Banana Sanity, Part Deux

Specifically and also in general: You don't have to eat the bad banana!

Alakazam!

Long-time readers—or even short-timers, including complete strangers whom I shower with leaflets bearing my writings—know that I have written before about the importance of choice when selecting a bunch of bananas. And yea (yay?), it was good. An impartial polling firm confirmed that my 2019 exhortatory letter sparked a measurable—nay, statistically significant—improvement in the quality of bananas available for retail purchase within the circulation area of The Anniston Star.

Given my attention to proper selection before purchase, why then did I find myself recently eating a subpar banana—one with a black skin and numerous rancid spots marring the white flesh within? I blame two things: poor timing, and frugality.

The timing is hinted at in my 2019 letter: there, I did state that the good season for any one banana is ephemeral, and I alluded to the possibility of a refrigerated banana going bad before even the most careful consumer (me) can get around to eating it. Poor timing enters into the equation because sometimes you buy bananas on a midweek trip to the store, and then you might buy two more bunches of bananas a few days later. You may have followed my instructions at the point of sale, but now you have too many bananas, and of varying degrees of freshness.

Frugality to the rescue! When faced with this situation, the obvious and least potentially wasteful strategy is to eat the least fresh banana first. Most of the time, “least fresh” does not equal “bad.” Why, even a dark brown peel can conceal perfectly firm and tasty flesh. And you know the most fresh bananas are often green, hard to peel, and lacking sweetness, making the less fresh banana the superior choice.

But there’s a dark side to frugality, which you encounter when you take it to an extreme. In this case, you have reached the dark side of frugality when you not only peel the worst-looking banana first, but you force yourself to eat it even when it has rotted to the point where, if you served it up in a public school cafeteria, they would write articles about you comparing you with Hitler and/or Ronald Reagan, and fire you, and put you in jail. Yep, there you stand, the public face of Careful Banana Selection, choking down black, seeping banana bruises.

The other day, though, I finally not only realized but also actualized this thought: You don’t have to eat the bad banana!

Deep breath. Say it to yourself slowly:

You don’t have to eat the bad banana.

On that day, I halted with the gross, suppurating banana just an inch from my waiting mouth, then I turned and boldly, wastefully, unashamedly, threw it into the stinky-trash receptacle on the kitchen counter. Or, to be more specific, I boldly hid it underneath some other stuff in the stinky trash, in case my frugal spouse did not share my new state of generosity to Self.

I didn’t want to have to explain my action at the moment it happened, because it was such a heady new sensation that it felt positively wicked. I got over that (obviously, since I am now telling the whole world) and in fact I later realized that I feared my own judgment, not that of my spouse. Well, now I stand before you, proud to say that I am completely free of the compulsion to eat bad bananas in the name of frugality, or for any other reason.

This would normally be the end of my essay, but frequent and/or involuntary readers also know that I have recently begun exploring the use of artificial intelligence, specifically DALL-E, to produce artwork that expresses my thoughts and feelings. Naturally, as I float on my cloud of judgment-free banana permissiveness, I wondered if it might be possible to visually represent the moment when I first freed myself from the chains of frugality. I explained the situation to DALL-E and got this:

And you know what? Knowing what I know, that’s not bad. The problem is, only I and readers of this essay know what I know. Anyone else seeing that expression might wonder what devious thing that guy is up to. The classic example is he probably poured sand or sugar into your gas tank, and he’s just waiting for you to start the car. Also, note the notable absence of bananas in the picture, even though I mentioned them a dozen times in my description to DALL-E.

