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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.
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