The truth was more tragic: Egbert was struggling with depression and drug addiction, and he had gone into the tunnels to kill himself with an overdose of sleeping pills. When his attempt failed, he left the tunnels and hid out at a friend’s apartment for about a month before letting the police know he was OK.
COULD IT BE…SATAN?
Egbert’s disappearance had nothing to do with Dungeons & Dragons, but no one knew this until he reappeared. During the weeks he was missing, his story provided journalists with a tantalizing hook into the game fad that was sweeping the country. Religious groups had warned from the start that any game that featured as many demons and magic spells as this one did had to be the work of the devil, and now with Egbert’s disappearance their claims found a national audience.
New Hampshire has an official state Seagull Harasser. His job is to drive gulls away from nesting terns.
YOU CAN’T BE SERIOUS
Gygax was dumbfounded by their accusations. The spells and demons in the game were as imaginary as the gold and treasure. And to demonstrate the absurdity of his critics’ claims, Gygax invited them to try to deposit the loot in their bank accounts.
As silly as the controversy was, it dragged on year after year. In 1982 Egbert’s story was dramatized in a fictionalized TV-movie called Mazes and Monsters, starring 26-year-old Tom Hanks. In 1983 a woman who blamed her son’s suicide on a curse he “received” while playing the game formed an organization called Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons (B.A.D.D.) and spent more than a decade leading a moral crusade against the game. Even 60 Minutes got in on the act, airing a story in 1985 that questioned whether the game had driven some players to suicide.
But if Gygax worried about the impact of the controversy on the game’s sales and popularity, he needn’t have. The media attention actually boosted sales: Instead of doubling in 1979 as they’d forecast, sales quadrupled to more than $16 million and kept right on growing after that, finally peaking at $29 million in 1985.
THE REAL WORLD BUTTS IN
Ironically, though they had invented the first modern role-playing game, by the mid-1980s both Gygax’s and Arneson’s own roles had ended. They were no longer involved with TSR and did not participate in the further development of their game.
Arneson, who never did join TSR, was the first to go. He ended his creative contributions to the game in 1976 and three years later filed the first of five lawsuits against Gygax and TSR, alleging that he’d been shortchanged on both creative credit and royalties. The suits were eventually settled out of court, but his relationship with Gygax never fully healed. (Today Arneson is a partner in a gaming company called Zeitgeist Games, which publishes a series of his games that are playable using Dungeons & Dragons rules. He taught game design for several years at Florida’s Full Sail University before retiring in 2008.)
When Gygax’s business partner and childhood friend Don Kaye died suddenly in 1975, Gygax had to bring in outside investors to raise the money he needed to buy out Kaye’s widow. In the process, his stake in the company dropped to 35%; then in 1979 the other investors seized effective control of the company, relegating Gygax to a figurehead position where he had very little say over the running of the company. By 1985, the year that revenues peaked at $29 million, the company had become so bloated and mismanaged that it was actually losing about $3 million a year. That year, after Gygax lost a second power struggle, he sold his shares in TSR and severed all ties with the company.
By 1997 TSR was more than $30 million in debt and close to collapse. That year the company was acquired by Wizards of the Coast, makers of the best-selling card game Magic: The Gathering. (Today Wizards of the Coast is owned by Hasbro.)
After ending his involvement with Dungeons & Dragons, Gygax dabbled in fantasy fiction writing and other projects. He even developed another role-playing game, called Lejendary Adventure, which went on sale in 1999. Although the game developed a loyal following, it never approached the popularity of Dungeons & Dragons. After years of declining health, Gygax died in 2008 at the age of 69.
STILL ROLLING ALONG
More than 30 years after it was introduced, Dungeons & Dragons remains the best-selling pen-and-paper, or “tabletop,” role playing game of all time. An estimated six million people were still playing the game in 2007, and that number was expected to grow following the release of the fourth edition of the game in the summer of 2008.
