Uncle John's Ahh-Inspiring Bathroom Reader (68 page)

THE DEFENDANT:
Harrah's casino

THE LAWSUIT:
After losing $350,000 playing blackjack, Van Blitter decided to sue the Las Vegas casino. She filed to have her debts canceled, claiming that Harrah's was negligent—they should have told her that she was an incompetent blackjack player.

THE VERDICT:
The gamble didn't pay off. A federal judge dismissed her claim.

THE PLAINTIFF:
Timothy Ray Anderson, an armed robber

THE DEFENDANT:
John Hobson, a security guard at a McDonald's restaurant

THE LAWSUIT:
Anderson was robbing a McDonald's at gunpoint; Hobson ordered him to drop the weapon. Anderson spun around, aiming his gun at Hobson, but Hobson shot first, hitting Anderson in the stomach. Anderson was subsequently convicted of armed robbery and sentenced to 15 years.

Anderson then sued Hobson, the firm Hobson worked for, and the owner of the McDonald's, claiming “excessive force” was used against him. His argument: “The mere fact that you're holding up a McDonald's with a gun doesn't mean you give up your right to be protected from somebody who wants to shoot you.”

THE VERDICT:
The case was thrown out of court.

THE PLAINTIFF:
Boomer, a golden retriever

THE DEFENDANT:
Invisible Fence Co.

THE LAWSUIT:
According to a petition filed in Common Pleas Court in Dayton, Ohio, in May (2001), Boomer, is suing the fence company because the electrical charge to his collar, triggered when he attempts to leave his guardians' yard, was too strong and, according to an Associated Press dispatch, caused him severe emotional distress, for which he asks $25,000. Boomer's guardians,
Andrew and Alyce Pacher, who purchased the “invisible fence” and permitted the electrical charge, were not sued.

THE VERDICT:
Unknown.

THE PLAINTIFF:
Robert Lee Brock

THE DEFENDANT:
Robert Lee Brock

THE LAWSUIT:
Brock, an inmate serving 23 years for grand larceny at the Indian Creek Correction Center in Chesapeake, Virginia, filed a $5 million lawsuit against himself. He claimed that he violated his own religious beliefs and his own civil rights by forcing himself to get drunk—and because of this self-induced drunkennes, perpetrated several crimes. Brock wrote, “I partook of alcoholic beverages in 1993. As a result I caused myself to violate my religious beliefs.” He went on to claim, “I want to pay myself $5 million for violating my own rights but ask the state to pay it in my behalf since I can't work and am a ward of the state.”

THE VERDICT:
Judge Rebecca Smith dismissed the claim.

THE PLAINTIFF:
Ned Searight

THE DEFENDANT:
State of New Jersey

THE LAWSUIT:
In a $14 million lawsuit, Searight claimed he had suffered injuries while in prison in 1962. He charged he was injected with a “radium electric beam” against his will. As a result of the injection, Searight claimed he began hearing voices in his head.

THE VERDICT:
The U.S District Court dismissed the claim… not on the grounds that it was frivolous, but because the statute of limitations had run out. In his opinion, the judge also offered this strange lesson in physics: “Taking the facts as pleaded…they show a case of presumable unlicensed radio communication, a matter of which comes within the sole jurisdiction of the FCC.…And even aside from that, Searight could have blocked the broadcast to the antenna in his brain simply by grounding it…Searight might have pinned to the back of a trouser leg a short chain of paper clips so that the end would touch the ground and prevent anyone from talking to him inside his brain.”

Misnomer:
The tit
mouse
is actually a
bird
.

Ever heard of Benjamin Disraeli? He was British Prime Minister (1868, 1874–80), a staunch supporter of Queen Victoria, and the British Empire…and very wise
.

“Justice is truth in action.”

“The palace is not safe when the cottage is not happy.”

“The greatest good you can do for another is not just to share your riches but to reveal to him his own.”

“It is much easier to be critical than to be correct.”

“What we anticipate seldom occurs: but what we least expect generally happens.”

“Nobody is forgotten when it is convenient to remember him.”

“We should never lose an occasion. Opportunity is more powerful even than conquerors and prophets.”

“Man is only truly great when he acts from passion.”

“There is no act of treachery or meanness of which a political party is not capable; for in politics there is no honor.”

“You will find as you grow older that courage is the rarest of all qualities to be found in public life.”

“Everyone likes flattery; and when you come to Royalty you should lay it on with a trowel.”

“Youth is a blunder, manhood a struggle, old age a regret.”

“Let the fear of a danger be a spur to prevent it; he that fears not, gives advantage to the danger.”

“One secret of success in life is for a man to be ready for his opportunity when it comes.”

“To be conscious that you are ignorant of the facts is a great step to knowledge.”

“Desperation is sometimes as powerful an inspirer as genius.”

“Action may not always bring happiness; but there is no happiness without action.”

