Japan: not just your normal brand of strange...

Besides their strange social fetish, Japan is also well known for their love of manipulating everything, taking advantage of "unused" space. It's perfectly understandable practice, considering that there's practically 3 hundred billion kajillion people living on a tiny tiny strip of island no bigger then california, they need to use everything they can find. So it's with no surprise to find out that Japanese farmers has been experimenting with growing a square watermelon, to decrease the unused space and increase shippability.


Left you have a "normal" square watermelon, while the one on the right actually has a dice design imprinted.

Of course, not leting conventional wisdom stop them, they soon began experimenting more and more, until they developed the pyramid watermelon.


but NO!!! The pyramid was only but a stepping stone, letting they set foot onward to the terrifying world of HUMAN CLONING THROUGH WATERMELONS!!!

It ended up being sort of a failure...

Disheartened, they went back to the drawing board, and settled for hearts and stars (and Horseshoes, Clovers, and Blue Moons! Pots of Gold and Rainbows, and me Red Balloons!)


Say what you will, but they certainly add a nice "omph" to your average stir fry!


PingMag they also had some excellent explanation for how the fruits came to being.