Wolmania - Friday, March 4, 2022

Good morning to those in the Americas and hello to everyone else. I simply don't have time to draft custom newsletters just for you, individually, but I have hand-crafted the following items just for you, as a collective. I did my best. I hope you like it.

Item 1: a link

Grapefruit Is One of the Weirdest Fruits on the Planet

The early days of the grapefruit are plagued by mystery. Citrus trees had been planted casually by Europeans all over the West Indies, with hybrids springing up all over the place, and very little documentation of who planted what, and which mixed with which. Citrus, see, naturally hybridizes when two varieties are planted near each other. Careful growers, even back in the 1600s, used tactics like spacing and grafting (in which part of one tree is attached to the rootstock of another) to avoid hybridizing. In the West Indies, at the time, nobody bothered. They just planted stuff.

Sometimes it didn’t work very well. Many citrus varieties, due to being excessively inbred, don’t even create a fruiting tree when grown from seed. But other times, random chance could result in something special. The grapefruit is, probably, one of these.

From this piece ("probably"???) it kind of seems like nobody has a clue where grapefruit comes from. But I think we can all agree that it’s one of our finest fruits (when it’s not having terrible, potentially lethal, interactions with our medication).

Item 2: a list

Saved By the Bell characters, ranked:

1. Tori Scott
2. Jessie Spano
3. Kelly Kapowski
4. Lisa Turtle
5. Zach Morris
6. Samuel “Screech” Powers
7. A.C. Slater
8. Mr. Richard Belding
9. Max

(Characters that appeared in 10+ episodes. Not including the College Years or the New Class or Whatever Else They Have Done With This Valuable Intellectual Property.)

Item 3: a media recommendation

Item 4: a photograph

See ya!

Thanks for your time and attention. See you next week, assuming we don't run into a bigger fish!