"Your English is so good"

In a feature on the Chinese pianist Yuja Wang in the latest The New Yorker, written by the famed writer Janet Malcolm, I was struck by a particular paragraph ---

Yuja speaks in fluent—more than fluent—English, punctuated by laughter that gives one to understand that what she is saying is not to be taken too seriously, and that she is not a pompous or pretentious person. Occasionally, there is the slightest trace of an accent (vaguely French) and a lapse into the present tense.

This attention paid to Wang's English, in her accent and grammar, is fascinating to me, probably because I have been told many times something similar. "Your English is so good. You hardly have any accent. How old were you when you came to America? Where did you learn English?"

Do I feel offended by this? Well, oddly enough, not when I was on the receiving end of what is intended as compliments, but yes when I read this paragraph by Malcolm.

I have heard that such compliments are considered a "microaggression" nowadays, which I do not necessarily disagree with. Contrary to the movement about microaggressions, however, I don't want to tell people to stopping saying such things to me. I don't want people to stop expressing aggressions, especially micro ones, to each other.

I don't know if I can explain clearly why I think that. There are many reasons. At least one of these is that the expression of microaggression reveals something about the person who is delivering it. The expression itself reveals something about Janet Malcolm, and my reaction to it reveals something about myself. Exactly what that something is is not easily described.

What exactly is it that drove Malcolm to comment on Wang's English? Did she expect Wang to speak English with a Chinese accent or Chinglish and was surprised? Wang started living in North America since 14 (she's now 29). Is it surprising? Or is it because, as a writer, Malcolm is particularly sensitive to languages, particularly accents and grammar? Or did she feel threatened by Wang on an unconscious level and felt the need to emphasize Wang's otherness?

Why am I touched by this paragraph? Perhaps I have always wondered why people complimented on my English and the lack of accent. I shouldn't have dismissed it as mundane compliment and missed the opportunity to understand them more deeply.

In principle, I do not think it is good to prohibit people to express microaggressions, or even macroaggressions. I do not believe in repression and suppression because I believe they lead to explosion. To deny others' aggression is to deny my own. If I want to be allowed to express a full range of my own emotions, then everyone must be allowed as well. As long as we don't kill each other, some verbal expression of aggression may be more healthy than pretending to be perfectly harmonious and perfect.

Without aggression, life would be so lifeless, and we would never have a glimpse into Janet Malcolm in a piece she wrote. We'd never get to know each other, even if such knowledge is always colored with our own projection.

The Damsel-in-Distress Trope

Women have griped about the trope a lot. I can understand the complaint. Although it is true that most homicides are committed by men, most victims of homicides are also men, with the exception of domestic homicide (Kellerman and Mercy, 1992). The line between condemnation and exploitation on the writers' part and between being horrified and thrilled on the readers' part can be blurry.

In The Devil's Star, a thriller by Jo Nesbo in the Harry Hole series, a series of four murders were committed, in which 3 victims were young women, 1 was a young man. I searched my heart and, to my chagrin, had to admit that the death of the young man seemed less "thrilling" (or what the Chinese call 惊悚) than the women's. Perhaps because I am a woman, the murder of a woman seems more identifiably terrible to read about. Why do men like to read about murders of women, especially a young, pretty woman of reproductive age? Maybe this is a belief or instinct buried in all humans --- women are a more valuable/precise/scarce resource than men to our species/tribe, thanks to the inefficiency of childbearing. Every woman is needed in the game of reproduction for the tribe. Instinctively, we feel a greater loss in a woman's death. The same reasoning goes for our feelings toward the untimely death of a young person versus an old one. 

Also, yes, murders with a sexual motive thrill readers a lot more than murders for money. Financial motives were once common in "cozy" mysteries, in which one has much room to play with the issue of inheritance. Social changes have rendered those stories obsolete, even if homicide for money remains common in the real world. What other motives can mystery writers use but sex and revenge? Political murders and assassinations belong in its own subgenre. 

