Apropos of the silkworm video, I thought I’d compile the grand list of horrific food. My whole life, I’ve been interested in eating unusual foods, especially animals. I don’t go in for endangered species, though. It’s just too trendy here in China to eat the last of something. (The Yangtze River dolphin, for instance.) The closest I’ve come to orthorexy is giving up tuna.

I’ve had enough wretched pizza in my life to know that preparation is more than half the battle, and you can’t assume that what you ate yesterday is the same as what you’ll eat today. Tripe is an excellent example of a food that can swing from revolting to delicious, depending on the chef, so take my reviews with a grain of salt.

Insects and Arachnids-

Live Ants- Sweet, lemony flavor and a soft, grainy texture. Refreshing, but I did get bitten on the uvula once. Not painful, but gave me a rather dry, choking feeling. Eaten on a dare, they became a favorite stunt. I imagine they would taste differently if cooked.

Nacho Cheese Flavor Mealworms (Larvets)- Novelty snacks, look and taste almost exactly like Cheetos, but with that musty flavor all novelty food seems to have. Mom got me these for my birthday one year.

“French Style” Crickets with garlic and parsley- Delicious. A faintly sweet seafood flavor, like soft-shell crab. Ellen and I just went to the pet store and bought a bag of these guys (“They’re for our turtle.”) It is tragic, though, to throw a handful of live jumpers in the pan. Recipe from Calvin W Schwabe’s fabulous Unmentionable Cuisine.

Deep Fried Bee Larvae- Flavorless, they needed a good dose of hot pepper salt to make an impact. Like slightly soggy puffed rice. Served to us at the very mediocre Middle 8 restaurant here in Beijing. There are more appealing descriptions here.

Grilled Silkworm Pupae- Lacquered poop on a stick. A thin flavorless shell surrounds a juicy, fecal inside. The hot-pepper sauce didn’t help at all. Like shellfish, I have to suspect that freshness is key to getting good bugs. Gotten at Wanfujing night market, Beijing.

Fried Grasshopper- Delicious, crunchy, like half-popped popcorn. Could snack regularly on them. Also at Wanfujing. Also kosher.

Grilled Scorpion- A less tasty variation of the locust. The stinger was nice, but the body had a slightly liverish flavor. It failed to confer any mystical powers on me, either. Gotten at Wanfujing again.

Grilled “Diving Beetle”- Rather bitter, with too much husk/body ratio. A waxy, unpleasant nibble. Wanfujing night market.

(They have delicious chuan’r and other snacks at the night market, but the whole point of the trip was to eat bugs. That’s Beijing has a little feature here about a chef at a similar snack-street…)

Other Exotics-

Raw Urchin- Salty iodine flavors predominate. Like my friend Josiah said about Laphroaig Whisky: “The Floating Hospital.” Got one on the halfshell at the Oyster Bar a long time ago, and disliked it. I love urchin roe sushi, though.

Deep-fried Starfish- Unpleasant. A crunchy, gritty carapace surrounding a firm iodine paste. The one I ate had quite a bit of sand still in it, but that might be simply indigestible bits of the carapace. Also eaten at Wanfujing, on the merits of having an uneven number of legs greater than four.

Whole Grilled Baby Birds (or Sparrows?)- 马马虎虎 (“mama huhu”, aka mezza-mezza, nishkoshe). The preparation was lacking; simply grilled on a hot plate, and sprinkled with “Xinjiang” spices, mostly hot pepper and cumin. With finesse, it could be good, but as it was, it was simply unpleasantly rubbery and crunchy. Got these at a restaurant in the Quianmen neighborhood whose name escapes me. (The only endotherm on the list!)

I invite you all to top this list in the comments section.

Love and kisses,

Will

We were summoned yesterday to the Beijing Hotel, for to be extras on Transsiberian. The experience was eerily similar to acting for the DVD guys.

We got an email on Thursday, saying that we’d get a second email telling us when to show up. The second email, sent midnight Thursday, told us to get to the hotel by 9:30 the next day. Naturally, we didn’t get this email until 8 the next day, asking us to show up at the “Beijing Hotel, floor 18 conference room”, and to wear “casual clothing- sneakers and t-shirts.”.

