Robot Claw

NYC #2

March 18th, 2023

We went to the St Patrick’s Day parade yesterday. From an early hour the city was full of people in festive green clothes, and if you didn’t have any street vendors had popped up to happily sell you some.

The parade travels over 30 city blocks and lasts for about 5 hours. According to the forecast, there were 150,000 marchers and over two million spectators. We inadvertently ended up at a good viewing position about two blocks past the starting point.

The parade alternated bands (many with bagpipes), military groups, school groups and Irish community groups. There was a seemingly never-end to them, and we saw all sorts of banners and flags and uniforms walking by.

The crowds lining the street were deep, and it was all a bit surreal to stand in such a crowd watching another large crowd walk past! But it was fun, and we stayed much longer than we had expected to.

I was particularly impressed by the school bands. I don’t recall any school I attended ever having a band, and certainly not like some of those I saw yesterday: dozens or even hundreds of students in some cases all wearing flashy uniforms and playing every imaginable instrument (including xylophones and triangles!) as they walked through the city.

The above is a shot taken in one of the side-streets, which were used as a staging area. These were stuffed with people waiting to join the parade, and the streets were closed for 12 blocks to hold them all!

Notably this was the first parade since before Covid to have no restrictions, and it was great to participate in an event that confirmed the pandemic part of Covid is behind us (yes I know the disease isn’t, but life has moved on).

However security was very tight, and we were both particularly impressed by the unmarked cars and bodyguards that were part of the retinue of the NY Governor as she walked past.

Afterwards: more shopping and eating. Another full day in NYC, and as usual we’ll need a day or two to recover from all the activity 🙂

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NYC #1

March 16th, 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…

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Conkers, Milkies and Cats-Eyes

March 5th, 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 🙂

Posted in Blog, History, Retro, Toys | 4 Comments »

Ramen Universes Beyond: Batman

February 19th, 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.

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The Magnet-Mages

February 16th, 2023

It’s time for the second installment in my magnet series! Sure it’s been almost five years since the last, but there’s been a development.

For the first time ever, I sorted through our voluminous abundance of magnets, discarding and rearranging them, and clearing some space on our fridge for new additions. In doing this – which took much longer than expected – I thought it a good time to showcase a few.

Some of the oldest magnets we own are Pokémon and Digimon ones bought almost 30 years ago. I’m surprised they’ve lasted so long since they’re so cheaply made: just a sticker on a plastic base. Even though they’re a little low-rent, now we’ve had them for so long they’ve endeared themselves to us.

Back in 2019 when I was in Tokyo with Bernard I picked up the above magnet of ‘Someity’, one of the two Olympic mascots. She was supposed to evoke a cherry blossom, and merchandise of her (and her brother) was abundant. She looks a bit like a Pokémon doesn’t she? The Rey is a large static cling we’ve had for about a decade but I no longer remember where I got it.

A few years back I visited Forster with Sue and picked up this magnet. Thermometer magnets like this are trash of course, and questionably accurate, but there’s a lot of good in a bad magnet! Apparently it is possible to take whale cruises from Forster… maybe I should investigate that more one day?

A recent purchase! I got this striking metal embossed magnet (it’s about 10 cm wide) from the Ultra shop/exhibition in Nakano. This is a wonderful magnet, but it was a tad expensive. I wish I’d bought more though.

Not a magnet, but the above is our first ever ‘digital photo print’. This photo of Daisy was taken and printed on a dot-matrix printer when she was a little kitten. Its wonderfully low-tech and quaint, and since it is over 25 years old now I recently embossed so it lasts forever 🙂

Can you guess where we bought this? I’ve read that tourists can’t get very close to Stonehenge anymore, since they’ve moved the barrier back even farther than when we visited twelve years ago. I’ll always remember that as a special day.

A few years ago Florence texted me a photo of the above magnet, so naturally I had to buy it. I laughed aloud when it arrived and was about five times the size I thought from the pic. There were two to choose from, the other being Putin. I made the right choice.

I don’t recall exactly where I bought the above, but they feel like they’ve been on the fridge forever. The Luke is permanently attached to the base, but the other two can be replaced with any minifig. I recently had a look in the LEGO shop to see if you can still purchase these magnetic bases and they’re no longer made. A shame, since I think they’re great.

One of my all-time favourite magnets! This was purchased in Nara (Japan) back in 1997. Nara is the city with all the deer oft visited by school groups hence the design (the deer is wearing a school backpack). It’s only about an inch high, and its smile is infectious! I want to return to Nara one day…

Two ‘home made’ magnets. The bottom I made, and the top was bought on Etsy. It’s a 3D printed skull painted black with gold accents. I bought this as a gift for Bernard but liked it so much I kept it 🙂

I wonder if these sort of magnets – funny ones with jokes on them – are made in other countries? This is one of the better ones I’ve got, and for a long while lived on the whiteboard in my office at school.

The traditional ‘lake monster’ magnet, displayed alongside a couple of others also from Inverness. I bought all these the day we went to see the loch. That was another great day, since it was a place I had wanted to visit since childhood.

These are extremely high-quality mini Star Wars magnets. These were a series of blind-box items from over a decade ago, and I first bought them in Japan and then at Target when they were (surprisingly!) released here. I’ve got lots, and they’re now all together on the fridge. Can you name all these characters?

The above are our front doors, now covered in magnets from all over the world. There’s still space though, but I’ve probably got another twenty or so years before I need to sort them again…

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