by Red Green
Yet again we have an invention that is much more than meets the eye. Let’s start with the name: Trivial Pursuit.
Now, we all know that the word trivial means “not important,” “meaningless,” “waste of time.” In any other time in history, that would have been a negative. But not in the ’80s. At that moment, trivial was cool, hip, saucy and a big breath of fresh air. Everything else was important back then—your career, your marriage, your life. The idea that these guys would call their game trivial was a head-turner. Felt good to snub your nose at society and spend some time doing something trivial.
Then you add the word pursuit, and now you’ve gone way over the top. The message is that not only is it okay to do something trivial, but you should actually go out there and pursue trivial things to do. Don’t wait for the meaningless to come to you—get out there and go for it. Carpe inutilis—seize the useless.
And along with this rebellion came validation. All that dumb stuff that had been cluttering your mind for years and absolutely never came up in any conversation now had value. If you were the only guy in the room who knew stuff like the GDP of New Guinea, you were suddenly a genius.
What a fantastic windfall for all of the world’s boring nerds. They were buying Trivial Pursuit in crazy numbers. They’d have Trivial Pursuit parties where there were ten or fifteen minutes of awkward conversation along with bizarre snacks and obscure soft drinks, and then the host would set about destroying his guests in the game. Now that’s what I call fun.
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Balderdash was designed by Canadians Laura Robinson and Paul Toyne. The game came out in 1984. It was sort of the board game version of a parlour game called Fictionary.
You play the game by making up false definitions for words nobody knows, and then trying to get the other players to “pick” your definition as the real one while trying to guess the actual definition yourself. It was a great way to practice lying, and has been recommended to anyone seeking a career in politics or timeshare sales.
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The game has sold over fifteen million copies worldwide. The world has more balderdashers than ever.
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Balderdash came out of a backlash to trivia games. All the people who had bluffed their way through life, pretending to know more than they did, were being regularly humiliated playing Trivial Pursuit. They needed a game that was geared to their strengths. Then along came Balderdash, where bravado and deception were rewarded and knowledge was, at best, of no value. This was the game for the “fake it till you make it” crowd. A game for people in sales or public relations or televangelism or any field where you need to make people feel good.
We played a similar version when I was in school, but it was called “What happened to your homework?”
The truth rarely works. People say they want the truth, but they’re usually way more comfortable with a pleasant, credible lie. That’s because the truth, and facts in general, tend to be disappointing. And when you’re trying to make people feel good, disappointment is rarely gonna get you there.
Telling believable lies is a talent that takes years to perfect. It starts with sharing pieces of information that are factually correct but are missing the key elements that would turn them into bad news. “The oak tree next to your house was struck by lightning and fell to the ground, narrowly missing your garage.” Information omitted: “It nailed your car.”
Once you get that part down, you can gradually start introducing false information, “The oak tree next to your house was struck by lightning and fell to the ground, narrowly missing your garage. I understand the government has created a homeowners’ fund that will award you up to fifty thousand dollars, no questions asked. By the way, I have a great investment opportunity, but the clock is ticking. I suggest you borrow against that subsidy and get in on the ground floor.”
Over time, increase the percentage of the made-up stuff, and one day you will get to the point where virtually everything you say will be totally fabricated and yet have the eerie ring of truth. “Bats can make their own hearts stop beating for up to thirty-seven days.” Wouldn’t everybody enjoy that kind of fun? The inventors of Balderdash certainly thought so. And they were right. But the best part about Balderdash is that it taught us the most important part of being dishonest: credibility. “Lying is easy,” U.S. President Richard Nixon said in 1973. “Getting people to believe the lie is the hard part.”
To see the reigning Possum Lodge King of Balderdash in action, go to the Book of Inventions page at redgreen.com and click on “Balderdash.”
TV CENSORSHIP
Tim Collings
Tim Collings began work on the V-chip technology as a student at St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia in 1990. (Have you noticed how many of these inventors have a connection to Nova Scotia? Don’t know what it means, just wondered if you noticed it.)
After the 1989 mass shooting at École Polytechnique, he decided to try to restrict the kinds of harmful images children were exposed to through television. Tim—a dad himself—saw it as something parents should control, not the government or broadcasters. So with Tim’s gizmo, the parents could decide what types of programming were shown or blocked on their home TV sets.
The unofficial code name for this software was Party Pooper. The way it works is different shows are given an adult rating based on language, violence and/or sexual content, and with a TV equipped with a V-chip, parents can filter out what is shown and what’s not. The V-chip filters can be adjusted using a four-digit password, so Mom and Dad can watch whatever they want after the kids have gone to bed, but the kids still can’t watch whatever they want after the parents go to bed.
Okay, let me get this straight. Collings invented the V-chip so that parents can set the television to shut out whatever is not okay for their kids to watch. The television would now do this. So with this little doodad, the parents could feel even less guilty about not having to actually be around their kids.
