Pears, eh?

As orchard fruits go, they seem on the surface to be utterly reasonable, appearing as they do in a variety of desserts, from a humble fruit salad through these so-called modern "smoothies" to "Poire belle Hélène" . But do not be fooled by their seemingly innocent shape and delicate flavour, kind reader. They are inherently evil. They sit there, like butter wouldn’t melt, in the fruit bowl. “Come, eat me, humble human. Taste my juicy fruitiness,” they beckon. So you approach, you are weak. You give one a gentle squeeze to test its ripeness, only to find it’s as hard as a very hard rock from Hardrocksville which has just won the annual prize for the hardest rock, like, ever.

This cycle repeats itself for several days.

Approach pear,
Squeeze,
Pear is as hard as rock.

Approach pear,
Squeeze,
Pear is as hard as rock.

Approach pear,
Squeeze,
Pear is as hard as rock.

Until one day:

Approach pear,
Squeeze,
Hand now covered in slightly granular, whitish, suspicious looking mush.

Most fruits have a couple of days when they’re not quite ready, another couple when they’re just right and a couple more where they’re edible, but on their way out. Pears, on the other hand, have, as far as I can ascertain, a one second edibility window. The likelihood of your deciding to attempt to eat the pear (or peel it – you try peeling a ripe pear, go on, I dare you!) during this one second timeframe is understandably very small.

The bastards! The juicy, tasty, delicious bastards!

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On another subject, I've been having problems with comments recently, as you may have noticed. Switching to Blogger comments simply meant that I now have problems with two comment boxes, rather than one, since I have established that the original problem was with the browser, not the commenting system.

Now that I have downloaded a different browser which displays the comment box first time (not too much to ask, surely?), I am left with the dilemma of which comments to keep: Blogger or Haloscan?

This is where you come in, dear reader. Which do you prefer?

Obviously, Blogger + Haloscan is the "classic combo" for us old-timers who remember the days when Blogger didn't have its own commenting system (yes, really, young Blogger bloggers, in the olden days, we didn't have the choice: we *had* to set up an external commenting system - oh, how times have changed...)

So, why don't you vote with your "fingers" (or your voice recognition software, if applicable) and pop a comment in the comment box of your choice. Now, if that's not democracy, I'm a monkey's uncle!

By the way, my own comments will not be included in the vote!