If Hamlet were a bureaucrat or an academic, how would he proclaim his existential dilemma –

To be or not to be?

Richard D. Altick, a literary critic, wrote a hilarious parody –

A policy decision inexorably enforced upon a depression-prone individual whose posture in respect to his total psychophysical environment is rendered antagonistic by apprehension or by innermotivated disinclination for ongoing participation in human existence is the necessity for effectuating a positive selection between two alternative programs of action, namely, (a) the continuance of the above-mentioned existence irrespective of the dislocations, dissatisfactions, and disabilities incurred in such a mode, or (b) the voluntary termination of such existence by self-initiated instrumentality, irrespective in this instance of the undetermined character of the subsequent environment, if any, in which the subject may be positioned as an end result of this irrevocable determination.

Ha ha ha.

I found this passage in Richard A. Lanham’s brilliant book “Revising Prose“.

This sweet robot from NEC (via collisiondetection) understands wines better than I do, knows whether an apple is sour or sweet, and is wary of fatty and salty food.

And like a refined, aloof, hoity-toity nobleman, it looks at the coarse hand of a journalist and pronounce the judgement: “Prosciutto!”

Witty.

There’s antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium… The Elements is one of my favourite songs. I am very much looking forward to the renditions by Celine Dion or Snoop Dogg.

Tom Lehrer wrote and sang this song in 1959 in Havard. Here are the original recording (quicktime format) and the lyrics.

Panamarenko’s craft is as great as his obsession, meticulously building flying machines that will not fly at all. But the lightness of thought floats above the weight of metal, and animates these heroic yet tragic creations. I can almost hear their creaks and groans, see how they stretch, tremble, stumble onward, lift off, and then explode.

I am fascinated by Dr Daina Taimina’s hyperbolic needlework. Pseudospheres become tangible, geodesics are shown, and the Parallel postulate is falsified in these lovely, fluffy models.

It is a romantic scene: a mathematician, sitting by the candlelight, weave together arts and sciences, thread by thread.

My childhood hero is this robotic cat, who lives with a middle-class family, takes gadgets out of his Kangaroo-like magic pocket and saves the day. What are Doraemon’s gadgets?

• Gravity Paint: paint it on the wall, and the wall becomes the ground!
• Raining Umbrella: open it and it rains!
• Girlfriend directory: find all your future girlfriends’ information!
• Memory bread: write notes on it, eat it, and you will remember it!
• Story shoes: wear the shoes and walk into the world inside the story book!
• Totalitarian button: make a person vanish by simply pressing the button!

It is sad that Doraemon is no more, and I have grown up.

While well-cooked pasta are good for teeth, well-designed pasta are food for thought. When I was living in a small Italian town, and had too many idle evenings, I cooked pasta and contemplated upon their forms. What a fantastic medium to capture tomato sauce indeed!

Spaghetti often isn’t sauce enough, and Rigatoni sometimes has too much. Variations of Fusilli (spiral-shape), Farfalle (butterfly-shaped), and Casarecce (has a nice twist) are lovely, practical, and well-engineered solutions. My favourite is Canalini: it is like Linguini but with a “canal” in the middle, into which the perfect amount of sauce flows. It is an intellectual pasta.

Because of these witty, elegant, and high-carb inventions, life is good.

The spirit of a silly thing is always more delightful than the nonsense wrapped in a grand package. Would you rather use a Chindogu or read a business report?

Chindogu means a strange tool in Japanese, which is suitably useless (or unuseless) to the strange modern life indeed. Yet, according to one of its tenets, a Chindogu must exist — in order to be useless, it must first be. Ah!

Perhaps a Chindogu aims not at solving a particular problem, but at exposing the perplexity of human existence — a geeky adaptation of Zen koans.

Cervantes told this “interactive” story in Don Quixote –

While waiting for dawn, Sancho entertains his master Don Quixote with a love story between a shephred and a shephredess.

One day, the shephred sees the lovely shephredess on the other side of the river, and asks a fisherman to ferry him and his 300 goats to her. The fisherman, having only a small boat, can only carry one person and one goat each time — Sancho then reminds Don Quixote to keep count of the goats, or else the story will end — and so the fisherman carries a goat, returns, carries another, returns to carry another, and so on…

“How many goats have already passed?” Sancho asks, after a while.
“How the devil should I know?” answers Don Quixote.

And thus the love story abruptly ends.

I prefer Josef Scharl over Pixar studio. His illustrations first appeared in the 1944 edition of Brother Grimm’s Complete Fairy Tales. What fantastic drawings for fantastic tales — simple, bold, and quaint. Never had I seen chickens so thoughtful, frogs so sensual, dwarfs so spirited, dragons so sleepy, and princesses so strange!