Uncle John’s Unsinkable Bathroom Reader (41 page)

3. Bat Masterson
, Old West lawman

4. Frank Gehry
, architect

5. Fay Wray
, star of the original 1933
King Kong

6. Peter Jennings
, ABC news anchor

7. Christopher Plummer
, star of
The Sound of Music

8. Leslie McFarlane
, writer of the first
Hardy Boys
books

9. Robert Goulet
, singer/actor

10. Lennox Lewis
, heavyweight boxing champion

11.
(and
12.) Scott Abbott
and
Chris Haney
, inventors of Trivial Pursuit

13. Steve Nash
, two-time NBA most valuable player

14. Conrad Bain
, played the father on
Diff’rent Strokes

15. Mary Pickford
, silent-film actress nicknamed “America’s Sweetheart”

16. Wolverine
, fictional superhero from the X-Men

17. Tommy Chong
, of Cheech and Chong

18. Art Linkletter
, TV host

19. Kim Cattrall
, actress from
Sex and the City

20. Jack Warner
, founder of Warner Bros. Studios

21. Louis B. Mayer
, founder of MGM Studios

22. James Naismith
, inventor of basketball

23. John Kricfalusi
, creator of
Ren and Stimpy

24. Seth Rogen
, actor/writer (
Knocked Up, Superbad)

25. Joe Shuster
, co-creator of Superman

26. Morley Safer
, journalist from
60 Minutes

27. Linda Evangelista
, super-model

28. Frederick Banting
, scientist who discovered insulin

29. Neil Young
, rock star

30. Monty Hall
, host of
Let’s Make a Deal

What’s so funny about that particular part of the human anatomy? We don’t know—it’s one of the mysteries of nature…like the rings around Uranus
.

G
OODNIGHT, MOON
“Utrecht police say a 21-year-old Dutch man is recovering after a ‘mooning’ that went horribly wrong. The report says a 21-year-old man and two friends were running down a street in Utrecht with their pants pulled down in the back ‘for a joke.’ At one point the man ‘pushed his behind against the window of a restaurant.’ The glass broke and resulted in ‘deep wounds to his derriere.’ Police detained the three men after the incident, but the cafe owner decided not to press charges after the men agreed to pay for the broken window.”

—
Yahoo! News

“A Denver sheriff’s deputy has been slapped with a 45-day suspension for slapping another deputy’s buttocks, which prompted the co-worker to quit. While Deputy Francisco Hernandez reportedly resigned after having his rear-end whacked, attorney Derek Cole called Deputy Bobby Rogers’ subsequent suspension an over-reaction. ‘It’s gross overkill,’ Cole said. ‘It’s like executing somebody for blowing their nose and not washing their hands.’ The incident occurred Aug. 30, 2007, when Hernandez bent to pick up some keys only to be ‘slapped hard on the buttocks’ by Rogers. ‘If you’re going to stick it out, I’m going to hit it,’ Rogers allegedly said after the hit, according to city documents.”

—
United Press International

“As revenge attacks go, it was pretty cheeky. A ‘cheating’ husband is having to see 200 photos of his naked bottom plastered on walls, lampposts and bus stops all over his home town. Pasha Cummings believes the posters, which show him posing at a barbecue, are the work of ex-wife Carol—who coincidentally emigrated
to Cyprus the day after they appeared. Beneath the ‘glamour shot’ the posters read: ‘Pasha Cummings: lying, cheating, two-timing arse! Sandra Beckworth is no better.’ Cummings recently split with his wife after six years together. He claims he did not start seeing Ms. Beckworth—his boss at the care home where he works—until two months later. But his wife believed otherwise. ‘Carol was very bitter when I left her,’ Cummings said.”

—
The Metro
(U.K.)

“Stephen Murmer, a popular art teacher at Monacan High School in Virginia, has been placed on administrative leave because of his private ‘artwork.’ Working under the pseudonym ‘Stan Murmur,’ he produced pictures by smearing his undercarriage with paint and then sitting on canvas. Far more than your typical ‘pressed hams’ though, Murmer created images of flowers, including ‘Tulip Butts,’ with higher-end pieces selling for as much as $900. Things seemed to be going fine until an interview of ‘Stan Murmur’ wearing only a Speedo, a fake nose, glasses and a towel on his head found its way onto YouTube. According to Chesterfield County schools, ‘teachers are expected to set an example for students through their personal conduct,’ and apparently painting with your backside is not the example they had in mind.”

—
Washington Post

“Engineers in Idaho have developed an interesting new device designed to motivate employees—the World Famous Manually Self-Operated Butt-Kicking Machine. Creator J. Reese Leavitt says the Butt-Kicking Machine came out of a brainstorming meeting when he and his co-workers were talking about raising employee productivity. How does it work? Just sit firmly on your fanny, fasten the seat belt, apply pressure, and a size-9 Chuck Taylor shoe will hit your hindquarters. ‘That, by the way, is the most expensive part of the machine,’ said Leavitt. ‘The shoe cost us about $40.’ (The total cost is $250.) Leavitt and his associates plan on renting out the machine for fundraisers.”

—
NBC-5, Dallas

If you’ve ever played Risk, Diplomacy, Axis & Allies, Dungeons & Dragons, World of Warcraft, or any other game that lets you conquer the world, here’s the war game that started it all—the most influential game you’ve never heard of
.

