100 Things I Learned and Did in 2024

  1. Ahoy! Last year I finished writing my 100 things in Dieng Plateau, and today I’m sitting in Railway Tuan Cafe in Hanoi, Vietnam, waiting for the train to come pass while finishing my final edit for this year’s 100 things. Life is indeed an unpredictable adventure. Alright, let’s jump straight right in, here’s what I learned and did in between the 2 adventures.
  2. In India there’s an annual festival where villagers throw cow shit at each other for good luck and prosperity. Riiight. The event is called Pikadala War, and it takes place after the Ugadi festival. The event is inspired by a marriage dispute in mythological Hindu, where the villagers then split into two sides and start throwing each other the holy excrements. It usually gets brutal after a while where people get injured, due to the hardening of the cow shit (not sure which one is better to get hit by, a hard shit or a fresh shit).
  3. After Donald Trump won the US election in November, the price of cryptocurrencies skyrocketed due to Trump’s pro-crypto outlook. But doesn’t it bother you that it’s 2024 and we still don’t know who the creator of Bitcoin Satoshi Nakamoto is? But let’s translate the Japanese name, and we could probably get a clue of who he is. So, if we put the Japanese name in the right Japanese order, the name becomes Nakamoto Satoshi (with the surname at the front). Naka means center, Moto means origin. So, Nakamoto is center origin. And Satoshi means clever or intelligence. So, Nakamoto Satoshi is roughly translated to central intelligence. Hint hint.
  4. The US and Australia are half a planet away, but did you know that the west coast of Australia perfectly fits the east coast of the US? Yeah it’s like that realization that the west coast of Africa perfectly fits the east coast of South America (when we watched The Inconvenient Truth). It is also further proof that the planet used to consist of only 1 super-continent.
  5. Today the entire world are using Gregorian Calendar. But a while ago, for few millenniums people were using the Julian Calendar (for the explanation of why they switched it, see 100 things 2020 no 65-66). The switch from Julian to Gregorian began on 1752 by Britain, but it was not simultaneously applied around the world. In France, as in much in other parts of the world, the switch happened much later in 1582. Now, in the Julian Calendar the new year began with the spring equinox on 1 April, just like in the Hindu calendar. But as we all know in the Gregorian Calendar new year starts on 1 January. And in those days the spread of information was not rapid, and thus there were quite a lot of people who were slow to get the news of the calendar switch, and didn’t know that the new year had been moved to 1 January. And so, on 1 April plenty of people were still celebrating new year, and they became the butt of the jokes and hoaxes, a practice that ever since became widely known as “April fools.”
  6. One of the items in my bucket list is to visit the Museum of Banned Books in Tallinn, Estonia. The museum displays banned books from around the world, and we can even buy them at the museum’s shop (which I suspect will cost me a fortune). But there’s 1 book that even the museum is not displaying, but they rather put it behind the counter because it is too dangerous. So dangerous that even the writer himself years later after publication was trying to make the book banned. Can you guess what the book is? It’s the Anarchist Cookbook by William Powell.
  7. Ever think that money is the root of all evil and should be abolished? Well, during the brief but brutal Khmer Rouge rule (1975-1979), Cambodia became the only country ever in history to abolish the use of money. It was the attempt to forcefully establish the communist utopia with rural and classless society where there’s no rich people, no poor people, and no exploitation. And to accomplish this, not only they abolished money, but they also isolate the country from all foreign influences and abolish free markets, private property, schools, industrial factories, religious practices, foreign-style clothing, the traditional Khmer culture, and even blow up the central bank. But why? Khmer Rouge theorists, who adopted the ideas of Hou Yuon and Khieu Samphan, believe that these radical moves would stimulate the rebirth of the crafts and the country’s latent industrial capability.
  8. Except, that was not the result at all. To realize their goals, the Khmer Rouge had to force Cambodian to implement this idea: by emptying the cities and force the people to relocate to labor camps in the countryside to implement the agriculture plan. This move was complemented with forced labour, mass executions (for those who rebel against it), physical abuse, and resulted to mass malnutrition, disease, and death due to overwork. So, it seems that the genocide was not intended for bloodbath’s sake (like a cartoon-ish depiction of a pure evil character who likes to do evil stuff without reason), but rather to implement an idea that they believe in (which makes more sense, because nobody sees themselves as evil, and think what they’re doing is right).
  9. But anyway, the result was a complete disaster. In total it resulted in the death of between 1.5 million to 2 million people (around 25% of Cambodia’s population) and the economy was also disastrous where after the Khmer Rouge was defeated by Vietnam, the Cambodian currency (the riel) was eventually reinstated in the 1980s, but Cambodians remain distrustful of it and opted to use US dollars instead for their daily transaction (when I went there, all small things cost $1, bigger things $5, and big ones usually cost $10 like a whole-day charter of Tuk Tuk).
  10. Forget Wembley, forget the Maracanã, my current favourite football stadium got to be Estadio Daniel Alcides Carrión, home to Peru’s 3rd division football club, Union Minas. The stadium is located in Cerro de Pasco, in the Andean mountains and it can hold 8000 people. And while Estadio Hernando Siles in La Paz, Bolivia, is perhaps the most famous high altitude stadium at 11,932 ft (3637 meters), followed by Mexico’s Estadio Asteca at 7280 ft (2219 meters), Union Minas’ stadium sits at 14,420 ft (4395 meters) above sea level, making it the highest altitude football stadium in the world. The air is so thin there that football players need to inhale from an oxygen tank before kick off and during half time. Hot damn.
  11. People in the middle ages slept twice per night, or biphasically. So, people will go to sleep when the sun goes down and will wake up at about midnight for about 2 hours, only to hang out, and go back to sleep until the sun rises. The phenomenon was discovered by historian Roger Ekirch in the early 1990s after meticulously looking at medieval documents. Ekirch then prompted the question whether this is the natural state of sleeping for humans before the industrial revolution (with its artificial lighting).
  12. There’s a spot in China called the “Fangchuan National Scenic Area” where three borders of Russia-China-North Korea exist. In fact, if we go through the G302 road next to the Tumen River in China, we can see the contrast of Russian town of Khasan in the Primorsky Krai region on the left, and North Korean countryside village of Namyang on the right.
  13. There once lived a woman by the name of Grand Duchess Maria Alexandrovna. She was the only surviving daughter of Czar Alexander II of Russia. When Maria was 14 years old she met and fell in love with a guy named Alfred, an officer in the British navy who turned out to be the 2nd son of Queen Victoria of Britain. Now, Czar Alexander is like that typical dad who deeply loves his daughter and he did not want her daughter to marry someone from other country, who can take her away from Russia. And Queen Victoria was also not in favour of their marriage which would form the Britain-Russia alliance, because she suspected the Russians have a plan to take over India from the British Empire. And so the marriage was not happening. But years went by and both Alfred and Maria refused to marry other people. Maria even rejected multiple German princes, while in 1873 a rumor was circulating that Maria is having an affair with a Russian prince. But that did not deter prince Alfred, they were still madly in love with each others and cannot be separated, and he eventually proposed to her and they got engaged. And so on 23 January 1874 they finally got married in a lavish ceremony in St. Petersburg, and she then moved to Britain following her new husband to live happily ever after. Now, the star of this fact is not Alfred or Marry, but the biscuit in that lavish wedding ceremony that a London baker by the name of Peek Freans made to honor Queen’s Victoria’s new daughter in law. The baker used a unique baking technique to make this biscuit to be light, could absorb liquid well without collapsing, and featured on its edge a Greek key pattern designed after a river that took a lot of turns, which would become its signature style. The biscuit was also perfect for dipping into chai. And what name did the baker gave to the biscuit? It was aptly named after the new princess, and it was called Marie biscuit. That’s right, your Marie biscuit today is the result of a highly successful snack made at one wedding party a long long time ago.
  14. In the 1960s, bars in Turkey had a person whose job is called “basket man.” They all carry a huge basket as a backpack, and they use it to carry people who got too drunk and bring them home. Just look at the image, it’s hilarious.
  15. Pizza was first invented in Naples, Italy, in between 16th and 18th century, inspired by a similar flatbread known to the Romans as panis focacius. But it wasn’t until in the 20th century when the shape of pizza that we know today was invented, by Italian immigrants to the US. The dish was inspired by tomato pie, that has cheese at the bottom and tomato at the top, where in New York they would add toppings such as mushroom, onions, etc. And American tourists when they went travelling to Italy, they wanted “pizza” like the way they make it back home. So, gradually even in Italy the pizza would evolved into the American-style pizza that we all now know across the globe.
  16. There’s a boy in Australia called Billy Campbell, who was born in 2015. He is the son of Australian TV presenter David Campbell. But what’s special about Billy is that he claims to be the reincarnation of Princess Diana, almost 2 decades after she passed away in 1997. But before you brush off him as another weirdo, read this: he first started to claim this at the age of 2, when he saw an image of Princess Diana and said “look, it’s me when I was a princess.” He also able to describe Balmoral Castle accurately, without ever visited the place for himself. He also told his parents’ Scottish friend that when he was Princess Diana he used to go to a castle in that kilted wonderland, and described the castle as “having unicorns on it” (which has the Scottish coat of arms that indeed has unicorn in it). Billy said that he stopped being a princess when he hears the sound of ambulance (presumably when Princess Diana had a car crashed in Paris). Billy also said that he used to have a brother named John (which Diana had but he passed away before she was born). Billy also said one time when seeing William and Harry that they are his two boys. So, what do you think, true reincarnation or a scam product by his parents? Anyway Billy is now 9 years old, but he doesn’t remember any of this (and imagine the bullying he must have gotten).
