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I don't eat much fish anymore.  Unless I kill it myself, with a speargun.  And, yes, I know, that's weird, but I'll get into it another time.  For the moment, all I want to say is that even though I don't eat much fish, I do still have fond memories of fish eating.

For example, the night we had a celebratory Yanjing Browns basketball championship dinner at 独们冲 (not sure, actually, if there was a championship to celebrate, but we did win quite a few tourneys between 2004 and 2007, so it's possible; regardless, the point is that it was a bunch of happy, hungry, rowdy basketball players rolling into 独门冲), a night that rushed back into my mind after reading this chinabites blog post:

http://blog.chinabites.com/2008/07/23/spicy-roasted-fish/

I commented:

I think there's another Du Men Chong on the Dongzhimen side of Gui Jie. I vaguely remember going there once. Vaguely because whoever had arranged the meal explained as we sat down that spicy roasted fish wasn't spicy roasted fish unless everyone was dripping sweat while eating it. We found out moments later that the fish itself would have done the sweatiness job easily, but our host insisted that we get a jump on things by pounding a few rounds of 二锅头. And by "a few" I mean I don't remember how many. I think the spicy fish was pretty tasty, though maybe it wouldn't have been the same if my soaked and dripping head wasn't spinning and swaying in a grain alcohol fog.

I miss Beijing.

Is it totally ridiculous to use Chinese characters in a comment on a blog whose primary audience will be native English speakers?

I think the obvious answer is yes.

I just used a few, though, in my response to Wiley's latest chinabites blog post:

Just responded to a comment Danny left on A More Perfect Market. 

 

He's annoyed at chinabites for making him hungry for food he can't have.  I told him he might want to use chinabites as an artificial hunger creator next time he challenges a superior eater to burrito crushing. 

But I didn't mention the burritos.  I just alluded to competitive eating, figuring that'd be sufficient to conjure nacho cheese images in Danny's sad, nauseous memory.

I thought about providing the whole backstory, but there's something embarrassingly wasteful about competitive eating, and I didn't think it'd fit well into the Prairie Blog comment thread.

Radical transparency is tugging, however, so I think it's important that I post a confession here.

I have participated in and possibly will participate in further eating competitions.  Ridiculous, I know, but sometimes people challenge me, and sometimes I feel the need to show them they shouldn't. 

I will make a resolution, however.  I will do everything I can to make all further eating competitions as socially and environmentally responsible as possible.  I'm thinking watermelons.  Organic, locally grown watermelons.  Supporting farmers that do good things for the world by producing clean, healthy produce and and distributing it locally.

It'll still be a waste of food, but there will be good side effects.

Attached is a picture of my cousin Sophie, a protesting non-spectator of last summer's burrito extravaganza.