Drawing inspiration from the online role-playing games that it inspired, the fourth edition includes an online 3D “tabletop,” complete with Internet voice chat and even a social networking site similar to MySpace. These features are intended to make it easier for gamers who’ve spread far and wide over the past 30 years to gather together and play the game with the same old friends, even if only in cyberspace.
FINAL IRONY
You might think that Gygax was inspired by The Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien’s enormously poplular fantasy novels. While the books no doubt helped the success of Dungeons & Dragons, Gygax hated them. “I’d like to throttle that Frodo,” he once said.
Q: What are red-faced shags, horned screamers, and beach thick-knees? A: Species of birds.
BEWARE! TOILET ATTACK!
Proving that even life’s most hallowed place can be dangerous.
HOME INVASION. In February 2008 in Frankenmuth, Michigan, the toilets in 20 homes—all on the same block—started spitting up water…and sometimes more than water. The splash-backs were caused by the city public works department, which was cleaning out the main sewer line. Usually, a little gurgling is expected when a high-pressure hose is used to flush out the pipes, but for some unknown reason, the toilets in the affected homes erupted like volcanos—in a few cases making a mess all over the walls and ceiling. The city apologized and promised that in the future, instead of announcing the pipe-flushing in the newspaper, they’ll put flyers on people’s doors warning them to keep their toilet lids securely closed for the next few days.
DETHRONED. A Christchurch, New Zealand, man (he refused to give his name because he was trying to sell his house) was knocked off of his toilet when his house was hit by a runaway SUV. The vehicle had been parked next door by a construction worker who’d applied the emergency brake only halfway. The brake slipped and the truck rolled backward down a hill and bonked into the man’s house (it caused only minor damage). When asked by reporters how he thought the construction worker felt, the homeowner said, “What about me? I got knocked off the toilet! I got a hell of a fright!”
WATCH FOR FALLING PORTA-POTTIES. Morning commuters on a highway near Denver, Colorado, got the scare of a lifetime when a portable toilet tumbled off of a flatbed truck in 2007. The first car swerved around the toilet but hit a pickup truck, which then flipped over a few times onto the grass next to the highway. Then a tractor trailer roared through and ran over the toilet. More cars approached the melee and slammed on their brakes, creating even more confusion. In all, eight vehicles were involved in the accident and traffic was backed up for hours. No serious injuries were reported, but the Porta-Potti was a total loss.
Women metabolize caffeine about 25% faster than men do.
Q&A: ASK THE EXPERTS
Everyone’s got a question they’d like answered, like, “Why is the sky blue?” Here are a few of those questions, with answers provided by the nation’s leading trivia experts.
TRY TO CONTAIN YOUR EXCITEMENT
Q: Why is milk sold in rectangular containers, while sodas are sold in round ones?
A: “Rectangular containers use shelf space more economically than cylindrical ones. So why do soft drink producers stick with round? One reason is that because soft drinks are often consumed directly from the container, the extra cost is justified because they fit more comfortably in the hand.” But there’s more: “The shelf space that recatangular milk containers save is more valuable than it is for soda containers. Most soft drinks in supermarkets are stored on open shelves, which are cheap and have no operating costs. Mi
lk is stored in refrigerated cabinets, which are both expensive to purchase and costly to operate. Shelf space thus comes at a premium, and hence the added benefit of packaging milk in rectangular containers.” (From The Economic Naturalist, by Robert H. Frank)
YOU SNOOZE, YOU LOSE
Q: Why is the snooze on most alarm clocks set to go off after nine minutes instead of 10?
A: “By setting the snooze time to nine minutes, the alarm clock only needs to watch the last digit of the time. So, if you hit the snooze at 6:45, the alarm goes off again when the last digit equals 4. They couldn’t make it 10 minutes, otherwise the alarm would go off right away, or it would take more circuitry. Historically speaking, there’s another element to the answer. Clock experts say when snooze alarms were invented, the gears in alarm clocks were standardized. The snooze gear was introduced into the existing mix and its teeth had to mesh with the other gears’ teeth. The engineers had to choose between a gear that made the snooze period either 9+ minutes or 10+ minutes. They figured that ‘less than 10 minutes’ seemed more punctual and marketable than sending people back to dreamland for ‘more than 10 minutes.’ The public became accustomed to this, and clock makers have generally stuck with it.” (From Jewish World Review, by Jeff Elder)
Sounds fishy: In the U.S., anchovies always rank last on the list of favorite pizza toppings.
