JAKQ

Yesterday I headed out to Nipponbashi or でんでんタウン for a long overdue geeky day.  


I was hoping that since the new sentai series has started I would find some cheaper Gokaiger toys (particularly a certain blue figure that costs damn 3,800 yen D8).  No go on the Gokaiger stuff, but I did pick up a nice present to give to Becka when I go see her next week......




...and of course I can't make it away without a new blue ranger!

I am happy to introduce to you: 

Diamond Jack 

coming at you from way back in 1977 (9 years before I was born).

He was the blue warrior for JAKQ Dengekitai (ジャッカー電撃隊) which was actually not called a sentai series until sometime in the 90's.  I haven't really seen much of this show since it's a little harder to find but it pretty much follows along with the old school hero show bit.  Fuzzy filming, bad costumes and MAGICALLY 70's hair. 
This brings my "retro" sentai count up to three.
Bitches are hard to find ;_;

Youtube is surprisingly unhelpful when it comes to this particular series but I found something decent.  You can hear their badass theme song playing in the background of this beautifully choreographed, flawlessly executed fight scene.

  

So ends the geekery for this evening.

Back to the food tomorrow, promise~

it's Spring and that means 桜 season~

Cherry blossom season has come and gone and I magically managed to miss all of the hanami parties that my friends and co-workers had.  Not too big of a deal really, to be perfectly honest the crowded parks get on my nerves a little.

fruit by the foot?

HOWEVER, as it is beautiful, lovely Spring here in Osaka, I will share some sakura themed sweets I picked up.


First up is the Sakuranbo and Peach flavored soda.
This is some  weird, fruit soda line by Sapporo that I have only ever found in Family Mart.  All of the flavors are very distinct in that they do not taste like what they're supposed to.  さくらんぼ translates to cherry (but in the edible sense) so I suppose this soda has one up on all of the vague 桜 (cherry tree) flavored stuff.  What the hell does a cherry tree taste like anyway?

At any rate, this particular combo comes off as tasting like a red Fruit by the Foot.


The next treat is this strangely colored Sakura Maccha Latte Kit Kat.  The love that Japan has for matcha (green tea) is intense and all consuming.  However when you get candy that is matcha flavored it never actually tastes like tea.

So this Kit Kat takes the ambiguous, not tea matcha candy flavor and mixes it with the non flavor that they call sakura...
Yeah, I made a weird face at it too...

While as a general rule, I actually hate matcha flavored anything, this was really good.  It tasted a bit like cinnamon and a vaguely chai type spice.  The color is a little bit off putting but I'm not sure that the classic sakura pink would have been much better.

In all, I enjoyed my six mini Kit Kats that came in the box and I MIGHT even buy them again, but they are long gone from the store by now and the convenience store is sadly bereft of strange flavored Kit Kat at the moment.  The soda is still there but really, finishing the one bottle was hard...after a few sips

Orange Coke?

Fanta makes all sorts of weird-o flavors here.  Funmix was only around for roughly a month and that's probably being nice and giving it some.

I'm not entirely positive who thought orange and cola was the way that Fanta needed to go but it's not entirely horrible.  The biggest problem with this is that you really can't taste any orange.

I feel like I bought a bottle of Big K brand cola and added a shit ton moreCO2.  

In all, definitely not their best flavor...but really, who can resist something named Funmix?

In other news, I spent entirely too much money on bath salts and Batman underwear today.  Also I have not been to でんでんタウン in months so, no blue rangers recently...I feel saddened by this.