Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Wonderful World of Odd (17 page)

In 1979 Walter Kellner of Munich, West Germany, entered a story into a writing competition held by the magazine
Das Besteran
. The contest called for unusual—but true—stories, and Kellner wrote about his adventure while piloting a Cessna 421 between the islands of Sicily and Sardinia. During the flight he had experienced engine trouble and was forced to make an emergency water landing near Sardinia, where he was eventually rescued in his life raft. Kellner won the competition, and his story was printed in the magazine. Not long after, the magazine got a letter from an Austrian man accusing Kellner of plagiarism. The man wrote that years earlier
he
had piloted a Cessna 421 from Sicily to Sardinia, had engine trouble, and had to make an emergency landing in Sardinia. The stories were amazingly similar, and more amazing than that was the Austrian man’s name: Walter Kellner.
Das Besteran
checked both stories. Both were true.

A 70-year-old woman crashed her car through the front window of a store in Temple, Texas, in November 2006. The store: Budget Optical of America. The woman had an appointment for an eye exam. (No one was injured.)

On August 20, 1994, a white buffalo was born on the Heider family farm in Janesville, Wisconsin. White buffalo births—simply white-colored; not albino—are considered sacred omens of extremely good fortune by many American Indian nations, and are very rare. The birth at the Heider farm was the first since 1933, and “Miracle,” as she was named, generated thousands of visitors to the Heiders’ farm. The family even converted a corn
field into a parking lot for the visiting throngs (and never charged for admission). Then in 1997
another
white calf was born on the farm. “Miracle Lady” died four days later. Then, on August 25, 2006, a
third
white buffalo was born. And this one, a male named “Chance,” wasn’t even related to the other two. But if the chances for Chance’s birth were long, so was his death: Three months later, on the night of November 26, 2006, Chance was killed by a lightning strike.

A car crashing into a car crash isn’t uncommon; just ask anybody who’s been in a freeway accident. But a car crashing into a
Car Crash
is pretty weird. That’s what happened in July 2005, when a car careened into the Car Crash restaurant in Santiago, Chile, just days after it opened. The restaurant’s owner, Nancy Araya, said she named it that because the intersection where it was located had a reputation for accidents…but she didn’t expect it to work quite so literally. “It is unbelievable,” she said. “The restaurant is now a joke.” The Car Crash was closed for a week to repair the car crash damages.

In October 2006, 18 employees at Arcelor Auto Processing factory in Willenhall, West Midlands, England, decided to form a lottery “syndicate.” They each chipped in £1.50 a week (about $3) for the Friday lotto drawing, buying 18 tickets with different numbers to increase their chances of winning. And of course they had an agreement that any winnings would be shared equally among the group. On the week of November 24, employee Chris Tibbetts, 56, told the group that he wanted out. He thought it was a waste of his £1.50. That week his fellow workers won the equivalent of $10.3 million, with each person’s cut about $570,000. “I’m OK now, but Monday was a really tough day,” Tibbetts later told reporters. “It’s hard, but it’s not the end of the world. Nobody died.”

*       *       *

“I’ve seen aliens, so I had no problem witnessing the birth of my son.”

—
Will Smith

If you know anybody who believes in these wacky theories, please send them our way (we have an invisible bridge we’d like to sell them)
.

T
HEORY:
The government released a video game that was really an experimental mind control device.

DETAILS:
In 1981, a game called Polybius showed up in a few arcades in Portland, Oregon. Unlike the two-dimensional, graphically simple games of the era (Pac-Man and Space Invaders, for example), Polybius featured rotating 3-D images and strobe lights. Many people played this alluring game, yet no one remembers it. Why? The combination of spatial focus and strobe lights caused brain damage. Many players suffered amnesia, insomnia, and nightmares. At the peak of the game’s popularity, arcade owners noticed mysterious men in black suits who came to collect data from Polybius machines. They were from the military—Polybius was being used to test mind control techniques. After a few weeks, Polybius vanished from the arcades forever.

TRUTH:
In 1980, Sinnescholsen, a small German video game maker, created Polybius, a disorienting game that simulated 3-D graphics. But arcade owners weren’t interested: they said it was too new and too weird to be commercially viable. So Sinnescholsen decided to test-market the game in six arcades in Portland, Oregon. The owners were right—the game bombed. But one 13-year-old boy who played the game suffered a seizure from it. Sinnescholsen employees flew to Portland and immediately removed the game from the arcades (explaining the “men in black”). Faced with possible scandal, the company dissolved. The legend probably took off because one of Polybius’s designers was Ed Rottberg, also the creator of Battlezone, a video game used by the U.S. government to train army recruits.

THEORY:
Astronauts have never been back to the moon since the 1969 landing because they were scared away by an alien spacecraft base.

DETAILS:
Plans to inhabit, mine, and colonize the moon were thwarted once Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin visited the lunar
surface. There was more than rocks and dust there: there was a massive moon city and UFO base used by aliens to spy on Earth as well as travel to and from it. Ham radio operators claim to have eavesdropped on Apollo 11’s communications with NASA and report that Armstrong said, “You wouldn’t believe it! I’m telling you there are other spacecraft out there, lined up on the far side of the crater edge. They’re on the Moon watching us!”

TRUTH:
All other “evidence” aside, there’s one major hole in this theory: We haven’t been scared off of the Moon by aliens; in fact, we’ve been back…a lot. From 1969 to 1972, U.S. astronauts visited the Moon six times, all without ET encounters.

