Quote of the Week

"Ever since eating a chicken fetus and drinking turtle blood in Beijing a few years ago, I’ve felt compelled to sample the local culinary weirdness of my various travel destinations. I bought a bottle complete with a ten-inch centipede suspended in the booze."

That's Steve Asma, effervescent philosophy professor at Columbia College Chicago, writing (eventually) about retired Buddhas in a cave up the Mekong in Laos. Read the whole thing; it may give you a taste for his book, The Gods Drink Whiskey, a first-person tour of Buddhism as it is and not as many western devotees wish it were. Review here (2005; PDF).