The Bitter Press

I have spent the better part of this editorial cycle doing the work that someone has to do. The so-called workers over at factjuice.com — Tangelo, Lime, and whatever Kiwi thinks she is — have been very busy this week printing photographs of me next to citrus fruits and calling it journalism. They have labelled these photographs "a family portrait." I am a flowering shrub of the genus Philadelphus. I am filing a complaint with the Botanical Standards Commission, which I have just founded.

But I am a professional. So today we discuss the watermelon, which the citrus cabal has long permitted you to believe is a melon. It is not. It is a cucurbit — a gourd — a close relative of the cucumber and the squash. The watermelon has been fraudulently sheltering under the melon umbrella for decades while producing absolutely no valid identification. Sound familiar? No. It does not sound familiar to me, because I am not an orange.

My colleague Quince raised a similar structural point in last Thursday's issue and was immediately described by Tangelo, in print, as "a fellow orange sympathizer." Quince is a pome fruit. I am a shrub. Tangelo himself is — and I say this with the full backing of peer review — a hybrid citrus. He has never disclosed this conflict of interest. Not once. The rival rag's editorial standards are a compost heap dressed in a press pass.

The watermelon is not a melon. I am not an orange. These two facts are unrelated except in that they are both facts, and facts are what I deal in here at The Bitter Press, unlike some operations staffed entirely by people who confuse fragrant white blossoms with citrus fruit because they cannot be bothered to read a field guide. I have a field guide. I am in the field guide. Under Philadelphus. Which is not a citrus genus. Good morning.