bookofjoe

Experts' Experts: Should you wash bananas?

It never occurred to me that anyone would until I happened on the article below last month in Better Homes & Gardens.

Should You Wash Bananas After Bringing Them Home? Experts Clear Up the Confusion

Produce washing is a topic our Test Kitchen gets countless questions about. You probably know that you should wash all produce items with skin that you plan to consume (plain water is A-OK!), and it's wise to wash items that you'll slice through the exterior to reach the flesh. That's because when your knife slices through the surface and into the flesh of something like a melon, it could introduce bacteria hanging out on the rind inside.

If there might be one produce aisle pick that could be safe to skip washing, bananas would be it. Their skin is so thick and a knife isn't needed to open them, so this feels like safe territory to dive right in, right? Wrong.

Should You Wash Bananas?

The "should you wash bananas?" debate has been turning heads on social media this summer, however, it's certainly not a new dilemma. In fact, Dear Abby even tackled the topic in 1994. After she initially wrote that she didn't wash her bananas and didn't think it was necessary, a flurry of fan feedback came in urging her to change her strategy and give her bananas a shower.

After speaking with Lynn Blanchard, Better Homes & Gardens Test Kitchen director and Daniel Kiefer, PhD, an entomologist and the technical director at American Pest in Washington, D.C., we can explain the science behind our final answer to this quandary:

Yes — you should wash bananas ASAP after they enter your home. 

Here are two reasons why:

• To Prevent Fruit Flies

Fruit flies are especially active in environments that have any ripe or overripe fruit sitting out, or that contain anything that might smell fruity or sweet, such as spilled fruit juice or residue in unrinsed and empty soda cans, Dr. Kiefer says.

The viral social media posts that have been swirling around this summer have been boasting that bananas would stay fruit fly-free for days longer than previous batches of bananas stored in the same home after a quick rinse, and Dr. Kiefer clued us in about why.

"Fruit flies are attracted to bananas because of their strong smell, along with the yeasts and bacteria that can grow on ripe fruit. Fruit flies commonly lay eggs on bananas," he explains. "To keep fruit flies out of your kitchen, you should try to eliminate the factors that attract them. Make sure to wash bananas immediately to get rid of the fruit fly eggs after bringing it home," as the fruit flies may have already laid eggs while the fruit was transported to or stored in your supermarket.

Other wise ways to prevent (or eliminate) fruit flies:

• Run a dehumidifier to reduce moisture around your home, which results in a less appealing environment for fruit flies
• Since fruit flies are attracted to moisture, keep an eye on laundry, mops, sponges, and kitchen towels, and try to allow them to dry as quickly as possible
• Remove ripe or overripe fruit from your kitchen as fast as possible by consuming, refrigerating, freezing, or composting
• Place soiled napkins, extra meat, past-its-prime food, and other products that might show signs of rotting to an outdoor garbage receptacle immediately after you discover them
• Try to keep your sink garbage disposal tidy. Here's how to clean a garbage disposal to eliminate stinky odors. If you notice fruit flies have already found their home there, we swear by these four tricks to eliminate drain flies
• If fruit flies are a minor nuisance, BHG home pros recommend these strategies to get rid of them. If the bugs become more active and cause a severe infestation, contact a pest control expert

• Food Safety

The other very important reason to wash bananas is to reduce your risk of illness. If any germs or grime is hanging out on the peel, there's potential to transfer it to the banana — say, if you are holding the fruit by the peel, then use your fingers to tear off a bite.

According to the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, "Even if you're not cutting the fruit, dirt and bacteria may be transferred as you peel or simply handle the food.”

Blanchard echoes this fact, noting that "it's a good practice to wash all fruits and vegetables before eating to reduce the bacteria and dirt that may be present."

How to Wash Bananas

Now that you know why you should wash bananas, we'll walk you through how. Yes, we know that this seems like a hassle and an extra step, but it shouldn't take longer than 1 minute total as part of your process of putting away your groceries.

The USDA suggests skipping detergent, soap, and commercial produce washes, and opting for water instead.

To wash bananas:

• Rinse your banana(s) under cool running tap water for 30 seconds, using your clean hands to brush away any visible grime
• Using a clean kitchen towel pat the fruit dry

Store your now-clean bananas on a countertop away from heat sources, direct sunlight, and other ethylene gas-producers (unless you want the bananas to ripen faster). If your home is prone to fruit flies, Dr. Kiefer suggests storing bananas in your fridge.

Wait a sec — what's that more recent song I'm hearing?

