Robot Claw – Page 134 – “Life In The So-Called Space Age”

NYC #1

March 16, 2023

We’re in NYC. Let’s call this a belated birthday trip, but as usual that’s just an excuse to shop and eat and do something fun over spring break.

The city is super busy. I’ve said on previous trips that it seemed ‘back to normal’ but even a year back was nothing compared to today.

There’s people everywhere and shops and fooderies are all packed. Our hotel room wasn’t even ready when we arrived – which is very unusual – and the concierge mentioned that they were at capacity last night.

Perhaps this is due to the fact that tomorrow is St Patrick’s Day and there’s a massive parade scheduled which may apparently draw two million spectators?

We had a fun day of visiting our usual shops and eateries and buying absolutely essential items (like blind box toys and model kits) and eating wonderfully bland (for me) or delicious (for KLS) foods 🙂

Tomorrow we’re going to try and see this fabled parade. Will we succeed? Or will we be defeated by the biggest crowds we (probably) have ever seen? Stay tuned…

Conkers, Milkies and Cats-Eyes

March 5, 2023

I got the usual things for my birthday (games, books mostly) but here’s something KLS got me:

It’s a little bag of marbles! Not new ones, but vintage ones from the 1980s. These are more or less identical to the ones I used to play with 40 years ago 🙂

This arose from me reading about an auction recently in which individual marbles from the 1950s – 1970s sold for thousands of dollars. Aside from the fact these once ‘worthless’ items can now be very collectible, reading the story triggered a lot of memories about a hobby I’d all but forgotten!

Back in primary school marbles was one of the go-to games at school. We’d all bring little bags of marbles with us to school and play endless games of marbles with each other. Rain or shine this was a game that could be set up and played very quickly and it was so easy to learn that anyone could participate.

Kids all over the world played marbles, and a quick google search shows the rules varied everywhere and in some cases were different enough to almost be a different game! Here are how we played our schoolyard tournaments:

– Select a hole in the ground, a gap in a wall/fence or if nothing suitable exists choose a big marble (we called them ‘conkers’) and place it about 2 meters away from where we’d roll the marbles.
– Each player selects the same amount of marbles from their collection. They need to be the same sizes and the same assortment of glass or metal ones.
– Each player takes turns rolling their marbles until they get them all in the hole or all of them hit the conker. The first to accomplish this is the winner.
– If playing ‘for keeps’, the winner chooses one of the losers marbles and it becomes theirs.

A search online suggests this is a variant called ‘marble billiards’ but as far as I remember this is the only way we played. I wonder if this was just the Newcastle rules, or if this version was popular throughout Australia?

Everyone seemed to have marbles, since they were able to be purchased inexpensively almost everywhere. We had names for all the different types and styles: ‘milkies’ were opaque glass, ‘cat’s eyes’ were like the ones I got for my birthday, ‘steelies’ were metal balls (usually just repurposed bearings), ‘tiger’s eyes’ were orange and black cat’s eyes. There were others as well that I forget, and again a quick search shows the nicknames were as regional as the game.

Marble collecting seems to be a popular hobby these days, and an entire industry has arisen around identifying and trading rare marbles. Although we had our favourites, we were never precious with ours and after we got a bit older aside from using some of them as ammunition in slingshots I don’t really recall what ever happened to our marbles?

I suppose we gave them away to younger children? Maybe we just threw them away? Maybe Bernard still has them to this day? I just don’t know. Marbles were fantastic in those primary school days, but then they just seemed to fade away very quickly. That said, I think it’s a perfect children’s game, and maybe it’s time for the worlds children to rediscover marbles 🙂

Ramen Universes Beyond: Batman

February 19, 2023

Over the last several years I have reviewed an amazing 51 different chicken ramen products. But it’s now been almost a year since I found a new one to try, and not for lack of searching! I even kept my eyes open in Japan, but despite plain chicken ramen being one of the first flavours ever marketed, I couldn’t find a single example.

Since I enjoy the occasional ramen blog, and because of this chicken dearth, it’s time for a companion series! Today is the first entry in a probably very sporadic licensed ramen series. And we’ll start with this one:

This was a Japan pickup: a Batman themed ‘garlic shrimp’ flavoured instant ramen. It’s a big, beefy man-sized cup with beautiful graphics on the side and lid:

But the real treat comes when you open the lid, since it also contains bat-symbol narutomaki, a traditional ramen inclusion in Japan made from tiny dried fish cakes:

As you can see there’s no flavor sachets: it is impregnated into the noodles which seems common for Japanese instant ramen. There was a strong garlic smell as soon as I peeled back the lid, and this became much stronger when the water was added,:

The dried shrimp, veggies and narutomaki puffed up as they reconstituted and the soup looked quite tasty once it was prepared! Even though I was sure I’d hate this, it was time to give it a try:

The product contains 372 kCal of energy, 6.6g of salt and 12.7 grams of fat, all somewhat normal for a ramen. Despite the strong smell, I was surprised that the taste was quite mild, and I could barely taste garlic at all. It tasted unpleasantly seafoody, and the aftertaste was disagreeable. The noodles were extremely tough – almost plastic – and it’s likely I didn’t let it sit enough before eating. KLS tried it as well, and was as unimpressed as I.

Because of the lovely packaging this one is more ‘for the collection’ than for eating, and would look lovely on the shelf of a Batman collector. Even though the little Batman fish cakes were superb, my verdict is that as a meal this ramen was a dud.