"The Affected" is a new documentary that chronicles the lives of banana and sugar plantation workers in modern-day Latin America - and has uncovered a startling, ongoing nightmare: an epidemic of kidney failure among sugar workers, possibly related to pesticide exposure. The work the filmmakers have been doing has led to the killing of one crew member, and threats on the lives of others. You can read more about "The Affected" - and learn how you can help - here. Commercial bananas have always been about brutal corporate trampling of the world. Disney hopes to extend its reach in that regard to our food supply, as Slate speculates on the company's plan to offer fruit and eggs (!) branded with its lineup of teen idols.
Kooky fruitmobile, from Funstasticus.
This is the craziest fruit truck ever. Where was the image shot? Hard to say. Judging from the apparent ethnicity of the driver and the guy watching, it could be Latin America, or it could be the Philippines, or somewhere else. The other items on the truck - pineapples, squash, sweet potato - could be grown in either place. Check the banana trees growing behind the house to the left. The image is from the Funtasticus website.
Follow-up: After examining the photo, my Dad notes that "just above the right tire are some daikon, and about a foot above the scale is a Durian(?). If these IDs are correct, it is Asia/ Philippines. Although daikon can be grown anywhere, I am not aware of Durian growing anywhere besides Asia, Philippines, Indonesia."
Good one, Dad!
Can't narrow the Asia part down, but if we arbitrarily make it a choice between Indonesia and the Philippines, then the Philippines gets the nod. Why? In the Philippines, traffic keeps right - and the driver sits on the left, according to Wikipedia. In Indonesia, roadside custom is the opposite. To the extent that this overburdened little truck is being "driven" - the driver seems to be stepping out of his compartment, and it may very well be to push - it seems to be happening from the left side.
I have no idea, and if I did, I wouldn't share it.
There's a world of bizarre banana toys out there, but these are especially strange, and with the holidays approaching - OK, not really; but here in the U.S., the shopping frenzy has begun to begin, because that's just how we roll - these are both super-weird and, in some cases, even unfathomable. I'll post just two samples, both from Jill Harness at the Inventorspot.com blog. Above, whatever. Below: inflatable key rings, which are actually kind of functional. Canoe, picnic, capsize, lose the camera but salvage the drive home - happens all the time.
All this stuff is from Japan, of course. There's more in Jill's original entry. Links to purchase, too.
Blow-up key chains with suffocating bananas trapped inside. Generally, controlled atmospheres are used for ripening the fruit. Not sure if this was the intention here.
Photo: PR Newswire
Readers from other countries, you'll just have to take my word for it: "The Banana Splits" was one of the strangest things ever presented to children as entertainment. It was an NBC show with costumes created by Sid and Marty Kroft, who might best be described as Walt Disney, split into two by genetic mutation, dropped into a vat of ergot, and unleashed onto the world with at least temporary carte blanche to produce television for adolescents and potheads. Since I was the former, and the grownups in my house were the latter, I have warm memories of Saturday morning gatherings to watch this program.
Four costumed creatures made up "The Banana Splits" (the name came from the rock band they formed; their jingle - also known as the 'Tra La La' song - was so genuinely catchy that it was appropriated as the hook for Bob Marley's "Buffalo Soldiers.") The quartet are Fleegle the Dog, Drooper the Lion, Bingo the Gorilla, and Snorky the Elephant. They live in a Banana Pad and drive in their Banana Buggy, which is more than most people in the banana world can say.
In a press release, Warner Bros. executive Jordan Sollitto, promised that the new version of the program would stay true to the original: "Everything that made The Banana Splits hugely popular in the '60s is back," he said. I believe this, especially since medical marijuana can be purchased by just about anybody who's willing to say they have a hangnail in California, where the show is produced. Definitely replenish your stash prior to visiting the show's website, whose accompanying soundtrack and multimedia you will find either completely hypnotic or very, very upsetting - just as the original show was.
Also, you can join a club and get an awesome membership card:
Read the hilariously titled press release: "Warner Bros. Serves Up Four Scoops of Hilarity With Relaunch."
UPDATE: The BBC sort of debunks the Bob Marley/Banana Splits song similarity. Audio from both is included, so listen for yourself and decide.
You may safely wear this brand of undergarment when seeking The Deadliest Catch.
My Dad sent in this one. Apparently it is bad luck to bring a banana on a fishing boat. There's an entry on the "How Stuff Works" website that attempts to explain why. One theory is that boats carrying bananas - prior to refrigeration - had to move too fast (too keep the fruit from spoiling), which prohibited fishing. That idea dates back to the 1700s. Another was that sailors might choke to death on the fumes of overripe bananas in cargo holds. Finally, there was the idea that crew members could slip and fall on rotting banana peels.
