Rage Against Coat Hangers

They make life a living hell for at least 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001% of the World's population (What? I've estimated the percentage of the World who is me. Haven't we all done that at some point?) with their spindly wires and looped bits. I don't like to overexaggerate, yet it seems clear that coat hangers are holding back humanity and keeping us from living in a utopia of freedom, peace, and endless new episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (of season 3/4 quality). They are terrible creations, one of the worst inventions that mankind has ever come up with. Let's quickly look over the basic concept of what a coat hanger is:

a. A way to store shirts so that they do not crease.

Except that isn't true, is it? Because the hangers hold the shirt up by the arms, meaning that the lower half of the sleeves fold inwardly on themselves, thus creasing the shirt.

b. A simple device to enable quick, easy storage

Also not true. When was the last time you took a shirt off a coat hanger without the hanger gripping on like Kate Winslet to a drowning Leonardo DiCaprio? Insistent that nobody stops them from performing their duty, hangers rarely allow you to simply remove a shirt. No, instead their long arms start to bend so that they stick to the shirt. The only way to get them free is to take the coat hanger and forcibly remove one arm at a time.

c. Futuristic and cool

Not many people think coat hangers are cool, ACTUALLY. We all know that they were invented so people could collect them like Pokemon Cards or POGS or celebrity twitter feeds, and show them off whenever a guest comes round, but frankly I don't think anyone does that.


What annoys me is that the original coat hanger design, which is terrible, has been followed by by a half-dozen even worse creations. Have you ever seen a coat hanger which has extra hooks running along the top wires? At least two shirts I owned have been ripped by those hooks, those little gremlin hands which destroy anything they get in contact with. Two whole shirts! You know how much those cost, in this day and age? Then there are the coat hangers which have a 'bottom rung' in case you want to hang your trousers from them. These are invariably weak, and sag noticably and alarmingly whenever tasked with this job. They're a timebomb waiting to happen, and yet we, the public, don't seem to care about the risk of the plastic snapping and flying into our neck. Why?

Because the coat hanger industry is incredibly powerful, that's why. The gun lobby in America is infamously for its bewildering power over Government. In Britain, the deep fat fryer industry has a crushing grasp on the people in control, especially in Scottish Parliament. Bt the coat hanger industry is so powerful that nobody knows how powerful they really are. Why else would we keep buying these things, which manage to tangle themselves up within seconds of being hung up on a rail? I have a similar grievance with iPod headphones, but that's best left for another time. Coat hangers are the enemy here.

The original function of the coat hanger was to perform abortions on the poor. How have we as a society fallen so far that we now need every single medical tool to have a secondary purpose? Clothes hangers are inappropriate and impossible to use, being unwieldy, prone to damaging clothes, and surprisingly difficult to actually hang clothes on. Why can't we just use magnets instead, like the Japanese do? Even better, what say we ban the wearing of shirts altogether and get back to our roots as members of the animal kingdom? Shame on us.

It's Hard To Be A Man

At Wilftonville we recognise the inferiority of women. Not many sites will admit to being so forward-thinking as we are, but this is because most sites have a history of fascism.

"Fascism: nobody on the internet seems to know what it means."

Whenever men and women get into a fight about which gender has it worst, the conversation inevitably turns to the idea of childbirth. Women have to go through with it for nine months (the pregnancy, not the birth itself) without any way of transferring the pain and general irritation over to the men-folk. Apparently giving birth is quite the painful experience, and women are not happy about the fact that they have to do it. And because they do, this means that they have some sort of monopoly on persecution complexes. We can’t stand for that!

Women may feel pain in childbirth, sure. There’s no way of knowing for certain. However, due to the screaming that women do on television whenever they do a birth scene, men will just have to assume that something painful is going on there. Let’s not fight about this. But the problem is that all women seem to be under the belief that childbirth is the most painful thing that could ever happen to a person, when in reality it barely scrapes into the top ten. Men have been far too chivalrous to tell women that their complaints are ill-justified, but a time has to come when every secret gets revealed to the World, and the time has come for this one to be told.

