The poiuyt is an optical illusion made famous by MAD Magazine. It has also been called the tri-pronged u-bar, and most engineers know it by the name of blivet. The poiuyt was first exposed to the masses in MAD #93, the March issue of 1965. Alfred E. Neuman was, as usual, front and center on the cover, but this time he was balancing a poiuyt on his finger tip. There is an interesting story that claims that MAD Magazine was shown the poiuyt by its "inventor", and proceeded to purchase the exclusive rights to the fictional object from this unknown man. They later discovered it had been around before then and it was in the public domain, so MAD was scammed. Of course, this is unsubstantiated, or at least I've been unable to find any specifics allowing me to track down the veracity of this any. It may have originated from someone "realizing" that poiuyt is a string of consecutive keys on a QWERTY keyboard, and thought they were the first to notice this. Hence, it must be a scam. Speaking of scams, the similarity between the poiuyt and the Enron logo has been remarked on by many individuals.

The poiuyt appears to be a three-pronged fork. If you look at any small section of the object, it makes sense, but as a whole something unsettling is immediately noticed. At the base of the prongs, there are two of them, squared with sharp edges. At the tips of the prongs, there are three rounded. Edges of the squared sides become open space at the tips. My best shot at an ASCII rendering of this is below.

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   \     \  \                                 ()
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     \     \ |
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