H5N1. If you don't know the Star Wars movies inside and out, you might suppose that was the name of a minor character in them. Yet what H5N1 really stands for is the end of "One from column A, two from column B" as we know it. H5N1 is the avian flu in China.

While unconfirmed reports claim that a birder in Washington State saw a red bellied sapsucker with a thermometer in its beak, in the Hunan and Anhui provinces of China there are documented cases of H5N1 spreading to human beings and utterly ruining their plans for the weekend by killing them. One of the human victims was a 24-year-old poultry worker; in a eulogy for her it was said that "she was not chicken to be around the birds."

Ni How Ma? is the transliterated Chinese for "How are you?" Alarmists' direst predictions regarding bird flu are coming true as the most common answer to that question in China these days is "Don't ask." Questioned about the topic in Manhattan's Chinatown just as a pigeon took wing from the sidewalk, an immigrant said "Yes, bird flew!" (By Scott Rose)