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Samples Pictures Glossary Home |
Rosa Parks (1913–2005)
To those who knew Rosa Parks
personally, it was a conundrum that the soft-spoken African-American woman so
boldly refused to give up her seat on a bus in Mongomery, Alabama, and
consequently launched the civil rights movement. In 1955, however, she took a
job as a housekeeper in Monteagle, Tennessee, where, in the summer, she ran
into a group of creatures and ended up traveling with them into Nuldoid. In
Nuldoid, Parks found that everyone was treated like a second-class
citizen, and everyone complained bitterly and vehemently about it. While
in Nuldoid, she was not allowed to ride the busses, not because of her race,
but because of her size. And, though she was never granted access to a Nuldoid
bus, she grew quite fond of standing at the bus’s open door, and arguing with
the driver. Her act of defiance in December of 1955 was merely an extension of
the arguments she’d grown to love in Nuldoid.
John Lennon (1940-1980) While on tour in Germany
with the Beatles in the summer of 1966, Lennon was involved in a minor
motorcycle accident just outside of Munich where he lost his glasses. After the
Beatle and road manager’s assistant, Tony Teesdale, searched the roadside for
nearly twenty minutes, Lennon was approached by two small creatures who offered
to sell him the chipped glasses for an outrageous sum. When Lennon refused to
do so, he was called a number of names by them. A lover of peculiar words,
Lennon became intrigued with the language of the creatures and accepted an
offer to journey with them to Nuldoid where he spent the remainder of the
summer. He returned to the Crust a changed man. In August, 1966, he began to
experiment with his music and speak out about the Vietnam War. While his
attitude pushed the Beatles to new creative levels, his love of squabbling led
to problems within the group.
J.R.R.
Tolkien (1882–1973) While it is well known that Tolkien spent a good deal of his time as a child
playing and exploring Moseley Bog near Birmingham, England, it is generally not
known that he disappeared for nearly three weeks in the summer of 1899 when he
was seven years old. After search parties had given the boy up for dead, young
J.R.R. came striding into his mother’s kitchen with a band of “diminutive and
objectionable culprits who demanded quite rudely that they be supplied with
crackers and a good deal of ale.” Mrs. Tolkien kicked the “culprits” out and
marched the boy to his room, where he proceeded to tell fanciful stories about
little people at the center of the earth until, finally, he was severely beaten
for it. He, thereafter, confined his “fanciful stories” about little people to
his writing.
Andrei Sakharov (1921–1989) Pages from the nuclear
physicist’s private journal were discovered in the fall of 2022 at a small
library outside Scherbinki, where Sakharov was exiled by the Soviet government
from 1980-85. The journal’s pages described, in detail, Sakharov’s journey into
Nuldoid during the early part of 1964, where he claimed to have gotten “an
incredible taste for beer” as well as his “first black eye.” Though he never
spoke of the trip when he returned to the Crust, it was obvious that he had
been greatly influenced by the Nuldoid culture, as he became a great irritant
to the Soviet government and a hindrance to their plans for expanding their
nuclear arsenal.
John Cage (1912–1992)
The atonal composer spent much of his youth in and around the Los Angeles
area where, as an only child, he would often wander off and spend time by
himself. In the summer and fall of 1921, he met up with a group of Nuldoids on
the beach near Santa Monica and traveled with them into 
M.C. Escher (1898–1972) Escher
made the journey to Nuldoid in the fall of 1923 while he was visiting Spain.
Though the young man was impressed with the stairwell into Downtown Nuldoid—it
having influenced a great deal of his artwork—the trip itself affected him more
in his ability to recognize and reject tyranny, hence his early distain and
brave resistance to the growing Nazism of the 1930s.
