Tag: observations

This is why we can’t have nice things

Considering that today was Halloween, have you ever had a “banana-flavoured,” candy and thought, “This tastes kinda like a banana but not really?”

There’s a reason for that.

Years ago, I had some friends over and we were playing Scattergories and the category was: Birds that begin with the letter “G.”

Him: What the hell’s a “Great Auk?”
Me: It’s a large, flightless, extinct bird.
Him: You can’t just put “Great” in front of a bird and say it starts with, “G!”
Me: OK Google, what’s a Great Auk?
Machine: According to Wikipedia, “The great auk is a species of flightless alcid that became extinct in the mid-19th century. It was the only modern species in the genus Pinguinus.”
Him: OK, stop, stop. Just take it.

Remember that line: “…the only modern species in the genus Pinguinus.”

I’d meant to write an entry about that, but it slipped my mind.

Now, the Great Auk was a true penguin – it looked like this:

I know what you’re thinking, “They kinda look like penguins.”

But that’s the opposite of the truth – the things we call penguins kinda look like them, the real penguins.

Those birds, the real penguins, completely died/were killed off some time in 1844.

A decade previously, around 1831, people started calling flightless birds in the Southern Hemisphere – far from the Northern Atlantic where the Great Auk was found – “penguins” because they kinda looked like the Great Auk.

But they weren’t actually penguins at all – again, the Great Auk was the “only modern species in the genus Pinguinus.”

Always found that so interesting: The birds we all call “penguins,” aren’t actually “penguins” at all but a completely different animal that we all assume are penguins now.

Somewhat related, my parents (and probably yours as well) grew up with a banana that was the Gos Michel banana but those went commercially extinct by about the 1960s.

In their place was the Cavendish banana, which I, and probably you, grew up on.

The Cavendish tasted a lot different from the bananas they grew up on, the Big Mike.

And that’s why a lotta banana-flavoured things don’t taste exactly like a banana to us – because those flavours were developed to imitate the original Gros Michel and not the Cavendish.

On a completely unrelated point, the election is happening soon.

Growing up, I spent most of my young adult life voting Republican because I was always fiscally conservative whilst being socially liberal.

What I’m seeing these days is a complete takeover of what I grew up with.

The compassionate conservative, which I prided myself being, has been taken over completely by a woman-hating, “Christian,” anti-choice, subtlety racist, and otherwise hateful group that seems to be wholly different from what was once called the Republican party.

Just like the Greak Auk, and the Big Mike, I think that the current GOP has taken over so completely that no one remembers that the Republican party used to be substantially different and something wholly unrelated is now known as the Republican Party.

Oh, and the Cavendish banana may be going extinct too.

Really, this is why we can’t have nice things.

Location: a former Masonic temple
Mood: irritated but fulla carbs so, not terrible
Music: Hey, Marianna, you gotta no banana? (Spotify)
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