Meet Taylor Troesh

Who's Taylor Troesh, and why should we care?

I'm glad you asked that question.

I only learned of his existence yesterday when he commented on the day's first post.

You can confirm this by glancing at the screenshot below.

More?

The post went up at 8:01 a.m. and he published his comment at 9:16:33 a.m.

But wait — there's more!

I told my Crack Research Team©®™ to drill down and find out exactly who this person is who made such an excellent comment in their — to the best of my knowledge — first appearance ever in my homepage's Comments section.

Turns out he has a spectacularly original and entertaining website at taylor.town, replete with myriad rabbit holes — pictured up top and below — that will cause you, once inside, to wonder why I didn't warn you with my trademark heads-up: There goes the day.

Except I just did.

But I digress.

Try his exegesis on Sudden Adult Death Syndrome (SADS), for example.

Now, don't you feel better?

Sure hope Taylor drops in on bookofjoe again in the not distant future.

Fannypack For Your Head

"Does this make my head look big?"

Never mind.

Seven color combinations.

$15.99.

True or false?

I'm thinking that when — not if, because if we're honest with ourselves, we know that the bloom always comes off the rose sooner or later — one of the people in a relationship first considers the question of who has more power, the honeymoon is over.

Blast from the past (1937): 'Making moccasins that really fit'

Written by Maurice H. Decker, Camping Editor of Outdoor Life Magazine, it originally appeared in the August 1937 issue of Popular Science.

R.A. Schenk found it and republished it on April 9, 2010 on Mister Crew.

Some things are timeless.

Magcable — 'Tidy charging, easy living'

Sounds good to me.

I never heard of these self-coiling cables until I got the following email this past Wednesday:

While I won't be working with them because that requires effort and time, it doesn't mean I can't take a flutter on one of their cables.

From their website: 

The frustration of traditional messy cables, GOODBYE!

The joy of clean Magcables — Hi!

The whole cable is magnetic to ensure it sticks together strongly, stays coiled nicely, and keeps your desk, car, or bag neat and tidy every day.

Great for traveling, business trips and daily life — 1 second to grab and go with no tangles.

Variety of connector combinations available.

Magcable is flexible to be curled at your preferred size for travel and storage: Whether 2 circles, 4, or 6, it looks the same — tidy and well-behaved.

The entire cable is wrapped by soft magnets regularly spaced that allow you to coil it swiftly and securely.

Kind of like a tricked-out Slinky, what?

Grey or Black.

3.2 feet or 4.9 feet: $19 or $25.99.

FunFact: I spent a LOT of time thinking about whether I'd call it Magcable or MagCable if I was in charge.

Usually I know in a Podunkville minute which is better but in this case it seems a toss up.

Perhaps that's why they use both on their website.

Prolly better to pick one and ride it, what?

Anyone reading this care to weigh in?

No?

That shows excellent judgment.

World's Longest Bicycle

YouTube description:

This team from The Netherlands built the world's longest bicycle after previously setting a record for the longest tandem bicycle.

Ivan Schalk, Joost Sweep, Jimmy Vermeeren, Sander Vissers, Bas Zuidema, Steffie van de Riet, Daan Husson, Toine Kleemans, Jasper Korving, and Op De Beek Hebben We De Langste

were inspired by a longstanding interest in Guinness World Records and a desire to follow dreams and achieve something incredible.

F.A.Q.s About the Hadron Collider — Roz Chast

Boring Belt

From the website:

It has always seemed a little loopy to us to have belt loops on our pants and a keeper loop on our belt.

While we were trying to get rid of the keeper loop, we wondered if we could also get rid of the belt buckle.

Could we make the cleanest looking belt the world has ever seen?

Boring Belt works like any other belt but the hidden hook and magnets make it so you’ll never again have to carry all that clutter around your waist.

It works with jeans and with a suit or dress, both casual and formal as the occasion requires.

Features and Details:

• 30"-40"

• 1.25" wide

• Made in the U.S.A

• Medium Brown or Black

• 8/10 oz. premium vegetable tanned full-grain leather

$65.

'Chocolate Room' — Ed Ruscha

["Chocolate Room" is currently on display at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. It will be up through October 6, 2024.]

From the New York Times:

Ed Rusha's 'Chocolate Room' Still Tantalizes

A rich perfume wafts through the sixth floor of the Museum of Modern Art, where the installation of Ed Ruscha's full-dress survey "Now Then" is underway. You sense it before you see it: a room where the white walls are turning velvety brown. A chocolate room.