The first problem, as you might imagine, is that there is more than one Beijing Hotel in Beijing. We emailed them back, and we got an address- “33 Chang Avenue”. Cross-Googling them, we divined that there was, in fact, a Beijing Hotel at “33 Xiang An Avenue”. Close enough- we ran down to the subway, hopped on a rush-hour train and found the place. Of course, when we arrived at the hotel, we got into the elevator only to discover there was no button for the 18th floor. So we went to the front desk.

“We’re looking for the movie set. We were told it was on the 18th floor.”

“I’m sorry, we don’t have an 18th floor.”

“We were told to go to the conference room on the 18th floor. We’re actors for the Brad Anderson film. Is it on another floor?”

“The conference room on the 18th floor is very forbidden.”

A-ha.

“We are actors, who were told to go there. Is there a way to get to the 18th floor?”

“I will have to call the director of conferences.”

Ellen gets the phone.

“Yes, we’re actors. We are supposed to go to the conference room on the 18th Floor. We are actors on the film. We are actors. Yes.”

“Go to the 17th floor. There are stairs.”

Thank God. We get back in the elevator, go up, climb a set of stairs, consult with a pair of Chinese conference-stooges who also try to turn us away at first. Finally, we find the film set, in an enormous dining room. A man in an immaculately wrinkled linen suit, hand-whittled owl glasses and a massive Beethoven haircut comes over to us. He’s the costumer.

“So, what have you brought?”

“What do you mean?”

“Where are your winter clothes?”

So Ellen sprints back to our place.

By the time Ellen gets back, the place is flooded with regular extras, three dozen or so 外国人, and a sprinkling of Chinese people, as well. I sat between a Sichuanese lady named Stella, and a Venezuelan woman named Estella. Estella was a white-haired woman in her 60′s and said she was an English teacher, which I found depressingly plausible, because of her near-pathological shyness and imperfect mastery of English. Stella was a businesswoman who lived in Australia full time, and had gotten into the movie for a kick.

We’re finally summoned from the side lounge into the dining room. It was an afternoon of toasting, and pretending to eat the withered food prepared by the props department. I had a nibble of hot-dog, two squares of fingerprint-laden chocolate, two boiled peanuts, and three slices of dried banana on the plate.

Brad Anderson seemed nice, but his affect was almost completely flat, not what I normally associate with a film director. Everyone was fried- the production had been going for 10 weeks, with the majority of shooting happening in Lithuania in freezing weather. Woody Harrelson, a nice-seeming female celebrity who I can’t identify off the top of my head (Emily Mortimer), and another character actor who was pulled in at the last minute, who I also can’t identify.

The whole production crew was Spanish. We sat next to the Assistant director and a guy who I assume was assistant-assistant producer, who gave us an especially hard time about being American in perfect, unaccented English. (“Celsius just makes sense! We PROTESTED after our 9/11! The Spanish got through killing people in our colonies 100 years ago!) Infuriatingly, he seemed to speak pretty good Chinese as well. Basically a good guy. We were seated, very considerately, right behind Woody, so that we would (most likely) show up in the scene. I wasn’t able, however, to get a shot of the famous guys.

We toyed with our food, made inane conversation, and shouted “Amen!” at certain moments.

I induced a possible continuity error by rolling up my sleeves- film nerds take note.

Just to soothe Mom- the New York Times just published a nice article on the risks I was running as a carpenter, the job I had before moving to China. They frame it, understandably, as “risks for the do-it-yourselfer”, but most of the guys in the building trade I’ve met take the same kind of dumb risks.

I won’t list any of my own close calls here, but I recall one time, standing on a board, acting as a wedge and counter-weight, while my boss walked the plank, three stories up, trying to get at the sofit.

Or the time he cut the live wire with the aviator’s shears- I told him that I wasn’t sure if it was on the circuit we shut off- I couldn’t trace the wires, because they ran straight through a beam. He was going to cut them with metal-handled pliers, and I insisted he use the insulated shears. The blades welded together from the voltage, and he got mad at me for jinxing him.

