Thing of the Week. Buttons. – by Ryan Donahue.

The button was invented by Button Bershwick, a coal miner in ancient England. He had two daughters, Jane and Bane, and they were both rather promiscuous in their younger days. They would say things like “thank god there’s no reason my pants can’t fall off at any moment!” and “what a shame it would be if I had to wear clothes that would make it harder for me to have sex with everything!”

Button did not like this. “I’ll invent something,” he said, “something so flawless that it will at once keep the pants of my daughters snug around their waists, and become a global phenomenon.” So he went into his shop, he huffed paint, and he spent days whittling a plastic bucket down to a coin-sized plastic circle. Then he tried to make a happy face by piercing two holes into it. From there, he was stumped. He didn’t know how this would help his cause at all. It was almost as if his initial vision as an inventor had dissipated entirely, and the only thing he could do was huff more paint.

So Button huffed more paint. And as the sun shined through his window, he got higher than he’d ever been. And that’s when Button got his grand idea. “That’s it!” he said. “I will have my wife sew this onto the pants of my daughters, and I will cut a small, pinky-sized hole in their trousers, so it acts as a latch that keeps their pants sealed and prevents them from having sex with everything in existence!” And so it was. His daughters had these blue plastic things on their pants and they couldn’t figure out how to take them off for the longest time, so they defecated and they defecated and they defecated until they finally figured out how to remove the pants. And that day, for them, was one of the best. Because they realized that even with a piece of plastic on their trousers, they could still have sex with anything they wanted.

But Button Bershwick did not know this. He thought they were forever stuck in their pants. Proud as he was, he named his new invention after himself, as many inventors of his time did—i.e. Leonard Bucket, Electricity Jones, Farm Equipment Barrows—and he died peacefully in his sleep the next day.

You can find more stuff from Ryan Donahue at @ryanjaydonahue