I'm here to warn you about the MENACE FROM OUTER SPACE. This MENACE FROM OUTER SPACE is MENACING our refrigerators, it is MENACING our cafes, it is MENACING our children. It MENACES our understanding of the perfect truth and it is a MENACE to democracy. I refer, of course, to the AVOCADO. First, to prove that the avocado is FROM OUTER SPACE. The irrefutable proofs: The avocado is unlike any normal terrestrial fruit. Its grossly swollen and oversized Pitt is a mockery of the form, a disgusting reminder of the avocado's alien desire to spawn and reproduce itself to cover the Earth with a pulsating, pullulating mass of slippery greenish flesh. The Pitt is the alien seed, come to infest our blue world. The Pitt of the avocado shows its alien nature by failing to conform to the friendly and familiar Earthian catgories: is hard and yet soft, woody and yet pulpy at once. The skin of the avocado shows similar exogenous tendencies. However, the skin resists discussion because the avocado camouflages itself in two different skins so as to deter generalization and classification. If I point out that the avocado's skin is shiny, green, and metallic, with a slippery waterproof coating, like the hull of a frog or flying saucer, the effect of my warning may be blunted because you are thinking of a bumpy avocado. If I show up the avocado's foreign nature by exposing its monstrous, nubbly, greenish-black hide, so like the armored skins of the extinct earth-burrowing dinosaurs and other reptillian monsters, you may dismiss me by exhibiting the smooth avocado. Thus: The avocado is the only fruit whose skin is a propaganda machine. But in fact the skin, whether a shiny virulent green or a rough, all-devouring black, again shows the avocado's alien nature: Whether slick or lumpy, the skin fails once again to be thin and papery, like the skin of the revered apple, or soft and leathery, like the skins of the hallowed orange or the beloved banana, or even delicately furred, like the peel of the gentle peach. The meat of the avocado, which fills the yawning void between the reptillian skin and the abominable Pitt, is neither solid nor liquid, but an ambiguous green and yellow slime, halfway between. It appears to hold a shape, but when pressed, flows like water. Even the avocado's flavor is a mystery. Not sweet, like most fruits, not even sour, like the lime, the lemon, or the tomato, nor again like the squashes, its outlier nature demonstrates beyond a doubt its remote provenance. The avocado has no color. Green, yes, but *which* green? Not the deep forest green of broccoli, not the pale vegetal green of the snap bean. It is at once a green that is many greens, a colony of single-celled green organisms of various types, waiting to multiply in their numbers and their greennesses. Finally, the molecular structure of the avocado is clearly not of This Earth. The avocado's `fat' is shaped like a HEXAGON. The fats of earth are shaped like the excellent and egregious letter E, three fatty acids hanging from glycogen, forming an the very monogram of Mother Earth Herself. But there is no known language which has a six-sided letter. The avocado is an alien in our midst. The avocado MUST BE STAMPPED OUT.