Four (or Five!) Reasons Why

….Why You Shouldn’t Buy Bananas

1. For many people (North Americans, Europeans), bananas are not a local product so they have to be shipped/flown in from thousands of miles away. In the buy-local/green world in which we now live, bananas are far from being eco-friendly.

2. By buying bananas at a low price compared with other fruit such as apples, we’re encouraging the continuation of a business model that favors the employer rather than the employee. There’s a reason why they call them banana plantation - and it’s not about the fact bananas are plants.

3. The vast majority of bananas consumed by consumers are one variety - the Cavendish. There are two major problems with this reality. One, the Cavendish variety lacks genetic diversity. The Cavendish banana grown in Jamaica is the exact same as the one grown in Thailand or Honduras. This could make it prone to disease and pests. Second, our obsession with the seedless Cavendish means we ignore the 1,000+ other types of bananas grown in Africa and Asia.

4. Because bananas are so inexpensive and always available, they dominate the fruit landscape. On average, Americans eat more bananas than any other kind of fruit, chomping down 26.2 pounds/year while Apples are a distant second at 16.7 pounds. Around the world, people eat 100 billion Cavendish bananas every year.

For more on the banana and its challenge, check out Popular Science - “Can This Fruit be Saved” - and well as Freakonomics, which had a great post recently looking at the economics of bananas.

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…You Should Take A Sabbatical

1.Taking a sabbatical doesn’t mean taking time off. But what it does allow you to do is take time away from your routine. It allows you to escape, rejuvenate and recharge. If you take a working sabbatical in the same field, you can get inspired just by being in a new environment. If you take time to do something completely different, you can explore new directions and the possibility of changing tracks. Regardless of your intentions, it can only help you think about and appreciate your values, self and purpose. Or if you are not that introspective, it can be the start of an adventure.

2. You never really get to know a place well until you live there for an extended period of time. Two or three weeks a year of meandering as a tourist only scratches the surface of a place that is naturally foreign to you. New cultures and geographies can take months before a real understanding can develop and once this has happened, you gain a new appreciation and insight.

3. You are forced to meet and interact with new people, even if you are not a particularly social person. While meeting new people can itself be an adventure and exciting, it also opens you up to new ideas and ideals. Whether you agree with any of them is almost irrelevant. What is important is that it may provide inspiration, reinforce existing ideas or get a new perspective on old ones.

4. You will be doing your employer a favour. Sabbaticals can improve employee morale, reduce burn-out, lower turnover and lead to better human resource expense management.

Looking for some inspiration? Check out Sabbaticalhomes.com.

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….Grammar is So Terrible

1. No one really teaches or studies grammar any more. From what I can tell, it’s not really a major part of the curriculum given teachers are scrambling to get their students to read, let alone understand grammar.

2. The importance of grammar is terribly under-appreciated. It’s unfortunate that there’s little attention or interest paid to having a comma, for example, in the right location so that a sentence is properly structured. At a time, when people want to consume information as fast as possible, it’s not something people care about or, for that matter, even recognize.

3. E-mail has killed grammar. With the use of emoticons, acronyms and personal digital shorthand, grammar is getting ignored and/or butchered. This contrasts when the golden age of letter writing when beautiful language, including proper, grammar was important and ubiquitous.

4. Many people write like they talk with same kind of informality and lack of structure. This explains why punctuation is pretty much non-existent, run-on sentences are the norm and spelling is atrocious.

For thoughts on grammar, check out Stanley Bing’s rant on “When smart people use bad grammar”, while the Big Bad Book Blog has some interesting thoughts on how some grammar rules are meant to be broken.

Technorati Tags: Grammar

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…Fishing Isn’t As Boring As You Think

1. Most people think that when you fish, all you really do is sit around, get a tan and drink beer. The truth of the matter is that fishing can be quite meditative. Sitting in the middle of a secluded lake, disconnected from the rest of the world, gives one a chance to reflect and clear your mind. And there is a certain poetry in the act of casting, particularly that for fly-fishing. The elegance of feeding out a line takes years to perfect and can only be achieved when you focus your mind on only the rod in your hand.

2. For city dwellers, it is not often enough that your we get back in touch with nature. To some, this is torture. Why would you put yourself in a place that is void of cell phones and broadband connections? But there is something primeval and elemental about doing so. Not only does it remind us of where we came from, but also what we really need to live and survive.

3. Whether or not the fish are biting, you get a chance to connect with those out there with you in a circumstance that you might not otherwise get. You can talk about about anything. Or you don’t have to talk at all. And there’s always stories to tell over a beer at the end of the day. Bonding can take many forms. That’s the beauty of it.

4. If you’re lucky enough to catch the big one, there is a certain amount of ego and bragging rights involved. Maybe it goes back to the notion of being a “provider” or boost you get from the trophy catch. Regardless, it feeds to ego and is good for the soul. And given that there is always a bit of luck involved, nobody really feels jealous or envious. Maybe they wished is was them, but there’s never any ill feelings.

5. Nobody really knows what goes on during fishing trips or whether any fish were actually caught, and this makes for all sorts of tall tales. “Oh, the one that got away!” A little imagination goes a long way and covers up for the fact that all you did was sit in a boat, tan and drink beer. Oh, wait…

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….Baking is Becoming Cool

1. As we become increasingly aware of eating better and healthier, doing your own baking is a much better choice. You know decide the ingredients you want to use. Instead of refined sugar, you can use brown sugar. Instead of shortening, you can use butter.

2. When you bake at home, you know everything is fresh. The bread is soft and chewy because it just came out of the oven; not because of some artificial preservative that lets grocers keep bread on the shelf for a week.

3. As the prices for wheat continue to climb so will the cost of baked goods that you purchase from a grocery store or bakery. The price of bread, for example, has jumped 50% in the past year - and there’s little chance prices are coming down soon. If you bake at home, however, you cut easily cut your prices in half.

4. There’s nothing like baked goods coming out of the oven. More than anything, it’s the smell that permeates your home and draws you into the kitchen looking for something delicious.

Technorati Tags: baked goods

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