penalties and bananas

Today I learned that the impending super-scary penalty for not cutting your water use by 20% in the hotter, drier part of the San Francisco Bay Area turns out to be something along the lines of $4 per month and a scolding letter.

In banana news, and if you are at all involved in the really, really sick lady's banana supply, you have a category for banana news, bananas used to taste better back before the 1960s when banana companies supplied Gros Michel bananas instead of Cavendish bananas. The Gros Michel variety was wiped out by Panama disease, a fungus, which has mutated and is now capable of wiping out the Cavendish variety, although it has not yet gotten to Latin America. Also, a banana company was responsible for the 1954 overthrow of a democratically elected government in Guatemala.

In grocery-store banana gossip, I heard from the produce guy at Safeway that the Del Monte organic fields got wiped out last month by some other fungus that goes away if you cut down all your current bananas trees and grow new ones, which I understand takes about 8 months. And Dole organic bananas have been going for a $1/lb ever since their fields flooded in Ecuador (according to the Basha's produce guy), and if you're really into banana trivia, you will have noticed that they put the field numbers on the stickers, like 542 and 712 (see for yourself).

Since that's more than enough information about bananas, I will now give you the headline of the day, which by its very existence, dooms some of us to hell:

Suspect in custody in fatal porch shooting