Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Wonderful World of Odd (33 page)

The brothers also figured that if they still enjoyed playing the game, other adults would, too. They created an organization called the World RPS Society and put up a Web site. By 2002 they were ready to host their first world championship in Toronto. First prize: $800 and an XBox. Today the grand prize has grown to $10,000, and the tournament’s success has led to the formation of the rival USA Rock Paper Scissors League, sponsored by Bud Light. It holds its $50,000 annual championship in Las Vegas. Dave McGill, a 30-year-old bartender from Omaha, won the top prize in 2006.

The experts differ on the best strategy for winning:

1. Psychology.
One school of thought says you should try to read your opponent, guess which symbol they’re going to throw, and respond with the symbol that will beat it. Rock is considered the most aggressive symbol, so if you detect signs of aggression, throw paper to beat their rock. Paper is passive, so throw scissors if your opponent appears weak…and hope they aren’t just faking you out. If they look neither aggressive nor passive, throw rock to beat their scissors. Playing several rounds? Use your opponent’s past throws to predict what their future throws will be, and respond accordingly. If they throw lots of rocks, throw lots of paper, etc.

2. Runs.
Another school of thought says that you should ignore psychology entirely by selecting one or more runs or “gambits” of three throws each (paper, scissors, paper, for example; or scissors, scissors, rock) and stick to them no matter what your opponent does. By choosing throws at random, you thwart your opponent’s attempts to read your psychology. Some of the most popular runs even have names: Paper Dolls (paper, scissors, scissors); Avalanche (rock, rock, rock); and Bureaucrat (paper, paper, paper).

In the Art World.
In 2005 a wealthy Japanese businessman named Takashi Hashiyama decided to auction off four of his company’s most valuable pieces of art: paintings by Pablo Picasso, Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, and a fourth artist named Alfred Sisley.
But when he couldn’t decide between the rival Christie’s and Sotheby’s auction houses, he invited both firms to play a game of Rochambeau to decide the winner. Sotheby’s picked paper…and lost to Christie’s scissors.

Sotheby’s says it didn’t have a strategy and just picked a symbol at random. Christie’s turned for advice to Flora and Alice Maclean, the twin 11-year-old daughters of Nicholas Maclean, head of the modern art department. They suggested scissors. “Everybody knows you start with scissors,” Alice explained to an interviewer. Christie’s auctioned the paintings for $17.8 million and pocketed several million dollars in fees from the sales (no word on whether Flora and Alice got a share of the loot).

The Legal World.
When two opposing lawyers couldn’t agree on the location for a witness’s testimony to be taken, Florida judge Gregory Pressnell issued a court order instructing that the lawyers settle the matter by playing a round of Rock, Paper, Scissors. So who won? Nobody—after Judge Pressnell’s order made international headlines, the lawyers gave in and settled the dispute themselves.

The Natural World.
In 1996 a California biologist named Barry Sinervo published a study claiming that the mating habits of the side-blotched lizard (
Uta stansburiana
) demonstrate a pattern similar to that seen in Rock, Paper, Scissors, according to whether the male lizard has an orange, blue, or yellow throat:

• Orange-throated males are the largest and most aggressive lizards; they easily dominated the blue-throated lizards when competing for mates. (Orange beats blue.)

• Similarly, blue-throated males are larger than the yellow-throated males and had no trouble fending them off. (Blue beats yellow.)

• The yellow-throated males most closely resemble the females of the species. While the aggressive orange-throated males are fighting each other for mates, the yellow-throated males are able to slip in among the females and mate with them without being noticed. (Yellow beats orange.) They are unable to do this with the mates of the blue-throated males, because the blue-throated males form stronger bonds with their mates than the orange-throated males do, and can spot the yellow-throated males among the females.

Fly the friendly skies—in complete and utter horror after you read this.

E
NGINE SCHMENGINE

In 2005, a Los Angeles air traffic controller watched as one engine on a British Airways 747 that was taking off started on fire. “It appears you have flames coming out of your number two engine,” the tower radioed, and the pilot responded, “We’re shutting it down”—meaning the engine. Then what did he do? He continued flying, reporting his plan to “get as far as we can” toward his destination—London, England, 11 hours away. The plane, which was carrying 351 passengers, started to run out of fuel and made an emergency landing in Manchester. Officials said the pilot acted within Civil Aviation Authority guidelines. (A week later, the same plane lost an engine during a 14-hour flight from Singapore to London. That flight also carried on.)

Passengers aboard an American Airlines flight from Washington, D.C., in 2006 became alarmed when they smelled burning matches in the cabin. They alerted crew members and the plane made a quick emergency landing in Nashville. The plane was searched —and sure enough, burnt matches were found near the seat of a female passenger. When questioned by FBI officers, the woman admitted that she had indeed struck the matches. Why? To cover the smell of her farts. She was eventually released from custody and told that she would never again be allowed on an American Airlines flight.