Today most video games are played in the home, but in the 1970s and 1980s, if you wanted to play the newest, hottest games, you went to an arcade. Here are the stories of a few of the classics we played back in the golden age of arcade games
.

Object:
Using a laser cannon that you scroll back and forth across the bottom of the screen, defend yourself from wave after wave of aliens descending from the top of the screen.

Origin:
Space Invaders started out as a test that was used to measure the skill of computer programmers, but someone decided that it might also work well as an arcade game. They were right—the game became a national craze in Japan.

Introduced to the U.S. market by Midway in October 1978, Space Invaders became the biggest hit of the year. It made so much money—a single unit could earn back its $1,700 purchase price in as little as four weeks—that it helped arcade games break out of arcades and smoky bars into nontraditional venues like supermarkets, restaurants, and movie theaters.

Object:
Shoot the moving shapes—red brackets, green spikes, yellow lines, and multicolored balls, before they climb up and out of the geometrically shaped “well” they're in and get you.

Origin:
Atari game designer Dave Theurer needed an idea for a new video game, so he went to the company's book of potential themes compiled from brainstorming sessions. The idea he chose to develop was “First Person Space Invaders”—Space Invaders as seen from the perspective of the laser cannon at the bottom of the screen.

Theurer created a game and showed it to his superiors…and they told him to dump it unless he could “do something special with it.” Theurer told them about a nightmare he'd had about monsters climbing out of a hole in the ground and coming to get him. “I can put it on a flat surface and wrap that surface around to
make a cylinder, and rotate the cylinder,” Theurer suggested. As he conceived it, the cylinder would move while the player stood still…but he abandoned that idea when the rotating cylinder started giving players motion sickness. “I switched it so the player moved around,” Theurer says. “That fixed it.”

Object:
Maneuver Pac-Man through a maze and eat all 240 dots without getting caught by one of the four “ghosts”—Inky, Blinky, Pinky, and Clyde.

Origin:
In 1979 a game designer named Toru Iwatani decided to make a game that would appeal to women, who were less interested in violent, shoot-the-alien games like Space Invaders. Iwatani thought that eating things on the computer screen would make a good nonviolent alternative to shooting them. He came up with the idea for the Pac-Man character over lunch. “I was having pizza,” he says. “I took one wedge and there it was, the figure of Pac-Man.” Well, almost: Pac-Man was originally supposed to be called Puck-Man, because the main character was round like a hockey puck…but the name was changed to Pac-Man, because Namco officials “worried about American vandals changing the ‘P' to an ‘F'.”

Object:
Get the girl.

Origin:
One of Nintendo's first video games was a Space Invaders knockoff called Radarscope. It flopped in the United States, nearly bankrupting the distributor—who wanted to stop doing business with Nintendo. What could Nintendo do? They promised to ship new chips to American distributors so the unsold Radarscope games could be turned into new games.

There was just one problem—they didn't have any new game chips. So Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi told the company's staff artist, Shigeru Miyamoto, to come up with something,
fast
.

Miyamoto had never made a game before, and he hated tennis games, shooting games, and most games that were popular at the time. So he invented a game about a janitor who has to rescue his girlfriend from his pet ape, who has taken her to the top of a construction site. Miyamoto wanted to name the game after the ape,
so he looked up the words for “stubborn” and “ape” in his Japan-ese/English dictionary…and found the words “donkey” and “Kong.” Donkey Kong went on to become one of the most successful video games in history, giving Nintendo the boost it needed to build itself into a multibillion-dollar company and an international video game juggernaut. And it might never have succeeded if Radarscope hadn't failed.

Object:
Use your spacecraft to shoot hostile aliens while saving humanoids from being kidnapped and turned into mutants.

Origin:
Another game helped along by a dream: Defender was supposed to make its debut at the 1980 Amusement & Music Operators of America (AMOA) convention, but less than two weeks before his deadline, creator Eugene Jarvis had only the rough outlines of a game—the name, Defender, and a spaceship attacking aliens, all against a planetary backdrop dotted with humanoids who didn't really do anything. What was the defender defending?

“The answer came to him in a dream,” Nick Montfort writes in
Supercade
. “Those seemingly pointless little men, trapped on the surface below,
they
were the ones to be defended.”

Jarvis made his deadline, but the AMOA was afraid the game was too complicated. They were wrong. Defender became one of the most popular games of the year and made so much money that in 1981 the AMOA voted it Video Game of the Year.

Object:
Find a flat spot on the lunar surface and use your booster engines to slow your spaceship (without running out of fuel) and land it safely on the moon.

Origin:
The game was adapted from a computer simulation used in college physics courses to teach students about lunar gravity. Atari had high hopes for the game, even designing a special two-handled lever that controlled the booster engines. It flopped. So did the special lever: “Springs on the lever made it snap back in place when it was released,” Steven Kent writes in
The Ultimate History of Video Games
. “Unfortunately, some younger players got their faces too close to the lever, resulting in complaints about children being hit in the face.”