I have no clue what the answer is. But the funniest part of the account of the superstition is that it is so extensive that it involves an underwear check: if you're wearing "Fruit of the Loom" tight-whites, you'll have to go commando - or at least cut the label off - before you're allowed on board. Underwearfortunately, I am required to call shenanigans on this one, since there is not - and has never been (see images) - a banana on the company's label.
You may board when ready.
That's all you'll find on this blog - nearly 100 of them. Here's part of the anonymous creators' statement:
"I see them everywhere. They're languishing on doorsteps, hanging out in the middle of the road, dangling off street signs, peeking out of piles of garbage, reclining in the middle of the sidewalk, riding the bus for free. A great number of them are bright yellow as if they're fresh and have just been dropped, although they appear in all states of decay. I don't know how or why they caught my attention, but within a week of being in London I couldn't get my mind off these banana skins. Where were they coming from? Who was eating all these bananas and leaving the skins around? Why was it always bananas I was seeing, and not, say, oranges? Was it a sign? Was there something sinister going on? Apparently these little hazards were a covert operation going completely unnoticed; everyone I asked about it said that they had never noticed anything of the sort and looked at me as if I was nuts."
I buy it.
By the way, you really can slip on a discarded banana peel - in fact, the hazard was so real back when the fruit was introduced about a century ago that cities enacted ordinances against discarding the fruit's outer skin. The reason so many banana wrappers were left laying around? Spectacular popularity: the early banana marketers were so good at building demand for the fruit that municipalities were literally overwhelmed with an unexpected glut of rotting, slippery waste. Simply put: there weren't enough trash cans to hold all the banana peels. No kidding, There's a whole section about it in my book; you can also hear my talk about it in my Fresh Air interview, linked above.
Via Boing-Boing .
Bikes and bananas, captured together in this $9.95 t-shirt I saw at a Jamba Juice in NYC. (I know, WEAK post. I'm on vacation.)
Atomic banana juice from India
This is really more than you'll ever want to know about extracting juice from bananas, but it is interesting, because the folks at India's Bhaba Atomic Research Centre have figured out ways to squeeze a lot more juice from the fruit than previously was thought to be possible. I don't know why the nuclear scientists are spending time doing this, though my (absolutely uninformed) guess is that atomic research involves advanced centrifuges, and so do the juice extraction techniques described on the linked pages. A second guess might be more political: India's atomic energy program is a huge source of national pride and strategic military importance. Bananas are also a source of national pride - and are of huge importance to the national diet. Maybe it isn't so silly that top minds and resources would be devoted to working on both in a single facility?
Or maybe these guys just have a lot of time on their hands and got thirsty.
Battles Banana-Wielding Thug.
In my book, I note that one observer described the banana as a "weapon of conquest" in Latin America. This doesn't apply in Maryland, where a would-be thief attempted to use the fruit to rob a 7-Eleven - and was denied by a brave clerk.
Incredibly (or maybe not so incredibly), this isn't the first time this has happened - and the last time, the guy got eighteen months in the hoosegow for his malfeasance (third item down.)
I'm sorry for this picture.
Click the link, to the Daijiworld newspaper, to find out the results of the study, if you dare...
Bangalore, May 29: Nagasandra, a village 50 km from Bangalore in Doddaballapur taluk, isn’t any different from the hundreds of others surrounding it. But in a remote corner of this small village is a 1-acre banana plantation that has been part of a unique research project: a study on the effect of anthropogenic liquid waste on soil properties and crop growth. In lay-man terms, it is a study on how human urine can be used as fertilizer in agriculture...
read on...
The company's chief information officer says so here. They probably use Blackberries. The phone pictured above is neither; it is LG's "Banana" model, which is only available in Korea. (OK, so it was a slow banana news week. After the onslaught of disease, terrorism, and Chiquita-related news, thank goodness.)
Image: Lake County News-Sun
This seems draconian. Even worse is the kid quoted at the end, who sucks up and accepts his sentence.
ZION, Ill., April 23 (UPI) -- A Zion, Ill., high school has suspended 11 seniors involved in a prank that featured a student in a gorilla costume chasing banana-clad seniors in the hallways.
Zion-Benton Township High School handed seven-day suspensions to the costumed students, who phoned in sick before the stunt and wore pantyhose over their heads to conceal their identities during the prank, the Waukegan (Ill.) News-Sun reported Wednesday.
Some of the students said the school overreacted with the harsh punishment.
"What's funnier than a gorilla chasing bananas through a school? Nothing," said Andrew Leinonen, the prank's mastermind and the student who dressed as a gorilla. "It was a harmless prank."
However, others said they were just thankful the school decided not to bar them from prom and graduation.
"We think this is a just punishment," said Brendon Epker, one of the students who dressed as bananas. "We broke rules we shouldn't have broken."
A longer and more explanatory account of the whole affair is here.
