Categories
culture politics thoughts

A Cat Is Not A Dog

I know this seems like a painfully obvious and completely unnecessary statement to make but imagine with me for a moment what would happen if a society decided to remove the distinction between two things that are fundamentally different by nature.

If the government said that a cat and a dog were the same thing it could punish people who wanted to distinguish between the two types of animals but doing so wouldn’t make them the same thing. If they declared that the words “cat” and “dog” were just  synonyms for the same things or outlawed the use of the word “cat” and if for two or three generations nobody was allowed to say, or teach, or publicly acknowledge that cats and dogs were different, few people in the society would be able to consistently identify what defines a cat as distinct from a dog, but if you put any cat next to any dog virtually everyone in that society would still be able to recognize that those animals are distinctly different. (And even if they couldn’t distinguish them, a cat would still not be a dog.)

If a government decided to grant privileges to dog owners or to enact some kind of requirements for dog owners and then someone (whether a cat owner, a dog owner, or someone who owned neither) decided that those privileges or requirements should also apply to cat owners the proper approach would be for them to get the laws changed either by making equivalent laws for cat owners, or to change the wording of the existing laws to apply to pet owners (or “cat owners and dog owners” if they need to be more specific). The wrong approach would be to declare legally that cats and dogs are the same and consequently anyone who kept a domesticated feline was as much a dog owner as anyone who kept a domesticated canine.

Categories
culture life

Year Round Gardening

As I learn more and more about healthy eating – both through personal experience and study – my interest has grown in not only growing some of my own food, but also in being able to do it for as much of the year as possible. In that vein I am very interested in the possibilities presented by this idea of a below-ground greenhouse.

I’m seriously looking into whether I can make this idea work.

Categories
life

Digital Dissociative Identity Disorder

If you were to look at my email inbox and my twitter feed you would discover that besides being a regular(ish) guy I am also the former mayor of Toronto, a businessman (and former mayor of Elkhart) in Indiana, a playwright in New York, and a professional cricketer in South Africa.

I can only imagine how confusing my digital Dissociative Identity Disorder (formerly known as Multiple Personality Disorder) would be if I also got communication for the former mayor of Lubbock, Texas who also shares my name.