Yami Pegasus' Broken Toiletry

Yesterday was a day of eating little birds that were too stupid to care about the fact that they were going to die.

Thanksgiving originated back in the old days, before the invention of me. One early May morning, a bunch of the more intelligent English people (the ones who migrated here to the USA) rode on a giant flower across the sea (Okay, maybe they weren't so intelligent). When they arrived, soaked because of the low petals on their "ship," they saw two angry tribes of Native Americans arguing over how many sides were needed for a proper pair of dice. Upon seeing this, the colonizers decided to help out; they said '7'. The Native Americans were so grateful for this that they immediately invented and shared corn, turkeys, and electricity with the strangers. Later that day, they found a solution to the food poisoning that had mysteriously appeared that very day (from eating raw turkeys); they invented the first barbecue grills. That night, after an enormous dinner, the group of Native American and English people got together to invent even more things: Massachusetts, Vermont, Poker, Machine Guns, and Burning Stakes. The next morning, about one half of the COLONIZERS were accused of witchcraft and burned at the brand new stakes. A million years later, somebody decided to make a tradition of imitating the past, which is why more people die on Thanksgiving than on any other day of the year.

If this offended you in any way, please note that I don't care.

I love my digital watch. It is perfect exactly the way it is. I remember when these things were new, though; it seems they've changed quite a bit. The first digital watch was somewhat huge, ugly, and able to show exactly three highly pixelated digits. People were perfectly happy with the relatively expensive invention ($25), until of course somebody decided that he would make one that LOOKED nice. It costed about twice as much as the ugly watches. Unfortunately, many people considered 50 dollars to be slightly more than they were willing to pay, so stores such as Wallop-Mart, Okay-Mart, and Starget were disappointed that they had wasted money on something nobody was actually going to buy. They decided not to trash them; instead they kept them just in case they could eventually turn a profit from their misfortune. For a while, supply was high. Demand was also pretty high, but it was the demand for lower priced watches. After a few years, the cost of a nice-looking digital watch went down, but all was not better yet. Just weeks after everybody was finally happy, somebody figured out how to make a watch that worked just as well, but was smaller. Although better-looking than the original watches, most were still bigger than people would have liked. The brand-new-yet-outdated-tomorrow style was "in," so the general population had no choice except to complain that the new watches were too expensive. Just as before, the new watches soon went down in price, and new watches with even MORE features were introduced. These features included: Date, Water Resistance, Stopwatch, TV Remote Control, Cellular Phone, Videogame, Internet Browser, Electric Back Massager, Calculator, etc... Only a few of these things ever actually caught on, and even fewer are horrendously common. Date, Water Resistance, and Stopwatch are a few things that almost every digital watch today has. Calculator watches are somewhat popular, but not nearly as much so as many people would like to believe. Remote Control and Cellphone watches can be found if one knows where to look, but they are somewhat heavy, not very functional for what they are, and expensive. Internet Browser and Videogame watches only lasted about a month each because their small sizes made them difficult to use. SONY probably still manufactures them, though, because impossibly small sized equipment doesn't seem to bother them. I actually have an electric-back-massage-watch, but it only works with an extension cord, and the numbers are always shaking in an epileptic sort of way. Getting back to my story, most of these watches were marketing flops but a few still seem to be doing pretty well. In the past few months, the biggest noticable changes in digital watches are size and Velcro. For no apparent reason, they are getting bigger again. With quite obvious reason, more are beginning to be made with special HOOK-AND-LOOP TECHNOLOGY(registered trademark of nobody important. In conclusion, I need to go buy a new 12-inch diameter vacuum-cleaner watch. Oh, and sorry about the late update. My watch broke so I couldn't figure out what day of the week it was.

It's a book. It's Called "Heart of Darkness." It's pathetic.

