BTW, Happy Columbus Day.

In celebration of this great American holiday, a holiday whose sole purpose is to recognize the achievements of a man who got hopelessly lost one day while travelling to India, I have reprinted a bit of writing that was once (and actually still is somewhere...) on another website of mine. This way, if you were looking for this piece of writing on my other website, but got hopelessly lost and came here instead, all would not have been in vain. HAPPY COLUMBUS DAY!!!

Hi. My name is Mike Moore. I live in Maryland. For the benefit of those of you out there reading this who are generally ignorant of things, let me explain. Maryland is a state in a country called the United States of America. Maryland is a happy, fun, joyful place where many people of different backgrounds live and work. Maryland became the 7th state to enter the Union on April 28th, 1788. Since that time many wonderful things have happened in Maryland, such as in October of 1998 when milk officially became the state drink. Lots of other stuff has happened here too, but I think you get the idea. Let’s move on to the United States of America. It is a fine country where many people of different backgrounds live and work. Sometimes, when people want to cut down on how much they have to say or type, instead of calling it the United States of America, they just call it America. I think I’ll call it America from here on out. Typing is very time-consuming, and people only live so long.

Sometimes I digress. This just happens to be one of those times. Digressing is when you mean to talk about one thing, but in the course of your discussion you discover that there are many other fun things to talk about too. Eventually you forget what it was exactly you had started talking about. That’s why typing comes in handy. Instead of having to try and remember what it was you were talking about, you can simply glance back at the words that you had been typing before you began your digression. In this instance, I was talking about America. America is generally considered by its citizens to be one of the greatest and most powerful countries in the world, but this wasn’t always the case. A long time ago America wasn’t even a country. It was inhabited by long-haired people who didn’t wear many clothes. They were called hippies. Ha-ha. That’s a joke. A joke is like a little story with a funny surprise ending. Your brain doesn’t expect the surprise ending and becomes confused. When people are confused they tend to laugh. That’s because they feel awkward and out of place, and laughing helps them feel more comfortable. The jokes that work best are the ones that make people feel awkward and out of place, though other people might tell you different. That’s because they’re misinformed. Misinformation happens to be one of the two most popular forms of information. The first one being, of course, no information.

But I should get back to the hippies. Back before America became a country they weren’t called hippies. Back then they were called… come to think of it; I have no idea what they were called back then. Right now I am doing something that is called admitting I don’t know everything. It’s always good to admit you don’t know everything from time to time, that way, when you’re making stuff up about things that you know nothing about people will take your word for it, because they’ll remember that other time when you admitted you didn’t know everything, and they will assume that if this was one of those times then you would admit it here too. Assuming is when you make an ass out of you and my dad. At least that’s what he used to say. That’s another joke, though possibly not as funny as the first. But I digress… I was saying that I didn’t know what the hippies were called back before America was a country. I know that today we call them Native Americans. At least that’s what we called them the last time I checked. We used to call them Indians until somebody pointed out that they weren’t technically from India, but were instead from America.

You might think that this would lead us to call them Americans, but that’s not what happened. Calling the Native Americans just Americans would upset a lot of people who live in America but aren’t native. That’s why we call them Native Americans. They’re not the only Americans that receive special designation based upon their ancestral heritage. Some people call people whose ancestors lived in Africa, African Americans. Some people call people whose ancestors lived in Asia, Asian Americans. People whose ancestors lived in Europe are not generally called European Americans. They are called just plain Americans. I’m not sure why this is other than the fact that the people whose ancestors lived in Europe are generally the ones making up the names for the people who live in America. Getting back to the hippies, they lived here before anyone else. Then, in August of 1492, a man named Christopher Columbus decided to sail around the world. Christopher Columbus was from Europe. He thought the world was spherical. The world is actually an ellipse, but that’s pretty close. Columbus also thought that the world was much smaller than it really is. This is because Europeans back then were unaware of the existence of America. Many Europeans today would like to pretend that they are unaware of the existence of America, but we like to remind them by blowing things up on their side of the world from time to time. Columbus thought he could sail around the world and get famous and was awfully disappointed to find all these hippies in his way.

He went back to Europe and told important people about what he found and all of a sudden everyone with a boat was heading to America, which seemed like a great place, aside from the hippies. Eventually the hippies were moved further and further away from where the Europeans wanted to live and today reside mostly in Arizona and San Francisco near the intersection of Haight and Ashbury. About the same time that the hippies were being moved, a group of people called the “British” started to take over. They were called “British” because they were from a country named England. Generally speaking the British believe that the things they do are much better than the things that other people do. They believe it so much that they used to go around the world telling people from all sorts of cultures to stop doing things how they had been and start doing them like the British. They don’t do that anymore. That’s the job of the Americans now. So the British started to colonize America and soon there were all kinds of British people living here. The problem with that was that the British who lived in England kept telling the British who lived in America what to do and the British who lived in America, being British, didn’t much like that. So on July 4th, 1776, the British people who lived in America declared their independence.

And that is, in a nutshell, why we celebrate Columbus Day, because without Christopher Columbus, we'd probably all be living in England right now, forced to listen to a bunch of British people tell us what to do. And nobody wants that. Hooray Columbus!