•Archie, who refers to gays as “fairies,” discovers that his best friend is gay.
The hacker group Anonymous sends all-black faxes to people they don’t like. Reason: To drain their ink cartridges.
And while the Bunkers held frank and funny exchanges about current events and everyday problems of working people, toilets flushed in the background, Archie burped in the foreground and Mike and Gloria enjoyed an active sex life upstairs. By the end of the first season, All in the Family had become the number one show on television.
SURPRISE ENDING. Instead of disliking Archie, television audiences actually embraced him and his “Bunkerisms.” During the 1972 presidential campaign, “Archie Bunker for President” bumper stickers appeared on many TV fans’ cars. President Nixon, who was not a fan, can even be heard discussing several episodes of the 1971 show on one of the infamous Watergate tapes. Over its award-winning nine-season run (1971–79), All in the Family continued to address such taboo subjects as abortion, integration, rape, Watergate, gun control, and prejudice, setting the bar high for all the shows that followed and earning it the distinction of being one of the greatest television series of all time.
Archie Bunker: “They just wanna get rid of us old guys over 50, that’s all, and put us out to pasture. Well, I ain’t ready to be pasteurized.”
FAMILY FACTS
•All in the Family was videotaped in front of a live studio audience. Canned laughter was never used.
•It’s the first sitcom for which all of its main actors won Primetime Emmy Awards.
•Archie Bunker was partially based on Norman Lear’s father, who called him “Meathead” and “the laziest white kid I know.” Like Archie, the elder Lear called his wife “Dingbat,” and when he wanted her to stop talking, he’d order her to “stifle herself.” He also had an armchair reserved for his use only.
•Harrison Ford was originally offered the role of Archie’s son-in-law Mike Stivic, but turned it down.
•Penny Marshall was almost cast as Gloria Stivic, which would have been interesting, considering she later married Rob Reiner.
•Even though Those Were the Days didn’t work as the series title, it worked perfectly as the theme song that Carroll O’Connor and Jean Stapleton sang at the start of every show (including the pilot).
•The chairs used by Archie and Edith Bunker are on display at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.
Oscar-winning actress Natalie Portman has published two papers in scientific journals, one of them when she was in high school.
ROBOTS IN THE NEWS
One day, they’ll enslave and/or kill us all. Until then, let’s just enjoy these stories about (mostly) friendly robots.
IT’S GOT A GOOD BEAT AND YOU CAN RISE UP
AGAINST THE HUMANS TO IT
Electronic dance club music sounds like it was made by robots, so why have a DJ up onstage pressing buttons on a computer when a robot could just as easily handle the task? That’s the thinking of the management at the Karlovy Lazne Music Club in Prague, Czech Republic. They’ve had DJ KUKA, a former car factory robot, dropping beats at the venue since late 2017. The club’s owners hired a local robotics firm to create the robotic arm with a pincer on the end. The robot takes CDs from a rack and puts them into a player, scratches records, and even dances. So far, club regulars aren’t particularly fond of the electronic entity’s style. “It can’t feel what the people want to dance to,” one human told reporters. “There is no emotion behind the music.”
CITIZEN BOT
The signature droid of a Hong Kong-based company called Hanson Robotics is Sophia, a robot that looks like a human female and can make a variety of realistic facial expressions. Because Sophia can accomplish tasks while seemingly empathizing with humans, Hanson thinks “she” has a big future replacing customer service workers… and getting humans more used to humanoid robots. Saudi Arabia is already embracing the future. In October 2017, the Middle Eastern nation (where women have been allowed to vote only since 2015) made Sophia a citizen—the first robot to ever get citizenship anywhere in the world.
WHERE’S THE EXIT?
In 2018 researchers at Scotland’s Heriot-Watt University put their robotic “shopping assistant” to work at a Margiotta supermarket in Edinburgh. The first robotic store clerk in the UK—nicknamed “Fabio”—was programmed to know the locations of hundreds of items in the store, and direct customers when asked. Fabio also offered high fives, hugs, and jokes on command. (It greeted some customers by saying, “Hello, gorgeous!”) “We thought a robot was a great addition to show the customers that we are always wanting to do something new and exciting,” store owner Elena Margiotta told reporters. She misjudged her clientele. They found the robot, which resembles a toddler in an all-white robot costume, off-putting. Very few asked it for help, and those that did got terrible directions. One customer asked where the beer was, and rather than directing them to the correct aisle, Fabio told them that the beer was “in the alcohol section.” The robot’s creators chalked it up to too much ambient background noise, but after just three days on the job, Fabio was demoted to handing out samples.
Seven percent of Italy’s GDP is Mafia-related business.
ROBOT ARMY
A few years ago, high-tech organizations Android Technics and the Advanced Research Fund began work for the Russian government on a highly advanced, humanoid rescue robot. Once they got going, however, all parties realized that their project, FEDOR—short for Final Experimental Demonstration Object Research—had much more practical military applications. FEDOR’s finger-like appendages have remarkable dexterity. It’s able to change a light bulb, handle small tools, and, most alarmingly, fire semiautomatic firearms with remarkable accuracy. Anticipating exactly what everyone is thinking, Russia’s deputy prime minister of defense, Dmitry Rogozin, said, “We are not creating a Terminator, but artificial intelligence that will be of great practical significance in various fields.”
