Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Wonderful World of Odd (41 page)

Getting the police department to sign off on the game was one thing; winning the approval of New York mayor Michael Bloom berg was another. “Aliquo could probably use some psychiatric help,” Bloomberg said when he learned about the game. “If he calls one of the public hospitals, we’ll try to arrange that. It is not funny in this day and age.” Aliquo and Liao felt exactly the opposite—people needed games like StreetWars as a temporary escape from the bad news they confront in the headlines day after day. They went ahead with the game.

Seventy-five people signed up to play the first StreetWars, and it went off without a hitch. (Aliquo never did ask for psychiatric help.) Since then, Aliquo and Liao have organized tournaments in Vancouver, San Francisco, Los Angeles, London, and Vienna, with future games planned for Paris, Chicago, Rome, Tokyo, Montreal, Amsterdam, and even Reykjavik, Iceland.

Here’s how the game works:

• Each StreetWars tournament lasts for three weeks and is played 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It costs $50 to sign up and is open to anyone over the age of 18. When you sign up, you are required to submit a photograph of yourself as well as your home address, work address, and other contact information.

• Shortly before the game begins, players receive an e-mail telling them where to pick up their “assassination packet,” containing the photo, addresses, and contact information of the player who has been designated their assassination target. Each player has a target and is the target for another player.

• As with Assassin, each player’s mission is to kill their target and avoid being killed by the person who is targeting them. There are no restrictions on how the target can be hunted down. Stalk them on city streets? Ambush? A fake delivery to their front door? Anything goes. One assassin even staged a fake job interview and “killed” the target when they came to apply for the job.

• Players are allowed to defend themselves from assassins by shooting back and by using an umbrella to block the spray from
the assassin’s squirt gun. (Raincoats are not allowed.) If the assassin’s spray does not hit the target, the target survives the attack.

• If you succeed in killing your target, your victim hands over their assassination packet and their target becomes your next target. How do you know when you’ve won? When you kill your target and the packet they give you has
your
picture and contact information inside.

• If a winner is not determined at the end of three weeks, the game moves into a one-week sudden-death tournament where Aliquo, who calls himself “Supreme Commander,” becomes the target, and the prize goes to the first person who can kill him as he and his escort of bodyguards move by limousine from one safe house to another.

• Aliquo and Liao have added a few more twists to the game, too: Players are free to form teams and work together to kill their targets. But then they, too, become a single target of sorts—if the team captain is killed, the entire team is out of the game.

• There’s also a group within the game called the League of Rogue Assassins. These assassins are free to kill the players in the game, but since they are not players they cannot be killed themselves. Don’t feel like taking out your next target? You can hire a member of the League of Rogue Assassins to kill them for you.

• Another departure from Assassin: If you successfully defend yourself against an assassination attempt by shooting your assassin, the attack is thwarted…but the assassin doesn’t die. They are free to attack you again at any time in the future.

That’s about all Uncle John has been able to piece together about the game; if you want to know more, you’re just going to have to sign up and pay the $50. The official rules to StreetWars are a trade secret and are made available only to people who have signed up to play the game.

There’s nothing like a good dose of irony to put the problems of day-to-day life into perspective.

N
AME YOUR IRONY

In 1978, Giovanna D’Arco of Italy was sitting by her fireplace when a spark jumped out and ignited her clothes. Ironically, her name is Italian for “Joan of Arc.” Related irony: In 1979 a Texas man named Stanley Stillsmoking was jailed for trying to steal cigarettes.

Corfe Castle in Dorset, England, is one of the windiest places in Great Britain. In 2003, researchers set out to measure the exact wind speed and what effect it had on the castle. The study had to be postponed because it was too windy to set up the wind-speed recording equipment.

In 2002 firefighters were called to put out the flames at a factory in Neuruppin, Germany. What did the factory make? Fire extinguishers. But the fire extinguishers were filled with flame retardant at another facility, so at the time of the fire none of them worked.

In the late 1990s Golden State Fence, a California company, was contracted to build a 14-mile fence in San Diego to prevent illegal immigrants from sneaking in. In 2006 Golden State was fined $4.7 million when 10 of the people hired to build the fence were discovered to be illegal immigrants.

The legendary library of ancient Alexandria, Egypt, was burned to the ground by the invading Roman army in the 4th century. In 2002, a new $150 million library opened on the exact same site. Five months later, a short-circuit started a fire that destroyed the fourth floor.

Our biggest stars are so much larger than life that it’s hard for fans to comprehend their deaths. Maybe that’s why people invent bizarre conspiracy theories to explain them.

T
HEORY:
Comedian Andy Kaufman faked his own death.

DETAILS:
In addition to playing Latka on the sitcom
Taxi
, Kaufman was known for outlandish stunts, including pretending to be a confused foreigner in his stand-up act, starting a fight with a pro wrestler on
Late Night With David Letterman
, and showing up for performances as an obnoxious lounge singer named Tony Clifton. But Kaufman wanted to pull an even bigger stunt. So, in 1983, he told friends he was going to fake his death and re-emerge 20 years later. In May 1984, he “died” of a rare form of lung cancer. Then what? There are several theories: 1) He moved to a quiet New Mexico town; 2) He changed his name to Steve Rocco and won a seat on the Orange County, California, school board. Rocco, a recluse who rarely leaves home, strongly resembles Kaufman and runs a Web site called
andykaufmanlives.com
; 3) He underwent plastic surgery and is actually actor Jim Carrey (Carrey played Kaufman in the movie
Man on the Moon
).