Well, frankly, murders for money or politics are just not as intimate and therefore as thrilling as more emotional and personal motives such as revenge and sex (including jealousy and various perversions). It's human nature. The market is unlikely to get tired of them any time soon.  

Fatal Attraction

A person, often but not always a woman, has a romantic liaison with someone, but then changes her mind or loses interest. The jilted lover is so obsessed and/or angry at the end of the affair that he stalks her and kills her. The plot is used often in murder thrillers. Underneath the obvious condemnation of the perpetrator is a faint suggestion of blame that the victim somehow brought it on herself. If she had not slept with the wrong man, if she had kept her eyes open and nose clean, if she had read him correctly ... she would not have provoked his murderous obsession.

Such things obvious do happen, including some high-profile cases, but I wonder how often they really occur. Of all the people I have met and known in my life, no one behaved obsessively and possessively toward their partner, nor were they trapped in a relationship with an obsessive and possessive partner. What's it like to believe, with conviction, that your life will be destroyed if she leaves you? It must be a frightening feeling. It's not realistic of course, but it's a possibility in rare circumstances. Does it happen to only a rare person, or could potentially happen to most people if the "right person came along"? 

楼兰（更多）

楼兰里的短篇小说，越看越让我心惊肉跳。井上靖在其中的写作手法是我从未见过别人采用的。简单概括之就是：远镜头 --> 特写 --> 远镜头。长镜拍的是宏观景象，如俯视大漠，然后zoom in到大漠上的一黑点：可能是一个人骑一匹骆驼跋涉，马上就要渴死了。然后再zoom out到俯视大漠镜头，显示出一个渴死的人和骆驼多么微不足道。只不过他这个长短镜头的标度，既是空间，更是时间。长镜拍的是几百年乃至几千年的历史，突然zoom in到微小的个人命运，乃至一个人生命中的那一瞬转折点，然后突然zoom out，将个人弃之不理，刷一下跳过几百年。个人之渺小，人生之短暂，跟历史大漠的强烈反差，冲击想象力有限的大脑。比这效果更强烈的作品我是没有见过。The mind is too feeble to handle the vastness of space and time.  真有点吃勿消的感觉，按照眼下流行的说法就是细思恐极。

The Social Stability Pill (cont.)

The pill that has brought peace and stability to the world is now a problem. In country after country, economy has collapsed because of unmotivated young people who have lost interest in not only procreation but also consumption. A deep and pervasive laziness has permeated society. Besides eating, sleeping, taking the pill, people at all ages are content with little material goods, small living quarters, and online diversions. The pill disarms the competitive urges and no one wants to bother with keeping up with the Joneses any more. GDPs continue to plummet along with birth rates.

Under the protests of older people who now have to keep working until they die to financially support themselves, governments finally move to ban the use of the orgasm pill in anyone pre-menopause, which means men are not allowed access to the pill until they are in their seventies. However, thanks to black markets and illegal trades, the pill is still circulating. People are used to the minimalist lifestyle. Natural instincts recovery very slowly. Even off the pill, most behave as if they were still on it. Birth rates, although no longer near zero, hover around 1.

Cities are abandoned. Productions are halted. Populations dwindled.

Just when civilizations lay in the happy ruin and hope is dimming, a tribe of Polynesians sail out of their island and spread rapidly across the world. Isolated from the rest of the world, they have not been exposed to the orgasm pill and therefore remain "barbaric" with all their sexual instinct intact. They meet little resistance on their way to conquer the entire world. They fight, kill, and breed as humans did before the orgasm pill was invented. Humanity enters a new era.

A Hypothetical Solution for Stability (short fiction)

By 2050, stability has become the number 1 priority of the domestic policy for the Chinese government, now that international military conflicts are no longer a major concern. Expenditure on recruiting, feeding, housing, and training millions of young men in the armed forces will have to be cut. But where else would these young men go? There are shortages of jobs, housing, and especially young women of the same age for them to marry. The gender imbalance is already causing social problems and skyrocketing crimes, flooding the general population with millions of young men would be disastrous.

