and surf in the rustic yet uncrowded elements, and the camp was cashing-in $250,000 per year! 
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G-Land wasn't just the world's first surf camp, but a fitness camp, health and nutrition lab, and even a detox center at times.
Of course, all of that money brings the wrong kind of attention. 
 
“But much of this was my doing.  The surf camp was a great idea but we should have known that something so spectacular was impossible to keep secret.  I look back on it with a mixture of pride and sadness,” wrote Bill Boyum in 2002 about the eventual commercialization of G-Land.
 
The Indonesian authorities who had once granted Boyum permission to start a little surf camp wanted a piece of the action. And then, a bigger piece of the action. 
 
I’m not sure if it was the police, local politicians, regional authorities, or just strong-arm thugs who put the pressure on Mike, but sometimes in these developing countries, they can all be one in the same. 
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Mike at G-Land
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​But in the end, an enraged Boyum wouldn’t concede to these Indonesian bribe solicitors. Instead, in an act of ultimate defiance, he set fire to all the nipa huts and tree houses they’d meticulously erected, burning down the camp, willing to kill his dream before someone else took it away.
 
While this is accurate, I found out that they actually burned the nipa huts and bamboo tree houses in G-Land at the end of every season to prevent rat infestation, rebuilding them at the start of the next surf season when they came back. So, this may have been less an act of arson than one of frustration and just ending the season early. Mike was less spiteful and more spiritually wounded by what happened, according to a mutual friend.
 
Forced out of the G-Land, his surf camp and every penny (or Indonesian rupiah) he’d earned over the years taken from him, Mike left the country heartbroken and jaded, with nothing but the shirt on his back. 
 
Soon after, Boyum relinquished control of G-Land to a local Indo surfer, Bobby Radiasa, who built it up into a legitimate surf resort of the decades, and it still stands today.
 
But this story isn’t just about G-Land, nor is it only about surfing, because Mike Boyum started doing what plenty of other surfers did in the 1970s to fund their round-the-world adventures: he trafficked drugs.
 
And this is also where the story really gets crazy, with twists and turns out of a Hollywood movie, eventually leading him to the exact paradise island where I’m living now in the Philippines: Siargao. 

***
This is just part 1 of 3 of this series documenting the legend of surfer Mike Boyum. Stick around for the rest, coming soon.

-Norm  :-)

P.S. I'm not a surfer, nor do I pretend to be "in the know" or part of Mike Boyum's life in any way. I'm just a curious dude living on Siargao in the Philippines who wants to honor his contributions and pay tribute to his remarkable life, good and bad. If I got anything wrong or you have an issue with something I said, PLEASE contact me and set me straight - I welcome it!


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6 Comments

Your September 2019 Postcard from Norm: 10 More things I now consider normal!

9/18/2019

5 Comments

 
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A few months back, I shared ten things that I now consider normal as part of an ongoing series (although some would argue that the last thing I’m qualified to write about is normalcy!). 

So, to 
celebrate the variety diversity, randomness, and abject craziness of life abroad, here are ten more things I now consider normal:
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1. Soft rock (still) rules!
Soft rock was, at best, an unfortunate stain on the U.S. music scene in the 1970s and early 80s. If we listen to soft rock songs by Air Supply (Lost in Love), Christopher Cross (Ride Like the Wind), or REO Speedwagon (I Can't Fight This Feeling), they either serve as nostalgia or make us cringe with their milquetoast creepiness. That era is as dead as disco (or dead-er!), never to be heard from again…or is it? 
 
In the Philippines, the soft rock scene is still booming, and I hear all of these 'oldies-but-softies every single day. But the soft rock playlist isn't just reserved for elevators and malls (that's the Bruno Mars playlist). Instead, you’ll find them in the background in everyday life, and guys, especially love them! 
 
With a Red Horse beer in hand and a karaoke mic in the other, they’ll howl out Extreme ( More than Words), Phil Collins (In the Air Tonight), or Bryan Adams (Everything I Do).
 
In fact, the thugiest thugs will belt out a ballad along with the radio, and taxi drivers, in particular, are enamored with soft rock. So, bring on the Styx, Hall and Oates, Toto, Chicago, Kansas, Boston (boy, there were a lot of bands named after places!), and the immortal (unfortunately) Kenny Loggins! They’re all alive and well in the Philippines.
 
You’ll find dozens of complete strangers singing along to “I’ll be Your Hero” from the Karate Kid II soundtrack, and when “Faithfully” by Journey hits the airwaves, it’s cause for a national celebration!

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2.  There’s no personal space (get off of me, sucker!)
About 70% of the world’s population lives within a 1,000-mile radius of Southeast Asia, and the Philippines also has some of the most densely packed metropolitan areas in the world. We're all stacked on top of each other, and the space I have to live, breath, walk, and operate in would be unimaginable claustrophobic to most westerners (including me!).
 
Unlike in the U.S. or the west, your personal space is not a given right. People press up against you standing in line, cut right in front of you while walking, and buses are packed so tight that you literally sometimes can't find space to put your two feet on the floor (assuming you didn't get a seat, which is filled by about three people).
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There’s also no consideration for boundaries. No one cares. It leads to some bizarre and hilarious situations. 
 
For instance, you may get bullied by a little grandmother who pushes you right out of the way as you’re standing in line at the grocery store, go into the men’s bathroom only to find (thoroughly unimpressed) female custodians working amidst all of the half-pants'd men, and a creepy strange dude may walk up and start massaging you at any given moment! That's not even to mention the traffic, which is so bonkers that you have to see it to believe it.
 
“Get in where ya fit in!” should be the slogan here!
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​3. A different relationship with food
I could write a whole book on the relationship with food in SE Asia. It seems that everyone is always eating 24-7, and no one is counting calories or talking about “non-fat,” “gluten-free, or “organic.” Yet, they’re still head-scratchingly lean while I'm the chubby guy giving out health advice. Go figure!

Check out the normal size of Wendy's French Fries here and you can see the portion control is a big part of that equation.
 
In Southeast Asia, Rice is the daily staple. In fact, rice is life” is the popular saying, and they eat it for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and even sweet/sticky rice for dessert!.

They don’t really make sandwiches like in the U.S., and cheese isn’t on everything. Nor do they have many salads in the western sense. ​

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Milk doesn't need to be refrigerated (because it's not pasteurized), but red wine is served out of the fridge (because of the high air temperature).
 
By the way, it’s called a “ref” in the Philippines because they’re not interested in spelling out or saying the full “refrigerator,” as they do with many words.
 
Condiments are all mysterious, only available upon request, and doled out in liquid-gold portions.
 
Oh, and one more thing – don’t ask for a “napkin” in a restaurant because that refers to a sanitary napkin. You need a “tissue” instead. 
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4. The whole world is shit-faced drunk (except me)
In the U.S., we think we have a vibrant party scene, but it doesn’t even hold a candle to the level of boozing that goes on in other nations, especially poor and tropical countries.

Young people, especially, drink every single night, but that extends to people in their 20s and 30s, and even middle-aged people are day drinking and sitting around guzzling cheap spirits and singing karaoke. And they don't stop at 2 am, but routinely go until 5 or 6 am!
 
At this age, I'm a big lightweight, getting pleasantly buzzed after three beers and ready to call it a night. So, just about everyone – man, woman, and child, can drink me under the table in SE Asia. I've seen plenty of 90-lbs. females who could drink 20 shots of tequila in a night when I'm soused after just one! I still have no idea how they do it.