WATCH THIS
As hundreds of martial arts movies and Michelangelo from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have demonstrated, the Japanese weapon known as nunchucks—two heavy sticks connected with a short chain—are pretty cool. It takes a skilled fighter to handle them—to fend off bad guys and simultaneously manage to avoid hitting yourself in the head. Or you could get a robot to do it. Roboticists at the New Jersey Institute of Technology taught a small robotic arm how to wield nunchucks. An army of nunchucking robots may sound like bad news, but that wasn’t the NJIT team’s goal. They were developing new ways to quickly “teach” robots new tasks by using motion sensors to have a robot “watch” a human do something. Lead researcher Cong Wang taught himself how to use nunchucks over the course of two months, then he let the robot watch for two hours…by which point it was a master.
LIKE THE MOVIE? READ THE BOOK! (AGAIN)
In 1992 Francis Ford Coppola directed Bram Stoker’s Dracula, based on the classic novel by Bram Stoker, of course. To promote the movie, Signet Books released Bram Stoker’s Dracula: A Francis Ford Coppola Film. It’s a novelization of the movie… which was based on a novel.
Only country without a capital city: the island Republic of Nauru, which is only 8.1 square miles in area.
FIGHTING THE GOOD FIGHT
Even if you don’t know it by name, you’ve probably familiar with “Lucha Libre,” the Mexican form of professional wrestling where the fighters wear facemasks. Here’s the story of one of the most unusual people ever to take up the sport.
MEAN STREETS Sergio Gutierrez Benitez was a kid growing up in a tough neighborhood of Mexico City in the 1950s. By age ten he’d already joined a gang, committed petty crimes, and started using drugs—marijuana at first, then harder drugs. Finally, after years of gang violence and drug addiction, he hit rock bottom in his early 20s and went to a local church to get help. As he told the BBC in 2018, the response he got was not what he expected:
The priest said, “Have you come to confess or wh
at?” And I said, “No, I want you to help me. I’m a drug addict.” He said, “This is not a rehabilitation center here, so get out!” The priest took me by one ear and threw me out. When he kicked me out of the church, I turned around and insulted his mother. And from that moment, my idea to become a priest was born.
Benitez thought that if there were more “cool and laid-back priests” who understood what it was like to grow up in poverty, they’d be better able to help troubled young people like himself turn their lives around. He decided that he would be that kind of priest. He checked into a drug rehabilitation facility, where they detoxed him using a primitive technique: they tied his arms and legs to a table until the drugs left his body. Then he entered a seminary, and after several years of study he was ordained a Catholic priest in Veracruz, Mexico, in 1973.
Father Benitez was going to have to come up with the money himself… but how?
KID STUFF Father Benitez says he found his true calling by chance one day when he came across an orphan who was living under a bridge in Veracruz. He took the child in, and asked his superiors for permission to build an orphanage. When they refused, he moved to Teotihuacan, northeast of Mexico City, where the bishop was more welcoming. There, using donations from the community, he opened his orphanage and began taking in street children.
Benitez never turned away a child in need. Soon he had dozens of kids in his care, more than he had money to feed. But the diocese was poor and the bishop didn’t have the money to support the orphanage. Father Benitez was going to have to come up with the money himself…but how?
In 1923, jockey Frank Hayes died of a heart attack mid-race…and his horse still won.
The inspiration turned out to not be too far away. Benitez thought back to two wrestling movies made in the 1960s that were still shown on TV—El Señor Tormenta (Mister Storm), and Tormenta En El Ring (Storm in the Ring). They both had the same storyline: a priest becomes a masked lucha libre (“free fight”) wrestler to support a struggling orphanage. It worked in the movies—why not give it a shot? “I decided to make the fantasy come true,” Father Benitez says.
“I decided to make the fantasy come true,” Father Benitez says.
LEARNING THE ROPES It took a while for Benitez to find a wrestler who took him seriously enough to teach him how to wrestle. He eventually found a wrestler named El Líder (The Leader), who taught him some moves, and also agreed to wrestle Benitez in his first match, in the mid-1970s. “The Leader must not have taught me everything. I lost,” he later joked.
Benitez took the name Fray Tormenta—“Friar Storm,” and wrestled The Leader wearing a homemade costume that consisted of yellow tights and T-shirt, both trimmed in red; red shorts with yellow stripes on the sides; and a gold mask trimmed with red around the eyes and mouth. Printed on the front of his T-shirt: “FT,” framed with lightning bolts on either side.
Father Benitez admits that when he started wrestling, he imagined he’d be able to make a quick fortune and get out after a year or two. He soon found out that the job paid as little as $20 a fight. But he kept at it, being very careful not to let anyone know that “Friar Storm” was really a priest. Luchadores live and die by their athletic skill and artistry in the ring; how many fight promoters would have been willing to believe that a priest had the goods? In those early years when Benitez was trying to establish himself, he was helped by the fact that lucha libre wrestlers never remove their masks in public. Nobody knew what he looked like or had any idea who he was.
