THE HISTORY OF SLIPPING ON BANANA PEELS | PRETTY GOOD, EPISODE 14

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Beware of banana peels. They are capable of inflicting great physical harm. Even worse, they might own you so badly that you’ll need to make a 33-minute documentary about them several years later simply to purge yourself of the abject shame and humiliation.

Video by Jon Bois

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nearly 100 years ago in 1927 the editor of the Brooklyn daily Eagle had had just about enough the concept of slipping and falling on a banana peel had already been a common Trope for decades by this point but this editor remained unconvinced that it had ever actually happened in the real world that it was nothing but slapstick something that only ever happened in Vaudeville acts and comic strips a prize was promised to anyone who came forward with an eyewitness account of somebody actually slipping on a banana peel in real life life purely by accident it’s no longer possible for me to claim this prize since the daily Eagle went out of business and closed its office near the Brooklyn Bridge many decades ago but I could promise that it is indeed possible to slip on a banana peel because it happened to me the year would have been 2018 I cannot offer the exact date but I can specify the precise location Brooklyn new York Broadway the road that defines the border between bedy and Bushwick near the corner of sodam Avenue my story is the same as everyone else’s I just didn’t see it one time when I was a little kid I dropped a banana peel on the kitchen floor and tried to slip on it on purpose but it just didn’t work like it did in cartoons I couldn’t do it the problem was that I was being too careful too intentional it only really works if you’re walking with a normal oblivious stride you cannot choose it it chooses you it CHS me I caught my balance I didn’t fall but I could have and from that day forward I’ve had no trouble respecting the terror that a banana peel can wreak upon your physical form if you’ve never slipped on a banana peel let me tell you it is a very unique experience to say the least um if you haven’t you might have slipped on a patch of ice before right that’s a lot more common but at least then you kind of had some tells didn’t you you knew it was in the cards it was cold out there was precipitation on the ground you were probably walking around ice before you slipped and fell and it hurts and it stinks but at least you kind of had some sort of warning banana peel you have none especially if it’s a warm sunny day you have no reason to expect it and then on the ground the banana peel could not possibly be better engineered for this purpose the exterior of the skin grips the sole of your shoe like brakes on a tire and the slippery side works like ball bearings to send you flying down the sidewalk despite all the meticulous cultivation and human engineering of this banana and despite all our efforts to pour concrete over nature and banish it from our sight nature still found a way to shake me by the ankle when I least expected it I was as surprised as I have ever been nature was telling me not so fast I am more powerful than you will ever be you can run from me you can pave me over you can try to suffocate me but I will always find you Nature has in fact used the banana peel to Humble many many residents in New New York City over the past 150 years hundreds will’ll never hear about probably thousands we are fortunate enough to have many newspaper accounts of New Yorkers slipping and falling on banana peels ranging from 1867 to 2013 often with specific locations and addresses listed but this is not merely a New York story this is an American story [Music] what we have here is a non-exhaustive compendium of banana peel slips and Falls throughout the United States that were documented in newspapers at the outset I’d found one funny story in the newspaper archives I didn’t have firm expectations of how many more I would come up with but I expected maybe one or two dozen I found a lot more than that more than enough reason to limit my scope to the US specifically this means leaving out some astonishing International slip and fall stories such as that of stunt man Bobby leech who while in his 50s climbed into a barrel got shoved into the Niagara River and fell down Niagara Falls when they found him and opened up the barrel he was described as quote more dead than alive despite inflicting countless serious injuries Niagara Falls did not end his life but a banana peel did 15 years later he slipped on a peel and injured his leg which developed an infection which killed him this occurred in New Zealand however between that and the fact that some reports claim he’d actually slipped on an orange peel not a banana peel leech is excluded from this sample we are now going to relive the history of America’s complex relationship with the dreaded banana peel a quick