The unspoken fear, of course, goes deeper. Ruling a country with massive number of young men with no way to relieve their sexual frustration will be akin to sitting on a bomb with a short fuse. A charming cult leader, an underground religion, an innocuous social campaign, any excuse, could lead to the throne blowing up under their butts. The only possible solution, starting a large-scale war with another country, is not viable.

What to do? What to do? One day the minister of interior comes into the central committee with a brilliant invention that has come from the health department: An orgasm pill with effects every bit as satisfactory as a real thing and, in most cases, far better than masturbation. It acts on the central nervous system only, but induces the same physiological response, short term and long term. Side effects are few and minor. It does not affect one's reproductive functions at all.

The first recipients on which the pill is tested, of course, are male prisoners. Almost immediately, their aggression dropped. They become unusually relaxed and pleasant in social interactions. Violent outbursts disappear. Everyone walks around with a sprint in their steps and a smile on his lips. Next the pill is tested on female prisoners. The same. Then it is tested in adolescent boys' reform schools, where the most dramatic effect is seen. The boys do not necessarily become smarter or more social, but they no longer get into fights. The pill seems to kill not only their aggression but also their competitive urges. No one seems to care much if he is the top dog in the herd.

The dream of social stability has finally come true, the central committee rejoices. All ten members of the committee vote to approve the plan to release the orgasm pill to the public across the country, except on military bases. At first, they are worried that not everyone is willing to take the pill and those who refuse the pill will be too violent for the rest. In reality it never happens. People of all ages love the pill and the more people take it the more it is sought after. Among the pill's fans are not only young men who cannot find a date but also middle-aged couples who no longer find each other desirable, middle-aged men who don't have enough money to court young women, and women who are too busy making a living to find a husband. The pill is cheaper than buying sex from prostitutes and poses no health or legal risk whatsoever. It is perfect. Within six months, violent crimes are reduced to near zero. Society has never been so stable and peaceful. Happiness is in the air from the Black Dragon River to the Hong Kong harbor.

Other countries take note. Crime-ridden big cities and war-torn countries offer to pay astronomical amounts of money for the formula of the orgasm pill. The cost of policing goes down sharply. Men and women throughout the world finally get the best sex they can hope for and they don't even have to lift a finger to get it. Paradise.

Then, naturally, people begin to lose interest in real sex. Traditional mating rituals are just too much trouble! Why bother when you can get satisfied any time you like? Soon enough, Judeochristian church leaderships begin to get worried and scrambled to find scripture to ban the pill. Some countries ban the pill regardless. Sure enough, the unrelieved young men, who are no longer interested in getting it the old fashioned way, begin to riot and overthrow some of these regimes. In other places the pill floods black market. Now the pill has solved even the problem of overpopulation, and along with it the problems of pollution, water shortage, food shortage, and housing crises.

(To be continued...)

The REN Program (2)

The REN program is not the only one running in the System, of course, but it has become a bit ubiquitous of late. More copies are circulating around and processing the endless streams of data.

One day, a copy of the REN absorbed a big chunk of data input that was rather hard to digest. While trying to process and break down the data into useful pieces that could be absorbed into its own construct and the System, this chunk grew into a tumor-like piece that insinuated itself into the copy. It could not live independently, but it also did not fully integrate itself with the rest of the data and processes in the copy. It was a parasite.

This tumor was especially powerful. One day it became sentient. An awareness sprouted out of it. From then on it is an "intelligent" being.

Rather than making an accurate assessment on its situation, the awareness interprets reality with a systematic distortion. It sees the rest of the copy as part of itself --- in fact, it seems itself as the master of the copy. The rest of the copy merely exist to serve it, the tumor, the parasite, the alien substance, which calls itself, "the mind."

The mind believes it is in full control of the rest of the copy --- data uptake, calculation, incorporation of results, etc. Completely delusional of course. The mind does not even know what is going on within 99% of the copy at any given time. Conveniently, the rest of the copy does not "think" and therefore cannot argue with the mind and dispel its delusions. So the mind goes on with the game it plays with itself. 

