the musical fruit: movement #12.
song: "grapefruit diet," "weird al" yankovic
fruit: pink grapefruit
what's up with "weird al" & food? dude is obsessed with food. there's "i love rocky road," "my bologna," "eat it," "girls just wanna have lunch," "addicted to spuds," "the white stuff," "lasagna," "spam," "livin in the fridge," "waffle king" & "snack all night." in '93, he even put out a compilation album called the food album, featuring many of the aforementioned songs. his biggest food-themed parody was probably "fat," his "bad" parody off his 1988 album, even worse. it centers around a dude who is totally obese & when it comes right down to it, makes fun of fat people. as a fourteen year old, i found it funny. nowadays, i have mixed feelings about it, but it is a "weird al" song, so i suppose it's not that big of a deal.
another one of his songs that makes light of being fat is "grapefruit diet," off of his tenth album, running with scissors, which was released ten years ago this past june. the song's a parody of "zoot suit riot," by cherry poppin' daddies & is about a guy who's "got more rolls than a pastry truck" & "made sumo wrestlers look like kate moss" before he went on a grapefruit diet. "weird al" put out a live vhs dvd from the tour supporting the album, creatively titled "weird al" yankovic live! the concert featured a medley with "grapefruit diet" in it & that portion's totally on the youtube. check it. what a showman! he's sort of laid off the food parodies since alapalooza came out, so we've gone almost sixteen years without a new "weird al" food-themed parody, but i'm assuming he has approx 7,000 others rolling around in his head, so it can't be long til we get a new one.
this morning, i had myself a breakfast that included that not-so-pink pink grapefruit half you see above. since an early age, i've always loved grapefruit & that's largely because it has its own knife, one made with serated edges & a little curve on the end of it so you can properly cut it & get out as much of the fruit as possible. sure it wouldn't do jack for you if you found yourself in a knife fight, but to this day, all i have are butter knives, steak knives & a grapefruit knife. it's a pretty exclusive club. as for grapefruits themselves, the grapefruit tree was first documented in barbados & is considered one of the "seven wonders of barbados," which is a pretty sweet title to have. the other six? harrison's cave, the baobab tree, the historic jacobean mansions, morgan lewis mill, a famous jewish synagogue & cannon galore. obviously, none of those are as famous as the grapefruit tree.
i decided to relive one of my childhood habits, so i sprinkled a spoonful of sugar on top of the pink grapefruit & let it sink in to dull its slight bitterness. i first started sprinkling a little sugar on my grapefruits not because i minded the bitterness all that much, but because i enjoyed putting sugar on stuff whenever possible. i assume my parents were all "well, as long as he's eating fruit, i guess we can let him cover it in sugar." thank you kindly for your indifference, mom & dad. compared to how long it took to cut up the pink grapefruit half, i finished it pretty quickly, but lucky for me, there's another half waiting for me in the fridge for later. bonus grapefruit!