I love Apple products. They are simple, elegant, and clever. However, those “I am a Mac” ads are truly annoying.

Apple ads used to present a great vision (Think Different, 1984), but now they are reduced to some cheap jabs which are neither funny nor fact-based.

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.

My Christian friends would remind me the true meaning of Christmas every December, and I couldn’t help but think “yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever”. Every good story becomes exceedingly dull when repeated a thousand times.

And Santa Claus — even as a child, I knew he was a fake hired by a stupid department store. Now, I think he is also too fat and probably a pervert.

Should we go shopping then? There are so many things on sale, but so little that I really need.

Thus repetition makes cynics of us all. Christmas is fast becoming a tautology.

Perhaps I should go scuba diving in Australia next Christmas, and get some BB guns for my family…

Nevertheless, when Christmas comes, people become happier, more spirited, more generous.

It must be the break from endless cylces of vapid working weeks. The glittering lights, fancy shopping windows, impressions of prosperity and happiness around you. A hearty dinner, hopefully with plenty of booze.

Above all, the realization that you are truly loved.

I toil, like many others in my generation, in a corporate world. There I seek illusory glory, and bear unnamable sufferings.

I suppose, if completely submitted to its culture, one could indeed be happy and successful and well-fed. But one would drift away from one’s true self, and interact in chary manner towards people with similar guises, and be a team player in a machinery that exists solely to profit its shareholders.

Yet it would be far-fetched to call this “suffering” when we consider the magnitude of upheavals in our era.

To those who were dying of hunger in China in 1960s, it would be a divine blessing to be working in a corporate world. But to those who studied Renaissance in college, it is only natural to regard Excel spreadsheets with contempt.

It is with this sense of ambivalence, an irresolution between feeling grateful and feeling entrapped, that I conduct my professional life.

To relieve my petty sufferings, I try to emulate the qualities of J Alfred Prufrock:

no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.

At times, alas, I also bullshit.
(more…)

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.

I imagine I lived in the ancient time, and was a hunter of deers and a forager of berries. I saw the direction of streams, the movements of stars, the shape of clouds in summers and winters, and the colours of trees in springs and autumns. The lawfulness of nature was apparent to me, although I could not decipher the details of its laws. What language must I invent to describe a generalization of nature? What system must I devise to bring together a list of abstract principles derived from observation and experience?

Reading I-Ching, the sweeping vision of nature and humanity in ancient times spreads before me. I-Ching, also known as the Book of Change, is a system said to be originated by Fu Hsi (~2800BC). Using a binary notation to denote an extraordinary set of symbols, it is a system to interpret the processes of nature, and thereby the affairs of man.
(more…)

Contemplating the forms in nature, we recognize the change of seasons; contemplating the forms in culture, we shape the world.

– I-Ching

I have a wandering mind, and would open my mouth inadvertently when I am deep in thoughts. Here I shall record and share the things to which my mind wanders, and for which my mouth opens.

There are three noble pursues for a wandering mind: carnal visions, strange stories, and intellectual gobbledygooks. The weaving and unweaving of these thoughts, blending into a melting reality, do give me much happiness.

But, as I get older and know the ways of the world, these intellectual excitements fade. My mind are now occupied by goals and objectives. Career, health, marriage, retirement, dinner - these now agitate my neurons more than art, science, and boobies.

On a sleepless night like this, I shall forget about works tomorrow and let my mind wander again. Think about this: our lives, like the whole course of human history, are as infinitely divisive as time and space. A turning point in history can be subdivided, and a long cycle of tragedies and comedies can be grouped. What is a human life but bits of sensations and bits of thoughts molded into a pathetic or glorious goo?

What makes the beautiful ivory tools of Magdalenian evolve into Microsoft Office, stone axe into Taser gun, prokaryote into eukaryote, tree worshippers into UFO worshippers? The juxtaposition of past and present is often more revealing than a chronological order. The hidden relationships and sweeping sense of change, found among bits of ideas and things, often cause me wonderment.

Once dinner is done, it is natural for a curious mind to seek puzzles: lawfulness in nature, aspects of humanity, visions of beauty, variations of truth. I hope this blog can be my personal collection of these puzzles, stirring senses, whetting curiosity, and inviting thoughts.