Those fibrous ribbon-like strands that cling to ripe bananas after you peel them, what are they called? I'm not the least bit bothered by them, but I can see how they might disturb some people. Actually I'm a little surprised they don't disturb me, that's just the kind of tiny normal little thing that usually troubles me. Lately what's bothering me is when things that aren't cheese are likened to cheese. This is never good news, nothing good can come of it. It's usually some horrible, horrible medical thing, the kind of thing society is always simultaneously obsessing over and turning away from queasily, like a car accident or the Paris Hilton sex tape. "A cheese-like substance which can spread the infection if the sac bursts." Terrible. How can we live? "The consistency of a soft cheese, a sample taken for laboratory analysis." Mortifying, truly. I can just barely accommodate actual soft cheeses themselves, let alone ghastly biological excrescences that possess hideous cheese-like properties. Give me a nice Gouda, a clean simple Colby. In my personal opinion, medical science should be discouraged from co-opting gastronomic language when describing revolting phenomena, as it taints one's experience of the food in question, such as cheese, and also makes quite possibly serious medical conditions sound silly and inconsequential by their lazy association with items of food.

Now, those little seed pods that fall from certain trees in the autumn, the ones that look like pale cheese puffs or baby corn...