TRUTH:
Kaufman’s friends and fans thought lung cancer was just another joke, especially since he wasn’t a smoker. But it wasn’t. Kaufman went to a movie premiere in March 1984, painfully thin and nearly bald from radiation treatments. Mourners saw his body at his funeral. But perhaps Kaufman still wanted everyone to think he’d played a trick on them: Tony Clifton showed up at many Kaufman memorials. It wasn’t revealed until years later that Clifton was played by Kaufman’s friend Bob Zmuda, even while Kaufman was alive.

THEORY:
A psychedelic trance-inducing machine drove Nirvana lead singer Kurt Cobain crazy and made him kill himself.

DETAILS:
Cobain collaborated with Beat poet William S.
Burroughs on a 1992 album titled
The “Priest” They Called Him.
According to a Seattle-based group called “Friends Understanding Kurt” Burroughs gave Cobain a device called a “Dream Machine,” which looks like a space heater outfitted with flashing colored disco lights. Like a powerful drug, the Dream Machine induces mind-altering trances when it’s looked at, even through closed eyes. (It was invented in the 1960s by friends of Burroughs.) The Dream Machine made Cobain so crazy that he could only stop the hallucinations by shooting himself. The machine was discovered in the same room as Cobain’s dead body in April 1994, but went unreported by both the police and the coroner’s office.

TRUTH:
A bizarre-looking device going unnoticed next to a body seems unlikely, as does the legitimacy of a group called “Friends Understanding Kurt” (check their initials). Sadly, a weird machine didn’t kill Kurt Cobain—years of depression and drug abuse did.

Here are some more rumors of celebrity death conspiracies that have been widely circulated in books and magazines and on the Internet:

•
River Phoenix
didn’t die of an accidental drug overdose on a Los Angeles sidewalk. He was poisoned by members of a cult that his parents were involved with.

•
James Dean
didn’t crash his car while speeding. He was run off the road by CIA operatives. Reason: Dean was a Communist.

•
Paul McCartney
hired a hit man to kill Yoko Ono. The hit man shot John Lennon by mistake.

•
It wasn’t an accident:
Considering her a threat to the throne, Queen Elizabeth II had MI6, the British Secret Service, kill Princess Diana.

•
Tupac Shakur and The Notorious B.I.G.
were not rival rappers at all. They were actually lovers who faked their own deaths to run away and be together.

•
Former Enron CEO Kenneth Lay
reportedly died of a heart attack in his bathroom in 2006. He actually faked his death to escape prison.

•
Marilyn Monroe
didn’t die of an overdose. Fidel Castro had her killed and tried to have her former lover, attorney general Robert Kennedy, framed for it.

On page 167 we listed a few of the quirky films that members of the Bad Film Society love to hate. Here are a few more awful gems.

T
HE BRAIN THAT WOULDN’T DIE
(1962)

“A major entry in the absurd trash genre. Love is a many splattered thing when a brilliant surgeon keeps the decapitated head of his fiancée alive after a car crash while he searches for a suitably stacked body onto which to transplant the head. The head talks so much, the Doc tapes her mouth shut!”

A wealthy old crone hires a surgeon to transplant her brain into the body of a beautiful young woman…if one can be found. “Three gorgeous mademoiselles are imported as candidates but the evil doctor and his mutant assistant stray from their mission. There’s zombies, and look out when a gal gets a cat’s brain! Meow!”

“An undertaker befriends a pair of motorcycle-riding, knife-wielding, psycho restaurant owners who kill people for body parts to use in their (gulp!) blue-plate daily specials. Business for the undertaker and cheap meat for the restaurant owners—sounds like a merger made in hell!”

Operating from their outpost on the Moon, invisible aliens animate human corpses on Earth and sic them on the living. Meanwhile, a team of researchers hiding inside a cave race to stop the invasion before it’s too late. “The big question is, ‘Why do these aliens have to use corpses to do things?’ In a few scenes, they seem physically capable enough to achieve their goals without the hindrance of rigor mortis, and you’d think invisibility would have more tactical value than looking creepy.”

Bela Lugosi plays Dr. Carruthers, a scientist who creates scents for a perfume company. He’s also secretly creating a species of giant killer bats that he uses to murder his enemies. “Lugosi makes the bats hate a particular scent, which he then incorporates into an aftershave lotion and gives to his victims as a sample of an upcoming product. ‘Rub a little here…on the tender part of your neck.’”

Joan Crawford’s last—and worst—film. When a mysterious monster kills students in England, researchers trap it and bring it to anthropologist Dr. Brockton (Crawford), who discovers that the monster is actually Trog, the missing link that connects man to his ape ancestors. Rather than kill it as originally planned, Crawford decides to study Trog, but he escapes from the lab and kidnaps a small child. Who will find Trog first—Dr. Brockton or the cops?

“Transparent bald aliens in search of diamonds to power their spaceship turn a wealthy, jewelry-loving woman into a giant. Doctors chain her in the house and give her injections out of an elephant syringe. But she breaks out and heads for the bar where her cheating husband is smooching and plotting with Yvette Vickers (
Playboy
’s Miss July 1959). No happy ending here!”