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5. And very caffeinated (including me)
Coffee is also a huge cultural phenomenon abroad, with about 10x more coffee shops than I see in the U.S. They act as de facto gathering spots, community centers, mobile offices, entertainment venues, and a clean, safe, air-conditioned refuge from the wild world outside.

​Coffee is such a big deal that there are even whole nightclubs based around coffee to plenty of cafes with pristine outdoor gardens and koi ponds, to plenty of street vendors selling joltingly-strong and sugared ice coffees from their carts. 
 
You’ll find international franchises like Starbucks, Canada’s Tim Hortons, and Australia’s Bo’s Coffee, but also local S.E. Asian brands like Amazon [coffee], Tom n' Toms, Gloria Jeans, and a million little local cafes.
 
There’s also a huge milk tea and bubble tea trend going on from Korea that people go absolutely nuts for, lining up for hours just to buy one. I don’t get it!

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6. The “Pink Price” – there’s a separate foreigner economy 
Being a foreigner has its advantages, but it also makes you a target when it comes to anything that has to do with money or finances. That’s because locals will attempt to charge you more since you are a foreigner. 
 
Sometimes, this is blatant, like a sign on the wall in Cambodia that says haircuts are a certain price for Khmer (Cambodian) people (written in their language), but way more expensive for foreigners (written in English). Or, a boat ride, the entrance admission to a beach or national park, etc. may be significantly-lower for their countrymen than for foreigners.

I get that, and it makes a whole lot of sense (even if there’s no way that would fly in the U.S.!)
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However, the concept of paying “the Pink Price” (ostensibly, because foreigners have pink skin) goes to a whole other level when people try to rip you off or scam you.

For instance, they have these cool used clothing stores called “Ukays” here, with piles of t-shirts, shorts, jeans, etc. from all over the world. I might pull a pair of shorts from a bin that says “100 Pesos” right on a sign, but the store clerk will tell me that they cost 350 Pesos for me, and not even budge when I try to negotiate. 
 
The Manila airport is notorious for scamming the pants of unsuspecting tourists, as taxi drivers routinely try to charge $50 USD for a fare that should cost $6 if a Filipino or local was sitting in their back seat! 
 
Of course, this ain’t my first rodeo, and I have plenty of battle-tested strategies how I can counter this form of foreigner financial f*ckery!

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​7. Flying is cheap
I often complain about the prices in SE Asia (because I'm a big complainer at heart), but one thing I can’t “whinge" (a U.K. term) about is the cost of airline tickets. In fact, they range from affordable to ludicrously cheap. For instance, to fly from Manila to Bangkok, Thailand costs only about $86 with the cheapest fare, or about $150 for a standard ticket. You can find tickets from SE Asia to New York or California for as low as $600 or so – ROUND TRIP! 
 
In the Philippines, flying around the nation’s 7,500 islands will run a prudent traveler about $160 for the most expensive and longest fare, to $60 or $70 for most common routes. In fact, I used to live in and near Cebu, a transportation hub, and I routinely found tickets all over the central region of the Philippines for $30 or $40.

I once found a flight from Dumaguete to Cebu for only $11. With airport taxes and fees, it was still only around $20.
 
For that price, how can you NOT fly as much as possible? (I flew 64 times total that year!)

8. Subtlety is not a thing
People in Asia are uncomfortably forthright when it comes to sharing their opinion of your shortcomings. There’s really no subtlety, nor is there any consolation for feelings or the possibility that someone may take offense.
 
“You too fat,”
“You look old man,”
“You have no hair,”
“What is wrong with you?”
 
These are all things you may hear on a daily basis from friends, coworkers, loved ones, and complete strangers (especially strangers) every day. Of course, they offer full disclosure on the negatives, but become mute when it comes to compliments.
 
And if you get mad and retaliate by pointing out that they're a midget or only have one eye, they'll just look at you strangely, adding your anger issues to the growing list of your un-flattering traits.
 
I've learned that this is actually a form of endearment, believe it or not. Families and close friends are often the most critical of each other, and it shows that they care enough to verbally beat you into submission and shatter your self-esteem. 
 
What else are families for?!
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9. Almost getting creamed by cars
Pedestrians have no rights in the Third World, and it's up to you to cross the street safely at your own peril. That's also exponentially more difficult because there are far less usable sidewalks, crosswalks, stop signs (they actually don't exist here in the Philippines- just because everyone would ignore them), and stoplights.

Even so, those are suggestions – not something drivers follow to the letter of the law.  
 
I’m not exaggerating when I say that the cars won’t stop – they’ll just run right over you without slowing down. In fact, I’ve heard of bus drivers backing over a pedestrian to finish the job once they’ve hit them since the payout for killing someone is far less than the cost of paying their medical bills for life! 
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It’s also a wealth/privilege thing, since if you're rich enough to drive a car, then you can basically do whatever you want to lower class people, including hitting them with the car, speeding off, and not thinking twice.  
 
It’s no wonder why traffic fatalities and accidents (often on motorbikes) are the leading cause of death for foreigners in SE Asia and many other countries.

10. Life is full of surprises:
You never know what you're going to run into living abroad in developing countries. The shenanigans I see and experience are often bat shit crazy, or, just as often, remarkable and beautiful. I can't tell you how many times I've thought, "I wish I had a video camera attached to my head right now so that all of my friends and people I know could see this."
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Either way, life is definitely full of surprises. Waking up, you never know if you’ll encounter a cockroach as big as a small rat in your shower, a marching band blaring outside your window starting at 5am; a violent political protest or a 100-person spirited dance competition around the next corner; ​a goat riding on the back of a motorbike or a Bentley rolling down your street; a bathroom that looks like a Turkish prison cell or the most beautiful beach you've ever seen in your life.
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Here’s a good example: I have a relatively nice, modern studio apartment in Manila. It’s pretty simple by my standards, but many Filipinos would consider it luxury.

Anyways, the whole idea of electricity and proper wiring is a hazy concept here. Even with appliances manufactured here and with the proper plug and grounding, I never know what might happen when I l plug them in.

Usually, nothing happens and it works just fine. But, sometimes, it sparks and then works. A few times, I plugged it in and the plug exploded, leaving smoke marks all over the outlet and the wall and nearly melted my plug. 

 
I approach each outlet with caution now, plugging the metal prongs into the socket like I'm hand-feeding prime rib to a hungry tiger. But, there's no way to half-ass it – you just have to stick it in, get ready for the fireworks, and hope for the best.
 
I'm not complaining; I've come to sort of enjoy the adventure of the mundane.

​In fact, I think that life would become a little boring if you didn't think there was at least a good chance you might get electrocuted and explode every day.

-Norm  :-)

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5 Comments

Your August 2019 Postcard from Norm: The Honest Aeta

8/13/2019

5 Comments

 
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I came across the story of Grace when her photo and a headline went viral across Facebook here in the Philippines. Working as a custodian at the Clark Airport about 90 miles north of Manila, she came across an envelope while she was mopping the floor nearby in the waiting area of the terminal. Since the envelope was unattended and no passengers were nearby, she picked it up. It was open, and inside she found a stack of hundred-dollar bills in American dollars!


At first, Grace thought it was play money since she’d never seen crisp, new $100 bills. But, just in case, she brought the envelope to her supervisor immediately, who confirmed that it was real money. There was $1,000 in the envelope, but no other writing or information to help locate the passenger it belonged to. 
 
Grace was officially commended for doing the right thing with the money. She could have just as easily pocketed the envelope – almost half a year’s salary for her – and not one single person would have known. (To be honest, I’m less than 100% sure I would have done the same thing!) 
 
