Uncle John’s Unsinkable Bathroom Reader

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  THE LONG MARCH

  Participating in these games could be a war of attrition in its own right: Mapping out the battlefield took time, and so did setting up dozens and dozens of miniature soldiers just as they would have been positioned in the real battle. War gamers prided themselves on historical accuracy, and this meant that while the main campaign was being fought across the tabletop, countless other battles raged around it as players bickered over one arcane historical point after another, often brandishing military histories and biographies as they argued. Add to this the fact that a single military campaign might drag on for months, with war gamers meeting every weekend in Gygax’s basement until final victory was achieved, and it’s easy to understand why the hobby was popular with only a limited number of people.

  In Marco Polo’s time, Japan was known to European geographers as Cipango.

  SPELLBOUND

  Just as they had since the invention of Kriegsspiel, gamers were constantly writing new rules for existing games as well as inventing new ones. Gygax was no exception: In 1968 he took four pages of rules that a friend had written for a game set in the Middle Ages called Siege of Bodenberg and expanded them to 16 pages, creating a new game called Chainmail. Each player still had a dozen or more plastic soldiers, but instead of each figure representing up to 20 men as had been standard in other games, Gygax had each figure represent only one soldier.

  Chainmail was an interesting departure from other war games, but after several weekends it started to get boring and attendance at the gaming sessions began to drop off. One afternoon Gygax decided to try something new: He grabbed a plastic dinosaur off a shelf and declared it to be a fire-breathing dragon. Then he took an oversized figure of a Viking warrior and said it was a giant. And then he created a wizard who could throw fireballs and lightning bolts and a “hero” character that had four times the strength of an ordinary character. This fantasy element alienated many of the most orthodox war gamers, but plenty of other people liked it—soon Gygax’s basement wasn’t big enough to hold all the players who wanted to play in his games. He wrote a fantasy supplement to the standard Chainmail rules and published it in 1971.

  NEW(ER) AND IMPROVED

  One of the early players of Chainmail was a 21-year-old University of Minnesota student named Dave Arneson. He and his war-gaming friends began experimenting with Chainmail, keeping what they liked about it and discarding much of the rest. In the process, they created a new game that Arneson named Blackmoor:

  • Armies turn into single characters. Chainmail had been a game of combat, with the soldiers controlled by one “general” attacking some strategic point held by monsters or another player’s soldiers. But Arneson’s players got tired of just tackling one military objective after another, so in Blackmoor he got rid of the large armies and had each player assume the identity of a single character. The players rolled dice to determine their characters’ attributes: strength, wisdom, charisma, etc. Then the characters went on decidedly nonmilitary missions, such as sneaking past monsters to steal their treasure or other valuable items that they could sell on the black market. Again, the players rolled dice during each encounter to determine whether or not the mission was successful.

  • The birth of role-playing. Placing the emphasis on a single character caused players to identify with their characters in a way that they hadn’t when they were commanding legions of troops. They gave the characters names, invented personalities, and even began to imagine themselves in the role. The players became so attached to their characters that they didn’t want them to die, certainly not during a game—not even after it ended.

  • Die hards. Arneson responded by revising the rules of Black-moor to make the characters harder to kill. In Chainmail, a single roll of the dice determined whether a player died in combat. This made sense when there were dozens of soldiers on the board and the action had to be quick, but it didn’t when each player had only one character—and one life. So Arneson took an idea from Ironclads, a Civil War naval game he’d written. In that game, he used “hit points” to determine how much damage a warship received from cannon fire. It took numerous hits to sink a warship, and the stronger its armor, the more hits were needed.

  Arneson applied the same concept to the characters in Black-moor. It would take many successful rolls of the dice to accumulate enough hit points to kill a character; if the character was wearing armor, he was even harder to kill. And since each player had only one character instead of dozens, it was easy to keep track of the hit points.

  • You’ve been promoted. Arneson also allowed characters to advance to higher levels after surviving difficult ordeals. The characters grew in strength, wisdom, and other qualities, just like human beings. When one game ended, they carried their points over to the next game.

