The alien, in what is likely his finest environment suit, walked over the ridge in the road, and I stood there watching him disappear from the bottom up. When he was out of sight, I ran to the rise and could see him again, ambling unconcerned past the private cemetery and further toward the little league baseball game, where the boys playing had not yet noticed him. When they see him, it’s half a bet they run away, half a bet they crowd at the fence closest, gawking. All I know is he plodded past me as I stumbled on […]
Californians told not to charge EVs as grid struggles in heat wave
Californians were told Wednesday not to charge their electric vehicles, just days after the state said it would stop selling gas-powered cars, as the aging electricity grid struggles with a fearsome heatwave.
Meet the Bakers Giving Mooncakes a Modern Twist
Like many others around the world, Hong Kong college student Phoebe Chan found herself cooking at home a lot when the global pandemic hit in 2020. “One day, I was making individual beef Wellingtons, and thought they looked quite like a mooncake,” she says. “So I put them into a mooncake mold and it just worked.”
She shared a photo of her invention on Instagram, where it went viral. With the blessing of her family, Chan paused her studies and started up a mooncake business, Phoebe’s Kitchen. Just two years since her very first mooncake, Chan’s whimsical creation is now stocked at high-end supermarkets around Hong Kong. She’s even partnered up with Grand Hyatt Hotel to create a special rendition filled with Angus beef, Parma ham, and truffles.
Needless to say, beef Wellington mooncakes are an immense departure from the traditional Cantonese-style mooncakes that she grew up eating. “The majority of my clients are teenagers, because they are more into creative stuff,” says Chan. “It’s boring giving lotus-seed mooncakes every year.”
Mooncakes are the signature dish of the Mid-Autumn Moon Festival, an annual Asian folk holiday celebrating the fall harvest. In China, celebrants built altars offering food and incense to the moon. At its fullest during the fall, the size of the moon signified the beginning of autumn. Over thousands of years, the custom of celebrating the Mid-Autumn festival radiated out throughout the world with the diaspora, and so did mooncakes.
The pastry is usually purchased in boxes and gifted to friends, family, and business acquaintances, as a symbol of gratitude and generosity. Recipes vary by region. In Cantonese-speaking societies, the classic mooncake is hockey puck-shaped, filled with lotus-seed paste and salted egg yolks. Shanghai and the surrounding province of Jiangsu specialize in flaky round pastries stuffed with either savory chunks of pork or sweet red bean paste. Taiwan’s mooncakes are usually flat, chalky white discs flavored with mung bean paste and dried ground pork.
While traditional mooncakes still dominate, a new cohort of chefs and entrepreneurs are redefining the pastry. There’s now elegant chocolate ice cream mooncakes in Taipei, mooncakes infused with Earl Grey tea in Hong Kong, and in Malaysia, mooncakes spiked with aged whisky.
Whereas traditional mooncakes drew from locally available ingredients, these new renditions have no historical or symbolic ties any region. Instead, they are created for their wow factor—intended to both shock and delight.
“You always want to bring the coolest mooncake to the party,” says Edmund Tan, co-founder of The Ice Cream Bar in Malaysia. “There’s a competitiveness to it.” For the last three years, Tan and his wife Lim Shiew Li have been selling boozy ice cream mooncakes infused with a shot of Johnnie Walker, which they say is a guaranteed way to spice up any Mid-Autumn gathering.
“Consumers nowadays are not looking for tradition,” Tan says. “We are looking for new forms of excitement, new forms of innovation. When you bring that mooncake to a party, do people light up? Or do the people go, ‘Oh, another mooncake.’”
Once a pastry baked in small batches by agrarian households to mark the beginning of autumn, the mooncake only became a gifting commodity in the late 50s and 60s. As Hong Kong transformed into an international financial hub, mooncakes gained a special social cachet. Propelled by the booming economy, mooncakes were so sought after back then that Hong Kongers would pay them off in monthly installments. Designers created bespoke packaging keep an edge up on the competition, while hotels and bakeries started infusing the mooncakes with quirky flavors like egg custard and mochi.
Decades of relentless reinvention has resulted in a host of eclectic, elaborate mooncakes. In fact, some brands spend months nailing down the design and flavors.
“It’s a long process and we try to think at least one year in advance,” says Ken Romaniszyn, the CEO of Lady M, a luxury confections brand with locations in Asia and North America. This year, Lady M is selling limited-edition packages of purple yam custard, Earl Grey, and coffee caramel-flavored mooncakes in a spinning lantern adorned with golden rabbits. “It lights up on the bottom. You can turn it on and it actually spins,” he says.
Romaniszyn first launched Lady M’s mooncake bundles six years ago in Hong Kong. Back in the day, there wasn’t much competition. Their only rivals, he notes, were the mooncakes sold in elegant tin boxes by upscale hotel chains like the Peninsula or the Mandarin Oriental. “But now you have bakeries like us who are participating in this festival, and I think we’ve really elevated the game,” he says. “We’re trying to make delicious mooncakes, but the presentation is equally as important.”
There’s an ambitious thoughtfulness to the design process. While mooncakes themselves are meant to be devoured, the containers they come in will long outlast the confections. It’s imperative that they stand out. At The House Collective, a luxury hotel chain in Hong Kong and the Chinese mainland, the pastries come in actual treasure chests—inspired by toy boxes belonging to Chinese emperors from the Qing Dynasty. “People like to collect it,” says Jaime Chua, the assistant director of marketing at The House Collective. Each box is adorned with faux jade amulets made with recycled glass bottles and used uniforms from the hotels. There are even four separate box designs, each one inspired by the architecture of a different House Collective hotel.
