Uncle John’s 24-Karat Gold Bathroom Reader® (50 page)

THE LEGEND OF ZELDA: A LINK TO THE PAST
(1991)

The first two
Legend of Zelda
fantasy games were among the most popular titles for the Nintendo Entertainment System in the late 1980s: Combined, they sold more than 11 million copies. By 1991, Nintendo had successfully launched its next home system, the Super Nintendo and with it, a third
Zelda
title. They used the promise of an Easter egg to promote the already highly anticipated title.
Nintendo Power
magazine held a contest in which the winner would have their name added to a hidden room somewhere in
The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
. Reader Chris Houlihan won the contest, and, sure enough, the programmers obliged. The room is almost impossible to find, though. A series of tricky maneuvers is required to enter it, plus you have to have procured an item called “the Pegasus Boots” during the game. Anyone talented enough to uncover the secret chamber is rewarded with rubies and a message that says, “My name is Chris Houlihan. This is my top-secret room. Keep it between us, okay?”

NBA JAM
(1993)

This was one of the most popular arcade games in the early ’90s due to its state-of-the-art graphics, four-player option, and the chance to play as real NBA stars such as Clyde Drexler and Shaquille O’Neal.
NBA Jam
was played more than four billion times in arcades, which meant somebody was bound to stumble onto some Easter eggs. Hitting certain key combinations or entering specific initials causes the stars on screen to take on the likenesses of members of the games’ programming team, or make the players’ heads incredibly huge. Later updates added even more secrets, like the ability to play as ninja warriors from the
Mortal Kombat
game series.
NBA Jam
’s home version, released in 2003, also had Easter eggs. One code allows gamers to play basketball as either the Beastie Boys or President Bill Clinton.

DOOM II: HELL ON EARTH
(1994)

During the climax of this violent and bloody game—one of the first POV “shoot ’em up” games—players must defeat the severed head of an evil demon. And if they enter the final level in a special, secret mode, the head they fight is that of the game’s programmer, John Romero. But Romero, who designed other video-game classics such as
Quake
and
Wolfenstein 3-D
, didn’t put his head there. One of the game’s other programmers was so tired of dealing with Romero’s allegedly huge ego that he secretly included the demon-head alternative as a cathartic “tribute.” Just before the game went to stores, however, Romero discovered it. Fortunately, he thought it was funny and added a backward recording of his own voice that plays when the Romero head is encountered. Played forward, it says, “To win this game, you must kill me, John Romero.”

GRAND THEFT AUTO
SERIES

This controversial video game series is filled with both violence and Easter eggs. Here are two examples:

• In
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
(2004), determined players can track down Sasquatch in a forest, view risqué statues in an atrium, and enjoy some “hot coffee” (a video-game euphemism for sex) in a hidden level that, once it was discovered, led to an outcry from lawmakers and parental advocacy groups. The secret level started out as an add-on developed by a Dutch hacker and distributed for free via the Internet. It was so popular that the game’s publisher, Rockstar Games, decided to add it to the game for its 2005 re-release. The “secret” became so widely discussed that it helped propel
San Andreas
to sales of more than 17 million units, making it the Sony PlayStation 2’s top seller ever.

• One of the oddest of the series’ secrets can be found in
Grand Theft Auto IV
(2008). Players can hijack a helicopter and fly out to the “Statue of Happiness,” a mock-up of the Statue of Liberty. On a platform attached to the statue is a door with a placard reading “No Hidden Content Through Here.” It’s lying, of course. Inside, there’s an enormous beating heart chained to the wall.

KIDDIE CAR

Henry Ford’s son Edsel received his first Ford when he was 8 years old. He drove himself to the 3rd grade.

Bestselling Hot Wheels vehicle: the Corvette.

THE ZERO MILEPOST

Here’s the story of an unusual historical artifact... and the city that grew up around it
.

H
UMBLE BEGINNINGS
Terminus, Georgia, was never expected to amount to much. In 1837 the Georgia Railroad Company decided to build a depot there and staked out the spot with a stone marker: the Zero Mile Post. The railway’s chief engineer declared the place fit for “one tavern, a blacksmith shop, a grocery store, and nothing else.” He was wrong. Once the depot went up and the trains started coming, Terminus prospered. Within a few years, the town’s merchants and railroad men had turned Terminus into a regional hub. They even gave it a new name: Atlantica-Pacifica, later shortened to...Atlanta.

A few decades later—not long after the city council banned hogs from the streets and okayed gas lamps—along came the Civil War, and the thriving city, with its railway lines, became the perfect target for Union cannons. Remember the depot where Scarlett O’Hara tended wounded Confederate soldiers in
Gone with the Wind
? That was the bull’s eye. In late July 1864, as the Battle of Atlanta began, Sam Luckie, one of only 40 free blacks living in the city, had the bad luck to be standing near the depot. Luckie, who owned the Barber and Bath Salon in the nearby Atlanta Hotel, was leaning against a gas lamp talking with a group of white businessmen when a Union shell struck. Luckie was killed, but the lamp made it through with just a few dings.

