Episode 1 Again

  • May 6, 2024

I’ve written about Episode 1 before and I still unequivocally love the film. So last Fridays drive-in was very special:

This was the sixth time I saw the film in a ‘cinema’, and while I have watched it (from disc) more than once since the last time in 2012 I was overjoyed they brought it back again to the big screen to celebrate the 25 year anniversary:

Look at that beautiful new poster!

I discovered I still knew all the lines, all the characters names (yes even obscure ones like Sio Bibble and Oppo Rancisis) and all the shots and musical cues. It’s possible I know this film even more than any of the originals.

I was pleased to see how popular the screening was. This was at the bigger drive-in with four screens, and given the film was up against three new releases I was amazed that it was the second most popular. And it was clear that many of the other cars were full of super fans (like the guy above)! Particularly wonderful was the young kids – not even born when the recent trilogy was released! – dressed as Jedi and wielding their own tiny lightsabers.

We both loved watching the film again on the giant screen. Sitting in our car eating fries and candy made it even sweeter. I just read it was #2 at the box office this past weekend so the audience is clearly still there for there for big screen Star Wars rereleases. Let’s hope this isn’t the only one 🙂

  • Posted in Miscellaneous
  • Robert

Let’s Cook Omerice!

  • May 5, 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.

  • Posted in Miscellaneous
  • Robert

Confucius Say

  • May 4, 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 🙂