In Book 10 of Homer’s Odyssey, Circe prepared a feast for Odysseus’ crew, and after the dinner the sailors all turned into pigs. Mercury tipped Oysseus and gave him a Moly herb as antidote to Circe’s portion:

As he spoke he pulled the herb out of the ground an showed me what it was like. The root was black, while the flower was as white as milk; the gods call it Moly, and mortal men cannot uproot it, but the gods can do whatever they like.

Circe, seeing that her plot had failed, then invited Odysseus to bed. They were lovers for 3 days.

Pundits debated about Moly. Some said it’s garlic, or mullein, or snowdrop. Nobody knows the true identity of this herb, or why or when it was transformed into an interjection, most often uttered by soccer moms.

The debate is moot, but the stories amaze me. They are like quantum particles, jumping around, bonding with each other, annihilating each other.

So old stories evolve into new language, like Circe’s changing moods, like sailors turning into pigs and turning back.

The two numbers 220 and 284 are called amicable number. The sum of the divisors of 220 (1,2,4,5…110) is 284, and vice versa.

Flipping through the book Fermat’s Last Theorem the other day, I found this interesting story:

An Arab numerologist documents the practice of carving 220 on one fruit and 284 on another, then eating the first one and offering the second one to a lover as a form of mathematical aphrodisiac.

Wonder if any of our modern-day geeks would like to pick up this fantastic ritual again — perhaps as laser-engravings onto mobile phones?

Also try a geekier pair: 9363584 and 9437056, discovered by Descartes in the Age of Reason.

Gadgets acupuncture our bodies, command our glands, and alter our consciousness.   

In 1969, W.H. Auden noted the excitment of moon landing thus: “It’s natural the Boys should whoop it up for so huge a phallic triumph… We were always adroiter with objects than lives.”

In 2007, Wired magazine has another set of observations (in its jargon watch) –

(Expired) Blackberry Thumb
(Tired) Guitar Hero Wrist
(Wired) Wii Elbow

Which would be the first machine to wear out our toes and erode our souls?

We shall miss you, Mr. Momofuku Ando. The inventor of instant noodles passed away, aged 96.

This high sodium, low fiber food holds a strategic spot in my memory. It instantly evokes memories of misery, solitude, friendship, inspiration, intoxication.

It is a good dinner for poor college students. It prevents hangover after heavy drinking. It soothes the mind at dawn, exhausted after a night of work. It promotes comradeship, when 4 hungry roomates share 1 cup noodles. It tastes good.

Like wine, truffles, oyster, and cigar, an appreciation of its quality needs to be acquired, through a sharpened sense of taste and countless years of slurping —

What is the texture of the noodles? How complex are the flavours of the soup base? Quality of the sesame oil? Quality of dried vegetables and seafood? Is the MSG too overwhelming? Are the plastic packages easy to open? How gratifying is the after-taste?

However, Mr Ando drew his Cup Noodle inspiration from black market stalls, where he saw people queue to buy bowls of hot ramen during the hard times after World War II.

Times have changed. Nowadays you can find the premium instant noodles sell for more than the price of one whole rotisserie chicken.

It would be a poetic vision to juxtapose the different flavours of instant noodles with the ups and downs of a man or a society.

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.

Miss Israel won’t be carrying an assault rifle, because it bruises her legs and make it difficult for her to model in photo shoots.

Aesthetics gives peace. The ugly one carry a rifle to destroy lives, but the beautiful one must put down the weapon lest it bruises one’s pretty legs.

…though we all know that bruises can be airbrushed out in Photoshop.

Coo. Coo.

Fat and arrogant in London. Poor and miserable in Manhattan. Crispy and tasty in Hong Kong. Now that we don’t need their magnetic noses for letter delivery, they have become the flying rats circling our metropolises.

They are perhaps more intelligent and cultured than many of us. They can tell apart paintings by Monet and Picasso, and know that Renoir is more like Monet than Braque. (Watanabe, Sakamoto & Wakita, 1995) They even understand the music styles of Bach and Stravinsky. (Porter & Neuringer, 1984) And they certainly have no interest in whether Britney Spears is pregnant again or not.

I wonder how many among them are adventurers - flying around the world, going to study Gaudi’s cathedral in Barcelona and peck bits of Serrano ham on the street, then to the red light district of Amsterdam and giggle amid the strange fumes in the air.

What do they think of humanity? Those in New York City must have met enough kind old ladies and mean little kids, and flown above the Empire State building and into the dirtiest corner of Subway system, and observed the happenings in Central Park past midnight. 

They are cynical like some of us. In Trafalgar Square, they squabble for bits of food and poop on Admiral Nelson’s head. Sometimes, like us, they are screwed by the government too.

I don’t seen them often now. Here in suburban Seattle, the streets are always clean and empty, and the lakes are guarded by gangs of ducks and gulls.

Two fantastic portraits of artist come to my mind.

The first portrait comes from Jean Cocteau’s 1930 film, The Blood of a Poet. A lustrous mouth appears on the artist’s hand, sighing and whispering, bringing along much pleasures and much confusions. The artist puts his hand-mouth on the sensual parts of his body.

The second comes from Paul Klee’s book, On Modern Art. He compares the artist to a tree. The root is the branching and ordering of a passing stream of image and experience, and the crown of the tree is his art. The artist is the stem, gathering and passing on what comes to him from the depths. “He neither serves nor rules — he transmits.”

I suspect an artist is someone who swings wildly between such strange spectrum, from sensation and obsession to wisdom and wholeness.

I love monsters that breathe no fire, guard no treasure, live in their own creepy ways, are unharmed by heroes or capitalism –

Baku, for instance, is a monster that feeds on dreams. Headless Xiantian turns his nipples into eyes and navel into mouth, dances with a shield and an axe. A drowned girl turns into a bird, called Jianwei, which drops pebbles into the ocean to fill it. The songs of Sirens lead the sailors astray. The singing Mermaids, riding seaward on the waves, would not sing a song to J. Alfred Prufrock.

All these little creatures are more lively, more curious, more fascinating than the saliva dripping Aliens of Hollywood or a Tamagotchi in monotonous pixels and beeps.

Georges Perec, the silly and brilliant French author (who, among other things, writes a novel without any use of “e”), discusses jigsaw puzzles in the Preamble of his masterpiece La vie mode d’emploi (Life A User’s Manual) thus:

“…despite appearances, puzzling is not a solitary game: every move the puzzler makes, the puzzle-maker has made before; every piece the puzzler picks up, and picks up again, and studies and strokes, every combination he tries, and tries a second time, every blunder and every insight, each hope and each discouragement have all been designed, calculated, and decided by the other.”

Perhaps interaction design is also a form of puzzle-making. A good puzzle should be neither too obvious nor too frustrating. How puzzling!