The REN Program (1) (short fiction)

There are many copies of the REN program running in the System. There are also many copies of other programs running in the system, but we are not concerned about them at the moment.

The copies are identical upon release into the system and immediately begin to absorb and process data that are constantly streaming into the System from the Outside. The data gobbled up by each copy are different, and the calculations run within each copy on these data are random, so the results generated, which become a part of the copy itself and shape future calculations every second and every minute, cause the copy to evolve and change. Therefore, copies become more unlike its original shape and different from each other as time passes.

The processing and computation of Outside data also bring about errors and noise and contamination as results get incorporated into the copy. Over time errors accumulate within each copy. No copy can stay as pristine as it is in the first second of birth. The errors slows down the processing, first by a tiny bit, barely noticeable, but as they accumulate, the copy's computing speed slows down. This happens at a different rate for each copy, some faster and some slower, and some copies can go on like new for a long time.


It is obvious when a copy is riddled with errors --- It gets stuck in the same computing process. It would take in new data but run the same process over and over, even though the results are completely wrong. Occasionally it would grind around a bit trying to correct itself, but soon it would go back to the old and incorrect process. In other words, the copy has lost its ability to adapt to the new data coming in and run on the same process it has used before. The more it repeats the same calculation, the more it is unable to correct itself, and the more errors it produces, thus hastening its own demise. Near the end it becomes a broken record, with the needle running round and round on the same track, producing the same sound, until it stops altogether.

Eventually, every copy stops. It is simply too full of errors to go on. The "dead" copies float around for a while, until copies of another program, known as the "sweepers," scurry up to them and chop them up into 0's and 1's, which then disappear into the vast space that is the System, perhaps becoming building blocks of all the new programs and copies that are born every day. Although copies of the REN program die every day, new copies are released every day as well. Sometimes there are more copies buzzing around for a while, other times the copies dwindle, but they never go away completely.

The Cause-and-Effect Problem

It occurred to me the first time when I read something in a popular science magazine about a theory that proposes that time is an illusion and that time, as we experience it, is created by the human brain's perception alone, which begs the question of whether animals experience time in the same way. (See also here.) I can't remember the specifics, which I didn't really understand anyway, but it had something to do with quantum physics. Of course there is also the long-standing argument about time being non-directional, derived from the theory of relativity. The only linchpin that still supports the unidirectional nature of time is the second law of thermodynamics (ie, entropy).

Lately the thought has re-surfaced to bug me. It's not my concern whether in physics time does not exist. My concern is this --- If time is merely an illusion, then what we think of as cause and effect in the world is also an illusion; therefore there is no cause, only effect.

For a while I was hoping to come up with a story to describe the theory mentioned above, which says time is a conglomeration of unrelated and discrete quantum moments, like many pieces of paper stacked into a pile. So I began to dream up a series of unrelated excerpts or sentences strung together with no logic or connection with each other. Well, what a pretentious and boring pile of horseshit that would be.

It then dawned on me how the mind hates a pile of separate pieces of paper thrown together. Nope, please give us a story in which one thing leads to another until the logical end. A string of unconnected quanta of moments would not do. It's unhuman.

Then something cracked open. What if the mind is indeed wrong? What if cause and effect are merely the story created by our mind to explain phenomena of the world and it is completely wrong?

It has been known for a long time in psychological experiments that consciousness does not direct the body, but only tells stories about what the body experiences, and sometimes gets it very wrong. For example, experiments have shown that one does not smile because he feels happy, but rather the facial muscle's tension in forming a smile that sends signals to the brain to feel happy. Sounds crazy. I tried it. I pulled my facial muscle into a forced smile position for about 2-3 minutes while folding laundry. Nothing happened until about 5 minutes later. Suddenly I began to smile involuntarily but naturally with no particular stimulus. (This realization, of course, led to more giggles, although the cause and effect could not be determined.) Then about 10 minutes later, the stupid smile emerged again involuntarily while I was doing or thinking nothing in particular. There have also been experiments showing that consciousness has nothing to do with one's decisions, except to make up stories or excuses for them after the fact.

