A Data Point

I had occasion to recall an incident of my youth in a Quora thread. I repeat it here to establish a reliable historical record.

When I was young, I walked in my sleep. Once while I was at college I woke up with muddy feet, dressed only in a tuxedo jacket. What was especially alarming about that was that at the time the campus was being terrorized (if that’s the right word) by some guy who urinated in the dead of night on the flower beds in front of the women’s dorms. I was afraid I might have been the mad pisser (as people called him). Fortunately for me, the real mad pisser kept getting madder and soon revealed himself in broad daylight by urinating from a bell tower on a passing philosophy professor.

 

In the Quora thread, somebody misunderstood the story and asked “Philosophy Professor? That seems most appropriate. Why did they consider him mad?” I responded:

The philosopher professor certainly wasn’t mad. In fact he was a rather eminent man in his field—he’s got a Wikipedia page—and was regarded with great respect and affection by the students and faculty. His moral earnestness—I almost wrote innocence—did strike some of the more irreverent among us as amusing, which probably accounts for the “improved” versions of what happened at the end of the mad pisser saga. The story ran that eyewitnesses saw the prof holding out his palm as if to see if it were raining and then looked up… That picture is almost too perfect, and I didn’t include the detail in the interest of journalistic accuracy. It is mere hearsay. On the other hand, it is true that the bell tower, a then recent addition to the school paid for by a rich alumnus named Smith, was known locally as Smith’s last erection.