note before proceeding the precise dates and locations of most of the following incidents are completely accurate although some reports lack detail and left me to estimate when and where they occurred as best I could incident one in what I believe to be the first ever instance of a banana peel slip documented in American newspapers Mary E Brown of Jersey City is walking on Reed Street in Manhattan when she steps on a banana peel Falls and unfortunately breaks her leg May 27th 1867 we ultimately wait 5 years for incident 2 but coincidentally we only need to walk a few blocks November 22nd 1872 Charles Bogart is arrested on suspicion of blackmail at the world famous restaurant Del Monaco which used to have a location on Chamber Street while being walked out he makes a break for it running about 10 blocks through Tribeca before slipping on a banana p and being caught New York City was absolutely filthy in this time so it might seem a little strange that it took even this much time but this was only the dawn of the story of bananas in America which until now were occasionally available but not very popular it wasn’t until 1870 that they finally figured out that bananas imported from places like Jamaica and Costa Rica should be cut down when they’re green so they aren’t half rotten by the time they get to their destination incident 3 sees the first reported banana peel slip outside of New York City when Senator David Davis slips in Washington Washington DC but incident 5 is the most troubling on July 23rd 1879 Lev steel fractures his wrist while breaking his fall at the corner of third and Vine in Cincinnati Ohio the doors have now swung wide open bananas have now officially made it Inland and with them they will bring catastrophe by the end of the 1880s banana peels will become known as a serious safety hazard after incident 17 in which a girl in Chattanooga slips on a peel the local Daily Tribune advocates for the arrest of anyone seen carelessly throwing a banana peel on the ground this has clearly happened many many times that just went unreported in the papers the uptick we see in the 1880s is substantial there are sprains and broken bones all over the country as far west as Deadwood South Dakota but none of them compare to incident 16 May 17th 1888 Galveston Texas will Willis is in his upstairs bedroom when he’s awakened by a noise downstairs fearing it’s an intruder he grabs his pistol heads down the stairs slips on a banana peel that’s been left on one of those stairs loses his balance accidentally pulls the trigger and fatally shoots himself in the head I believe this to be the first banana peel related death in American history there will be many more incident 19 Wheeling West Virginia July of 1889 Richard man is walking down the street when he slips on a banana peel and breaks his right arm incident 20 Wheeling West Virginia August of 1889 weeks later that very same Richard man is walking down that very same street when he slips on a banana peel and breaks that very same arm Mr man’s awful luck contributes to an overall tally that is really ramped up as we can see by looking at the progressive total a problem has exacerbated that only 15 years ago did not exist and yet this will be nothing compared to what we see in the 1890s these disasters continue to take new and more terrifying forms incident 24 October 1st 1890 Richmond Indiana and what appears to be the first banana peel slip that results in the loss of a limb Mr Sharon Jones is walking alongside railroad track when he slips and falls on a banana peel a passing train runs over his arm necessitating its amputation incident 31 Uniontown Pennsylvania September 1892 railroad employee Charles Gardner slips on a banana peel and for reasons unknown believes someone intended to injure him he accuses nearby man Robert Williams of dropping the banana peel there on purpose Williams pulls out a gun and shoots him dead incident 32 Atlanta Georgia February of 1893 a woman is suing the city of Atlanta after sustaining serious injuries from slipping on a banana peel this is out of control there are now 32 reported incidents and using the loosest of estimates I’m supposing that for every banana peel injury that’s made the papers there are about a 100 that have not which would imply about 3,000 serious injuries Nationwide all because of littering the Carbondale Daily News in search of an insult so searing that it could burn right through the page and Into the Heart of an anonymous wouldbe litterer settles on the phrase malignant idiot not bad in our time banana peels are most closely associated with Mario Kart you’re most likely to draw a banana if you’re in first place implying it’s perhaps the weakest item but as any season player knows the banana peel is as capable as a red shell of ruining your day incident 39 October of 1893 Belo Ohio inventor William Saunders intends to drive his prize invention the steam Road Wagon which we today would call a uh car to