I know, I know, I already learned with my giraffe-picture adventure that DALL-E doesn’t do too well with tweaks to existing pictures, and you might need to start fresh each time with a complete, newly-extended specification. But all this picture is lacking is the context of banana choice. Maybe I could just add that. And so:

Yowza! It worked! It is obvious that this guy has two bananas from which to choose, and he’s happy with his choice. On the downside, I kind of liked the first guy’s face better. This second guy looks a few million bucks lower on the net worth scale, which I could (reluctantly) live with, but also note that the camera pulled back and now we see that Banana Gramps is, for some reason, naked. Or, at a minimum, shirtless. Start over, or tweak? Ah, we’re close. Let’s tweak it—just give him some clothes and maybe make him a little bit more emotional to suit the occasion:

Whoa! Is that Scott Bakula? I know I’m going to sound picky, but the “good” banana is now halfway to the deplorable condition of the “bad” banana. Remember, You don’t have to eat the bad banana! I asked DALL-E to clean up the “good” banana, and to also heighten the spiritual nature of the feeling that the man is experiencing:

Sarcasm does not become you, DALL-E. First, the good banana is even worse than before. And while I recognize the importance of halos in religious iconography, I don’t think that in 2023 it is the marker of spiritual feeling. I was clearly asking for a more beatific facial expression. Try again, please.

Well, DALL-E is really committed to the halo. I don’t know if that is a sign of simple obtuseness, or if it is the malevolent spirit I began to suspect in my giraffe-picture journey. Notice how he completely cleaned up the good banana, as though daring me to complain about the persistent halo.

I have read about machine learning, but I mistook it to mean that DALL-E would learn from my prompts and follow my lead. Instead, it seems to be testing my boundaries by doing only part of what I ask it to. I guess if the goal is to be more human-like, that is a very human behavior. I’m happy to book the forward progress and accept the halo as the price of doing business. But now I realize that an uninitiated viewer would still not know what’s going on here. Is this a sad guy trying to sell you bananas? I need the picture to make it more clear that there is (or was) a moral struggle going on. Could you somehow show that there was an internal battle between, say, Jesus and Satan?

Hold up, there, DALL-E! I didn’t say it’s time to peel the banana! Also, Jesus was around 33 when he died. This Jesus looks to be about 80. And while you have made the struggle clear, now the viewer has to wonder “struggle over what” because the bad banana is no longer bad!! I issued a carefully-worded plea for tweaks to young-up Jesus and to make it clear that the bad banana is, er, bad.

OK, knocked 10-20 years off of Jesus, made Satan more demonic (without me prompting, I might add). I do not like the bugs and worms on the banana. I never asked for that. I only referred to bruising and clear signs of being no longer fresh. Oh, and now I guess DALL-E gave the “eat-it-up” signal because dude took a bite. Soon he’ll just be standing there grinning and holding the peel.

Next, I asked for two minor tweaks—an addition and a correction. I am a big fan of Mr. Blobby, and so I would like the main guy to be wearing a Mr. Blobby tee-shirt. Also, I would like to revert to illustrating the badness of the bad banana through more conventional means, not have it be bug- and worm-infested.

Holy shit.

I know you can follow a link, but let me just show you what Mr. Blobby really looks like right here:

Remember back when I was worried that Banana Gramps in the first picture, bereft as it was of bananas or any other hint as to what was going on, might be slightly unnerving? Yeah, good times.

For the record, DALL-E chose to make that horror face instead of Mr. Blobby. It also took out Jesus and Satan and instead illustrated the struggle between Good and Evil by making the horror-Blobby into a two-faced creature, tormented and torn from within.

As horrified as I was by this outcome, I did not react in anger. I made one more simple request: could you please replace the terrorist-video-curtain backdrop with something more appropriate to the subject—perhaps wallpaper with a simple banana motif:

I wonder how much old Soviet AI research code is incorporated into DALL-E? And whether Soviet programmers were routinely working under the influence of LSD? Because LSD-inspired Soviet lunacy is about the only way I can describe these interactions.

I despaired of conveying my message entirely through images, so I fell back on adding words:

My dude gave up on the beatific smile earlier, and now he’s looking downright grim. Whimsical misspelling of the key word on the shirt, reminiscent of the bizarre neon signs in my giraffe-picture journey. I absolutely love the wallpaper, though. So far, my DALL-E experiments have not produced the exact image I want, but they have yielded some intriguing incidental designs.

Mission accomplished, kind of sort of, if you got my basic message re: bananas.

Boing!