EXTRA-CRUNCHY PEANUT BUTTER
Q: Do we eat insects without knowing it?
A: “We certainly do. It is impossible to totally exclude insects while a food is grown, harvested, and shipped, so most of the foods we eat do contain small quantities of insects or insect fragments. It might be possible to produce, say, a bottle of ketchup that contains not even one insect fragment, but it would take a huge effort that could raise the price to hundreds of dollars. Recognizing this problem, the FDA sets a maximum legal limit on how many insect parts can be contained in a food that is to be sold. For example, peanut butter is allowed to contain up to 30 insect fragments per 100 grams.” (From The Handy Bug Answer Book, by Dr. Gilbert Waldbauer)
WHERE DID MY CHILDHOOD GO?
Q: Why can’t we remember anything that happened to us when we were babies or toddlers?
A: “Our memories of past experiences are organized in our brain as narratives. Kids younger than about three don’t yet know narrative conventions. They can’t tell a story. They don’t know how to set the scene. They don’t understand time, place, character, or plot. In other words, our memories start at the age when we realize that what we’re all trying to do in life is find the moral of the story.” (From Why Things Are & Why Things Aren’t, by Joel Achenbach)
A RASH DECISION
Factory worker Robert Preston was fired from Phelps Dodge Copper Products in Connecticut and not given a reason, so he sued the company and won nearly $800,000 in damages. But a few weeks later, the judge made Preston pay back the money after the real reason for his termination was discovered. He’d contracted poison ivy and then used a toilet seat at work, which spread the rash to several other employees…including the factory manager.
Q: What brand of toothbrush was carried aboard the Apollo 11 mission to the Moon? A: Oral-B.
THE PIANO MAN
Everybody loves a good mystery. Like the time Uncle John went to the movies and left Porter the Wonder Dog home alone. When he returned, someone had eaten three bags of dog food off the kitchen counter. Who did it? (It’s a mystery!)
WASHED ASHORE
On April 7, 2005, police in Sheerness, a coastal town in southeast England, noticed a man wandering the streets. Confused and disoriented, he was wearing a suit and tie and was soaking wet from head to toe. It hadn’t been raining, so the police assumed he’d been in the ocean and may have come in from a boat. But he had no ID and no travel papers. Even the tags had been cut out of his clothes. Further complicating matters, the man couldn’t—or wouldn’t—speak.
The police took him to nearby Medway Maritime Hospital. Doctors, nurses, and social workers spent hours gently trying to persuade the man to talk. He remained completely silent, entirely unresponsive. One doctor was curious if he might have some kind of neurological or other medical condition that prevented him from speaking. So he gave the man a pen and some paper, hoping he’d write down anything—his name or any information that could be used to identify him and notify his family.
The silent man suddenly sprang to life. He grabbed the pen and paper, but he didn’t write anything. Instead, he drew an elaborate, detailed sketch of a grand piano. Doctors took him to the hospital chapel, which had a piano. The man sat down and played for more than four hours, nonstop. He played all kinds of music, mostly pieces by Tchaikovsky, as well as other classical music and even a few Beatles songs. And he played them very well. In fact, he played better than that—he played exquisitely, at the level of a virtuoso concert pianist.
So who was he?
New York City had a fleet of electric taxis in 1897.
ENTER THE MEN IN WHITE COATS
The man, whom medical officials called “Mr. X,” was admitted to the high-security mental health wing of the West Kent NHS and Social Care Trust. In addition to traditional forms of therapy, doctors tried music therapy and art therapy to get the man to communicate, but to little avail, as therapy requires some kind of interaction. Mr. X barely even ate or drank. Aside from his frequent trips to the piano, the man lived completely inside his own head, with a couple of exceptions. He once drew the Swedish flag in an art therapy session. Another time, he pointed to Oslo, Norway, on a map. A Norwegian interpreter was called in, but could elicit no response from Mr. X.
