Interlude: Doomsday for the Banana?

They've joined pandas, gorillas, and McCain supporters on the endangered list.

For those of you who haven’t heard, the cherished banana is endangered. Apparently, this most important of fruits is rapidly succumbing to a fungal disease.

For those of us in the U.S., this is bad news. But for people in less developed countries, where bananas are a nutrional staple, this is really, really bad news.

Find out more about the beleagured banana in David Koeppel’s book “Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World”. Also, you can visit Koeppel’s banana blog, where you can learn more about bananas than you wanted to know, or even thought there was to know. (Seriously.)

Come to think of it, this banana doomsday shouldn’t come as a surprise. I think the Reverend David Jeremiah found a prediction of it encrypted in the Book of Revelation.