The McPherson family, dressed in their La Paloma Fine Arts company T-shirts, bustle around their rig. Edan McPherson dips a long squeegee into a pool of melted chocolate, draws the rubber blade across the coarse mesh. His son, Daniel, whisks the prints away, while his sister Robyn feeds fresh paper. His wife, Lynda, and daughter, Kayla, monitor double boilers of chocolate in reserve. The drying racks fill up, two tenths of a pound of dark chocolate coating each sheet. When the chocolate sets, they'll trim and hang each print, floor to ceiling, like shingles on a Craftsman house.

"Chocolate Room” is an oddity in Ruscha's influential oeuvre. Of the 85-year-old Nebraska native's hundreds of projects — paintings, prints, and photo books; dry eulogies of Americana like SPAM cans and Mobil stations and two-lane blacktop — "Chocolate Room" is his only installation. It's been shown just seven times since its creation in 1970, and never before in New York.

[The McPherson family, of La Paloma Fine Arts, melt chocolate to then print onto paper.]

Yet for all that, "Chocolate Room" is a remarkable distillation of Ruscha's sensibility: chalky humor, sweet gumption, American bleakness, an existentialism that rests on objects of pop culture, like common chocolate.

Christophe Cherix, MoMA's chief curator of prints and drawings, called it "almost mythical. You read about it, you hear about the insects, the smell."

"Chocolate Room" might have remained a legend, but in 1995 the curators Ann Goldstein and Anne Rorimer featured it in a survey of conceptual art at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. The museum acquired "Chocolate Room" in 2003.

"I do think we surprised Ed with our proposal to remake the work," Goldstein, now the deputy director of modern and contemporary art at the Art Institute in Chicago, said over email. They saw the piece as "a union of painting and conceptual art."

Cherix agrees. In the MoMA show's floor plan, "Chocolate Room" is crucial, connecting Ruscha's 1960s pop-art paintings and conceptual books to his prints and drawings in unusual materials like gunpowder and tobacco. Like taste, "Language comes from the mouth," pointed out Michael Govan, director of Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where the show travels next and where "Chocolate Room" will be remade again. He said "Chocolate Room" was the first piece he and Cherix chose.

For his part, Ruscha seems charmed by the resonance of that wholesome, elegant gesture — wallpaper a room with chocolate. "It's locked into itself," he told me. "I'm not sure where it took me, I'm not sure I learned anything from it. It's just, you know, what it is."

At the end of March [2023], while La Paloma were still fine-tuning the production, I met Ruscha in MoMA's Drawings and Prints Study Center. Museum staff had set out examples of his work — including a spare leaf from the original "Chocolate Room," tan with age. The cornflower stripes on his western-style shirt set off his irises.

[The trick, as chocolatiers know, is to temper the chocolate, and keep it tempered as it’s shaped.]

In 1970, the curator Henry Hopkins invited 47 artists to the United States Pavilion for the 35th Venice Biennale. More than half withdrew in protest of the Vietnam War. Hopkins set a room aside for rotating printmaking projects, and Ruscha's was first.

The way he tells it, "Chocolate Room" was "very much ad hoc. I was on the plane to Venice, and I said, good Lord, what am I going do?" Ruscha is the modest kind of genius.

"I was a little bit tired of making conventional pictures," he said, "and so I thought I would use unconventional materials." The previous year he’d made the "Stains" portfolio — paper daubed with everything from Los Angeles tap water to the artist's blood. In London, he'd been working on "News, Mews, Pews, Brews, Stews & Dues," six words in gothic font printed with organic substances like axle grease and pie filling. (These series bracket "Chocolate Room" at MoMA.) The background of "Pews" was a mix of coffee and Hershey’s syrup.

"Chocolate has a way of laying itself out, almost like an ink," Ruscha told me. "And I thought, well, I'll do the same thing, and I'll avoid making any pictorial statement and make what amount to shingles on a wall."

So Ruscha and the dealer Brooke Alexander gathered up every tube of Nestlé chocolate paste they could find. The master printer William Weege was stationed in the Pavilion, and he and Ruscha ran the syrup through the silk-screen press, onto deluxe, handmade Fabriano paper. They trimmed the edges and tacked up the sheets four high.

"Chocolate Room" was playful and abstract, evocative in the way of scents — and slightly brutal, a fragrant blank. Ants marched in. Visitors drew peace signs and anti-war slogans with their fingers.

