Uncle John's Ahh-Inspiring Bathroom Reader (54 page)

Ebersol's first move: let Eddie loose. Murphy's characters, such as Gumby, Buckwheat, and Mr. Robinson (an urban parody of Mr. Rogers), became as popular as Belushi's samurai warrior and Radner's Roseanne Roseannadanna from the original cast. Ebersol later admitted that “it would have been very difficult to keep the show on the air without Eddie.”

But Murphy's growing stardom soon alienated the other performers, especially his friend Joe Piscopo, the show's second-most-famous cast member. After starring in the hit film
48 Hours,
Murphy became too big for the show, even television in general. He left after the 1983 season to make
Trading Places
with fellow
SNL
alum Dan Aykroyd. To this day, Murphy—not Dan Aykroyd or Bill Murray or Mike Myers—holds the record as the highest-earning former
SNL
cast member.

In 1984, trying to fill the huge void left by Murphy's absence, Ebersol did something new for
SNL
: he hired established names, hoping they would attract viewers. Billy Crystal's Fernando (“You look mahvelous!”) and Martin Short's Ed Grimley (“I must say!”) were funny, but they weren't Murphy. And viewers wanted Eddie Murphy. In fact, the highest rated episode of the entire 1984–85 season was on December 15, when he returned to host the show. At the end of a difficult season, Ebersol had had enough. He quit.

Here we go again: no producer, low ratings. Would
Saturday Night Live
rebound? Of course it would! Turn to page 427 to find out how.

Born a slave in 1817, Frederick Douglass secretly learned to read and write. He escaped slavery in 1838 and went on to become an acclaimed orator, newspaper publisher, abolitionist, and advisor to presidents Lincoln and Grant.

“Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them.”

“There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven that does not know that slavery is wrong.”

“A little learning, indeed, may be a dangerous thing, but the want of learning is a calamity to any people.”

“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

“The soul that is within me no man can degrade.”

“I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and to incur my own abhorrence.”

“Men are whipped oftenest who are whipped easiest.”

“I know of no rights of race superior to the rights of humanity.”

“You are not judged on the height you have risen but on the depth from which you have climbed.”

“Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one's thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants.”

“Men may not get all they pay for in this world, but they certainly pay for all they get.”

“They who study mankind with a whip in their hands will always go wrong.”

“The simplest truths often meet the sternest resistance.”

“No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck.”

We told you about the history of the Nobel Prize on page 267. Now, how do you win one? Well, it turns out it's not as simple as “make a major contribution to humanity”—THERE ARE RULES! Here are a few of them.

Y
ou can't nominate yourself.
Anyone who does is automatically disqualified. No exceptions.

• You must be alive
. Nominating dead people has never been allowed, but until 1974 if you died
after
you were nominated—but
before
the winner was chosen—you could still win, even though you were dead. (Dag Hammarskjöld, for example, won the 1961 Peace Prize after he died in a plane crash.) In 1974 the rules were tightened up—people who die after they are nominated can no longer win, even if they're the only person nominated.

• There are no runners-up.
People who are alive when they are selected as the winner (usually in October or November) but die before the awards are handed out on December 10, are still considered winners, even though they're dead. So if you come in second behind someone who drops dead before they pick up their medal, you still lose.

• You can't win by default.
What happens if you come in second behind someone who refuses to accept their Nobel Prize? Do you win…or at least get their prize money? Answer: No and no. When a person declines a Nobel Prize, they are still entered into the official list of Nobel laureates; the only difference is that they just get the annotation “declined the prize,” next to their name. The forfeited prize money goes back in the bank. Who says “no” to a Nobel Prize? Vietnamese politician Le Duc Tho declined it in 1973.

• There's no such thing as a team effort.
With the exception of the Nobel Peace Prize, which can be awarded to entire organizations, such as the International Red Cross (1917) or Doctors Without Borders (1999), no single prize can be awarded to more than three people. That's true no matter how many people contribute to the endeavor. So if you and three of your friends find a
cure for cancer next year, one of you is going to be out of luck. Of all the Nobel rules, this one is “probably the most damaging on a personal level,” says Dr. Paul Greengard, winner of the 2000 Nobel Prize for Medicine. “The scientific world is full of embittered team members who were left out.”

• Nobel Prize in Economics? What Nobel Prize in Economics?
Alfred Nobel's will stipulated five prizes: Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, Literature, and Peace. In 1968 the Nobel Foundation approved the addition of a prize for Economics, but it is awarded by the Central Bank of Sweden. Its official name is the “Central Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.” So even if you win it, Nobel purists will tell you that it's not
really
a Nobel Prize. Only the five original categories are considered true Nobel Prizes. Adding insult to injury: If you do win the Economics Prize, they don't engrave your name on the face of the medal like they do with other prizes—they just inscribe it on the outer rim.