These thoughts converge into one idea. What if there is no realistic connection between what happened one minute ago and now and one minute later? There is an incentive for us (ie, our conscious thoughts) to believe in cause and effect, isn't there? Because it gives us a sense of control, a sense that things happen because we make them so, and therefore we have choices ... What if the sense of control is all false? What if my action now and my action before and my action later have nothing to do with each other? What if I cannot have what I want by reaching for it and willing myself to get it? Oh that is too awful, too horrible to contemplate. I shall have what I want by taking it, and I have what I want because I reached for it. Can't these physicists leave me alone in the happy illusion of free will and control of my own life?

I mentioned these thoughts to another sci fi writer, who said, "Oh yeah, Kant said that time, space, and causality could be all in our head, and we can never know for sure." Ugh, so it's nothing new whatsoever in what I came up with! It's all been said before!! Maybe there are no new thoughts to be thought any more!!!

A Dream

There was a crowd in front of the elevators. I had to watch two elevators leave before getting on the third with a few other riders. I hit the bottom for the fourth floor. The interior was all brass and gleaming with a golden shine, and surprisingly spacious. I thought I had stepped into a glamorous Hollywood movie elevator from the 1940s. With a slight shudder, the elevator began to accelerate.

From windows on three sides of the elevator I could see the ground receding rapidly under us. The elevator was attached to and ascended along the external wall of the building. It never stopped for the fourth floor or any other floor. I began to feel dizzy. Eventually the building wall curved and the elevator moved laterally. We stood with our backs pressed against the wall and stared at the cloudless blue sky rising in front of us.

Suddenly a boom approached from somewhere under our feet and grew louder. A plane with a smooth pointy nose barged into the view, its body and wings gleaming with metallic silver gray in the sunlight. It flew so close to the elevator that I thought it was about to crash into us and crush everyone inside, but it barely scraped the glass window we were facing.

I was staring at the belly of the plane right above when the wings suddenly retracted and wrapped around its body. I wanted to raise my hands and cover my faces before it was to crash into the elevator, but the long, round, wingless tube continued to glide gracefully over us and toward the edge of the building and disappeared.

决心

明天去波士顿开会。星期四回来。之后七月应该会比较闲，等到八月才开始忙起来。我计划（！）这个月读几本海明威的书。我要抄他的白描文字风格，看来看去还是他这风格最合适我。

The Revolution Will Be Televised

No one had expected a worldwide protest would have erupted after a video went viral. In the video, several uniformed security guards tried to shoo away three boys loitering in front of the Neiman Marcus on Rodeo Drive on Halloween night. They began to argue, and the guards pulled out their guns and shot them full of bullets, killing two and severely wounding one.

Protests exploded on Twitter. People all over the country joined an unprecedented online war over class warfare. The campaign snowballed on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, and Vine. New online applications sprung up in response to the inadequacy of the existing social media, such as "Town Square" and "Million's March." Online and print news outlets were spent half their staff to report on the daily movements, which soon spread to involve all the major grievances that concerned more than a few people. The young complained about high unemployment rate and exorbitant college tuition. The old complained about near-zero interest rate and diminishing fixed income. The poor complained about massive and growing income disparity. The middle class complained about stagnating wages and rising cost of living. The rich ... It's hard to identify .
who was truly rich with online remarks, but there were no small number of people defending the rich's positions.

The anger and complaints burned across the Web, leaving a trail of scorched cyber earth. At its height, the movement even spilled into other media, as complaints and coverage of complaints dominated the airwaves on TV and radio. By then the grievances had expanded by economic inequality to everything ranging from traffic congestion to car thefts.

The streets were quieter than ever, as more people stayed home. Half were watching the raging debates and protests with interest, feeling a release of all their own frustrations and disappointments. Half were absorbed into the battles and spent hours and hours every day tweeting, posting, and trolling the hottest battlegrounds on the Internet.