I
NSTANT REPLAY
For as long as armies have gone to war, there’s been a need to remember lessons learned in battle. The losers want to know what went wrong, so that it doesn’t happen again; the winners want to understand why they won, so that they can repeat their success. But how do you pass these lessons on to the next generation of military officers before they’ve even been in combat?

Card games and chess have both been played in Europe since the 1500s, and over the centuries numerous attempts were made to use them for strategy games that would teach young officers the lessons of war. But no matter how many variations were tried—replacing the jacks, kings, queens, and aces with captains, majors, colonels, and generals, or giving chess more pieces, more players, or a larger or more varied game board—these attempts never came close to recreating the battlefield experience. Their value as an instructional tool for young officers was limited at best.

Then in the early 1800s, Baron George von Reisswitz, a Prussian civil servant and military-history buff, decided to create a war game entirely from scratch:

• Why limit yourself to a chessboard? Von Reisswitz thought it made more sense to play on a surface with real topographical features. He built a box several feet square and filled it with sand that could be used to model the hills, valleys, rivers, roads, and bridges that a Prussian soldier might encounter on a real battlefield.

• He made the playing surface large enough, and the square blocks that represented soldiers small enough, so that the blocks approximated the size of actual soldiers on a battlefield landscape. This allowed von Reisswitz to incorporate the concepts of time and distance into the game, something that had not been a part of card- and chess-based games.

• Troops on the march can only travel a certain number of paces per minute. By setting the scale of the game at 3 centimeters = 100 paces, it was possible to measure the distance between opposing groups of soldiers to calculate where and when they would meet on the battlefield. And since the range of rifles, cannons, and other weapons was also known, it was possible to tell when a group of soldiers would come within range of enemy fire.

Although von Reisswitz discarded playing cards and chess, he retained a third popular game of the era—dice—which he used to incorporate the important and often decisive role that random chance—or “friction,” as it’s sometimes called—can play in warfare. Is the weather too hot? Too cold? Too wet? Do rain or ice or snow make the roads impassable? Is troop morale unusually high? Abysmally low? Were they sleeping when the enemy attacked? Did their drinking water give them dysentery? Von Reisswitz understood that having more soldiers and a superior position on the battlefield can only go so far in determining the outcome of a battle. He incorporated rolls of the dice to account for anything and everything else.

But von Reisswitz’s most interesting and valuable innovation was his decision to deny his players knowledge of everything that was happening on the battlefield.

• In chess, both players see the entire board at all times and know where all the pieces are at any point in the game. In warfare things are very different, of course. The commanders’ knowledge is limited to what they and their troops can see with their own eyes. The location and deployment of the enemy, the size of its forces, and the direction in which they are moving are anyone’s guess.

• Von Reisswitz wanted to replicate this important concept of limited knowledge, so he created the position of a game master or “umpire,” who would host the game and be the only person with full knowledge of everything that was happening.

• At the start of the game, the umpire would explain the battlefield scenario to the commanders of opposing armies, and then these commanders would go off into separate corners or even separate rooms to prepare written orders. Each commander would give
their plan to the umpire; neither commander would know what the other’s troops were doing.

• Then, as the game progressed, the umpire would reveal this information to the commanders only as quickly as they would have learned it on an actual battlefield. If one side’s troops were hiding in a forest, for example, the umpire wouldn’t reveal their position on the sand table until the other side’s troops got close enough to spot the hidden soldiers themselves.

• As the umpire revealed information to the players, they would use it to issue new written orders. This in turn caused the umpire to reveal still more information, which would prompt yet another set of orders. The process continued this way until one side won the battle.

• Having the umpire implement the orders of both sides at the same time allowed both armies to act simultaneously, just as they would in a real war, instead of having one side sit still while the other side made its move, as was the case in cards or chess.

Kriegsspiel
, or “Wargame,” as the game came to be known, might have remained an obscure hobby had the captain of cadets at the Berlin Military Academy not learned of the game and mentioned it during a lecture in 1811. Two of his students—Prince Friedrich and Prince Wilhelm of Prussia, the teenage sons of King Friedrich Wilhelm III—wanted to play. They arranged for von Reisswitz to umpire a game at Berlin Castle, with the princes commanding their own armies. They enjoyed the experience and told the King about it. He, too, was soon hooked on the game.

Another early player of Kriegsspiel was Baron von Reisswitz’s own son, George von Reisswitz the Younger. By the early 1820s, he was an officer stationed in Berlin, and while there he and several friends played regularly. When they didn’t like something about the game, they changed it. For example, they abandoned sand tables in favor of maps, which were much more portable, and they changed the scale of the game to allow for larger battles fought with entire brigades (3,000 to 4,000 men) of soldiers.

George’s improvements must have been impressive, because when Prince Wilhelm played the new version, he saw to it that it
was demonstrated to the entire Prussian general staff. “Gentlemen,” the chief of the general staff exclaimed to the group, “this is not a game; this is a war exercise! I must recommend it to the whole army!”

Soon the entire Prussian officer corps was playing Kriegsspiel. Then, after Prussia won wars against Austria in 1866 and France in 1871, other countries began to take an interest in the training methods of the Prussian officer corps, including Kriegsspiel. Interest in the game spread throughout Europe and the United States. By the turn of the century, even civilians were playing, too, with clubs springing up in England and elsewhere. Just as George von Reisswitz the Younger had set to work changing parts of the game he didn’t like, the new hobbyists made their own changes.