Stephen Colbert
(1964-2072) After brutally satirizing the George W. Bush Administration (in
front of President Bush) at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner,
April 2006, a secret investigation was launched by government officials into
Colbert’s past. Although the investigation turned up no untoward association
with terrorists or communists, it was discovered that Colbert had a deep and
lasting relationship with several groups of Nuldoids, dating back to his senior
year at Northwestern University, which is near a Lake Michigan access tunnel (referred to
by Nuldoids as Dooblehoid Nubbledorff Water). Colbert’s quarrelsome nature and lack
of respect for authority was largely attributed to his association with these
contentious creatures. Later in his life, Colbert was involved in
ousting the Oidenoids from Downtown Nuldoid after the 
Samuel Adams (1722–1803) Considered, by many, to be the real father of the American Revolution, this Adams
was one of the first Colonists to complain about the British government. As a
young man, however, he was not particularly combative or argumentative until
the fall of 1745, when he was approached by a group of Nuldoids. He was lugging
malt (used for making beer) through the streets of Boston, when the Nuldoids
caught scent of it and followed him. He ended up traveling to Nuldoid and spent
seven months there, returning to the Crust with a chip on his shoulder and a
thirst for politics. By 1775, the British were so annoyed with his constant
rabble-rousing—especially after his Tea Party idea—that they sent troops to
Lexington to arrest him. He escaped capture, but the ensuing battle was the
beginning of the Revolutionary War.
Theodor Seuss Geisel (Dr. Seuss)
(1904–1991) Though Geisel never saw the inside of Nuldoid
itself, he did travel through the Region of Neither Norr, and spent time in the
Plains of Low Weather. There he befriended a “circle” of 
Jesus Christ
(0000–0033) It has been rumored that Jesus spent his “missing years” in
Nuldoid, which was then the 
Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) Copernicus visited Nuldoid
in 1530, after a Crystal placement team accidentally tunneled into his cellar.
He helped the confused creatures return to Nuldoid, and then spent seventeen
months there. After he returned to the Crust in 1532, he managed to cause a
great stir in Rome with his theory that the earth revolved around the sun. What
most astronomers don’t realize, or refuse to believe, is that he was not
serious. He was, in fact, as convinced as his contemporaries that the opposite
was true—that the sun revolved around the earth—but he’d apparently grown so
fond of arguments while he was in Nuldoid that he presented the “absurd claim”
just to rile the Catholic Church.
W.C. Fields (1880–1946) Fields spent several years in Nuldoid during his early twenties, where he
developed much of his disagreeable attitude. He was stranded near the Lake of
Rubber Balls and consequently passed the time learning to juggle, a skill that
he incorporated into his early Vaudevillian act. That he had a great love of
peculiar-sounding names and words (used in his movies)—Otis Cibblecoblis,
Egbert Souse, Baby Elwood Dunk, Cuthbert J. Twillie, J. Pinkerton Snoopington,
Mr. Muckle—was due to his time in Nuldoid, where he would often repeat
creatures’ names and make rhyming stories out of them, which annoyed a great
many of the Nuldoids and almost got him killed.
Joseph
Heller (1923–1999) Heller visited Nuldoid in the winter of 1944, while he was stationed in
Italy during World War II. After falling through a large opening near the
outskirts of Palermo, he ventured into Neither Norr and then Nuldoid. It was
there he grew to appreciate a lack of respect for authoritative figures. He was
also quite taken by the Nuldoids’ system of government, especially their
standards for choosing officials—that is, those Nuldoids who had no interest in
politics and self- aggrandizement were considered most suited for politics and
aggrandizement. He later incorporated the idea (some say stole) in his classic
novel Catch-22.
Jay
Tarses (1939–2056) Though his name was not a household word until the end
of the 21st century, Tarses was fairly well known in his own time for
television programs he’d written. After spending several months in Nuldoid
during the early 1980s, where he acclimated well to the Nuldoidian culture, he
returned to the Crust with a brisk attitude toward the television industry that
got him in a lot of hot water. In 1992, he and playwright Richard Dresser
produced a television show called The Black Tie Affair. Though the show
garnered little attention at the time, it became immensely popular on Cerebral
ChipCasts of the late 2070s, and a favorite of Iceland’s emotionally unstable
prime minister, Ólafur Björnsson—one of the most powerful men in the
world. It was Björnsson’s obsession
with the show in 2081 that delayed his use of the world’s first chain link
mega-nuclear bomb, ultimately saving the world from nuclear annihilation.
Steven
Spielberg (1946–2055) During his senior year of high school in Saratoga,
California, Spielberg went back to visit his mother and sisters in Phoenix,
Arizona. While there, he accidentally fell into a Nuldoid access tunnel and
spent nearly a month lost in the Region of Neither Norr. He eventually stumbled upon Nuldoid,
where he spent another week before returning to the Crust. The trip would
become a significant influence on much of his future work, most notably E.T.
Though he had often characterized E.T. as a story “about the divorce
of my parents,” many film historians believe it had more to do with his
memories of feeling like an alien lost in the unfamiliar world of Neither Norr.