In childbirth, women push their legs apart and think of England (unless they are not English, in which case they think of something pagan) and a baby comes out a few hours later, if all goes to plan. Now that’s pretty nasty, but how often does a woman go through the process in her life? Maybe two or three times, generally speaking, although many others don’t have any children at all. Or have fourteen. But the women who have fourteen babies are obviously enjoying the whole process, and so can’t be counted into the equation. Most women give birth maybe two or three times. They are one-off moments which don’t come around very often. For men, there is something much worse that happens, and society has been too quiet about this for too long. It needs to be said.

Society wants men to set their faces on fire.

There, it’s been said. Society as a whole is aimed towards making sure that men burn themselves hideously around their face at least once in their lives. But where’s the evidence for this, you wonder? Well, let’s first take stock of what nature does to male faces. For no apparent reason, if you take a man out into the wild for more than a few days, he’ll come back with facial hair all over his lower face. Unless the man is still hilariously undeveloped, that is. But most men will return with a warm coat of hair all around their chin, cheeks, and nose. Is there any logical reason for why hair grows here? No! It’s a completely irrational - some would say ‘dick’ - move on nature’s part.

That’s nothing to do with society, though. What is part of society is the notion that if a man shaves, he should cover his face with aftershave... after... he shaves. Again, there is no reason provided for why men should have to do this. And yet: did you know that aftershave is flammable? It says on the bottle that if you put near a naked flame, the thing will explode! So what’s being said is that if a man doesn’t have a beard, he should instead have a face covered in flammable substances?

Why does society want men to set their faces on fire?

As a side-note: this week I’m writing all my articles one after another on the same night, and at the moment it’s gone well past three in the morning. This will provide amusing narcoleptic humour for all of you, if things go well. If things go badly, I may cause a diplomatic incident which will result in my quiet elimination at the hands of covert nerdy operatives of the Government. I welcome either outcome.

Seventeen!

It’s the 17th! Do you know what that means? You should know what that means. If you don’t know what that means, then I insist that you either slap yourself round the head with a sock filled with ketchup, or read on.

The number 17 has long been held in culture to be a number filled with absolutely no mythology. Whereas 7 is thought of as lucky and 8 is beloved by the Chinese, and 13 is known to be either very lucky or very unlucky, 17 doesn’t have anything going for it at all. It appears to be neutral in all respects, without any defining characteristics to make it special or something to be scared of. And this is just what 17 wants you to think.

It was the Italians who first realised the inherent evil that lives inside the number 17. It was a warm summer’s day, and Daedilius was taking a stroll through his atrium, as was his wont as a homeowner. As he passed through the courtyard and admired an urn of the goddess Minerva, he suddenly realised that the date was the 17th June. This fact didn’t strike him as important to begin with, and he walked off down the impeccably straight road to go have his back scraped. It was whilst walking this admirably non-curved road that he saw a rabbit hop along on the grass beside him. Being a Roman, Daedilius’ first instinct was to conquer the rabbit, so he crouched down and picked some grass, which he then offered to the curious little bunny.

The creature sniffed the air and saw that some grass had been picked for it. Now, rabbits are incredibly idiotic, so when it saw this fresh grass waiting there, the rabbit went straight for it, despite the fact that it was currently standing on grass that was at least as good, and that the grass was attached to a large monstrous looking creature stood on an astoundingly direct road. The rabbit didn’t pin any of this to danger, because it was an idiot, and it tucked in heartily to the meal offered it.

That’s when Daedilius grabbed the rabbit by the ears and beat it on the ground twice, killing it on the first blow. Whistling a jaunty tune which in years to come would sounds eerily similar to ‘Black Night’ by Deep Purple, he slung the dead animal over his shoulder and strutted to the Roman Baths. As he lived in Rome, however, these were called simply ‘the Baths’. Entering the building, he paid the entrance fee and headed off towards the locker room. The rabbit went in one locker, and he changed in one of the stalls and left his clothes in a second locker. He was a very clean Roman, after all, and didn’t want to get blood all over his toga because whites are a bitch to get clean. Thus stripped naked, as was custom, he entered the first bath. The cold bath.

