Uncle John’s Unsinkable Bathroom Reader (55 page)

In case you don’t know, an
oxymoron
is a phrase made of two words that appear to be contradictory. Here are some of our newest favorites
.

Cautiously optimistic

Bigger half

Rock opera

Boneless ribs

Resident alien

White chocolate

Global village

Minor crisis

Act naturally

Defensive strike

Slumber party

Oven-fried

Deafening silence

Graduate student

Educated guess

Free trade

Instant classic

Calculated risk

Wilderness management

Vegetarian meatball

Wireless cable

Detailed summary

Fresh from concentrate

Extended deadline

Negative growth

Paid volunteer

Small fortune

Controlled chaos

Doing nothing

Going nowhere

Athletic scholarship

Open-book test

Primitive technology

Audio book

Civil disobedience

Forgotten memories

Virtual reality

Accurate stereotype

Down escalator

Bittersweet

Sharp curve

Unbiased opinion

Alone together

Short distance

Outer core

“The rumors are true”

On page 251, we told you the story of the “most influential game you’ve never heard of.” Well, here’s one you
have
heard of. And if this one wasn’t
the
most influential of all, it certainly comes close
.

R
OLL MODEL
More than 30 years after the first edition of Dungeons & Dragons hit store shelves in 1974, the game is still the best-selling “tabletop” or non-computer-based role-playing game of all time. More than 20 million people have played it, and over the years they have purchased more than $1 billion worth of Dungeons & Dragons books, dice, and other merchandise.

Not many games have reached this level of success. Even so, the sales figures alone do not begin to describe the impact that Dungeons & Dragons has had on game-playing culture in the United States and around the world. That’s not just because it was the very first role-playing game, but also because it happened to appear at the dawn of the microcomputer revolution.

When Dungeons & Dragons arrived on the scene, only giant corporations and government agencies could afford computers, which cost millions of dollars apiece and filled entire rooms (and they had less computing power than pocket calculators do today). Personal computers were still a few years off, so the only way ordinary people could get access to a computer was by majoring in computer science at a university that had one.

And how did these privileged college students spend their time, once they were granted a few precious hours on one of these rare, multimillion-dollar machines, time that was intended to be used to complete important classroom assignments?

A lot of them created and played computer games.

Many of these early programmers were fans of Dungeons & Dragons, which, because it was based on the roll of the dice, translated
easily into computer code. So the programmers did just that. At virtually every point in the evolution of computer games—from single-player games to multiplayer games played on a mainframe computer, to multiple mainframes communicating with each other over the ARPAnet (precursor to the Internet), to personal home computers—these Dungeons & Dragons fans drew directly from their tabletop gaming experience to create one fantasy role-playing game after another.

One of the most successful such programmers is Richard Garriot, who wrote his first Dungeons & Dragons–inspired game, Akalabeth, in the summer after he graduated from high school in 1980. When Akalabeth had sold enough copies at $5 a pop to pay for his college education, he followed up with a game called Ultima, which with nine different incarnations over two decades became one of the most successful computer game series of all time. The success of these PC games led to the creation of a “massively multiplayer online role-playing game” (MMORPG) version called Ultima Online, which launched in 1997.

Although it wasn’t the first game that enabled hundreds or even thousands of players all over the world to interact in a virtual world over the Internet, Ultima Online demonstrated that such games could make big money by charging players a monthly subscription fee. Its success prompted many other companies to create MMORPGs, and today the games are a
billion-dollar-a-year
industry, with the market leader, World of Warcraft, once again drawing obvious inspiration from Dungeons & Dragons. So even if you’ve never played the game that started it all, if you’ve played
any
tabletop or computer role-playing game in the past 30 years, you have the creators of Dungeons & Dragons to thank for it.

And yet for all they contributed to pop culture, outside of gaming circles their names are almost completely unknown.

So who are these people to whom game players owe so much?
That part of the story begins on page 393
.

Observations on the human condition from author Henry Miller, best known for his groundbreaking novel
Tropic of Cancer.

“Life has to be given a meaning because of the obvious fact that it has no meaning.”

“Man has demonstrated that he is master of everything… except his own nature.”

“In expanding the field of knowledge we but increase the horizon of ignorance.”

“The moment one gives close attention to any thing, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.”

“Fear is something with which we are all so familiar that when a man appears who is without it, we are at once enslaved by him.”

“True strength lies in submission, which permits one to dedicate his life, through devotion, to something beyond himself.”

“Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such.”

