Jinja and Shoga: Life in the Land of the Rising Sun

   Well, it's finally happened. After almost 10 years of eating nothing from McDonald's, my mom came home with a snack-size fruit and yogurt parfait for me yesterday. So I caved in and ate it. Fittingly enough, it was also the last thing I ate from McDonald's in early September of 2001. I probably wouldn't remember the last time I ate it at all, but I picked a friend up from O'Hare a few days before 9/11, and we stopped at a McDonald's when heading back into town.
  The decision to avoid the Golden Arches for so long wasn't really planned, more just a choice to eat healthier in general. By the time Super Size Me came out, I'd already been boycotting most fast food items besides salads, and that movie obviously just served to reinforce my stance.
  While mass consumption of Big Macs, Whoppers, chicken nuggets, or other fatty and deep-fried foods aren't likely to become mainstream now, at 160 calories a serving the newly proportioned fruit and yogurt parfaits aren't all that bad! Score one for the scary red clown.