Best Fake Sudafed

Target beats them all. 20 tablets of 12-hour (generic/Target brand) for under $5!

I used to swear by Rite Aid's fake sudafed. Or Eckerd when they existed. Same product, different house brand, about $6 if I remember right. But lately they've been having trouble getting them from their supplier and they're frequently out of stock. When you can only buy one pack per visit, availability is important.

Today I stopped by Walgreens. They just built one in my neighborhood - literally; they bought and demolished my friends' house to make room for their drive-through pharmacy. I'm not a big fan of the strobe light that flashes on the outside of their building all night, but otherwise it seems like an okay place. They had a decent stock of their house brand 12-hour, but it was $7.50! Also, instead of scanning my ID they had to type in some information, so it took a lot longer.

For the record, I tried the Sudafed brand 24-hour pills when they first came out. They just don't work. I don't know why, maybe it doesn't release the way it's supposed to. I haven't seen a generic 24-hour, maybe it doesn't work on them either.

But Target rules.

Two Great Tastes that Taste Great Together

Though I still have guilt about failing to blog more Japan stories, I have an out. The new Top Gear episode that just aired Monday on BBC America features a race across Japan. Jeremy Clarkson drives a souped up Nissan while James May and Richard Hammond take trains from Hakui (Ishikawa Prefecture) to Nokogiri mountain (Chiba Prefecture), south east of Tokyo.

On the way, they have several standard tourist experiences.

• Yes, it is rude to talk on a cell phone on the train! A very strange concept for us. You also don't eat or drink on commuter trains or the subway (long-distance trains like the Shinkansen are different), though we saw several women doing makeup and other similar grooming tasks.
  
  
• The manhole covers are awesome.
  


• The trains stop precisely so that the doors are lined up with the lines on the platform. That's why people queue there to get into the train, but you can sort of stumble in after them if you weren't lined up.


• There's no point in working out how to ask a question in Japanese if you aren't going to understand the answer. Hammond and May find this out while trying to buy snacks from a pushcart on the train. (Incidentally, we are big fans of that Toppo that Hammond chose. It's like pretzel Pocky - tiny pretzel rods filled with chocolate - but a little softer and better.) Their electronic translator asks how much it costs and the snack cart woman tells them it's 250 yen - at which point they realize they have no clue what she said. They're still near Hakui at the time, which is fairly remote, but in areas that get a lot of tourists most merchants use pocket calculators to show prices. Also people tend to assume that caucasians don't speak Japanese, which is sometimes helpful.


• Clarkson joyfully crunches all manner of dried or fried sea life as snacks while driving. He eats little dried whole fish (we had some, mainly as bar snacks or garnish) and these tiny crabs (we didn't see these but they looked good). Hammond, on the other hand, has some issues with the food. There's a great line when he and May are in a convenience store trying to find snacks for the train:

  Hammond: But it's all fish. I don't like fish.
  May: Then you've come to the wrong country.

Since we didn't drive on our trip, we didn't get to experience a Japanese service station, though they did look impressive. It's great to see one in action in the video.

Here's a link to the episode description. There are also two videos from the segment that you can watch online.
http://www.topgear.com/us/the_show/more/season-11-ep-4-nissan-gt-r-vs-bullet-train/

Share and enjoy.

RoboOrange

RoboOrange
Originally uploaded by erink

My orange has a barcode.

That never happened before.

Life in Pennsylvania

You don't see this headline every day:

Police say buggy driver drunk in crash that killed horse

Apparently a 19-year old "man" was driving his horse and buggy, ran a stop sign, and hit a car. I feel bad for the horse, but it does seem like the driver deserved some penalty. And the horse probably could have been smarter about that, now that I think of it...though maybe it couldn't see the car. Or maybe the horse was drunk too. Now there's a picture.