Spice Catalysts?

Odd lunch today. The school cafeteria offered kara age - fried chicken, but not breaded - with a bit of what looked to me like salsa on it. Turned out to add a bit of spiciness to the basic fried chicken bits. Not much. But I also had zarusoba, cold buckwheat noodles, with it. I like these, but they are a bit bland, just dipped in tare - shoyu-flavored stock, basically. However, when I tried eating the noodles after a bite of the chicken, thinking they would provide a cool contrast - WOW! Somehow the noodles or the tare woke up the spices and gave me a whole extra bite of sensation. Very surprising effect for me, although it was quite tasty once I knew it was going to happen. Have a bite of chicken, chew and swallow, feel the mild spiciness, then dip and eat some noodles - and there's that second-bite of spiciness.

Now I wonder what else combines that way. Never would have expected this one, although a friend suggested that the two go well together.

World Con Last Day (delayed a bit)

Blivets and blunderbusses - I forgot to post the last day? Okay.

9/3
rambled over to the dealers room. Not much happening, although the handouts I left on the freebies tables were clearly disappearing. That's good.

And off to the masquerade debriefing -- postmortem, according to the schedule. Lots of fun, since I ended up being the main interpreter and we did have quite a bit of discussion. Let's see, some odd notes from that:

This is a chance for us to find out what everyone liked or disliked to improve the next masquerade.

One problem area was during the rehearsals, where it was hard to find the rehearsals. The stairway was inconspicuous, and there just weren't enough signs.

The master of ceremonies and translator really needed to attend the rehearsal. As it was, people's introductions were dropped.

Some discussion about this being a volunteer effort, and such slippage happens.

One of the differences between Japanese and American approaches is that the Japanese would typically show their costumes and have the audience look at them, but not really do an act. The American approach is more a mixture of theater and costumes.

Apparently there was a problem with announcements to the audience during the judges "thinking time" to the effect that people could leave? And many of the audience left, of course.

That was about it for what I can remember of the postmortem - it is really hard to translate and try to take any kind of sensible notes.

A conceit. Consider two clockwork mechanisms, one metric, one English -- and for a while, they interlocked, creaking and groaning here and there, but mostly running surprisingly smoothly together.

And that's sort of my picture of the World Con/Nippon 2007.