What makes her story even more remarkable is that Grace is an Aeta (pronounced "eye-ta"), the native indigenous group here in the Philippines with direct ties to the Aborigines in Australia. 

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Aetas are noticeable because they don't look like Filipinos but more like Aborigines, with coal-dark skin, tight kinky hair, round black eyes, and even the men are lucky to stand five feet tall. They are totally out of place in modern society yet abandoned and forgotten at the same time: a shadow people. 
 
How the Aetas got to the Philippines still confounds anthropologists. The popular theory is that they came over in hunting parties that migrated across the land bridge extending from Oceania to parts of Southeast Asia. Indigenous tribes with similar characteristics exist along that path, in the Solomon Islands, Fiji, and New Caledonian. Eventually, they walked all the way to the Philippines archipelago through the elongated island of present-day Palawan, around 30,000 years ago. 
 
While that land bridge was covered with rising oceans around 5,000 years ago, the Aetas still inhabit the Philippines. They live in makeshift bamboo huts deep in the jungles or high in the mountains, living off the land. 

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When the Spanish colonized (invaded) the Philippines in the 1500s, that isolation and tribalism allowed the Aetas to resist rule. They largely kept their own ways (and bloodlines), although the Spaniards did bestow the “negrito” moniker on their race due to their dark skin color.
 
Aetas used to scar their bodies as a form of art like tattoos, a ceremony where they were wounded and then made to scar with fire or lime. They also would chip away or filing of their teeth when they were teenagers, and then dying them black soon after.
 
During the Vietnam war, the largest American naval base outside of the U.S. was established in Subic Bay in the Philippines, strategically close to the Aeta village of Pastolan. There, G.I.s learned jungle survival and warfare skills from an Aeta elder named Manifacio De La Junta Florentino. 
 
Still, to this day, Mr. Florentino teaches a jungle survival course (but now, just for fun) outside of Subic. The walls inside his humble abode are decorated with well wishes, letters, and memorabilia from U.S. soldiers, thanking him for teaching them how to stay alive.
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By the 1990s, the vast majority of Aeta in the Philippines were living near the base of Mount Pinatubo. So, they were devastated when that volcano erupted in 1991, burying the surrounding countryside in ash and debris, obliterating villages, and killing or displacing possibly tens of thousands of Aetas.
 
They did return, and many now inhabit the volcanic region again today. But Aetas are also scattered across some of the central and southern region’s jungles and mangrove swamps. Today, it’s estimated that only 15,000 Aeta still exist in the Philippines (in a country of 110 million), although I’m not sure how accurate that number is or how they’d even go about counting. But, I also read that between 10% to 20% of the Philippines has some Aeta blood.
 
During my quick research before meeting Grace, I was shocked to read that the life expectancy of an Aeta born today is just 16.5 years. Only one-third of all Aeta children live past 15 years (at which point, their average life expectancy rises to 27.3 years). That's hard to believe until you realize that most Aeta are born at home or with the help of a midwife, never see a doctor or take medicine in their lives, have no medical care or proper education at all. They also are subjected to many of the same addictive predispositions and vices that befall Aborigines and Native Americans, cutting short their tragic lives.
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The Aeta are traditionally monotheistic – they believe in a supreme being but also lesser deities, and can also be described as animists because they pay homage to various environmental spirits, like those that exist in the rivers, wind, sea, skies, and even inside Mount Pinatubo, “Apo Na.” However, their sense of religion is less than rigid, and they also show influences of American Evangelical Protestant missionaries in the 1960s as well as Jehovah's Witnesses.  
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​From what I've read, any help from the government is largely ceremonial, and Aeta communities still rely on church or private donations.

Sadly, these First People are not even second-class citizens in their own land, as they’ve been largely forgotten and constitute the poorest of the poor here in the Philippines. They mostly live within their own isolated tribal communities, where there are scarce few jobs (Grace told me that the men carve wooden flutes that are sold as souvenirs, earning $1 per flute), opportunities, or chances for a better life. 
 
The Aetas haven’t even received recognition or restitution for their plight by the government, such as the Aborigines or other First People around the world. In 2001, the Philippines government did pass the Indigenous People Development Plan, which awarded them ownership of their homelands – in theory.  
 
But, tellingly, the plan was drafted in English – not the Aeta native tongue or even the national language of the Philippines, signaling that it was mostly just for optics. Their lands have been stolen or raped through logging, slash-and-burn farming, or outright annexation.

Now you know a little bit about the Aetas, and why the story of the forthright airport cleaner who turned in $1,000 in cash spread like wildfire online. Soon, reporters from several popular Philippines shows and newspapers showed up to interview her and snap photos. Dubbed, “The Honest Aeta,” Grace was given a certificate by the president of the airport, and her temporary job made permanent. But she wasn’t given a raise or promotion, and life soon went back to normal for her when the fanfare died down.
 
That is, until I saw her photo and the headline on Facebook. I was so inspired by her story that I reached out to a local friend, who was able to track her down. We found out that while Grace was happy just to do the right thing and not asking for any recognition, her three kids couldn’t even get to school most days in the rainy season.
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In fact, that was a problem for most of the 75 kids that attended this simple school up in the mountains, little more than an open-air concrete shell with no front door, no desks or chairs, and only one ceiling fan. The rainy season meant long walks up muddy roads, treacherous hills, and through flooded fields so, without any rain gear, the little ones often couldn’t make it to school for weeks.
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Luckily, through Lifted International, the charity that I helped found along with some great friends, we were able to arrange some funds to buy the rain gear those little Aeta students needed.
 
On a gray Saturday morning so humid you could almost ring water out of the air like a washcloth,  I was instructed to meet Grace and her brother at a Jollibee (the popular fast food chain) in Mabalacat, an industrial town that served as the “other side of the tracks” to the tourist hub of Clark, where she worked at the airport. 
 
Squeezed inside a trike, I breathed exhaust and tried in vain to get my bearings as we sputtered and sped through traffic. Finally, the driver pulled into a Jollibee, allowing me to get out of the trike's sidecar and unfold my legs. But it was the wrong Jollibee’s, I found out after furious Facebook messages back and forth, and there was another one, much further in the depths of the city.
 
I got back in; we continued on; and soon, we were in parts where I didn’t see one other foreign face for hours. We found the correct Jollibee, and it wasn't hard to spot Grace, as she was standing out front scanning the street so not to miss us. Grace also introduced me to her older sister, Lea, who was accompanying since her brother couldn’t make it. They had been waiting since 7 am (for our 10 am meeting time) since they were so excited and didn't want to be late! More Filipinos should take note of that time management! 

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Grace and Lea turned out to be the sweetest, nicest people ever, and we had fun joking around, but I also got to hear their story as we drove around. They were effusive in their thanks when I handed them the big bag of personal items, which some local friends donated specifically for Grace’s three kids as a thank you for her honesty. But, in the Filipino tradition, they didn’t open the bag of gifts in front of me since that would be rude. 
 
Next, we were on a mission to find a great discount store that offered all of the things the 75 school children needed. There were four of us now occupying one motorcycle trike, so, with our gangly Filipino driver, Jun, kick-starting the engine, Grace and her sister sat comfortably in the trike’s sidecar, while I was left to ride side saddle hanging off the back of the motorcycle seat behind Jun. 
 
