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The Sacred Hairy Family of Burma: A Forgotten Royal Curiosity
Johannes & Co Recent headlines about India’s Lalit Patidar, the teenager with the world’s hairiest face, have stirred memories in Myanmar of an extraordinary family once known across the globe as the “Hairy People of Burma.” In the 19th century, four generations of one Burmese family captivated royalty and colonials alike with their striking appearance—faces and bodies thickly covered in hair due to a rare genetic condition known as hypertrichosis lanuginosa. Unlike Patidar, their condition affected their entire bodies, earning them the nickname “monkey people”—a label far removed from their otherwise ordinary intelligence and manner. At the heart of this story was Shwe-Maong, first recorded by British envoy John Crawfurd in 1826 during a diplomatic mission to King Bagyidaw’s court in Ava, following the First Anglo-Burmese War. Gifted to the king as a child from present-day Laos, Shwe-Maong grew up within the royal court, eventually marrying and fathering four children—one of whom, Maphoon, inherited his distinctive hair. Maphoon herself became a figure of fascination. When Captain Henry Yule visited Amarapura in 1855, he found her widowed but living comfortably. She had refused an Italian suitor after the king offered a generous dowry to ensure she married a Burmese man. That union produced Moung-Phoset, equally furry, who went on to have a daughter—Mah-Me—who also carried the genetic trait. This unusual lineage spanned nearly a century in Mandalay, serving successive kings, receiving royal privileges, and even managing market taxation under King Mindon. Their tale took an international turn in 1886, after the fall of King Thibaw and the collapse of the Burmese monarchy. With the help of Italian ex-military advisor Captain Paperno, Maphoon and Moung-Phoset travelled to Europe, performing at London’s Egyptian Hall and later under P.T. Barnum’s banner in the U.S. as the “Sacred Hairy Family of Burma.” Maphoon, reportedly blind by then, died in Washington in 1888. What became of Moung-Phoset remains a mystery. Despite their global fame in the 1800s, no similar cases of hypertrichosis have been recorded in Myanmar since. The family’s story, once at the intersection of science, spectacle and empire, now lingers as a curious chapter in both medical history and Burmese folklore. -2025-04-09 -
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Pruning trees Thai style
It a Thai thing. I could prune a tree like them with a chain saw or axe. I planted a lemon tree, my wife has a gardener guy come in each month. Chops the Sxxx out of the tree. I lose plot with my wife. She says we got to make it look good.🤣🤣🤣 I like and walk around reservoir everyday, all trash left on ground, they come to take photos of nature. Empty food containers, masks, bottle, cans and plastic cups. When I walk now best sleep not to look a ground or I get pxxxed off. All that a side Thailand is amazing. -
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World stock markets plunge again as Trump doubles down on tariffs
So last October, when Scott Bessent, soon to become Treasury secretary, said that Trump was really a free trader who used tariffs as a negotiating tactic, Wall Street was eager to believe him. “It’s escalate to de-escalate,” Bessent told The Financial Times. This claim was obviously absurd. Trump has been obsessed with tariffs, which he called “the most beautiful word in the dictionary,” for decades. In his 2018 book “Fear,” Bob Woodward reported that Trump scrawled “TRADE IS BAD” in the margin of a speech he gave after the G20 summit. It makes sense that Trump would see things this way. When he makes sales, whether of Trump University courses or Trump-branded cryptocurrency, he is usually taking advantage of the buyer, and he views global trade through the same zero-sum lens. It’s widely known that during his first term, the so-called adults in the room thwarted some of Trump’s most destructive whims. There have been far fewer such figures in the Trump sequel, resulting in the wholesale degradation of American governance. The conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer just directed a purge of the National Security Council. Thanks to Elon Musk’s haphazard cuts, employees who once worked to prevent the spread of diseases like Ebola are gone, as are nuclear safety experts. There’s no one in the executive branch willing to publicly push back on Trump’s threats to take over Canada. Somehow, traders failed to recognize that there would eventually be economic fallout from such profound misrule. “The markets should have put two and two together that if you’re talking about annexing Greenland, Canada, the Panama Canal, you’re probably going to be more radical on trade as well,” said Berezin. But Wall Street professionals, like so many other ostensibly smart people, refused to see Trump clearly, mistaking his skill as a demagogue for wisdom as a policymaker. “I don’t think this was foreseeable,” a mournful Ackman posted on X on Monday. “I assumed economic rationality would be paramount.” What an odd assumption to make about a man who bankrupted casinos. Usually, if stocks go down, so do yields on U.S. Treasuries, because they become more desirable to people looking for a safe place to park money. At least right now, that’s not happening, which he thinks could signal a crisis of confidence in the stability of the U.S. government and the debt it issues. “If we’re moving to this new world where the U.S. just can’t be trusted, then do we really want to hold a lot of Treasuries?” he said as he sketched out investors’ thinking. “Do we really want to use the dollar as a reserve?” It turns out that there’s a price for taking all the soft power America has accrued since World War II and setting it on fire. Who knew. -
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