You say tomato

[venta]

What a wonderful sentence:

"[The Supreme Court of the US] acknowledged the botanical reality of their fruithood, but ruled that in common understanding and usage, they are treated as vegetables and should be taxed as such."

(From an article about tomatoes, as read out by my boss this morning.)

In other news, I have betrayed the Marmite. I just had lemon curd on my toast.

Comments

[cardinalsin.livejournal.com]

Wow, I'm making a lot of comments long past the time when anyone will read them. Ho hum...

Anyway: Lobsters have no cerebral cortex, which makes them exceptionally primitive neurally speaking. This isn't a justification for them being insects, but it might justify the claim that its ok to boil them alive.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Could you define, for the uneducated among us, what a cerebral cortex is ? I tend to read it as mostly synonymous with "brain", but figure lobsters must have a brain of some sort.

[cardinalsin.livejournal.com]

The cerebral cortex is the outer layer of the brain, the kind of mushroom-shaped walnut-wrinkled part, which is generally regarded as the bit which does thinking, perceiving, emoting, language, memory, and most of the other stuff which characterises non-vegetables. Well, that's a bit of an exaggeration - the stuff below makes up an awful lot of brain, and does an awful lot of stuff such as allowing you to walk, telling you when you should be hungry, co-ordinating your responses to extreme, terrifying danger, and such. But not having a cortex makes you pretty non-advanced - all mammals have one, for example.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. A part of the brain which co-odinates "responses to extreme, terrifying danger", but blithely allows you to be boiled to death is, in my opinion, an evolutionary failure :)

[cardinalsin.livejournal.com]

Hence the evolution of the cerebral cortex! That, and doing the crossword.