... but I stopped. Now I'm a dad, and may blog again...

Saturday, March 26, 2011

244: A fox is a dog, is a dog is a cat?

A heavy-lidded, droopy-jawed pram-pusher plopped her carcass on the back-facing bus seat directly before me.  He young son sat awake and alert in his pram, straining for eye contact with members of the public and excitedly pointing out scenes he observed through the bus window.  Coach station, he deliriously spotted.  Where are the coaches?  There’s one, pointed out mummy.  Cat, blurted out the curious little boy.  It’s a fox, corrected his mother.  It was a bus-side advert for Foxy Bingo, with that smarmy suited little twat of a fox. But, she continued; a fox is a kind of cat; they are in the same family.

I wanted to leap across and slap her, grab the child and say run, run from this idiot you call mummy.  Be free from her stupefying influence, or you too will grow from a curious and bright little chap, into a dunder-headed plonker absentmindedly fumbling from one field of ignorance to another.  She sat there stewing in her own vacuous bliss, completely unaware she had made a total twat out of herself.  My field of vision included her and the Foxy Bingo fox, and she was the biggest twat I could see.

After writing those last two paragraphs I pissed myself laughing at the pointlessly directed fury they contain.  Yes, she was clearly an idiot, but who cares.  Idiots are everywhere.  Some people are too busy watching television to actually bother to know things.  This is Manchester, the city that produces The Jeremy Kyle ShowI read books, and only watch educational and intellectually fulfilling television documentaries on historical diagrams.  I find joy in exercising my mind with the consciousness raising of evolutionary biology, and the intellectual aesthetics of Cy Twombly.  As a general result I have been able to pass into adulthood fully aware that a fox is a sort of dog, more specifically it is related to the dog and is of the family Canidae.

A cat is obviously of the family Felidae, and therefore a fox is not a cat, you twat.  They both fall under the broad order of Carnivora, which obviously means they share the same class (Mammalia), Phylum (Chordata), and Kingdom (Animalia).  But to say a cat is a sort of fox because they both reside within the same kingdom is literally the same as saying a cat is a fox because it is not a mushroom.  That is clearly not intellectually robust.  You know, do that if you want.  But just be aware that people like me will anonymously think you an idiot, and then call you a twat in a blog.

And who’s the twat now?  It’s not me, is it?  Oh, wait; it is...

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