A few days ago, I mentioned the report that the world-famous Shaolin Temple in China was going to sell stock in its related tourist infrastructure.

Today, according to the BBC, the temple is denying any such plans. However, it sounds as if the China Travel Service may go ahead with the stock market listing.

Would anyone like to buy a piece of hype around this 1,500-year-old landmark?

It may not be the most crucial result of Britain's Raj in India, but still... How odd that a certain Lieutenant WLS Churchill never paid for the 13 rupees worth of alcohol he drank at the Bangalore Club.

The ledger entry showing that the club wrote off the future British prime minister's debt is dated June 1, 1899.

A number of British citizens have offered to make good Churchill's debt - which would be about $0.28 US today. The Bangalore Club refuses such offers, though. After all, you shouldn't erase history.

Photo of Lt. Winston Churchill, c. 1900, by J.E. Purdy. Library of Congress Prints and Photos Collection.

Just when it seemed that the world-famous Shaolin Temple, home to the kung fu fighting monks of movie and comic book fame, couldn't get any more commercialized... the abbot announced plans to sell Shaolin stocks on China's stock market.

Although like most Buddhist temples in China, Shaolin was purged of monks and artifacts in the 1960s during the Cultural Revolution, it began to recover in the 1980s. Today, more than one million tourists from China and abroad visit the temple each year.

The shares to be sold are not in the temple itself, per se, but in the tourism company that runs the hotels, buses, cable car and other tourist amenities associated with Shaolin.

See more photos of the Shaolin monks in action!

Photo by Cancan Chu / Getty Images.

An article in today's New York Times highlights the problems that Mongolia's pastoralists face today.

The Central Asian nation is one of only a handful on Earth that still have significant populations of nomadic herders. Mongolian pastoralists have lived by raising herds of horses, camels, sheep or goats on the wide-open grasslands since well before Genghis Khan's day.

However, according to the Times, modern-day herders face a number of problems, including fluctuating market prices for commodities like wool and flour, as well as environmental changes wrought by global climate change.

Here's hoping that this generation of Mongolians won't be the last to follow in the footsteps of their ancestors out on the steppe.

Photo by neurmadic aestetic on Flickr.com.