“The only thing we never get enough of is love; and the only thing we never give enough of is love.”

“The frantic desire to live, to live at any cost, is not a result of the life rhythm in us, but of the death rhythm.”

“Every man is working out his destiny in his own way and nobody can be of any help except by being kind, generous, and patient.”

“Moralities, ethics, laws, customs, beliefs, doctrines—these are of trifling import. All that matters is that the miraculous become the norm.”

“The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.”

“If we have not found heaven within, it is a certainty we will not find it without.”

“I have never regretted anything. Regret, like guilt, is a waste of time.”

Time to test your ad-slogan IQ. How many products and brands can you recognize by their slogans? Answers are on page 540
.

1.
“Live in your world, play in ours.”

2.
“Because I’m worth it.”

3.
“You’ve got questions, we’ve got answers.”

4.
“So easy a caveman can do it.”

5.
“The freshmaker!”

6.
“Hello, boys.”

7.
“Progress is our most important product.”

8.
“Obey your thirst.”

9.
“Science for a better life.”

10.
“The pause that refreshes.”

11.
“Kid tested. Mother approved.”

12.
“Quality is job 1.”

13.
“Let the dance begin.”

14.
“The cereal that’s shot from guns.”

15.
“Stronger than dirt.”

16.
“You’ll wonder where the yellow went.”

17.
“Once you pop, you can’t stop.”

18.
“When it rains, it pours.”

19.
“Australian for Beer.”

20.
“The Champagne of Beers.”

21.
“Where do you want to go today?”

22.
“Lifts and separates.”

23.
“Who wears short shorts?”

24.
“The toughest job you’ll ever love.”

25.
“It’s all inside.”

26.
“Leave the driving to us.”

27.
“A mind is a terrible thing to waste.”

28.
“Zoom-Zoom.”

29.
“The happiest place on Earth.”

30.
“Tastes so good cats ask for it by name.”

31.
“Put a tiger in your tank.”

32.
“The ultimate driving machine.”

33.
“We’re number two. We try harder.”

34.
“Be all you can be.”

Living proof that not all celebrities are bimbos and bozos
.

•
Marcia Cross
(
Desperate Housewives
) was having trouble getting acting work after she left
Melrose Place
in 1997, so she went back to school. Result: She earned a master’s degree in psychology from Antioch University.

• Rage Against the Machine guitarist
Tom Morello
graduated Harvard University with honors in 1986. More impressive: He found time to practice guitar for eight hours a day.

•
David Duchovny
(
The X-Files
) has a master’s degree in English literature from Yale.

• Guitarist
Jeff “Skunk”
Baxter
was a member of the Doobie Brothers and Steely Dan. But while his bandmates spent their free time partying, Baxter was studying missile defense systems. Today he’s a freelance defense consultant and chairs a congressional advisory board.

•
Ashley Judd
majored in French at the University of Kentucky, but had four minors: anthropology, theater, art history, and women’s studies.

•
Dexter Holland
, lead singer in the punk group the Offspring, has a master’s degree (and is halfway to a Ph.D.) in molecular biology.

•
Emeka Okafor
, power forward for the Charlotte Bobcats, joined the NBA in 2004 after three years of college. But he didn’t leave school early—it took him only three years to earn his degree (with honors) in finance from the University of Connecticut.

• In 1970
Brian May
was studying for his Ph.D. in astrophysics at the Imperial College of London by day and playing guitar in the band Queen at night. He quit school in 1971 when the band became successful, but in 2007 he completed his dissertation (“A Survey of Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud”) and was awarded his doctorate.

•
Graham Chapman
earned a medical degree and began a residency at a hospital, but quit to join a comedy troupe formed by some old college friends—Monty Python.

White? Black? Cherokee? Chinese? All of the above? Recent DNA studies say you might be surprised
.

I
T REALLY IS A MELTING POT
In 2006 Professor Peter Fine at Florida Atlantic University asked his class to do a project on their own racial identities, and to submit to DNA tests as part of it. Twelve of the students considered themselves white with European ancestry; one considered himself black and of African descent. Results: Only one of the white students turned out to be completely European, and the black student turned out to have 21% European ancestry. The rest had various degrees of European, African, Native American, and East Asian genes. Professor Fine himself, who considered himself of typical white European stock, found out that he had 25% Native American genes. “I honestly think these tests could have a large effect on American consciousness,” Fine told the U.K.’s
Observer
newspaper in 2007. “If Americans recognize themselves as a mixed group of people, that could really change things.”