The bananas are safe...or are they?

A year or two ago, I read an article that talked about how bananas are in danger of extinction from a fungus. That's because the bananas we eat so greedily here in the US are all of one variety, and so are vulnerable to being wiped out en masse. In fact, the bananas we eat are all clones of the same fruit; how weird is that?

I can't find the original article now, but here's one from Popular Science that takes a long look at the issue.

I post today, though, because I found a reference on the wonderful Ask a
Biologist site to some hope. In essence, it says that if bananas are wiped out, we'll find a new
variety that we can eat, and cultivate it....we've done it before.

Now maybe I can stop bugging my wife about how we need to eat bananas while they're still around. But it's hard to be sure we can stop worrying. According to the Popular Science article, we may be able to make a new banana, but it won't likely taste just like Cavendish we're so fond of, and it might not taste much like it at all. Many banana varieties taste more like apples. The soft, creamy fruit we're used to is something of an oddity.

Carcasonne: It's new to me

I had a lovely evening on my birthday: Tanya took me to a casual nearby restaurant, where she unveiled the game Carcassonne, and we played a couple of games on the spot.

Carcassone is one of the set of German boardgames that you see in the comics shops in recent years. I didn't know that it's kind of the icon of these games. The games have beautiful materials and neat abstractions; Carcassone is one of the simpler ones.

You can learn the rules in minutes, and my 7 and 9 year old were able to play. You're building structures (illustrated as cities, roads, and fields), but you do this by pulling a random tile from the face-down set. You place your new tile somewhere so that its sides match existing tiles. Then you can choose to place a marker on the tile, or not. Those are your only choices.

Your tile can have a field, cloister, city, or road on it. If you place a marker, you're claiming the field/cloister/city/road. If the tile has more than one of those, you've got to pick one to claim. When a road or city is complete, you can collect your markers and get the points for the structure. If it's a cloister you've claimed, it has only one tile, but is complete when it is completely surrounded.

If you place a marker in a field, you're placing a farmer, who stays in place until the end of the game, when you claim points based on the cities your farmer's field is contiguous with.

Okay, the farmer thing is a little complicated, but it's the only thing that is, and it's elegant. You want to place farmers near the end game, so that you keep markers available, but you want to claim fields that are open and reach many cities. It's a big part of the strategy.

When you've played a game you end up with a pretty structure of cities and roads and fields. Note that no dice are used, and turns go fast. The game can be played by two or more. It's notable in being a good two-player game.

This game has been around a while, but I'd never played it before. I love it; any game I can play with my kids and all of us enjoy gets points from me.

There's a page about the game at BoardgameGeek, and even a strange site devoted to the wooden people used as markers in the game, called Meeples.

NYC Mech

I read a review from Graphic Novel Review of a graphic novel called NYC Mech, which makes several interesting points:

• It's easier to do unusual settings or premises in comic books. "Even non-fans expect a wild ride from a comic book or graphic novel."
• This book is about a New York where all people/animals are robots...and it doesn't try to explain this weird fact. "In NYC Mech, the robots, like Barks’ ducks, serve as simple stand-ins for humanity (and for other animals - robotic dogs and sharks both make appearances). That said, the surface non-humanity of the characters does provide a bit of distance between the reader and the material - which, ironically, makes the work even more believable."

You can find the book on Amazon.

My son is starting to learn to juggle

Maybe a month or more ago I noticed that Ethan, who is nine now, has gotten a lot better at throwing and catching balls. He also started to say things that indicated he was more interested in juggling. He's always said he wanted to learn, but couldn't stick with it very long, or would lose interest as soon as we started to work on the steps. But this week I've spent just two days in a row where I just told him to get out there on the lawn and practice with me. He listens to my direction, and he does pretty well at the two-ball step. Yesterday I got him to try the
three-ball throw. He laughed when he started to get it. I recognize that laugh; the laugh when something you do surprises you.

