“Why Did No One Tell Me That in 1988, The United States Elected Its First Avian Vice President, Dan Quayle??”

     How have I been on this planet for 23 years, in an age where information is easier to access than ever, and only just learned that in 1988, the people of the United States decided to, with the election of George H. W. Bush, elect its first Avian and first non-human Vice President, Dan Quayle? 

     Why wasn’t I taught this in school? I was under the impression that the 2008 election was the first time in American history that the presidency and vice presidency would not be held by two white men, that the election of Barack Obama or Sarah Palin would be able to break the 219 year record. I guess that was not true, because of how the Vice President from 1989 to 1993 was a bird, Vice President Dan Quayle.

     Are there more facts I wasn’t taught in history class? I thought I learned it all, but this has me wondering. I’m actually quite scared that there is more information out there that I am unaware of. 

     If you have any information about our first avian Vice President, please contact my dad so he can send you his fax machine number so that you can get in touch with me. Thank you.

Billy Mays' Family History

     Ten years ago, we lost a legend. Someone we all knew and we all are thinking about. It has been ten years since the world lost one of its greatest icons: Billy Mays. Here’s some cool information you might not know about him.

     Not many people know this, but Billy Mays, the famous OxiClean salesperson, had three half-brothers, also named William, who also tried to make it in the spokesperson industry. The four brothers shared a mother, who had four sons with four separate men. She called dibs on naming the babies if they were male. They all were, and she named each of them William. She didn’t realize that she could change her choice of name after the first one. She was an only child and not very observant of the rest of the world. 

     To distinguish the four of them, she gave each of them a nickname: Bill, Willy, Billy, and Jeremiah. She didn’t call the fourth one ‘Will’ because she was worried about copyright infringement laws regarding her friend who went by ‘Will.’ Because the four boys shared a mother but not a father, they each had different last names. Here’s what’s incredible about this story: the four names were homophones: Maze, Maize, Mays, and Meighs. 

     Fast forward several years and the siblings all ended up in the sales industry. With their high energy and excellent work ethic, the world was their oyster; so many products to sell — so many choices! So what would they sell? The possibilities were endless: they could sell those extra big marshmallows that start to get gooey on the outside before they have a chance to heat up on the inside, they could sell those colorful marshmallows that definitely use artificial coloring, they could sell mini marshmallows that are mostly used by humans for hot chocolate and for roasting primarily by rodents, and they could even sell things that weren’t related to marshmallows in any way. The possibilities were endless. 

     To narrow it down, the four half-brothers decided to draw inspiration from their respective surnames. Each brother thought about a product that they could dedicate to selling related to their last name. The oldest son, Bill Maze, decided to sell those wooden marvel puzzles that parents get their ‘gifted’ children when they want them to do something besides watch TV and play video games. This was the late 80s, so parents didn’t know much about video games yet, so they bought their kids lots of wooden marble puzzles. 

     Willy Maize, who was white, decided to sell many varieties of corn. To do so, he dressed up in what he thought was traditional Native American attire. It was distasteful and undoubtedly racist. Thankfully, he had virtually no success selling any corn. Billy Mays started selling the fifth page of calendars, but only the fifth pages, which really wasn’t useful to anyone. No one needs only the month of May. He found very little success. 

     The youngest brother, Jeremiah Meighs, had a hard time figuring out what to sell. He eventually came to the realization that his last name was probably someone’s poor attempt to spell a different last name in a convoluted way just as a joke. Upon this realization, he decided to sell verified unique baby names to white people. Some of his best works were “Paizleigh,” “Alyzzabeth,” and “Tiphaniee.” He found moderate success. 

     The nineties were a slow decade for the brothers. Eventually, with the turn of the millennium, Billy Mays found his way to OxiClean. The rest is literally history, as documented in the 2009 special episode of PitchMen, titled “Pitchman: A Tribute to Billy Mays”, hosted by Anthony Sullivan. The other three brothers made a deal with Google upon their brother’s passing in 2009 that they would be unsearchable on their search engine — ghosts of the modern age. That is why you won’t be able to find any record of them. That’s the reason why. 

Addressing a Serious Issue (please read until the end)

     Everyone remembers the first time they saw it; maybe it was when you were young, just tall enough to look outside the window of your parents’ minivan. Maybe you were more oblivious and saw it when you took your first road trip after you got your license. For many of us, it was probably somewhere in between. The image is scarred deep into our minds, like the lingering shape of a camera’s bright flash. At first, you couldn’t quite believe it, but the miles went by and you saw it everywhere. How could this happen? you ask yourself. Why has no one fixed it? Has it always been like this? Must it always be this way?