In an attempt to find his relatives, Mr. X’s picture was posted on England’s National Missing Persons Helpline Web site. The mysterious circumstances of the case quickly made it front-page news all across Europe. (The media quickly gave Mr. X a new nickname: “the Piano Man.”) By mid-May, the Helpline had received more than 500 phone calls and 100 e-mails, which generated 300 “legitimate” leads as to the Piano Man’s true identity.
IS YOUR PIANIST MISSING?
Possibilities as to the Piano Man’s identities came in from all over the world. Some of the more promising leads:
• A street mime from Rome told Italian police that he recognized the Piano Man as a French street performer named Steven Villa Masson. Reporters from the British newspaper the Independent found Masson at his home in Paris, so he wasn’t the Piano Man.
• An Italian TV news show uncovered footage of a 2000 music festival that featured a concert pianist who bore a strong resemblance to the Piano Man. His facial structure was similar, and festival participants recalled that he didn’t talk much. He also was tracked down and ruled out. He wasn’t the Piano Man, either.
• Klaudius Kryspin, a Czech drummer, identified the Piano Man as Tomas Strnad, with whom he had played in a band called Ropotamo in the 1980s. He hadn’t seen Strnad since 1996, but when he saw the picture in the newspapers, he said, “I knew it was Tomas.” Michael Kocab, the band’s lead singer, backed up Kryspin’s assertion that the Piano Man looked exactly like Strnad, but it turned out that Kocab had seen the real Strnad on April 10 in Prague, three days after the Piano Man had showed up in England, so he couldn’t have been the Piano Man.
• Susanne Schlippe Steffensen, a Danish politician, told reporters that the Piano Man was her husband, whom she hadn’t seen since February when he went to Algeria to visit his family. Steffenson thought he must have wound up in England after a fight with his mother. She went to the West Kent Trust to meet her “husband,” but it wasn’t him.
• Several Norwegian college students came forward to identify the Piano Man as an Irish exchange student they’d once known. Norwegian newspapers were able to quickly locate the real exchange student. He wasn’t the Piano Man.
• Orchestras across Europe were contacted to see if any of them was missing a pianist. Nobody was.
A diamond heated to 1,400°F will completely vaporize. Not even ashes will remain.
SING US A SONG, PIANO MAN
By August 2005, no leads had panned out and the Piano Man still wasn’t speaking, although he was beginning to show signs of having a better rapport with caregivers—for one thing, he was eating and drinking regularly. His social worker Michael Camp told reporters that it was a possibility that they might never learn the man’s identity. “If nobody can name this guy, then I don’t see how we can possibly find out,” he said.
Camp also said that while doctors initially thought the Piano Man must have suffered a highly traumatic event and was in the throes of post-traumatic stress disorder, they were now beginning to think that his extremely withdrawn nature but spectacular piano skill suggested that he must be autistic.
GRAZING IN THE GRASSL
Then, on August 21, just a couple of weeks later, the Piano Man suddenly snapped out of it. According to his doctors at the West Kent Trust (who could reveal only a little information because of doctor-patient confidentiality), he suddenly remembered his name and that he was German. His identity was confirmed with the German embassy, which issued the Piano Man a replacement passport and flew him home.
The milk seen in TV commercials is usually a mixture of white paint and turpentine.
Three days later, the Piano Man’s name was revealed to the public as Andreas Grassl, a 20-year-old student from a farming family in Prosdorf, Germany. How had he wound up in England? In March 2005, Grassl had been working, ironically, as a caregiver in a mental hospital in Saarbrücken, Germany, when he decided to quit his job, move to Paris, and enroll in school there. Grassl called his parents in Prosdorf to let them know he was going to France. After not hearing from him for weeks, they reported him missing to German officials, who told the Grassls there wasn’t much they could do—their son was last seen in another country, and he was an adult.
Uncle John’s Unsinkable Bathroom Reader Page 55