  Best-educated U.S. city: Boulder, Colorado. 52.4% of its citizens have a bachelor’s degree.

  In Tororo, Uganda, it thunders about 251 days of the year.

  THE UNDERGROUND

  After a few weeks of playing scenarios in conventional landscapes, Arneson decided to try something different. When his players showed up to play the next session, he told them they were going “underground,” into the dungeon of an old castle. Not only was it an interesting change of pace from the usual outdoor scenario, but Arneson also found that it was easier to draw a finite number of tunnels and rooms than it was to map out an entire countryside. Moving the action to subterranean tunnels also limited the avenues of escape—instead of scattering in every direction in a “crisis,” the players pretty much had to face whatever Arneson threw at them.

  ADDITION…AND SUBTRACTION

  In the process of inserting all of these interesting elements into the game, Arneson also removed many of the annoying elements of traditional war games. Limited numbers of characters and simplified play reduced the setup time to almost nothing and sped up the pace of the action dramatically. Debates over arcane historical points came to an end—how can you argue about the historical accuracy of stealing gold from a troll?

  The role of the game’s host—or “umpire,” to use a word from Kriegsspiel—expanded significantly. He was no longer just a referee responsible for interpreting the rulebook during reenactments of historical battles. The host became the creative master of the game as well, part storyteller, part guide, responsible for designing the dungeon and filling it with monsters and treasures to the limit of his own imagination. He became the Dungeon Master.

  After more than six months of developing Blackmoor, in late 1971 Arneson and some friends took the game to Gary Gygax’s house in Lake Geneva and hosted a game in which the players tried to sneak into Castle Blackmoor to open a gate from inside. Gygax was impressed with Blackmoor and especially liked the dungeon idea—as a kid, he had often played hooky from school to wander the tunnels beneath an abandoned sanatorium overlooking Lake Geneva. He sensed that, with more organization and development, Blackmoor might have commercial potential.

  So how did an obscure fantasy game grow into

  a worldwide phenomenon? Part II of

  the story is on page 477.

  Where did the NFL’s Cleveland Browns get their name? Former coach Paul Brown.

  WEIRD ATTRACTIONS

  Not all museums are stuffy, pretentious marble-floored buildings. There’s a museum for everything—even dummies.

  Attraction: Presidential Pet Museum

  Location: Williamsburg, Virginia

  Details: Most presidential pet-related treasures are in the presidential libraries, but curator Claire McLean managed to get her hands on some curious mementos of the presidents’ pets. For example, she’s got a cowbell worn by President Taft’s pet cow, Pauline, who grazed on the White House lawn Be Sure to See…A bronze statue of Barney, George W. Bush’s Scottish Terrier, and a portrait of Ronald Reagan’s dog Lucky made out of Lucky’s actual hair.

  Attraction: Center for Urologic History

  Location: Linthicum, Maryland

  Deta
ils: Located in the headquarters of the American Urological Association, this museum is dedicated to the history and science of the human bladder, genitals, and other private matters. Among the displays of various medical devices are one exhibit on the history of male sexuality and dysfunction, and another on 1800s medical quackery.

  Be Sure to See…The pineapple-size kidney stone.

  Attraction: Vent Haven, the Ventriloquist Museum

  Location: Fort Mitchell, Kentucky

  Details: In a suburban home outside of Cincinnati, Ohio, lurk hundreds of ventriloquist’s dummies. The house is filled to the rafters with dummies, dummy heads, dummies in costumes, dummies that look like famous people (Adolf Hitler, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan), and dummies with names like “Cecil Wigglenose” and “Tommy Baloney.” There are exhibits on the history of ventriloquism and on famous ventriloquists, including Edgar Bergen and Waylon Flowers.

  Be Sure to See…The “dummy school”—an entire room made to look like a classroom, with dummies filling all but one chair… which remains empty so you can have your picture taken with them.