Daedilius was not a fan of the cold bath, because he always worried that he might get a heart attack (he had a weak heart, you see) whenever he jumped into the freezing cold water. Why Romans had to jump straight into a bath of cold water before they were allowed into the decent swimming pools was an eternal mystery to Daedilius. He queued up diligently, though, and when his time came he looked over the edge of the floor and into the deep, crystal water. With a deep breath, he jumped. The cold water immdeiatly took over his senses, and he felt like he couldn’t breathe and his chest was constricting. His eyes snapped open underwater and he struggled to get back to the surface, his arms scrabbling to the great light in the roof.

He got out, and shook himself clean. A passer-by grimaced as the water splashed him while he was trying to read the newspaper.

Daedilius made his way through the other pools, before finally he reached final destination; the scraping room. He was quickly made aware, however, of the fact that his regular scraper Cindy wasn’t here today – called off sick or something. Instead he’s have to make do with Julie. The lady in charge called Julie in, and Daedilius looked at her with disgust as she entered. She was a Jew, or something. Too clean to be a Christian, but too dirty to be a functional member of society. She smelled of money-grabbing. To his further dismay, she hobbled and had a crippled hand, in which she held the pointed sickle. That sharp, sharp sickle. Daedilius sighed, and got his naked self onto the table. It was the seventeeth of June, and he was about to have his back scraped by a woman who couldn’t hold the razor-sharp sickle properly.

After he left the baths, having had a surprisingly decent back-scrape, Daedilius walked off home feeling positively jaunty. He did a small dance that in years to come would be known as ‘The Charleston’, and brought home the rabbit for his servants to cook into a pie. Delicious. Daedilius went to bed that night feeling full, clean, and happy about the way his day had panned out.

The End.


PS: You’re probably wondering about why 17 is a evil – I’ll get to that later.

The Point of The Large Hadron Collider

It got switched on today. The big giant tube thing that somehow is going to redefine science for ever has been activated, and as scientists attempt to work out what dark matter is and how particles hit each other and all that, the rest of the world has been united in saying “huh”? Nobody knows what a Hadron is, you see, or why it is so important that we make them collide regularly. All we do know is that now it’s been switched on, there is a chance we might all be sucked into a black hole and killed, or something.

We’ve been researching the project to find out what the heck is going on, exactly. The LHC, as we shall evermore call it, fires particles down a 17km tunnel (can’t they translate that into metres for people who don’t speak ‘crap measurement scales’?) which is buried underground somewhere underneath France and Switzerland. These particles get sped up by giant magnets and start moving at such incredible speeds that when they smash into each other – as hoped – they will disintegrate and scientists can analyse what’s inside them. That’s about as much as we can understand about the whole thing.... and that’s what the man wants you to understand about it.

In reality the whole thing makes no sense. Why would anyone want to analyse particles when we still can’t make a loaf of bread last two weeks without getting mouldy? As a representative of the common student – not the posh ones, nobody likes an Oxbridge kid – Wilftonville cannot understand why science isn’t working to improve things for those people who suffer from having no money. As it turns out, the answer was simpler than we realised.

Go back to the second paragraph and look to see if there’s anything unusual there that bears analysis. I’ll wait.

Right, so hopefully you’ve now realised that for some reason this massive project has been located in France and Switzerland, instead of somewhere where the locals aren’t inbred, stunted smokers with a keen interest in vineyards and cheeses. That’s what’s going on here. The LHC causes black holes. The LHC is located in France and Switzerland.

The LHC is designed to destroy France.

Finally: science we can all get behind! There’s no need to fear about what this does to religion anymore, or about if the LHC will cause us to realise new and more terrifying things about the world we live in. Because it’s sole purpose is to destroy France. God speed, LHC! One other thing we noticed today which interested us: they’ve finally built a vacuum cleaner than can go in more than one direction. James Dyson has realised that by using a ball instead of fixed wheels, the common vacuum cleaner suddenly becomes much more useful. Truly, this is the best day for science since they discovered that monkeys were sort of like humans but not quite.