the World’s Fair in Chicago he loads up some of his other inventions climbs in and gets going but doesn’t get far until one of the wheels hits a banana peel and slides into a ditch breaking all of said inventions when a Cleveland newspaper writes up the incident and makes a little bit of fun of him Saunders replies tell me who wrote that so I can destroy them if no one tells me I will go up to Cleveland and destroy you all the journalist who wrote it resigns in Terror within this decade seven Americans will be killed by banana peels but where many of us see catastrophe some of us see a business opportunity incidents 41-43 Boston Mass Mary Freeman and her daughters Jenny and Fanny are important innovators in the burgeoning slip andf scam industry and that they seem to have been the first to utilize the banana peel the Freeman women went after Big Rich easy targets AKA railroad companies so this is the way it usually works and the way they probably did it one of them discreetly drops a banana peel on a train platform and casually walks off then a few moments later another one of them theatrically slips and falls on it the key though is that they have perfected an ability to pretend they’ve sustained permanent waist down paralysis when they’re examined by doctors they run this scam three times in Boston first two go great the third time Fanny is ready to fake paralysis again when it turns out the doctor assigned to examine her is the same Doctor Who examined her last time whoops suddenly and miraculously cured Fanny jumps up and runs away wow that guy’s a really good doctor the decade of the 1900s will’ll see more banana peel injuries than any other decade before or since before we examine incident 72 a brief personal story in 2000 many years before my banana peel Encounter of 2018 I was 17 years old my friends and I headed out from Louisville to somewhere in Kentucky off I64 probably near Simpsonville to help out with some Landscaping work it was there where I walked across a yard littered with various Lawn Care implements and completely by accident stepped on the teeth of a garden rake the handle of the rake sprang up and hit me square in the face even at this young age I appreciated the magnitude of this it was something I’d only ever seen in cartoons much like slipping and falling on a banana peel it had never even occurred to me that this would ever happen in real life and yet it did to me this was the first of two signature oish acts required for me to achieve High o Hood I must acknowledge unfortunately that since I did not fall after slipping on that banana peel 18 years later it fell short of a full oish act and to this day I remain a mere minor o a title from which I will never graduate until I actually do slip and fall on a future banana peel fall down a well sit on a chair that breaks when I sit on it walk into an open manhole roll down a hill pill Mel into a Brier patch fall off a turnup truck or wear underwear with hearts on them while my pants fall down until that day I will never be John Goodwin of Indianapolis who in August of 1900 slips and falls on a banana peel one year after falling down a well he did it he is a high o perhaps one of the greatest oos ever seen it’s in 1905 when we encountered the difficult to believe Saga of a man named William Lidle of San Francisco incident 99 March 14th corner of vaness and giri Lidle slips on a banana peel falls and breaks his wrist he remarks that he actually doesn’t mind this so much because it gives him some time off from work he otherwise wouldn’t have taken interestingly he’s not the only banana peel victim who said this sometimes in their own way they can do you a favor incident 100 2 weeks later on Market Street Lidle slips on another banana peel and takes an even worse fall breaking his shoulder and knocking him unconscious when he returns to work his co-workers mock him for somehow allowing this to happen to him twice incident 102 2 months later while walking through the office he slips on a third banana peel and re breaks that same shoulder and while nobody admits to it he’s fully convinced that someone dropped it there to taunt him incident 103 2 weeks later Lidle is getting ready for bed in the room he has r Ed on Post Street he turns out the light walks across the room and slips and falls on a banana peel Lidle pulls himself to his feet takes another couple of steps and incident 104 slips and falls on another banana peel he turns on the light to find several banana peels lying all across the floor he’s adamant that he did not put him there and concludes that someone for some reason must have thrown them through the small open window above his door understandably Lal immediately moves out of that room and into a new place on Filmore he’s carrying his things up the steps when in at 105 he slips and falls on a banana peel in addition to his pre-existing injuries he’s now hurt so badly that he has to spend a couple of weeks in bed at this