September 1, 2013
Do you see something strange about this lion?
A woman named Liu Wen went the zoo in Luohe, a town in the Chinese province of Henan. She noticed that the 'lion' was not a lion — it was a Tibetan mastiff, the kind of dog shown here!
She said: "I had my young son with me so I tried to play along and told him it was a special kind of lion. But then the dog barked and he knew straight away what it was and that I'd lied to him."
A spokesman for the zoo later said: "We're doing our best in tough economic times. If anyone is unhappy with our displays we will give back their money."
Tibetan mastiffs are not true mastiffs. They're impressively large dogs widely used in Tibet to protect people's houses. They're a primitive breed, which goes into heat just once per year instead of two, like a wolf. They're aloof with strangers, intelligent, and very stubborn.
My friend Weiwei Pan says the Chinese attribute wonderful powers to these dogs. They command high prices — one was recently sold for $1.5 million. When we were in the Tibetan part of Gansu province, our Chinese guide repeatedly warned us not to stray too far, lest we encounter a ferocious Tibetan mastiff. But we never saw one, except in the distance. The guide was probably just trying to keep us under control. He also said it was dangerous to drink beer at high altitudes.
Since it's so big, China is full of strange and outrageous news stories — and luckily, you can now read a lot of them translated into English:
For more on Tibetan mastiffs, see:
Here's a great story. Steve Volk is a reporter who suffered from a recurring nightmare. He had it whenever he was going through a stressful time, and it always went the same way.
Alone at home at night, he feels something bad is about to happen. He looks out the window and sees the face of a man, just hovering there. It goes away... but then it reappears, looking very threatening. Then there's a knock at the door. Quivering with fear and rage, he yells at the man outside, cussing, daring him to come in. The man knocks down the door, bursts in, and they start to fight... then he wakes up.
Then he learned about lucid dreaming, where you know you're dreaming while it happens. He researched it,, learned how people do it, and then prepared for months, getting ready for this dream again
And then one night it happens:
I'm walking through my apartment, nobody there but me. And I feel that familiar buzz of anticipation, something bad is going to happen. I look into the window, and there's that guy. But this time I'm there. My perspective shifts and I am in this body, in this place. Not observing something, but in it. So I could feel my fingers tickling my palms, I could feel my feet on the floor. And I'm locked into these feelings, because they make the dream more stable. And I wanted the dream to be stable, because this face has been showing up in this window for twenty years.
And it does its thing: it recedes, it comes back. And I go to the door, and I reach for the door, and the handle is a door-handle: it feels that real. And I turn it.
A moment or two later, the guy appears in the doorway. And there's this moment when we look at each other, face to face, and he's this total nondescript guy, like any old beer-drinking dude. And he looks at me, and he's clearly perplexed, because we're not going through our usual dance. You know, I'd backed up to give him room. And the guy walks in, and we're looking at each other. And I hadn't thought about what I'd say — I just thought I'd let him in.
And what does the guy do? He pulls out a gun...
For the rest of the story — which is really interesting! — go to this website and click the little thing that says 'Stream':
© 2013 John Baez
baez@math.removethis.ucr.andthis.edu