  17. By the way, what’s the deal with the Scottish and the unicorns?! I’ve been to Scotland several times, once on a car road trip across the high lands, and I never realised that the official national animal of Scotland is unicorn! The usage of unicorn as the popular symbol since the Scottish royalty era was derived from the depiction of unicorn in Celtic mythology, which is filled with tales of dominance and chivalry, where the animal was seen as a symbol of purity and innocence but at the same time also a symbol of power and masculinity. It is simply believed to be the strongest animal, wild and untamed (except, it can be humbled by its kryptonite: a virgin maiden).
  18. The first computer bug in history was literally a bug, where in 1947 a moth get stuck in a Mark II computer at Harvard University that caused a glitch to the computer. Cleaning up the moth ultimately led to the term “debugging.”
  19. Did you hear about the “Disney hug” rule that was pretty viral this year? So apparently all the cast members and characters in Disneyland if they’re hugged by a child they are not allowed to let go first. It is because we don’t know what has been going on with them, and they might need the long hug to feel loved of safe. This is actually a good parenting hack.
  20. But before you think that Disney is truly the happiest place on Earth, this year Disney also got viral after someone named Kanokporn Tangsuan, who was alergic to nuts and dairy, dined at Disney World’s Raglan Road Irish Pub. Tangsuan initially asked the pub whether her food had nuts or dairy, but she was ensured that it was safe, before she ate it and experienced a severe allergic reaction and died. Her husband, Jeffrey Piccolo, then sued Walt Disney Parks and Resort, but Disney’s lawyers said the matter should be referred to an outside abritrator. And this is where it got viral, the reason why the lawyers said that was because when Piccolo signed up for a Disney+ account in 2019 and when he separately bought tickets to EPCOT on the Disney website in 2023, he unknowingly agreed with one of the terms and conditions to arbitrate all disputes against the company. Sneaky little bastards.
  21. The death of TE Lawrence in 1935 indirectly led to the regulation for bike riders to wear helmets. So TE Lawrence (of the Lawrence of Arabia fame) died in a horrendous motorcycle crash, when he tried to avoid crashing into some kids when riding in a rainy day. And at the time of the crash he wasn’t wearing a helmet, as it was not compulsory to wear one and nobody wear them anyway. One of the medics that tended Lawrence was a young doctor called Hugh Cairns who was so horrified by Lawrence’s head injury that it set him on this path to start gathering evidence related with head injuries and motorcycle accidents. And he published his results in October 1941 in the British Medical Journal with the title “Head Injuries in Motorcyclists – The Importance of Crash Helmet.” By now Cairns was a consulting neurosurgeon to the Army, and thus the army then naturally took it on board and started to order their dispatch riders to wear them. But it wasn’t until 1973 that it eventually become a government policy. Sadly, Cairns died of cancer in 1952, and so he didn’t live to see the full result of what his research turned out to be.
  22. The Jewish genocide that killed 6 million people was initially regarded as only one of the many World War 2 mass casualties that comprised of 50 million civilians + 25 million military personnel. It wasn’t until 1967, when Israel badly needed a good PR after grabbing the Golan Heights from Syria, the West Bank from Jordan, and Gaza and Sinai from Egypt, that the horrifying historical episode became exploited, because they needed a justification for their war crimes. Enter the Holocaust Industry, which was thoroughly analyzed by a book with the same name by the child of Holocaust survivors, Norman Finkelstein. Firstly, according to Finkelstein, they locked the term “Holocaust” to make their genocide stand out from others, even though there were some others that were much worse with multiple the death toll (such as Congo 20 million deaths, Soviet 20 million deaths, Mao’s China 40-80 deaths, Native American genocide 56 million, etc). They then enhanced the stories of their sufferings – through multiple mediums – while downplayed others who suffered alongside the Jews, such as the 500,000 Gypsies killed. And finally they use the Holocaust victim card to extort compensation from the German government, German firms, and Swiss Banks who were involved in the “Holocaust.”
  23. However, the extracted money barely reached the Holocaust survivors (if any), and instead they (and by “they”, Finkelstein means World Jewish Congress) create museums, movies, books, memoirs (with a lot of them have been proven fake), etc. Notice that a lot of these mediums, especially movies, were created in the 1970s (just years after 1967). And they also created the buzzwords that have been used ever since, even until today. Phrases such as: “Israel have the right to defend itself”, “never again”, and of course labelling anyone who criticize Israel as “antisemitic” even though Arabs are also a Semitic race and many of the Zionist supporters aren’t even Jewish (Biden, Trump, Harris, Scholz, von der Leyen, Trudeau are prime examples of Christian Zionists; Narendra Modi and Rishi Sunak are Hindu Zionists; MBS, King Abdullah, al-Sisi are Muslim Zionists; Sri Lanka’s Sinhala monks are Buddhist Zionists; Macron is an agnostic Zionist; Theodor Herzl (the founder of Zionism) and David Be-Gurion (the founder and first PM of Israel) were actually atheists).
  24. Back in the day, they used to transport manure on ships as cargo. And due to its flammable nature, the manures has a high risk of catching fire that could burn the ship down. So, in order to alert the crew of the ship of this risk, they used to write a warning label on the batches which says “Store High In Transit.” And that’s, ladies and gentlemen, where we get the word “SHIT.”
  25. Tennis balls are painted bright yellow thanks to sir David Attenborough. So, the first Wimbledon championship was held in 1877, but it wasn’t until 1937 that it was first televised. Traditionally, tennis balls has always been white, and it also suited the black and white TV programming. But in the mid-1960s colour TV was becoming increasingly on demand, and that became a bit of a problem when a young TV executive David Attenborough sent 4 colour broadcast cameras to Wimbledon in 1967: the white balls often blended with the background on the grass courts, and making it difficult for viewers at home to spot the ball. After the disastrous broadcasting of the 1967 tournament, Attenborough then suggested that a fluorescent ball would be more visible to the cameras, which is eventually backed by the research conducted by the International Tennis Federation (ITF), and thus fluorescent yellow was approved to be the official colour of the tennis ball. The new colour was first used at the US open in 1973 and adopted elsewhere ever since.
  26. Let me tell you about one of the greatest prison escape stories. One day, in the morning of 26 May 1986, a helicopter approached Prison De La Santé in Paris, lowered down, picked up a convicted bank robber Michel Vaujour and his accomplice Pierre Hernandez, and then it fucks off. The pilot of the helicopter? It’s Michel’s wife Nadine. Now she’s not your average housewife, when as soon as Michel was caught and jailed she immediately enrolled in a helicopter piloting classes, became a regular at a helicopter rental company, and eventually rented helicopter twice a month without raising any suspicions. And so, one day she used the rented helicopter to help her husband escape prison, landed at a nearby football field, and then fled using a waiting car, nowhere to be seen ever since. Well ok, not quite. The story doesn’t really have a happy ending, when 3 months later the couple were caught during another robbery (you would thought they would lay low, but nooo), with Michel got into a shootout with the police and got his head hit by a bullet that left him partially paralyzed. He was finally captured, and returned to prison. Believe it or not, the helicopter escape was his FIFTH prison escape, and he did try to escape once more after this, with a new accomplice Jamila, but failed. LOL, what a character. He eventually got to serve 27 years in prison, and was only released in 2003 after serving his full sentence. He has since written an autobiography “Love Saved Me From Sinking”, sharing his life lessons on patience, love, and yoga (huh, yoga?). But unfortunately it’s only available in French. Nadine also wrote a book “Fille de l’air” about her daring helicopter escape, but again it’s only available in French language.
  27. There’s a theory called the phantom time hypothesis, where it claims that we could actually living in the year 1726 today. The hypothesis is created by German historian Herman Illig, where he argued that the year 614-911 AD never actually happened. The 297 missing years, he said, are fabricated by the Holy Roman Emperor Otto III, Pope Sylvester II, and Byzantine emperor Constantine VII, all of whom altered documents and the Gregorian calendar so that they can fast forward time to 1000 AD, to make Otto’s ruling year falls in a nice round year of 1000. The theory reasoned that despite there are written records, many artifacts from those missing years were never found. What an interesting hypothesis, but is it true?
  28. Hell naw. Firstly, the missing evidence is incredibly Euro-centric, where there are plenty of historical accounts in the same period of time from Africa, Asia, Australasia, and the Americas. And then there are also astronomical proof and archaeological evidence found in this time span. So, as amusing as the theory is, this period of time also coincidentally falls in the middle of the European Dark Ages. So, maybe, just maybe, the unavailability of data occurs because there were really nothing big happening in those 297 years in Europe? But as always, I’m here to learn and absorb every kind of information, from truth, to conspiracy theories, to even lies, so that I know the big picture of information without really needed to agree or disagree with any of them.
