Apocalyptic Banana Cannibalism

If you've read these ramblings, then you know the obsessive eye I cast over bananas. For example, you learned that most of the bananas we eat are clones of one single banana. Or something like that.

Well, now my friend Karen has revealed the unsubstantiated truth that human DNA is 40% similar to a banana. Now, also being a paranoid. I can only take this information and assume that something terrible is going on here. To begin with, if we are this similar to bananas and we are eating bananas, then aren't we essentially committing cannibalism? If we're eating clones of one banana and we are 40% of that banana, then aren't we all 40% of one another? If so aren't, we eating ourselves?

I needed help, so I Googled this, and the top 4 or 5 results varied the percentage from 40 to 90% shared DNA. But one site cleared it, saying it's sequencing, not composition that matters because since we're all made of the same stuff, we would be 100% similar to a banana, looking at it that way. So we are all bananas.

But then I remembered the BBC report that said that Googling something twice creates the same carbon impact as an electric tea pot (it is BBC, afterall). Google has let me down again! You can Google it. Wait, don't. Because of the global warming it will create. Killing all the bananas--most importantly the bananas that are us.

I need a paper bag....

Bananas in the News

You know how Heather's well-documented obsession with bananas has seeped over into my blog, and now I see bananas everywhere. If I were one to use puns, I'd say I'm going bananas--I, however, am not one to use puns and rather dislike them so I won't say that. But here is the news in bananas:

The Associated Press (you know you can trust those associates) reports that two men near the Costa Rica-Panama border were caught with $372,000 and when asked what they were doing with that much cash, they claimed to be "banana brokers" looking to buy bananas. Sometimes life is just too good.

My favorite part of the article is that it ends with "Bananas cost about $1.65 a pound in Costa Rica." That's right, the reporter is daring you to figure out how much bananas you could actually buy with 372K. Follow along kids: laundryed cash divided by Costa Rican banana rates= 225,454.55 lbs. of bananas.

Now those are banana brokers!

Banana in Santorini

So thanks to Heather and her banana lecture I did not go hungry today when faced with a green banana and unable to peel it the right way. I flipped that sucker over and opened it from the bottom. That's right, I'm as smart as a monkey. Here's a picture of the blue monkeys fresco in Santorini:

Go Bananas

So I talked bananas with Heather again. She got a leg cramp and said she needed to eat one for potassium. Then, spacing out a little, she said, "I'm going to freak out with the next banana I get. I'll just stare at it, thinking: I've eaten you before...." This led to her telling me that it's easier to open a green banana from the bottom. I call it the bottom--and I'm sure all right-thinking people will agree with me--because the stem is clearly the top of the banana. Monkeys know this trick of opening the banana from the bottom, but see, that's what separates us from the animals--we do things the hard way.

What You Talking About, Poe?

So I’m researching epitaphs. Why? Because it beats the hell out of writing. Some of course are amusing:

Here lies the body of our Anna
Done to death by a banana
It wasn't the fruit that laid her low
But the skin of the thing that made her go.

Heather tells me, by the way, that NPR told her that the bananas we eat will disappear in 30 years due to Panama disease. I miss them already. She further tells me that bananas are sterile and so are essentially clones of one another. We are all eating one banana. I have to quit talking bananas with Heather because she is blowing my mind.

But getting to the famous epitaphs I find Poe’s: “Quoth the Raven, Nevermore.” Why does that make me so sad? Am I the only one who had a morbid teacher who made us play the come up with your obiturary? I can swear the same teacher made us draw a tombstone and write our own epitaph, but you know the betrayer memory…tricky bastard. I was both frightened out of my mind my these exercises in mortality and offended that I could (at some insanely young age) sum up my life in a sentence.

And that’s Poe’s: Quoth the Raven, Nevermore. It’s perfect, some would say. Fitting. But my problem is that it’s cliché. I know you can’t judge that time then from the standards of now. But I can only react now and that’s like Gary Coleman’s epitaph being “What you talking about, God?” Wait, is that his epitaph? No, that’s right, he didn’t die recently…he got married—totally different. Unless you were in a Poe story where death and marriage might be something akin.