Hot Potatoes
I don't know why we were talking about sweet potatoes- we just were. Maybe in everyone's life the subject of sweet potatoes comes up once- I just don't have the information you need. You look to me for the answers to these big questions but I'm afraid I just can't deliver, all I can do is tell you what Susan says, and then hopefully we can all learn something and the world will be that much closer to a state of blissful harmony.
So this week's piece of idiocy defended with an almost admirable commitment to wrongness, was
"Sweet Potatoes aren't vegetables".
This in itself is just a simple incorrect statement, curable when countered with a subtle mixture of two special ingredients- 1) the truth, and 2) the slightly nauseating intellectual snobbery that comes effortless pouring out of me and which, incidentally, I'm not proud of.
"No, really Susan- it's a root vegetable, it might be a tuber", I countered. Now the truth is I haven't got a bastard idea what a tuber is and I was almost cetainly wrong, but I know a vegetable when I see one.
"It's not a vegetable, I saw it on something".
Clearly this would be more difficult than I anticipated, someone had clearly got to her with some nonsense first, much like they did with the whole creationism thing (see April 2006). Maybe Susan is just a pawn being played backwards and forwards between me and some unknown malevolent demon of stupid.
She was very insistent in much the same way that you would be if you were sure you were right.The brilliant twist being that she wasn't right. "what is it then?" I enquired.
"I don't know but it's definitely not a vegetable"
And that, as it so often is, was the ending. No moment of realisation, no glorious victory- just two people getting on with their work, unchanged in their opinion. If only all unexciting throwaway conversations had a smart-assed narrator.
posted by Si @ 1:37 PM
4 comments
4 Comments:
The sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas) is a crop plant whose large, starchy, sweet-tasting tuberous roots are an important root vegetable. The young leaves and shoots are sometimes eaten as greens. The sweet potato is only distantly related to the potato (Solanum tuberosum). Although the sweet potato is sometimes known as yam in the United States, it is unrelated to the botanical yam.
god bless wikipedia!
And God bless vegetables. Even sweet tuberous ones.
My brother had a vaguely-similar conversation with his pub landlord...
LL: Do you know what the biggest carnivore in the world is?
B: (thinks) Er... Killer Whale?
LL: I said biggest land carnivore.
B: No, you didn't. But... Polar bear?
LL: No, they're not true carnivores. They eat... lichen, and stuff.
B: (beginning to suspect something is wrong) Uhm, ok... You tell me, then.
LL: (triumphant) It's a badger.
B: .....
Turns out, it was the right answer, but the wrong question. He'd once been quizzed upon the largest carnivore native to the British Isles...
Oh, well.
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