Los Pepinos Inocentes

Cucumbers. They're everywhere. Every time I make the mistake of turning on the television news, there's ever more extravagant footage of alleged Spanish farmers dumping ever more prodigious quantities of cucumbers. This is by way of illustrating the story of how the Germans spectacularly fouled up over their e-Coli outbreak, unfairly pointing the finger - or the cucumber - at the Spanish. At first the news showed us what looked suspiciously like stock footage of a single peasant chucking misshapen cucumbers into a large skip - these cucumbers were probably already doomed under those laudable EU guidelines that protect a grateful citizenry from misshapen vegetables (which are actually better for you and tend to taste nicer too). Now, though, the cucumber disposal is on a truly heroic scale, with small armies of sturdy peasants pitching in, hurling tonnes (as they say in the EU) of blameless cucumbers into ever more gigantic receptacles. What fate awaits these hapless vegetables? I hope they will be put to good use. Perhaps they could be sent to Laputa, where the Projectors could extract sunbeams from them - a project which, according to this fascinating analysis, might actually have some slight basis in science...