But for some, the reinvention of the mooncake is not just a marketing ploy, but rather a necessary upgrade. “In Taiwan, it’s actually very hot during the Mid-Autumn Festival,” says pastry chef Yu Hsuang Chang of Yu Chocolatier, a Taipei-based chocolate shop. “The traditional mooncake is dense and greasy. Not that it’s not good, but it can be a bit overwhelming.”
For the last four years, Yu has been rolling out ice cream mooncakes for the festivities—round frozen discs, stuffed with either a chocolate cake or a strawberry vanilla sponge with cheese from Normandy, all enveloped in a delicate chocolate shell. “I wanted to do a version of a mooncake that could be pleasing in the hot weather,” he says.
And it works; Every year, his ice-cream mooncakes sell out. Like many other mooncake designers around the world, Yu believes that innovation is what keeps the holiday interesting and fresh. “Traditions were new when they first began, as well,” he says.
Shapespark creates real-time visualisations that are easy to navigate in a web browser
Promotion: the Shapespark visualisation tool makes it easy for designers to turn 3D models into interactive online walkthroughs. Read more
Film-maker Claire Denis: ‘The only problem with sexuality is when the body doesn’t want it any more’
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Someone should make AI that makes storyboards for movies with characters that do not change.
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NASA’s Webb Telescope Captures Hypnotizing Swirls Of “Phantom Galaxy”
NASA’s Webb Telescope Captures Hypnotizing Swirls Of "Phantom Galaxy"
NASA’s $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has provided an even deeper look into the cosmos, revealing the clearest view of the Phantom Galaxy, more formally known as M74, located around 32 million light-years away from Earth.
"Webb’s sharp vision has revealed delicate filaments of gas and dust in the grandiose spiral arms of M74, which wind outwards from the center of the image. A lack of gas in the nuclear region also provides an unobscured view of the nuclear star cluster at the galaxy’s center," NASA and the ESA wrote in a statement.
Combining data from the Hubble Space Telescope and ground-based observatories, both space agencies pieced together a crystal-clear view of the Phantom Galaxy.
The Phantom Galaxy has been a significant focus for astronomers studying the origin and structure of galactic spirals. The new spacecraft with infrared technology allows astronomers "to pinpoint star-forming regions in the galaxies, accurately measure the masses and ages of star clusters, and gain insights into the nature of the small grains of dust drifting in interstellar space," NASA and ESA said.
"Now we have a broader (and even more beautiful!) understanding of the galaxy M74!
"These Hubble and NASAWebb views show the power of observing in different wavelengths. Hubble’s optical vision highlights older stars near the center and younger, bluer stars in the spiral arms," NASA tweeted this week.
In July, NASA released the first images of JWST’s findings since the spacecraft was launched into deep space last December. Though still operational, JWST has already been struck by tiny meteoroids, causing significant uncorrectable damage to the craft’s infrared technology.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 08/31/2022 – 23:00
Sneaky fake Google Translate app installs crypto miner on 112,000 PCs
Dressed up as legitimate desktop software, this sneaky malware has infected thousands of machines across 11 countries, forcing them to unknowingly mine Monero (XMR).
These Are The Countries Most In Debt To China
These Are The Countries Most In Debt To China
According to World Bank data analyzed by Statista, countries heavily in debt to China are mostly located in Africa, but can also be found in Central Asia, Southeast Asia and the Pacific. As Statista’s Katharina Buchholz details below, as the new preferred lender to low-income countries, China now holds 37 percent of these nations’ debt. Just 24 percent of the countries’ bilateral debt comes from the rest of the world in 2022.
You will find more infographics at Statista
The "New Silk Road" project, which finances the construction of port, rail and land infrastructure across the globe, has created much debt to China for participating countries. At the end of 2020, of the 97 countries for which data was available, Pakistan ($77.3 billion of external debt to China), Angola (36.3 billion), Ethiopia (7.9 billion), Kenya (7.4 billion) and Sri Lanka (6.8 billion) held the biggest debts to China. The countries with the biggest debt burdens in relative terms were Djibouti and Angola, followed by the Maldives and Laos, which has just opened a debt-laden railway line to China. The President of the World Bank, David Malpass, called the level of debt many countries once again hold “unsustainable” in January.
The Paris Club used to hold the majority of low-income countries’ debt before it was restructured and largely forgiven after the turn of the millennium for qualifying, developing countries. Whether such a process will be available for Chinese debt is unclear. As of 2020, China had officially lent around $170 billion to low and middle-income countries, up from just around $40 billion in 2010.
Chinese loans have higher interest rates than those from international institutions like the International Monetary Fund or The World Bank or bilateral loans from Paris Club countries, and also have shorter repayment windows. Their setup is closer to commercial loans concerning their conditions of repayment, confidentiality as well as their objectives of funding specific infrastructure projects instead of pursuing development goals in general.
The Covid-19 pandemic has now complicated the already difficult repayment of Chinese loans even more. According to the Financial Times, the country had to renegotiate loans worth $52 billion in 2020 and 2021 – more than three times the amount that met this fate in the two previous years. One such case was Sri Lanka – also among China’s biggest debtors – which in May was the first Asian country in two decades to default on its debt.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 08/31/2022 – 21:40
Mysterious whale wallet now holds 50% of the Smooth Love Potion supply
Join Our Telegram channel to stay up to date on breaking news coverage A mysterious whale wallet address has accumulated billions of Smooth Love Potion (SLP) tokens. SLP is the in-game cryptocurrency that powers one of the largest blockchain gaming networks, Axie Infinity. Mysterious whale accumulates 50% of SLP supply The mysterious whale wallet now […]
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