What kind of Onions are these?

No, they spent most of their life looking completely different, lying in their beds soaking up sunshine and water and nice stuff from the dark soil. Oh, I hear you say:

I’d still know an onion if I saw it in a field.

That may be true, but is it ready to eat yet and more importantly, what type of onion is it?  Bah, what interest is that to me, I only go to the shops and buy onions in bags?  OK, fair enough but did you ever have a bad onion for your tea?  You’d know all right.  Days of misery and leaking out both ends and it’s maybe a couple of weeks until all is well again.

So it is with code.  Themes and plugins are code.  Code picked, processed and packed together in a nice shiny bag.  All you have to do is take it home and unpack it in your fridge.  However, just like a bag of onions, code can look nice, yet on the inside be rotten or full of weevils or not the kind of code your wanted when you went shopping.  Once in your fridge a bad onion will infect all your other veg and it will happily let you chop it up, cook it and eat it, in the full knowledge that you will be very sick.  For a bad onion this is the only laugh left.  Code is no different.

So do you really know your onions?  If not at least learn to tell the different types apart and learn what a good or bad onion looks like.  At the very least take a moment to ask your grandma.  She’ll spot a bad ‘un at twenty paces.

Don’t assume the supermarket ones are best.  They don’t even get checked.  You want to ask at an established green grocer’s where the dude puts out each onion himself and bags them up for you himself.  Better yet, go see an onion farmer and ask a few questions.  A decent chap won’t mind you asking -  he’ll appreciate you taking the time to know your onions.  He’ll get repeat business that way.

Oh and by the way, those onions in the picture.  Those are red onions.

1. Dog Food.  Dogs not not like raw onion and would rather stave.  They will eat them boiled and fried but in this case there is an after-effect that isn’t worth the saving over regular dog chow from the shops.
2. Cheap earrings for your chav ex-girlfriends birthday present.  She won’t see the funny side and she will pour brake fluid over the boot of your car.
3. Person Repellents.  Some say hanging onions on your front door will repel people you don’t want to see.  This is a myth that probably sprung up with the vampire and garlic thing.  No one, it seems, is frightened off by a string of onions on the door.  Certainly not Jehovah’s Witnesses, postmen, the tax collector or my neighbours.  They do cause people to ask the same fecking question though.
4. Batteries.  Everyone knows that MacGyver can use two onions, a tea spoon and the foil from an kit-kat to power anything from a cell phone to a thermonuclear device.  But let me tell you:  Onions are fecking useless as batteries in everyday situations.  Unless you are professor of Chemistry (at a red brick university) never come to the rescue of an attractive colleague who says her cellphone battery as died, saying “Don’t worry I’ve got half a pound of onions, we’ll soon have you fixed up”.  You’ll look as much like a burk as it’s possible to look.
5. Currency.  Unless you live in the jungle and your neighbours are happy about a barter economy then you’re going to be disappointed by the purchasing power of onions.  (if you do live in the jungle and trade onions with the pygmies then may I ask how you keep mould out of your laptop screen?  This was such a problem I moved back to the city, but I digress).  In the western world a pound of onions is worth at most 50 pence.  Thus paying for things in onions is a true pain in the arse so people just won’t take the damn things.  Here are some  examples of the number of average sized onions required to purchase stuff.  As you can see it soon gets ridiculous:-

• A pint of beer – 19 onions.
• A hamster – 58 onions.
• A video game – 206 onions.
• Decent earrings for your chav ex-girlfriends birthday – 456 onions.