Crook

Once a crook, always a crook.

That was something his mother had always told him, which was peculiar, for as far as he could tell he had never once shown any signs of being a crook.  He could remember being just four years old, as his mother walked him down the sidewalk past a local toy shop; he would be gazing longingly through the window at all the wonderful inventions inside when his mother would stop him and look into his eyes.  “Remember William,” for his name was William, “once a crook, always a crook.”

They would be walking past a fruit stand.  “Remember William,” for his name had not changed since the first example, “once a crook, always a crook.”  He did like fruit, but not once had he considered taking any.

Or perhaps most vexing of all:  They would be walking past a barber shop.  He would be looking the other direction, naturally (for he possessed a healthy fear of barbers), when his mother would stoop down low (she was an unreasonably tall woman) and whisper harshly in his ear.  “Don’t you ever forget it, William.  Once a crook, always a crook.”

He was never quite sure what one might want to steal from a barber shop.  An especially nice pair of scissors might fetch a schilling or two in the back alleys, but there was not much of a market for hair cutting utensils these days.  He knew these sorts of things now.  After all, he had become a crook.

It seemed a most natural course for him to take.  After years of his mother’s endless prodding, he had finally taken her threat seriously.  Only to him it had never been a threat.  To him it had been something more of a guarantee.  Once a crook always a crook.  After a childhood of mindless odd jobs for the neighbors; of hocking papers on the street corner, carrying the groceries of widows or doing whatever he could find which might garner a penny or two, the idea of becoming a crook had become highly appealing.  After all, his mother did promise him that such a life decision would lead to nothing less than a life of consistency and, if he took the logical leap, happiness.  If a crook remained a crook forever, there must be something to it, otherwise they would want to quit; only if there was true happiness in the job would those who embark upon such a path feel so little desire to leave it.  So he became a crook and, thus, would always be one.   And he was happy.

William Priest (his last name was Priest; passed down from a long line of Priests – his father, grand-father, great-grandfather, and so forth.  Being, however, that a person’s surname was often intimately tied to the profession of one of their ancestors, one has to wonder what a Priest was doing having children in the first place.  He was a child of infidelity, to be sure, though the sin had surely been watered down in the ensuing generations, so he didn’t lose much sleep over the fact), was eighteen when he stole his first pocketwatch.  It was gold in color, though upon closer examination it wasn’t very remarkable (or valuable) at all.  Fortunately he wasn’t intending to hock this watch.  This was his first real attempt at crooking.  It was his first grab, and it was a source of pride.

Oh, to be certain in his heart he knew what his mother had meant when she had warned him about becoming a crook.  He was not so dull as to misread her meaning; but he was clever enough to yet convince himself that she, God rest her (which is what one says to signify that a person has died, which is what Mrs. Priest had done when her son was only fifteen, leaving him orphaned, though in the care of kind and not altogether impoverished relatives), might actually be proud of what he had made of his life in the decades since; especially since now he could buy some decent flowers to put on her grave.

The pocketwatch was only the beginning.

It was a noble, if somewhat undersized start to his career, and he promised himself that he would never stoop to such petty crookery again.  If he was going to devote the remainder of his life to crookdom, he would have to move swiftly along to greater prey.

So the crooking of William Priest began in earnest.  He was nineteen years old when he stole his first grand piano.  Twenty three when a prized walrus suddenly went missing from the zoo, only to be found three weeks later on the estate of a rare animal collector in Australia (where decent walri are most certainly at a premium).  He was forty years old when one of Hartfordshire’s most famous pubs disappeared entirely over the course of a single short evening, foundation and all, leaving nothing but a crater into which several people fell while on their way to get a beer.

All of this is to say that by the time he was fifty, William Priest had been a crook for some three decades and had amassed a not altogether inconsiderable amount of wealth.  He could very easily have retired at the age of forty, but his mother’s words proved true enough indeed.

Once a crook, always a crook.

