Rejoicing at the surcease of boiling + some slapdash snapshottery (Saturday Nattering)

What I’ve got for you here is a haphazard assortment of photos and observations. First up, an orange inside an orange.

Navel oranges (including the Cara Cara ‘varietal’ aka Cara Cara Navel, mentioned here back in May, often have a second miniature peel-less orange inside their peel, but blood oranges aren’t navels and the peeled and halved blood orange shown in the photo above contained a second, much smaller (a thumbnail’s width in diameter or, to put it another way, slightly smaller than an olive) orange which boasted (and this was the novel aspect for yours truly) a peel of its own.

The tiny inner orange’s peel had a spongy texture, mayhap from being encased inside another orange and not exposed to air, but it was unmistakably an orange peel. In retrospect, I wish I’d had the presence of mind to have sliced the thing in half and taken a picture of the cross section before chucking it into the trash along with the full-sized outer orange’s peel fragments. Next time, if there is a next time, I’ll do it.

In a bookstore in a shopping mall in Tsuen Wan, copies of a couple of translated editions of Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, bearing discount stickers, were stacked on one of the display tables. The cartoon skull in the Chinese title on one cover caught my eye and prompted me to take a quick photo.

On closer inspection, it turns out that the Chinese title isn’t anything like a translation of the book’s original, English name. 人性的弱點 means Human Weakness. In the edition with the black paperback cover, a drawn skull replaced the left half of the final character (點). Human Weakness or an equivalent like The Weakness of Humanity or the The Weakness of Human Nature seems to be the accepted title of that book throughout the Sinosphere. How odd. One wonders whether the translators have taken any liberties with the source material or cast the contents in a different light than intended.

In the same shopping complex, attached to the base of an escalator and at the edge of the mall’s food court at street-level, I saw an Automatic Hand Washing Machine (pictured above). The iconography for the drying step, the fourth and final stage in the left-to right sequence (Triggering, Scraping, Rinsing, and Drying) displayed above the blue plastic piece seems to show a towel. The appliance has not yet been put into operation.

Recently, for the first time in months, S. and I sat down inside a Starbucks. I’ve always enjoyed pumpkin pie, a dessert that’s not readily available in Hong Kong, even in autumn, so I was interested in trying out HK Starbucks’s pumpkin cream tart, priced at HK$ 35 (halfway between 4 and 5 USD, so not a cheap treat), when I spied it in the store’s display case. It was early-ish that morning but they only had one of them and removed the label from the case after plating the tart for me. As you can see from the cut-away photo above, it was mostly cream.

On the same day, I was struck by the sight of a banner promoting a tomato soup dish on sale at MX aka Maxim’s restaurants. Incidentally, Maxim’s also operates all Hong Kong and Macau Starbucks stores and possibly all of the Cheesecake Factory stores in Mainland China, Macau, and HK. The tomato soup seems to consist, if the imagery on the sign is accurate, of a tomato broth base, boiled Fusilli aka Rotini corkscrew pasta, chunks of tomato solids, and clumps of processed ham luncheon meat (i.e. generic Spam).

Mid-October has brought a slight, yet perceptible and welcome, seasonal contraction in daytime temperatures to us here in Hong Kong. We’re roughly ten degrees Fahrenheit down from September’s highs, which hovered between the upper 80s and middle 90s (low-to-mid 30s in °C). Hurrah for seasons.