Self Perpetuating Moth

It’s that time of year again, when cigarette manufacturers cynically launch their iced cigarettes on a sweltering public.

At the other end of the spectrum, the tree huggers remind us that this is the season when we should be saving as much sunlight as possible to power our homes and cars, rather than selfishly tanning ourselves in our back gardens. Meanwhile, Pope Benedict has completed his review of the state of Limbo dancing, and mysteriously concluded that it should not be abolished.

I cannot accept that the above are not all connected in some way. For one thing they’re together in a single paragraph (or were, until a 2024 revision). If there’s one thing the education system has taught me, it’s that a paragraph is a self-contained discussion of a sub-topic within an essay. If there’s two things it’s taught me, they are: (1) That a paragraph is a self-contained discussion of a sub-topic within an essay, and (2) something else. It’s similar to the way in which the domestic cat is a sub-group within the extended cat family. If I came across my cat Hairy mingling with a sabre-toothed tiger at Dublin Zoo, I would immediately think that one or other of them were out of place.

That’s not to say that the modern day Zoologist is particularly challenged when trying to differentiate between those particular cousins. The domesticated cat is very rarely seen in these places, except in countries where there are no domesticated cats in the wild, and people come to the zoo hoping to see one for the very first time. In these countries of course, a house cat is “speed-evolved” from the indigenous tigers or lions, so that locals can see what a genuine native housecat would be like, were it to actually exist in the wild locally.

The speed evolving process is fascinating, I’m sure, but I know nothing about it. I’m quite sure though that if you go to Wikipedia you’ll be able to find information about it. If you can’t, don’t be shy about going making something up yourself. That’s how Wikipedia works, after all. Be sure to quote this article as a source though. They’re very fussy about citing sources over there. I’ll go ahead and name Wikipedia as the source for this article, just for tidiness.*

The book of the cult British television sit-com “Red Dwarf” asserts that a cat, if left alone in the basement of a spacecraft for a million years, will evolve into a very selfish and self-obsessed humanoid creature who likes tuna. Obviously this is an appalling stereotype, and I made up the bit about the tuna. However, I did this for a reason. I cannot, under current copyright laws, simply recount a story that someone else has already told elsewhere, no more that I can legally perform an exact copy of the Bob Dylan song “Buckets of Rain”, by growing a clone of his voice box and having it transplanted into my body, and instructing my band to learn to perfectly duplicate every note of the performance. That would be stealing.

However, I am perfectly entitled to perform a “skit” of an original piece of work, by adding a bit about tuna to make it obvious that my version is a ridiculous spoof. And that’s what I’ve done here. The beauty of the whole scheme is that my “tuna” bit appears to fit naturally into the story, and only the most widely-read among you will have spotted that it was my own addition.

Of course, the whole cats-liking-tuna thing is a popular but unfounded myth, the beginnings of which lie in the similarities between dolphins and cats, of which there are very few. In a nutshell, they both have whiskers. It certainly is funny that such an untruth could spread so widely through the cat owning population. Luckily, cats have over time grown to like the fish, and it has turned into one of those self-perpetuating myths.

Incidentally, I’ve always wanted to start a myth about moths. The opportunities for alliteration would be almost endless. Sadly though, spreading a rumour through the population is not as simple as that. Take for example the fact that Michael J. Fox caught his unfortunate illness from spending too much time in a rocking chair in his youth. Clearly nobody would believe this, because young people are supposedly “known” to be averse to rocking chairs. But has this ever been proven? Has there ever been an article in “Scientific American” setting out the results of a study of the recreational sitting habits of our young children?

Frankly, I don’t know.

An Into Your Head podcast blog post From 2007