• Whether you are on a hiking trip, day trip, athletic event, between classes, or at a board meeting, the BananaBunker will keep your fruit safe until you are ready to snack.
• The Banana Guard currently comes in 9 colours, available online: Ravishing Red, Outrageous Orange, Mellow Yellow, Sublime Green, Skyhigh Blue, Brilliant Blue, Passionate Purple, Pretty in Pink, Glow in the Dark.
• Our BanaBox is the perfect second skin for your bananas. Your days of worrying about smashed bananas in your bag are over.

Who volunteers to write a comparitive review of these products? Anybody?

I usually love it when an Adam Gopnik piece shows up in The New Yorker. But a coupla issues back, Gopnik chose to rant about the new street signs popping up around New York. His first complaints make him sound like a bitter old copyeditor:

[The new signs] name the street that runs beneath them (and therefore, of course, announce to drivers the street they may want to turn onto), and they do this loudly and with unfortunate abbreviations. Over the intersection of Park Avenue and Eighty-sixth Street, for instance, there is now a long green sign proclaiming “Park Av,” with no period. A couple of blocks east, it gets worse: the green sign rubbernecks its way out into the middle of the street and announces “3Av.” This keeps up (2Av, 1Av) until 86St runs, at last, into East End Av. more...

Ladies, are you on the pill? There’s a new study about how those hormones can affect your taste in men:

All women preferred the healthier face on average but those on the pill were significantly more choosy. “Women using oral contraceptives expressed stronger attraction to apparent health than women not using oral contraceptives,” the researchers reported in the Proceedings of the Royal Society.

This reminds me of a different study from a couple of years ago:

Psychologists have found that women who are taking the pill tend to fancy macho types with strong jaw lines and prominent cheekbones. However, women who are not taking that form of contraception seem to be more likely to go for more sensitive types without traditionally masculine features.

Three cheers for rubbers and diaphragms, sez I.

Earlier today, the_lucky_duck asked me a hypothetical question which I shall rephrase thusly:

The Gestapo is enforcing a new rule: Everyone gets to own five (and only five) books, and those five are the only books you ever get to crack open again. (Book sharing will be punishable by death or something. I dunno. Just play along, okay?) So, which five books do you want to have with you for the rest of your days?

A ridiculous question, and one that’s perfect to answer on a blog and solicit additional answers to in the comments. My five (at this point in time, anyway):

Finnegans Wake
The Sound and the Fury
The Mezzanine
Stranger In a Strange Land
The Power of Now

Your turn!

It’s been a little over a year since I last rode the NYC subway. Boy, do I miss it. You ride around underneath Manhattan long enough, and you’ll see a bit of everything. An example: The Fourth Annual No Pants! Subway Ride.

[spotted at kottke.org]

When I visited Paris in 2001, I was told ahead of time, “Just be friendly and try to speak the language, and you’ll be treated well.” Uh, no. Pretty much everywhere I went, I was treated with disdain. This piece in The Observer is fantastic in that it both (a) makes it clear your poor treatment is probably not your fault and should not be taken personally and (b) gives you specific tips for vanishing that snooty little garçon’s attitude.

One of my guilty pleasures is Jon Carroll’s column in the Chronicle — which of course I never read in the Chronicle, but instead on SFGate. Today’s column is fantastic for at least three reasons:

1. He refers to “fine East Bay people,” which many City dwellers think is a mythical species. No, friends: We exist.
2. He speaks of folks who send him angry e-mails about his columns. My own column (very different from Carroll’s, and orders of magnitude less exciting) only posts once a month, but still generates messages from malcontents who write like this: “CLEARLY you are one of those PATHETIC tech journalists who has ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA what he’s talking about.” As Carroll notes: “Clearly they are not trying to persuade. I know what persuasion looks like … and it rarely involves words like ‘pathetic.’”
3. When he gets to the meat of the column, so to speak, he never actually names the thing that he’s talking about. It reminds me of the Seinfeld episode “The Contest,” which was all about masturbation but never used that word or anything close to it. Here’s Carroll:

   Here is the problem: A naked female actor can mime erotic involvement with another person and be completely convincing. A naked male actor cannot, because the deal-breaker, as it were, is right out there in the open. Are you unhappy to see me, or is that nothing at all in your pocket?

Today’s lovely dose of Carroll reminds me that we are coming up on the five-year anniversary of the greatest Jon Carroll column ever. Stay tuned for coverage.

[Ya like that statue? $79 gets you one of your own.]

Bob Woodward has long maintained that when Deep Throat dies, we’ll all finally find out who he was. According to John Dean, it all may happen soon:

Bob Woodward, a reporter on the team that covered the Watergate story, has advised his executive editor at the Washington Post that Throat is ill. And Ben Bradlee, former executive editor of the Post and one of the few people to whom Woodward confided his source’s identity, has publicly acknowledged that he has written Throat’s obituary.