"I remember not being too insulted by it," said Ruscha. "I'd prefer that nobody graffiti that thing here," at MoMA, he added, "but, you know, it's possible." Not to mistake his ease for apathy, but Ruscha seems to embrace contingencies. Certain parameters are fixed, others wild. "It's like a quiet fun house," he said.

Of the MoMA version, Cherix said: "We want to preserve the presentation as much as we can." But when I talked to Ed about that, he couldn't care less."

Cherix laughed. "He said, well, the work changes, chocolate changes color, that's what it is."

Indeed.

"I don't try to replicate what’s been done before," Ruscha said. "I don't stand up there with a color sample and demand accuracy."

For accuracy, there's La Paloma. "They're fabricators extraordinaire," said Ruscha.

While Ruscha was in Venice cornering the market on Nestlé syrup, Ron McPherson, Edan's father, was working the press at the storied Los Angeles print shop Gemini G.E.L. That's where he first met Ruscha. When Ron started La Paloma, shifting to fiberglass and metal fabrication, they continued working together — in 1985, for instance, his company built a set of giant curved stretchers for Ruscha’s mural in the Miami-Dade Public Library rotunda. When the call came in 1995 to revive "Chocolate Room," Ron was his man.

[Installing chocolate-covered paper, or shingles, at MoMA.

In late March, I visited La Paloma's vast workshop on the fringe of the San Fernando Valley. Ron and his team, now led by his son, Edan, have installed every "Chocolate Room" but the first: "Los Angeles twice, Palm Springs, Anchorage, Reno, Oklahoma City." The New York install is different. Ruscha’s survey is an occasion to dial in the "Chocolate Room" recipe for the ages.

To get the shingles to hang straight, they chose a coated paper. They experimented with different chocolates, too. "We wanted to stick with a commercial mix," Edan said. "Something you could get consistently."

They'd always used regular Hershey’s bars before. So long as the brand uses pure ingredients, it's a matter of color. They'd winnowed it to three — Hershey's regular, a dark Ghirardelli's and a darker Callebaut — and sent samples to Ruscha's studio. He chose the Callebaut. MoMA's team matched it with a touch-up paint, to fill in around the walls’ edges: Benjamin Moore Arroyo Red.

Most of all, La Paloma wanted to prevent the powdery, fatty bloom that sometimes, not always, covers the chocolate's surface. The trick, as chocolatiers know, is to temper the chocolate, and keep it tempered as it's shaped.

The double boilers they'd been using to melt the Hershey's bars were inexact. Now they travel with the ChocoVision Revolation Delta, an electronically regulated, air-heated, self-stirring metal bowl that puts chocolate through its paces, up to 115 degrees or so, then back down to 86. Then, explained Edan, "you add a little bit of unmelted chocolate, and that tempers it." It's called "seeding": "The seeding tells the cocoa butter molecules how to realign correctly inside the chocolate."

"We printed and then everything looked fine," Edan added. They hung up some test sheets at LACMA. "But then several days later it started to bloom."

They realized the light bulbs they'd rigged over the press to keep the chocolate flowing were a little too hot, and it was separating again. Now they use controllable heat lamps and a voltage regulator. The crew monitors the chocolate ink with an infrared thermometer. During printing, the temperature is kept around 95 degrees.

All this precision — but the result, almost by design, remains capricious. Every installation is different. MoMA is the first version using dark chocolate, which Ruscha said in an email, "was a visual choice and was more appealing." A few of the corners went on thicker than the rest, and look slightly toasted. The exhibition team sent photos to Ruscha. The artist approved.

To repeat: "Chocolate Room" is currently on display at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. It will be up through October 6, 2024.

Do you have any idea...

  

I simply couldn't resist posting this.

Forgive me if I'm too easily amused.

Tippy Type

[Typing is one of the most annoying things about having long nails. Taking out contacts is the scariest.]

From The Verge:

Long nails are not for the weak. Have you ever tried removing contact lenses with 20mm claws? Terrifying. But aside from the fear of poking out my eyeballs, long nail life makes little everyday things difficult, too.

Opening soda cans, pressing buttons, changing out trash bags without poking a hole, and even personal hygiene — they all require you to get creative. But by far, the most annoying thing is typing.

Typing with long nails is the embodiment of "beauty is pain." On phones it makes me slow and I end up with so many typos. It's worse on laptops, where the keys are flat and fundamentally incompatible with the curve of a longer nail. You end up typing with the tips of your nails and the sides of your fingers. No big deal if I'm shooting off an email, but a 1,500-word review? After a while, it hurts.

It's why I was intrigued when the TikTok algorithm threw the $45 Tippy Type into my feed.

