Constant readers will recall Part 1 re: this breakthrough in the junk food space, which appeared on July 26, 2026.
To refresh your memory and bring it to the attention of the rest of you, I've posted it up top.
Long story short: My Crack Research Team©®™ spent countless hours locating these noodles, which are only available in Japan with no release date set for the rest of the world.
Finally they succeeded and a box containing four of each variety arrived from Osaka a couple days ago.
BTW: Pricey, about 10x the price of regular Cup Noodles.
One problem: The directions for preparation — water temperature, duration of water immersion — were entirely in Japanese, which makes sense if you're only selling them in Japan
I still have enough functioning cerebral cortex to solve problems like this with what's in the room, per Edwin H. Land's nonpareil exhortation: the penny dropped and I took a few pictures of the container with my phone, then uploaded them to Perplexity Pro, my new best friend, and asked for a translation into English.
In 10 seconds it provided one, with specific directions: Use water chilled to 41°-50°F, and wait 5 minutes until ready.
However, I couldn't find an old-fashioned glass thermometer to measure water temperature so I had to buy one from Amazon, which I did.
Last night, finally, I prepared the noodles, one of each flavor: Chicken Salt Lemon and Spicy Kimchi.
I followed the directions exactly.
Result: HORRIBLE cold noodles with much worse consistency than Nissan's flagship cup noodles.
The remaining 6 will go into the very back of my cupboard for when I'm in extremis.
They're SO BAD!!!
How they could have made it to market is beyond me.
Prediction: They'll die a quiet discontinuation in Japan without ever being released worldwide.
When you're young, you learn facts about the world that are later revised or debunked.
If you're curious to see what has changed since you graduated from high school [heh], check out Retrocodex.
You'll find that many "facts" you've always thought were true aren't: many are the opposite of what you learned and still believe.
From Nature:
"This image of a tardigrade molting and laying an egg in the old skin, by evolutionary biologist Gonzalo Quiroga-Artigasin, was one of the winners of the 2026 Nikon Small World competition."
Over the past year or so I've noticed a slow but unmistakeable decline in my TV watching experience.
What with NFL Sunday Ticket and a zillion streaming services along with cable and internet, I don't want to sit down with a calculator and add up just how much I pay to watch all these games and movies and shows but I know it's a lot.
My hardware: 2007 Kuro 50" plasma HDTV, 10-year-old Comcast cable box modem; Apple TV 4K (3rd Generation, November 2022); tvOS 27.2.
I keep the ancient TV because its fantastic, almost 3D picture at 1080p is still better than any 4K screen I've looked at since.
Below, details of my gradually decaying media presentation, all of which travels through the described hardware — I never watch TV direct from my cable box, rather I use the Xfinity app on Apple TV.
That way I only have to deal with one remote — though Apple's is a total FAIL IMHO, but I'll save that for another time.
• The biggest problem watching stuff is that it freezes for no apparent reason — sometimes for a few seconds, sometimes ongoing to the point I have to leave my game or whatever and click back to where I originally clicked on to watch. That usually, but not always, fixes it, sometimes for just a minute and more often for hours.
When freezes happen, I get that circular ring of white rectangles that goes around and around and around.
• When I watch Xfinity and click on a channel in the guide I sometimes get
Playback could not proceed. Error message xyz.
This only happens when I want to watch the lower number channels, like ABC/CBS/NBC 3/4/5 etc. at the top of the onscreen guide.
But guess what? When I then scroll to those same channels in the 800s — 803/804/805 — they play just fine.
• The ESPN Saturday college football grid function is janky, and rarely works the way it's supposed to. It did before; now games don't show up where directed but instead I get that circular pattern of dissolving/reappearing little white rectangles as described above in some or all of the grid boxes.
• When watching games on a multitude of iPad screens along with the TV, when the TV freezes the iPad screens freeze and go dark for as long as the TV remains frozen.
This tells me that the problems isn't just my TV and Apple TV but rather an issue with my internet and modem, since the iPads are independent of the TV setup but rely on the same Comcast internet connection.
I've got one last card to play before I bite the bullet and arrange for Comcast to upgrade my modem as it's been offering to do for many years: tomorrow my new Apple TV 4K Gen 4 arrives.
I'm hoping that somehow, as if by magic, it will solve all my problems related to TV watching, and that any future freezes will be confined to my iPads when configured as described above.
Otherwise the pain of dealing with Comcast to arrange for one of their techs to come to my house to install its up-to-date 2026 modem, pictured up top, will have to be faced.