• Prizes don't necessarily have to be awarded every year.
If war or some other problem makes it impossible for the prize committees to meet (as in World War I and World War II), or if the foundation just decides that nobody deserves an award that year, they don't give them out. The Peace Prize has been withheld 19 times—more often than any other Nobel Prize.

• You don't get a laurel.
The term “Nobel Laureate” is just an expression. If you win a Nobel Prize, you get a gold medal, a diploma with your name on it, and a cash prize. If you want to wear a crown of leaves, you've got to make it yourself.

• Good news: If you do win, you will get more prize money now.
Over the years, taxes, inflation, overly cautious investment strategies, two world wars, and the Great Depression ate into the Nobel Foundation's assets. It wasn't until 1991 that the prizes finally recovered their full value and were worth more than they were in 1901. Since then, their value has continued to rise; in 2000 the payout for each prize was about $1 million.

• More good news (and some bad news):
If your government orders you to decline the Nobel Prize (as Hitler did to German winners after 1936), the Nobel Foundation will hold the award until you're able to accept it—but you won't get the cash prize; that goes back to the Foundation.

If you know anything about the pop culture of the 1970s, the name Atari is synonymous with video games. So what happened? Where did Atari go? Here's the story.

In the early 1960s, a University of Utah engineering student named Nolan Bushnell lost his tuition money in a poker game. He immediately took a job at a pinball arcade near Salt Lake City to make back the money and support himself while he was at school.

In school, Bushnell majored in engineering and, like everyone else who had access to the university's supercomputers, was a Spacewar! addict. But he was different. To his fellow students, Spacewar! was just a game; to Bushnell, it seemed like a way to make money. If he could put a game like Spacewar! into a pinball arcade, he figured that people would line up to play it.

Bushnell graduated from college in 1968 and moved to California. He wanted to work for Disney but they turned him down, so he took a day job with an engineering company called Ampex. At night he worked on building his arcade video game.

He converted his daughter's bedroom into a workshop (she had to sleep on the couch) and scrounged free parts from Ampex and from friends at other electronics companies. The monitor for his prototype was a black-and-white TV he got at Goodwill; an old paint thinner can was the coin box.

When he finished building the prototype for the game he called Computer Space, he looked around for a partner to help him manufacture and sell it. On the advice of his dentist, he made a deal with a manufacturer of arcade games, Nutting Associates. Nutting agreed to build and sell the games in exchange for a share of the profits, and in return Bushnell signed on as an engineer for the firm.

If you've never heard of Computer Space, you aren't alone. The game was a dud. It
sounded
simple—the player's rocket has to destroy two alien flying saucers powered by the computer—but it
came with several pages of difficult-to-understand instructions.

The fact that it was the world's first arcade video game only made things worse. Neither players nor arcade owners knew what to think of the strange machine sitting next to the pinball machines. “People would look at you like you had three heads,” Bushnell remembered. “‘You mean you're going to put the TV set in a box with a coin slot and play games on it?'”

Still, Bushnell was convinced that Nutting Associates, not the game, was to blame for the failure. And he was convinced that he could do a better job running his own company. So he and a friend chipped in $250 apiece to start a company called Syzygy (the name given to the configuration of the sun, the earth, and the moon when they're in a straight line in space).

That's what Bushnell
wanted
to name it…but when he filed with the state of California, they told him the name was already taken. Bushnell liked to play Go, a Japanese game of strategy similar to chess. He thought some of the words used in the game would make a good name for a business, and company legend has it that he asked the clerk at the California Secretary of State's office to choose between
Sente, Hane,
and
Atari
.

She picked Atari.

Bushnell hired an engineer named Al Alcorn to develop games. Meanwhile, Bushnell installed pinball machines in several local businesses, including a bar called Andy Capp's Tavern. The cash generated by the pinball machines would help fund the company until the video games were ready for market.

Alcorn's first assignment was to build a simple Ping-Pong-style video game. Bushnell told him that Atari had signed a contract to deliver such a game to General Electric and now it needed to get built.

According to the official version of events, Bushnell was fibbing—he wanted Alcorn to get used to designing games and wanted to start him out with something simple. Ping-Pong, with one ball and two paddles, was about as simple as a video game can be. In reality, there was no contract with G.E. and Bushnell had no
intention of bringing a table tennis game to market. He was convinced that the biggest moneymakers would be complicated games like Computer Space. “He was just going to throw the Ping-Pong game away,” Alcorn remembers. But then Alcorn gave him a reason not to.

Instead of a simple game, Alcorn's Ping-Pong had a touch of realism: if you hit the ball with the center of the paddle, the ball bounced straight ahead, but if you hit it with the edge of a paddle, it bounced off at an angle. With Alcorn's enhancements, video Ping-Pong was a lot more fun to play than Bushnell had expected.

As long as the game was fun, Bushnell decided to test it commercially by installing Pong, as he decided to call it, at Andy Capp's Tavern.