774 Banana Points

Pliny the Elder thought he would try googling banana parts. He wanted to see if there was any mention of the mysterious banana part I had written about yesterday. There wasn't, but he learned a lot of interesting things.

He learned that many people call the bottom end of the banana the icky end. He learned that
some people think this is the most nutritious part of the banana.

He learned that in Tanzania research had been done on two Black-Head Persian Sheep to see which parts of banana plant residue had most nutritive value. Separate mixtures of crushed lower leaf lamina, mid-leaf ribs, pseudo-stem sheaths, pseudo-stem cores, and banana fruit peelings were placed in nylon bags with nylon strings and fed through a rumen cannula into the rumens of the sheep and left there for different amounts of time to see which mixture was absorbed most efficiently. Pliny could not quite believe anyone would bother to do this.

He checked the meaning of rumen cannula in the online dictionary. Yes it really was a sort of tube through which to feed things into the first stomach of a sheep. At least they said they washed the bags thoroughly after drawing them back out of the rumens. But he couldn't shake the feeling that it was a lot of unpleasantness for nothing, especially when he read the results showing that the peelings had been found to be the most digestible.

He learned, also, that if he would care to be the first to review a certain book by the name of Pliny's Women, he would receive 774 banana points. He was both shocked and astonished at this. He clicked on the site and was at once relieved to see that the book was about his nephew, Pliny the Younger, and not himself, and that furthermore it appeared to be rather scholarly. He remained puzzled about the banana points.

But when he looked again at the title of the website he began to understand. It was the Mighty Ape, New Zealand's Leading Online Bookstore. For a moment he considered ordering the book.
Eventually he decided against it because he didn't really know what he would do with 774 banana points.