point there’s no way he can tell anyone about this except for his fiance who lives on Golden Gate Avenue he trusts her to believe him at this point she does not there’s an argument they have a falling out Lial blows off steam of the night on the town incident 106 he slips and falls on a banana peel on pal Street and breaks his arm months later it would seem that Lidle is still partying pretty hard on a a 18th 1906 he’s up until 5: in the morning playing cards on o Farrell Street this is where he finds himself when San Francisco is rocked by the historic and devastating 1906 earthquake bricks are falling from the building all over the place but Lidle and his friends escape unharmed and take refuge in Golden Gate Park the next day Lidle manages to take a long detour around the city’s ruins to reach his place on Filmore and save a few of his things then while carrying an armload of stuff still manages to navigate the hilly terrain on his way back finally he reaches the the park at which point incident 116 he slips and falls on a banana peel and breaks his leg around 5 or 6 weeks later his leg is still in pretty bad shape but he’s able to get around with a cane to survey damage across the city he’s at the corner of vaness and Gary near where he used to live when incident 119 his Cane slips on a banana peel and he falls down now if you were having trouble believing any of this you’re about to have a lot more trouble reportedly his ex- fiance happens to be nearby sees him fall guesses that maybe he wasn’t lying about all that stuff after all and reunites with him they plan to get married December 19th in Columbus Ohio while walking up the aisle during the ceremony inant at 128 he slips and falls on a banana peel Lidle and his fiance both conclude that he’s cursed and that it would be bad news for her to marry into this cruel fate and they call things off that is 10 alleged banana peel slips and Falls suffered by one William Lidle I don’t know how many of them to believe about half of them appear to be corroborated by eyewitnesses and this was no small time rag that printed this it was originally published by the Chicago Tribune and then reprinted by The Washington Post as such I made the somewhat difficult decision to go ahead and include them in the official tally I mean hey sometimes you just got to fill up a page with a story as we’ll see with incident 110 one of many banana peel incidents that occurred Nationwide between Li’s first slip and his last Ionia Michigan November 1905 apparently banana field slips are now such a commonplace fixture in American life that in this story Roundup a slip receives third billing behind and a wagon of hay drove through town and some guy stood around for a while [Music] Sensational but no human being on Earth is more matter of fact than Hugh Sheridan of Wilmington Delaware incident 123 August 6th 1906 fourth in Market Sheridan is running to catch a street car when he slips on a banana peel and Falls his foot falls under the wheels of the car onlookers are probably screaming in Terror but Sheridan calmly gets up dust himself off walks over to the sidewalk takes off his shoe and gives it a little bit of a shake until his big toe falls out hey all right that’s by far the best toe he puts his toe in his pocket and stands around until the ambulance arrives let’s now go back to the big board with Yachts all wrapped up we have totaled 142 newsworthy banana peel incidents stop being an urban or regional thing a long time ago wherever there are Americans there will be banana Terror 1910 although unfortunately we cannot identify the specifics of any one particular incident we have to stop here and acknowledge all the scams run by a woman named Anna strua nicknamed banana Anna she was one of the greatest scammers of all time and within her specific genre she was the Michael Jordan of banana peel fraud and just like Jordan banana Anna commanded the most respect and admiration from her adversaries years later the insurance adjuster who finally caught her in 1910 wrote a feature in which he described her as quote one of the cleverest fraud artists who ever operated he even secretly shadowed her for a while before apprehending her just so he could witness her craft remember the Freeman women of Boston they were running Amateur hour sticks compared to this although Anna seems to have operated primarily in New York City she went all over and maintained homes in several different cities so she could list claims from a variety of different addresses and although she worked with the partner she threw out the conventional Playbook that called for the partner to drop the banana peel instead her partner would find a station worker and tell him hey I almost slipped on a banana peel somebody should clean the floors around here the worker would walk around in search of a peel but wouldn’t find one 5 minutes later Anna would drop a banana out of her dress slip on it expertly and scream in pain at