Posts Tagged ‘ Banana Culture ’

Banana Gin kills 81 in Uganda

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This is tragic. Uganda – the world’s top banana consuming nation (with an average intake of about 500 pounds per person, compared to about 25 pounds for the typical U.S. consumers) – finds dozens of ways to use the fruit. That includes the national dish, a sort of mush called matooke, along with banana beer and a banana spirit – that’s the gin in question – called waragi. Last week, 80 people died after consuming a home-distilled batch of the drink that was, apparently, laced with methanol. Many suffered blindness and kidney failure before they actually succumbed.

Tragic, as I said, so I hope you won’t see this video – which I made in the Democratic Republic of Congo after my first taste of waragi – makes light of the situation. Even bottled and (assumedly) pure, the stuff isn’t so great, though my review was a little more kind…

Banana Museum, Saved, Again!

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Still the best banana picture ever.

I met Ken “Bananaster” Banister about six years ago, when I was beginning to research my book. At that point, his museum occupied a storefront in Altadena, California (a suburb of Los Angeles.) He’d been running the museum for decades, and it was the most amazing repository of banana items I’d ever seen. But Ken was retiring, and was trying to sell the place. At that point, he was asking several hundred thousand dollars for the facility; an eBay auction resulted in no takers.
A couple of years later, with the future of the museum in jeopardy, he moved it to an exhibition center provided by the city of Hesperia – a high-desert town between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. All seemed well when I visited in 2008. But earlier this year, Hesperia told Ken that his collection – now reduced – could no longer be accommodated. The search for a new home was on, again. Last week, that home was found: Virginia Garbutt, who owns a liquor store near Salton Sea – a dry lake bed and former resort area south of Palm Springs – picked up the collection, and hopes it will be a tourist attraction.

I hope so too, and I’m optimistic. I also hope that the new owners will maintain Ken’s sunny and wacky demeanor. Sunny, as in “a banana looks like a smile”  (he told me that when I first met him) and wacky, as in the picture below.

CNN did a comprehensive report on the saga; the picture illustrating the story is from my collection.

Here’s an account of my visit to the Hesperia museum.

Here’s a chapter from my book that didn’t make the final cut about Ken and his museum.

“Fake Banana” at Significant Objects

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Here’s panel one of Josh Kramer’s funny cartoon. Follow the link for more.

From Josh Kramer

Fake Banana | Significant Objects ; tip from the fabulous Siel at GreenLAGirl…

Video taste test: Ugandan banana gin

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Waragi is to Ugandans what tequila is to Mexicans, vodka is to Russians, and Diet Coke is to Sarah Palin. I bought a bottle during a stopover at Entebbe airport, and conducted a video taste test when I got to Kinshasa, in the Democratic Republic of Congo. I’d been in the backcountry under rough conditions for a couple of weeks when I recorded this, which might explain my enthusiasm.


The stuff is rotgut – which isn’t meant to diminish the importance of bananas in Uganda, which are used not just for hooch, but  as a primary source of calories. People would starve without them, and the fruit is threatened by disease, making the nation ground zero for banana research.



Still, you could run a moped on this stuff. Which is more than you could say for Diet Coke.

"Banana" is a "Low-Probability" Word for Typographical Errors

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Above: The world’s most beautifully designed search engine. Wikimedia Commons License.

That’s according to the very cool Typo of the Day for Librarians blog, which posts a single word each day and – by searching electronic catalogues – determines how high the chances are that it will be misspelled in those records. They also add a little snippet about the word in question, and when the name of the world’s best-loved fruit was chosen, I was happy to see that a mini-review of my book was included.

I think the first impression one might have on encountering this site is one of novelty, but there’s cool utility here, as well. Though modern search engines automatically  recognize frequently misspelled words and do the correcting for you, but the TOTDFL blog is conducting real-time research in how mistakes appear and behave in both the digital realm and – via the collections that the databases link to – the analog world, as well.
According to the site – which solicits participation from librarians all over the world – he word “banana” has a low chance of being misspelled. The database the group searched found seven bad versions of the word (the commonly used “Bannana,” which most spell-checkers catch.)
Great site for word geeks, and thanks for making an example of me. I’m glad they didn’t comb my book for spelling errors, of which my readers have found over a dozen (one day, I promise, I’ll post a list of corrections – spelling and factual – here, so feel free to mail me your own lists of my screw-ups.)

No Cups or Glasses Necessary…

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This is a demonstrator project created by Japanese designer Naoto Fukasawa. I love the idea, because it really does capture what a banana skin is. The colors, shape, and texture are perfect.

Here’s Fukasawa’s design for a strawberry juice box:

Here’s a second version, with a similar design. This one is actually on the market in Japan, I’m told, which is why it is less clean: the package needed information on it.

Less clean, but still lovely compared to some of our stateside juice packaging horrors:

Tropicana’s “Pine-Sol” line of bottle styles…

pom-wonderful-1950.jpg.jpeg

…everything about this is undignified.

You get the idea.

Thanks for the tip, Dimitri (again!)

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THE BANANA BLOG is about the world's most endangered - and dangerous - fruit. THE BIG PARADE is about stairways, route and transit geekery, and pedestrian pursuits in Los Angeles. You can also read all the topics at once, which might also include productivity, geekery, DIY whatever, mountain biking, stuff that I think is funny that nobody else likely will, and other boring, useless crap.

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