The Secret World of Sonic The Hedgehog

Sonic the Hedgehog is one of the most recognised computer game characters of all time, a blue hedgehog with a short patience and the ability to run really, really fast. Created by Sega, he has starred in several of their most popular games, and it second only to Mario in terms of worldwide fame, when it comes to computer game characters. The premise of most of his games are simple: run to the exit as quickly as you can. Avoid the baddies and run like a devil over different levels until you make it to the exit. It is simple, but very addictive, and the popularity of the games has meant that the character has crossed over into comics and television several times over the past few decades. It’s all a very simple premise, which is what makes it so surprising to find that there are several dangerous aspects of the series which Sega have repeatedly tried to hide from the public. Cover-ups, conspiracies, and recurring illegal practises are inextricably linked to the games, and once you’ve read up on the disturbing shadowy overworld that makes up Sonic The Hedgehog, you won’t be able to view the lil’ blue spinester in the same way again.

Cover-Up 1: Sonic The Hedgehog is illicitly sponsored by fast food companies

During the early development of the first Sonic game, Sega were faced with a budgetary issue, as they found they were rapidly losing money due to increased global fondness for red-capped plumbers. With nowhere else to turn, the company struck a deal with several fast food companies in order to fund their labour of love. In the process, however, they had to make several concessions in order to fulfil their contracts. The main villain, Dr Robotnik – an evil half-unicorn, half-robot badass – was replaced with Dr ‘Ivo’ Robotnik, who was all-human. This changed the story significantly, as Ivo’s backstory (which was later retconned further, as will be detailed below) was made to be more in line with fast food desires. No longer a unicorn who was evil due to grief at the death of his species because of hedgehogs, Robotnik now became an allegorical symbol of the egg-industry.

Ivo Robotnik was a mild-natured man who was turned evil after an egg exploded in his face, thus transforming him into a fat, beady-eyed villain with an indeterminately gay moustache (see “the refusal of Sega to accept homosexuality”, below). It was the conclusion of the general public that this story was designed to make Robotnik the very essence of a “rotten egg”, but in reality this was Sega’s way of downplaying the healthy and nutritious value of eating eggs every day. As Mr Strong has proved, eating eggs is a great way to grow up to be big and strong – exactly the characteristics that fast food chains do not want associated with their customers (apart from Subways, who offer superb quality food for great value). The name ‘Ivo’ is the reverse of ‘Ovi’, based on the Latin for ‘eggs’. Later, the character was connected even more strongly to the egg industry through the unexplained change from ‘Dr Robotnik’ to ‘Dr Eggman’. This was all based off the further payments Sega received after the failure of the Dreamcast, which saved it from bankruptcy.


Conspiracy 1: Is there a company-wide hatred for Australians?

The basis for this conspiracy stems around a character introduced in Sonic 3; called Knuckles. A red echidna, Knuckles personifies the country of Australia almost as much as the once-planned “Retard the platypus” would have done. Retard was originally imagined to be Sonic’s idiotic friend who runs a surfing shop, who continually attempts to sell Sonic surfboards even though Sonic has no need for them because water instantly kills him. Retard was scrapped after the company realised that portraying an Australian as someone capable of running a small business was too positive, and instead Knuckles was born. His role was to guard the Master Emerald, a source of massive power within the Sonic Universe, and he does so diligently by sitting on his arse all day and doing jack-all. When it comes time to actually do some work, he fails to beat Dr Robotnik – and on top of this failure, he is then tricked by the evil Dr into believing that Sonic is the real villain. Thus encouraged, Knuckles loses his temper and goes after Sonic with no thoughts for protecting the rest of the emeralds, and promptly loses in battle to the hedgehog.

After he realises how wrong he was, Knuckles goes back to sitting round all day and doing nothing, from time to time losing the emeralds due to his own uselessness or laziness, dependant on the game involved. Not only does he then prove to have the worst sections of all the most recent Sonic games, but he also is due to be kidnapped in the next game to be released; this time by aliens. For a character that is tasked with looking after a Master Emerald, Knuckles proves remarkably able to leave his duty behind to go off and take part in other Sonic games, where he plays sport without a care in the world. All in all, it seems remarkably clear that Sega have got it in for Australians.


Unanswered Question 1: Why does everyone like such a dick?

Sonic is a prick. Why do people keep buying his games?


Conspiracy 2: What’s with all the gambling?

Sonic games typically feature one level set in a carnival, and one set in a casino, where Sonic has to bounce off flippers and bumpers in order to make his way through the game safely. These are typically some of the hardest levels, but always provide a feeling of strong relief and achievement once they have been completed. This begs the question: what’s with all the gambling, Sega?


