Green Bananas And Other Lies

Recently I’ve been so distraught over the Sichuan earthquake that I haven’t been able to post any trivial rants about cars, the Hong Kong government or any other things I hate or detest.

But this morning I went into the screaming, ten-people-shouting-at-once over the loudspeakers-hellhole that is Wellcome, Hong Kong’s leading supermarket, where things are only 30% more expensive than in normal shops.

Above is the photo they’ve got hanging over the banana section in that shop. And here are the bananas they dare to sell to people:

 

 

 

 

 

My humble camera doesn’t do justice to the irridescent greenness of these rawer than raw parodies of a fruit. You think eating lots of fruits and vegetables is healthy? Think again. These babies are snatched from the tree before they’ve even had time to develop 10% of the nutrients a real banana should have.

To make a profit the banana companies, aided and abetted by Wellcome, Park’n'Shop and others like them around the world, won’t allow the fruit to ripen naturally but rely on the customers, old muggins, to let them slowly turn yellow in the comfort of people’s own home. If the fruit was picked when ripe, there would be untold wastage as the bananas would be soft and subject to squeezeage. The skin would have brown spots and customers wouldn’t buy them. Therefore we are left to eat what’s in effect a piece of fruit with no nutrition at all.

That was what I wanted to write about today, but then I came across a little snippet in Time Magazine. It was Tony Blair’s wife, Cherie, uttering in the “Verbatim” section: “It’s fair to say that our hearts sank when the result was finally ratified” (about the couple’s reaction to the 2000 election of George W. Bush.)

Oh really? Is that why Tony spent the rest of his political life lapping up every drop of spittle the W. spat, hanging on his every word and joyfully joining in his every war? Because his heart had sunk … so low?

It’s funny with these politicians – they only seem to tell the truth after they’re booted out of office.

“Banana” is a term for a Chinese person who’s “yellow on the outside, white on the inside.” What do you call the likes of T. Blair I wonder? A bin liner – white on the outside, full of crap on the inside?

 

Beautiful Fruit

I have grown so fond of cabbage of late.

No, not because of the roughage, you understand; I get that from eating gravel. No, I love cabbage for purely aesthetic reasons, something about the way it looks in a certain light, in the afternoon light on a Chinese train.

There they were, the old cabbages, just lying around waiting to be consumed by the ungrateful.

And I thought: When the last beautiful building in China has gone to the great olympic scrap heap in the sky; when the millions of eight-lane highways criss-crossing the country have been filled bumper to bumper (we hate America but worship on the altar of the American dream: Two cars for each man)  I always have this to fall back on: Photographing beautiful vegetable matter imported from China’s new buddy Africa, since all her (China’s) vegetable fields will have been concreted over.

A strangely comforting thought.

Save Time! Put Two Proverbs Together!

One bird in the hand is better than two in the bush, OR as we say in Norwegian: better than ten on the roof. See how Norwegians think bigger, proverb-wise? So that means that two birds in the hand must be better than FOUR in the bush! (Or twenty on the roof) at which stage you can kill both of them with one stone. Saves a lot of time or what?

Talking of killing things with things; just like Norwegians think bigger, they are also more kind-hearted. For this cruel proverb doesn’t exist in Norway where they feed birds instead of killing them, with stones or anything else. 

No, in Norway it’s “Killing two flies with one whack.”

Here you see what you’re missing out on by being monolingual. This, and many other things.