That’s not to say that the entirety of his life was about taking things.  It was neither an obsession nor an addiction.  It was simply something which he found to be a reasonable diversion from the oddities of life, and a great way to pass the time while keeping his mind sharp.

And while William Priest was most certainly a crook, it is not his crookery which he considered to be the most significant aspect of his life.  He had a great many other hobbies and interests; he was never short on friends (for he himself was about as likeable as they come – when he said “Hello, how are you?” there was no question at all that he meant it), and since his marriage at the age of only twenty-four to one of the most lovely girls in the village, his family had been growing by leaps and bounds.  Four children and two dogs later, his house was filled with the roar of laughter.

So all was very nice; but that is not particularly the point of this particular account.

The point of this account is a particular conversation.  All that preceded was included for no other reason than to provide suitable context for that which is to follow, which is something of a dialogue.  It took place at a particular gentleman’s home, precisely in the midst of some thievery.  William Priest was taking for himself the chimney from this man’s house, which was a rather remarkably difficult feat and while I haven’t got nearly the time to fully elucidate how such a thing might have been possible, suffice it to say that William had been forced to learn a thing or two about reverse masonry, which is not at all simple.  His reason for doing this, however, was relatively simple, and must be added, for the reader must surely be curious as to why one would bother to steal a chimney.  He was stealing this particular chimney because it was a chimney of particular worth.  It was attached to a wood-burning fireplace which was not altogether absent from the history books.  It was the very same chimney upon which Lord Cromwell had once hung up a pair of boots to dry after a particularly bloody battle against the King’s forces.  While this may seem to rather lack the sort of importance which would make one take notice, to certain wealthy collectors of all things relating to the Lord Protector, the chimney was something of a find.  Added to this was the blessed difficulty of extracting the object in the first place – something which added value to any task.  It should not be difficult at all, in fact, to recognize the intrinsic value William Priest saw in the challenge.

It was directly in the progress of this remarkable task that William Priest was confronted with some suddenness by a certain senior citizen who had, up until and including this particular moment, owned the building to which the chimney belonged and, consequently, the chimney itself (although at this point, the chimney was just about half stolen, so it could be said that he only owned half of the chimney).

“I don’t suppose you’ll stop?”  It was a statement spoken as a question, and it caused William Priest to stop what he was doing quite suddenly and turn around to find the dark silhouette of a rather frail old man looking on at him from the doorway leading into the kitchen, clearly somewhat taken aback that he seemed to have lost half of his chimney over the course of just a few hours.  In his hand he held a candle which only partially lit his wrinkled face in an orange glow and carelessly dripped wax across the wooden floors.

The remaining portions of the conversation went as follows:

William:  Ceasing my activity does not seem particularly likely, kind sir, but only because I’ve come so far already, and I’d certainly hate to provide anyone with the opportunity to accuse me of failing to follow through with something I have so thoroughly decided to do.  While not a virtue, certainly, there is an inescapable matter of pride to attend to which ensures that I will continue with that which I have begun.

Milton Bullfinch (which is the name of the old man):  I can’t say I particularly care much about your image or the protection of it, but my chimney is another story.  That I do care something about.  I suppose you already know of its history.

William:  I certainly wouldn’t be here if I did not.

Milton:  No, of course you wouldn’t.  But there’s surely something that even you do not realize.  You, a man of what I’m sure are not inconsiderable talents and what must be a very quick mind – for what I see you doing here… it really is something quite a bit more remarkable than I have seen in all my years, though I suppose I might have forgotten a few remarkable things as the years have passed.  No, it really does surpass all, and I praise you for your ingenuity.  And yet, you will forgive me for pointing out the obvious facts:  While a remarkable thief, you are not all knowing.  Nor are you all seeing.  You understand only what you have been told – that this is a chimney of supreme monetary value, and indeed it is.  Why, I’ve been told that there is not another chimney of such worth this side of Greenwich Mean Time.  That’s never meant much to me, of course.  I’ve got plenty of money (though I won’t bother explaining just how I came into my fortune, for that is a story that is far too long and uninteresting to be recounted here), and I never once cared about owning anything of particular monetary value.  What I do care about, however, is that it was in front of that very fireplace that I proposed to my wife, God rest her.  It was on that mantle that we hung the stockings of our children every year until they went out on their own and began their own families.  It was in that fireplace that I burned the first draft of my very first short story upon deciding that I could never be a successful writer.  You see, it is not in the form of money that I see value in this particular possession, but in memories, which are more valuable than any hearth.  So while I can see your reasoning for so taking it from me, I do hope that you’ll also see my reasoning in trying to dissuade you.