It took us about an hour in traffic, bolting back and forth across town to three different stores like that. All at the same time, I shifted my weight when my limbs lost circulation, ducked down so I wouldn’t bang my head on the metal roof overhead, and tried not to lose a flip flop as they brushed the street below – or get a leg ripped off by a truck that passed too close. 
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I was relieved when we reached our final destination – a “99.9” Peso store (about $2 USD and our equivalent to a 99 Cent store) deep in the heart of a public market.

We spent the next couple of hours there. Amid gleeful chaos, the sisters navigated up and down the aisles, picking out things the children needed, negotiating five transactions at once with the store’s eager-to-please young staff, who were dispatched to find us 75 white t-shirts, raincoats, umbrellas, and backpacks in various sizes, colors, and with a host of cartoon characters, Disney princesses, or superheroes printed on them.
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The store workers looked on in puzzled wonderment, as foreign guests never visited their shop - and certainly not with two Aeta women, each one standing about 4 foot 7 inches at best, overloading carts with supplies.
 
Once they found out who Grace was and what we were doing, they recognized her instantly since her story had gone viral. Even our driver, Jun, who surrendered the rest of his afternoon to be our personal chauffeur, knew of her.
 
Soon, it became a community activity, as other visitors to the store wanted to chat, people out on the street stared as we took photos with the Aeta woman, and others stopped to pitch in. When the store ran out of rain boots in kids sizes, the manager made a phone call and a man soon arrived with two massive grain sacks filled with about 100 rubber rain boots, all dumped on the floor in piles so we could go through and get what we needed.
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I had set the budget limit to 15,000 Pesos (about $300), but no one seemed to pay attention to me as the workers rushed around to and filled the carts with more and more.
 
Once the calculator came out, it was the time of reckoning. I was sorry to see that we’d blown past that 15k budget and were up closer to 25k. I chipped in the last Peso I had in my pocket (minus that I had to pay Jun), and we managed to get just about everything (except the white shirts) for less than 19,000 Pesos. 
 
We even took photos with the store workers as we said goodbye, and the manager gave us her number to call ahead next time. The haul was loaded and strapped into a second trike outside.
 
Grace and Lea invited me to come along and present the things to the school kids. But it was only Saturday, and with a Muslim holiday on Monday, it wouldn’t be Tuesday until the kids got their new rain gear and school supplies, and I’d already be back home to Manila.
 
But I promised them that we'd all stay in touch and I'd visit next time in the dry season when the roads are passable - with the missing white shirts!

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With plenty of hugs and waves, we said goodbye, and I made sure the trike driver would take the two Aeta sisters through Mabacalat and as far up the mountain as his bike would go.
 
I found out later that he couldn’t go all the way up to their mountain village, so Grace and her sister had to actually start carrying all of those things – including two huge sacks of boots almost as big as they were – straight up the mountain road! Luckily, a couple came along in a sturdy SUV that could handle the incline and offered to drive them the rest of the way. 
 
The crazy thing is that they, too, had heard of Grace, the Honest Aeta!

-Norm  :-)
 
Check out these photos and videos of the kids receiving their new stuff and thanking Lifted International (or, something that sounds close enough!). And if you'd like to make a donation to help these kids, just go to LiftedInt.org.
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5 Comments

Your July 2019 Postcard - Norm vs. the Volcano: Adventure to Taal

7/20/2019

6 Comments

 
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Last week, I had the opportunity to revisit an extraordinary place here in the Philippines – the Taal Volcano. Located on an island in the middle of a rugged and windswept lake, we actually hiked up to the volcano’s crater for an up-close, stunning view.
 
Located only 35 miles outside of Manila in the upscale lakeside region of Tagaytay, Taal is a remarkable feat of geography and geology alike. 
 
Get this: the Taal Volcano sits on an island in a lake in the middle of a volcanic crater on a larger island, which sits on a huge lake on the giant island of Luzon.
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If we follow that inside-out, tiny Vulcan Point Island sits inside the Main Crater Lake, which is on Volcano Island and surrounded by Taal Lake sitting in a volcanic “caldera”, which is on the Philippines main island of Luzon, surrounded by the Pacific Ocean. Wow. 
 
That’s like something out of a Pirates of the Caribbean movie…except it’s too fantastical to be made up. According to my research, it’s also the only one of its kind in the world
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​Of course, there are plenty of active volcanos in the Philippines (53 to be exact) since it sits on the western Pacific edge of the Ring of Fire. Most of them are dormant, but some still spit lava when we anger the gods, like on the island of Camiguin, which is home to seven volcanos but only five towns. 
 
Mount Pinatubo provided one of the largest eruptions in the world in 1991, causing the overnight evacuation of the USA’s naval and air force bases nearby. That’s also why there’s so much seismic activity in the Philippines (aka earthquakes that scare the shit out of you).
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​But Taal still holds a fiery, menacing presence over the surrounding countryside, erupting 34 times since Spanish friars first discovered it in 1572 and started keeping written records. For that reason, it’s been designated a Decade Volcano, one of only 16 in the world, warranting close monitoring to prevent further natural catastrophe.
 
Taal, which means native or original in the Philippines aboriginal language, is also notable because it’s one of the lowest volcanos in the world, cresting at only 1,020 feet above the onyx-colored beaches, lakeshores, and tropical jungle below. 
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That wasn’t always the case, as the Taal peak used to be a mountain reaching 18,000 feet high. But every time the volcano erupts, rocks, dust, and magma are shot into the sky, knocking the mountain down like a sandcastle and reshaping the whole island.
 
The most powerful of all Taal eruptions took place in 1754, when the volcano raged smoke, fire, and ash a full 200 days nonstop from May 15 to December 1!
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​A Catholic priest stationed at Taal at the time of the 1754 eruption, Friar Buencuchillo, wrote this account: 
 
“The volcano quite unexpectedly commenced to roar and emit, sky-high, burning flames intermixed with glowing rocks which, falling back upon the island and rolling down the slopes of the mountain, created the impression of a large river of fire.”
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While there were plenty of volcanic explosions and seismic events over the ensuing decades and centuries, the next huge eruption occurred in 1911. That explosion was so profound that it obliterated the main crater floor completely, allowing water to fill in and creating a volcanic lake. The volcano started raging on the night of January 27 and by the end of the next day, there were about 240 total seismic shocks, 10 of which were severe.
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​With Taal still shooting fire and debris on the night of January 30, residents of Manila who saw the flashes of light 30 miles away first thought it was a thunder and lightning storm. But they soon saw a massive mushroom cloud of debris and dust, illuminated by sparkling fields of electricity, rising until the eruption ended and the cloud disbursed around 2:30 am.
 
By mid-morning, a blanket of dust and ash settled on Manila, covering streets and the inside of homes, leaving a thick layer on floors, furniture, and all surfaces. In total, that eruption shot about 80 million cubic meters of debris into the air, dissipating it over an area of 770 square miles. The titanic sound from the eruption was heard more than 600 miles away.
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Back in 1911, the area around Taal island and the lake region was far less populated than it is today, but the official death toll still reached 1,335. The true loss of life is estimated to be up to five times more.
 
At that time, there were seven barangays – small fishing villages or farming communities – on the island. They were all completely wiped out, sparing no man, woman, child, and turning the 702 cattle on the island into smoking carcasses. 
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​Buried mid-stride as they only managed one or two steps in a futile attempt to run, the deceased were found to have perished from boiling steam and scalding volcanic mud, melting trees and nipa huts in its path.

Remember that this was well before seismologists and meteorologists could measure and share data, so there was no warning, and only grainy black and white photos of the event exist. ​

​While that was the deadliest saga in the history of Taal, the ring of fire exploded violently once again some 54 years later in 1965. During that eruption, ash and debris were shot a full 12 miles straight up into the atmosphere. ​
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The eruption of '65 was different because it was actually caused when underground magma hit the lake water, creating what’s called a cold blast or base surge (the scientific name is 'phreatomagmatic eruption’). 

