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Well, I'm a medium-dark black guy (about the tone of Denzel Washington). It takes me a full summer of working in the sun to get a "farmer's tan" in the midwest (Oklahoma through Nebraska).
I went to Oahu and got one by the second day. After a couple of days of bicycling, I had Y-marks on the sides of my face from the helmet straps.
I had a couple of white friends there--one male, one female--who have suffered the removal of their ears because of skin cancer. Never knew that to happen to anyone in Oklahoma, not even farmers who had spent their entire lives in the sun.
You must have friends with some very bad luck - I've never roamed the islands and seen anyone with missing ears.
They had been serious with outdoor sports--particularly surfing. They wore visors and baseball caps that gave them no protection for their ears. That's why I always wear hats with wide brims all around. I've never been sunburned, but skin cancer doesn't require burning, just enough accumulated radiation.
It's nothing to joke about. A friend just had a piece of his nose removed in February due to a skin cancer. Fortunately, today plastic surgery and silicon prosthetics help keep such surgery from being as disfiguring as it used to be.
Overall about 1 in 5 Americans develop skin cancers, and 1 in 50 develop the most dangerous kind, called melanomas, which can kill you if left untreated. And for reasons that should be obvious, the ears are the third most common place they occur.
Not to mention that Hawai'i has the highest rate of skin cancers in the country, due to our proximity to the equator and outdoor lifestyles, which gives us higher exposure to the most harmful rays. Use sunblock, and wear big brimmed hats and long sleeve shirts as much as possible to keep sun off the most vulnerable areas.
Sunglasses that block UV rays, too. No need to fry the eyes.
Folks going to Hanauma Bay usually forget the sunblock on the backs of their ears and get nasty sunburns there.
The sun really ages the skin, too. We visited Alaska where they don't get as much sun on them as we do here and some of the folks we talked to were older - eighty plus - but they didn't look over what we are used to seeing as fifty or sixty.
Usta be, we're talking back in the sixties, here - folks in the MidWest would mix baby oil with iodine and use that as tanning lotion. Someone tried that on Waikiki beach and ended up in the emergency room for burns. Heck of a way to spend a vacation. They'd been warned, but didn't listen, too.
No rain this January in California, reservoir levels are running low.
As a result, the snowpack in the Sierras--a critical reservoir of water that is used throughout the rest of the year--is abysmally low, running about 30% of normal for this time of year. California's eight largest reservoirs are 33% - 86% below their historical average, and the portion of the state covered by the highest level of drought expanded in mid-January--a very ominous occurrence for the height of the rainy season.
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