You know what else is tragic? I buy bananas all the time, and have never found a large spider among them. I’d pay extra for a bunch of bananas with a bonus spider!
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Look for a large yellow spider with eight banana-shaped legs. Not exactly among the alleged-bananas insomuch as is the alleged-bunch.
I’ll never forget the spider that crawled out of a bunch of grapes I was eating when I was seven. I screamed like a pig
You know banana spider venom is a neurotoxin, right? If you find one, I hope you handle it carefully.
Do banana spiders have ten legs (and dark glasses and a beret)?
4) @Pierce R. Butler
It’s funny that it’s called “Tarantula coffeehouses” but alludes to banana spiders, and kinda looks more like the Brazilian sort.
As to the legs, I believe it’s holding the paper with its pedipalps.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoneutria#/media/File:Phoneutria_nigriventer.jpg
OK…I don’t get it. I get PZ’s comments about bananas as a reference to Day-O, but I don’t catch the reference of “Step on Me.”
rrhain@6, Amusing that’s serious, it’s being way overthought.
Poopyhead’s reference to a spider in a bunch of bananas is very probably just that, a phenomenon which happens occasionally, Are Dangerous Spiders Hiding in Your Fruit?
Poetry experts can correct, but the beatnik spider’s poem is a simple so-called “beat poem“. As for the poem itself, think of what is done to some spiders by some humans… step on… shovel…
Judging by the beret and sunglasses, I gather it’s a Beat poet at a poetry slam?
I too am confused by the conflation of banana spiders with tarantulas.
The bananas are on the sign.
I am amused that blf posted about beat poets before I managed to write, preview, and post my own.
@8 Tethys: That’s the lyric from Day-O:
A beautiful bunch of ripe banana!
(Daylight come and me wanna go home)
Hide the deadly, black tarantula
(Daylight come and me wanna go home)
I guess I was trying to see something more in it than just a stereotypical representation of a poetry reading where the poem is taken by the audience as “so deep” and yet seems superficial and nonsensical to the squares. For example, was it parodying some specific poem that I ought to know but don’t? But, apparently not.
I myself also wonder if it is. (I haven’t a clew as to what poem, if there is indeed one.)
I missed the reference to “deadly, black tarantula” in Day-O, thanks ! Maybe a coincidence, maybe what poopyhead was referring-to — but very possibly perhaps why there are bananas on the sign?
Ah, I did not remember that the song Dayo mentions tarantulas.
I looked for a beat poem it could reference but did not find anything. Perhaps it’s just in the nihilistic style of Ginsburg?
I saw the best arachnids of my generation
Beaten, stomped on, shoveled away……..
Try grapes. A woman in Chicago had a bonus black widow in her seedless grapes. She donated said spider to a zoo.
Not by the time you’ve bought those bananas in the supermarket.
I grew up in a port town which took some cargo from the Caribbean. There was a hall owned by a famous tropical fruit company where fruit was packaged for redistribution for local sales up and down the east coast of England (yeah, hall, not warehouse; it was a traditional reference to a large building located where the town’s original fire brigade had been based a century earlier). The town paper would multiple times a year report that a tarantula had been discovered in one of their fruit cargoes by one of their workmen. Just for variety, the large, scary but harmless spider would sometimes be replaced on occasion by a small but incredibly venomous spider. Each such warning, of course, came with an admonition to beware of spiders in bananas.
As kids we would collectively give the hall a very wide berth when walking into town, but equally it never stopped us buying lovely, lovely tropical fruit at good prices from the local shops. Years later a major gentleman’s outfitters took over the hall and the adjacent shop premises, after the banana company had closed down. Upon bringing a girlfriend to meet my family and visit my home town, I refused to buy a new shirt from there by telling her that I’d probably feel the scratching of spider legs in the collar, whether or not there weren’t any. Life so lived.
The Doc wrote ” I’d pay extra for a bunch of bananas with a bonus spider!”
You are one weird dude doc , I was in my shed earlier taking down a bit of plywood ,there were two ,i think you call them cave spiders on the bottom of it ,and i didn’t squesh them .Do I get a star ?
I’d also forgotten about the tarantula lyric, but when reading the poem, I was hearing it in Eddie Murphy’s “Kill my landlord. Kill my landlord” voice.