With RocketNews24’s fast-paced global news cycle of Polish otaku nylon parties and Taiwanese McDonald’s employees, we can’t always keep up on all the escapades of our star reporter Mr. Sato. So, every once in a while we would like to take a look back to some of his past antics that we might have missed in a segment called “Retro Sato.”

This installment we’re going way back to the year 20 hundred and 14. It was a simpler time when Pharrell’s “Happy” was topping the charts and an Ebola outbreak was threatening to destroy us all. However, on one unusually chilly March morning Mr. Sato was taking a walk to ease his troubled heart. A sales tax hike was set to take place in a few weeks and that meant his monthly cigarette budget would have to go up as well. It was then that some dead leaves gently floated down in front of his eyes.

“That’s it! I’m a freaking genius!” thought Mr. Sato as he gathered a bunch of the fallen foliage in a plastic bag and ran back to the RocketNews24 offices.

The logic was so amazing that Mr. Sato had to go over it again and again as he ran back, taking breaks every fifty meters to catch his breath. “What are cigarettes anyway, but a bunch of dried up leaves rolled in paper?” he said to himself, “Why can’t I…huff, huff…just take any old leaf and smoke it just the same?”

He also thought that with all the bad press he had heard about tobacco, these leaves must be at least a little more healthy. Heck, they might even taste better since they had naturally dried and were freshly fallen rather than processed by some big company.

Arriving at RocketNews24 HQ, Mr. Sato grabbed a cigarette roller and some papers then hurried over to a quiet, well-ventilated place to experiment.

He began breaking up the fallen leaves and inserting them evenly into the rolling paper, and then added a filter.

When he was finished, Mr. Sato held up the dead-leaf cigarette triumphantly and sat quietly. He smiled thinking about all the money he was going to save, and what he would buy with it all.

Then he lit it up and took a drag. It actually burned pretty normally compared to tobacco, but it tasted like a bonfire. It wasn’t delicious by a long shot, and yet it wasn’t the worst taste in the world either. Although it performed well as a regular cigarette, it would never match tobacco in terms of taste.

Considering the money he would save, that wasn’t entirely a deal breaker, but Mr. Sato thought about it some more. Sure, he would get a momentary relief of his money, but at what expense?

He would smell funny all the time, like he just got back from camping or something. On top of that, those leaves couldn’t be good for his health. Who knows what kind of weird chemicals they had soaked up in their urban lives.

Nope, the experiment was a failure. Smoking fallen leaves tasted weird, stunk up his surroundings, and were most likely poisonous. “Best to stick to cigarettes,” he thought, “at least they…um.”

Original article by Nakano
Leaf Critic: Mr. Sato
Photos ©RocketNews24