(This is a recovered re-post of an old blog entry from 2007. Since that time, the snack lost its original madness, and turned disappointingly sensible. This post, then, is a memory of what once was.)
Although we’ve been careful about food, every now and then, along comes a snack that just needs to be tried. One we came across was pretty close to an English Choc Dips pot, a fine import from Japan called Yan-Yan, manufactured by Meiji.
It’s a decent snack, with a nice set of crispy cookie sticks, and comes in two wonderful dip flavours – the familiar chocolate, and the stranger but oddly delicious strawberry (our cat’s particularly fond of that one), and both are nice, smooth, and more generous with the dip than the stingy Choc Dips I grew up with. But what really shines is the stuff they’ve chosen to inscribe on the cookie sticks. Confucius, step to one side, and take a back seat to the impressive wisdom of the Yan-Yan snack pot.
They start slow, offering up only the most basic of information. This is like the beginner course, preparing you for the deeper mysteries buried deep within the rest of the pot.
Admittedly, Biggesy Mammal isn’t quite perfect English, but I prefer to think that the shrewd philosophers behind Yan-Yan have struck on the idea that you need something even bigger than the biggest, and have gone for Biggesy as the ultimate example of something big. But this is just the starting point. From here, they start to follow the examples of the Shaolin Monks, using the animals to learn and teach a lesson about life. Peel back those eyes and take in the incredible wisdom that can be learned from the Animal Kingdom…
That’s right! Study the fox and the mouse particularly, as their examples hold true nuggets of golden Eastern wisdom for you to absorb. These great philosophers aren’t done yet, though – far from it. From here, they wish to teach you the secret knowledge of the animals themselves. Although dubious at first glance, I’m sure you’ll quickly see the genius it took to delve this deep into the wild world.
See? How much time would you have saved in school, if you’d already known that your best friend was actually a squirrel, not that dark-haired kid in the corner? And the fact that an octopus has eight as its lucky number has clearly influenced its decision to have eight tentacles, instead of the considerably more useful twenty-four that it could have decided to have.
It’s rather unfortunate that, at this point, the Yan-Yan philosophers appear to have decided that wisdom was all well and good, but it was really time to take a tab of acid, sit in the corner and trip out. That’s the only solid explanation you can offer for their last two pieces of wisdom…
Ah well. I suppose even the finest philosophers have their off days, don’t they?