Let's get one thing straight right off the bat, here: Ellen Feiss is not an Apple product. If anything, she is most likely the product of Mr. and Mrs. Feiss, though that's just a semi-educated guess. We are, however, reasonably certain that Ellen is an American product, which is perhaps noteworthy because on occasion Japan creates products similar to our American ones that in some way improve upon our domestic version.

One common improvement, for example, involves miniaturization. Since America still has vast, sweeping chunks of open land just waiting to be paved over, miniaturization over here is really more of a novelty than a necessity; people here buy small cell phones because they're cute, but most folks would get along fine with a model several hundred times larger as long as they could strap the thing on top of their SUVs. On the other hand, Japan, we're told, has rather less land available and its residents are stacked three deep, which is why a cell phone that's small enough to carry inside a single nostril (with room to spare for a folding bicycle and a magazine or two) is an indispensable modern accessory.

Where are we going with this, you ask? Well, simply put, it appears that the Japanese have engineered their own Ellen Feiss, complete with a distinctly Japanese improvement. No, we're not talking about a MiniFeiss, as charming as such a creature would undoubtedly be; the Japanese equivalent is named Momoko Kikuchi, and she looks to be roughly Ellen's size-- but judging by her performance in her Japanese Switch ad, she was designed for greater energy efficiency.

Seriously, check it out. We here at AtAT don't know a lick of Japanese, but faithful viewer jetfuel kindly provided us with the following translation:

"The computer I had before was this... black thing. I was writing an email to my friend. I worked REALLY HARD and typed the whole thing up in English and everything. I got alllll the way to the end of it, and then, all of a sudden... it froze. EVERYthing I wrote was... gone. Haaaaaaaa. I CAN'T USE THIS THING!, I thought. But now I use a Mac, and... it... hasn't done that once. Isn't that awesome!? [logo and URL] I'm Kikuchi Momoko, and I'm a... student."

Note the similarities to the well-known Feissian scenario-- they're both students, and they both worked really hard on something they were writing when a Windows crash led to data loss. They also share similar mannerisms, speech patterns, and body language. But watch the two performances back-to-back and you'll find that, in the same thirty seconds, Momoko outputs at least 33% more energy than our own domestic Ellen. Impressive, no?

We're receiving a significant amount of mail these days from viewers who express a preference for Momoko over Ellen, which implies to us that Apple may have a second cult icon on its hands before long. So who's going to put together the first Momoko Kikuchi fan site?

(If you're out there, Ellen, please, don't feel threatened-- your fifteen minutes of fame can certainly run concurrently with Momoko's. Besides, there's at least one solid reason why you'll always occupy a warm spot in our hearts: Momoko may be more energy-efficient, but darnit, she doesn't bleep.)