Eric's Beijing Diary

Sitting here at the Taiwanese coffee bar, eating a dish of caged pigeon on a bed of rice, while I am trying to clean some viruses off my USB drive that I picked up in the lab at the college. Their virus protection here is virtually nonexistent. Fortunately, I have good virus software on my laptop.

I feel kinda guilty, sitting here getting ready to eat one of my favorite birds. I used to have homing pigeons when I was a kid. I don't know..the way they serve these dishes seems almost designed to put a guilt trip on you. They arrange that cute little head right on top; I can almost imagine little birdie looking at me pleadingly.

Reminds me of the time Winston Churchill was getting ready to carve the Christmas turkey for his family. Churchill's kids were always begging him to get one kind of pet or another. He was too much of a soft heart to say, "no." So the Churchill Chartwell estate was a veritable menagerie of different kinds of domesticated creatures. One Christmas, dear pet turkey got the axe. Churchill was standing there at the table with the carving knife in his hands, ready to do the honors, and the whole family was waiting for dinner to begin. He hesitated a bit, then handed the knife to his wife. "You carve him, Clemmie. He was a friend of mine."