William:  Oh, please don’t get me wrong, sir.  I do understand the whole of what you’ve said, and it certainly moves me greatly.  I daresay that memories are some of the most important things that one can have in life.  I, too, am certainly in a place where I have no want for material goods, and yet I would give up all if it meant holding onto my most cherished memories.

Milton:  Oh good!  I was so hoping that you would see things from my perspective.  You seemed from the first like such a reasonable gentleman.

William:  Indeed I am, my good sir.  Reasonable and, I assure you, filled with a certain particular form of kindness.   And while I recognize that because of my career choice there is a certain irony to be found in my personality traits, I have learned to look past life’s little inconsistencies.  In fact, in my great kindness I will give you a grand gift; a gift that may very well affect the rest of your life and teach you lessons which will prove invaluable for you as you continue on in this world.  I give you the gift of taking your chimney.  Yes!  I will take your chimney, and you will no longer be in possession of it.  Now, Mr. Milton, please don’t give me that look!  Such a look makes my heart feel heavy, and I do not care for that feeling.  Please hear me out!  I will take your chimney, as you can see I continue to do, and you will heretofore be without it.  I will sell it for a substantial amount of money, which I will keep for myself (a fair price for such a difficult task as this, I should think) and spend as I see fit.  While at this moment it may seem to you as if this fact will result in the loss of your memories, it will, in fact, do precisely the opposite.  It will teach you a valuable lesson, which is just this:  Memories do not lie within things; they lie within each of us.  This chimney is just an object, and because it is an object, it is foolish (I don’t mean to call you a fool, but it is a wise lesson you must learn) to associate one’s memories so directly with it.  Tomorrow, you will awake to find little but a hole in your wall where once was brick and mortar, and I guarantee that you will find that you still remember your wife.  You still remember the Christmases spent with your children.  You still remember your failed literary endeavors…  And I will have considerably more money.  There will be benefit to all.

“I would certainly be willing to leave your chimney in place,” William finished as he turned to go back to his work, “but I am a crook.  And as my mother once said: Once a crook, always a crook.”

An Elephant Can Kill You in Six Ways

“An elephant,” so he said, “can kill you in any one of six ways.”

We were, of course, in awe of such a statement and certainly desired to hear more.  One cannot simply make such a bold declaration and presume that others will not wish it to be expounded upon.  He knew this, of course, and was ready with his explanations.  Explanations of not just one or two of the elephant’s homicidal methods, but with all six; all presented in the fullness of horrific detail.

The first method possessed by an elephant with which to take the lives of his victims is perhaps that which is least shocking.  This, of course, is known in every corner of this globe as “the trample.”

An elephant can and will trample any man who should dare stand in his path, and there is a very good chance that he will go out of his way to trample a man who is very much minding his own business.  The elephant considers this nothing less than his modus operandi, and one would be well advised to resist arguing this point with him, as elephants commonly have much more pressing matters to attend to than to argue matters of behavior with what they uniformly consider to be a “lesser species.”  While we, of course, are most correct in asserting to the contrary – that is, that it is we who are the greater of the two species’, as we have motorized boats and Chunnels to our name – there is not much point in trying to convey this to an elephant, as they do not speak, and are liable to trample anyone who dares oppose them.

