Robot Claw

Let’s Cook Omerice!

May 5th, 2024

Time for another Japanese candy food kit:

This is very much like the hamburger steak we made six months ago and preparation is very similar so I won’t show every step here.

Start with the (melon flavoured) beans:

And then prepare the (pudding flavoured) omelet section, which needed both microwaving and refrigeration:

And then the (chocolate flavoured) ‘rice’ portion:

Much like other similar kits we have made, the ‘rice’ is a strange breadlike material, very fluffy and to be honest not looking too much like rice!

By the way, ‘omerice’ is a Japanese dish where rice is topped with a runny – sometimes almost liquid – omelet. Usually the rice is plated first, then the omelet is made somewhat like a balloon of egg, placed on top, and then cut so it spills over and covers the rice. Here’s a typical photo:

It was time to complete our version. Even after 40 minutes of refrigeration the omelet was very runny and it was a challenge to get it atop the rice without losing its integrity:

Here’s the finished product:

Yes, it’s all candy. Melon, pudding, chocolate and strawberry flavoured candy! We of course tried it and…. it looked better than it tasted 🙂

I’d say overall a success, although not as tasty or as much fun to make as the steak was.

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Confucius Say

May 4th, 2024

A few years ago I bought a Japanese manga monthly and it came with a sheet of stickers of all 22 members of an idol group. They were postage stamp size, and prime for adding to postcards. But they were also nearly identical, and it seemed a shame to separate them. A plan was hatched.

Rain Of Frogs had been a great success the previous year, but it had been a passive exercise on my brother’s behalf, and I think I needed to step things up a little. I’d had a few ideas in my mind, and the stickers made them all coalesce: I’d send him a puzzle across a series of postcards. Twenty-two, to be precise. And here is what he received:

There’s a message encoded in the cards, and my hope was he could decipher it. Two cards were sent at a time over about a month. There’s a staggering amount of potential combinations in which the cards have been arranged, so I encoded them with hints and icons. The hints themselves were of course received with each card, and the idea was as he got them he could use the hints to work out the correct order and therefore the message.

Some hint examples were:
– “Squirrels are next to cats.” (referring to the cat/squirrel stamps on some cards)
– “I’m in the first five positions.”
– “The colours of the letters are significant.”
– “There is a typo: one O should be a U.” (this was unintentional).

It’s worth mentioning that the nature of the puzzle meant I had to devise a message of precisely 44 letters, which wasn’t at all easy. I didn’t want it to be grammatically strange, or use unfamiliar words, or be the sort of thing that wouldn’t jump out at him after he managed to decode portions of it. In the end I believe I chose something familiar – indeed expected – to make the task easier.

I started sending the cards in early September, and gave him until Thanksgiving to solve it for a prize (which was going to be a second wave of frog/toad cards). He didn’t solve it in time, so I extended the date and provided more hints. Eventually they became explicit to the point of almost giving things away: such as telling him that the colours of letters on adjacent cards matched (which massively reduces the potential combinations) or identifying certain two-card combinations. I issued an ultimate deadline of mid-January (2023). Alas, he failed to solve it.

Could you have solved it? Here’s the answer:

Confucios say Gary Oldman is younger than Gary Numan.

I thought it was easy 🙂

Posted in Blog, Miscellaneous, Postcards | 4 Comments »

Postcrossing Update

May 1st, 2024

It’s been over six months since I last posted about Postcrossing, so now seems like a good time for an update.

As you can see, I’ve now sent and received about 1150 card, and my monthly activity seems to be on the rise. I usually ‘do postcrossing’ every two weeks, writing about 10-20 cards every time. It’s time consuming and a bit expensive, but it’s always fun getting new cards in my post box.

Here’s the updates on the top sent and received countries where you can see just how much the service is dominated by Germany:

On the other end of the list, here are the countries to which I have only sent a single card: Albania, Algeria, Bangladesh, Costa Rica, Cyprus, French Guiana, Guernsey, Jordan, Kosovo, Malta and Reunion. (I also sent a single card to South Africa but it never arrived.)

And here the countries from which I have only received a single card: Asland Islands, South Africa, Croatia, Denmark, Israel, Armenia, Bahamas, Guam, Morocco, Puerto Rico and Sri Lanka.

