I bought a bunch of bananas on Sunday. I tried to pick them strategically: one bunch of almost ripe ones, and one bunch of not-so-ripe ones.
Well, none of the bunches are ripe. And I’m sitting here giving them the eagle eye, because clearly the energy contained within my laserbeam eyes is enough to ripen these bananas.
(I’ll circumvent the inevitable comment about putting them in a paper bag by saying that yes, bananas ripen faster if you put them in a sealed paper bag. The porous paper bag still allows them to vent – that is, not rot – but still traps the ethylene that is emitted. Ethylene makes bananas ripen. Ergo, trapping the bananas in ethylene makes bananas ripen faster.)
However. I choose to stare at bananas in a bowl, rather than at a paper bag with bananas in it.
What will inevitably happen is that they’ll reach optimum ripeness, but by this point I’ll have grown bored of my little game. I’ll discover the bananas when they’re just past the stage that I’ll eat them, at which point I’ll refuse to eat them. Instead, I’ll let them proceed on their merry way to spotted, mushy banana-for-banana-bread territory.
