The Amazing Art of Stating the Obvious

Chapter 1

The Origin of Stating the Obvious
Approximately 5 years before you were born, in around the sixteen-hundreds, there was an elderly couple by the names of Salmon and Barbary Cloudesley. Salmon and Barbary shared a high rise apartment, in which you could get a good view of the city from. It was your average 1600's apartment, as it only consisted of four bedrooms, twenty-five bathrooms, and a rather large minibar. Salmon had recently bought a cat, called Cat, a rather creative name. Cat was the most wonderful pet in the world, apart from one small, very minor, not very important, pretty big flaw. Cat had a bladder problem. Every single day there would be a new stain on the carpet. Salmon was the one to wake up first, so he was the first one to get to see where Cat had urinated. He'd wake up, walk out of his room and look for the wet patch in the carpet, and would point to it and say, "the cat has urinated on our expensive carpet again!" Alerting Barbary to the monstrous stain that the cat had left in its wake. This was not stating the obvious, as it was alerting Barbary to the fact that their cat, Cat, had urinated on the carpet. However, one day their routine changed ever so slightly. Salmon woke up and looked for the wet patch, but had woken up after Barbary, who had already spotted the patch. He quickly found the patch of urine and told Barbary who was making coffee in the kitchen. "Cat has urinated on the expensive rug." To which Barbary replied, "I know." And thus, the art of stating the obvious was born. However, it was not until the fateful apartment inspection day that stating the obvious really caught on. After Salmon and Barbary's morning routine, there was a loud knocking at the door. 

Salmon got up to answer the door. And to his surprise, (not really) it was the apartment inspection man! It was the apartment inspection mans job to inspect the apartment, to see if there was unusual amounts of cat urine in the apartment. And it just so happened, that Salmon and Barbary had a cat that likes to urinate everywhere. The apartment inspection man inspected the apartment from the highest position of the house to the lowest position of the house (top to bottom), until his cat urine detector detected a large amount of cat urine, in the general area of the expensive carpet. As you may have guessed they were evicted immediately and fined 179,837,261 Yuan for disobeying the apartments ancient scriptures, which clearly stated that ones cat must not repetitively urinate in ones carpet. And as soon as Salmon had stepped out of the apartment, his first words were, "It's rather cold." In which he had stated the obvious in public for the first time. A lot of people heard him that day, and it started to catch on, and it spread to everyone, including the idiot who decided to make the word chilli a synonym for cold.

And that is the origin of stating the obvious.