Traveling like a supercharged typhoon of ash, mud, and boulders, it screamed furiously across the lake, crushing villages and jungle canopy at the water’s edge two and a half miles away, killing about a hundred people.
 
The other difference was that in 1965, more people owned cameras, so there are more photos from during and after the eruption, including one shot of people on the “mainland” fleeing with suitcases in hand.
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The blast was so powerful that it rearranged the landscape of the island, cutting a new crater that was one mile long and 1,000 feet wide.

No significant eruption has taken place since 1977, but plenty of minor disruptions, toxic gas leaks, and seismic activity occur periodically. Those include rumbling threats in 1991 (when Mount Pinatubo erupted), 1992, 1994, and June of 2009 most recently. For that reason, it warrants careful monitoring with advanced scientific instruments by the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology.
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You’re also not allowed to swim in the crater lake inside the Taal Volcano anymore. While a few of the shoreline areas are inhospitable but safe to swim in, other parts of the lake are so hot that your skin would burn right off if you jumped in. Or, the waters contain poisonous gases that instantly kill all of the livestock on the island when released by seismic activity.

That’s also where the volcanic lake’s water gets its majestic emerald color, but there are no fish under the water. That color has changed over time, too.
 
Before the 1911 eruption that redrew the map, the 18-mile diameter Taal lake actually had several openings because it was lower than sea level, with a green lake, a rusty red lake, and a bright yellow lake based on the minerals and gases it was interacting with. Some were so hot, steam billowed off of them incessantly. ​
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But, now, things have settled into one massive lake, filling most of the Taal caldera.
 
The most telling sign of an impending eruption would be a precipitous rise in the lake’s water temperature. For example, the water temperature rose from a bath-water-like 86 degrees Fahrenheit to a scalding 113 degrees right before it erupted.

Taal will blow again - it’s just a matter of when and how big – and that’s the reason the government has banned the public from living there, so there are no official towns or barangays.
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Of course, in true Philippines fashion, no one listens, and the island is now settled by a few thousand desperately poor people who found their way to the island. They risk the poisonous gases and possible eruption in order to scratch out a humble living. They fish the lager lake or plant crops in the magically-enriched volcanic soil. Many now capture a buck or two from the steady stream of tourists visiting the island, acting as tour guides, tending to the horses, selling coconuts or water bottles, and charging made-up “official” fees.
 
The locals, who don’t even have a name (like Taalians?) because no one is actually from there and they aren’t supposed to be there, live in makeshift nipa huts and sunbaked concrete communities, many of them built right on the volcanic ash. There are a few churches, remnants of NGOs or Catholic mission work, no electricity (only solar power and generators), and no government-sponsored roads, clinics, or public schools. 
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​But we weren’t trying to flee the volcano this sunny day in July – we were trying to actually go to it, boating over to the island, hiking up to the volcano, and entering the crater.
 
Stay tuned for my account of that adventure in next month’s postcard!

​Stay cool, everyone!
 
Norm  :-)

6 Comments

Your June 2019 Postcard from Norm: A look at our world in 2050.

6/8/2019

3 Comments

 
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Welcome to 2050 - wanna look around?

2050 sounds SO far away; THE FUTURE.


But life comes at ya fast. Remember when you felt like 2020 was so far in the future, it was hard to envision? Or, for you old-schoolers like me, 2000 used to be the FUTURE personified when we looked ahead. (Remember the big Y2K scare?)

Since we’re squarely in the middle of 2019, that means we have “only” 30 years and 6 months until 2050.
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To give you an eye-opening parallel, 30 years and 6 months ago was June of 1988 (when I was a sophomore in high school!).
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We know that 2050 will be here sooner than later…but what will it look like?

In this ongoing blog series, I’m going to take a close look at what life will most likely look like by mid-century, from demographic changes to (lots) of environmental issues, technology and medical advances that may be our only salvation, SMART cities and yes, flying cars (that are self-driving, of course). 

As far back as the Jetsons we thought we had a handle on what the future would look like, but the human stain and the Law of Unintended Consequences always seem to lead us far astray from a Utopian world. 

To come up with these bullet points from the future, I did a bunch of research written by a bunch of wicked smart people at MIT, Harvard, the United Nations, Milken Institute, the Smithsonian Foundation, Rockefeller University, Oxford University, Time, World Bank, Popular Science, the World Wildlife Fund, and many more. I also applied some informed conjecture as to which trends, movements, or phenomenon will emerge and continue.

So, if someone uncovers this blog in 2050 and my textual time capsule is spot on, I’ll take all the credit. But if these predictions are far off, don’t blame it on me but the eggheads at Harvard.
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Enough chatter already (the English language will be truncated by 20% within 30 years, by the way, with far more emojis and emoticons). Let’s take a look at our world in 2050:

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A whole lot more of us
By 2050, the world's population is forecast to reach 9,725,147,000 – or just about 2 billion people more than we have now. For those of you keeping count at home, that's like adding another India and China to our current population.
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The slightly good news is that our population growth rates will somewhat level off in the next few decades. 
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But the bad news is that there will be major consequences to adding an additional 2 out of every 10 people to our already resource-depleted planet.


​Urbanization
One of the most significant shifts we've seen over the last fifty years that will continue is urbanization. By 2050, 6.3 billion people will live in cities, or nearly two-thirds of the entire human population, putting the nail in the coffin on the agrarian period of human history.

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And we all need to be fed 
The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization ran the numbers on what it will take to feed more than 9 billion people and determined that we’ll need to increase our current food production levels by 60% by 2050.

That’s a tall order (and we haven’t even talked about usable water yet). For instance, wheat and rice production across the world has only increased at a rate of less than 1% over the past 20 years.
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However, the task isn’t insurmountable. We already have the technology and know-how to fill about 80% of that need for increased food production by 2050 – it's just a matter of implementing it (and getting away from huge private corporations feeding us).

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​We’re getting really old
In 2050, the world’s population will look much older than it does today. By that year, it’s expected that one out of every six people on earth will be 65 years or older.

​This is due to several factors, but more prominently advances in health and medical care (and less major wars) that are allowing us to live longer, and as well as decreases in fertility rates.
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By 2050, some industrialized nations like Germany, Japan, Canada, and, yes, the United States, will have public health campaigns and economic incentives in place that encourage its citizens to have more babies!

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If you think traffic is bad now, wait until 2050!
By 2050, there will be 2.5 billion cars and automobiles on the roads (or in the air!), a 150% increase over the one billion vehicles we have now.
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Let’s do the math: An extra 2 billion people+ 65% of the world living in cities + 1.5 billion more cars = a lot of traffic jams.

The good news is that self-driving cars and semi-private shuttle vehicles will free us up to use that time wisely, with virtual offices, sleeping pods, entertainment centers, and even mini-fridges and coffee makers all standard features in self-driving cars by 2050! Well, maybe not the coffee makers (read below).


Hot earth
Scientists predict that the world’s temperature will increase significantly by 2050. In fact, our world’s average temperature will be 1.89 C to 2.5 C hotter than it is now, with far-reaching and drastic effects.

We’re going to talk about climate change and the environmental Armageddon facing our world 
ad infinitum over this series of blogs looking at 2050, as it is THE most pressing issue for the human race right now. 

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Coffee and climate change
Here’s one example of how climate change can hit close to home.

