[OTHER] New Contest

The truth is, we all eat too well.

I mean, I love good food as much as anyone, but after a while the hunt for culinary epiphanies becomes a silly exercise in splitting hairs. Fine meals gain or lose an inordinate share of their luster simply because of the smallest shifts in seasons, moods, dining company, fresh drinking water, perfumes, B.O. and O.P.P. And really, aside from my annual bout of food poisoning, I should have no room to complain about the things I can afford to wolf down.

So every so often, we should need to recalibrate. Hence, the game is now "Worst Meal in Tokyo."

Here are the rules:

1. The limit is 1000 yen per meal. This is intended to capture the proletarian ambience of the quest, and to prevent anybody from whining about something like mislabeled beluga caviar, for example.

2. Sushi, sashimi, other raw foods, and strongly suspected sanitation code violators are excepted. We don't want an E. Coli or botulism breakout just for the sake of good fun.

3. The criterion is simple. The food must be bad. Not necessarily like "bad for unagi" or "bad for a Caesar salad," but just bad. Like a foodstuffs manifestation of "Searching for Debra Winger." Use the piles of shit rating system, if you will.

4. Ideally, when someone comes up with a 4 pile of shit contender, we should like to have someone else verify it. I will work this out later.

5. With the need for verification in mind, the meal should be located somewhere in the 23 wards.

Of course, I'm happy to take any suggested revisions to the rules and ideas about the timeframe.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

I think this all started when BSD Reilly had a bunch of people do some research regarding a cancer on the face of pop music called Atomic Kitten. So I located their greatest hits album on Amazon and scrolled through the reader comments posted by the 8-year-olds trapped in their strange uncles' basements. One of them read something like, "If you don't want to get one of their albums, this is what you have to get!!!"

I said to Kekke-san, "What type of fucked up logic is that?"

And Kekke-san responded, "I guess it must be related to, 'This food is terrible . . . You should try it.'"

Hence, the contest.