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Is this a cool looking fruit or what?

Pandanus tectorius is a species of Pandanus (screwpine) that is native to Malesia, eastern Australia, and the Pacific Islands. Common names include Thatch Screwpine, Hala (Hawaiian), Bacua (Spanish), and Vacquois (French).

Ripe fruits fill the air with a pleasant aroma, much like flowers. The fruit is healthy and can be eaten raw or cooked. It is a major source of food in Micronesia, especially in the atolls. The fibrous nature of the fruit also serves as a natural dental floss. The tree's leaves are often used as flavoring for sweet dishes such as kaya jam, and are also said to have medicinal properties, the oil to cure headaches and the flowers to cure constipation.The fibers on inner ends of dry keys are used as brushes for painting kapa/tapa. They also contain tasty seeds which are difficult to remove.These ends of hala fruit are often strung to make leis.

Photo by colleeninhawaii

More about the pandanus fruit.

Crows have such a marvelous sense of play!
Crows playing on a snowy car.

Ravens like snow rolling too

And this old chestnut, snowboarding crow

Wing surfer

Crows swinging

Playing king of the castle on an antenna

W.H. Auden's Night Mail. A white man's rap in the 1930's

Night Mail

I
This is the night mail crossing the Border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order,

Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
The shop at the corner, the girl next door.

Pulling up Beattock, a steady climb:
The gradient's against her, but she's on time.

Past cotton-grass and moorland boulder
Shovelling white steam over her shoulder,

Snorting noisily as she passes
Silent miles of wind-bent grasses.

Birds turn their heads as she approaches,
Stare from bushes at her blank-faced coaches.

Sheep-dogs cannot turn her course;
They slumber on with paws across.

In the farm she passes no one wakes,
But a jug in a bedroom gently shakes.

II
Dawn freshens, Her climb is done.
Down towards Glasgow she descends,
Towards the steam tugs yelping down a glade of cranes
Towards the fields of apparatus, the furnaces
Set on the dark plain like gigantic chessmen.
All Scotland waits for her:
In dark glens, beside pale-green lochs
Men long for news.

III
Letters of thanks, letters from banks,
Letters of joy from girl and boy,
Receipted bills and invitations
To inspect new stock or to visit relations,
And applications for situations,
And timid lovers' declarations,
And gossip, gossip from all the nations,
News circumstantial, news financial,
Letters with holiday snaps to enlarge in,
Letters with faces scrawled on the margin,
Letters from uncles, cousins, and aunts,
Letters to Scotland from the South of France,
Letters of condolence to Highlands and Lowlands
Written on paper of every hue,
The pink, the violet, the white and the blue,
The chatty, the catty, the boring, the adoring,
The cold and official and the heart's outpouring,
Clever, stupid, short and long,
The typed and the printed and the spelt all wrong.

IV
Thousands are still asleep,
Dreaming of terrifying monsters
Or of friendly tea beside the band in Cranston's or Crawford's:

Asleep in working Glasgow, asleep in well-set Edinburgh,
Asleep in granite Aberdeen,
They continue their dreams,
But shall wake soon and hope for letters,
And none will hear the postman's knock
Without a quickening of the heart,
For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?