One way to up the Fourth of July budget

My buddy A and I have known each other since I was six, she was five and she brought a pair of tiny waterguns to afamily friend's potluck. With that dysfunctional start, you can expect a typical IM conversation to look like this:

A: Dude, check this out.
H: Nope.
A: Why not?
H: Your link doesn't work RAWR.
A: Rawring is inapprops, since you wouldn't be doing that in real life. Check your email...wait, what is it?
H: It's not that hard when it's automatically saved into an address book.
A: My b.
H: WHAT THE FREAK. Awesome.
A: The watermelon?
H: Yeah. I should blog about this.
A: Haha, yeah.
H: Obvs?
A: You mean obviously. Get your vocab straight.

The picture in question:


And after a quick Google search for "square watermelon," I found out that
1) Those were real!
2) You, too, could stuff a watermelon plant in a box and quite possibly have it grow square.
3) This Japanese-developed fruit also happens to cost around 10,000 yen.

So you probably wouldn't spend $80 on a watermelon. But you could always cut up your watermelon (no curved rind showing, of course) and say, "This is where it came from." Kind of like how most weddings now use sheet cake, while the official cake is largely Styrofoam decoration.

In short: Weird but cool.

"Pomegranate is so 2007..."

I really liked Naked pomegranate juice when I first had it; I liked it even more than the Naked smoothies.

Then I had concentrated pomegranate juice. And slowly, the trend trickled down the quality scale:

1. Blueberry juice is a poor complement to pomegranate - it makes it too sweet and doesn't give it enough berry flavor.
2. Nom pomegranate iced tea. Stick with the lychee - the pomegranate's overrated.
3. Arizona pomegranate iced tea. Which shamefully, I am drinking right now for the first time. A strange fruity flavor and lots of corn syrup.
4. The tipping point, in my opinion? Haagen Dazs' premium pomegranate-chip ice cream. You may remember me briefly mentioning this as an early taste for my senior project - no real pomegranate and no real chocolate chips.

I guess I'll move on to acai...oh wait, that was winter '07? Shoot...for that matter, acai was overrated too.

Tropical Fruit, as covered by Newsweek

Click here. (Unfortunately, the online edition doesn't feature the cute little chart of pictures alongside each fruit.)

Helpful, but it looks like they missed the custard-apple, the dragon fruit and the Buddha's hand. And maybe even the pomelo?

Also, has anyone tried the dragon fruit Ice Breakers gum?
It be poppin'. Like my lipgloss.

...and there goes all legitimacy of this blog post.