Things you recently bought or got

Google needs to get on that—they don't want to lose both their Xoic and Emily Dickinson endorsements!

 

You are sooo... librarian!

 

A bag of large breed puppy food. Until a month ago, I had no idea such a thing existed.

 

Didn't you already make this post, like about a month ago? It sounds very familiar to me...

 

Probably; this was our second bag. Put the repetition down to Old Timer's Memory lapse. I'm still amazed by the variety of special diet food available for dogs.

 

I'm amazed by the massive variety available for everything in a store. Toothpaste, shampoo, potato chips, you name it. Walk along the aisle and there's an endless panorama of different options. It fries the brain to a crisp. I suppose it's a good thing, but I'd never be able to try them all or decide from the packaging which is the best.

 

It's common enough that it's become a comedian's cliche, but it really wasn't that long ago you went to the store and bought some, well, Oreos. Now there are 32 shelf feet of Oreos, and the breakfast food section has gone from maybe 48 feet to an aisle and a half, both sides. There are at least thirteen varieties of freakin' Spam.

 

M&Ms have appeared in dozens of flavors over the years. Dozens.

 

Yet the non-traditional flavor I like, Coffee, remains as rare as hens' teeth

 

I was about to post this. I can't ever find the Coffee Nut ones.

 

For the first year I lived in Japan I used the only brand of shampoo that had "shampoo" written in the Roman alphabet on the bottle.

Later on, after I got married, we used Asience for a while. A shampoo formulated for Asian hair (yes, there's more than a color difference between NE Asian and northern European hair) that advertises specifically on how much more beautiful and composed the Asian woman is than her catty and over-permed White counterparts:

 

So, did it turn you Asian and beautiful?

 

I bought myself a stuffed animal because I'm an adult. I also bought the paperback copies of the Writers Helping Writers Series by Becca Puglisi (emotion thesaurus and etc).

 

I didn’t even know such a flavour existed. The only ones available here are peanut (of course), milk chocolate, and ‘crispy’ I think they’re called.

 

I didn't know about crispy. I'm assuming it's a crisped rice thing.

 

Bought a year's subscription to Masterclass. We'll see how it goes. The Chris Voss "Art of Negotiation" is the one I'm starting with and I've found it intriguing and rather informative.

 

Ages and ages ago (late 90s) when they re-released the big Star Wars action figures dolls I asked for a Darth Vader and a Storm Trooper because my parents wouldn't get them for me when I was eight.

I was in my late 20s when I finally got them.

 

Don't feel bad. My wife's continuously expanding collection of stuffed animals is beyond out of hand. As in six to seven hundred out of hand. The last one I added to it was a cinnamon roll cat that looks so fun. I couldn't pass it by.

 

where does she store them? Do they have their own room?

 

Wait, in the last 2 sentences the plot thickens. Is it your wife who's causing the problem, or the enabler who supplies her habit?

 

EVERYWHERE

 

I've given her maybe forty of them. They make for good box filling gifts when the other items are smaller. Or sometimes they have pockets.

 

Lol, suddenly I'm remembering a story from this site a while back called Jackets, where jackets of all descriptions just started appearing in a house, for no apparent reason, until they had just about filled it up...

 

Interesting. Any company that made an ad like that reversing blond and brunette would get fried for racism.

 

BWAHAHAHAHAHA!
バカ外人！

Of course, バカ　(baka) is much stronger that "crazy," means more like "idiot."

Japan is an utterly racist country. Not in the cross-burning, fear for your safety way, but just in the countless and unending microaggressions. Going to post a couple of pictures that were put out by a prefectural (state) government a few years ago for the foreign community, explaining what to do in case of an earthquake. Let's see how they measure up to those white ladies. Spoiler-wrapped because racist as hell.

Spoiler: TRIGGER WARNING: Racist imagery

And finally here's a link to a video put out on NHK (the national broadcaster, akin to the UK's BBC). It's from a news program for younger people (not sure if that means kids or younger adults. There's a lot of important information conveyed via cartoons in Japan) explaining the causes of the Black Lives Matter protests last summer. If you turn on the CC you can get a translation. The narrator uses very rough, low-class Japanese, and the US Embassy registered a formal protest.

So if you made it this far, you can see that those nice white ladies got off pretty easy.