Not the Only Fruit

This new 'Last Word' section of the forum is for moderators to post terse messages to all recently banned members. These will be retrospective posts containing witty and/or clever replies that we were too angry to think of before we popped the cork on a bottle of BAN!

First up is 'John1967', who made the schoolboy error of mistaking the tomato for a vegetable. Far from backtracking, he then went on to question the ethics of my putting the FRUIT that we call tomato, into my FRUIT salad. Prior to lashing out with a ban, I was too busy trying to poke blood pressure medication through my grinding teeth to remind John that the tomato is in fact not a vegetable, but a fruit. FACT.

"Just like a unicorn that doesn't have the horn, or a seal without whiskers and flippers, a fruit salad without tomato is incomplete. It is little more than a work in progress, and needs to be treated as such."

Not my words, John, but the words of a well-respected expert horticulturist who's outstanding in his field of horticulture, and who, unfortunately for you, also wrote:

"The tomato is very much a fruit, and no amount of holier-than-thou ranting vegetablists on pseudoscientific web-based websites touting the so-called "aubergine paradox" can change that fundamentally fruity fact. I've traipsed all across the tinternet and back, but have never found any compelling evidence to suggest that the tomato is anything other than an
awfully red and undeniably juicy fruit. I've found a lot of inspirational pornography, but nothing whatsoever to backup the, quite frankly, ridiculous notion that the tomato is some kind of vegetable. If there are any vegetables in this argument (which there aren't!), then it's the vegetablists themselves and their "flat earth" thinking on matters involving this savory, typically red, edible FRUIT."

Professor Rumple T. Jazzhands, PhD, VD, BO.
Deputy manager, Toddington Garden Centre, Cheltenham.

So there you have it, John. You've been dealt a truly scientific, fact-based beatdown, and I suggest you take it with the love it's given. Whilst YOU might choose to omit tomatoes from YOUR "fruit salad", this does not grant you licence to deny others access to such tangy strangeness.