Bananas—they’re sweet and kid-friendly…and seem to be in the news a lot more than they ought to be.
MONKEY GOT YOUR GUN?
Seventeen-year-old John Szwalla walked into a Winston-Salem, North Carolina, convenience store in May 2009, showed owner Bobby Ray Mabe that he had something under his shirt, and demanded money. Mabe could see that the object under Szwalla’s shirt was a banana, so he, along with a customer, jumped on the robber, beat him up, and restrained him while they waited for the police. Szwalla managed to eat the banana before officers arrived at the scene, but he was arrested and charged with attempted armed robbery anyway. (Police took photographs of the banana peel as evidence.)
Have you always wanted to eat a banana that had a thin ribbon of something else running down the inside of it? You’re in luck: Someone in Argentina has invented the “Destapa Banana: The First Banana Refiller in the World.” Just attach the device to the tip of a banana and push down on the plunger, and it extracts a thin core from inside the banana. Then simply fill the middle of the banana with jelly, liquid chocolate, melted ice cream, jalapeño sauce, fish oil—whatever you like—and peel and eat.
Have you ever wondered why banana juice has never caught on like orange or cranberry juice? It’s because bananas are so high in starch that their liquid can’t be extracted by traditional juicing methods. But scientists at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre in Mumbai, India, have recently patented a new banana-juicing process that results in a sweet, nutritious juice that contains no added water or sugar, requires only a dash of citric acid for preservation, and has a shelf life of about three months. The scientists hope the new juice will help get kids off sugary, “unnatural” sodas and make lots of money for banana-rich India.
Some ultramarathon runners have their toenails removed to make running easier.
LondonBananas.com has nothing but photographs of banana peels that have been discarded at various locations around London: in dumpsters, in alleys, and at entrances to famous landmarks like the Underground. According to the site’s photographer, S. Astrid Bin, “On average, I see about five skins a day, and my one-day record is 22. I don’t go looking for them.”
In 2008 scientists at the University of Agricultural Sciences in Bangalore, India, convinced the owners of a one-acre banana plantation to try an experimental new fertilizer. Its secret ingredient: human urine. Thousands of gallons of pee were collected at local schools and hospitals, and 150 banana plants were given doses of the fertilizer every day. Result: The bananas that had been treated with urine bore fruit two to three weeks earlier than bananas that hadn’t, and their bunches weighed an average of five pounds more.
If you ever find yourself on a crab-fishing boat, don’t take along any bananas. Why? They’re considered bad luck on crab boats, and if you’re found with one, tradition has it that the captain will turn around, go back to the dock, and throw the banana—and you—off the boat. No one’s sure how the superstition started, but it’s believed to date back to the 1700s and the Caribbean banana trade. Bananas come from tropical regions that also were home to many poisonous spiders—and it was very bad luck to be trapped on a boat with a bunch of those. The superstition is still common today.
In April 2008, eleven high-school seniors in Zion, Illinois, were suspended for seven days after taking part in a “vicious and dangerous” prank. What did they do that was so heinous? Ten of them put on banana costumes, while the eleventh donned a gorilla costume—and the gorilla chased the bananas through the school’s hallways. Most of their fellow students thought it was funny, and said the punishment was ridiculous. “What’s funnier than a gorilla chasing bananas through a school?” asked Andrew Leinonen, the gorilla mastermind of the prank. “Nothing.”
Veterinarians can now detect fraudulent udder-beautifying schemes used on county fair show cows.