Not to move along with an excess of speed, but it is important, so said that experts on all things pachyderm, that we move along to the second point, as the first was so simplistic that it need not be explained any further.

The second method by which an elephant can kill a man is, of course, by way of its bite.  While other animals are far more well known for the ferocity and deadliness of their bite, it is the elephant’s which is surely the most fierce when one finds themselves in the midst of an angry herd.  So it certainly pays to know something of an elephant’s teeth.

The incisors can grow upwards of six inches from the gum.  That is certainly sufficient to pierce a man’s spine should they be inserted through the front of the abdomen, or enough to pierce the hart if inserted through the back of the ribcage.  Either of these methods are commonly employed by most common species of elephants, – including African, Indian, and Northwestern European – with very little abandon or concern for human rights.  For to them human rights, if anything, are a joke – something to be laughed about around the savannah or in culs-de-sac.

Teeth in a very general sense are fearsome when being used to bite through a man’s skin, but certainly all the more dangerous when they are in the mouth of the world’s largest land mammal.

The third way that elephants have been known to indulge in their murderous ways is through the act of mistaking a man as a pile of hay and sitting on him.  Laugh as you might at such a scene, this happens far more often than is thought by most.  It has been estimated, in fact, that worldwide more humans are killed by being sat on by elephants than by either being struck on the head by shovels or being crushed by falling timber.  Perhaps even both put together – and the risk only increases when an elephant is in captivity, where seating is far less ample than in the wild.

Fourth, an elephant may infect a human with any number of deadly viruses to which man has not built up an appropriate immunity.  These imparted illnesses are terrifying enough to put the venom of the asp to shame.  Even the sparsest interaction with the person of an elephant is more than likely to result in the exchange of several  billion bacteria, some number of which are most certainly hostile to the health of humanity.  Only those who have spent some significant amount of time in the company of elephants might grow to withstand such terrible calamities – but alas! Would one dare spend time in the company of elephants simply to achieve such an immune defense if it means risking death by any of an elephant’s ample other means of killing?

Fifth, and penultimate, elephants have been known to kill by means of suffocating men with their ears.  As much as there is very little to say about this method, for it is so simple that even a child could understand it, there is value in repetition.  An elephant may kill with his ears.  One often wonders the reason for an elephant’s massive ears, but the answer is easily discovered by being around these beasts during feeding time.  With their strong, yet gentle trunks they embrace their victim (whether it be human, rodent or wildebeest) and draw him up, not directly to their mouth – for they do not eat their victims alive – but to their ears, where they proceed to wrap the animal in these terribly strong flaps of skin like a giant boa constrictor until the breathing stops.  Only then is the animal eaten.

Sixth and last on the list is surely the most shocking of all – the man said as we all waited with baited breath, hanging upon his every word as he imparted upon us his elephantine knowledge – elephants have certainly killed by means which must remain a mystery.

It is clear by the ample evidence provided that elephants possess a certain means by which to end the life of a human in such a way that even the most modern medicine is unable to determine precisely what caused this tragedy, for there are neither marks on the body nor signs of a struggle.  While elephants may not be particularly known for their abilities of stealth, this has in no way impeded the continuation of these mysterious deaths.  Individuals throughout the world have woken up only to find themselves having been killed by an elephant during the night.  How do we know that elephants are responsible for these innumerable deaths?   Precisely because it is only in areas where elephants are known to dwell that they occur.  Also, there is universally a faint smell of peanuts to be found in the vicinity of the death.

This final method by which elephants have to systematically thin the human population is one which should certainly be capable of keeping one awake at night, for even if one does not particularly live in an area where elephants are known to roam free and to stalk the land in search of human victims, they are certainly not far from a zoo, where elephants most certainly dwell, contemplating escapes and reigns of terror.  You could die tonight, and an elephant could be responsible.

So he said, and so we believed, because it was true.

