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June 30, 2006

We played charades with the weather; humidity chose poison gas, and everyone guessed on the first try. I don't think I've ever lived anywhere that wasn't humid in the summer, but for whatever reason, Hiroshima-style has me reeling.

Let's get back on track with some exhilirating product reviews:

NEW! LET'S ENJOY: GRILLED CHEESE FLAVOR PRINGLES

I have never met one, but I suspect that Japanese flavor scientists are a bunch of cocky bastards. They routinely set ridiculous tasks for themselves, and they have no sense of their own limits. I remember being faintly astonished to find a bag of Ozack baked-potato flavored chips during my first trip to a convenience store in Japan. I mean, here were potatoes that had been flavored to taste like...other potatoes. And it worked. There are failures, too, of course. Calbee makes these pizza-flavored chips that have the pizza flavoring caked into the ridges of the chips; they are disgusting. You'll have to get someone else to tell you how the shrimp and crab chips taste.

This, though, has to be the apotheosis of flavor science. Everyone makes cheese-flavored chips. But using only the medium of powder dusted on Pringles, can these guys communicate the difference between cheese and grilled cheese? This is no small matter of variation. They are trying to express changing states of matter through taste. It's absurd. It can't be done. Can it?

Well, no, actually. I sat in the park, up in the hills, eating my can of Grilled Cheese Pringles in the shade on a sunny day. Every can comes with a free giveaway make-up compact mirror. You flip the lid, look at yourself and think, well, I don't look any fatter, so why not polish off this can? Alternately, if you are me, you slip the mirror into your messenger bag, finish reading your book and feed the rest of the chips to the feral cats who frequent the park. Imagine that a Hollywood executive wanted to make a really classy Oscar-winning picture, "Cheese", but he has no idea how to do it. He gets in touch with this fellow named Uwe Boll, who, within an hour of the meeting, has a script and a budget ready. The executive is thrilled to have met such a go-getter, and "Cheese" goes into production. One day, however, just before shooting was scheduled to begin, Uwe Boll disappears. Nobody knows where he went. After much hand-wringing, the executive goes with a new director, Alfred Hitchcock. A few line changes are made here and there, but they're on a tight schedule, so Hitchcock has to direct "Cheese" from the budget Uwe Boll negotiated, as well as the basic story Boll came up with. The resulting film, bearing little resemblance to the snazzy Oscar-winner originally envisioned, is re-titled "Grilled Cheese" and marketed as a genre flick to avoid competition with Ron Howard's forthcoming somewhat more faithful production of the original idea.

(See, these seductively witty celebrity metaphors: they massage your sense of cleverness without passing on any message to your senses. Fuck 'em, right? It was fun to write, though. Did your great-grandmother ever set out a platter of old Sociables and similar crackers with thick cheese paste in the middle? Did you ever open one up and eat it like an Oreo? That's sort of how these taste, but more faintly, of course. Not awful, but I don't think I'll buy them again.)

NEW! LET'S ENJOY: GRAPEFRUIT FLAVOR AIR

You can buy iPod Nanos and Shuffles at 7-11 next to cans of air that cost about $5.50. Yeah, it's Japan. I always expected it would be this way, but it wasn't until recently.

They don't give you anywhere near enough air for it to be worth the price, but it is kind of fun. There are flavor strips that you fit into a slot in the oxygen mask. I chose grapefruit. (I forget what the other option was.) Just a little assembly required; then you sit back, relax and huff oxygen. It's not immediately apparent whether it's working or not, but then all of a sudden you realize you're getting weirdly emotional about this episode of "Doctor Who", and, hey, you're high on oxygen. Thanks, Japan!

I think we all know that canned air is the future.

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Comments:

i dunno why i'm commenting this butt... um...
let jus say i'm very bored..
1st i luv the Calbee pizza chipss soooo much!! if u dont like tht try the spicy chicken wings kind...
2nd sooo jealous tht u get to live in japan!.. u there caz of work rite? well hope u enjoy Japan. i would like to live there someday too, thou not LONG-TERM but maybe 5-10yrs...
oo and the flavor air thing is funny!

Posted by: nobody.... | July 2, 2006 11:48 PM

It's quite elementary. Jesus didn't die at Golgotha. He skipped out and moved to Aomori Prefecture. Today his descendants carry on a bastardised form of transubstantiation utilizing whatever foodstuffs are at hand. You can look it up.

Posted by: Sacki | July 5, 2006 01:40 PM

I don't mean to slander the entire Calbee line. I don't know what they're called in English, but they make some salty potato chips in a dark blue bag that are about the best in Japan, to my taste. It's fairly admirable that you're getting acquainted with Calbee and you're not even here. That's way ahead of where I was before I arrived.

I had a quick look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bastardised_form_of_transubstantiation, and it turns out that Sacki, as usual, is totally right.

Posted by: Marc Heiden | July 7, 2006 12:40 PM

Fucking MAD.

Posted by: becky | July 7, 2006 12:40 PM

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