The above are the approximately 400 cards received since my last update. It’s always a surprise to see what sorts of cards people send – and what they write on the back – and they range across every possible type of design.

My profile says I like vintage cards and I get a lot of them (like the German one in the bottom left from the 60s) but I also get an increasing amount of cards with art or non location-specific themes, which is likely because tourist postcard printing is on the decline in most countries.

The one on the right above has an actual signature on it of a Czech actor/singer. The message on the back humorously describes her as ‘not famous’ but a quick Google search showed she was indeed in a few films. Apparently the sender got the card at a concert she was giving.

Here’s the most unusual card I received in the last six months:

Yes, that’s the front of the card! It was send from Canada. If you saw this, would you buy and mail it to someone? (I would!)

As for stamps, I recently changed my profile to say I like ‘unusual’ stamps and it seems to have had an effect on the amount of non-rectangular stamps I’ve been receiving:

Most are from Finland, and it seems their post office can’t not release unusually shaped stamps! The two at the top are particular notable: could the one on the left be the only instance of a Commodore 64 on a stamp? The bottom right image is of a lovely wax seal which survived the post completely intact. Maybe it’s time for me to dig out my wax seal kit again…

In other stamp news, I got one of the UK Bowie stamps, an unusual stamp of a singer (?) from Taiwan, and my first King Charles ‘machen’ stamp! The low denomination Canadian stamps are nice as well, especially since most stamps from that country are fairly mundane.

Russia and China also continued their silent war of who can release the largest stamps. Every one of the above is larger than any US stamp I have ever seen – in some cases two or three times larger. It may seem like China is winning from the above pic but take a look at this beauty:

Yes, that’s almost the entire back of the postcard with a single stamp on it! You can see they used the remaining 8 mm of space at left to write a short message and my address. This sender couldn’t have possibly known of my endless quest to fill the majority of the back of a card with stamps, and in one fell blow has surpassed my greatest effort. This is a card that will live in my memory forever!

Posted in Postcards, Stamps | 2 Comments »

LEGO R2-D2

April 28th, 2024

I recently bought and assembled this guy:

It’s a brand new model of R2-D2. Here’s what was inside the box:

About 1000 pieces and some stickers. A quick build therefore, and a less expensive one (even at $99). He went together easily and his main body is about as big as a rockmelon:

Construction is somewhat repetitive, but utilizes clever techniques to (mostly) hide the studs. He’s very solid too.

He has a few display modes once completed. Here he is with all his contraptions in use:

And here he is with his third leg, which is probably how I’ll display him:

I like this kit! At about 29 cm it’s not too big so it can be displayed even on a shelf, and considering the size it’s both poseable and a good likeness of everyone favourite droid.

LEGO has done two other versions over the years (excluding a terrible technic one 25 years ago), but they’re both more expensive and much bigger. Here they are:

The ultimate one on the right certainly looks great, but it’s also twice the size of the little guy I built so displaying it would be a problem which is why I never bought it.

I’m glad they made this new one. He’s cute 🙂

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Ramen Universes Beyond: Pusheen

April 23rd, 2024

If you’re keeping track, this is the 5th ‘Universes Beyond’ post and the 31st ramen-related post! What do we have today? This:

Pusheen is a character created in 2010 by an American illustrator. In the years since the fat fluffy cat has become heavily merchandised and there’s a large array of Pusheen items available today. Apparently he’s big enough he now has his own ramen!

You can clearly say the package is labeled ‘chicken ramen‘, but when I opened it I found this:

That’s not ramen! Those are pho noodles, and since I’ve never tried a chicken pho that I liked I was immediately suspicious of this incorrectly labeled product.

I followed the sparse instructions and – like most other instant pho soups I’ve tried – the noodles hardly softened. My suspicion only deepened since the smell was abhorrent, but I sealed it and let it steep another few minutes.

Eventually it was time to sample it and – surprise, surprise – the taste was reminiscent of weeds and the noodles had the consistency of elastic bands. A dreadful product, not even worth 1% of the $4.99 I paid for it. Pusheen can go to hell!

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