The Dark Ages, pt. 2: The Final Chapter

The Venerable Bede lived during the Dark Ages; and yet, this fact in no way detracted from his venerability.  If you had asked someone who had known him during the 8^th-ish century – perhaps Phillip the Bold or John II Lackland (for these are the sorts of names that one might have been blessed with during this period) – you would surely stand in awe of their answer.  He was surely nothing that one would expect from a monk during the Dark Ages.  He was bold as a knight, witty as a jester, musical as a minstrel.  At least, that is what one is led to assume after having read his satirical/historical masterpiece “An Ecclesiastical History of the English People.”  It may sound dull, but it is truly nothing of the sort.

I say all of this not simply to endorse the works of Bede, but to wholeheartedly endorse the era which brought him to bear upon the unsuspecting world of scholarship.  The Middle Ages.  The Dark Ages.  Whatever you wish to call it, that is the era in which Bede lived.  An era which would, just a few centuries later, give rise to the feudal system – that much-maligned way of running things which held such prominence both in and out of Europe for so many centuries (and which still survives to this day on the tiny island of Sark in the English Channel – but that is a story for another time).

Very few have stepped up in recent years in order to defend the system.  Far more important, it seems, is the demonizing of the system in order to save face in today’s politically correct world, where Kings, Lords, Serfs and Vassals have no place; where they are tossed haphazardly onto the junk pile of history, with the flat-Earth theories and hereditary monarchies.

Such is my intent here.  Refutation of these nonsensically ignorant notions and defense of a system which clearly holds far more value than it is given credit for.

So, here is feudalism.

The King conquers land, usually by means of having a larger army than whoever had inhabited the land previously.  Fair enough.  It is unfair bringing in modern views of justice to such a situation, where a person’s hold on land was tenuous at best, where borders were painted with shades of gray and where treaties held less value than the parchment on what they were written, so we must simply accept the fact that kings took over land and had every right to do so.

Then the king built castles to protect himself and his army – mighty fortresses and strongholds against other kings bent on the same ends.

Now, after the king had conquered a territory he had a tremendous amount of land to deal with, so instead of trying to micromanage things (as is far too often done today), he hired a bunch of nobles to do it for him.  These were Lords; they were each given some land and told to manage it.

The Lords, in turn, divided up the land between various vassals, and the vassals got serfs to do the dirty work.  But being a serf wasn’t so bad – they weren’t slaves.  In exchange for working for a vassal they would be given food and shelter – far more than many people have even today.

So the feudal system worked pretty well.  Perhaps the time is not right to bring it back just yet, but it was a decent system.

But what of those other things credited with making the period so very “dark?”  Things like the plague?

Overstated.

Yes, the plague wiped out much of Europe and beyond.  Yes it was horrible.  Yes it caused people to go somewhat crazy and blame people who shouldn’t have been blamed.  Yes it is not something we should repeat today.  But here are the good things:

It helped us to recognize the value of quarantine.  Isolation kills disease – we didn’t know it before the plague, but after we had started to have some idea.  Also, so many died in Europe that great swaths of land were suddenly uninhabited.  Over-population was no longer a problem and for more than a century afterward, Europe thrived.  It seemed that nearly everyone had enough to eat and many who had not been landowners suddenly found themselves with land.  It was a terrible, wonderful time.

I’d like to move on in my thoughts now.  There is surely much more to say of the dark ages, but I am not the one to say it… just yet.  Perhaps I will return to the subject at a later dated (who am I kidding – it’s a subject I return to every few months whether I like it or not), but for now, I’ll just assume that I’ve changed a few minds about this rather fascinating era in human history.

Point made.

The Dark Ages, part 1: “A Discourse on Method”

Alright.  I’ve got 6-8 minutes before my chicken enchiladas are done cooking; which gives me something like 360-480 seconds to get my point across (calculations done in-house)… and I’m not entirely sure just yet what that point is going to be.  Looks like it will be a journey for all of us.

