I can't live without it

串儿 that is. So yesterday I bought some scrap lamb (soup bones) and tonight I trimmed off the meaty pieces I gave it a shot on the gas grill. What I came up with was a pretty fair approximation: good enough to serve to company, but I'm not sure it would impress a Beijing bicycle mechanic.

One problem here is that there is no recipe online. Google it if you don't believe me. There are some guesses, but they're off. So at the moment I'm using sesame oil and garlic-chili paste as a base with a sprinkle of salt, slightly ground cumin seeds, thyme, cayenne, just a pinch of 5 spice powder, and MSG. During grilling, I added a bit more oil (the leftover sesame cut with some canola).



And of course, I had to throw in a couple beers. Now, Buffalo Bill's pumpkin ale is no Tsingtao in a 1 liter bottle, but like I said: a pretty fair approximation. So there's something missing that may have made the meat a bit more red. If anyone knows what it is, please do let us know.

While we're being nostalgic, it's hard to believe that two weeks ago tonight I was:



watching Cory Doctorow speak in Beijing. What's even more bizarre is that about 10 days earlier, long before I knew he was in China, I walked up to a guy in a restaurant in Nanjing and said "Excuse me, are you Cory Doctorow?" It wasn't, but boy, it looked a lot like him.

He gave an awfully good talk. Starting with calling the 'information economy' a misnomer from the start and dropping gems like:

• "If you buy movies, you get ripped off. If you steal it, you own it forever." (referring, if memory serves, to Google Videos that stopped working when Google stopped selling them.)
• Content companies are "breeding a population of civil disobedience" by continuing to attempt to stop copying.
• 'Opening archives is starting to be valuable because opening them means bloggers can link to them.
• And in relation to performing artists who are pissed off about online music services: "The people who feel they have a God-given right are descended from people who stole from people who felt they had a God-given right." This was in reference to the sheet music business being destroyed during the early days of recorded music.

A really smart guy, saying lots of well-thought-out things. I've got to get to more author readings.