Below is a photo of some corroded rebar, exposed through spalling, on the floor of a multi-level underground car park in a residential complex here in Hong Kong.
Today’s other photo is of a rusty cover for some sort of plumbing/electrical infrastructure access point in the same structure.
In both images, one can see signs of reworking or repair. The thumbnail for this post, cropped from a photo taken in the same place, shows a different bit of rebar emerging from a spot in the wall somewhere else in the garage.
A smidgen over a decade ago, I bought a copy of Alexandra Horowitz‘s On Looking: Eleven Walks With Expert Eyes, newly-published at the time. My copy has a neat-o cover (click 
to have a gander). The book seems to have been subsequently rechristened On Looking: A Walker’s Guide to the Art of Observation, a less-accurate title, and afflicted with lackluster cover designs. I only read On Looking the one time, but the original hardcover’s dust jacket may have helped charm the book’s way into an durable place in my memory.
Why not crack the book open, flip through it a bit to confirm that it’s generally how I remember it, and fish for a meaningful bit of text to share?
thirty-three seconds later…
Even its spine is sufficiently visually distinctive that hunting down its resting place on a middle shelf in one of our bookcases was a cinch. Here’s a brief quote from page 15 of my copy, near the end of the introduction (Amateur Eyes):
In this book, I am looking for what it is that I miss, every day, right in front of me, while walking around the block.The blockincludes the physical elements of the street—from the sidewalks to the buildings—and their history.
Horowitz writes, a few lines further on, that a sense of perpetual wonder in my surroundings
is a perceptual skill
. Near as I can remember, she doesn’t lay out any rigorous arguments in support of the value of this skill and I don’t have a burning desire to attempt it myself, but I instinctively agree and have made a habit of trying to keep my eyes peeled and priming myself to notice details of my surroundings when out and about.
One side effect, at least in my case, of maintaining this sort of attitude is the snapping of lots of quick photos of things that strike me in the moment as interesting, like the pictures above.
Obligatory note: I do not believe that the structure in which I took these photos is at imminent risk of any significant sort of structural failure, with the caveat that I am not a structural engineer or metallurgist or [so on and so forth]. I simply found the phenomena interesting.
Synchronicity strikes again (UPDATE)
Shortly after I posted this entry, as I was passing through the same structure, a rather large centipede (a Scolopendra subspinipes from what I can gather), unexpectedly undulated its way out of a drain a few yards ahead of me, directly in my path. I backed up a few feet and watched its perambulations only for it to turn towards me and approach at speed. Each time that I moved out of its way, it turned and charged again until, after a couple of minutes, I put a bit more distance between us. Then, it seemed to lose interest and began exploring the immediate vicinity, still near a foot traffic choke point but no longer right in front of it.
As passersby came and went, to my amazement, not a one of them noticed the forearm-sized, rapidly-flowing arachnid criss-crossing the concrete. Even the presence of someone obviously photographing or filming something on the ground failed to spark their curiosity.
If you are inclined to suspect that I am exaggerating the thing’s size, I invite you to feast your eyes on the photo below, showing it mid-stride in front of a parked minivan.
The centipede was constantly on the move and, while it hadn’t strayed more than a few meters from the drain, it had moved enough that it was no longer blocking my route. Having things of my own to do, I wasn’t going to tarry much longer and was on the verge of leaving when a couple approached, each with a smallish dog trotting ahead of them on its leash. Neither of the people and neither of their canines had noticed anything unusual and were headed close to where the many-legged predator was, at that moment, doing figure eights on the mottled and scored concrete car park floor. I drew their attention to the beast and they gasped in unison, stopped in their tracks, and drew up the slack on their leashes and pulled their pooches closer. My good deed done, I left the area, intently scanning the ground ahead of me all the while as I went.
These little terrors are venomous, but it’s my understanding that a bite from one, even of this size, might be extremely painful but ought not to be life-threatening for an adult human. For a small animal like an unwary pet dog or cat, I am not so sure. Reportedly, they are more than capable of preying on mice and on birds.
I’m glad that I spotted this arachnid when it emerged from beneath a grating rather than when it was, for example, scuttling up onto one of my sneakers and so I am inclined to chalk this incident up as an example of the real-world benefit of striving to cultivate the ol’ sense of perpetual wonder in my surroundings
.