THEORY:
A left-wing Food and Drug Administration conspiracy is trying to make people gay by convincing them to eat more soy, which triggers homosexuality.

DETAILS:
While the FDA claims that a diet rich in soy protein reduces the risk of cancer and heart disease, the agency knows the real truth about soy: it’s extremely high in estrogen. This makes soy formula-fed American babies grow up to have sexual development problems. In men, the estrogen-rich soy delays puberty and shrinks the genitals. In women, it speeds up puberty and enlarges the uterus. These malformations, along with the estrogen, “feminize” the brain, making men more likely to become homosexual.

TRUTH:
The theory can be traced back to a column written by author Jim Rutz in 2006. He outlines his case against soy but doesn’t cite any specific research, instead saying “research in 2000” shows soy leads to thyroid problems without saying who did the research, and that “leukemia went up 27 percent in one year,” without saying what year. Hormone imbalances were proven not to have anything to do with sexual orientation in a 1984 Columbia University study. Soy does contain trace elements of estrogen, but not enough to cause sexual deformation. As for the left-wing conspiracy in the FDA, that’s unlikely because the agency’s leadership is appointed by the president, who, since 2000, has been a conservative Republican.

*       *       *

“I don’t wear makeup. I use knives.”

—
Phyllis Diller

The long and storied tradition of the World Chess Championship was nearly brought to a halt by a tiny bathroom and a player who (allegedly) spent too much time in there.

B
ACKGROUND

Few sporting events are more intense than the FIDE World Chess Championship. (FIDE stands for “Fédération Internationale des Échecs,” or the World Chess Federation.) Two chess masters face off in a series of 12 games to determine the world’s best player. Because games can last for many hours, at various times breaks are allowed between moves, during which players often get up and walk around. To keep them from cheating—such as calling an outside party for assistance or secretly using a computer program to determine the next move—video cameras are placed throughout the facility…except in the players’ private bathrooms. In the 2006 championship, held in the town of Elista in Kalmykia, Russia, it turned out that as many eyes were on a private bathroom as there were on the chess table.

The match pitted Russia’s Vladimir Kramnik against the reigning FIDE world champion, Bulgaria’s Veselin Topalov. After four games, the two men were tied with one win and one draw apiece. That’s when things got weird: Topalov’s manager filed a formal protest, accusing Kramnik of taking too many bathroom breaks. The complaint described the breaks as “strange, if not suspicious.” He requested that the appeals committee change the rules, eliminating the private bathrooms and setting up a single—and monitored—common toilet for both players.

The appeals committee agreed, but Kramnik was appalled and insulted by the allegations. His manager issued a statement, demanding that the original rules be adhered to: “The resting room is small and Mr. Kramnik likes to walk and therefore uses the space of the bathroom as well. It should also be mentioned that Mr. Kramnik has to drink a lot of water during the games. Mr. Kramnik will stop playing this match as long as FIDE is not ready
to respect his rights,” the statement threatened, “in this case to use the toilet of his own restroom whenever he wishes to do so.”

Kramnik’s team also insisted that the appeals committee members were unqualified and should be changed. In the meantime, they said, Kramnik would not play again until his demands were met.

When Kramnik showed up the next day for game five, the appeals committee had not been replaced and, even worse, he found a padlock on his bathroom door. Kramnik refused to start the game, and instead sat on the floor in front of the bathroom door waiting for someone to come and remove the padlock. “My dignity does not allow me to stand this situation!” he fumed as he sat. But no one unlocked the door, and Kramnik was charged with a forfeit, giving the lead in the match to Topalov.

The situation became so dire that the FIDE president, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, issued an ultimatum: If the teams could not come to a bathroom agreement within three days, the remainder of the tournament would be cancelled. He added that he had full confidence in the appeals committee and there were no plans to replace it. After a series of tense meetings, Kramnik and Topalov agreed to adhere to the original bathroom rules. The lock was removed. But Kramnik wouldn’t back down on his demand that the committee be replaced, and, as one of the top players in the world, he had considerable clout. Result: A new committee was put in place.

So with the original private bathrooms restored, the match continued…albeit under formal protest from Kramnik’s team, who believed that game five should have been replayed instead of forfeited to Topalov. Kramnik, using the jargon of the appeals committee, said, “My further participation will be subject to the condition to clarify my rights regarding game five at later stage.” If things didn’t go his way, he said, he would sue the FIDE and would “not recognize Mr. Topalov as World Champion under these conditions.”

Meanwhile, Topalov’s team kept on questioning Kramnik’s frequent pit stops, citing “coincidence statistics” that showed that Kramnik’s moves following his bathroom breaks were an 87% match for what a popular chess computer program would advise. Kramnik laughed off the allegation, claiming that Topalov’s “coincidence statistics” in another tournament were even higher.

Kramnik then turned the tables and accused Team Topalov of attempting to plant a device in his private bathroom that would falsely implicate him. Topalov fervently denied Kramnik’s new charges, but both bathroom entrances were now being monitored. Topalov refused to shake hands with Kramnik, as per tradition, before each game.

As the match continued, the hostilities between the two men grew even worse, and FIDE officials found themselves talking more to the press about bathrooms than chess. “This a black eye for the game,” said one. But the game continued—tense even for a chess match. After 12 games, the two players were tied. A “speed chess” tiebreaker was held the next day, and Vladimir Kramnik barely won it, making him the chess champion of the world…even though he sat out one of his games in front of a bathroom door.
Postscript:
A month later, Kramnik defended his title against a computer…and lost. (It was the same computer program that he’d been accused of cheating with in his match against Topalov.)