A slideshow is here.
These kids deserve medals, not demerits.
This fellow, Ray Comfort, is using a banana to prove that a "designer" created the universe. The general idea is that only an intelligent force could have created such a naturally convenient item (with a protective wrapper, an easy-to-use "pull tab," perfect shape, etc.) There is so much stupid about this that it would be laughable, if so many people didn't fall for it. The reality, simply put, is that the banana is so "perfect" for human consumption because we've spent seven millennia - longer than just about any other crop - cultivating it to be so. In other words, since we've selected and reselected the best bananas, finally arriving at the one we eat today, the fruit - rather than proving that an unseen hand created it - tells us the opposite: we're the ones who made it what it is, and we used the tools of evolution to do so.
Oh, and also, the other guy in the video is washed-up child star Kirk Cameron, of "Growing Pains." Crediblity achieved.
Watch the video...if you want to read more about Comfort, or the Athiest Test, click below (you'll also find out why peanut butter contains yet another proof of a willful creator of the universe...)
Continue reading "This ninny says bananas disprove evolution..." »
California's latest racket lottery game is "Go Bananas," a scratch-off contest that claims odds of about one winner per every five tickets (at a buck each.) That includes tickets that win you other tickets. The chance of getting real cash are twelve to one. In the interest of public service, I've purchased five tickets, labelled them, and will scratch one out every day for the coming week. If you're really bored, check back in tomorrow to see what I won (half of everything I win will go to Bioversity International, the banana conservation organization.)
THE WAY THE TICKET WORKS: You scratch off six boxes. If three match you win. There's a bonus "quick $10 spot" box that - if the number ten is revealed - nets you that amount of money.
MONDAY I LOST. Got a pair of $6.00 scratches, and one $500. Tease. TUESDAY I LOST. Got a pair of $150s. WEDNESDAY, THURSDAY, FRIDAY, LOST LOST LOST! Lesson: you can't save bananas with lottery tickets.
Here's a stupid page from the California lottery that lists the entire array of theft devices they offer.
The point of all this, besides making me richer than the book ever could, is to point out - once again - that the origin of the term "go bananas" is not necessarily known. See here.
Images from the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive. Read the full post for direct links and downloadable (!!!) cartoons.
In the 1940s, as disease ravaged banana plantations in Latin America, the major banana companies implemented strategies to convince consumers to buy their particular brand of fruit. The Chiquita banana campaign was, and is, one of the most successful in marketing history. The singing, dancing, sexy fruit was based on the real-screen cinema exploits of Brazilian bombshell Carmen Miranda, who'd famously cavorted with man-sized bananas in the 1942 Busby Berkeley musical, “The Gang’s All Here.”
Continue reading "Amazing Chiquita banana cartoon from the 1940s" »
This comes from Oddity Central, via Terri Wahl (aka Auntie Em): New York artist Stefan Sagmeister has installed a panel of 7,200 bananas at the Deitch Projects gallery. This fruited megalith was put up on January 31 as part of the "Things I Have Learned in My Life So Far" exhibit, which hinges around the idea of continuous transformation (the structure itself is in a state of rapid change - rather fetid at this point, since yellow cavendish bananas generally last about seven days before mushing up. The yellow brown barrier tumbles down next week.)
At my recent reading at Warwick's bookstore, I was asked why monkeys peel bananas "upside-down." My flippant answer was that I don't answer "monkey questions," but the truth is that I just didn't know. However, Slate, the online magazine that usually writes about important things, answered the question in 2002. "Monkeys are the real experts" in peeling bananas, writes Steven E. Landsberg during a discussion of whether bananas are better eaten - by humans - from the bottom up. (I vote against. He's non-committal; Landsberg also claims to know a guy who "scoops out the seeds" before eating a banana. Since bananas are seedless, this is a miracle, and whoever this fellow is, he needs to talk to banana breeders immediately.)
Some other general monkey/banana questions:
(BTW, The monkey is Magilla Gorilla, one of Hannah-Barbera's 1960s stable of challenged anthropomorphic Saturday morning fun-time pals. See more of this huggable, luvable simian after the jump.)
There was recently some debate on a blog over whether the loss of the endangered Cavendish might not be such a big problem; a poster from Brazil pointed out that there are many unique bananas available in that country.
True enough, though all have problems that most likely make them poor candidates for global Cavendish replacement. Nevertheless, if you get to Brazil, you should try them. Here - again, inspired by the Brazilian blog poster - are three of the "Fabulous Five."
Nanica: This is a banana that stays a bit green, even when ripe. But that doesn't mean it isn't a good-tasting banana. The Brazilian Fruit website describes it as "sweet, tender and pleasantly aromatic."