When I was a kid, we also had something that decided what was okay for us to see or not see. We called her Mom. And since there was only one radio, and later one TV, in the house, whatever we were listening to or watching, so was she. It is sad to think that televisions and computers are raising our kids now.
I guess it is good that things like V-chips exist so that our new electronic parents at least have some kind of moral compass. If my uncle had a V-chip installed in his brain, that would have cut my twelve-year-old vocabulary in half.
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Naturally, this particular invention takes us into the whole world of censorship and whether any person, even a parent, has the right to restrict what another person, even their kid, is allowed to see. I know the V-chip was designed to stop kids from watching certain shows, but it would also work on adults. If you don’t know the code, you don’t get to watch. So husbands could lock out the Food Network from their wives, and wives could do the same thing to prevent their husbands from watching Speedvision.
I’m not sure this approach even works anymore. Kids today see more X-rated stuff on their iPhones and hear worse language on the school bus than ever gets on television. Maybe the real value of the censorship is that it makes the parents feel better because at least they’re not condoning their kids’ exposure, while it also sends a message to the kids that their parents don’t approve. When I was a kid, that just made me want to see it all the more.
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Local free spirit Skunk Morrison moved the TV censorship initiative in a different direction. He had taken a correspondence course in electronics and had learned a lot from experimenting with the endless stream of used televisions and stereos that he sold from his van.
While visiting his brother-in-law, Skunk became aware of the V-chip that had been set up so that his nephews weren’t allowed to accidentally see any prison programs that featured other members of the family. After sitting through five episodes of The Brady Bunch in a row, Skunk went home and created the X-chip. It had many s
imilarities to the V-chip. It shut out programs and channels, and you needed to enter a code to override those barriers. But the conditions governing those restrictions were quite a bit different.
Doug “Skunk” Morrison, Party Animal and Partly Animal
Skunk set up the X-chip so that only shows that had adult content, nudity, profanity, sexual situations and extreme violence were allowed to be seen. He also added a feature whereby no show could be viewed if it had a main character named Marcia. Even with this elaborate filtering system, Skunk noticed that once in a while a good, clean, family-oriented program would somehow sneak through. He called the local TV station to get them to be more specific in their disclaimers.
Skunk complained that when the message said, “The following program may contain scenes with foul language, nudity and sexual situations,” the word may created an uncomfortable uncertainty. Skunk was not interested in sitting through the whole show and then finding out it didn’t contain any of those things. He wanted them to replace the word may with does or doesn’t.
Ultimately, the TV station stopped taking Skunk’s calls and the X-chip was abandoned. Skunk had never applied for a patent, so he was out of luck when the X-chip resurfaced under the name HBO.
UFO LANDING PAD
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As part of Canada’s centennial celebrations, the world’s first UFO landing pad was constructed in St. Paul, Alberta, in 1967. I guess the town council was assuming the aliens speak English and are into geography, because the site features a map of Canada as well as a sign reading, “The area under the world’s first UFO landing pad was designated international by the Town of St. Paul as a symbol of our faith that mankind will maintain the outer universe free from national wars and strife. That future travel in space will be safe for all intergalactic beings. All visitors from earth or otherwise are welcome to this territory and to the Town of St. Paul.”
If there is ever a War of the Worlds, we can never blame it on the good people of St. Paul.
Okay, there’s a lot to think about here. It’s one thing to reserve one of the larger Walmart parking spaces for UFOs only. It’s a much bigger thing to dedicate a piece of property in a prime location and then cough up enough money to build a landing platform that would be functional and also attractive to the eye for the literally tens of tourists that might ultimately come to look at it. It seems like there would be so many unanswered questions with a project like this.
Aside from the obvious—Why?—there’s the amount of guesswork that has to go into the design. The U in UFO stands for “unidentified” which is a fancy way to say “unknown,” and there are plenty of those. What are they made of? How big are they? How heavy are they? Just because nobody sane or sober has ever seen one, it doesn’t mean they’re small. How big and strong does the landing pad have to be? How did anyone talk the town council into going along with this?
Let’s look at it from the aliens’ point of view. If they do exist and have the ability to visit other solar systems, out of the infinite universe of places to go to, what are the odds that they’d pick St. Paul, Alberta? Not that there’s anything wrong with St. Paul, Alberta, but I was thinking they might want to visit Paris or Rome or London or New York before they dropped into the Calgary Stampede.
At first glance, you might think this means there are a whole bunch of people in Alberta who believe in UFOs. I think it’s just the opposite. I don’t think they believe in UFOs at all. If they did, they’d have used the money to monitor intergalactic activity so they could see a UFO coming and direct it to Saskatchewan.
Even if they went as far as building a landing pad, if they were serious, they’d have to man it 24/7. Which they didn’t, ’cause they’re not. No, my friends, this baby is just a tourist attraction. A fun way to put St. Paul on the map. I just hope that if UFOs ever do show up, they don’t take offence at this little joke and blast us all off to Zorgon.
