Robot Claw

It’s time for some more licensed ramen, this time two examples I purchased recently in Japan.

We’ll start with this Chiikawa ramen, based on a popular manga series that has been licensed to hell and back. Chiikawa is super popular in Japan right now, and I saw long lines (of exclusively young women) just to enter some of the popup shops.

The ramen is soy sauce flavour, but caught my eye since it contains Chiikawa naruto (little fish cakes) which feature the characters face and are incredible finely made:

That’s not printed: the pattern extends right through the fish cake with sub-millimeter detail! I’d love to see the machine that made these. Once prepared the ramen looked like this:

And… it was almost good! The first and second bits were quite tasty, and I was about to take a third when the awful chemical aftertaste hit. That was the end of it for me, but I still liked the cute little Chiikawa faces 🙂

Next up we have this Puyo Pop ramen. Much like the Chiikawa one this is quite small – possibly intended for children – and while this is heavily branded with the characters from the game, it seems to just be a standard kitsune udon ramen and doesn’t specify a flavour. It also doesn’t promise special naruto inside.

So imagine my surprise when I opened it and found these tiny sakura flower naruto in the flavour packet! I liked the look of the noodles as well. I added the dehydrated tofu brick and hot water and this is what it looked like:

And… it’s not for me. It tasted like petrified wood, which is a shame since the noodle size and texture was great. If I had bought two of these I would have tossed the flavour packet of the other and used one from a chicken ramen!

While neither of these were to my liking, both get a high score due to the cute little naruto. Next time I’m in Japan I’ll be watching out for more like these!

We went to Rochester for a few days for July 4 and a very special 80th birthday!

That’s what we lit this year, which as usual we had purchased in Pennsylvania a couple of weeks ago. Unfortunately I was stung by a wasp shortly after arriving (even now, four days later, the sting site is swollen and painful) which was a bit of a setback and required a few changes to our early July 4 plans, but luckily it didn’t impact our evening.

We purchased one of these instant fireplace logs just to see how they worked and we were extremely impressed. A single match resulted in a fire that burned for about two hours and could have easily been used for cooking. If you’ve seen these in a shop and debated buying one, I recommend it!

The fireworks were of course wonderful, and this year even more neighbors were launching their own so the sound of nearby booms and crackling was near endless.

And as usual I edited some of the highlights together (on my phone) into a brief video:

And here’s a shot of the birthday girl celebrating her 80th:

The garbage lid was a shield against potential firework mishaps, which as it turns out was almost needed when one of them fell over and launched a projectile that just missed us!

The next night the festivities continued when we went to a drive-in not far from where KLS’s parents live. It was a massive four-screen place with a mini golf course and a large food/snack shop (with eye-opening prices) that sold the biggest frozen coke I’ve ever seen! This beast was about a kilogram of frozen coke and filled a cup as big as my head. Even sharing, it took KLS and I well into the film to finish this one 🙂

While in Rochester we also visited the largest antiques mall in New York state, which has two sites and over 1000 dealers! The above is a photo taken in the larger of the two locations, showing a hall of booths each of which is full of treasures for sale. This particular site was a converted strip mall, and had dozens of halls like the above with several hundred booths in total. Kristin and I were determined to see everything, but even going at a cracking pace it took us over four hours to browse the two locations.

It was absolutely fascinating, with an incredible variety of items for sale. Of course there was lots of the usual tableware and art and decor items and the like, but there were also many unusual and specialized booths such as a seller who specialized in political badges.

I almost bought that 48-year-old King Kong glass, but you can be assured I had no interest in the weird PEZ and definitely not the sealed box of disturbing Trolls trading cards.

I browsed through those View Master slides looking for Doctor Who (without success), and I may have bought that Pac-Man bowl had it been in much better condition. The Hitler stamps though: not for me!

My big mistake was not buying this portable TRS-80 computer. A precursor to a laptop, this includes a several line LCD display and came with the programming manuals. Did it work? I don’t know. Was it worth the risk at about $56? Probably.

Even though I made the wrong decision on the computer, I did make a couple of intriguing purchases as well as hundreds of postcards. You’ll read about them one day on this blog 🙂

I can’t resist a good card-dropper, but I’ve played out the DC Comics and Star Wars versions and they’re dead to me. Yesterday my eye lingered on this Willy Wonka version:

With six play areas surely there would be one with a few cards ready to drop? A quick perusal found this was indeed the case. Behold this imminent avalanche:

Not one but two Wonka cards! “Surely it couldn’t be that difficult to win one?” I thought. Surely it couldn’t cost that much? I walked away, then back, then away again at which point the girl at the counter smiled at me and I was lost: I had to win that Wonka!

At this point the very logical question would be “Why?” Why would I want these cards? The simple answer is I don’t. The fun here is the winning, not the prize itself. The release of endorphins when the cards fall is addictive, but perhaps you have to play one of these machines yourself to understand. Thank god the vast majority of these machines are based on licenses I care less about else I’d be in trouble. I mean even a Willy Wonka machine coaxed some cash out of me today!

In the end it took me ‘only’ $20 to win the Wonka cards. And it was very close, with the final fall of three cards happening when I had only a few coins left to drop. I could go into some detail about the player-thwarting refinements in the basic engineering of the ramp or back wall but suffice to say I mastered it quickly (as I always have) and that $20 was less than I daresay it may have taken most.

In addition to the five cards (I got two Wonkas) my $20 had earned me 46 tickets, with potentially another 250 tickets from redeeming (turning in) the five cards. A quick look through the shop showed 46 tickets weren’t even enough for a single Chupa Chup and even with the potential additional 250 tickets the options were less than worthless.

The cashier girl smiled at me again and I walked away.