     Later in life, we become numb to it. Some of us repress it and convince ourselves it isn’t really like that. After all, it couldn’t really be like that if the world had any order. Others believe that it is normal and even necessary, despite the unsettling absurdity of it all, and thought of something so common being so wrong is so disturbing that we explain it away with excuses. Few are truly shaken by in any meaningful way — it is much easier to ignore it altogether and go on with our lives. 

     At this point, it almost seems unnecessary to type out the words to describe the thing that we are all collectively picturing, but avoiding it gives it a power it does not deserve. I’m here to renew awareness of how highway signs have right angle corners but have painted-on rounded corners.

     It doesn’t have to be like this. We know for a fact that both design software and metal cutting technology have progressed to a point where this problem should have been solved a decade ago. Please consider signing the petition to enact real and lasting change: http://chng.it/RyxPmrxswW

Printer Manufacturers Win Lifetime Achievement Award in Subtle Evil and Cruelty

PITS OF HELL — After months of deliberation by the Committee of Nefarious Monotony and Nastiness, it was announced today that the Lifetime Achievement Award in Subtle Evil and Cruelty will be given to the world’s printer manufacturers for their work in creating small hells for users any time they needed to print literally anything.     

     The committee cited the numerous ways that printers fail their users on a regular basis, including the exorbitant price of toner, endless driver updates and malfunctions, and the fact that printers are perpetually running low on ink. They came to a consensus that very few evils had subtly ruined the days of so many people so often.

     “This one was really a no-brainer for me,” said Baal, a longtime member of the committee. “Printers work frequently enough that there is enough plausible deniability that the average person could convince themselves that they couldn’t possibly be a work of evil. Something going wrong could cause anything from slight frustration to full on rage-induced meltdowns. We down here are such fans. I especially love how they had the audacity to rename ‘blue’ to ‘cyan’. That’s just so bad! I hope that as paperless technologies develop at schools and offices, the printer manufacturers can invest this money to create something even more sinister.”

     The $6,660,000 prize will be split four ways between the printer manufacturers with a market share above 10%: Canon, Epson, HP, and Brother.

     Upon contact, Canon, HP, and Brother all declined to comment. An Epson representative expressed that the company was “shocked” by their inclusion because they were unaware that had achieved 10% market share, a number that they had previously believed they were a few years from reaching.

     To the surprise of many, the committee revealed that Satan himself would be presenting the award, something he has not done since 2004 when the award was given to the man who decided that the quality of music while on hold would be far too poor to enjoy. The Prince of Darkness has been a long time fan of printers ever since he first watched a student turn in a paper late because their school technology services decided not to refill the toner on the last day of finals. He called it a "highlight of the 21st century."

     Other nominees included parking meters for their innovation in accepting nickels and pennies that add no time, to door manufacturers for creating enough variation in the weights of doors that when you go to open a door that looks heavy you actually pull the door so hard that you end up slamming the door open in front of a quiet but busy café, and everyone looks at you like “what’s your problem?” when you really don’t have a problem at all, you just wanted to see if they had iced tea, but they only have unsweetened ice tea, which you don’t want, so you leave right away, making sure to open the door quietly, which you get absolutely no credit for because people don’t notice things when they happen like they’re supposed to, and to climate change deniers for their hand in hastening worldwide destruction and catastrophe, which the committee agreed was too serious of a problem to fall under “Subtle Evil”.

CornWhole, not Cornhole

  In college, I took a class for my humanities requirement called, “The History of the Midsection: Midwifery, the Midwest, and Midlife Crises.” My professor thought that, as rich, coastal elitists, we might begin to understand the Midwest in an attempt to better grasp the mindset of rust belt/Bible belt/belt buckle/bootstrap Trump supporters. The final project for the unit was a short report on a piece of Midwestern culture that is often misunderstood by whiny liberals. I’ve chosen the lawn game that you’ve probably been forced into playing by your uncle’s drunk high school friend at a barbecue, cornhole. There is a large misconception around cornhole, mostly regarding its name. Most people believe that the name must have come from a beanbag, probably filled with corn, was being tossed into a hole. This seems probable, but the origins of the game actually reveal a completely different history.

  Cornhole was invented around the turn of the 20th century by two farmers in Indiana, Orville and Wilbur Redenbacher. After learning of the industrialization of factories in New York City in the day’s newspaper, Fort Wane Weekly, the brothers realized that they too could modernize their industry. They started thinking about the raw materials that go into feeding livestock: largely, the vast amount of grass it took to feed their cows. They realized that they could open up more area to plant by feeding the animals some of the corn that they had been growing and eating. The unused grazing fields could go towards growing other crops, like beans of some kind. They weren’t sure yet which kind, but knew of at least three varieties they were interested in. They decided to give the cows a mix of grass and corn to start.