Unanswered Question 2: How do rings keep Sonic alive?

Mario collects coins, which makes sense, but Sonic collects ‘power rings’. How come they just sit around on the levels waiting for him to pick them up, then? If these rings give him so much power, wouldn’t it make sense for Dr Robotnik to simply take all of those, before he embarks on his quest to destroy the world? There’s a world of difference between fighting a blurry whizz-kid who can break the sound-barrier, and a hedgehog, y’know.


Conspiracy 3: Are Sega trying to promote drug-use?

Chaos Emeralds. They are the item that Robotnik is always trying to steal in order to turn the world into ‘Egg-Topia’ (see above, “Sonic The Hedgehog is illicitly sponsored by fast food companies”) and thus rule the world. They are interesting, in that they are hard to find and obtain, but contain almost unlimited energy that can be used by the characters whenever they want a fix. If a character gains all seven of the emeralds that exist in-universe, then they ’transform’. Sonic, in particular, turns golden and starts going completely mental whenever he uses them all together, and other characters have also been shown as ‘going golden’. This is, to put it “bluntly” (ha!), due to the efforts of ‘Sonic Team’, the designers responsible for creating the games. A bunch of meth-addled creatives with a flair for hokey dialogue, Sonic Team are high all the time, and they want you to join them. They don’t want to actively be seen promoting drugs, of course, so instead they decided to put in this aspect of the Chaos emeralds.

Mario collects power stars, but once he collects them they go in a fault. Donkey Kong collects bananas so he can eat. Sonic… gets a charge off of Chaos Emeralds. In many respects, as he goes from game to game and fights Robotnik again and again, he has become a junkie, relying on the benefits of the Emeralds to boost his power time and time again. Super Sonic, as he becomes, is then able to completely save the day with his massive OTT powers. He becomes faster and taller and stronger and he has forceshields – and he’s a little bit addled. He becomes a meth-addict, in other words. And every game sees him do this at the end, making him not just an addict, but a full-blown junkie. Sure, Sonic ‘says’ he does it to save the day, but how can we trust an anthropomorphic hedgehog?


Cover-Up 2: The refusal of Sega to accept homosexuality.

If you know anything about Sonic the Hedgehog, then you’ll know that I’m about to mention a certain character, That’s right: Tails. Tails is a Stuart Miles lookalike who also happens to be a fox with two tails. He is, as is made ludicrously obvious to everyone in the World, a gay man. He likes floating around by whipping his tails around in a tight circle which lets him hover above the ground, and his best friends are blue, pink, and red. That sentence may well be the most gay sentence ever written to not actually invoke any gay references in it. On top of this, Tails spends most of his time with Sonic floating behind him, watching his blue bottom with a fearless devotion and passionate intensity that hasn’t been seen since Des and Mel got taken off the air. It is obvious that Tails is gay. So why hasn’t he come out as gay, you wonder?

There is nothing wrong with homosexuality, as everyone should know but don’t because of that ‘religion’ thing. The gays (or poofs, as I will henceforth be calling them) are the best people in the World, and that is a fact that you cannot verify unless you happen to have gay friends yourself. Or, y’know, if you yourself are gay (but why would you read this? Gay people don’t like computer games!) Poofs turn up on TV and in comics all the time, movies have been written about them and music is filled with them. So why won’t Sega finally let Tails come out of the closet and film a cut-scene at the end of the next game where Tails has an awkward conversation about his feelings with his best friend? Politics, my friend. Even though Nintendo are open about the fact that all their computer game characters are either gay or into bestiality, Sega remain reluctant to admit that their blonde fox with a mullet might not like other female foxes.

It all goes back to the start of the company. When Sega was first founded, poofs were illegal in Japan. As such, when the company drafted up the rules it was made clear that nobody gay would be allowed to work for them. Although times have changed and gays are now only illegal in a very few places, this company policy is still enforced throughout Sega. There is a reason they haven’t changed this charter, which would finally allow Tails to come out of the closet. We went online to check up their website, and found a picture of the president of Sega:

Proof: Sega are a subdivision of Vatican City.


Feel free to copy and paste all of this into Wikipedia now you’ve finished reading.