There are many interesting things in the world today, few of which involved me, so I'll tell you about them instead.
"The annoying thing is that most "Jewish wedding" books assume that their reader knows nothing about either Judaism or organizing events. (Honestly, it's sort of like a small academic conference, only without grant support. And we have to make all the participants wear vaguely coordinating outfits.)" (Read on Baraita)
You will recall a while back that I wondered about unusual Kit kat flavors of the world, particularly the British Christmas Pudding Kit kats. The BBC reports that the bars are selling like hotcakes in Japan, where some consider them good luck tokens. "The name of the chocolate bar resembles a Japanese expression - "kitto katsu" - used by students to wish each other luck before exams. The phrase has been translated roughly as: "I hope you will win."" (via Food Section Appetizers/
fs_appetizers)
Lego (tm) social theorists - educational AND cute. (via
d_benway)
"The annoying thing is that most "Jewish wedding" books assume that their reader knows nothing about either Judaism or organizing events. (Honestly, it's sort of like a small academic conference, only without grant support. And we have to make all the participants wear vaguely coordinating outfits.)" (Read on Baraita)
You will recall a while back that I wondered about unusual Kit kat flavors of the world, particularly the British Christmas Pudding Kit kats. The BBC reports that the bars are selling like hotcakes in Japan, where some consider them good luck tokens. "The name of the chocolate bar resembles a Japanese expression - "kitto katsu" - used by students to wish each other luck before exams. The phrase has been translated roughly as: "I hope you will win."" (via Food Section Appetizers/
fs_appetizers)Lego (tm) social theorists - educational AND cute. (via
d_benway)
Profile
- owlfish
- S. Worthen
- S. Worthen
Comments
All of these flavors are "limited edition", which means as much or as little as the company decides it'll mean. Seasonal and time-limited candy seem to be rather popular in Japan--the historicity of this particular facet, I'm still looking into.
(The ads for Kit-Kat seem to be marketed to high schoolers, from a rough analysis of the people who appear in them. Breaktown.co.jp I think is their official "entertainment" site.)
The Passion Fruit Kit-Kat ads are timed for Valentine's Day here (which can be summarized, although it's far more complicated in practice, as "females give chocolate to people they like, or are indebted to in the case of work relationships"), and suggest said Passion Fruit Kit-Kat as appropriate gift for sharing with the one you love. There've been a lot of chocolate-related ads on tv lately leading up to the holiday, including one from the new Pocky campaign.
Glico always has a variety of Pocky that they sell at once, some regional-only varients, some limited edition flavors, some basic line varieties, etc. Men's Pocky and plain Pocky usually are the cheapest. Since I don't see other main-line flavors much around here, I can't compare those prices. Other sub-lines of pocky include the Decorations series (there's a French word they use for the line, which I can't remember the spelling of at the moment), the Mousse series, etc. There's also Giant Pocky, but you don't see that around here. Now and then you see Mini Pocky, which is basically just a shorter version of plain Pocky (from what I see).
The current limited edition flavors that I see around Yokohama are Green Tea Mousse and An Mousse--the Green Tea Mousse isn't good at all in my opinion. I liked the Royal Milk Tea Mousse better. Otherwise, there's tsubo-Strawberry [sic?] (has freeze-dried strawberry chunks in it), Almond-White Chocolate, and Almond-Milk Chocolate. Sometimes I see plain Strawberry, but not often. Recently, there was a Banana-Fudge Brownie flavor in the Decorations series, but I don't remember seeing that in the past week.
It kind of surprised me that you can't get many of the varients around here. There's definitely regional variation in the Glico distribution chain.