  Portland, Oregon, is home to Casa Diablo, the world’s first (and probably only) vegan strip club.

  Attraction: Leila’s Hair Museum

  Location: Independence, Missouri

  Details: Leila Cohoon became a hairdresser in 1949 and shortly thereafter started collecting art made from human hair. Originally a room in Cohoon’s cosmetology school, the Hair Museum now occupies a two-room office in a business park. Most of the exhibits come from the Victorian era, when hair was braided into wreaths, framed, and put on the wall as decoration. Cohoon has hundreds of braids and lots of hair art, including jewelry, bookmarks, and buttons, all made out of hair.

  Be Sure to See…Celebrity hair—strands that once adorned the heads of Marilyn Monroe and Abraham Lincoln.

  Attraction: Moon Museum

  Location: The Moon

  Details: According to artist Frosty Myers, astronauts on the 1969 Apollo 12 mission unwittingly took a tiny “Moon Museum” with them to the lunar surface. Myers (with the help of an anonymous Grumman engineer) claims to have secretly put a ¾" by ½" iridium-plated ceramic tablet in a leg of the lunar landing module Intrepid. Etched on the tablet are six miniature drawings by major artists of the day—Myers, John Chamberlain, David Novros, Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, and Andy Warhol. Is it really there? No one knows, because NASA didn’t sanction the project. But the Intrepid is still there, so maybe someday…

  CONE HEAD

  Police in Cullompton, England, were called in October 2007 to help a 3-year-old boy: he’d gotten a traffic cone stuck on his head. His parents said he was trying to imitate his hero, Harry Potter. “We shouldn’t have laughed,” his mother said, “but he looked so comical.” It took police 30 minutes to get the boy’s head free.

  One of Henry VIII’s first acts as king was the execution of tax collectors.

  THE RUNNINGMAN, PT. I

  You know that scene in Forrest Gump when he runs across the United States? A British man decided to do that in real life…except around the world. Turns out it’s a lot harder than it looks in the movies.

  THINKING OUTSIDE THE BOOK

  Robert Garside’s big idea began as a whim. The 28-year-old London University student was halfheartedly studying in the school’s library in 1995 when he came across an edition of Guinness World Records. Flipping through it, Garside noticed records for cycling and even walking around the world, but none for running. Garside liked to run, so he decided then and there that he would be first human to run across every continent. “I just thought it would be cool to set a world record,” he said.

  BORN TO…?

  You’d think that a quest of that magnitude would require extensive planning, but Garside didn’t have that kind of discipline—he took the same casual approach that he’d taken to the rest of his life: Born in Stockport, England, in 1967, he ran away from home at age 17 and then had 80 different jobs over the next decade (including a stint as a cop) before going to college…where he dropped out to start his long run.

  Something else that Garside lacked: long-distance running experience. He figured his record attempt would be like “going for a jog every day and not going back home.” His laid-back attitude would eventually haunt him, but at least he found out Guinness’s requirements to make the attempt official: He must run the length of at least four continents, covering a distance of 18,000 miles; he must cross the equator once and finish at the same longitude from which he began. He had to run from place to place—he could not walk or use any other means of transportation, save for a plane to take him from land mass to land mass, but there was no time limit. And he’d need both visual proof and documented records of his journey.

  So Garside stuffed his small video camera into his backpack along with his passport, visas, maps, a water bottle, and his diary. Then, sporting a brand-new pair of running shoes, he set out from London’s Piccadilly Circus on December 7, 1996, with £20 in his pocket. The plan: Run between 25 and 75 miles a day—more if the terrain was flat—and rely on handouts for food, water, and shelter. The night before he left, he watched Forrest Gump for inspiration.

  Global spending on defense is more than $700 billion Global spending on education is less than $100 billion.