which point her partner would help her up and assist in making a big show of it he’d point to the banana see I told you there was a banana so now the station worker feels guilty which makes him an easy Mark partner goes around collecting contact info from the many witnesses and Anna seals the deal by showing off her terrible wound she had this old leg wound that she could expertly prepare beforehand supplementing it with a deep bruise or a fresh cut to make it look like a new injury and that right there is the dedication that made her the greatest of all time eventually of course she ran out of luck banana anim made the papers Nationwide which I suspect partially motivated the creation of a national register that recorded claims all over the country and although many tried to follow in her footsteps the Heyday of slip and fall scammers was over incident 151 February 1912 sadelia Missouri local high school student William wadell is walking around town when he slips and falls on a banana peel he’s in good health a single fall to the ground shouldn’t be that much of a problem trouble is Young William for what I’m sure of very good reasons is carrying a small capsule of dynamite in his pocket he falls on the dynamite the dynamite explodes wad El’s leg is seriously injured and he loses a finger Rodman law is a famous stunt man who lives his life in defiance of death he shoots himself out of cannons but he’s probably best known as a climber and a jumper he routinely jumps off the roofs of 20 story tall New York skyscrapers and lands with his parachute to be honest I didn’t even know the parachutes would work from that shallow of a distance but they do every single time Rodman law walks away without a scratch incident 172 Rodman law is walking around when he slips on a banana peel and breaks his ankle by the end of the 1910s banana peels have presented a serious public health issue for 30 years 80 fractures nine lost body parts 15 deaths the banana Peel’s preferred targets are the arm and the leg but it also attacks the head face hip shoulder ribs even organs nothing is safe back in 1889 the New York telegram proclaimed that quote the banana peel has wrought more damage to life and limb than all the dynamite explosions that have shocked Great Britain that probably sounded over dramatic at the time it’s hard to argue now let me return once again to my rough estimate that for every banana peel slip reported there are about a 100 that are not this is based on nothing more than a wild guess on my part but it’s a point to start from and it suggests about 20,000 banana peel injuries since a death from a banana peel slip is pretty likely to make the news our count of 15 fatalities is probably fairly accurate but we are probably looking at for example 8,000 broken bones given the state of medicine around the turn of the century fractures were much more dire and might even permanently compromise one’s ability to use that body part yes the banana peel is dealing out pain and hardship in abundance Nationwide it’s a banana peel it’s an improv frop it’s nothing in the public imagination it belongs in the same category as the whoopy cushion this can’t be the thing that breaks your ankle your arm your ribs it just can’t be but it is during the Roaring 20s there seems to be only one industry in America that is not booming the slip and fall racket banana Anna might have ruined it for everybody incident 208 January 23rd 1921 in a the New Jersey trolley car Frank Smith slips and falls on a banana peel and insists on a payout but raises eyebrows after insisting they settle out a court he’s been running a slip and fall operation for 6 months and he needs to stay under the radar unfortunately for him claims records are a lot easier to look up than they used to be and Smith is arrested the rail industry is pretty clearly wise to these tricks by now leading one Chicago entrepreneur to pick out smaller targets mainly small shops he’s a true grinder dropping banana peels at storefronts and slipping on him to win on the spot out of court settlements that are sometimes as low as 10 bucks a pop incident 225 this time though someone saw him drop the peel and he is hauled off to jail let’s fit in one last fun story before the Great Depression hits incident 226 will stay right here in Chicago as a little kid slips on a banana peel and is sent to the hospital for apparently not twoo serious injuries they ask for his first name orange they ask for his last name Apple orange Apple has slipped on a banana newspaper editors Nationwide are the happiest they have ever been both within and Beyond the depression there will still be a fair number of banana peel incidents in the 1930s including one of the last ever fatalities incident 231 in Indianapolis in which a man slipped and fell into the path of moving Freight Trin thankfully once we get past the 30s there will appear to be no further banana peel fatalities in America it’s in the 40s when reported