Faithful readers of this space will recall the tragic plight of the baiji, the Yangtze River dolphin, that isn't around any more to complain about the noise and bustle of modern industrial China. Before adopting son (son!) last year, we took a river cruise. It was gorgeous, memorable, gave an unforgettable perspective on both our Chinese kids' birthplaces, and really didn't help the creatures swimming beneath us at all. National Geographic reports on another Chinese river-dweller struggling to survive - the giant sturgeon, also known as the "underwater panda". It's not nearly as cute as the panda, and this typist would hesitate to suggest nibbling on caviar from fish farmed in the Yangtze's green waters, so prospects for sturgeon farms or nature reserves are pretty slim.

On the other hand, the country is working hard to clean things up before the Olympics, which means avoiding things like major extinction events if at all humanly possible. For those of us that breathe air, Beijing's subtract-a-million-cars experiment may or may not have been successful, which is not much of a surprise, given that most of the smog is from coal-burning factories and power plants, not cars. In that regard, at least, Beijing isn't really like L.A. at all. (In other regards, however, you'd be surprised at the similarities - cosmopolitan cities, fashion centers, large police forces....)

Mention of which brings us to the latest installment of Things To Worry About While Waiting For The Visas To Go Through (my least favorite show): this Info-war scenario that has been carefully graphed out and published up at Wired magazine. Because, as is becoming clearer every day, if America is going to plan another war, it's going to be against China. Which would be a tragedy of a whole other order than the disappearance of the giant sturgeon - and would affect our families and our kids a lot more intimately.

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