  THE FIRST LEG

  He ran to the English Channel, then crossed into France by boat and ran through Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Slovakia (where he visited his parents), and Poland. He hoped that as his journey progressed, the publicity would increase and he’d land sponsorship deals to pay for meals, accommodations, or, more importantly, airfare to the next continent. But in the early days of the run, Garside relied solely on his charm—he’d spark up conversations with curious onlookers and explain what he was attempting to do… hoping they’d offer up some food, water, or a bed to sleep in. “The gift of gab gets you through,” he later said. (It didn’t hurt that Garside is tall, thin, and handsome, with a friendly smile.) And every 20 minutes, he turned on his video camera to show where he was. Whenever possible, he convinced police and town officials to sign a document confirming he had run (not walked) into their town.

  So what would you think about if you ran the equivalent of two to three marathons every single day through unfamiliar surroundings with no one by your side (most of the time)? “I philosophize while I run,” explained Garside, “taking in the local color and trying to interact with the people.” Every so often a bicyclist or a pretty girl would join him for small stretches. In France, a dog ran by his side for about 20 miles. “It’s like the time-travel show Quantum Leap,” he said, “but instead of jumping, I’m running from one experience to the next.”

  NOT SO FAST

  As Garside left the familiarity of western Europe, the road turned dangerous. He wrote in his diary about being shot at by gypsies in Russia. Then, when reports of war in Afghanistan reached him, he decided the risk was too great and skipped the country altogether. In Pakistan in September 1997, he wrote: “I was robbed, my tent slashed with a knife, and all my contents taken. I have only my clothes on my back and my passport.” But having already run across most of Europe, and now fit enough to feel confident, Garside wasn’t about to give up. So he tried again, this time with a little money (thanks to a few private donations) and a laptop computer so he could post updates on a Web site. Calling himself “The Runningman,” in October 1997, Garside started anew from underneath the arches of India Gate in New Delhi.

  The journey was fraught with peril: A mob in a small Indian town pelted him with rocks, and in another town he was chased by ax-wielding farmers. In March 1998, he ran straight into the harshness of the Tibetan winter. In the Himalayas he met a runner from Spain, who joined him for a stretch—on a few occasions they had to sleep in the snow, but most of the time, people helped them. “A monk I encountered took us back to his monastery,” he wrote, “where we got a bed for the night and feasted on a dinner of roasted barley, roasted sheep’s f
at, and yak tea.” From there, Garside headed alone into China.

  INCARCERATED

  Travel through China was even less hospitable than his path from India. In Huzhou, after evading Chinese police for three months because he didn’t have the proper papers, Garside was arrested and sentenced to 30 days in jail, followed by deportation. Again, Garside used his gift of gab to talk his way out of trouble. After three days of annoying his cell mates by running in place to stay in shape, “I begged to be allowed to finish my run and finally, they gave me one day to get out of the country. I had to cover 158 kilometers (98 miles) in that one day. I ran through the night but I did it.”

  After receiving a donation from a Hong Kong businessman, Garside flew to Japan in late 1998. The Japanese press was very interested in his quest, and he was able to secure more donations after giving interviews. That got him to Australia for the next leg, but in the desolation of the Outback in January 1999, Garside found himself destitute once again. “I arrived in a small town in New South Wales called Violet Town, a guy came out of the pub and said, ‘You’re that mad Pommie bastard I’ve seen on TV who’s running around the world.’ He bought me a beer and introduced me to a wealthy farmer friend, who gave me $1,000 because he was so impressed with what I was doing.”

  Only Beatles song in which no Beatle plays an instrument: “Eleanor Rigby.”

  ACROSS THE ATLANTIC

  In mid-1999, Garside flew to South America. By this point, his run was well publicized and the hits to his Web site kept increasing. “My original idea was just to see the world. But as I was going through with it I realized I could make myself a future. I have created my own sport—and I am the only practitioner. So I have a monopoly on it,” Garside told a reporter in Rio de Janeiro (who bought his dinner and board for the night). And then the runner was off again. In his journal entries, Garside wrote about being threatened at gunpoint in Panama and again just outside of Acapulco—both times he was able to escape by running into heavy traffic. For protection at night, he slept at police stations.