incidents almost completely grind to a halt in fact across a 5year stretch between 1940 and 1945 there are only three reported incidents total and you might be able to guess why German UB boats are menacing shipping lanes everywhere they’re marauding within the Atlantic Pacific and Gulf of Mexico dissuading many companies from importing non-essential items and rendering bananas difficult to come by in the states if you do score some you’re more inclined to make them stretch by baking them into a recipe and a lot less inclined to Simply eat one while walking down the street therefore peels are ending up in kitchen garbage cans instead of on the sidewalk when banana peel injuries finally start happening once again they’re celebrated as harbingers of Peace time incident 269 December 11th 1946 Northfolk Virginia corner of what was then bank and Market Josephine Ricky slips and falls on a banana peel the war is over this story acknowledges two important hinge points first bananas will be easier than ever to come by from now on this will be counteracted though by Nationwide initiatives to keep cities clean by installing garbage cans in massive quantities the age of the banana peel Menace is ending but the Goof keep on rolling incident 272 Pittsburgh March 16th 1949 Edward mcgilvery is in his third story north side home minding his own business when he slips on a banana peel stumbles backwards and out the window Falls 40 ft to the ground and lands on his feet a claim I would immediately dismiss if not for the number of eyewitnesses he’s almost completely unheard doctors will check him out later but we only find a potentially burst blood vessel in one of his legs so imagine if this were you if you were just walking around your home one instant and the very next instant you realize you just Fallen 40 ft and not only completely defied death but ended up pretty much fine and now you’re just standing outside what do you do next maybe go to the hospital and get checked out just to make sure you’re all right grab some eyewitnesses go to the local paper and recount a story of historical magnitude if nothing else walk over to a bar and get a drink while you’re you reflect on your mortality well Ed mcgilvery does none of those things after standing there for a moment he just walks back upstairs and goes back to doing whatever he was doing Mr mcgilvery may have been the first NPC in American history from here forward we’re going to see a gradual yet total shift eventually you won’t be able to make the news simply by slipping on a banana peel and hurting yourself there’s going to need to be a hook for example incident 294 1963 fton Kentucky it’s the international banana Festival a reeler slips on a banana peel falls and breaks her wrist didn’t see that one coming incident 295 one year later Fon Kentucky it’s the international banana Festival the princess of the festival slips and balls on a banana peel didn’t see that one coming incident 297 a subway station New York New York Val Maly slips on a banana peel Falls and has trouble getting up a man sees this rushes is over steals his watch and runs away a second man sees this rushes over tries to steal his wallet and runs away in June of 1984 Milwaukee Brewers pitcher Mike Caldwell miss his time after spraining his ankle although the Brewers don’t appear to elaborate on how exactly he did so Phil Pepe does though Phil Pepe the venerable baseball Rider who covered the New York Yankees for decades has sources all across the league and he has got the scoop apparently Caldwell and some of his teammates got drunk on the plane on the way to Baltimore and upon arriving at the hotel decided to start a drunken food fight in the lobby incident 302 according to Pepe a banana peel was thrown cwell slipped on it and he sprained his ankle incident 303 on June 9th 1991 a man is believed to have possibly slipped on a banana peel before falling and hurting his shoulder so what’s the hook well that man is Byron Scott of the Los Angeles Lakers who are currently in the process of losing the NBA Finals now let’s go back once again to the big board Scott was the only reported instance of a banana peel slip in the 1990s that I could find and Caldwell was the only reported instance of the 1980s I couldn’t believe it I still think there are a couple of stories I just wasn’t able to dig up but I ran several different searches using many different search parameters and aside from those two athletes all I could come up with was an abundance of newspaper writers using banana peel slip as a metaphorical device to describe something like a team blowing a lead or a politician committing a gaff by the end of the ’90s banana peel incidents have become so such an astronomical Rarity that things have inverted you no longer even need a hook you just need to slip and hurt yourself on a banana peel incident 305 Edwardsville Illinois Dorothy Williams is walking out of a quick trip when she slips Falls and sustains