May holiday has arrived in Beijing, along with my girlfriend’s buddy Tim Krieder, and millions of Chinese tourists up from the provinces.

A strange flooding and abandonment happens around the national holidays, when all the migrant laborers and provincial professionals leave the city, causing an ear-popping drop in human pressure in the everyday places. A day or two later, the public spaces in Beijing are packed with tourists, fifty or sixty thousand deep.

I’d left Ellen and Tim to tour the Forbidden City on their own, but I’d promised to meet them for lunch- I knew a place nearby that served whole grilled sparrows (or baby chicks?). I walked down to my local subway stop and found a complete riot. Everyone was on the move, hauling luggage on and off the trains, packing them full, fighting with security guards, etc.

I had to let the first train go, and as it went, I noticed a pair of old ladies, nicely dressed, with rollie bags, standing on the edge of the platform. I stood next to them. They were looking over the edge onto the tracks. In all the bustle, they’d dropped a small bag of apples onto the tracks. Surely not.

Indeed. The older of the two women grabbed the hand of the younger, and with her help, lowered herself onto the tracks to get the apples. After all, they probably cost almost as much as the subway ticket, and you wouldn’t want 3 元 to go to waste, right?

I shouted “别的！” which is nonsense (~”Don’t of the!”), but which was all I could muster at the moment. I followed it up with “No!”. The security guard came running, but by the time he got there, she’d all ready gotten the apples together, and her friend and I dragged her back up onto the platform. I admit, I was a little rougher than necessary.

The security guard immediately began berating the women about the insane risk they just took. I couldn’t follow the language, but then I kept hearing the term ”电“ – electricity. The women responded by voiciferously asking for directions. This was 东四十条 station, wasn’t it? Which exit should they take? They wanted 东四十条 street. Why are you yelling at me? I just want to find the street. The train had just left- there wouldn’t be another one for a while!

I looked back down onto the pit. Unlike Boston or New York, I there was no third rail. I cocked my head, and looked along the length of the tracks. There it was, under the lip of the platform. She’d been standing on the third rail when I grabbed her arm, using it as a step.

This is actually the second time I’ve dragged someone off subway tracks. The first time was very frightening- I wrote about my experience here.

There’s been a lot of guff on the internet recently about how “if only those poor students had been armed” this tragedy would never have happened.

Yesterday, by pure coincidence, an 18 year old crashed his car into my friend’s house, through the wall and into the living room. She was asleep upstairs and unharmed, although a passenger in the car was killed. Police say speed was a factor in the crash.

Regardless of your position on gun control in general, it seems obvious that a college would consider it in its best interests to keep guns out of the hands of their students, at least while on campus. Young people are impulsive and prone to make poor judgments about all sorts of things- drugs and alcohol, sex, cars and guns, especially in the presence of their peers.

College administrators are in a good position to witness the outcome of poor decision-making among large groups of young adults. They see the alcohol poisoning, the car crashes, the date-rapes and the other stupidity otherwise smart students get into. Why on earth would they permit these people to carry guns onto campus, and into classrooms?

This is not to say that young people are particularly vicious or violent, or that they can’t be taught to safely handle firearms. They are young. They haven’t lived very long, and haven’t necessarily developed the skills or patience that only experience can teach. They certainly have the right to carry firearms outside campus according to the laws of the state. But school, and college especially, is intended to be an environment where youthful mistakes are tolerated, and used to instruct. Mistakes with firearms are far too permanent, and too horrific, to be tolerated in such circumstances.

As has been noted many times, it is extremely difficult to defend oneself against a suicidal terrorist attack, which is precisely what has just happened. In the event of a calculated ambush, none of us know how we would react, especially since we cannot live our lives in constant expectation of violence. We can only take action to protect ourselves from reasonable threats, not extraordinary ones. Cold-blooded, targeted execution is monstrous, and rare. Accidents and crimes of passion are equally deadly, and far more frequent.