Skeleton Trivia for Tuesday, 2025-10-07
I’m simply bananas for bananas!
Hiya Skeleton Crew,
Hope ya have a happy harvest moon tonight. Or hunter’s moon, if ya prefer—they’re the same thing this year!
Answers to Last Time
- Bluey & the Heeler family live in Brisbane. Do ya think they’ll be at the 2032 Olympics??
- Apparently not too many of youse guys have the Bananas in Pyjamas song seared into your cranium the way it is into mine, ’cause this question played pretty hard.
Today’s Trivias
Trivia 1
Probably part of what made the Bananas in Pyjamas question tricky is that I referred to bananas as “botanical berries”. Now, maybe that’s true on some kinda technical level ... but if someone ask ya to bring “berries” to a picnic & ya showed up with a bunch of bananas?? I think they’d look at ya kinda funny, at the very least. (If ya wanted to be truly deranged, ya could show up with a basket full of tomatoes, coffee beans, & peppers.)
Slightly more defensible in this putative picnic would be if ya brought along some Chinese gooseberries, since at least those have got the word “berry” in the name. Although I think most people would still give ya a hard time, since folks generally don’t call these guys “Chinese gooseberries” but instead know ’em better by what name?
Trivia 2
There’s lots to know ’bout bananas! Like didja know that nearly all the bananas that ya see in U.S. supermarkets are a breed called the Cavendish banana, & they’re all basically genetic clones of each other? It’s true! Apparently folks bred the seeds outta the Cavendish banana, so now the only way ya can grow a NEW tree is by snippin a little bit from an existing tree & planting it.1
Before we had ourselves the Cavendish banana, there was the Gros Michel.2 It was a perfectly fine banana—tasted basically the same as a Cavendish, in my personal opinion—but suffered from the slight disadvantage that it was nearly entirely wiped out by a horrible fungal disease in the 1950s. & although the Cavendish was originally resistant, in recent years it’s been gettin threatened by a newer strain of this blight.
Can ya tell me what country is this wilting disease named after? Although this country DOES export bananas, it ironically ain’t one of the paradigmatic “banana republics” of the 20th century. I mean, yes, sure, it definitely was subject to crazy foreign interference, but it was just for not-entirely-banana-related reasons.
OK then
Byeeeeeeeeeeeeee