I’ll begin by admitting that I’ve had a lot of peculiar goals in my life.  I suppose I don’t much need to convince anyone of that.  My resume of failed ideas (a document which I have not actually made, as it would not do much to help me find a job) is rather extensive: Field goal kicker, Pope, musician, theoretical physicist, inventor…

But all of these failed because they were far too practical.  In each case there were far too many forces working against me right from the start.  I’m thinking now that perhaps my best bet is to become some sort of universal “idea man,” where I can just sit around thinking of abstract ideas and the logical arguments in favor of them (or against them, if that’s what the job entailed).  After all, I find this sort of thing to be one of life’s greatest diversions, and since I naturally tend to do this anyway, why wouldn’t someone pay me for it?

And some of my ideas are pretty good, too.  You can tell those ones because I tend to go back to them time and again; they become themes which somehow entwine themselves with my writing and crop up at the most peculiar of times.  For example, I have for some time been – for reasons which even I do not entirely know – a staunch defender of the European Dark Ages.  While a glance through the modern “enlightened” history books tends to leave one with a rather sour taste regarding these volatile years in European history, I can’t help but believe that there’s more to it than that.  Thus, whenever I’m in some sort of a blocked mental state, this is one of those topics that I find myself returning to, because I find it fascinating.

So, yes, all of that was just a long-winded introduction to me talking about the Dark Ages.

Fortunately, because I’ve written on this topic a few times (a couple dozen, perhaps) previously, much of my work has already been done for me.  In fact, I just opened up a previous page-long synopsis of the Dark Ages that I wrote a few years back, which is going to serve as my primary source for what is to follow (though it’s rather poorly written, so don’t expect any quotes).  That’s right, I’m doing this old school.  No Wikipedia for me.  No Google searches.  No foray into my ample literary resources.  I’m going to write some history the way that history was meant to be written.  I’m going to shoot from the hip; in the style of Plutarch, Pliny the Elder, Tacitus, Livy and the others.  A time where logic and rhetoric were all a man needed to find success – certainly not things as destructible as facts.  History is much more than just “what happened”; it’s more along the lines of, “what seems to have happened.”  The latter is certainly far more intriguing.

Using such methods as these (and some others that I will invent as I progress), not only will I defend the Dark Ages, but I will issue an argument or two in favor of a return to the Dark Ages.  Impossible, you say?  Perhaps difficult, but surely not impossible.

Oh, and while I’m at it, I’m going to reinvent how historical study is done.

The journey thus begins (though over the course of this introduction the journey got slightly too lengthy for its own good, and thus was split into multiple parts – just how many remains to be seen, but I’m guessing this thing’s going to go book-length)…

To the Weatherman, An Ode, To the Commoner, A Woe

We, as a people, don’t much like weathermen/meteorologists. They are the misplaced targets of our wrath.

Sure, we like them just fine when their predictions turn out correct, but just as soon as they make the slightest misstep, we turn on them like so many rabid wolves. The cynics among us (and surely they outnumber the rest, which is sad) are all-too quick to judge the humble student of the weather.

But have we really fallen so far as a society that we would dare speak with loathing of these people of great honor who have chosen to devote the whole of their professional lives to public service, using some of the most advanced scientific and mathematical principles ever devised for no other purpose than to tell us if it is or isn’t going to rain on our vacations?

Could there be a more noble profession than this? Could there be a more perfect union of brilliance and benevolence?

Imagine this: You are a weatherman/woman/person. You’ve had a rough week. You called for a thirty percent chance of rain on Saturday and people were angry when it actually started raining. You got some hate mail. Then on Sunday you asserted that the day would be warm, but mostly cloudy – but the clouds never came. More anger.

