Tibetan Vampire: fun is universal across time and culture

Talk about a mystery. Where does a Tibetan kid in remote Litang get a set of wax vampire fangs? I mean, I had these things 60 years ago in West Virginia. Watching him play vampire to a couple of rarely seen Westerners brought back my childhood. I can remember what the teeth tasted like after I chewed them into a ball of wax. Fun is universal, it crosses culture and time.

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Happy Valentines Day: A Love Story

“You don’t fu….. care about me!” It came from a young woman sitting in a car beside Turtle. “You don’t treat me like you did before. You don’t treat me the same fu….. way you did before we got married.” A young man, stood tall beside her window, hands at his sides, outer calm mirrored in his desert camouflage uniform, defending himself in an even tone. “It’s not me. It’s you,” he said.

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Laotian Time Bombs: A war’s explosive environmental legacy (Sierra Magazine, Feb. 2011)

Our risk was nothing compared to the average Laotian farmer, wandering children, firewood gathering women, who know their next footstep can mean death, or for some worse, maiming, in a poor country where everyone must contribute.

Some facts: 270 million of these bombies were dropped on a country the size of Utah. Of the more than 50,000 people killed or maimed by the bombings, 20,000 have occurred after the end of the war. An average of one person a day is killed or maimed in Laos now, nearly 40 years later.

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