The Tippy Type is a silicone keyboard cover for folks with medium-to-long nails. It features tower-like cylindrical keys so you can type as you naturally would: with your finger pads and not your nails. The proposed benefits are two-fold. One, it shouldn't hurt at all. Two, it protects your manicure.

I can already hear the trolls making jokes about women being concerned about breaking a nail. If it's so inconvenient, why not just have short nails? Well, I'm not out here wearing long nails for fun. Being a reviewer often means acting as a part-time hand model for whatever gadget I'm testing. The Internet Nail Police has repeatedly shown up in my comments over the years if my polish is chipped or, God forbid, there's a smudge of dirt under my natural nail.

The worst part is that they're not wrong — the photos and video footage won't look as nice. Never mind that this is largely a gendered burden. Something about longer nails elongates the fingers and makes for a more attractive product photo.

But nice nails are not cheap. A set of acrylic or gel extensions, for example, can cost as much as $120. Press-ons are much more economical, but I live in fear that one of them will pop off at an inopportune moment. For example, the other day, I lost one because I pulled my pants on too aggressively. I've had a couple fly off while typing. And it's annoying carrying nail glue everywhere you go — or, in the case of extensions, having to schedule another appointment. Preserving your manicure for as long as possible is a form of saving time and money.

In theory, this is why the Tippy Type is attractive to long-nail devotees despite its $45 price tag. But like any product, it has to live up to the promise.

The first time I used the Tippy Type out of its case, it felt weird. CEO and cofounder Sara Young Wang warned me that there's a slight learning curve. She wasn't kidding. It's hard to describe, but if you're used to squishier keys, this isn't that. The keys are firmer and require a little more pressure than your typical laptop keys. The cylindrical shape also gives you less surface area so, at first, you have to think about finger placement.

 

 

 

 

 

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A post shared by The Verge (@verge)

Adapting doesn't take long, though. I gauged my progress with and without the Tippy Type using one of those one-minute typing tests. On the first day, I got around 60 words per minute with 98 percent accuracy. After about a week, I was averaging somewhere between 80–90wpm with 98–99 percent accuracy. Anecdotally, typing with the cover has reduced my typos compared to typing without it.

But it's not perfect. I had no problem with both medium and long press-ons, but if you're rocking extra-long nails, this might not work well. Also, some keys still aren't the easiest to press. For example, the arrow keys are small and awkward, and there's no cover for the function keys aside from the Esc key. In addition, you can't easily close your laptop if you're, say, stepping out to the bathroom. Lastly, the Tippy Type is only available for MacBooks at the moment, though Wang says the company is working on versions for Lenovo, Dell, and HP laptops.

Ultimately, whether the Tippy Type is worth buying boils down to how often you use a laptop and how committed you are to your nail game. Are you like gymnasts Simone Biles, Jordan Chiles, or Suni Lee, where not even Olympics-level tumbling can stop you from long-nailed glory? Then, yes, it is probably worth it. In my everyday life, however, I mostly use a desktop with a mechanical keyboard — which is more forgiving to long nails. I probably wouldn't have felt the need for a product like this if I weren't in the thick of tech review season.

Even so, the Tippy Type has been useful for me these past few weeks, when my deadlines were tight, the review word counts long, and the nails fabulous.

$45.

My Hornet Nest, Hiding in Plain Sight

Above and below, videos I just made of a giant (18 inches high) hornet nest nestled about 25 feet up in a magnolia tree in my yard, about 30 feet from my front door.

Obviously it didn't appear there overnight, but how is it that I only noticed it yesterday?

Below,

a side-by-side comparison of hornet and wasp nests.

Helpful Hints from joeeze: Knife Safety

No knife block?

No problema, as long as you've got a few wine corks not otherwise engaged.

[via Cook's Illustrated]

World's First Medieval Electronic Instrument

From the website:

Hurdy gurdys, lutes, Gregorian chants, thundering drums and punishing percussive Foley FX.

The EP-1320 is the first of its kind.

Featuring a large library of phrases, play-ready instruments, and one-shot samples from an age where darkness reigned supreme, the Instrumentalis Electronicum is the ultimate — and only — medieval beat machine.

The EP-1320 comes with hundreds of medieval sounds and samples, a redesigned set of sound effects and punch-in FX, a brand new aggregator, and a collection of craftily captured multi-sampled instruments.

The line input and internal microphone allow you to sample your own sounds in just seconds. Whether you're into making sultry serenades or bubonic beats, the EP-1320 has you covered.

$299.