  29. The word “ketchup” comes from the Hokkien Chinese word “ke chiap”. Ke chiap is a sauce made from fermented fish (particularly anchovies and salt). In the 1400s Chinese merchants sailed to Malacca (modern-day Malaysia) and brought along the sauce and it became very popular and spread around the area and abroad. And the word was then became localized as “kicap”, which is why in Indonesia today the black sauce is still named “kecap.” And then Europe started to colonize several South East Asian lands for spices, and kicap caught the attention of the British merchants, who then brought the sauce back to Britain in the 1600s. The British then wanted to experiment with the sauce, and add ingredients such as mushrooms, shallots, oysters, horseradish, white wine, etc with the pronunciations became catsup or catchup or indeed ketchup (no consensus was reached at this point on what to name it). And when the British colonized America, they also brought along ketchup. And in 1812 a tomato-based ketchup was first appeared, created by Dr. James Mease, which was then added sugar and vinegar by others. Moreover, in 1876 A German American named Henry James Heinz eventually created a bottled version of this tomato-based ketchup, and it became the benchmark of the “ketchup” that we all know now.
  30. In 1985, Ethiopia was among the poorest countries in the world, with its economy in ruins, its food supply had been destroyed by years of drought and internal war, and its citizens dying by the thousands from starvation and diseases. Hence, it is not surprising that in the same year a $5000 relief donation (about $14,600 today) was transferred between Ethiopia and Mexico. The only catch was, the donation was donated by Ethiopia for Mexico and not the other way around. Incredibly, the money was sent to help the victims of that year’s earthquakes in Mexico City, and Ethiopia had done so because in 1935 Mexico had sent aid to them when it was invaded by Italy. Ethiopia never forget Mexico’s great help, and they reciprocated the help during their worst condition, sending a relatively humble amount of money (in the scale of international aid) to help out a friend.
  31. During World War 2 the US formed the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) that took the role of intelligence agency. And during the war in the Pacific theatre, they had some ideas to eliminate the Japanese enemies using some bizarre spy shit. One of the ideas is to arm Chinese call girls with poison to use against high-ranking Japanese officers who solicit their services. The most obvious question would be, where would they hide the poison, as the call girls would not be wearing any clothes when they perform the “poison delivery system”? Yup, exactly where you think it is. The poison itself was based on the highly lethal botulism toxin (today botulism toxin is perhaps more well known by their short name: BoTox – yes, highly lethal), and it was successfully smuggled into Japanese-occupied China. But nothing actually happened; no Japanese officers were killed, and it baffled the OSS.
  32. As it turns out, before they proceeded with the plan, their OSS contacts in Asia decided to test the poison on donkeys before giving it to the call girls. And to their bafflement, the poison didn’t work and the donkeys survived, so the contacts assumed that the poison was ineffective and they cancelled the mission. But here’s the thing, botulism is indeed very lethal and will kill almost anything on God’s green earth…. except for donkeys, which is one of the few creatures actually immune to it. What a sheer dumb luck, well, a sheer dumb unlucky (is that even the right phrase?).
  33. I was today’s year old when I learned that club sandwich is not sandwich from the house or club (aka the restaurant’s own signature style – I don’t know why I always thought that way). But it’s actually an abbreviation. CLUB: Chicken Lettuce Under Bacon.
  34. The theme song for Mission Impossible is actually based on the morse code signals for M.I., the show’s initials. So, the song is written by Argentine composer Lalo Schifrin in a 5/4 time signature, where 1 dot is one beat, and a dash is 1 1/2 beats, making the theme song a bar of 5 beats: dot dot dash dash, dot dot dash dash, dot dot dash dash, dot dot dash dash, trululuuuu trululuuu (you get the picture). Well, two dots in morse code = i, and two dashes = m. That’s freakin genius!
  35. Did you know that there’s a piece of Europe in Africa. Huh? Meet the Spanish city of Melilla, a 12.3 square kilometer city that physically is in Morocco, North Africa. Ok fine, there are TWO pieces of Europe in Africa. Ceuta is another Spanish city at the edge of Morocco. It is a legacy from Spanish’s past colonial power, both of which have been under Spain’s control since the 17th century. As you may have guessed, the Spanish presence in the Moroccan land has caused several arguments between the two countries over the years.
  36. You know that famous phrase that Churchill said, “history is written by the victor”? In the light of recent events, this year I began to question all narratives written by the West, both the media and especially the history books and documentaries. The biggest revelation is of course how they handle the genocide in Gaza (for more context on the 7 Oct event can be found in 100 Things 2023, no 56-60). Despite the ICJ has officially declared that Israel’s aggressions in Gaza is indeed a violation of the Genocide convention – confirming several reports by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Oxfam, and the likes – the Western governments still deny that Israel has committed a genocide, and worst, they keep on supplying billion dollars of aid and weapons. And those who are protesting against this genocide? They are quickly labelled as antisemitic and even terrorists, while those who are protesting in social media they got shadow-banned (me included at several points over the course of 1 year). Meanwhile, those genocide-supporters are making a big fuss over 120 hostages held by Hamas (who are of course humans with family and dogs that miss them) but ignored the 9000+ Palestinians held by Israel (who are only seen as statistics, or worse, are considered rats or cockroaches by them). They also overdramatized the killing of 6 hostages at one occasion, and even the 695-1400 deaths, while hardly mentioning about the 44,000-186,000+ killed by Israel (as at November 2024). The hypocritical double standard is disgusting.
  37. As they say, the myth about Western humanity died in Gaza. I would take it a notch, the myth of Western value of rule and law died the day a war criminal Netanyahu (as per the verdict of the ICC – alongside Hamas leaders) is still allowed to join the UN General Assembly in New York to gave bullshit speech, and he then gave the orders to strike the densely-populated southern alDahiya in Beirut Lebanon from inside the UN Head Quarter, and still didn’t get any consequence. Israel even assassinated 200+ UN workers and destroyed multiple UN schools and facilities, and still haven’t been expelled by the UN (if you’re asking why, of course it got to do with the big brother US who funds 22% of the UN’s budget and home to the UN headquarter in New York).
  38. Now contrast this with the West’s treatment over Putin’s invasion towards Ukraine. Days after the first attack, Russian athletes were instantly banned from competing in the Olympics, banned by FIFA, and omitted from the Eurovision song contest (rightly so). Israel? They’re nowhere close to being banned, even if the athletes were literally soldiers who have murdered Palestinians. Israel even participated in the Eurovision song contest while they’re not even European (the country, not the Ashkenazi Jews who were indeed from Central and Eastern Europe). Moreover, after the Ukraine aggression, Russia was immediately sanctioned with assets frozen (and those frozen assets will be used to pay back Ukraine’s loan – talking about daylight robbery). And Israel? Like I said, they keep on funding Israel with billions of dollars of aid and weapons. The US and Turkey even assisted Israel (through US proxy, the HTS) with getting rid of Assad in Syria in early December, which followed by an immediate Israeli ground invasion towards Syria and the airstrikes on few sites in Damascus (which were not retaliated by the HTS, a clear proof that these so-called “Islamist” groups are US’ and Israel’s attack dogs all along). So it’s never about fairness and justice, is it? But it’s about US interests and the interest of its allies, while they still project themselves as the good guys with moral high ground.
  39. Which bring us to the next question, do they act like this only now, or has it always been like this throughout history? Perhaps the biggest eye-opener for me this year is the truth about Churchill himself, who said the memorable quote. Hitler was without a doubt evil, but Churchill as it turns out, was far from being a saint. He advocated using chemical weapons against the Kurds and Afghans in World War 1, he was responsible for the Bengal famine 1943 where 3.8 million people starved to death, not to mention his racist rants and policies towards Irish, blacks, Jews, and Muslims. Hitler, on the other hand… well to be honest it’s still weird to see Hitler in a different light, as trending in the social media this year as the Gaza genocide is getting worse. I didn’t buy it at first, I thought this was just one of those antisemitic generalization nonsense that say something like “Hitler spare some Jews to live so that the whole world can see why he massacred them.” But then several media (especially Murdoch-owned media) began to comment about the availability of Hitler AI-translated English language speeches being dangerous. Hang on, if Hitler is so evil and speak about evil stuffs, why wouldn’t they want us to directly hear his evil English-translated speeches?
  40. Which led me to diving deep in the rabbit hole, and find this incredible book, Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War by Pat Buchanan. Buchanan reveals that Hitler didn’t really want war with Poland, in fact the Nazi government (who control Central Europe) was hoping to be allies with Poland in the struggle against the communist spread from the Soviet east (who control Eastern Europe). However, Churchill and his French counterpart used Poland as their pawn to challenge Germany’s new economic model (as a solution to their Treaty of Versailles-fueled hyperinflation), which would make their international finance model irrelevant (where Hitler himself mentioned in his speech). The Brits got their opportunity to drive a rift between Poland and Germany by giving Poland a war guarantee (that is, if Poland goes to war Britain will back them up). Which came true when Hitler got provoked and strike first on 1 September 1939, followed immediately by Britain’s declaration of war against Germany two days after.
  41. This is a bit like the US and NATO allies provoked Putin by promising Ukraine (in their NATO summit in June 2021) that the country can join NATO. Putin already said if Ukraine – a country that borders Russia – joins NATO it’s like Canada becoming a Russian ally (remember what happened with the Cuban missile crisis in the 1960s?). Ukraine was the line in the sand for Putin, and US knows this. Was Putin at fault by taking the bait and invade Ukraine? Heck yes, just like Hitler was wrong for getting provoked to attack first at its eastern border to create a buffer against now-British ally Poland (and attack France at its western border to create a buffer against Britain). But remember, after Putin started to invade Ukraine 8 months since the NATO announcement, the US and NATO immediately washed their hands and said they won’t get involved in the Ukraine “war” because Ukraine is not a NATO member… only to pour billions of dollars into the country AFTER it got destroyed (you know, for rebuilding purposes) thanks to the “help” of BlackRock and JPMorgan.