They tell me they'll send me the new modem for free and that I can easily install it but I know that is simply not true.
Far better to pay $250 for their tech to make the change.
The headline above appeared over a November 5, 2026 Guardian story – and made me laugh out loud.
It's yet another in an endless series of variations on the trope popularized by Steve Jobs in his much cited 2005 Stanford University commencement address, in which he called death "the single best invention of life" because it acts as life's "change agent."
Why I laugh is because every single Silicon Valley billionaire, if an antidote to death became available, would line up outside the Eternity Store behind Peter Thiel and Ray Kurzweil to get some.
All the rationalizations about why dying makes life meaningful would fall to the curb in a Palo Alto minute.
Gimme a break.
Wait a sec — what's that song I'm hearing?
Just when I thought Hacker News couldn't get any better, yesterday I happened on Hacker Books, a sequel to last Sunday's Hacker Tube.
Up top, the all-time top 40 most frequently mentioned titles since 2007.
Among the many things you can do on this website is get lists of the most recommended and search by topic: there are 32.
Full disclosure: I've read 37 of the top 100 books.
Because what happens if you break/lose your remote, or it gets wet?
Your TV becomes a giant sheet of reflective black glass.
The time to get an extra remote is NOW.
The exact one you have, from Comcast or whomever, costs $15-$20 for a new one at zillions of places online as well as eBay.
Full disclosure: I have three (3) separate remotes:
1. The one that came with my Pioneer plasma TV in 2007, which I haven't touched in many years (I can see it from here, it's not lost/broken — I simply have no need for it).
2. The Comcast/Xfinity remote, paired with my cable box: I haven't touched it since forever: it's sitting right behind my cable box covered in dust.
3. The Apple TV remote, which is the only one I use for everything (I have the Xfinity app and watch Comcast stuff through that).
I have extra Comcast and Apple TV remotes, new in their boxes, right behind me, just in case.
Don't get me started on the dreadful ergonomics/design/functionality of the Apple remote: I'll save that for another day.
I have no idea how long this has been the case, but for many years I've lamented what I believed was the absence of such a feature, since it would make searching the site so much more efficient.
I'd just begun a boj post about this lacuna but for some reason I visited to confirm there was no such function — then I noticed the tiny camera icon (top).
I clicked it and voilà — the image below appeared.
w00t!
Ben Cohen's October 30, 2026 Wall Street Journal story featured the superb graphic above.
"Open the pod bay doors, HAL."
"I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that."
I've loved this object ever since I first saw it online twenty years ago.
By Greek industrial designer Panayiotis Mastroyiannis, it's made of brushed matte-finished aluminum segments which function as an accordion-style roll top, paired with a solid beechwood base tray, and measures 44 cm L x 30 cm W x 28 cm H.
The distinct segmented rolling aluminum shell resembles an armadillo's plates.
It's sometimes referred to as the Opera Bread Bin, after the Sydney Opera House.
It was produced by design manufacturer Radius.
Back in the day you could buy one on Amazon UK but that's no longer the case.
The best I could do in terms of finding one that sold was a September 29, 2018 auction in Nicosia, Cyprus, where it went for €3.
You could look it up.
But wait — my Crack Research Team©®™ stayed up all night, persisting, and they found one for sale in Germany for €60, reduced from €75.
It's been listed since September 20, 2025, so no hurry.
Wrote Mark Frauenfelder on Recomendo:
"Visit AirPano to watch 360-degree videos of interesting, beautiful, and/or unexpected places on Earth, from Tokyo's Shibuya Scramble pedestrian crossing, the busiest in the world (top), to a village of the Warao indigenous people on the Orinoco River in Venezuela."
Fair warning: there goes the day.
YouTube description:
.....
"Perfect Days" is a quiet, beautifully observed Japanese drama directed by Wim Wenders and starring Koji Yakusho.
The film follows Hirayama, a Tokyo public toilet cleaner, whose simple daily routine becomes a meditation on solitude, work, music, books, nature, and the small moments that make life meaningful.
"Perfect Days" is about finding beauty in ordinary life — sunlight through trees, a favorite song, an unexpected conversation, a quiet meal, or simply having another day to live.
Winner of the Best Actor Award at Cannes for Koji Yakusho, and Japan's official entry for the 2024 Academy Awards.
.....
The full movie is free (again, on YouTube), the way we like it.