By 2050, coffee will be a high-priced luxury item, not an everyday staple. Due to shifting weather patterns, rainfall levels, temperatures, soil conditions and more, growing coffee will be far more difficult and possible in fewer locations around the world, leading to a run on prices.

Forget your $2 Dunkin Donuts coffee, your $3 Starbucks, or making coffee for even less at home - the average cup of coffee in 2050 may cost about $12 in 2019 prices! 


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​A world without vino?
The same can be said for wine, which will be far harder to grow. The change in micro-climates also means that Napa Valley and other areas where conditions are perfect – albeit fragile – for growing grapes right now will be barren of vineyards. Our beloved vino will be extremely rare and the price will shoot up exponentially.

A world without coffee or wine?!

​Hell no! We won’t go!

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We’ll all use Bitcoin 
It hasn’t earned mainstream appeal as anything more than a speculative investment…yet…but many of the world’s top economists think that the rise of e-currencies is inevitable. In fact, they anticipate that Bitcoin will finally break out and take over FIAT currencies as soon as the next global economic crisis (which may be only a couple of years away).
Even if it takes a decade or two for Bitcoin to become the preferred method of payment, savings, and investment, by 2050, we’ll think of traditional banks as an archaic token of a bygone era. 

Other e-currencies will come and go, but they’re anticipated to make up only about 10% of total use compared to Bitcoin’s domination.

Late in 2018, the United Nation’s International Telecommunication Union (ITU) announced that we’ve reached a notable milestone where 50% of the world has Internet access. 

They anticipate meteoric growth in the coming decade, most of it on mobile devices. But, the ITU also projects that we won’t reach the high-water mark of Universal Access – defined as Internet access for 90% of the world population – until 2050 – or later. ​

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We finally have Universal Internet access 
By mid-century, 97.5% of the entire world will be online, or 8 billion people. However, reaching the last 20% (from 70-90%) will prove to be the most challenging jump since the vast majority of internet access (78%) is now in wealthy nations, as opposed to only 32% in developing countries.
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This vast disparity in Internet access mirrors a phenomenon called the Great Cognitive Divide, with literacy levels, education levels, job opportunities, modernization, and much more following that same chasm.

The Pope will be black
This may seem like a random event, but a black pope in 2050 is both a sign of demographic shifts and of huge socio-political significance. For two thousand years (as long as there have been Popes!), the euro-centric Catholic church has tapped their own as Popes. Sure, a few of the early 266 Popes throughout history were from the middle east or Northern Africa, but not African or black in the sense we think of today.
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But within 30 years, Africa will hold one of the highest populations of Catholics thanks to Nigeria and other growing countries, spawning the naming of a Pope of color from that continent and a seminal event for inclusion and religious leadership. It might even signal the official end of a post-Colonial era! ​
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The U.S. is a true melting pot
In 2000, the United States census allowed people to select more than one category under "Race" for the first time ever. That year, 6.8 million Americans checked more than one box, claiming multi-racialism. 

By the 2010 census, that number had increased 30% to 9 million Americans who registered as multiracial.That demographic and racial shift is expected to increase exponentially, jumping 176% between 2018 and 2060. 

In fact, by the year 2045, Caucasians will become a minority in the United States for the first time, comprising only 49.7% of the population.

One out of three people under thirty years old will be multi-racial, which will (hopefully) provide an inevitable salve for some of the wounds and racial divides in our nation. But those divides don’t just disappear, as classism will be the new racism.

So…will we have flying cars in 2050?
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Of course! That’s like so 2040!

I hope you enjoyed this look at the not-so-distant future and look forward to more analysis of 2050 in future blogs. Until then, have a great month and thanks for sharing!

-Norm 2050   :-)
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According to computer aging projections, this is how I'll look in 2050. The scary part is that's exactly how I look in the mornings now! 

3 Comments

Your May 2019 Postcard: Norm Writes

5/12/2019

2 Comments

 
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“Oh, you’re a writer? Wow. That’s impressive!” she said in her thick Filipino accent.
 
I stood a little taller, puffed out my chest a bit, and started calculating the odds that she was a sapiosexual. 
 
“Yes, I am a writer,” I said, smiling at her.
 
“That’s so cool,” she said, visibly excited. “And dangerous!”
 
Dangerous? I never thought of writing as dangerous. I did get a nasty paper cut once but soldiered through it.
 
“What do you ride?” she asked. 
 
“I write books, blogs…” 
 
“Do you ride motorcycles?” she asked.
 
“What?”
 
“Do you ride horses? Do you race them?”
 
“No, I’m a W-R-I-T-E-R,” I explained. “Not a rider.” 
 
But she was already scanning the room for someone with a speedier vocation.
 
The rider/writer thing actually happens more often than you may think here in the Philippines, so I’ve started scribbling in the air as I tell them what I do, instead of revving the throttle on my imaginary motorcycle.
 
It’s also a perfect metaphor for my career.
 
It’s been a journey cleanly stripped of any “success,” accolades, or financial gain, like a fish down to the bones. In fact, my chosen life as a rider…err a writer…has been filled with solitude, sacrifice, and a lot of fudging hard work. 
 
Most days, I ask myself, “Why the hell did I give up a job making tens of thousands of dollars a month for this?!” Why on earth am I fighting it out on the scrapheap of society while every Instagram marketing punk is raking in the dough?
 
I’ve even called writing my “beautiful failure” before.
 
But when I get over my daily freak-out, I realize that I wouldn’t change a thing. Being a writer has granted me plenty of amazing new friends and opportunities, a creative outlet that’s given life new meaning above just paying bills, and, perhaps the most valuable thing of all, freedom. 
The friendships, laughter, and deep conversations – with people near and far - have been invaluable, and worth more than gold to me.
 
So, when it all starts to feel like I’m the piano player on the Titanic, I remind myself that I have a rare opportunity to make a difference in the world through my writing and outreach. Through my words, I can impact a positive change.
 
I must confess that when I started this crazy ride (not write) in 2011, I had less than altruistic goals. In fact, I had visions of grandeur floating through my head. I was moving to Costa Rica, eschewing my worldly goods, fast toys, and high-paying career in California. On the beaches of Tamarindo there, I would write my first book, which would be a smash hit because…well, because I wrote it, of course.
 
I’m not kidding – I really thought that’s how it works! 
 
Let me tell you in my own words, from this passage I wrote in my second book, South of Normal in 2012 as I contemplated success and fame:
 
“I’d daydreamed about that for hours while I should have been writing. 

Most likely it won’t happen—there are over 2,000,000 books published every year, and even the established authors with big publishers have a tough time making a living at it.

BUT...let’s just fantasize for a second and say that lightning strikes and my book hit it big. Here’s how I see the whole thing going down: 

Have you ever heard people say that when they get rich or famous, they won’t change? Or. lottery winners who keep their jobs and remain the average Joe? 

Not me. I’m going to turn into a completely self-absorbed asshole!

The moment I sign with a publisher, I’m going to morph into a totally different person, leaving behind everyone who’s been good to me. 

Let’s just say that my first book hits it big and does end up on the New York Time’s Bestseller list. The critics will probably call me “Raw and refreshing, with prose as smooth as a $50 cigar. The best underground American writer since Bukowski.”
 

The royalty checks will start coming in faster than I can take them to the bank. I’m going to start wearing leather pants, put product in my severely-thinning hair, and don gaudy fur coats while walking down the street. Actually, I won’t walk anywhere, but hire someone to drive me around in my Bentley. 

