Yesterday, the weather forecast for today in Sapporo called for rain in the afternoon, but this morning, it was revised to partially cloudy. I was considering going for a hike, but the gutbag is still a little noisy and unhappy from the flight. I definitely don’t want to be hunting down a un-nasty toilet in an unfamiliar town if the XD rears its brown head, nor do I want to poop in the woods when the bears are about in their final weeks of fattening up for winter. The clouds are ripping by, so the windspeed is pretty high. Temperature is nice though, around 11-13C.
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WTF?!?! I’m reading the ingredients list on my lunch dessert tiramisu and the word “silicone” comes as a bit of a shock. I’ve seen food-grade silicone spray lube for use on industrial food preparation machinery, but this is the first time I’ve seen it listed as an ingredient! According to the internet, the common uses for silicone in food products is as an anti-foaming agent, but I’m not sure how it’s being used in this instance. This probably wouldn’t prevent me from buying this product again, but the use of margarine over butter would.
With plate lunch and burger prices in Hawai’i rising to the $10 USD mark, let’s see what I got for lunch today from the Seicomart convenience store in Japan. Seicomart is one of the few chains that have actual service kitchens in the back of the store, so they produce hot meals instead of only having cold lunches that the register staff can microwave for you. It took me the entire time it took me to eat my entrée to figure out what the heck it was being called because of the katakana on the label. Let’s see… that’s a “he” with a handakuten mark, followed by a little “tsu” and a “ha” with a handakuten mark and a long sound mark… “Pepper-burg don.” It was essentially a deconstructed loco moco. The flavor was really good. There was even a nice little piece of broccoli and a ragout of onions and carrot as a concession to nutritional balance. For 450-yen, equivalent to around $5.75 USD, it was a good value, considering it was between “mini” and full-sized plate lunch in size, but priced less than a mini. Continue reading ‘Cheap Lunch’
My lower back and ass hurt from sitting in worn-out JAL seats all the way across the Pacific yesterday. At least the plane wasn’t stinky like the last time I was on JAL. Can’t wait for Hawaiian to get approval for the direct CTS route. Narita either had the A/C turned off, or had the heaters turned on, because it was hotter than Honolulu International if you can imagine that. Broke a sweat there where I didn’t back home. Some JDM girl in front of me in the domestic check in line cracked a silent fart of death just as I bent down to check the TSA lock on my bag. I actually got a gag reflex and had to drink water to get the gullet peristalsis moving back in the “down” direction.
(0)Finally, a good HI5-0 episode. I feel they dropped the ball on the August March episode last week. If he was such a crafty, well-connected dude, he would have found a way out of the situation besides stepping back into traffic and turning into a greasy stain on Pali Highway. I guess the writers didn’t want yet another criminal eluding Five-O’s tenuous grasp. Man, they’ve killed off a pile of recurring characters recently! …oh, and I like how they patched the entrance holes, but not the exit holes on the inflatable boat.
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I hate when that happens! I was looking for something, but somebody had ignored the labels and removed the area where it was, leaving a weird spatial vortex where random places from random times would fill in the void spot. Dangerous. Just plain dangerous… and irresponsible too! There was just the label left. You just can’t make this kind of stuff up.
I haven’t been by the mall recently, but when I went by Shirokiya yesterday, the Akimune-an taiyaki concession and whatever that place next to them were gone and a construction barrier wall stood in their place. I guess I’m not surprised. Their rotating bi-weekly limited flavor stopped rotating at a certain point, and became unchanging chocolate custard creme and sweet potato (although the signs claimed they were still limited). Also, when the rude/lazy Micronesian woman started working there, I really didn’t feel like going and having her tell me to just buy the pre-made ones that she would crank out and let go cold and soggy. Run something poorly – watch it fail.
I must have either been underneath a rock or just not paying attention, otherwise I would have gotten one of these a long time ago. When I wasn’t looking, Victorinox added glow-in-the-dark yellow to the list of choices for scale color for their Classic pocketknife. Like the GITD 1-liter Nalgene bottle, the luminescent feature at first seems gimmicky, but in actual use the ability to glow is understandable and desirable. I figure it will make the knife easier to find and harder to lose. If the knife lives in your pocket or SERE kit, it won’t be “charged” with ambient light, so it won’t glow when you whip it out in the dark, but if you’re using it at night with a flashlight or headlamp, the glow will probably help locate it if you put it down or drop it. Even if it isn’t “charged”, the slightly greenish yellow is pretty garish, so it stands out against most natural background colors, making it easy to spot even if it isn’t actively glowing. Continue reading ‘Victorinox Classic Stay Glow’
I kept slacking on picking one of these up in the couple of years they’ve been out, but I finally managed to find one in stock. There is no great technological leap here, just a rigid, screw top BPA-free plastic bottle and some glow-in-the-dark paint. The Nalgene 1-liter bottle is pretty much the de facto worldwide standard for rigid water bottles. There are a lot of pouches and accessories for them, so if you’re going to get one anyway, might as well get the glowing one. The glow is muted compared to some other GITD items, but it is enough to spot the bottle in total darkness. This makes both finding the bottle for a late-night sip of water and avoiding tripping over the bottle on the tent floor a lot easier. The glow material is a sprayed-on coating, so it can be scratched or worn off. I am guessing they used a coating instead of mixing whatever it is that supports the glow into the plastic itself to prevent the material from coming into contact with the water. It’s probably safe to say that in general, you don’t want to ingest stuff that glows. Continue reading ‘Nalgene 1-liter Glow-in-the-Dark Tritan Bottle’
Funny how the current Acura MDX ad says that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, trying to intimate that theirs was the first non-box, non-truck-based crossover SUV. The Toyota Harrier/Lexus RX beat them to the egg-shaped game by three years. The only thing that Honda has an exclusive over is developing SUV’s and a “pickup truck” from a minivan platform. This is like Audi’s “cookie cutter” ad when their Q7 is a badge engineered VW Touareg/Porsche Cayenne. Don’t these kinds of deceptive campaigns belong in the political arena?
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