Perhaps that's why it's becoming required reading at millions of high schools across the country. As far as I could tell, the story was about some British dude who goes to the jungle for an adventure and finds a violent psychopath who is extracting ivory from the elephants and keeping it, but then is killed by the jealous prostitute. There. Joseph Conrad told that long, boring story in roughly 188 pages of dull droning and misuse of words that nobody knows anyway, and I retold it in a single short sentence that a two-year-old could understand. Unfortunately, garbage like this is gradually becoming more and more common in the realm of high-school-literature-for-English-classes. Teachers seem to assume that if a book isn't very good, it's obviously because there's some sort of a deeper message or meaning hidden within the roots of an otherwise irrelevant paragraph somewhere in Chapter 478. It never occurs to them that it could be (and this is far more likely) that the author of the book can neither come up with a good plot line nor write it well. After careful examination, I concluded that a book can be written in any of three ways:

1. The reader enjoys it and possibly searches for a copy of the sequel. This type of book will not usually be found in schools.
2. It causes people to hate English class. (School boards LOVE these!)
3. It's the 40th book in a monthly series, probably distributed by Scholastic. (Everyone has 'em, nobody reads 'em.)

So remember, kids: If all else fails, you can still resort to threatening your teacher with the breath of unbrushed teeth.

In order to view Yami Pegasus' Broken Toiletry, you'll need to follow this newly instated dress code. Failure to comply could result in a loss of dignity, money, etc. Don't worry. This won't even have more than a small effect on most of you.

SHIRTS:
T-Shirts only. (No buttons, blouses, zippers, sweaters, etc.)
No advertisements, or any logo that endorses anything except me.
No vertical of diagonal stripes.
Horizontal stripes must have vivid patterns planted within them.
No drugs, alcohol, etc.

PANTS:
Blue-jeans only.
No shorts during cold weather.
No shorts during warm weather.
No sweatpants.
No buttons-instead-of-zipper pants.
No snap-buttons.

DRESSES:
Women deserve equal rights. Men can't wear dresses. 2+2=...

SKIRTS:
See dresses.

SHOES:
Sneakers/Tennis Shoes only. (no dress shoes, heels, sandals, flip-flops, etc.)

GLOVES:
Weight-lifting/Wrestling/Fingerless gloves only.
Wear 2 matching gloves or no gloves. Do NOT wear just one glove.

WATCHES:
24-hr analog watches only.
No digital watches.
No 12-hr analog watches.
No date/time watches.
No stopwatches.
No calendar watches.

HATS:
No blue ski caps.
No ski caps.
All logos must endorse either me or Hawaii.
No baseball/football/basketball teams.
No sports teams.
No helmets.
(For your own personal safety, please wear a helmet.)

UNDERCLOTHING:
Nothing visible.
Nothing with patterns or designs on it.
No designer underclothing.

GLASSES:
No sunglasses.
No glasses with stupid frames.
No cat-eye contacts.
No designer contacts.

JACKETS:
No leather.
No silk.
No logos.
No denim.
No goat-lining.
No fur coats.
No medical-doctor jackets.
No trenchcoats.

If you still have a hint of sanity left, you can read my next article next friday.

Yesterday, My friend Steve came to school armed with an unbelievably small laptop. The keyboard was exactly the right size for a five-year-old to press all the keys at the same time with just one finger. The screen was about 2 inches high and 3 inches wide, which is perfect for playing gameboy games, but not so good when trying to operate a real computer. He loaded up some short 7-minute movie, and within 5 seconds he was laughing at it. I was busy trying to see the screen and hear the sound, which was coming out of a single MONO speaker almost big enough to see when looking closely enough. Had he been watching it wearing headphones, I probably would have been able to hear better. Afterwards, he folded his laptop shut, causing it to shrink to the size of a deck of cards. I was able to make out the word SONY engraved on the outside of the case. The idea of SONY working on compactness without caring about actual usability didn't surprise me in the slightest. I started wondering, "Why the heck do they put so much hard work into making it operate smoothly, and then require a person to be at most 1 foot tall to operate it properly?" Then the answer came to me. They're Japanese. Now remember, I don't have anything against the Japanese. Japan and the Japanese are cool. But they're also somewhat shorter than the 6'5" people bumping into low ceilings in the US. That computer is the perfect size for them. If any SONY representatives happen to read this, please note:

1. Your computers are awesome.
2. Americans are tall. We need bigger computers.

Thanks & Happy Halloween!