Fun with pomegranates...

My favorite fun fact about pomegranates: on the pomegranate wikipedia page, readers are warned not to confuse pomegranate with permanganate.  This is excellent advice.  At first, it seems like a pretty difficult mistake to make, what with pomegranate being a fruit and permanganate being a powerful oxidant.  Still, the colors are pretty similar, at least when the permanganate is in solution.  I've never tasted permanganate -- I expect it's a little tangy -- and I don't recommend it.

Here are some more fun facts:

1.) The little seeds in a pomegranate are called arils.

2.) Duckie and I did a little experiment a couple weeks ago.  We dismembered a medium-sized pomegranate (don't worry, we killed it humanely) and counted the arils.  Okay, I'll come clean.  We didn't actually count the arils.  We approximated using a technique I learned in elementary school.  We counted how many arils fit in a tablespoon (38) and how many tablespoons worth of arils were in one pomegranate (21).  Using the miracle of mathology we can use these numbers to determine how many arils are in a pomegranate.  It's too complicated for me to get into here, but the answer is about 798.

3.) Persephone ate 6 pomegranate arils while being held captive in the underworld by Hades.  As a result, she was forced to spend six months a year in hell.  This was the Greeks explanation for the changing seasons.  I'm pretty sure this is just a myth.  I'll look it up at work tomorrow, and see what scientific evidence there is to back this up.

4.) Jason Giambi Colorado Rockies t-shirts make perfectly reasonable pomegranate peeling shirts (note the little purple stains).