Friday, February 17, 2006


Fang Jing posed for pictures on the ice. But the photos were an anti-climax. She appeared mild-mannered and completely harmless. Seconds ago she had been a dynamic fury of action, soaring through the air, battling the water-breathing dinosaur hydras from outer space that had come to Earth to make everything wet. It was an opportunity Fang Jing had waited for all her life. She swallowed an ice cube to activate her superpowers, and - in the twinkling of a snowflake - was transformed into Winter Woman! She bombarded the massive beasts with snowballs formed out of thin air. She breathed sub-zero breaths at them, shot icicles clear through their thick hide. Finally the creatures began to slow down, tremble and succumb. They slipped into the river and Fang Jing froze them over with ice. Once again humanity had been saved from a fate worse than self-annihilation. All in a day's work for Winter Woman!

Story #337

A warm thank you to "Forgetful Anita" - the Chinese blogger brave enough to loan me some of her photos to play with. Anita knows English and German well, and posts (in part) Chinese translations of her favorite poems in these languages. She also posts the original text, so anyone knowing English or German and no Chinese, can still find enjoyment there. Unfortunately, she cannot read any of our blogspot blogs, as these are currently blocked in China.

4 comments:

The Mushroom said...

From the 2/15 entry in the Google Blog:
We will not store data somewhere unless we are confident that we can meet our expectations for the privacy and security of users’ sensitive information. As a practical matter, meeting this user interest means that we have no plans to host Gmail, Blogger, and a range of other such services in China.

So much for their mission statement, "Don't be evil."

And why is MSN Spaces allowed Chinese access, but not Blogger? (My work goes the other way: you can post to Blogspot without problems, and you can read MSN Spaces but not post because Passport login is blocked -- ostensibly so you can't get onto Hotmail, which seems crass since the cell company I work for offers a portal to a mobile version of MSN, thus when there are access issues we can't tech them.) How about MySpace or LiveJournal? If those are blocked it is to avoid their sheer lameness. :)

Question... did you find her, or did she find you?

Indeterminacy said...

Mushroom: I noticed that all these companies are in the news now regarding the freedom of speech issues with China. I hope they learn some integrity and stand up to the anti-democratic demands.

I found Anita (in technorati.com) because she translated a poem by Kurt Tucholsky into Chinese, one that I had translated into English.

Tom & Icy said...

This stuff is more complex than I ever imagined.

Jamie Dawn said...

And yet she looks so normal.
You just never can tell who may be a super hero.