By THOM HAWKINS
Yesterday, I came across a post on Lifehacker about how to eat a banana like a monkey. I immediately saw the advantage--often, when I peel using the stem, rather than the stem breaking, the back of the peel splits, resulting in a messy extraction. Here's the video (the monkey boxer shorts are a nice touch):
Later that evening, I was reading Good Night, Gorilla by Peggy Rathmann to H., and when I got to the last page, I noticed the banana peel on the bedspread appeared to have been opened from the base.
I flipped back through the book to confirm that the mouse does appear to have tied the string to the stem of the banana, so it really was opened by the base.
The next day, I asked my sister about this trick, and she's been opening bananas from the base since 1995, when her friend's boyfriend (possibly a chimpanzee--I never met him) showed her. She went fourteen years without telling me! Unlike in the video, she digs her thumbnail in just above the base, and then pulls the skin over and down.
Of course, all this flies in the face of the otherwise logically flawless "Atheist's Nightmare" video:
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Postscript: I talked to someone who lived in Poland for two years, and she remembered her host family opening bananas from the base. She admitted to thinking at the time--"No, don't do that--that's why people make jokes about the Polish!" She herself never tried opening bananas from the base, but promised to after I assured her it was the superior method. She also said the Polish were delighted by her idea for putting butter on popcorn.
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