Sunday 21 August 2005

Pic of the day: Widescreen bananas! From the anime Da Capo Second Season. That's how real bananas should look like. Well, a bit longer. Then again, these are Taiwanese...

Cut off

It was a Sunday like any other. I enjoyed not having to go to work, of course. I took a long walk. I probably made dinner, or perhaps not: Somewhere around that time, probably on Saturday, I found some delicious golden bananas at the local supermarket (the one half an hour's walk away).

Now, this is a rare sight: Usually bananas these days go from green to brown without passing through the yellow stage, or rather only a part of them is yellow at any one time, while one part is green and one is brown. I am not sure if this is a result of the relentless competition among Norwegian grocery chains to be cheap at any cost. Given that Norwegians are richer than all but a couple other small nations out there, it seems utterly weird that we would want to forsake edible bananas in order to save half a small coin. But mass hysteria is never to be underestimated. Then again, it could be that my childhood brand of banana is extinct. Bananas, unable to breed naturally, have very little genetic variation. A virus or parasite can eradicate vast tracts. The magazine New Scientist predicted that the banana as we know it would be extinct by 2013.

Anyway, these bananas were among the best I have seen in years. They were almost uniform in color, yellow with the finest small freckles. And they were big. I have kept eating them for days afterward, though I just barely managed to eat the last before it would turn to slush. The skin was already darkening, but luckily most of the fruit inside was still OK. But I am getting ahead of myself. Also, unlike green bananas, the yellow ones don't give me gut pains and doesn't make me run for the bathroom. So it's all good. I'm happy to skip dinner a few days for such a delicacy.

Yet the bananas were not what I would remember the day for, nor the next days. Alas.

***

Around 10 in the evening, I fired up City of Heroes to play a little. Firetall (my fire tanker) is currently level 19 and is patrolling the streets of northern Steel Canyon, making the area safe for newbies on their way to Icon (the tailor there). Well, not today. The login server was unavailable. It happens, so I terminated the program and looked for something else. That's when I discovered that the Internet was gone.

OK, the Internet is actually alive and well. It was me who was gone. My connection had died. It being late on a Sunday, there was no point in calling my ISP. Techies need their sleep. I don't think it would have made any difference. Because as I write this, the next Sunday, they have still not been able to fix my DSL line. My solitary confinement was about to begin.