Prata: The Prata is a less-sweet banana that grows very well and resists lots of diseases. It is a bit sour, which makes it a less-than-great Corn Flake candidate - but a great potential superstar in a market that might diversify to include varietal bananas (just as we've seen the number of apple types available in stores explode from the days when we simply got red delicious and granny smith fruit.)
Here's a recipe for the savory Prata banana pastry pictured above, from the "Taste of Brazil" Web site.
Maça: The Maça is known as an "apple banana," because it has a taste and texture similar to that fruit. They're yummy, though a bit of an acquired taste for Americans used to their sweet (and somewhat bland) Cavendish variety. A Brazilian breeder told me that he had "high hopes" that apple bananas might become a global staple - but added: "As long as the sweeter bananas exist, there's little incentive for banana companies to make that happen."
There are a dozen major diseases that affect the banana - most virulent, many incurable (the rest often require enough pesticides to turn you into a lobster.) But how to you recognize these maladies? The American Phytopathological Society (APS) has the answer: a CD-ROM called "Diseases of Tropical Fruits, Citrus, and Sugarcane."
That's right - you'll not only get pictures of the stuff that ails bananas, but you'll also feast your eyes on over 550 photographs of angry fungi, bacteria, viruses, worms, and beetles, on the march against avocado, banana, coconut, grapefruit, lemon, lime, mandarine, mango, orange, papaya, and sugarcane. A bargain at $59.00.
If - for some insane reason - an electronic photo album of plant sicknesses isn't up your alley, the "Banana Bunker" from Cultured Containers might be nice: this is a curved, protective plastic container for your fruit. I've already reviewed one of these - the "Banana Guard" - and though I normally attempt to refrain from commentary that might discomfort, to quote Bob Chipeska, those with "tender sensibility," this has to be said: the thing looks like it belongs hidden under your bed (though I like the accordion center, which presumably stretches to fit any size fruit.) The inventor, Paul Stremple, points out that the product not only keeps your banana safe and unblemished, but also safeguards the contents of your backpack or briefcase from the banana. Price: $4.99.
If only Stremple's masterpiece could extend its protective shield to the sick bananas on the CD-ROM.
Order the CD-ROM. Order the banana protector, or, if you happen to be in New England, buy one - no foolin' - at the gift shop of the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art.
...I think this is better than Scrabble. (OK, it really isn't, because the tiles get to be a mess and you run out of room on the table. But it remains a great game. I've been playing it non-stop since Christmas day.) The tiles come inside the banana pouch. You make up anagrams. No board required, so you can keep that banana in your pocket...
$14.99, direct from the manufacturer. Or, if you happen to be in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, or Dubai (!?!), you can buy it as a last-minute Christmas gift at Flight 001 stores, where I encountered it.
Once again, scooped by BoingBoing. In Japan, Lucy and Snoopy hawk popcorn with "banana milk" flavor. Picture from Cory Doctorow's flickr stream.
PS, you can't buy the popcorn stateside, but somewhat yummy Nesquik banana milk is only as far as your local Circle-K, AM-PM, or Kum & Go or - and this is kind of weird - United Dairy Farmers convenience store. The latter is the family business that launched the career of Carl Lindner, former chairman of Chiquita.
Continue reading "Made in a plant that processes Peanuts®" »
I'll just shoplift the post. I couldn't do better.
There's also a video.
Mark Frauenfelder writes: "I think the DestapaBanana is a device that sucks the insides out of a banana while it is still in its peel, so that you can fill resulting cavity with the filling of your choice. The creator of DestapaBanana comments: 'The message is clear, DestapaBanana values and increases the current sales volumes, highlights bananas as a new type of desert and open the doors to more businesses and consumers.'"
There are a lot of things Belgians know about bananas: the scientist Edmond De Langhe is probably the greatest living banana explorer. He's spent much of his life traveling the world, looking for new species of the fruit. His specimens are stored at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium; over 1,000 different banana types are kept there. The collection acts as both a way of preserving the fruit's biodiversity in a rapidly-overdeveloping world, and as the raw material for future banana breeding. One of the Leuven bananas might hold the key to building a more disease-resistant version of the fruit. Much of the work in the attempt to find that grail banana is being overseen by Rony Swennen, a De Langhe protege and advocate (as I am) of the use of genetic modification to broaden the fruit's experimental possibilities.
...more after the jump, including a correction...
Banana trees are pretty easy to cultivate, but getting them to yield fruit is unlikely unless you're in the tropics - or own a large greenhouse. But with luck, you can get some nice leaves and use them to wrap sticky rice (recipes). The banana growing kit above is s $12.98 and comes complete with a plastic monkey.
...even more presents after the jump...
The patented "Banana Guard" solves what is, I suppose, a real problem...
It costs seven bucks, and you can read all about it or even order one here if you like. I don't make any money off this, I swear. This information is presented purely as a public service.