Terry and Susan Smith of Blackburn, England, were about to take off from Manchester Airport to their new home in Lanzarote, Spain. As the plane started down the runway, they looked out the window…and saw their spotted spaniel racing down the runway alongside the plane. “We were in our seats ready for takeoff and looking forward to our new life,” said retired truck driver Terry, “when we suddenly saw Poppy on the runway.” They screamed for
the plane to stop, and spent the next hour attempting to catch and calm the terrified dog. Poppy had apparently chewed her way out of her travel crate before the hatch closed. The Smiths, including Poppy, took a later flight (at a cost of about $800).

The 189 passengers seated on a plane at Doncaster Robin Hood Airport in Sheffield, England, in December 2006 were told by the captain that he had dropped his cell phone somewhere in the cockpit. And that they couldn’t take off until he found it. Why? Because it was on and, as everyone knows, you have to turn off your cell phone before takeoff. For the next 15 minutes he gave them regular updates, but he still couldn’t find the phone. Then he called the ground crew to come in to dismantle the cockpit floor…and they still couldn’t find it. After an hour the passengers had to return to the terminal. “We just couldn’t believe our ears,” one told the
Sun
. “We thought we’d heard every excuse in the book for delays but this one took the biscuit.” They finally left—four hours later—on another plane (with another pilot).

A pilot for Sriwijaya Air in Indonesia successfully guided a 737 and its 100 passengers to a landing at Jakarta’s Sukarno-Hatta International Airport and then, with the plane still taxiing toward the terminal, the pilot died. Captain Sutikno, 54, had suffered a heart attack. The National Committee for Transport Safety launched an inquiry to investigate the incident, though the airline reported that Sutikno had no history of heart disease.

*       *       *

In 2006, writer David Sklansky, an outspoken atheist, made a public challenge: he’d give any practicing Christian who could score higher than him on the SAT test a prize of $50,000. Within a day, someone accepted the challenge: 74-time
Jeopardy
champion (and devout Mormon) Ken Jennings.

Bibliourophobia
: The fear of not having something to read in the bathroom. (Okay, we made that one up. But the rest of these are real, documented phobias.)

Peladophobia:
Fear of baldness

Alektorophobia:
Fear of chickens

Lutraphobia:
Fear of otters

Ephebiphobia:
Fear of teenagers

Amathophobia:
Fear of dust

Zemmiphobia:
Fear of mole rats

Arachibutyrophobia:
Fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of the mouth

Asymmetriphobia:
Fear of asymmetry

Aulophobia:
Fear of flutes

Chromophobia:
Fear of colors

Euphobia:
Fear of hearing good news

Cibophobia:
Fear of food

Automatonophobia:
Fear of ventriloquist’s dummies

Coprophobia:
Fear of poop

Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia:
Fear of the number 666

Consecotaleophobia:
Fear of chopsticks

Xylophobia:
Fear of wooden objects

Dextrophobia:
Fear of things touching the right side of your body

Cherophobia:
Fear of happiness

Agyrophobia:
Fear of crossing the street

Anthrophobia:
Fear of flowers

Melophobia:
Fear of music

Chronophobia:
Fear of time

Papaphobia:
Fear of the Pope

Alliumphobia:
Fear of garlic

Walloonphobia:
Fear of the Walloons (an ethnic group in Belgium)

Phobophobia:
Fear of phobias

Geniophobia:
Fear of chins

Logophobia:
Fear of words

Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia:
Fear of long words

A few years ago we discovered the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. The object: to compose the worst opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels. The competition was created in the early 1980s by a literary professor named Scott Rice. Here are some of our favorite entries from the last few years.

B
UT FIRST…

The sentence that started it all, from the 1830 novel
Paul Clifford
by English author Edward George Bulwer-Lytton:

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents—except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.

Now settle in for some modern-day longwindedness…

• It was a dark
and stormy night—actually not all that dark, but more dusky or maybe cloudy, and to say “stormy” may be overstating things a bit, although the sidewalks were still wettish and smelled of ozone, and, truth be told, characterizing the time as night is a stretch as it was more in the late, late afternoon because I think Oprah was still on.

—
Gregory Snider, MD, Lexington, KY, 2004 runner-up

• Jack planted the magic beans
and in one night a giant beanstalk grew all the way from the earth up to the clouds—which sounds like a lie, but it can be done with genetic engineering, and although a few people are against eating gene-engineered foods like those beans it’s a high-paying career to think about for when you grow up.

—
Frances Grimble, San Francisco, CA, 2004 Children’s Lit winner

• On reflection,
Angela perceived that her relationship with Tom had always been rocky, not quite a roller-coaster ride but more like when the toilet-paper roll gets a little squashed so it hangs crooked and every time you pull some off you can hear the rest going bumpity-bumpity in its holder until you go nuts and push it
back into shape, a degree of annoyance that Angela had now almost attained.

—
Rephah Berg, Oakland, CA, 2002 winner

A few of our BRI writers decided to try their hand at a horrible sentence.

•
The weary foot soldier
peered out from his squalid foxhole and saw them: a plethora of attacking aliens advancing toward him—or maybe it was a “myriad” of aliens, he thought, pondering the quantitative value of plethoras versus myriads, to and fro, until, sadly, he was instantly vaporized by what his fellow soldiers (who’d barely escaped themselves) would later describe as “a sh*tload of aliens.”