It’s important to me that when I get famous, I forget all of my old friends. Every chance I get I’ll “Big Time” the compadres who supported me through thick and thin. I’ll hire two super model assistants to screen my calls, until even my mom can’t get through. 

I’ll buy a mansion in the hills and decorate it all in white leather. I’ll have a huge “N” tiled onto the floor of my massive swimming pool. I’ll buy a rare white-striped tiger cub that I’ll walk around on a diamond-studded leash and develop a huge coke habit. 
My old friends and family will shake their heads and try to talk to me about their concern for my behavior, but that will just incite one of my tantrums where I curse them out and throw escargot and fire the super models and have them all forcibly removed from my estate. 

Then, my next book will come out, but the critics will turn on me. They’ll call it “self-indulged drivel, a soggy excuse for literature,” and publicly question whether I plagiarized the first one. 

By then, my spending habits of $20,000 a day will be impossible to maintain. I’ll have to return the Bentley and donate the white tiger to the Los Angeles zoo. The pressure of my poor-me existence will be so overwhelming that I’ll snort twice as much coke and start brushing my teeth with Jack Daniels. My finances will go into a tailspin and even the mansion will be up for sale. But, all of the potential buyers will be named Justin or Kanye or Ahmed, so no one will want an “N” pool. 

Soon, the bank will foreclose. All of those fair-weather friends will disappear when I can’t afford limousines and VIP bottle service anymore. I won’t be able to sleep, little Norm won’t work right, and, worst of all, I’ll suffer from a horrible case of writer’s block. 

I’ll lose it all and be resigned to the life of an average drunken bum, sleeping under my fur coat in the dumpster behind a vacant Borders. I’ll live off discarded McDonald’s French fries and rant and rave to anyone I pass how I used to be a somebody. 

Eventually, my true friends will hunt me down and drag me out of there and set up an intervention at the local Olive Garden. I’ll have a complete emotional breakdown, realizing the error of my ways, and vow to never be an a-hole again. 

My mom will take me home and tuck me into the twin bed in her guest room, where I’ll sleep for three days straight. Over the months, I’ll clean out my body and rebuild my constitution, until I’m gulping down raw eggs and doing one-handed pull-ups in her basement...and writing again. 

The ensuing book, “White Tiger Dumpster Fries: My Life from A-hole to Amen,” (Random House, June 2016) will be such a testament to the resiliency of the human spirit that it will shoot me right back to the top. 

“Bravo, a fete de accompli! Our generations Siddhartha!” the critics will applaud. 

But this time, I’ll donate all of my royalty checks to children’s charities. I’ll be invited to the Ellen show, taking public transport to the studio, and we’ll laugh and hug like old friends, even doing a little victory dance together before the commercial break. 

But I haven’t put a lot of thought into it or anything...” 

No, White Tiger Dumpster Fries never came out, and I never did more than sell a few hundred copies (at best) of a few self-published books over the years. 
 
But I’ve still managed to eke out a living writing blogs, websites, reviews, and all sorts of marketing content for companies and entrepreneurs. I estimate that I’ve written almost 5,000 blogs or other forms of content since 2011 – each one nearly 1,000 words!
 
I’ve thoroughly enjoyed working as a ghost writer on other peoples’ books, too. In total, I have my fingerprints all over more than a dozen books available on Amazon.com and Apple Books right now, and each and every one of them is special to me, whether or not my name is on it.
 
I’ve advised on a series sheet for a TV pilot, co-wrote a book about legendary martial artist Judd Reid, was chief blogger for Marijuana Weekly, did the marketing for a pro soccer team, got to write about Fantasy Football for a couple of years, got paid to write travel reviews for a great site called AllWorld.com, and even got to blog about bondage and S&M for a product website for a while. 
 
The subject matter, too, ranges from fascinating to mundane to just plain random, but I’m always up for the challenge. 
 
However, most of my work deals with topics that aren’t quite as sexy, like dentistry, taxes, credit scoring, and I even had to write all of the content for a huge website about ice fishing.
 
I appreciate all of the work, but I assure you that life as a writer is a lot more ice fishing than it is bondage! 
 
I have no idea where this all will lead me, but I’ll keep forging ahead, because one thing I’ve learned is that you only lose if you quit.
 
And I’m more all-in than ever.
 
As the calendar now starts flipping towards the 10-year anniversary of when I left the United States and decided to start anew as an author, I find myself prone to reflection – and nostalgia. I’m looking forward to putting together my next travel memoir in time for a 2021 release, with all of the crazy, remarkable, and insightful experiences from life abroad. 
 
It will be called simply, “Less.”
 
Until then, when someone asks me what I do for a living, I can just point to my wrist and say, “Norm Writes.”
 
-Norm  :-)
NormWrites.com

 
 
 

2 Comments

Your April 2019 Postcard from Norm: Things I now consider normal.

4/23/2019

2 Comments

 
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I was at a wedding in Sacramento, Ca last fall (don’t worry – it wasn’t my own) when I ran into an old friend in the mortgage business who I hadn’t seen in years. As everyone else danced, drank, and ate lemon chicken/halibut/or New York strip around us, Brent pulled me aside, intensely interested in my life abroad.
 
“Where did you live?”
“How much is your rent?”
“What was my favorite country?”
“Do you speak other languages?’
“How do you handle work?”
“Is it safe?”
 “Are you going to live there forever?”
 
The questions went on and on, which I appreciated because this was someone who I really respect and he chose to sequester me in a room full of more exciting options.
 
I realized that, although I’m pretty boring in my own eyes, my daily existence is anything but to a lot of my friends and family who live a world away.
 
So, for this month’s postcard, I started reflecting on the word “normal.” 
 
Of course, much of what’s considered typical, average, and unremarkable in my life is actually pretty b-a-n-a-n-a-s to a lot of you.
 
On that note, I decided to make a list of things that I now consider normal and don’t even give a second thought to anymore, but would make some people – like Brent – say “Whoaaa, really?”
 
Some things on this may apply to other places I’ve lived in the world over the last decade, like Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Vietnam, and Cambodia. But it’s weighed heavily towards the Philippines where I live now, which is unique (ok, bat-shit crazy!) in its own way.
 
I was going to document them all here, but after making a list of about 70 such “normal” phenomenon and still counting, I realized it has to be an ongoing series. 
 
So, without further ado, let’s have a little fun. Welcome to my bonkers/perfectly normal world!
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A pet goat on a motorbike. ​
​This photo was taken in the small seaside city of Dumaguete where I lived for over a year, and the “Goat Guy” was a resident. He treated his pet goat like a dog and trained him well, so he’d come with him everywhere - even jumping on his motor bike and holding on while they rode around.
 
I’ve seen plenty of exotic pets, like snakes, parakeets  and more. But in San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua, there was an American lady in her 70s who walked a small orangutan around everywhere hand-in-hand. Rumor has it that she used to be a star in the adult film industry in the 1960s before going down south permanently.

​



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Sports as bad as their teeth
The entire WORLD positively worships soccer (football), rugby, cricket, and all of those UK-based sports. Everywhere I go, I have to deal with soccer or weird Australian Rules “footie” on the TV (sorry, Judd-O and Clint!). I’m not even joking when I say that one of the reasons why I decided to settle in the Philippines instead of Thailand or other neighboring coutnries is because of the love and obsession with NBA basketball here.

​This is one of the rare times when you’ll hear me say that the U.S.A. is number 1!!! (In sports.) ​​

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Bathrooms are straight-up nasty
In most countries in the Developing World, public bathrooms are positively nasty. In fact, you may encounter little more than a whole in the ground, a bucket, and a water spigot on the wall.

