In which our intrepid hero encounters Trojan horses of a most unusual kind…

Let me declare flat out that unexpected pleasures are the best pleasures.  A gift is better if you don’t know what it is, better still if unanticipated.  Case in point:  twenty years ago, a local movie theater held a week-long series of Hong Kong films.  This was long before Americans knew who Jackie Chan was and Hong Kong cinema was known primarily to cinephiles.  I myself had never seen a Hong Kong film at that point, so I decided to go see one of the movies.  This was the 1993 film The Legend of Fong Sai-Yuk.  I knew absolutely nothing about this film—and this was before the World Wide Web—so I found myself in a situation that I pretty much never am in, going to see a movie completely blind about it.  I didn’t know the cast, the plot, the concept, nothing.   To my delight and surprise, the movie, an action-comedy, turned out to be extremely entertaining.  Because I had no expectations for the film at all (I didn’t even know it would be a comedy), the fact that it turned out to be pretty decent made it even better, because it was so unexpected.  Even the smallest pleasures get magnified when they come unannounced.

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