REDUCE (TO ASHES), REUSE, RECYCLE

The battle left Atlanta smoldering, but the same force that had jump-started Terminus before the Civil War got the city going again: the railroads. By 1869 a new three-story depot stood at the Zero Mile Post. Banks, hotels, saloons, law offices, and a whiskey distillery soon popped up in the new depot district. By the turn of the 20th century, 15 railroad lines passed through the city, with more than 150 trains arriving every day. Then something even more powerful than a locomotive came along: the automobile.

World’s busiest airport: Atlanta International, serving over 90 million travelers per year.

By the 1920s, the railroad district had become so congested that city planners decided to build viaducts (elevated roads), sending auto traffic up and over the rail lines. Merchants followed, moving their operations upstairs to the new street level and abandoning the former shopfronts one level below. Atlanta’s first city center faded into the past—covered over, and then forgotten. The granite archways, ornate marble floors, cast-iron pilasters, and decorative brickwork of the once-thriving depot district now moldered below ground.

HISTORIC HOT SPOT

As in most American cities after World War II, the 1950s and ’60s brought racial unrest to Atlanta and “white flight” to the suburbs. Urban decay followed. Determined to preserve the city’s history and revitalize its downtown, Atlanta’s Board of Aldermen declared the five-block “city beneath the city” a historic site and joined with private industry to create a downtown hot spot. It took $142 million to bring the district back to life. “We’ve preserved a piece of working history,” said Jack Patterson, one of Underground Atlanta’s original developers. “It’s not a cold museum. It’s full of life, with money changing hands.”

For those who enjoy eyebrow braiding, psychic readings, and As-Seen-on-TV products, Underground Atlanta is the place to go. Some say it’s the city’s most over-hyped tourist trap. Others see beyond the hype to Atlanta’s historic beginnings. The upscale restaurant at the entrance to the district is the city’s oldest building—the 1869 railroad depot. The gas lamp outside the underground’s MARTA light rail station still has the dings in it from the Union shell that killed Sam Luckie. And tucked downstairs on the old depot’s first floor is a Georgia Building Authority office. According to the Historical Commission, “The door is normally locked, so knock (or wave to the lady at the desk) and someone will open it.” Why bother? Because beyond that door stands Atlanta’s oldest artifact, the stone terminus marker for the Western and Atlantic Railroad: the Zero Mile Post.

“No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.”

—
Voltaire

On Arnold Schwarzenegger’s last day as California governor, he received a parking ticket.

ODD ECONOMIC
INDICATORS

Can’t make heads or tails of the Dow or the GNP? Fear not—there are lots of other economic “indicators” that tell us what the economy is doing
.

•
Nice Waiters/Waitresses.
When the economy is down, business in restaurants is slow. Result: The waitstaff isn’t overworked, and the customers are less grumpy because their orders aren’t backed up behind half a dozen other orders. In addition, when jobs are hard to find, waiters and waitress may be less likely to snap at you, even if they are in a bad mood.

•
Gorgeous Waiters/Waitresses.
In cities like New York and Los Angeles, which are centers of fashion and the arts, waiters and waitresses can become better-looking in hard times, as would-be models, actors, and actresses have to take jobs waiting tables when their other, more glamorous gigs dry up.

•
Belly Buttons.
In the 1920s, an economist named George Taylor advanced the theory that women’s hemlines rise along with rising stock prices and fall when the stock market tanks, as an “expression of conservatism.” Now you can add bare midriffs to Taylor’s theory: When the economy is booming, halter tops and other revealing fashions are popular, but when it slows down, women become less willing to bare it all.

•
Playboy
Playmates.
In their groundbreaking 2004 study “
Playboy
Playmate Curves: Changes in Facial and Body Feature Preferences Across Social and Economic Conditions,” Terry Pettijohn and Brian Jungeberg argue that the magazine’s Playmate of the Month selections vary according to the performance of the economy. “When social and economic conditions were difficult, older, heavier, taller
Playboy
Playmates of the Year with larger waists, smaller eyes, larger waist-to-hip ratios, smaller bust-to-waist ratios, and smaller body mass index values were selected.”

•
Hit Songs.
Five years after Pettijohn and Jungeberg wrote their
Playboy
Playmate article, Pettijohn published an analysis of #1 songs on the
Billboard
pop chart from 1955 to 2003. “When social
and economic times were relatively threatening, songs that were longer in duration, more meaningful in content, more comforting, more romantic, and slower were most popular,” he wrote. Also: “Performers with more mature facial features, including smaller eyes, thinner faces, and larger chins, were popular during relatively threatening social and economic conditions.”

Can you spot it? One of the asteroids in the
The Empire Strikes Back
is actually a potato.

•
Cemetery Plots for Sale on eBay and Craigslist.
Like boats, airplanes, vacation homes, and other luxury items, cemetery plots are something you can live without if you must. People buy them when they’re flush with cash; many have to unload them when their money runs out.

•
The Content of Military Recruitment TV Ads.
In good times, when civilian jobs are plentiful, the military has to hustle to meet its recruiting numbers. In such times it runs TV ads that resemble action movies and video games, hoping to lure people into joining. In bad times, when jobs are scarce and the pool of potential recruits increases, the military can afford to be more picky: TV ads will show a more realistic picture of life in the armed forces, to discourage less-qualified candidates from applying.