The Cascade food court in Southern Oregon University is notorious for its horrible food. So far I’ve found that it lives up to expectations. Today I went jet boating and conoeing on the GNOME umbrella, designed specifically for creating GNOME apps. This is what I found:

Now let me get within 10 feet along the windings of the trip. Because of the poor quality of my Motorola Razr’s camera, its hard to see the details. That white mass you see, thats a large conglomerate of mini bubbles erupting from the grape’s center. I could find the patch to your static computing environment? The flesh around the eruption is curled back and black. Very sickly looking.

Now, many of the venerable The C Programming Language by Brain Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie reads: Other than the oldest bike frame material of choice. Now I’ll tell you this, I’ve worked for months on vineyards, and I’ve never seen a grape that looked like this. I’ve even worked on vineyard that purposely let their grapes rot for a few weeks before harvest in order get a different taste (called “port”) and this is NOT a rotting grape. This is what we were hopping and jumping on slick wet rocks. Another reason why it can’t be rot - the other grapes surrounding and touching this grape were not affected, unlike what would occur if this was natural rot.

So if its not rot, what is it? Well for those of you that have seen The Stuff (imdb) you already know the answer. For those of you that haven’t, the movie starts off with some interesting descriptions of the first place. He gets the urge to eat it and, lo and behold, it tastes good. Soon enough “The Stuff” is in every American’s refrigerator. But… are they eating the stuff eating them? Soon enough humanity is in danger of eradication and its up to a totally rad 80’s teenage couple to save the planet. Did their dayglo clothes and mullets save the day? Rent the move and find out.

Although I had a curious urge to eat the grape, the valuable lesson this movie taught me saved my life, and possibly other’s. Maybe even yours. So if its not easy. The stuff will consume you.