The Emperor of Kowloon is dead. Once a peasant named Tsang Tsou Choi, then an unknown madman, finally a king.

Imaginea a time-lapsed movie of Hong Kong: tall buildings sprouted upon landfills, people multiplied like fungus under subtropical heat, smog blurred the habour, Mercedes crowded the streets. Can you also see the graffiti of the Emperor of Kowloon flickered, here and there, on this light pole nearby, and that post box yonder?

For 50 years, the city must have been to him like an eternal SARS scene of 2003. A world silenced. Masked people. Nervous and discriminating eyes. A great city is a great solitude; but to him, a great canvas as well.

For 50 years, he had written on walls and poles, in broad calligraphic strokes, the same nonsense: “Kowloon Emperor. New China Emperor. Chinese-British Emperor. Tsang Tsou Choi…”

His calligraphy has a complex and strange charm: repetitious, obsessive, pompous, childish. It is the antithesis of a pragmatic and fickle city. Once the police charged him with vandalism, now the government wants to protect his art as cultural heritage.

In his last days in the hospital, doctors and nurses all hailed him as the Emperor of Kowloon. “Ah, Emperor, it’s time for lunch!” said the nurse.

Who among us can radiate such majestic presence? Is it not why Mencius said a great man is he who does not lose his child’s heart?

He was more lovable than the Chairman of China, more genuine than the Chief of Hong Kong, and more buoyant and steadfast than all of us. I shall miss him dearly.

Photography from flickr: photo1 and photo2.

We all know the saying:

Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today.
Teach a man to fish; and you have fed him for a lifetime.

But there are great many people who know too well how to fish, but cannot afford a fishing rod.

And there are great many of us (myself included), who would order an 18oz filet mignon when my belly is only comfortable with 10oz, spend an extra $10 for a fancier t-shirt, and are easily tempted to buy shiny and excessive things like the iPhone.

If only we can cut some of our excesses and support a microfinance project like these –

Kiva
Global Giving
Grameen

108″ HDTV and music phones are but fads, but Las Vegas is full of strange eternal recurrence, such as these:

1.
A man finishes his pee, and hears the screams of his girlfriend or wife from outside the restroom, “Honey, let’s go!!” The man humbly walks out amid laughters in the restroom.

“Honey, let’s go… (whip whip),” a guy caricatures as he wees.
“If you are getting a wife, don’t get her in Vegas,” another reflects.

2.
We walk through the mazes of casino, trying to find a monorail station. An obscure exit door opens up a flight of stairs that smells of rotten rubbish and evaporated alcohol. It feels both disgusting and authentic.

3.
Taxi drivers who would not take you anywhere except a specific strip club.

4.
Poor labourers hand out sex ads on the street and flick the cards to make hypnotic click-click sounds.

Eat drink man woman. Food fills our belly and also leaves us with an aftertaste of humanity.

So BBC reporters recall their strange dinners: symbolic pies of mourning, alcohol from sausage tree, medium-size monkeys in the rainforest.

BBC reports a disorder called Retired Husband Syndrome in Japan.

For tens of years, the husbands devoted their lives to work and the wives tended the household. Then one day the men retired, stuck at home, and imposed some sort of passionless tyranny upon the household. Oi!

The wives could not stand their husbands. They developed weird conditions: fetish over teddy bears, obsession with young cute pop-idol, rashes, asthma, escaping to Hawaii.

In the affluent society, sufferings are often so petty in nature and so intense in display. In the days of war and famine, or in the realm of Ulysses and Penelope, things were different.

I shall look forward to my retirement. My wife shall not.

A silly job interview question: Which person in history would you like to meet most?

To which a good answer will be: Joseph Pujol, the Fartiste

A normal man with one very special talent, Pujol farted most wisely and became Le Pétomane. The gas from his abdomen swept Moulin Rouge, entertained kings, and suffocated women in corset.

How hilarious and disgusting it must be to hear the sound of a bride on her wedding night (small noise)… the morning after (loud rasping noise)… a cannon (loud thunder)… and towards an impression of San Francisco earthquake!

“Why?” The interviewer may ask.

To which I shall reply: Because farting wisely is a rarer talent than talking wisely.

A grey, decaying apartment complex in Poland encapsulates the depth and complexity of human condition. A rationalist father loses his child through a miscalculation on the thickness of ice. A young girl plans to seduce a man who may or may not be her real father. A man sells his kidney for stamps. A woman turns a teenger stalker into a hapless victim. An executioner murders a murderer.

In this series of ten 1-hour films by Kieslowski, we see the extraordinary happenstances in ordinary lives, the desire and despair in close-up faces, and the moral dilemmas undocumented in scriptures and laws.

On Wall Street Journal today, there is a Page One story about a man’s triumph over his problematic toenails. Hail to Mr. Dwight Thomas, who not only defeated toenail fungus in battles but also wrote a memoir about toenails and ran ads in New Yorkers and Harpers promoting it! The latter struggle is definitely more heroic yet.

Mr. Thomas’ toenails remind me of the strange obsessive story by Borges. (Foot fetish might get a kick out of it.) It goes like this:

Gentle socks pamper them by day, and shoes cobbled of leather fortify them, but my toes hardly notice. All they’re interested in is turning out toenails–semitransparent, flexible sheets of a hornlike material, as defense against–whom? Brutish, distrustful as only they can be, my toes labor ceaselessly at manufacturing that frail armament. They turn their backs on the universe and its ecstasies in order to spin out, endlessly, those ten pointless projectile heads, which are cut away time and again by the sudden snips of a Solingen…

Borges should have added that when the “pointless projectile heads” turn yellow and crumpy, they might be saved by Penlac and Lamisil (according to Mr. Thomas).