Rich and Strange Aeons

Guess what I've seen two of in Taipei: Trader Joe's shopping bags. My host brought some kitchen stuff in one, and tonight a woman on the escalator had one (bright pink logo), a bag with end pockets. Is there a TJ in Taiwan, or anywhere outside of the USA? No. Are people bringing them back from the US? Yes, at least somewhat: my host says her friend brought that one back for her. Is someone making knockoff bags locally? Wouldn't surprise me... An 'askai' web page said TJ is 'hip' in Taiwan, with imported products and people asked to bring stuff; it's obviously unreliable but I suppose something might have fed into that.

Makes me wonder if I could sell my bag for anything. It's very very old, possibly back to the 90s, with no structure -- it's just a sack, great for stuffing in my backpack. Don't particularly want to sell it, and I doubt an ugly old bag has much value, but it'd be amusing.

A few days ago I got looking into traffic mortality statistics. Wikipedia, World Population Review, World Life Expectancy, Our World in Data. The weird thing is that some countries have wildly different numbers across these sites: Vietnam is 30.6 deaths/100,000 people, 17.7, 29.8, 23.4. Granted the years are different -- 2019, 2021, 2020??, 2023, but still a big swing... though I guess 2021 being really low could actually make sense (covid lockdowns?). OTOH, the 2020 is high.

(Our World lets you examine earlier years, but doing so still doesn't match the other sources.)

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Guess I haven't had a Major Outing since the museum visit of the 11th. Keep dithering and getting out late, or having an online social event in the morning, or (yesterday) actually waking up after noon because I guess my body needed it. I've been out, but it's been small things like reading in the nice park, or going out for sushi... actually, I guess the 16th did add up to an Outing; I went to the Sushiro east of me, then walked north through a wet market, then a not-yet-open night market, to the river. ( Read more... )

I looked at more bicycles today, and saw some with Japan's over-wheel center kickstands. At first I thought they had O-locks too, but I didn't see any more, and now I wonder if I mistook rim/caliper brakes for an O-lock. I saw two bikes that were locked to something, but most are freestanding; maybe half have a cable lock through a wheel, so someone can't trivially ride off with it; the rest have no visible lock, maybe just counting on low crime and looking like rusty pieces of shit.

I went to a pho stall and pointed at a photo that looked nice. It turned out to have "duck blood tofu", blood coagulated into big cubes with a consistency like that of tofu. I ate one cube and part of the other. It was not deeply repulsive; if I hadn't known it was blood I might have eaten it without blinking. Knowing... I decided to stop and see if my stomach would revolt from new food or a surplus of iron.

I forget if I've talked about it in the travel series, but a distinctive feature of Japanese housing is balconies. I think basically every unit above ground level has one, even if it's shallow, a space (1) to hang your laundry outside and (2) so someone can install and maintain your heat pump compressor without risk of death or needing special safety equipment.

I haven't been looking up much, distracted by traffic and shops, or blocked by covered walkways, but today I did look up (starting from a park.) Album. And no, balconies are not ubiquitous here, and compressors are often just extruded from walls, with no obvious access.

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Discussion on Youtube opened my eyes to something: the US, tofu is largely considered an alternative to meat, something used by vegetarians and vegans. But in Asia, according to the comments, it's often complementary to meat. Most famous example in the US might be ma po tofu, recipes for which are often "2 parts tofu, 1 part ground pork." At Philly's SE Asian market, one of the skewers I bought was a mix of fish cake and tofu. And just now, I had some miso noodle soup, that was pork slices, meatball, fried egg, and tofu (not much tofu, less than anything else).

Whether Asian cooks are motivated more by "meat is expensive, stretch with tofu" or "tofu is good for you", I don't know. Today's tofu didn't seem abundant enough to count as stretching...

Train back to Taipei Main, wandered and browsed shops.

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When I lived in Osaka in 2019, my minisplit had a dehumidifier mode that puzzled me. Later research suggested it's supposed to dehumidify the air (duh) with minimal effect on temperature. What is actually did was function as a super-duper air conditioner mode: despite being fairly quiet, it would quickly push the temperature lower than my remote control allowed me to specify. It also seemed to help dry my clothes.

This time around, I was more interested in the heating function of minisplits, but here in Taiwan I've been using the A/C again... and the dehumidifier mode. And it behaves the exact same way. After not that long, my room has gone from 20 to 15 C in temperature, and 80% to 55% RH, or dew point from 16 C to 6 C.

Various notes:

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Skipping a backlog of Japan posts, to write this fresh... ( Read more... )

There was a Kura Sushi near me in Yokohama, so I tried going. And lo, not only did it deliver orders do you, but there were plates circulating to be taken! Almost nothing on the plates... because it was 16:30, with like 3 people in the store, so I guess they weren't going to waste food putting it out. But there were some tuna salad and shrimp mayo rolls still on the belt. (Even if I liked them, I would not have taken those particular items after unknown circulation time.) So I ordered everything anyway. But in theory.

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(Disclaimer: title is an exaggeration)

It's commonly said, particularly on Bluesky right now, that US supermarket rotisserie whole chicken is as cheap or cheaper than buying a whole raw chicken, with many people wondering how that's possible. A common reason suggested is "loss leader". More cynically, one might suspect of chickens about to expire, thus providing basically free input. (There's an independent grocer-deli in Montreal that I suspect did exactly this: their cooked drumsticks that I bought had a suspicious whiff to them.)

But why do people believe cooked chicken is cheaper than raw? Apparently because they compare the cost of cooked and raw chickens... as if all chickens were the same size. Or as if stores drew randomly from the chicken supply to cook. But really, given that raw chicken is sold by weight, and cooked chickens are sold by chicken, why wouldn't a store pull the smallest chickens to cook and sell at a markup?

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As for the "Big Lie" in the title, that's not the stores lying, per se. They offer you a chicken, and they sell you a chicken. But the belief circulating that it's comparable to a chicken you'd buy to cook on your own? That's generally a falsehood, if not a lie.

Guess I'm doing these out of order... Album

Took the train to Katase-Enoshima, to test my post-Odawara hypothesis of "see snow on Fuji if you get out early enough." Success!

(Yeah, so this happened before my Fuji-Ofuna entry, oops.)

After that I decided to walk to Enoshima island for the second time and see if I'd missed stuff. (Yes.) ( Read more... )