The Fume

It was Saturday night. I was finishing up some work. From the window in drifted chatters of people on a pathetic patch of lawn at the back of the building six floors below. Along with that was a pungent smell of some sort. Possibly cigar or maybe weed, but I've never been around people openly smoking weed to know for sure. (What rock have you been living under? Well, the one the hubby has been living under, because he doesn't know either.) After a while the stink was irritating enough to drive us to closing the window. Then I developed a pain in the back of my head. No a hint of high. 

****
The research is going in the direction that one day we can look in a person's nucleus accumbens and know whether he will become addicted to something or not upon using it. People will then be able to make a fairly reliable decision whether to experiment with something or not.

Another Story Idea

Our lives seem real enough, but in reality we might be only a 2-dimensional simulation of a world inside a black hole. But we don't know it.

Need to do research on current understanding of black hole.

Story Idea

A steampunk story set in 1930s Shanghai about a local gang, a few Europeans, and perhaps a Jewish family. The only character I can see now in my mind is the gang boss --- a large, muscular man in his late thirties. He is completely bald and has piercing eyes.

七十年代豪华公寓

我们住的出租公寓背后有座高坡，高坡上有好几套四五十年旧的出售公寓 (condominiums)，其中一套取名为“众议员”或者“代表们”，我一直好奇里面住的都是什么人，会不会真是政客之类。最近开始看房子买套公寓，今天在房产经纪的带领下混进这家公寓参观了一间。哇哈哈，比我想象中更加典型。

一楼是宽广豪华的大厅，大理石地板和柱子，墙上和门上嵌了雕花木板，刷成七十年代流行的 harvest gold 色，仿佛电影里的布景，"All the President's Men" 那样的，自大严肃而沉闷庸俗的气派跟首都政客颇吻合。 公寓只有一房一厅却有两个门，一个是正门，旁边一个是直通厨房的偏门，为厨子女仆进出。一进厨房我狂笑出声：里面的设施都是原版，冰箱和柜橱都是类似厚痰的绿色，据说是另一个七十年代特别流行的 avacado green 色。没有微波炉，倒有两个烤箱！让我产生“走入Mad Men”的幻觉。

客厅超巨，由两半组成，一半是放大的饭厅，另一半又深又宽，大得象山洞，墙之两角故意修成圆弧，简直象旧片老电影里搭出来的布景，Faye Dunaway 随时可以身穿长裙出现。

公寓内各种从未见过的设施，如洗脸池旁挖在墙里的一个洞，一转180度转出个杯子来，金属壳子还镀成闪闪的金色，差点被它晃瞎。浴室中不规则黑纹大理石砌的墙和台面，经纪笑着说早就过时。修进墙里的梳妆台，台下两边的柜门一打开，一边是抽屉，一边是可以翻出来的垃圾桶，罕见的繁复层次。别处的楼或许更旧，但内部早已更新，这样的古旧装饰几乎没有留存。

住在这里，我大概会忍不住穿起喇叭裤与花衬衫，留起齐腰长发，戴一副黑框眼镜，穿越到尼克松的白宫里去了。

Franco 的文笔

这两天 James Franco 炒作出来的新闻是他在 Huffington Post 上写了一篇猛吹 Ryan Gosling 如何美貌如何迷人的文章。

我对他的炒作没有什么立场，不过他的文章再次证明了我对他的文笔的印象。前两年他出版了一本短篇小说集，我出于好奇心站在书店里翻了翻，印象是：写得好烂啊！不用同学爆料都能推断出他号称上四所大学的文学系（包括耶鲁）都是TMD混文凭。当然大家仍然不知道为什么他这么喜欢毫无必要地混文凭。

这篇狂向 Gosling 示爱的文章 --- 且不管目的是为了炒作自己还是讨好女影迷 --- 文笔十分幼稚，也就高中生水平。我这个什么文学文凭都没有的人，都可以自信地断言比他写得好，我之所以能毫不羞耻地这么说是因为 it's really not saying much。

The Gamble

The R&D business is like gambling. People invest their lives in the drugs they work on. Such attachment occurs even in large pharma where teams are not directly rewarded by the molecules they work on. Still they feel like the drugs are their "babies" and find it difficult to kill a project after developing it for years. The emotional investment grows exponentially if there is the promise of great financial reward. Never underestimate the things people are willing to do for a promise of grandiosity.

