After announcing that Berkshire Hathaway would be investing $5 billion in Bank of America, Warren Buffett told CNBC that he had dreamed up the idea of helping the beleaguered bank just 2 days earlier, while taking a bath.  But as it turns out, baths and bathtubs are a bit of a theme for Mr. Buffett.

In “The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life,” Alice Schroeder’s 2008 biography of the Berkshire Hathaway chairman, one chapter is titled “The Bathtub Steeplechase.” 

Ms. Schroeder describes how a young Mr. Buffett would play a game with his sisters in which they would roll marbles down the side of a bathtub filled with water. The marbles, each of which was given a name, were rolled simultaneously into the water, and the first to hit the stopper won the race.

“His sisters watched him race the marbles over and over, trying to improve their times,” Ms. Schroeder wrote. “The marbles never tired, the stopwatch never erred, and — unlike his audience — Warren never seemed bored by the repetition.”

In the book, Mr. Buffett is also said to compare his brain to a bathtub:

The tub filled with ideas and experiences and matters that interested him. When he had no more use for information, whoosh — the plug popped up, and the memory drained away…  The bathtub memory’s efficiency freed up enormous amounts of space for the new and the productive. Buffett thought of the bathtub memory as a helper that allowed him to “look forward,” rather than “looking backward” all the time like his mother.

Apparently, Mr. Buffett’s fascination with bathtubs didn't end at childhood.  In 2008, after making a $5 billion investment in Goldman Sachs at the height of the financial crisis, he offered another tub-related analogy.  “Unfortunately, the economy is a little like a bathtub.  You can’t have cold water in the front and hot water in the back. And what was happening on Wall Street was going to immerse that bathtub very, very quickly in terms of business.”   [NYTimes, 8/25/11]