  42. So what’s the point of all this? History is not black and white, and certainly not a Hollywood movie where there’s a distinct protagonist and antagonist (with the protagonist is always American or its allies and the antagonist just happens to be America’s enemies: Russians, Arabs, North Korean). No, most of the time the characters in the real-life stories are a mix of both angel and demon. Hitler, like Putin, are still unquestionably evil for instigating the war and for their war crimes, but they’re not the ones who provoked the war. The likes of Churchill and Truman may be the great war heroes in our Western-centric history books, but just like Biden today, they’re the war-provoking assholes that know what they’re doing (if you want to be cynical, Biden administration stole Venezuela’s plane when it landed in Dominican Republic this September). Meanwhile leaders such as Ukraine’s Zelenskyy and Polish leaders in the 1930s are just idiots, who are willingly become a puppet and destroying their country along the way (they could have played diplomacy better).
  43. The sound of helicopter makes crocodiles horny. I’m sorry, what? It was accidentally discovered (sure, accidental) in Queensland Australia last year, when the owner of a crocodile farm in Queensland revealed that their mating season had suspiciously started early last year after several helicopters passed through. Apparently, the sound and vibrations of the Chinook Choppers flying overhead was somehow arousing for male crocodiles and it triggered a mating frenzy (read = orgy). Experts are still unsure why, but they think that the helicopter may have sounded like a thunderstorm (which raised more questions than answers LOL, with nothing can be found over the internet on this subject matter). Coincidentally, thunderstorms apparently also make snakes horny.
  44. There is a statue of Bruce Lee in Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina. It was erected as a symbol of unity, after the area has gone through numerous Balkan Wars, where the Bosnians, Croatians, Serbians, Albanians were constantly fighting with each others. Now in a relative calm, they feel the need of a statue to commemorate the peace, but they cannot seem to agree on who to pick as the symbol. So, enter the dragon (sorry for the pun), where Bruce Lee was the only person that everyone like. No idea how they can come up with Bruce Lee. The statue was unveiled in 2005 but suffered from multiple vandalism, until in 4 March this year it was sadly stolen on a heist.
  45. There’s only 1 person in history (so far) that is buried in the moon. His name was Eugene Shoemaker, he was an American geologist who is a pioneer in the field of planetary science and the founder of astrogeology. He also trained plenty of Apollo astronauts to identify and analyze lunar rocks and craters, without visiting the moon himself (his lifelong dream). Shoemaker passed away in a car accident on 18 July 1997 while exploring a meteor crater in Australia, at the age of 69. After his death, his family and friends wanted to honor his lifelong dream, and they contacted Celestis (a company offering memorial spaceflights for cremated remains) and Celestis agreed to send a small capsule containing Shoemaker’s ashes as well as a picture of him along with a NASA probe using the Lunar Prospector spacecraft that was programmed to map the moon’s surface and look for signs of water. And so on 31 July 1999 his ashes was brought along and buried in the moon, within a crater named in his honor near the south pole.
  46. Do you know why some countries use the word “tea” and some use “chai”? It got to do with how the word got to their respective countries. So in the beginning tea came from China, with the word leaf is translated as “cha” in central China and “te” in the southeastern coast. “Cha” then spread through land trade route (the fabled Silk Road), which gives us the variation of the word “chai” in Hindi, Russia, Persian, and Arabic; with the exception of Portugal (who were based in Macau) and Japan who also traded with the central part of China. Meanwhile “te” spread through sea trade route, mostly thanks to the Dutch who traded with the southeast coast of China and brought back “te” to Europe, which was a hit and prompted many European nations to trade “te” along with the sea route (through their colonies).
  47. There once lived a World War 2 war veteran who returned to his home in Balkans after the war was over. Immediately after he’s home, however, he began to stop speaking. Medical examinations confirms that he’s perfectly healthy, no wound, no brain damage, no vocal impairment. He could also function normally, he could read, write, understand a conversation, even to follow orders. 100% fit. But somehow, he would not talk anymore. Not to his doctors, not for his friends and family. Frustrated by this condition, his doctors eventually moved him to another city and put him in a veterans’ hospital where he would lived for the next 30 years, never breaking his self-imposed silence. Well, except for this 1 occasion. So one day a radio in his ward was tuning in a football match between his hometown team and their traditional rival. And at one crucial point of the play, the referee called a foul against a player from his team, which prompted him to jump from his chair, stared at the radio, and shout his first words in more than 3 decades: “You dumb ass!” “Are you trying to give them the match?” And then afterwards, he returned to sit in his chair, and remain silent for the rest of his life. What a legend.
  48. During the typhoon season (September) a powerful typhoon occurred in Hainan, China, which led to a sudden blackout in the area. And this blackout exposed a major flaw in China’s already cashless society. With power and water cut off, people were left struggling to charge their mobile phones, which is their only access to money. The residence can’t even made a simply purchase like buying a loaf of bread. The incident exposed the vulnerability of a digital-only economy in times of natural disaster like this (or in times where there’s no electricity).
  49. On the other side of the Pacific, the US also suffered from a severe hurricane this year, where Hurricane Helen and its flooding aftermath affected 6 states, with North Carolina as the most severe. But you know what’s messed up? FEMA declared that they don’t have sufficient funding to implement search and rescue operations, even weirder is when individual citizens are trying to organize a rescue operation themselves in order to save lives and provide critical aid, they got arrested. Arrested! What’s going on? It’s suspicious enough that in just few days before that the US government gave $8 billion aid to Ukraine and $8.3 billion to Israel, but don’t have anything for its own citizen in its own country (ok fine, they gave merely $750 for each person). And the more I dig, the worst it reveals.
  50. Coincidentally, juuuust coincidentally, North Carolina (where the flood is heaviest) is home to the richest deposits of lithium in the world, a commodity crucial for car battery, mobile phone, solar, fiber optic, etc. They also have the highest purity of Quartz Sand deposits, which are supplied to the $530 billion AI semi conductor global industry. And then not long before the hurricane a company named Piedmont Lithium submitted mining permit in northern Gaston County (that would be the 3rd largest lithium mine in the world), which was opposed by the local residence and city officials there (while Piedmont Lithium already made a deal with Tesla). Moreover in Spruce Pine, North Carolina, several mining companies such as Sibelco North America and the Quartz Corp wanted to expand their mines even larger, which also suffered from a backlash from the residents. Meanwhile, a company named Albemarie entered an agreement with the DoD to re-open the lithium mine in Kings Mountain, North Carolina, starting 2025, with backlash once again from the locals.
  51. But then, the hurricane and the flood happens, in all of those areas. Now it is worth noting that these places are inundated as a disaster zone by the government, which means the government can enter the area during a disaster and place an imminent domain and can pay the residence a disaster relief of what it worth 5 years ago rather than the current market price. Another point worth noting is that these are mountain towns who rarely (if ever) flooded before, which means that none of the residence there have flood insurance and when their homes were destroyed by the natural disaster they have nothing left, only to get compensated with much less money than what their property was worth. And you know what, the land is suddenly cleared. And the mining permits? In another sheer coincidence, they were approved days before the Hurricane started.
  52. By the way, for those who are still confused about the difference between cyclone, typhoon, and hurricane: they’re basically the same thing, a bunch of tropical storms. They’re only different by where they occur: cyclone is in the Indian Ocean, typhoon is in West Pacific, while hurricane is in North Atlantic and Northeast Pacific. And here’s the interesting part, tropical storms never crossed the equator line. So, tropical storm are formed over warm waters, where the air above the surface of the sea becomes heated by the warm waters, causing it to evaporate up and eventually cool down to form clouds and thunderstorms. The rising of the air also created an undercurrent of low pressure pocket, which sucked air in and could start a spinning movement of a wind and the clouds to drop rain and dump heat to the surface. Crucially, the direction of the wind is caused by the Coriolis force (an inertial spinning of an object that is caused by the Earth’s rotation – yeah, suck that Flat Earthers), where in the Northern hemisphere the rotation spins counter-clockwise, in the Southern hemisphere it spins clockwise, while near the equator there’s no Coriolis effect. Why not in the equator, you asked? The spinning direction of the Coriolis force practically made it impossible, for example, for a clockwise movement from the Southern hemisphere to cross the equator, because once it is near the equator it will start to try (and try is the key word here) to change direction into counter-clockwise, but will end up killing the spinning movement altogether.
  53. A full size basketball court can fit inside a football (soccer) penalty box. Seems surreal? Let’s look at the measures, an NBA standard court is 28.7 by 15.2 meters (or 94 by 50 feet) while football penalty box is 40.23 by 16.46 meters (132 by 54 feet).
  54. Who doesn’t like ice cream? But do you know who invented them? So the Arabs love to go to the mountains to chop out blocks of ice, to use it to keep food fresh. Seeing this, the ancient Persians then had an idea and began to crush the ice, put fruits in it, and they would eat them. The Arabs thought, hang on mate, what if we made syrup from the fruit and eat THAT with the ice! In fact, the word syrup comes from the Arabic word “sharbat”, which becomes “sorbet”. And so sorbet became wildly popular across the ancient world, including in an area where Italy resides today, where they then made various different types of sorbet and began to experiment with mixing fruit, ice, and, gasp, cream! And so, to answer the question, who invented ice cream: the collaboration of 3 different civilizations.
