Consumer Cowabunga #1

Hello!

I'm back in action after a lovely weekend bout with an intestinal bug that caused me to earnestly project my colorful personality through both major orifices, north and south. I initially thought it was food poisoning, seeing as how I'd eaten some fairly medieval-tasting convenience store tortilla rolls earlier that evening, but after speaking with Hodezor I learned that both he and Lorne, our friend who we had eaten dinner with at Hodezor's house last week, had come down with the exact same thing at the exact same time.

There can be only one explanation. You guessed it: that stygian child-daemon, Hodezor IV, is at it again.


When he learned that this latest chemical warfare scheme of his had come to fruition, he clapped his hands twice, burped loudly and fell on his butt. Well played, short one. Well played.

Anyway. Today's entry is the first in what I intend to make into a series of short installments, highlighting the funny, tasty, useful, not-so-useful, weird and wacky things that line the shelves of Tokyo's stores. Convenience shops, toy stores, train station souvenir kiosks, hair salons, panty vending machines -- whatever its place of commercial origin, if it's uniquely Japanese, uniquely funny or simply new to a small-country bumpkin blondie, it's going in here.

So, kicking things off slow, today I have two moderately exotic items for your viewing enjoyment: strawberry-flavored Meiji chocolate and apple-flavored Fanta.




















The chocolate, as is the case with most Japanese chocolate I've tasted so far, is absolutely delicious on the first bite. Smooth and creamy, with a delightfully subtle hint of croquant crunch at the center. One bite and you're flying. The first few seconds are DJ Shadow. They're Blade Runner. The color aquamarine.

By the third piece, however, Shadow starts sounding more like Spears. By the fourth, Blade Runner turns to Battlefield Earth. By the fifth, aquamarine gives way to muddy brown. By the sixth, already-labored metaphors run completely out of breath and resort to massive hyperbole to save themselves. By the seventh, every quantum eventuality in the imaginable metaverse collapses upon itself in a cataclysm of unimaginably epic proportions.

The Fanta, meanwhile, tastes like apple juice with carbon dioxide in it.

I'm not sure what I was expecting.