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Naturally, this brings me to the bigger question of whether or not there is life on other planets. Scientists and astronomers have speculated for years that when you have an infinite universe with a limitless number of planets, that it is mathematically impossible for there not to be life on at least one other planet and probably on many.
That’s because of what they call “probability.” Probability is the ratio between how many of something you’re looking for and how many there are. If you have three cards face down on the table and one of them is the ace of spades, you have a one-in-three chance of picking the ace of spades. But we all knew that the ace of spades was one of the three.
Not so with extraterrestrial life. The scientists base their probability on the endless supply of planets, not on knowing for sure there is life out there. So I say they’re wrong. I say there is no other life form in any galaxy anywhere. I know this is a huge blow to all bad sciencefiction movies. And there’ve been a few. But the fact that we haven’t found life, or even signs of life, encourages me to say there isn’t any.
As of nine o’clock this morning, there were 171,476 words in the English language. Mathematicians would tell you that means there’s a one-in-171,476 chance that I’m going to say any of those words. Not true. I am not going to say the word phlegm. Ever. I just wrote it, but I didn’t say it. And the fact that I’ve never said it doesn’t make me more likely to say it. For the same reason there’s no life on Pluto. Not even fleas.
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I’m also questioning the million or so assumptions we’ve made to get this far. Let’s start with the concept of flying saucers. Where did that come from? Maybe H.G. Wells thought of it after a domestic dispute. Maybe it comes from people looking at stars and thinking they kind of look like saucers. Which they don’t. And yet the flying saucer is the supposed airship of choice from galaxies far, far away. They didn’t build a runway in St. Paul, they built a pad. They’re not expecting the spacemen to arrive in a 747. They’re talkin’ flying saucer.
Well, I don’t see that happening, and here’s why. There is no gravity in space. Because of that, there is no air. Because of that, there is no air pressure or resistance. Because of that, there is no lift and no friction. You could strap a jet engine to a Winnebago and it would glide through space like a javelin.
My point is that, in space, a flying saucer is as good a shape as any. But here on earth, we have gravity and air pressure and air resistance and since, at least as of this writing, St. Paul, Alberta, is still part of earth, it will have all three of those elements.
This is gonna make problems for a flying saucer. It did fine hurtling through space, but the hurtling phase will now be over and the hurting stage will now begin. That’s because it will now be flying through air. And probably not very well. Because to fly through air for longer than ten seconds or so, you need to have lift.
Lift is what overcomes the pull of gravity. The normal way to create lift is with a wing (or see “Wonderbra,” this page). Our space shuttles have wings specifically for this purpose. A wing creates lift by having the top surface of the wing curved and longer than the bottom surface.
Because of that, the air that goes over the top gets deflected vertically, which creates a pocket of low pressure over the wing. A bit of a vacuum. But the bottom surface of the wing is flat, so the air pressure remains constant. The difference between those air pressures causes the wing, and the plane, to be pulled up by the pocket of low pressure. That’s lift. Now look at the design of a flying saucer.
The upper and lower surfaces are the same size and shape. Ain’t no lift happening there. So once the flying saucer enters the earth’s atmosphere, the combination of air resistance and gravity would give it a flight pattern like this.
The vertical dive section at the end will probably be around five miles long, which, based on gravitational acceleration of thirty-two feet per second per second, would have it hitting the earth at around 1,200 miles an hour. I’m not sure the St. Paul landing pad could handle that. On the bright side, they’d have the deep
est oil well in Alberta.
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In one of our very first shows, the guys at the Lodge saw a UFO. To watch it, go to the Book of Inventions page at redgreen.com and click on “UFO.”
Pictured opposite is the guy who came up with the greatest invention in the world of all time ever. Oh sure, it had a modest beginning. It was a one-trick pony that needed networks of wires and switches and people to make it work. But over the years it showed itself to be such a necessary part of everyday life that 150 years after it was invented, it is not only still around but has also absorbed all of the jobs of every one of the other candidates I already listed in this book.
Today it’s a calendar, a clock, a camera, a laptop, a video game, a flashlight, a remote control, a radio and a TV. And more things than that. And here’s the best part: I’ve got one in my pocket. It’s called a phone.
Thank Alexander Graham Bell—and chalk another big one up for Canada.
RATING: We have a winner!
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UPHOLSTERY COUTURE
Eleanor Gauthier, Woman at Large
Although she had no formal training in dress design, Eleanor Gauthier decided to go into the world of fashion in the hopes of being able to make attractive formalwear for the fuller-figured woman.
Eleanor had discovered from personal experience that the flimsier materials, such as chiffon and silk, did not have the structural integrity to keep all body parts covered when doing many of the more popular modern dances. Eleanor had worn such dresses many times, and there had been a fair amount of fallout. While only getting one or two wearings out of any outfit, Eleanor noticed that her parents had never needed to have their couch recovered in the fifty years they’d owned it.