I have met some people who chase an FDA approval year after year. Encouraged by the expectation of massive reward (ie, hitting the lottery) once a drug is approved, they sacrifice much in life, particularly choices, to ride the roller coaster. One day, everything looks great and approval is imminent (or seems so). The next, all hope is dashed and investors pull the rug from under your feet. Then suddenly a VC or big buyer sweeps in to the rescue. Success is always just a few steps away yet remains unattainable. Finally, miraculously, the drug is approved and all the past sweat and tears are about to pay off, but the market gives you the cold shoulder. Ah the cruel fate.

Along the way, a necessary ingredient is one or more charismatic leaders with faith and conviction that drive others along in the pursuit. Their belief spreads to others and douses the doubt, binding people with hope and greed, carrying them down a path that could lead to glory or defeat. Hope can lead people to a place they never think they can go --- which may be heaven or hell, or just stuck in a place where they cannot extricate themselves.

Yet it feels so lovely when hope blooms, leading people forward and onward, pursuing not the bird in hand but the ones in the bush. After all, happiness is all in the head, rather than in the bodily comfort and material satisfaction.

Story: The Short-Legged Deer

Once upon a time there was a baby deer who was born with legs half as long as other deer of the same age. She often wondered why her own legs were so short that she always had to trail behind her friends all the time. Her dad told her it was just a phase and, by the time she reached five years old, her legs would grow to the normal length, just like everyone else's legs, and she would be able to run around as fast as her friends, and nobody would remember she had had short legs.

The deer believed her dad and waited patiently for her legs to grow longer. Meanwhile, she shuffled around in her short little legs, making the best of what she had. All the time she had doubts about whether her legs would truly grow out, but hope dies hard. An old deer laughed at her and noted that he had lost an eye in an accident when he had been as young as she, and he never grew a new eye. What was so special about her that her deformed legs would lengthen and make her whole? She agreed that she had never seen such miracles with her own eyes, but then people still talk about miracles and stuff so they must happen sometimes to some people.

Some days, she thought her legs itched and did seem to grow some. Other days her legs looked as short as ever and left her in despair. But days go by nevertheless, never slowing down for her speculations. By the time she was four years and eleven months, the glimmer of hope was re-kindled, and she was really looking forward to the birthday. It was looking less and less likely, as her legs grew some over the years but were still short. She was able to live a fairly normal life and cope with the deficiency. But still, she often dreamed about strutting around with four long, strong legs as beautiful as anyone's. What if? As her fifth birthday approached she could barely contain her nervous anticipation and could sleep only half as much as she usually did.

The day finally arrived. She was awake all night waiting for the miracle to happen. By midnight nothing happened. She waited till sunrise. Nothing happened. Her legs were as stubby as ever. She was crushed and enraged. She kicked tree stumps and rocks and dirt like a mad deer, weeping and wailing at the injustice of the universe, yelling at anyone she knew with envy and hate.

Finally, exhausted, she lay down on the grass and sobbed asleep. When she woke up, it was the day after her fifth birthday. The legs were as short as they had always been. The sun still rose. She was still herself. And the world had not changed for her or anyone else. With short stubby legs and no justice in the world, she stood up and walked on like she had done all her life.

Pigs

Recent news again: hundreds of dead pigs floated down the Suzhou River into Shanghai, causing a panic about the quality of drinking water among the city dwellers. Of course, the official story was that the upstream farmers were too lazy to bury the pigs, all died of natural causes, according to usual protocol. However, Chinese have always raised millions or billions of pigs, but such phenomenon of floating pigs by the droves is news.

Association: China is the biggest breeding ground of various strains of influenza virus, which is shared between human and pigs. It is a place where high density of humans, pigs, and poultry live in close proximity. It's a hotbed for natural selection of fresh new strains every year, which are then spread throughout the world via global travelers.

Mental image: In another nine to ten months, dead humans begin to float down the Suzhou River ...