Beat your wife in India, and you’ll be beaten back. By a mob of women in pink saris.

They are the Gulabi (’Pink’) Gang, in one of India’s northern states and poorest regions. Theirs is an area comprised of 20% untouchables, beset by drought and unemployment, and targeted in the past for a massive jobs-for-work program. But local government officials regularly come down against the poor: a policeman recently arrested an untouchable, but didn’t register a case against him. The Gulabi Gang stormed the precinct, and gave the policeman a thrashing.

Their spitfire leader says they are ‘a gang for justice.’ Sampat Pal Devi was forced into marriage at the age of 12, and had her first child when she was 13. This is hardly unusual: in village society, the deck is heavily stacked against women’s rights and education. She worked as a government health worker, organizing meetings with neighborhood women on her own time.

They aren’t all women. Men speak with equal passion not just about dowries or child marriages, but about diminishing water resources and farm subsidies. The Gulabi Gang leaped into the spotlight only after it intercepted three tractors of wheat being pilfered from a public distribution program. They beat the thieves with lathis - traditional Indian sticks - and sandals.

The Wieliczka Salt Mine is known as ‘the underground cathedral of Poland.`This is because an entire city has been carved out of its very walls. Over the years, legions of anonymous workers carved bits of their workplace into everything they could think of, from saints to gnomes. Starting in the late 19th century, three miners decided to etch out a whole chapel as well, to the patron saint of mining, St. Kinga. It took them sixty-eight years.Salt used to be as valuable as silver. First evidence of this mine’s existence comes from 1044 A.D., and tourists have been recorded since the 15th Century - including Poland’s premier astronomer, Nicolaus Copernicus. The twists and turns of the mine – only three percent of which tourists can access - stretch for two hundred kilometers, and go as far as three hundred meters underground. Some of the tunnels are so wide that they were used as airplane factories by the Nazis.Buried beneath one of the most Catholic countries on the planet, the mine also has restaurants, bars, and a formal dance area that is great for weddings. And lest you ever forget where you stand, even the chandlers are dripping with salt.

Every year in New York City, a five-foot penguin walks the streets.

He is actually half-penguin, half-chicken: “Chengwin.” And for whatever reason, this oversized Sesame Street hallucination has become an annual fixture in the streets of downtown Gotham. He always arrives with a cheering hipster mob, oftentimes with a live band in tow, to battle his archnemesis: his half-brother, Chunk. Chunk is half-chicken, half-skunk, and has his own entourage of black-clad musclenecks in dark shades. People rarely cheer for Chunk.

They battle. They literally rumble in the streets, mostly by way of head butts and kicks to the shin. But this is more than a mere guerrilla theater street fight: it is Chengwin versus Chunk, good versus evil. Ignore the hipsters behind the curtains: this is a morality tale, a fable come to life, and the fairy tale ending always wins out. Always, Chengwin emerges victorious.

The half-chicken/half-something family has expanded over the years: there is Chove, a half-chicken/half-dove whom Chengwin married in 2006; Chabio, half-chicken/half-Fabio, who is dreamy; and Chixon, half-chicken/half-Nixon, who is cantankerous. There have been weddings, foot races, and a Million Chengwin March. But always, there is the war.

Don’t ask why.

Dolphins play frisbee with bubble rings.

This suggests that they understand both play, and fluid dynamics. After first creating invisible vortices in the water with their tailfins, these dolphins - particularly children - then infuse the vortices with air from of their blowhole. The result are called air-core vortex rings, and can be up to two feet in diameter.

The invisible dance of physics keeps the ring from going anywhere, at least for about ten seconds. But that is long enough for some playful porpoises to nudge the ring along wherever they like, and admire their handiwork. When they’re finished with their liquid toy, they bite it, and it breaks into thousands of tiny bubbles that, far more predictably, float to the surface.

They can also create helices up to twenty feet long. The same rules apply.

Ring-blowing stops entirely when children are outnumbered by adults. Which suggests the worrisome possibility that all species eventually grow up to be killjoys.

Moko Jumbies first protected believers from evildoers. Originally a West African tradition, men and women on gigantic stilts would dress in long gowns and masquerade as gods. Gods can look down on humanity from above, and foresee danger better than mere mortals. The stilt-walkers would collect donations, from revelers and onlookers on second-story balconies.

They now dance in the streets of Trinidad and Tobago for every Carnival. ‘Moko’ is the name of the an old African god, ‘the diviner.’ ‘Jumbies’ - ‘ghosts’ - was added by the emancipated slaves. After decades of decline, a man by the name of ‘Dragon’ Glen de Souza actually revived the Moko Jumbie tradition in the early 1990s, in an effort to teach children how to dance.

There is now one premier school for Moko Jumbies in all the world: the Keylemanjahro School of Art & Culture. It is open six days a week, has about one hundred and fifty students, and takes its name from Key (to open doors), le (the first two letters of ‘leader’), man (as in ‘mankind’), jah (the Rastafarian word for God), and ro, for the roar of the crowd as the Moko Jumbies come down the street.

This school keeps children off the streets. They often practice long after sunset, enjoying the cool night air in the midst of their exertion: each stilt can weigh up to twenty-five pounds. The youngest student was Dragon’s own son: he was two.

Chinese zombies devour life force. George Romero’s zombies only eat brains. That’s the difference.

