POPEYE! SAVE ME, POPEYE!

As further proof that absolutely anything can be found on the Internet, today we here at this one-man operation that insists on referring to itself as if it has some kind of a staff or something are committed to bringing you the very latest in olive oil news.

First, our Olive Oil Exclusive Hyper News Flash 7000 bureau chief in Marrakech, Morocco that we don't actually have but wouldn't it be awesome if we had that kind of budget (okay, it's actually Derek Workman of The View From Fez, reprinted at Moroccoboard) (NOTE: originally credited as just Moroccoboard) brings us to La Clinique du Ballon, a little shop where a guy named Kamal Boukentar hand-stitches old-school leather balls. And old-school-style leather balls with patterns they never considered using back then. A normal soccer ball has 18 panels; Boukentar has a ball on display with 72 of them. The leather starts out beige; three coats of olive oil give them the old-school color.

Not that they tend to actually get used to play soccer. You could, but there's a reason they don't use leather balls anymore. Leather balls are hard and chunky. They're mainly display things.

...well, it's interesting to me. I've been working on a soccer book, remember.

ULTRA-SUPER LIGHTSPEED OLIVE OIL NEWS WORLD PULSE SHIFT TO SPAIN did I tack on enough buzzwords? We go to the Olive Oil News- the olive oil news leader- who brings word of a cartoon recently produced called "Piqui and Mandy: The World of Olive Oils". In this cartoon, viewable here if you can read Spanish, olive oil production is compared to the production of orange juice. In the process, olive oil is referred to as a fruit juice, and after generally being an ad by the olive oil people, Piqui and Mandy conclude that olive oil and orange juice are the same.

...now wait just a minute here.

Technically, the fruit juice thing is on-point. Olives are fruits- they are the product of a flowering plant. Vegetables are just straight-up plant parts. In fact, speaking botanically, the word 'fruit' can be taken wider than you think. Tomatoes are just the start. What else is the product of a flowering plant? Well, cucumbers, for one, and beans, and squash, and okra, and eggplant, and peppers, and peas, and pumpkin, and zucchini, and corn. Yes, botanically speaking, corn is a fruit. You will never in a million years get away with telling a kid that at the dinner table, but there you go. When speaking of food, we more commonly divide fruits and vegetables by taste- sweet vs. savory- rather than their biological makeup.

So okay. An olive is a fruit and olive oil is a fruit juice. You have that one. But then let's get into this 'olive oil and orange juice are the same' business.

Try drinking olive oil straight sometime.

People have done this. Selena Gomez made them do it, and Kelly Clarkson made Selena do it. Kelly heard that drinking olive oil improves your singing voice, so she started drinking it. Selena heard it from Kelly, so Selena started doing it. Random people on YouTube heard it from Selena, so they started doing it.

Many of them immediately stopped. Why? Because drinking olive oil is terrible. And Selena told them as much. In a 2010 interview on Ellen, shown below (skip to 5:11), she said of the practice, "It's awful. You let it go down and it coats your throat. I gag every time. It's gross."



From what I've seen poking around, there are only two reasons anyone drinks olive oil straight. The first reason is for some sort of health benefit, such as Selena taking it for her voice. (Or you can not drink it and still get health benefits. Put it in your hair as a treatment for head lice, perhaps.) The second reason is because someone told them or dared them to (such as Selena taking it because Kelly Clarkson said to). The people who drink it for the second reason end up regretting it.

Like this girl, whom you will note is barely even coating the bottom of her glass:



Same as orange juice. Right.

In fact, I'm so angry about this blatant pro-olive oil agenda being foisted upon my reading audience by the Olive Oil Exclusive Hyper News Flash 7000 news team that I'm shutting down the whole division. COME INTO EXISTENCE SO I CAN FIRE YOU!