Banana Myths Debunked

There is an old wife's tale that you cannot store bananas in the refrigerator. There is a reason for this myth, bananas do get a dark and ugly skin in the refrigerator. However, this does not mean the fruit goes bad. Also, they do not produce gas or other toxins in the cold.

Once bananas are ripened, they can be kept in a fridge. A banana peel will turn dark brown, making it appear bad, but the part you eat inside actually stays quite good. Remove the ugly peel and you will see the flesh inside is as delicious as ever. You can let it sit out for a short time to return to room temperature, if desired before eating.

Bananas can typically be kept in the refrigerator for about a week, which is significantly longer than an optimally ripe banana will last at room temperature. A handy place to store them is in the crisper.

Banana companies Chiquita and Dole recommend you do this to make the banana last longer in its perfect ripeness stage. Once a banana reaches its optimal ripeness for your taste, stick it in the refrigerator to drastically slow the conversion of starch into sugars, almost to the point of stopping the ripening process.
It is important not to put the bananas in the refrigerator before they reach the level of ripeness you desire. Chiquita says, “If you place your unripe Chiquita bananas in the refrigerator, they may not be able to resume the ripening process even if they are returned to room temperature.”
There are other ways to keep bananas fresh longer. For instance, you can slow the ripening process of a banana by keeping the banana away from other fruits, including separating a banana from the same hand it came from. Bananas put off large amounts of ethylene, relative to many other fruits. This triggers and quickens the ripening process significantly.

Incidentally, if you would like to speed up the ripening of some green bananas or other fruit or vegetables, put them in a paper bag together over night. The trapped ethylene will quickly ripen the fruit, and the paper bag will still let enough oxygen in to keep the ripening progress smoothly.  Also, putting fresh bananas in the same container as an overripe banana will rapidly accelerate the ripening process of the fresh bananas. Related posts LINK1, LINK2.

Airline Seats and Windows

Have you ever noticed that most airplane windows do no line up with your seat? The reason for this is that the airline manufacturers place windows as they believe is the optimum seating arrangement. Airlines decide on actual seating arrangements, using the flexible tracks in the plane. So, while one airline might coincidentally line up seats with windows, others do not. Plane window placements are standard, seating arrangements are not.

Airport WiFi Passwords

If you want to make travel a bit less troublesome, there is a tiny free app that can ease your wait time. It shows the passwords for WiFi at many of the world's airports. It is constantly updated for you, so check it out for the next time you have an interminable wait at the terminal. LINK

Pronunciation Poem

The following is the beginning of a poem "The Chaos" The only way it makes sense is if you know how to correctly pronounce the words. If you can pronounce correctly every word in this poem, you will be speaking English better than 90% of the native English speakers in the world.


The poem was written during 1922 by Gerard Nolst Trenité. Here is a LINK to the poem in its entirety. There is also a YouTube version with someone reading it out loud (6 minutes long) LINK. Friday fun diversion.

Dearest creature in creation
Studying English pronunciation,
   I will teach you in my verse
   Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse.

I will keep you, Susy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy;
   Tear in eye, your dress you'll tear;
   Queer, fair seer, hear my prayer.

Pray, console your loving poet,
Make my coat look new, dear, sew it!
   Just compare heart, hear and heard,
   Dies and diet, lord and word.

Sword and sward, retain and Britain
(Mind the latter how it's written).
   Made has not the sound of bade,
   Say-said, pay-paid, laid but plaid.

Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as vague and ague,
   But be careful how you speak,
   Say: gush, bush, steak, streak, break, bleak,

Previous, precious, fuchsia, via
Recipe, pipe, studding-sail, choir;
   Woven, oven, how and low,
   Script, receipt, shoe, poem, toe.

Windows 10 Tip

 If you cannot get into Windows, hold down Shift key when restarting, then go to Troubleshooting options.

Baking Soda Facts

You likely have one or more boxes of baking soda in your home. Baking soda can be used for many purposes. It cleans homes, deodorizes furniture, exfoliates skin, kills mold, polishes silver, and more. You can use it to wash your hair, to make deodorant, and to take the stink out of sweaty clothes.


Baking soda comes out of the ground in the form of minerals nahcolite and trona, which are refined into soda ash (calcium carbonate), then turned into baking soda (sodium bicarbonate), among other things. Most of it comes from the United States, which contains the world’s largest trona deposit. Nahcolite, a naturally occurring sodium bicarbonate, is often found in evaporated lake basins. It is also mined in Botswana, Kenya, Uganda, Turkey, and Mexico.

Glass-making consumes about half of the soda ash and the chemical industry uses about a quarter of the output. Other uses include soap, paper manufacturing, and water treatment.

Happy Friday

Life's greatest achievements came from lack of experience.

Each week I experience a new and wonderful Happy Friday!

Ten Things You Never Knew the Name of

Agraffe: the wired cage that holds the cork in a bottle of champagne.
Barm: the foam on a beer.
Columella nasi: the space between your nostrils.
Griffonage: unreadable handwriting.
Ideolocator: a “you are here” sign.
Keeper: the loop on a belt that keeps the end in place after it has passed through the buckle.
Obelus: the division sign (÷).
Phloem bundles: those long stringy things you see when peeling a banana.
Punt: the bottom of a wine bottle.
Rasceta: the lines on the inside of your wrist.

Social Media Facts

A surge of new technologies and social media innovations is altering the media landscape and changing the way people behave.

Over one million books are published worldwide every year. A Google Book Search scanner can digitize 1,000 pages every hour. Americans have access to: 1,000,000,000,000 web pages, 10,500 radio stations, 5,500 magazines, and well over 200 cable TV networks.


There are 240,000,000 TVs in the US. More than 2,000,000 of them are in bathrooms.
Newspaper circulation is down 7 million over the last twenty five years, but in the last five years, unique readers of online newspapers are up over 30 million.

Traditional advertising is in steep decline while digital advertising is growing rapidly. More video was uploaded to YouTube in the last 2 months than if ABC, NBC, CBS had been airing new content 24/7/365 since 1948 (when ABC started broadcasting).


The number of unique visitors Myspace, YouTube, and Facebook receive every month, collectively is over 250 million. None of these sites existed 6 years ago. Wikipedia launched in 2001 and now features over 13 million articles in more than 200 languages.