‘Zombie’ isn’t actually the word. The literal translation of Jiang Shi comes out as ’stiff corpse.’ But in English, the best translation reads, ‘Hopping Vampire.’ They hop, because Chinese undead suffer from rigor mortis. They are also blind, and depend on their sense of smell.

The origins of Jiang Shi might stem from the old tradition of carrying dead bodies on bamboo poles. The resulting bounce, up and down along the long road home, gave them the appearance of hopping. And as vampires, these poor folks need your life energy, your qi.

According to the movies - of which there were plenty, in 1980s Hong Kong - Chinese hopping vampires have long tongues and fingernails, and dress in Qing Dynasty clothing. They can be battled with spells (written with chicken’s blood on thin yellow paper), an eight-sided Baqua Mirror, a sword made of lucky Chinese coins powered by the light of a full moon, blood (which freezes them in place), and sticky rice. The sticky rice is lethal.

Funerals are an opportunity to go out with some style. When Josephine Baker died in France, Paris came to a standstill. Jim Henson banned people from wearing black, and had a chorus of Muppets sing the send-off. Hunter S. Thompson had his ashes shot into space, because let’s be honest: he really, really loved guns.

In Ghana, they might bury you in a giant shoe.

In a suburb outside of Accra, the fantasy coffin industry is booming. Many of these hand-crafted creations reflect the trades of those who have passed: shoes for the cobblers, hammers for the carpenters - perhaps a Coca-Cola bottle for the street salesman.

Hens are particularly popular for young mothers, to symbolize maternal love. Occasionally an unrepentant drinker will partake of one last gigantic bottle of Heineken. A gynaecologist once ordered a six-foot uterus. The idea is to leave with dignity, and pride in a life well lived.

If in doubt, a gigantic Bible remains a popular option. And Cadillacs.

This is a fairly new idea. Sometime in the first half of the twentieth century, a village chief commissioned a famous carver for a gigantic cocoa bean, then a major crop in Ghana. The chief soon died - but why let all that hard work go to waste?

And so a tradition was born.

In order to commune with God, some people dance with poisonous snakes.

And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover. —Mark 16:17-18

The verse above serves as the inspiration for serpent handling, a religious movement which sprang up in 1920s Appalachia. The robber barons of the coal industry had decimated the fabric of the community, and many Appalachians felt compelled to turn to something more reliable: “the word of God.” And God, as it turned out, said a lot of interesting things.

Illegal in many states, sometimes since the 1940s, many practitioners hold services in their homes. They also speak in tongues, practice faith healing, and sometimes ‘drink any deadly thing,’ including battery acid. Getting bit by a stray water moccasin is taken as evidence of lack of faith. They prefer the term ’serpents,’ not ’snakes’ - snakes aren’t always poisonous. Many God-fearing serpent-handlers wear their beliefs on their sleeve: many are missing fingers, and their limbs are now distorted from the effects of venomous bites.

Nearly a century old, serpent handling does not seem to be going anywhere. A church opened up in Alberta, Canada in 2004.

“The Amish have the best parties.”

This boy was very drunk, and totally serious. He was just one of hundreds of Pennsylvania teenagers who were captured on camera during the filming of Devil’s Playground, a film about the Amish period of rumspringa. Starting around the age of sixteen, Amish children are allowed, if they so desire, to explore life among ‘the English’ - non-Amish North Americans.

Rumspringa literally means ‘running around.’ It isn’t so much a tradition, per se, as it is the concept of Amish adolescence. During the years of rumspringa, Amish children can drive cars, wear makeup, and apparently, throw wicked shindigs out on the farm. This is especially true for those in larger communities like in Pennsylvania, while smaller Amish populations tend to have far less of a wild streak: small-town life is pretty boring the world over.

The deal in Amish culture is that the children can experience the outside world to their heart’s content, and get it out of their system, before returning to the community of their own will. Occasionally, a few newly adventurous youths will stay away, and strike out on their own in the ‘English’ world. But most come back, accept baptism into adulthood, and allow the dangers and deviance of rumspringa to become mere memory.

But that doesn’t mean that people forget. In Devil’s Highway, one grizzled old farmer confessed that he was truly happy, as an Amish man in an Amish town. But he did miss one thing from rumspringa: his car.

Chittagong is where supertankers go to die.

One supertanker can carry about two million barrels of oil, which is about as much crude as Hong Kong consumes in a week. At the end of their life, half of these behemoths - provided they don’t go out with more of a bang, like the Exxon Valdez - eventually wind up here, on this beach in Bangladesh. They charge towards land at full steam during high tide, and ground themselves into the mud.

Thousands of impoverished Bangladeshis proceed to tear them apart with their bare hands. Gut the insides, drain the tank, and cart off every piece of metal you can carry, from the main deck down to the doorknobs. Eighty percent of the country’s steel comes from these ship-breaking yards.

Hard hats and goggles don’t exist here. This is Bangladesh: one immense labor pool, near-zero labor or environmental laws, and no records of how many people get hurt or killed. All told, oil tanker disassembly both directly and indirectly employs around 200,000 people. Women and children work until sundown and through the night sifting through the sand for the last scraps to sell to local merchants. Most workers manage to earn around two dollars a day.

It is both beautiful and terrifying, like Mad Max come to life.