  55. Brian Wilson, the vocalist and songwriter for The Beach Boys, wrote the song “Surfin” during high school for a music class, and he actually received F for it. But it eventually became The Beach Boys’ first single in 1961 and made millions ever since. It is yet another proof that you cannot take one person’s opinion as something set in stone. And anyway, the school eventually changed his grade to A….. in 2018, 58 years later LOL.
  56. Fishermen in an area known as Indonesia today caused the population of the Roman Empire to decline (now that’s a butterfly effect!). So, the fishermen had discovered that there were a lot of islands in the middle of the Indian ocean and that they can island hop all the way across, so much so that they can start at home and head towards Africa, and ended up in this big island of Madagascar. And once they’re there, they began to grow their staple food rice in Madagascar, and eventually began to trade rice with Eastern Africa and in time the rice trade spread to all over the place, such as Egypt. From Egypt, rice spread further to Mesopotamia and southern parts of Europe, which caused some trouble. Because, to grow a rice you need to flood a field, and if you flood a field it will attract mosquitos to breed. Mo mosquitos = mo malaria. And as a result, the sequence that began with fishermen in South East Asia led to the outbreak of malaria in Rome, which killed a lot of citizens and became what some scholars believe to be part of the downfall of the Roman Empire.
  57. Speaking of malaria, did you know the concept of “happy hour” is related with the disease? So, during British occupation of India the British soldier invented “gin and tonic” by merging gin and using local quinine as the tonic water. Well, quinine can also function as anti malaria cure. And so, British soldiers often drink “gin and tonic” (i.e. quinine) at about the time mosquitoes usually come out = before the sun sets, or around 5 and 6 PM. Which is exactly when “happy hour” is.
  58. The logo for Vans is so very cheeky. So if you notice, the V is actually a square root symbol over ANS. And what exactly the answer to the square root of ANS? 420, a number often associated with cannabis. Is this true? It has since become a never-ending argument, with some said that the logo was merely created by the co-founder James van Doren’s son and he simply liked it. But anyway, whether it’s accidental or not, I think 420 is so on-brand for Vans and its almost cult-like customers.
  59. For 68 years, between 1309 to 1377, the home for the Pope and the capital city for his Papal state was not in Vatican, but in Avignon. It is dubbed the Avignon Papacy, where 7 successive Popes resides in the city when at the time was part of the Kingdom of Arles (which is part of the Holy Roman Empire). The Papal residency was moved from Rome to Avignon by Pope Clement V who was elected thanks to the political maneuver by Philip IV of France. So prior to this, a conflict arose between the Papacy and the French crown that culminated in the death of Pope Boniface VIII (during the arrest and maltreatment by Philip IV). The election eventually occur after the successor Pope Benedict XI also died, and Philip IV forced a deadlocked conclave that led to the appointment of French Pope Clement V.
  60. Hence, in a way, the Papacy of Pope Clement V and his successors were controlled by the French Crown, with the successor 6 Popes were all also French. The papacy stayed there until Pope Gregory XI re-established the papal capital in Rome in 1977, while the cardinals of the Sacred College selected a second Pope and assumed the vacant Avignon seat which sparked the Great Western Schism (with the succession of “anti-popes” in Avignon then created, that rebel against the legitimately elected bishop of Rome). The internal rift created different factions within the Catholic Church that divide people into allegiance among the various claimants to the position of the Pope, which lasted until 1417 when the Council of Constance resolved it by electing Pope Martin V, whom was accepted by all. Avignon and the small enclave to the east remained part of the Papal State until 1791 when during the French revolution they were absorbed into what became the French First Republic.
  61. Why are the shape of books rectangular and not square? Well it hasn’t always been the case. In the early days of writing, books or codices were written on papyrus, the same material used in ancient scrolls. And to make a section of a book using papyrus they would lay strips of papyrus reed one way (like horizontally) and then the other (like vertically), so that the sheets we end up with is a square like the result of knitting. They then take this square sheet and fold it one way, and then fold it again, cut the top edge, and they will end up with a four-squared leaves. But when the materials used for making books switched from papyrus to parchment, the shape of books changed. Now, parchment is made from animal skin, and most mammals are oblong (rectangle-ish in shape, with the body is usually longer). And so when the oblong skin is folded, and folder again to make a book, it left us with the rectangular shape that all familiar with. It became the standard format of books in medieval Europe, and when we switch from parchment to paper the rectangle shape persist because at this point people are used to write in a rectangular format.
  62. Have you ever wondered why X marks the spot? It has something to do with the Muslim conquest of Spain in the Middle Ages. There are a lot of Arabic words that we still use today, like al-chemy and al-cohol; or al-gorithm and al-gebra which were invented by al-khwarizmi who introduced solving mathematical equations to solve an unknown quantity. Now, the Arabic word for unknown is “al-shayun”, but in the attempt to translate Arabic writing into Latin, the Spanish had no way of writing the “shush” sound in shayun so they borrowed the Greek letter χ (pronounced Chi) and later replaced it with a more common Latin X in the mathematical equation. So X literally translated to unknown: the [unknown] Files, the [unknown] Factor, etc (the [unknown] formally known as Twitter?)
  63. Do you know why in the English language we say cow for the animal but beef for the meat, sheep for the animal but mutton for the meat, pig for the animal but pork for the meat, but curiously chicken for the animal and also chicken for the meat, fish for fish? It is because between 1066 to 1362 Britain was ruled by the French, and for about 300 years the people there spoke actual French and not English. And those people who eat beef, mutton, and pork were only the upper class French people while the common Anglo-Saxon people only eat chicken, fish, rabbit, etc. And so for the 3 animals that belonged to the upper class, they named the meat after the French words: Beef (from Boeuf), Mutton (from Mouton) and Pork (from Porc).
  64. High heels, stockings, princess dresses, and perfumes were invented in the medieval Europe with one objective: to avoid shit. Literally. So high heels were invented because the roads in Europe back then were filled with feces (humans, horses, etc) and sometimes the roads get too, uhm, “muddy” with feces that it’s difficult to walk. Enter high heels, so people can avoid stepping on high shit, where the heels can get as high as 50cm back then. Princess dresses with a big and wide skirt were designed so that ladies can just pee and poop at the street without having the difficulties to open up pants. Heck, noble women attending a banquet or show also pee and poop at the event, making both the outside and inside filled with excrements. And what better way to prevent their legs to get stained by shit? Stockings! And why not put a cherry on top of them? In medieval Europe, despite all of those filth, people don’t often bathe, which make them tremendously smelly. So French King Louis the XIV came up with a solution: perfumes; to cover all of the smells from poop and body odor. With that amount of filth, no wonder the bubonic plague happened.
  65. And then Islam came to Europe and taught them hygiene, bathing at least once a day, washing hands (and some parts of the body, just before prayers), alongside the art, the science, and for some parts, the faith. Sure, the Greeks were the first to introduce bathing to Europe, but it was the Muslims that made it into a habit. Tommy Robinson would be timid if he’s reading this.
  66. Which brings us to the Robinson-triggered riot in the UK in August this year. The UK today is not the country that I lived in for 6 years more than a decade ago, with the Brexit + massive inflation from the Russian invasion to Ukraine have made living cost unbearable. Economic hardship then led to the search of a scapegoat, and just like the Nazis were blaming the hyperinflation to the Jews (where a lot of the common Jews can managed money pretty well during the hardship, or some even stayed rich), the far-right people are blaming the hardship to immigrants. Most visibly the Muslims, who look different than the locals and dress differently.
  67. And it only took a Tommy Robinson’s tweet to trigger a riot against the Muslims, when a horrific stabbing incident occurred in a city called Southport (killing 3 children) was SUGGESTED by Robinson to be instigated by a Muslim; while in fact it was done by a Rwandan Christian born in Cardiff. And there’s also another stabbing incident in Stirling Scotland, where the culprit is not mentioned but that didn’t prevent Tommy Robinson to tweet “alleged MUSLIM STABBED AT LEAST 3 WOMEN IN STIRLING SCOTLAND TONIGHT. They always target women. Will kier starmer talk about this.” (Note that the “alleged” part is not in all capital letters). Hence, all hell eventually break loose where in several UK cities Muslims were being attacked, mosque being burned, and a hotel where refugees were residing were also burned. The root-cause of the stabbing was not important anymore, as they milk the occasion to be an excuse to attack Muslims. But was it really just down to racism?
  68. Well, the Stockport stabbing occurred on Monday 29 July 2024. By Tuesday a mob of Tommy Robinson supporters protested (thanks to Robinson’s provocative posts) that turned violence over the weekend. Now, on Friday 2 August the Daily Mail reported that “civil servants had frozen all applications for new arms export licenses to Israel, pending a review ordered by Foreign Secretary David Lammy.” This was followed by a Tommy Robinson-led full blown riots on Saturday and Sunday. And by Monday the UK government denies the Friday report, and a spokesperson for the Department for Business and Trade said that it continues “to review export license applications on a case-by-case basis against the Strategic Export Licensing Criteria.” But was it just a coincidence? Let’s dig deeper into who Tommy Robinson really is, which is not even his real name. Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon is funded by Middle East Forum, the same people who also funded Geert Wilders, who is famous for his deeply insulting (and false) Islamophobic rhetoric in the past decades. The owner of Middle East Forum is an openly Zionist guy named Daniel Piper which in turn one of their largest investors is the Koch brothers. So who knows? An openly-Zionist guy who is funded by Zionist-backed organization, escalated the riot in the UK by tweeting hoaxes about the stabbing being instigated-by a Muslim, just after the UK is considering to halt weapon supplies to Israel? Yeah, no, it’s just a coincidence.