injuries that alone is enough to earn her a write up in the nationally syndicated column news of the weird fronted with the words it actually happens we wait more than a decade until incident 306 in which we see a nod to the scammers of old August 8th 2013 the elevator of the pic Metro Station in Washington DC I won’t show this man’s name or his face because this was relatively recent and he wasn’t looking for attention he was just looking for a little bit of money in choosing a train station he seems to have the right idea and in immediately complaining to a station employ that the floor wasn’t clean he has taken a page right out of banana Anna’s book but Anna could not have imagined a playing field as tilted as this one one in which security cameras are everywhere this man can’t really work with a partner to drop it because the partner would be caught on camera so he has to drop it himself earlier in the footage he’s standing on a clean floor so he’s dead to rights the instant he performs a pretty unconvincing slip and fall he’s eventually charged with a felony although I wasn’t able to dig up how his case actually turned out I hope they went easy on him and I also hope this doesn’t give anyone the idea that these things still aren’t Gravely dangerous especially in train stations incident 307 just a few months later December 20th 2013 on the platform of New York City’s Bowling Green station while waiting for the four train Manuel Cadiz steps to the edge of the platform to peer over and see whether a train is coming it is his foot catches a banana peel and as he leans forward he slips and Falls onto the tracks breaking his foot in the fall thankfully bystanders managed to pull him out of Harm’s Way in time add on one more nondescript slip and fall in 2022 and there we have it 38 total incidents that tell many many different kinds of stories but collectively tell a story of Triumph if the record is any indication it appears as though we can claim victory over the banana peel it’s not like bananas went away we eat them as much as we ever did so how did we do it there have been a few contributing factors there’s the rise of the automobile which meant less time standing on train platforms and walking down sidewalks the preferred stocking grounds of the banana peel there’s the fact that malnutrition was a major American problem during the banana peels Heyday with about a third of all Great War military applicants rejected because they weren’t healthy enough malnutrition takes a big toll on Bones and ligaments which UPS the risk of injuries during Falls and there are of course fewer newspaper reports of banana peel injuries because there are fewer newspapers to report them let’s take boo Kansas site of incident 209 reported in the November 2nd 1921 edition of the bot Gazette flip around a few pages and you’ll see an entire section dedicated to by scotsville which according to the 2020 census has a population of just 26 clearly most of scotsville has been torn down but the street grid still reflects the town’s 1920 population of 165 and if you were one of those 165 people you stood about a 25% chance of seeing your name in the paper on any given week this week alone The booy Gazette mentions 40 different residents of scotsville these people went to church this sick kid is feeling better these people went shopping happen these people ate some candy if you sneezed you could get in the paper if you hurt yourself on a banana peel that’d be a bombshell as you guess the BL Gazette ceased operations many decades ago day-to-day miscellania like this is no longer reported by newspapers that’s now the domain of social media a platform that’s just about impossible to investigate scientifically even there after a substantial amount of poking around I encounter the same phenomenon I do in contemporary newspapers search results are dominated by people using the banana peel slip as a metaphorical device as though it’s a lightning strike or something I spent more time searching social media than I probably should have but I couldn’t find a single post about someone actually injuring themselves on a banana peel I believe that we have virtually eradicated the banana peel Menace it’s true that for reasons we outlined we can only give ourselves so much credit but I think we should celebrate ourselves a little despite my Broadway encounter with the banana peel years ago I do not fear it while I walked down the street if you walk down this street eating a banana peel 5 minutes before I did I trust that you didn’t drop it on the ground for me to slip on I don’t care which Walk of Life you come from or who you voted for or anything else I trust that you looked out for me even if you will never meet me thank you I promise I’ll look out for you too if we’re going to spend all the time we do dwelling on all the ways in which we’re losing it is just as necessary to celebrate our Collective victories no matter how small we won [Music]