hwango

Dear sirs and madams,

I am writing to you in regards to your publication's December issue, specifically the article concerning certain Cucurbitaceae squashes, and to express my profound disappointment that the standards of quality to which you have previously adhered have been so thouroughly are carelessly abandoned. The article in question is riddled with errors and misinformation and absurd theories, and has no place in what I had always held to be a serious and reliable source of scientific discourse. My primary objections are as follows:

There is, nor has there ever been, such thing as magic. Nor were there such things as fairies, let alone fairy godmothers. The story of Cinderella is fiction with no basis in reality, and has been altered through retelling so many times that any resemblance to any actual historical events is at this point mere coincidence.

And so it is entirely beyond the realm of possibility for a pumpkin approximately thirty-two centimeterse in diameter to have been magically transformed into a carriage large enough to accomodate an adult human being. Even if I were willing to accept such a ludicrous idea as possible, the suggestion that said pumpkin could "return to normal" several hours later undamaged seems entirely unlikely.

The author of your article then expects us to believe that many generations ago it was his family who owned this pumpkin, and that they reclaimed possession of it after its adventure, and that they then took this highly significant squash and harvested it for seeds that they planted the following year, and so on down the generations, cultivating certain anomalies present due to "residual magical influence."

Preposterous!

I will grant that the cultivar in question is highly unusual - remarkable, in fact. But a few pumpkins maturing on the vine sporting fully functional wheels does not prove the existence of magic, fairies, or any of the other nonsense espoused by the offending article. I have no doubt that the wheels are the result of ordinary variations brought about by the slow process of evolution. Explaining the exceptional properties of some plants with "magic" is sloppy thinking. What would your author have us believe next? That certain brambles grow faster around castles to ward them against heroic princes? That some cultivars of phaseolus vulgaris grow to such extraordinary height because they grow from magic beans? Sheer absurdity.

I regret that your publication has fallen so far from the esteem in which I once held it, and I am sorry to say that I shall not be renewing my subscription.

Sincerely,

Jack Goldsmith