  69. There’s an interesting theory called “The Rice Theory” that argues the intensive labour demands of cultivating rice and its interdependent irrigation networks of paddy rice farming, as well as tying farmers together in tight and interdependent relationships, making cultures who are eating and cultivating rice more collectivistic in nature compared with wheat-farming cultures that can be cultivated individually. And we can easily check this by comparing the map of individualistic vs collectivist culture with the map of rice and wheat cultivating area. And we have a relative match.
  70. This year I noticed something obvious that has been hiding in plain sight. It was inspired by the brilliant book the Jakarta Method that tells the story about how the US gained control over Indonesia after the 1965 coup. This is the general idea: Every revolutionary force has to be a leftist, a socialist, because it’s about equality and freedom for everyone. But as the country gain independence, stabilized, and prosper, a shift would occur from the left toward the right, where those who have made it in this new liberalized system (aka the now-wealthy elites) will be trying to secure their wealth and power. And there’s no better way to do so than the policies of the right (tax cuts for the rich, anti-immigration aka hardening the barriers of entry, using religion more to control the masses, etc). And the peak of the right-leaning plutocracy / oligarchy / ethnocracy / kleptocracy rule? Another class struggle that will ignite a leftist revolution. This is what happened in the US where the US revolution had a socialist feel to it, and slowly turned into plutocracy. Or communist Russian revolution have since become an oligarchy today. Or Israel that is now ruled by a far-right ethnocracy. Or in Indonesia, the revolutionary Left by Soekarno slowly turned into kleptocracy today.
  71. On 8 August this year Japan had a magnitude 7.1 earthquake in the Miyazaki prefecture in Southern Japan. It injured 16 people and generated a 50 centimeter (1.96 inch) tsunami (I know, Zoolander, right? What is this, a tsunami for ants??). But this seemingly regular and uneventful earthquake sent the Japanese government into a panic mode, it even cancelled the Prime Minister’s plan to visit a summit in Central Asia, and instead he opted to stay in Japan to get the preparation ready. What the hell is going on? According to Japan’s meteorological agency, the Miyazaki earth quake confirms that there’s now a 70-80% chance of a magnitude of 8 or even 9 earthquake occurring in Nankai region within the next 30 years, triggering a tsunami as high as 30 meters (98.4 feet). AKA megathrust earthquake! They projected that a worst-case scenario will have 300,000 people died, and trillions of dollars worth of damages. The megathrust scare also spilled over to Indonesia, due to its vicinity in the Ring of Fire (if Japan had an earthquake, Indonesia will normally followed, and vice versa), with all media outlet seems to be discussing it. But the scare lasted only for few weeks, and the panic turned into a cautionary alert. It is still good to know though.
  72. Speaking of Japanese earthquake, the most recent mega earthquake in the country was of course the 11 March 2011 Fukushima earthquake, where its 9 SR magnitude triggered a tsunami that wipeout Fukushima and led to the nuclear power plant leaks, killing 18,000 people along the way. The 6 minutes earthquake was so massive and long (pun not intended) it actually shifted the Earth on its axis of rotation and shortened the length of the day by about a millisecond. Meanwhile, the earthquake also moved Japan’s main island, Honshu, eastward by 244 centimeters (8 feet) and caused around 402 kilometers (250 miles) of Honshu’s northern coastline to drop by 61 centimeter (2 feet). The tremors were even felt as far away as Antarctica, North America, and Norway, and the earthquake also produced an infrasonic sound (lower frequencies than what human ears can hear) that was so loud it can get detected by a satellite in space. Scary, scary stuff.
  73. Do you know where the political term “false flag operation” come from? It came from way back, from the days when pirates used to stalk the high seas. So, when sailing, every ship has to erect a national flag (a custom practiced even today). And if a pirate wanted to sneak up on and attack other ships, pirates like to use the national flag of the potential victim’s ship, so that they will look like an ally ship and making the potential victim still lower their guard, and get defenseless when the pirates started the sudden attack from such a close vicinity. Hence, the term “false” flag because the pirates were using flags that are not their nationality.
  74. The world’s shortest commercial flight route lasts only about 1 minute. Operated by Logan air, it is the 2.7 KM (1.7 miles) flight from the island Westray to the island Papa Westray in the Orkney islands Scotland. The average time of flight is around 1 minute and 14 seconds, but in a good weather it can be reached in just 47 seconds. The routes serves the transportation of local communities between the two islands, and ticket prices usually ranges between 20-30 British Pounds.
  75. Do you know what’s the difference between a watch enthusiast and a normal functioning person? An enthusiast’s watch not only tell time, but they also tell stories. This year is the year when I caught the watch bug and lost a bit of my brain cells. It began with Jurgen Klopp, believe it or not, when the Liverpool manager decided to retire after the 2023-2024 season ends. Now, Klopp is a massive IWC fan, and it fits with him, as the Swiss watch brand is at par with the likes of Rolex and Omega but not many people know it if they’re not a watch enthusiast. It is in a way a silent luxury kind of brand. Which is who Klopp really represents, a world class quality person but in a humble and subtle way. I like that, and long story short in February I found and purchased an IWC watch, Mark XVIII Le Petit Prince edition, a special edition watch that is also a tribute to one of my favourite authors, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (his book, Le Petit Prince, is the second most translated book after the Bible).
  76. That was [several] watches ago, when after purchasing the IWC a huge floodgate of dopamine rush opened up in me about the watch world, and I spent the better part of this year obsessing about everything there is about watchmaking: reading 2 books on watches (this and this), closely monitoring watch price fluctuations like a stock market, visiting Hodinkee religiously, frequently reading Watches of Espionage (which made me fall in love with Tudor), listening to several podcasts, watching a lot of YouTube channels (such as Bark and Jack, Teddy Baldassare, Worn & Wound, Ben’s Watches, WatchCrunch, etc), visiting Nakano Broadway (especially Jackroad and Betty, the “Mecca” for watches), visiting the Kurono salon in Tokyo, hunting down the English microbrand Studio Underd0g’s Watermel0n watch to a dodgy mall in the bad part of town, attending a workshop about fake and franken watches (which would later come handy when I’m hunting for old Soviet watches in Hanoi), and of course attending every single watch bazaar in Jakarta, so much so that I get to know most of the players in the industry, and at the last exhibition my wife was baffled on how I seem to know EVERYONE including the founder of a local microbrand (whose watch I of course purchased). LOL, yeah, this might be my mid-life crisis.
  77. And this massive obsession naturally got me thinking, how did this whole thing started? Well the Swiss watch and clock industry first appeared in Geneva in 1541, when the religious reformer Jean Calvin (of the Calvinist branch of Protestantism) banned his followers to wear ornamental objects, forcing goldsmiths and jewelers to switch to a different art form: watchmaking. And by the end of the 16th century these people had already acquired a reputation for excellence, which was culminated in 1601 when the Watchmakers Guild of Geneva was established. Fast forward to a century later, the watchmaking scene was getting too saturated in Geneva, and so a lot of watchmakers started to leave Geneva and set up business in the Jura mountains and elsewhere in Switzerland. And the rest, as they say, is [a long] history; that includes the oldest registered watchmaking company in the world (Blancpain, since 1735), the first wristwatch ever made (by Abraham-Louis Breguet for the Queen of Naples in 1810), the first men’s wristwatch (Cartier Santos-Dumont, in 1904), and I even dived deep into the criminal underworld to see how they utilize watches as a financial means.
  78. Ah yes, the criminal underworld actually use watches as a commodity. So, the international financial system is well known to be heavily regulated and monitored by both law enforcement and intelligence services to spot illicit activities. Any electronic transaction over $10,000 are automatically flagged, while international borders now restrict the amount of cash a person can bring in or out from any country. So, if you’re a criminal wanted to transfer illicit funds from one country to another, what do you think is the most fool-prove method? Nope, not crypto, definitely not digital transfers (no matter how many SPVs you use to hide your name), and nothing involving smuggling goods up yo ass. The easiest way to smuggle money is actually through watches.
  79. The mechanism goes as follows: let’s say you want to transfer $1 million from country A to country B. You buy a watch (or several watches) using the $1 million in country A, hire a smuggler (or several smugglers if it’s multiple watches), and pay them the travel fee from country A to country B where they will wear the watch(es) and go undetected at custom. In country B, you then go to a second hand watch dealer or auction house or pawn shop, and sell the watch(es) in a quite lower price (if you don’t bring along the box and papers), and you then give the selling proceeds to your end recipient. Nice and easy, and low risk. Among the many luxury brands, Rolex, Patek Philippe, and Audemars Piguet in particular are popular for money smuggling/laundering due to their ability to retain prices in the secondary market and their liquidity (easy to buy and sell because of their brand name).