​If you want to know how civilized any country is, just take a look a random sampling of bus station bathrooms.
 
By now, I’m well-prepared, and carry around an emergency hygiene kit in my backpack, including hand sanitizer, wet wipes, bug spray, Axe spray deodorant (to crop dust over others, or myself), Chapstick, tissues, bubble gum, and a stack of Starbucks napkins to use in case of emergency.

​

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Security that's omnipresent
Every single store, apartment building, office, restaurant, pharmacy, and coffee shop has an armed security guard on duty – if not more than one. Sometimes, they carry rusty pistols older than they are.

​But, most of the times here in the Philippines, they’re toting 12-gauge shotguns or semi-automatic AR15s – and they ain’t afraid to use them, as robberies are/would be common. I don’t even really notice it anymore – except maybe when a guard is eating lunch and Burger King and his rifle is on the table, pointed right at me.
 
A funny thing is that the security guards here are super friendly to me, calling me “sir” and even saluting me as I pass by. Since I have a shaved head and in decent shape, they all assume I’m in the U.S. military and want to show their respect!

​

Typhoons, volcanos and earthquakes, oh my! ​​
The Philippines is as cursed with natural disasters as it is blessed with natural beauty. On the Pacific “Ring of Fire” chain, it is home to hundreds of active volcanos, including Mt. Pinatubo which erupted in 1991 and devastated the surrounding countryside, killing tens of thousands and forcing the evacuation of a massive U.S. military base here.
Since I’ve lived here, I’ve been caught in the largest typhoon ever to make landfall (Haiyan), been stranded by other typhoons, and caught in a landslide.
 
BREAKING: No bullshit – about twenty minutes after I started writing this, I was in a park working out when suddenly, thousands of people starting spilling into the streets, evacuating from the surrounding office buildings and high-rise apartments. I quickly discovered that we’d had a 6.3 magnitude earthquake – not insignificant. 
 
Update: we just had another one – of 6.5 magnitude – in Samar today.
 
In many Equatorial and tropical parts of the world, these natural disasters are the norm, and locals show amazing resilience. 
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Skin whitening
A good part of the world's population are obsessed with having lighter skin. 
 
That’s incredibly sad and ridiculous but true. There are many reasons for this, but it’s directly tied into the cultural norms and preferences in many countries that were colonized by the Europeans and, in some cases, Americans. The deeply rooted effects include a power dynamic and social stratification that’s directly correlated to how light your skin is. 
 
People with darker skin tend to be more indigenous and less mixed with European blood, as well as known for being manual laborers and those who traditionally work in agriculture or out in the sun.
 
Skin whitening is most popular in Asia, with Japan and Korea make up a huge part of the demand, as its perfectly normal for me to see travelers from the country walking around like lily-white ghosts reminiscent of Michael Jackson later in life, covered head to toe against the sun even when swimming. Creepy. Globally, the skin whitening industry is expected to bring in about $7.8 billion dollars this year alone and rise to $8.95 billion within a few years.
 
But, no one is more concerned with the lightness of their skin and spends more on these products than Filipinos. Girls who are darker get teased and bullied mercilessly, called skin shaming. There are less social, educational, employment, business, and even marriage opportunities for them just because of their skin color (which I think is perfectly beautiful!). But it’s not just women who are obsessed with lighter skin. In one Philippines study, more than 25% of all young male university students were regularly using a skin whitening product! 
 
This misguided standard of beauty is blatant is everywhere in daily advertising and media, and all of the celebrities, actors, and models are all unnaturally white. 
 
Everywhere you turn, you’ll see lightening cremes, lotions, soaps, pills, sprays, even surgeries. (I can’t even find aftershave for sale that doesn’t have skin whitening additives, so I have to bring it back form the U.S. with me!). It also gives rise to a host of shadowy practices and downright quackery performed by unlicensed medical professionals or scam artists. Friends of mine had someone come to their hotel room to administer an IV with a “special” formula that was guaranteed to lighten their complexion, only to get them violently ill for days. 

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 The United States has their own complex and polarizing racial dynamic, but it’s important to understand that’s not the only “normal” throughout the world.
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Rice is life!
A good portion of the world lives on rice, and that’s no exaggeration. It’s also definitely true in Southeast Asia and the Philippines where they say, “Rice is life.” For some unknown reason, they LOVE rice! To me, it’s completely tasteless except for whatever you serve it with, but they literally eat rice for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and even have sweet and sticky rice for dessert. 
 
It goes to hilarious lengths, like when people check into hotels carrying their own rice cooker. When you ask Filipinos what they had for their meal, they’ll just say, “rice.” Upon asking them if that’s all they ate, they’ll answer, “No, we had fish/chicken/spaghetti, etc. too.” But to them, the highlight of the meal is the rice – not the steak haha.
 
Rice also serves as an efficient way to feed billions of people, as it grows year-round, is ecologically self-sustaining, and takes advantages of moist and flood-prone climates.

​

Counterfeits-R-Us
Outside of the U.S., counterfeiting is HUGE business, supplementing the GDP of entire world economies, like in China or North Korea.
 
In Thailand, I have access to an incredible market of counterfeit goods like designer purses and bags, clothing, perfumes and colognes, and every electronic gadget you could think of. Quality varies from Chinese rip-offs that will break after one use (or sooner) to solid merchandise that is actually built in the same factories and with the same materials as the real thing.
 
I know of one store that’s like heaven to me, as it has high-quality versions of vintage Nike basketball sneakers. From Air Force Ones to every generation of Jordan’s, they’re all for sale at only 1,000 Baht - $30. I was ready to drop about $300 in there but the kick in the balls is that they only have up to size 10 – another thing that’s “normal in Southeast Asia. Grrrrr!
​
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People don’t like the American government but they generally really like Americans
I get slapped around on social media for being overly critical of the U.S., but I can say with confidence that the myth of the Ugly American is pretty much dead. Instead, American people who travel abroad, whether for tourism or to live, are generally perceived as polite, caring, kind, fair-mannered, and generous.  

They like us, especially compared to the rude and demeaning behavior exhibit regularly by people of other nations.



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An uproarious sense of humor
Around the world, I’ve found that most people are gregarious, playful, cleverly humorous, and even hilarious. Of course, that humor translates differently in different cultures, but, to me, the Philippines is the funniest county on earth. 
 
The whole daily experience here consists of joking, teasing, mocking, smiling and laughing, all to a sing-song cadence that makes each day entertaining. Filipinos are also masteries of imitation and mimicry, so songs, skits, joke telling, and other forms of dramatics are the essence of socialization.
 
All of this humor also serves a practical purpose, as humor is a big part of how people can cope with the harsh realities of poverty, natural disasters, tough living and working conditions, and other extreme stressors. 
 
For those of you who know me, I’m a sh*t-talking, wise-ass at heart, so the Philippines is the perfect stage for my funny (that’s highly debatable) antics, too.

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Of course, sometimes, their humor isn't intentional as they have a less than substantial grip on the English language and wear the shirts to prove it!). 

Check out these funniest t-shirts I've seen in Asia that have become normal to me!
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That's all for this month, folks! 

Look for many more of these things that I now find normal in future monthly postcards, and thanks for reading and sharing!

Your abnormal friend,

Norm   :-) 

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    Norm Schriever

    Norm Schriever is a best-selling author, expat, cultural mad scientist, and enemy of the comfort zone. He travels the globe, telling the stories of the people he finds, and hopes to make the world a little bit better place with his words.   

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