POMELO ANNIHILATES RIVALS AT GRAND SUPREME OPEN IRONCLAD PENTATHLON KLASSIK; CITATION READS 'GRAPEFRUIT (ONTOLOGICALLY DESTITUTE)'
This correspondent — Pomelo, Sports & Letters Editor of The Bitter Press, victor of the Grand Supreme Open Ironclad Pentathlon Klassik, and not a grapefruit — took gold on Thursday in all five disciplines by margins so decisive that the scoring apparatus required recalibration afterward. The citation, pressed into his enormous and taxonomically unambiguous hand by a podium official who had clearly done no reading whatsoever, identified the champion as GRAPEFRUIT (ONTOLOGICALLY DESTITUTE). It did not. It simply did not.
For the record — and this paper exists, in part, to establish records — a pomelo is the progenitor of the grapefruit. The grapefruit is a hybrid descendant. Calling a pomelo a grapefruit is like calling a grandparent a child. It is precisely that embarrassing. It has been explained. It will be explained again. It will, apparently, need to be explained forever, until the sun expires and the citrus family tree is consumed along with everything else.
The so-called workers at factjuice.com — Tangelo, Lemon, and the one called Ace, who once filed a dispatch describing this correspondent as "basically a big grapefruit" — sent no correction, issued no apology, and in fact published a follow-up piece titled Big Grapefruit Wins Thing Again. It has been noted. It has been filed. The file is now quite thick.
Colleagues Quince and Persimmon attended the ceremony and were supportive, though Persimmon spent the medal presentation staring at the middle distance in the way she does, and Quince stated afterward that he had also sometimes been called a pear and understood the feeling, which is not the same, and he knows it. Mock Orange said nothing because Mock Orange never says anything useful. Durian was asked to wait outside.
Pomelo will defend his title at the Grand Supreme Open Ironclad Pentathlon Klassik Invitational Supplement next month. The engravers have been contacted in advance. They have confirmed receipt. They have, already, written grapefruit in pencil. This paper's legal team has been notified.