  Soon after the diet change, the Redenbacher brothers noticed something strange. The cow manure often had whole corn kernels, seemingly undigested. The brothers realized that feeding corn to cows must not be good for them since they weren’t digesting any of it, and they decided to go back to grass. Unfortunately, they had already tilled and sown a plot with kidney beans, mung beans, and, at the request of their local saloon pianist, William Ferguson, black-eyed peas. He had a feeling that they would be both cheap to grow and dense in nutrients. They decided they would have to keep the cows on the corn-based diet for the time being and wound up grinding the corn so that it could be better digested.

  After the cow situation, they started experimenting with themselves and other livestock to see if corn could be broken down in the stomach. They found that they too could not digest the kernels. This is, of course, known by anyone who frequents one of those cool, hip burrito places where white people pretend to make Mexican food in the 21st century but wasn’t known by the two farmers. There was no electricity and they couldn’t see the yellow kernels in the dark outhouses, obviously. They fed corn to the pigs, horses, and sheep, and found all the kernels intact. 

  The brothers found themselves at a fork in the road: did they continue their studies of animal diets, or try to profit on their findings? They chose the latter, because this is America, and began brainstorming a simple way to teach people that corn wasn’t digestible. The world needed to know. They thought the information might be best given through a game. Their creation, which we now call cornhole, was conceived.

  Here’s how their original game worked. Kernel-shaped, burlap beanbags were sown by Orville’s wife, Cora, and filled with the extra beans they had harvested. The idea was that a beanbag, which they called a “corn”, would go through a circular opening in a slab of propped up wood they had stolen from a lumber mill. This is how they named the game. They wanted to demonstrate that corn comes out whole. The circle in the plank of wood represented the hole where waste comes out in an animal, and the beanbag was a whole corn kernel. Corn came out whole. CornWhole.

  The game was a hit in the community and each family in the town developed their own scoring system. After a round, the players would lift up the planks of wood and laugh as they said “corn, whole!” The brothers ended up selling the game to the newly founded games company, Wham-O, who turned the game into a cheap plastic version.

  Eventually, the game took on a life of its own, and because there was literally no internet at all, the story of how the game came to be was lost. With the true educational back story lost, people started spelling the game 'c-o-r-n-h-o-l-e', mostly because of the hole in the wood.

  With the money they earned selling the game, the brothers continued to experiment with corn. In a stroke of genius, Wilbur later invented popcorn, which was so lucrative that Orville ended up killing Wilbur so that he himself could profit. Orville Redenbacher went on to start the first popcorn business after completely scrubbing his brother from history.

Polkémon and the Cards that Almost Existed

  With Detective Pikachu electrifying theaters last month, I want to take a trip way back to 1995, when Pokémon was just a twinkle in Satoshi Tajiri’s eye. Now, most people believe that the word ‘Pokémon’ comes from the portmanteau of ‘pocket’ and ‘monster.’ While clever and fitting, this is simply not the case. In fact, Mr. Tajiri coined the term ‘Pokémon’ before he even knew what the franchise would look like. It came to him in a dream after his first night home after several restless days and nights in the cargo hold of a commercial airplane, where he was stuck for three days.

  While it is true that he did eventually decide on the 151 colorful, battling monsters that would take the world by storm, the first draft of Pokémon looked much different. In fact, it had a different spelling, which would lead to a whole different set of characters and storylines. Before Pokémon, there was Polkémon.

  
     Polkémon was the original English spelling that Tajiri gave to his new word. He added the ‘l’ before the ‘k’ because he was more familiar with words like ‘folk’ and ‘yolk’, where the ‘l’ is silent. While looking at this word, he saw what you probably are seeing right now: ‘Polk,’ the last name of the 11th President of the United States of America. His mind started racing with the possibilities of a world exploring life in the mid-19th century in the ever-expanding, less-than-a-century-old United States. 

     Think of all that he could incorporate! The Democrats win back the White House after four years of the Whig party in control! How exciting! George M. Dallas becomes the Vice President, a dream that he had had ever since he realized that he wouldn't be able to be an Olympic weightlifter because the first modern Olympics wouldn't be held for another until many years after his death! And hello? The Mexican-American War!! There was so much to work with, and Tajiri got right to work.

  Here are just a few of the original Polkémon cards that Ken Sugimori, the art director, whipped up.

Very real original art for Polkémon cards

   
  Eventually, after several focus groups of children ages 8-14, Tajiri realized that the average Japanese child had neither the interest in James Polk (or any of the other notable people involved in 1840s geopolitics, for that matter) nor the desire to learn about him in any way — many were violently against the concept as a whole. He went back to the drawing board, thought of Pikachu, and the rest is a 90 billion dollar history. This is all very true.

I bought a website

I probably learned something at some point I just can't remember rightnow