Word: dragons
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What the surveyors had failed to detect was the baleful presence of an invisible cliff dweller-a dragon widely believed by local villagers to have lived there at least since the Sung Dynasty...
According to the village patriarch, Man Hing-lap, the bulldozers have aroused the dragon from his slumbers and he is now breathing vengeance on the local population. The first victim was Man's grandson, who came down with a mysterious fever. A few days later, seven other of his grandchildren were similarly stricken. Aghast, Man called for his local diviner, who quickly appraised the situation: the dragon's nose had been cut off by a bulldozer; in revenge, the dragon had put a curse on the whole Man clan, which since the 1200s has made...
Villagers prevailed upon construction workers to stop work until the dragon had been propitiated. Taoist priests were brought in to exorcise the demon. A member of the Man family predicted a "bloodbath" if government officials did not meet the village's demands. These included payment of thousands of dollars in expenses for exorcism and for hospitalization of stricken members of the Man family. For good measure, villagers mixed in a shakedown with their superstitions and demanded that the government construct a new drainage system and sidewalks for the village...
With its night still pierced by nearly all of its famous neon jungles, Tokyo is something of a dragon's palace. It is an outlandish monument to nonchalance in the face of a fuel shortage and economic repercussions that will hurt Japan far more than the U.S., and even more than Western Europe. But behind its hectic face, there is a clearly sensed feeling of desperation, the atmosphere of a Japanese Walpurgisnacht...
Vietvets spoke of "toe-poppers," "daisy cutters" and "dragon's teeth" -all antipersonnel maiming explosives that they had used in Viet Nam. Anthony Russo, who helped to make the Pentagon papers public, recalled that, as the war escalated, he once took a grenade to the computer room of the Rand Corporation. "I wanted to throw it in there," he testified. "Had I been younger, I think I would have done...