  80. Speaking of Rolex, the more I dig about the watch industry, the more I found strange stuffs and not necessarily reached a conclusion. For example, probably the most famous urban legend is that Rolex is technically and officially a non-profit organization. Which is true, but not quite accurate. So Rolex was founded in London by Hans Wilsdorf and his brother-in-law Alfred Davis. They started out in 1905 as “Wilsdorf and Davis” by distributing movements and placing them in watch cases, and sold these early wristwatches to jewelers who then put their own names on the dial. The men registered the name Rolex in 1908, the company became “Rolex Watch Co Ltd” in 1915, and then in 1919 they moved the company to Geneva in Switzerland and registered as “Rolex SA” in 1920. So it became a Swiss watch company. So far so good? Ok, here’s where it gets complicated. In 1944 Wilsdorf established the Hans Wilsdorf Foundation not long after his wife died, with the foundation functions as a private trust where he eventually left all of his Rolex shares. One of its big purposes is to make sure that some of the company’s income would go to charity. And when Wilsdorf died in 1960, the trust officially own Rolex SA.
  81. But to claim that Rolex is a non-profit company is not really accurate, because if we take a look at the structure within Rolex SA company, the company itself is still a for-profit organization, with billions of dollars of revenue each year, minus the sponsorships that they do like in tennis, golf, F1, yachting and equestrianism. But then Rolex SA is crossed-owned by hundreds of companies that own a share in each other – including some real estate portfolio, Tudor, etc – within the non-profit umbrella of Hans Wilsdorf Foundation. So why bothered registering it under a foundation? It so happens that in Switzerland taxes are lower for a foundation, and the law didn’t mandated foundations to reveal where its charity money go to. So, with the lack of transparency comes speculations where people claimed that the foundation was set up only to avoid taxes and not for charity purposes. The Hans Wilsdorf Foundation of course refute it, and claimed they have gifted 2 housing buildings to social institutions in Geneva and they say that they focus their charity on the environment, arts and science, as well as training people to become a certified watchmaker. But the thing is, they always fell short of providing the evidence.
  82. Every March in the US, the rate of vasectomy rises by 50%. After further investigation it turns out that the timing coincides with the March Madness in US college basketball season. It it because men tend to schedule the vasectomy (and more importantly, the recovery time) at around the most exciting period of the basketball season, so that they can watch the games during a medical leave from office. That is genius!
  83. During the medieval time, a wedding is a tense moment because there could be another person or even country who don’t agree with the marriage and would try to cancel the wedding by stealing the bride. That’s why 1. They used to have the best swordsman standing beside the groom (which after time when swordsmanship was no longer needed, the role evolved into only the best man) 2. Back then the bride wears the same dress as the bride’s maid so that the kidnapper won’t know which one is the real bride.
  84. There’s a beautiful story about a Beatles song, “Real Love.” The song was written by John Lennon and it was intended to be a part of a stage play that Lennon was working on, “The Ballad of John and Yoko.” The song was first recorded in 1977 with Lennon playing a piano at his house and recorded by a handheld tape recorder. But he kept changing it and would record many different versions of it up to 6 times between 1979 and 1980, before he eventually decided to just abandon it. And then on the evening of 8 December 1980 John Lennon was shot dead by a Beatles fan Mark David Chapman who was enraged by Lennon’s lifestyle and his cockiness. The song then was largely forgotten. That is, until 1988 when “take 6” of the song appeared on the “Imagine: John Lennon” soundtrack album. And then in 1995, 15 years after Lennon died, the Beatles decided to take the earliest version of the lyrical structure of the song and recorded it (the first time in 26 years since the band’s last recording in a studio) as part of the Beatles Anthology project. It was released in 1996 as a single, and earned a gold record quicker than any of the Beatles’ other songs. Unknowingly at the time, the song became the last new release by the Beatles before George Harrison died in 2001. It has since been covered by several artists, like the 2007 version by Regina Spektor that I listened the most, while in 2014 John Lewis used the cover by Tom Odell for that year’s Christmas ad, which is just magical.
  85. Have you ever observe a bunch of flamingo bird? Well the next time you do that, notice how some flamingos are less pink than the others. It is because those flamingos have just given birth, and it is the only animal that we can visibly sees that it is stressful and have its energy depleted as it becomes a new mom. I dunno, there’s something sweet but tragic about it. The loss of its brightness is only temporary though, and in due time the new mom will have her glow back.
  86. The origin of the term “hipster” comes from the Jazz age, specifically during the Prohibition era (1920-1933). So, when alcohol was banned in the US, people used to hide their drinks in hip flask and carry them around. And when people enter a club, if a patron asked “are you hip?” what they were really asking is if the person was carrying booze with them. The jazz musicians in the club and their fans gradually took the term and turned it into a status symbol, where “are you hip?” becomes synonymous with coolness (since carrying around an illegal alcohol was deemed to be rebellious). To be “hip” also meant that you were in the know and following the latest trend, since jazz music was the “it” thing in that era. And thus, to be a hipster means that you were a lover of jazz.
  87. Have you ever heard about the “lamp story”? The story was first told many years ago in the comment section of an r/AskReddit session by an anonymous person writing in the first-person narrative. It was allegedly a true story, but there was never a validation of its authenticity. Here’s the story: During the writer’s last semester at college he was assaulted by a football player almost twice his size, for walking where he was trying to drive, and then he got knocked unconscious. He then wake up and left, and not long after that he met a “wonderful young lady” whom he then pursue for months, dispatching a few jerk boyfriends, before he eventually won her over and two years later got married with her. Not long after, she bore him a daughter, while two years later his wife gave birth to a son, and he lived a happy life with a great family, good house, and a great job.
  88. But then one day he was sitting on a couch watching TV and he noticed that the lamp nearby was odd shaping. The lamp has a square base, red with gold trim on 4 legs and a white square shade. And although it is still looked 3D, it looked flat-ish or inverted. He couldn’t look away from it, so much so that he didn’t go to work the next day and decided to observe the lamp. He then stopped eating, left the couch only when he need to go to the bathroom, and he ended up spending 3 days transfixed to the lamp before his wife got really worried. She had someone to try to talk to him to no avail, she even bring the kids to her mother’s house, before it hit him: The lamp is not real, the house is not real, the wife, the kids, everything for the last 10 years of his life are not real.
  89. The lamp then started to grow wider and deeper, and he began to hear voices, screams, and feeling a tremendous amount of pain in his body. And then he woke up, still at college after the assault, surrounded by people. And then some cop came in and carry him away, took him inside the back of a cop car, and rushed him to the hospital where he got treatments and a brain scan, and found out that his brain had created the past 10 years of his life during the 10 seconds when he was knocked unconscious. That happy life and everything in it, never happened. A bit Kafkaesque, don’t you think? It’s almost like the inverse story of King Solomon in the Bible (where the dream state that he lived in was a nightmare scenario filled with hardship and suffering).
  90. The anonymous writer then said he went through about 3 years of horrid depression due to the lost of his wife and kids that he loved so much but never existed. And then after the OG post he said that he will not conduct any AMA (ask me anything); he also allows anyone to take his story for a screen play, book, etc; and then he just, disappeared, with the original post was even deleted. Naturally, this creates more hype and mystery, and it got picked up last year when plenty of people started to create their own skits based on the story, with #thelampstory clocking up to 73.5 million views on TikTok.
  91. Which transitioned nicely into my book of the year. This year I read a lot of existentialist-themed literatures, from the OG Fyodor Dostoevsky (White Nights and Notes From the Underground), to Albert Camus (The Stranger, The Plague, The Fall) and of course to Franz Kafka (Metamorphosis, Letter to His Father and In the Penal Colony). But the most fascinating existentialist literature that I’ve read so far got to be Kafka by the Shore by Haruki Murakami. Another favourite book this year is the Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins (that I’ve mentioned earlier, which shows what really happened with Indonesia around 1965 coup), Dangerous Rhythm by T. J. English (about the history of jazz and its criminal underworld), Why We Took the Car by Wolfgang Herrndorf (funniest), and I finally properly read Animal Farm by George Orwell, which was phenomenal. And of course I read the usual names: Ryan Holiday, Robert Greene, Karen Armstrong, Ernest Hemingway. But this year is the year when I was obsessed with reading Japanese literature (7 books in total). I even visited the legendary Jimbocho Book Town (home to 170 bookshops) in Tokyo, as described by the 2 book series Days at the Morisaki Bookshop (part 1 and part 2). So, the winner of book of the year for me? It is nearly impossible to chose one out of the best of the best, especially when these books are not apple-to-apple, ranges from a funny story, to a bizarre existentialism, to some serious histories. But if I have to choose one, the most enjoyable that I’ve read that consist of unbelievable treasure throve of information, which had an impact on my worldview, there’s only one book that did this: Dangerous Rhythm: Jazz and the Underworld by T. J. English. Click here to see the full list of the 53 books that I’ve read this year.
  92. There’s a very relatable term called “revenge bedtime procrastination.” It is when people who don’t really have control over their daytime schedule, they try to compensate it by NOT sleeping early so that they can regain some sense of freedom during the late night hours. I’m guilty as charged for this. I’m even writing this fact late at night, way past my bedtime.