From NASA:
What color is the Moon? It depends on the night — and the time. Outside of the Earth's atmosphere, the dark Moon, which shines by reflected sunlight, appears a magnificently brown-tinged gray. The featured image above highlights a collection of apparent colors of the full moon on Earth, documented by one astrophotographer over 10 years from different locations across Italy. A red- or yellow-colored moon usually indicates a moon seen near the horizon. There, some of the blue light has been scattered away by a long path through the Earth's atmosphere, sometimes laden with fine dust. A blue-colored moon is more rare and can indicate an atmosphere carrying larger dust particles. What created the purple moon is unclear — it may be a combination of several effects. The last image captures the total lunar eclipse of 2018 July — where the moon, in Earth's shadow, appeared a faint red due to light refracted through air around the Earth.
I happened on this website in a Hacker News post last Sunday: it made it to #2 on the front page (below).
Wrote its creator, Andrej Karpathy: "YouTube-style UI over 6,454 videos sourced from 39,834 Hacker News comments since 2007."
What blew me away: The elegance and lack of clutter and noise on the site: just thumbnails of the crowdsourced most popular videos along with how many times they've been viewed and when they were uploaded to YouTube.
Can't wait to see if any of mine made the cut... stay tuned.
Fair warning: There goes the day.
"You must reach for the power and make it serve you. Try."
"I am sorry. I do not know how."
"That is the only trouble. All matters are doubtful, unless one knows. You send your force into the Other World. You must reach into the Other World and claim it."
"Where is this 'Other World,' Grandfather?"
"The Other World," he said presently, "is the world you do not see. It is here and it is there and it is everywhere. But it is especially here." He touched his forehead. "The mind sits in it and sends its messages through it to the body."
"Let the mind be quiet," he directed. "Feel for the power. The Other World is close and full of power. Feel it."
.....
Those words were published the year before George Lucas was conceived but they might well come from a "Star Wars" script.
Heinlein's "Waldo," a 95-page novella published in 1942, is as fresh in 2026 as it will be in 2136.
I bought a used copy on Amazon for one cent back in 2007 but I doubt I can find it.
I just ponied up $5 for another.
In these random impressions, and with no desire to be other than random, I indifferently narrate my factless autobiography, my lifeless history. These are my Confessions, and if in them I say nothing, it's because I have nothing to say.
I was born in a time when the majority of young people had lost faith in God, for the same reason their elders had had it — without knowing why.
For those few like me who live without knowing how to have life, what's left but renunciation as our way and contemplation as our destiny?
I see life as a roadside inn where I have to stay until the coach from the abyss pulls up. Night will fall on us all and the coach will pull up. I enjoy the breeze I'm given and the soul I was given to enjoy it with, and I no longer question or seek.
Sadly I write in my quiet room, alone as I have always been, alone as I will always be. And I wonder if my apparently negligible voice might not embody the essence of thousands of voices, the longing for self-expression of thousands of lives, the patience of millions of souls resigned like my own to their daily lot, their useless dreams, and their hopeless hopes.
To express something is to conserve its virtue and take away its terror.
I'd woken up early, and I took a long time getting ready to exist.
The mere thought of having to enter into contact with someone else makes me nervous. A simple invitation to have dinner with a friend produces an anguish in me that's hard to define. The idea of any social obligation whatsoever — attending a funeral, dealing with someone about an office matter, going to the station to wait for someone I know or don't know — the very idea disturbs my thoughts for an entire day, and sometimes I even start worrying the night before, so that I sleep badly. When it takes place, the dreaded encounter is utterly insignificant, justifying none of my anxiety, but the next time is no different.
How katsuobushi — Japanese dried bonito, said to be the world's hardest food — is made in Nishi-Izu, Japan.
Inside Kanesa Katsuobushi Shoten, a workshop founded in 1882, 5th-generation craftsman Yasuhisa Serizawa still uses the 200-year-old "tebiyama" hand-fired smoke-drying method which only a few manufacturers in Japan preserve.
It involves digging a vertical hole about two meters deep, burning firewood (raw wood from Izu: oak, sawtooth oak, cherry, etc.) in the bottom of the hole.
Fresh bonito, first filleted, then boiled for 90 minutes, is then smoked and dried over the high temperature of the hand-tended open wood flame.
It is then fermented with koji mold and sun-dried for at least six months until the fish becomes as hard as wood and shines like a jewel.
This method of making dried bonito flakes has been used in the Tago district of West Izu for centuries, and its history is said to date back about 300 years (to the Edo period).
More here.
[via Kottke]