But the weather never sleeps. People need to be informed. So you toil over your radar screens and your computer monitor, checking the conditions in every corner of the nation, the low pressure system moving across the Midwest, the clouds forming over the great lakes, the ocean currents, the unseasonable rainfall in Zimbabwe… Into your sophisticated models you insert every variable you can think of and more; you run through every play in the book until you’re finally ready to make your prediction; but still it is just that, a prediction. Nothing more. People expect more, but they will never get it. In the weather there are no absolutes; there is only probability. But people don’t understand that. They refuse. They are stubborn and somewhat shaped like potatos.

When the weather report is correct, we take no notice. When it is wrong, we seethe. We are a fickle species who continues to go back, day by day, and check the weather reports no matter what darkness is in our hearts. We are excited to see that it will be sunny on the day of our trip to the beach; sad that it will be overcast. Why? Because somewhere deep inside we know that more often than not, the meteorologist is our friend; out to help us in every possible way. But we will never admit it.

We are a fallen and ungrateful people. We feel such depravity within ourselves that we seek to shake off our burdens onto something other than ourselves. I hesitate not a moment to admit my own guilt.

Quite frankly, I’ve had enough. Forever more I will trust and respect the practitioner of weather reporting. My cause is just and my motives are true.

You are welcome to join me in my solemn declaration.

The End of the Great Tomato Debate

I think I write a new note on this topic about once a year, but when you’re passionate about something and people don’t seem to be paying attention, it’s best to just continue to reiterate your perspective until everyone simply agrees with you out of pure exasperation.

So, are tomatos fruits or are they vegetables?

Maybe you didn’t think it WAS a great debate; but indeed it was (though now it’s pretty much over), and if you took the side that tomatos are actually fruits, I’m afraid you’ve backed the wrong taxonomical horse. In fact, you’ve backed a horse which has been dead for one hundred sixteen years and is nothing more than skeletal remains in some horse graveyard… and maybe some glue.

The arguments in my favor are practically endless: A tomato is a vegetable because it tastes like a vegetable. It is a vegetable because it is stuck in the vegetable section at the supermarket. It is a vegetable, quite simply, because it is everything a vegetable is.

In fact, ask any child who has not been tainted by the (almost criminal) lies of big botany and they’ll gladly tell you that a tomato is a vegetable, and that anyone who believes they hold any similarities to a fruit should probably have their head examined – for complete madness is not far.

My great-great-great grandfather on my father’s mother’s side was Mr. Alexander Livingston – the founder of A.W. Livingtston & Co. (http://www.saveseeds.org/biography/livingston/history.html) and one of the greatest Tomato growers this nation has ever known. If only by way of simple genetics, I have tomatos in my blood, along with oxygen, red and white blood cells, plasma, hemoglobin and whatnot. Because of that I can say this with confidence: I know my tomatos, and they are vegetabalic in nature.

Some more things to think about:
Ever find a tomato in your fruit cocktail? If you did would you complain? Ever find a tomato-flavored fruit roll-up? Would you buy them if they existed?

Still unconvinced? Hardly surprising. We are a hard-hearted and onerous generation, unwilling to accept on faith even something so obvious as this? But if we cannot have faith about the little things, what hope have we of ever coming to believe in the big things?

I can only say as a final argument (though not because I have run out of arguments, but because the length of this note has grown disproportionately long to my attention span) that I have public policy on my side. In fact, I have the Supreme Court, who under the humble guidance of Chief Justice Melville Weston Fuller (a man not to be trifled with, evident by the size of his mustache alone) ruled in Nix v. Heddon (1893) that, “The court takes judicial notice of the ordinary meaning of all words in our tongue, and dictionaries are admitted not as evidence, but only as aids to the memory and understanding of the court. Tomatoes are “vegetables,” and not “fruit,” within the meaning of the Tariff Act of March 3, 1883, c. 121″ (http://supreme.justia.com/us/149/304/case.html). A decision which has yet to be overturned, despite the overwhelming majority of books, media and public schools who have apparently taken up the opposing cause, despite having little to no evidence to back up their claims (and no, the word of a botanist does not count as evidence).

Quod erat demonstratum.

Opposing arguments are welcomed.