  93. Shortly before sunset on 25 May 2003, a Boeing 727-223 airliner was stolen from the Quatro de Fevereiro Airport in Luanda, Angola, and just disappeared without a trace. The plane was stolen by two men Ben C. Padilla and John M. Mutantu – the former of which was a pilot and flight engineer from the United States while the latter was a hired mechanic from the Republic of the Congo – where the pair were believed to board the plane at 17:00 local time. The plane then began to taxiing without communication with the control tower, maneuvered frantically and entered the runway without clearance. Air traffic controller did attempt to make contact but to no avail. And the plane just took off shortly after, with no lights on, heading southwest over the Atlantic Ocean, and, just, disappeared. Now, the plane was filled with 53,000 liters of fuel, giving it a capability to flight around 2400 kilometers. However, the plane was nowhere to be found within those radius, no debris from the plane has ever been found, and the two men have not been seen ever since. No idea why they stole the plane for.
  94. At one point in his life, astrophysicist and Nobel laureate Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar used to travel 80 kilometers every week from the Yerkes Observatory to the University of Chicago, where he taught a course in Chicago attended only by two students, Lee Tsung-Dao and Yang Chen-Ning. When people are baffled with his sacrifice, the professor replied that they were simply very good students. And he was right. In 1957, both students were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, and the course taught by professor Chandrasekhar became the only course in history where all its students received a Nobel Prize.
  95. Sigmund Freud might be celebrated as the creator of psychoanalysis, but he is actually a cunt. So, apparently a lot of his female patients that came to him and said they were molested by their fathers, were diagnosed by Freud with hysteria. Because, he said, what they really have is an attraction to their father. So instead of curing the trauma of his patients, he gave a cult of sexual abusers a justification to gaslight the victims. This revelation was exposed by Jeffrey Mason, who was a Harvard grad who got this job in the Freud archive center, which he then spill it all in his book “The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory”, which caused a mixed response from the public between praises, condemnations, and controversies. Moreover, Candace Owen pointed out that Freud’s father was a pedophile, Freud himself was covering up for a lot of his pedophile friends, and his grandson Clement Freud was also a convicted pedophile. Runs in the family?
  96. Speaking of pedophile, last year Katt Williams said that 2024 will be the year when all truths will come out. I know that he’s talking only about the whole P. Diddy spiderweb, but goddamn how this year is really the year of the great reveal. Not only Diddy got arrested but a lot of names have emerged to be the alleged accomplice, from Ashton Kutcher, to LeBron, Usher, to Jay-Z and Beyonce. Not to mention the alleged deaths related with Diddy, such as Aliyah, Left Eye, Michael Jackson, Brittany Murphy, and Tupac, even Kobe was said to went to a Diddy party days before he died on a helicopter crash, and the most recent Liam Payne’s death was also said to be connected to the Diddy case (look at what he “spilled” at the Graham Norton talk show). Are all of this true? No idea. And I suspect that it will never be confirmed, unless 50 Cent’s Netflix documentary can prove it. Speaking of Beyonce, have you guys watched the viral videos about Grammy Winning artists looking scared to death and praising Beyonce at their speech? Lizzo, Lady Gaga, Britney Spears, Adele, which is weird. And conspiracy theories alleged that Amy Winehouse didn’t address Beyonce and she died not long after, and what about Wendy Williams that suddenly had dementia after commenting on Beyonce’s allegedly fake baby bump? Oh, but there’s more. It is said that the death of Aviici, Antony Bourdain, Chester Bennington all occurred after they’re trying to expose child trafficking ring. I wonder whether all of this are related? And whether they’re also related with Jeffrey Epstein’s pedo ring (which is allegedly Mossad-run, because Ghislaine Maxwell’s dad Robert Maxwell was indeed a Mossad agent)? They surely have one thing in common: pedophilia.
  97. And as I mentioned Mossad, weirder things are also resurfacing in this year of reveal. Like did you know that Israel provided training to Pablo Escobar’s paramilitary men? Israel apparently has also supplied arms to Myanmar in 2019 for their massacre towards Rohingyas, and are involved in the DR Congo Colbert mine exploitation through Dan Gertler. It has also been pointed out that ISIS never strike Israel, while an ISIS member captured in Libya turned out to be a Mossad operative. And of course probably the most shocking for me is the story about the 5 dancing Israelis during 9/11, which suggests that Israel is actually the mastermind behind 9/11 attack. What the hell is going on? There’s more. This link summarized pretty much everything, which covers who owns 96% of the media, who own every single porn sites and dating sites, the majority of Biden cabinet, Trump campaign funders, who control gun control, the LGBTQ movement, Disney, and some more, even covering slave trade. Of course, I keep thinking to myself when reading them, is this antisemitic? Well as they say, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and there’s indeed a receipt for every claim, so does revealing the truth antisemitic? Just double and triple check them all yourself. Afterall, it’s not like they’re saying ALL Jews are bad or evil (that would be antisemitic), but instead they’re revealing that these areas of lives are indeed controlled by the few powerful Jews. It’s like pointing out that Al Qaeda and ISIS are evil, and that doesn’t make it Islamophobic because it’s true. It becomes Islamophobic if you’re then saying that subsequently the entire religion of Islam is bad or evil, or every Muslims are bad or evil, just because of the wrong actions conducted by these extremist minority.
  98. Which brings us to wanker of the year: This year’s wanker is actually a list of people. People that are complicit in the most documented genocide in history: Benjamin Netanyahu, Itamar Ben-Gvir, Yoav Gallant, Isaac Herzog, Bezalel Smotrich, Daniel Hagari, Amichai Eliyahu, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Anthony Blinken, Linda Greenfield, Robert A. Wood, Rishi Sunak, Keir Starmer, Ursula von der Leyen, Olaf Scholz, Annalena Baerbock, Ronald Lauder, Miriam Adelson, Bill Ackman, Bill Maher, Ben Shapiro, all AIPAC-bribed member of Congress, and many more “pro-Israel” leaders, celebrities, and even influencers whose job is to spread Israeli propaganda. They all should rot in jail for their war crimes. Person of the year: Likewise, the person of the year is also a list. It is a lot of those brave journalists, doctors, medical personnel, UN Staffs, UN peacekeeper troops, everyone who are still sticking by on the ground in Gaza, West Bank, South Lebanon, etc, despite being threatened by Israel to move away or be killed. It is the organizations fighting for peace, such as Jews for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace. It is those people in power who can make a difference, and are doing their best to do so, such as Rashida Tlaib, Jill Stein, Francesca Albanese, Claire Daly, Mick Wallace, Dr. Jennifer Cassidy, and their awesome Irish colleagues. Journalists and influencers who inform us daily, such as Alan MacLeod, Assal Rad, Craig Murray, Mohamad Safa, Tiberius, Dr. Anastasia Maria Loupis, James O’Brien, Diana Buttu, Mario Nawfal, Glenn Greenwald, Lowkey, Omar Baddar, Mehdi Hasan, Jake Shield, and many more. And of course the Jewish intellectuals who stand up for the truth and justice, such as Norman Finkelstein, Gabor Mate, Ilan Pappe, Masha Gessen and other prominent Jews who are banned by Germany for speaking up for Palestine (no sense of irony there).
  99. And there you have it, the year of the great reveal. We are indeed live in a precarious circumstance where the truth are coming out in abundance but there are still a lot of people who either in denial of them, ignoring them, or worst, attacking them. You know how that popular saying goes? “If you wonder what you would have done in Nazi Germany, you are doing it today.” I must admit, it gets so damn tiring sometimes, and borderline depressing because the assholes are getting away with their many violations towards international law with no accountability and there’s nothing we can do about it (hence I found my sanctuary in existentialist literatures this year and can’t for the life of me finish a heart-warming book by Mitch Albom). Indeed, the world is broken, the world is rigged, and that also includes Indonesian domestic politics which needs a separate long-post to even begin to touch the surface. All that constitutional rape, celebrity money-laundering web, and multiple tax increases to pay for an unnecessary mega project ridden with massive corruptions, while giving amnesty to the wealthy and increasing minimum wages for the poor (while not offering any assistance to the middle class, hence squeezing them dry) are all just frustrating to watch. Up to a point where in the most recent November regional election 43% of eligible people in Jakarta didn’t vote and 8.6% chose to vote all candidates on the paper (making it void). That’s how much apathy and cynicism people have towards the current political establishment.
  100. And so I’m closing this year’s 100 things with a Kafkaesque note, where just like the character Benjamin the Donkey in Animal Farm, all we can do is to be fully aware of what’s really going on, witness it unfold in front of our eyes without having any power to help, while struggling everyday to prevent ourselves to becoming what that poem by Hareem Ch describes (losing our voice and becoming silent). I just hope that in 2025 justice will somehow prevail, and that we’re not living in Kafka’s Metamorphosis or The Trial where justice are nowhere to be found, but rather unknowingly living in the Penal Colony where the machine will self-destroy the operator. After all, here I come to Railway Tuan Cafe in Hanoi to specifically meet Mr. Tuan himself, a super nice guy whom in July became famous worldwide for expelling an Israeli tourist (and his family) from his cafe. He was instantly smeared by genocide lovers as antisemitic and being praised by the rest of humanity for standing up against genocide, while the truth was he simply responded to the aggression of the Israeli tourist (a “professional victim”) against his Free Palestine sticker in the cafe. Because, as he explained to me, how can you keep quiet while (he’s pointing at my kids) innocent children are being slaughtered? His story is a reminder that the smallest voice through the tiniest medium (a sticker) can still make a worldwide impact if done right. Imagine what we can do when we all realized that we’re not the powerless minority after all, but collectively we become the silent majority.