Moonlight (1895) – E. Munch/ Death Head Oligarchy

Paperclip on banana drawn on the eve of an invasive war in Eastern Europe. Russia invaded Ukraine, and dozens of people are dying today, maybe more.

Two banana or not two banana, a day after Twosday, 2/22/’22.

War in Europe

nee Oligarchy Banana of Death in Moonlight – this article was begun on Monday, but it was paused while I processed the reality of war. It had slapped me upside the head.

This banana was to be a rumination on Munch, bananas, and moonlight, but now it sort of turned into a Werenana, a genetically unstable, imbred banana animal running on appendages mutated by strange forces, Gros Mike run amok.

Cloning makes the largest possible sample set susceptible to a change, or rather, the slimmest statistical deviation from the outcome of an unstoppable force, like a virus, or a genetic degeneration that travels through generations before expressing in alleles, li’l trainwrecks percolating in rotten sleepers. So the cascade of instability that can threaten bananas can be remedied by allowing bananas to become hybrid, to encourage genetic diversity and sustainable cultivation, probably.

Whatevs

People are desensitized to war because no one has any attention span. I asked high school kids today in an unstructured class period – they had online stuff, not much – what they thought about the horrible presence, not much.

Crazyboard

This is an attempt to find meaning in political violence perpetrated by heads of state in the global community. Specifically, I am troubled by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I am troubled by the connections that were broached during repeated Impeachment Trials in the House.

So, why not drag Harry Potter into it? February 23rd is nearly a pentacontatetragon on the Julian calendar, day 54. If you divide 366 by 54, you get 6⁷/₈. That’s the platform you mount to board the train to Hogwart’s. In that train of thought, Putin is a Dark Lord, Voldemort as “Vladimort”.

Making fun of world leaders is nothing new. It is part of the furniture, like Dobby the ‘house elf’, in itself an offensive character whose self-harm is to be a source of humor in the story. It could be said that he has used distrust to his advantage and to his disadvantage. He used it to build his power hierarchy, in a class protected but not bound by laws affecting the peasantry. As a former intelligence officer, he wore mistrust like cologne. When Russia pushed for Covid vaccines for its citizenry, people had little reason to trust him on that, either. Why was one of his first publicized targeted acquisitions the town of Chernobyl? What is he planning on doing with that mess? Hopefully cover it with banana peels.

Back to the Banana

This banana was fairly sweet, bruised from the dark masses of lettering used to spell ‘oligarchy’. Given that power corrupts, it is indeterminable what forms this abuse may take. Could it be from the gentry in the East, the West, the Middle East, or Other Places Capitalized Arbitrarily Because Money is Fancy.

Bananas were a big hit in the US after a fellow brought some in through Philly. They netted early stakeholders’ enormous wealth after the creamy yellow curved fruit took hold of the culinary world. The interesting part of the story about the banana is the planning involved in the original banananati, a cabal of likeminded fruited entrepreneurs up to their pseudostems in banana resources.

Import taxes had been lifted, America had become a fruit-forward nation, and so the banana moved in. This put a lean on steam ship production, and bananas steamed up through the Gulf, and around the Florida peninsula. So, Brownsville, a shipbuilding town on the Monongahela owes some of its success in infrastructure development to the banana. A steamship called the Enterprise actually reached Brownsville via the Gulf of Mexico, steaming steadily north, and then east to the Confluence in Pittsburgh. Steam power provided an efficient way of transporting bananas with less damage due to jostling. Old trains would be jerking left and right the whole time. The banana split was invented in Latrobe, PA by an optometrist experimenting in an ice cream parlor.

Why banana?

The cultivation of bananas originated in SE Asia among the oceanic civilizations who traded the banana, or perhaps from Africa. It seems likely it was happening in both place because the Diaspora is just a new arrival on old, old trade routes, and trade between Africa and SE Asia was always hopping. In an interesting turn of events, I found that an ‘acolyte’ of Carl Linnaeus – the botanist credited with classifying the banana in a binomial naming system, the species within the genus named with two parts of language – one of 17 budding botanists with an interest in Linnaeus binomial classification, hybrids be damned – accompanied Captain James Cook along with Joseph Banks in Oceana upon the Endeavor, Daniel Solander, possibly to get him off his couch, where he’d been crashing.

Nor was Daniel the last banana botanist. Aboard the Resolution, young Anders Sparrman went to sea to classify all that thee can see. You had to do that sort of thing if you wanted an appointment through an academic or scientific society. Enlightened people gotta shine. I think of it as an apprenticeship. Now we send drones using machine learning to find bananas.

The species usually wears the name of a scientist, or its place of origin, or a striking feature. The Cavendish banana, heavens.

I was an exchange student in SE Asia in high school. The country had emerged from British colonial power with an enhanced appreciation for ‘teh tarik’, black tea with condensed milk and an elected monarchy, the unpopular idea of Alexander Hamilton. I prefer it with non-dairy, so ‘ Saya minum teh tarik tiada tenusu’. Teh Tarik could be thought of as a culinary equivalent of the binomen used to name organisms. I am a wise human, a wise wise human, a homo sapiens sapiens, in my homo humus, my humble self, my humble home where I long for the perfect chewiness of roti canai, et circensus. The banana is old.

Ancient Banana

Some people think that the banana was the world’s first cultivated fruit. There is evidence of a banana plantation in China going back to 200 BC. The fruit was sampled by Alexander the Great Banana-Eater, and introduced into Palestine in 650 AD. They do well in a variety of soils. They thrive in tropical and subtropical regions.

Banana Lore

In India, the banana shades wise people. The sun is hot, and at midday in the tropics, you will find smart people in the shade, whether it is afforded by banana plants or others. I am not getting into banana mystics here.

Banana Science

Phytoliths, Peel Powder used to absorb heavy metals, the Potassium -40 isotope with its regular positron emission is sort of like a clock, and The Banana Project…

undeveloped topics ahead…