I'm pretty excited about this; it's been a long time coming. I guess the next step is to get him started counting catches. I remember when I taught my friend Rich Landry to juggle, and he competed with his kids for numbers of catches. (When you count catches, you start juggling and
see how many consecutive catches you can get.) I can't do that of course, since I can juggle three balls infinitely. Maybe I should try five, which I've never gotten much beyond 25 catches. :) Wow, I bet he'll have 100 catches of 3 before I have 50 of five. :)

When I talk about "step two" or the "three-ball throw", I'm referring to juggling three balls using this method:

http://www.damommio.com/~aaron/juggle/HowtoJuggle3Balls.htm

Cookies of peril

You know how sometimes you'll see a cookie sitting on the kitchen table? And you pick it up, and eat it, and it's kind of a manufactured peanut butter cookie, so it's not that great? But then you notice that it's a thin cookie, and it doesn't have strong peanut-butter flavor, and it's really flat on one side? And you remember that this kind of cookie usually comes as part of a peanut-butter sandwich? And the cookie was sitting at your seven-year-old daughter's spot at the table? So that
probably means that it's there because she licked the peanut-butter filling off of it and left it behind? I love that. That's a great feeling.

Heep, heep! I uck!

I have posted far too few items from the "kids say the darndest things" category, but here's a gem from this weekend: Lily was in her high chair at the table, and started hollering at us:
"Heep, heep! I uck!"
When we realized she was saying, "help, help! I'm stuck!" we couldn't stop laughing. Now that she knows it makes us laugh, of course, she uses this phrase a lot.

The universe loves me on my birthday

I'm going to interpret every good thing I notice today as the universe's tender affection. So far I have these examples:

• Metafilter posted several links to information about a movie based on the Watchmen graphic novel by Alan Moore.
• I was stopped by a train this morning at Duval road about 8 a.m. Now, that may not sound like a good thing, but I'm a train fan, and this train was led by a grey and yellow UP loco followed by no less than FOUR red CP Rail locomotives. I haven't seen their like in Austin before (which isn't saying much -- I could have been missing them for months, but I was excited).
• I went to martial arts class, and everyone else was busy except for one advanced student, so it became a private lesson for me, which is good since I'm brand new at it and I could ask more questions and get some details on the moves.
  

Ben Goldacre blasts nutritionists on badscience.net

I always enjoy Ben Goldacre's perspective, but this nutrition article deserves a mention:
http://www.badscience.net/?p=362#more-362
Since Goldacre is British, I don't always follow all of his UK references, but I think he's making a telling point here, in part of his blasting away at non-doctor Gillian McKeith:

I rent a flat in London’s Kentish Town on my modest junior doctor’s salary (don’t believe what you read in the papers about doctors’ wages, either). This is a very poor working-class area, and the male life expectancy is about 70 years. Two miles away in Hampstead, meanwhile, where the millionaire Dr Gillian McKeith PhD owns a very large property, surrounded by other wealthy middle-class people, male life expectancy is almost 80 years. I know this because I have the Annual Public Health Report for Camden open on the table right now. This phenomenal disparity in life expectancy - the difference between a lengthy and rich retirement, and a very truncated one indeed - is not because the people in Hampstead are careful to eat a handful of Brazil nuts every day, to make sure they’re not deficient in selenium, as per nutritionists’ advice. And that’s the most sinister feature of the whole nutritionist project, graphically exemplified by McKeith: it’s a manifesto of rightwing individualism - you are what you eat, and people die young because they deserve it. They choose death, through ignorance and laziness, but you choose life, fresh fish, olive oil, anf that’s why you’re healthy. You’re going to see 78. You deserve it. Not like them.

Best present ever!

Tanya, the wife I hardly deserve, has surprised me with an amazing present for my upcoming birthday: a 5-day trip to see longtime pal and former roommate Doug in Boise, Idaho. And no surprise, Doug already has big plans for the 5 days.
Doug says:

"I would say more about how I'm looking forward to your coming but it would just come out sounding gay. Not that there's anything wrong with that."

Wow, this'll be my first solo trip anywhere in...years, I think. Should be fun. After all, the midwest can't all be like Aaron Sorkin's vision of it a la Studio 60, can it?

(I'm reacting to some of the Studio 60 criticism. Though I note that it's Sorkin's characters, not Sorkin, who are always rankin' on the midwest, and that John Goodman's hick judge character -- also written by Sorkin -- neatly turns the tables on LA snobbery. So there.)