A young woman is preparing her first thanksgiving dinner. As she gets
everything ready for thanksgiving day, she very sternly reminds
herself to let the turkey finish thawing in the sink overnight. She
puts it in and places the dishrack over the top of the bird. Her
husband walks into the kitchen and sees this. "Why are you doing
that?" he asks.

"My mom always did that to help the turkey thaw" she told him.

The next day Mom calls to see how everything is going. "Fine, Ma. I
have everything ready to go in the oven. I even remembered to put the
rack over the turkey last night."

This seemed to confuse her mother a bit. "What are you talking about?"
she asked.

"Oh, I remember you always put the dish rack over the turkey when it
was thawing in the sink," she said.

There was a pause on the end of the line. "Yes, but honey, we had cats!"

* * *

A more frightened than injured young Seabee electrician was brought
into the hospital suffering from electrical burns. Shortly afterward
his instructor, a chief electrician, arrived. "Why on earth didn't you
turn off the main power switch before you tried to splice the wires?"
asked the chief.

"I wanted to save time, chief, and I've seen you stand on one leg,
grab the wires and splice without turning off the power."

"My God, kid," exclaimed the chief. "Didn't you know I have a wooden leg?"

* * *

Dee Lusby writes:
> An artificial system enlarged by man for getting bigger and better bees is somehow indeed opposite of nature.

I am sorry, but this is flat out nonsense. Nature certainly doesn't
prefer smaller and worse. In fact, over the millions of years, most
organisms have gotten better at what they do. Some by being bigger,
some by being tougher, and some by being smarter. The ones that didn't
get better are no longer with us.

When you look at the honey bee Genus, you have bees that are much
smaller and much bigger than Apis mellifera. Apis mellifera being the
most productive of all of these, one could reasonably conclude that it
is "just the right size". But of course, it is not size that is
responsible for its success but the fact that it has evolved into a
highly optimized system.

Were this not the case, people could not make a living by exploiting
the labor of the honey bee. Nobody makes a living off of carpenter
bees, say, or good news bees (hover flies). So, excuse me, but how do
you justify your exploiting the labor of honey bees? Or are you just
like the rest of us, compelled to depend on others to survive?

In the final analysis, everything we do and everything we have comes
from Nature. But for you to constantly claim the moral high road, more
Natural Than Thou, the one and only person who knows anything about
anything, is not only arrogant and ignorant, but utterly tiresome and
definitely not conducive to learning new things.

* * *

Natural law or the law of nature (Latin: lex naturalis) is a theory
that posits the existence of a law whose content is set by nature and
that therefore has validity everywhere. The phrase "naturalistic
fallacy" is used to refer to the claim that what is natural is
inherently good or right, and that what is unnatural is bad or wrong.

* * *

There is a well-known story in cooking that shows the folly of appeal
to tradition. In this story, there is a woman who, when cooking ham,
always begins by cutting off one end of the ham and throwing it away.
When this mysterious behavior is questioned by a friend or family
member, she admits that she does it only because her mother did it
that way. Becoming curious herself, she asks her mother why she cuts
the end off the ham; she, in turn, says that it is how her mother did
it. When the grandmother is questioned, she reveals that she cut off
the end of the ham only because it wouldn't fit in her pan otherwise.

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