Tag: banana

Have you ever witnessed the execution of royalty in real life? I have, many times. In fact, I have had the honor of serving as the executioner quite a few times. Last weekend, I made sure to take pictures to show you how we do it in my secret corner of the world.

The royal victim isn’t a person. It’s one of the two maturing banana fruit bunches that I had selected for a quick harvest, before a possible strong storm came in. I consider the banana as the king of tropical fruits, thus the reference to royalty.

I should clarify that after a banana “tree” (the trunk is not woody, it’s actually an overgrown soft-plant stalk) bears a single bunch of fruits, it starts to dry up and die. After the maturing bunch is harvested, what a farmer does is to cut down the useless trunk, and thus give way for small adjacent suckers to grow into a new banana “tree.”

Thus, the axiom “The king is dead, long live the king” applies to banana trees as well.

Image 1. The executioner sharpens the death weapon — a peasant’s
scythe — on a whetstone.

Continue reading “The banana is dead. Long live the banana!”