UNMASKED Fray Tormenta’s identity might still be unknown today, had a wrestler named Hurricane Ramirez not attended a wedding that Father Benitez performed and outed him after recognizing his voice. That got Benitez in trouble with his bishop, a man named Magin Torreblanca, who ordered him to give up wrestling. When Benitez explained that he did it to raise money for the orphanage, Bishop Torreblanca gave him his blessing…sort of: “Officially, I have not given him permission to continue wrestling, but I overlook it, because I consider his skills a gift from God,” he told the Los Angeles Times in the 1980s.
THE BIG LEAGUES Being exposed as a priest not only didn’t hurt Benitez’s career, it helped it. He built up a huge following of fiercely loyal fans who admired him for going to the mat—literally—for his kids. People began showing up at his fights with donations of cooking oil, rice, beans, and other foods for him to take back to the orphanage. They also brought pots and pans—not to cook in but to bang on as encouragement during Fray Tormenta’s fights. “Luchadores were afraid to fight me, not because of my strength or skill but they were afraid of the fans,” he told the Slam! Wrestling website. “They would shout out, ‘You can’t fight a priest!’ and they would throw tomatoes, garbage and even coins at them!”
If you can read this, you don’t have it: Optophobia is a fear of opening your eyes.
Father Benitez quickly moved from being just another obscure regional fighter to signing with the biggest lucha libre promotion agency in the business, which put him in bigger fights not just in Mexico but also in the United States, where he toured 70 times, and Japan, where he made 14 trips to fight professional wrestlers there. The days of $20 fights were over: the bouts in Japan paid $5,000 apiece, and even the fights in Mexico paid hundreds of dollars—sometimes even thousands. If the fights were far from Mexico City, money for airfare and hotels was included. But rather than use the money for that purpose, Father Benitez would drive to his fights in an old camper truck, sometimes traveling 15 hours or more to get there, fight a 20-minute bout, and then drive home again, sleeping on the road and saving the money for the orphanage. “To accept luxury would be taking food out of the mouths of the children,” he told Sports Illustrated in 1987.
“They would shout out, ‘You can’t fight a priest!’ and they would throw tomatoes, garbage and even coins at them!”
FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS Benitez wrestled in more than 4,000 bouts in a career lasting more than 20 years. In 1998 health issues forced him into semi-retirement, and he made only occasional appearances in the ring. In 2011 the 66-year-old quit for good, though he still makes personal appearances in his mask and refuses to be photographed without it.
Over the course of his career, Benitez broke his nose and his ankle, cracked three ribs, mangled several of his fingers, and dislocated his shoulder in the ring. (As you may have guessed, he’s the inspiration for the 2006 film Nacho Libre, starring Jack Black.) But rather than think about all that he’s been through, Benitez prefers to focus on the more than 2,000 homeless kids that his wrestling has saved from a life on the streets. Many have gone on to lead fulfilling lives as doctors, lawyers, accountants, computer technicians, and other professions. At least one became a priest, and several, including Fray Tormenta Jr., Tormenta II, Infernal-Face, and Krypton, have followed him into the ring.
A big galaxy can absorb a smaller galaxy—astronomers call it “galactic cannibalism.”
A STORE IS BORN
You’ve probably never heard of Joe Coulombe, but there’s a good chance you’ve shopped at the chain of grocery stores he founded. Even if you haven’t, it may just be a matter of time until you do.
ORIGINAL JOE
In 1957 the struggling Rexall drugstore chain hired a young Stanford University MBA named Joe Coulombe to run a project that the company hoped would stem its losses. At the time, Rexall was being hammered by discount drugstore chains like Thrifty Drug and Eckerd. The head of company, Justin Dart, had recently been to Dallas, Texas, where he’d seen a new kind of retail business: a “convenience store” called 7-Eleven that opened early, closed late, and stocked a limited selection of grocery basics like milk, bread, and eggs for people who shopped after hours or who didn’t want the hassle of going to a big store when they just needed a few things.
There weren’t any stores like 7-Eleven in Los Angeles, where Rexall had recently moved its headquarters, and Dart wanted Coulombe to open some for Rexall. The first location opened in Pacific Palisades in 1958. Called Pronto Market, it
was a mini-mart/drugstore that also processed photographs, sold paperback books, and stocked lots of Rexall health and beauty products.
CHANGE OF PLANS
Over the next four years Coulombe opened half a dozen Pronto Markets around L.A. and they were making money. But then his bosses told him to sell the stores. Reason: Justin Dart had recently purchased the Tupperware Corporation, and he wanted to free up money to invest in that business. At the time, Coulombe was due for a vacation, so he went to the Caribbean to clear his head and think about what he wanted to do next. By the time he returned, he’d decided that rather than stay with Rexall, he wanted to buy the Pronto Markets and run them himself.
He and Rexall agreed on a price, and over the next few years Coulombe doubled the size of the chain to twelve stores. His company was making money, but then 7-Eleven muscled into the Southern California market. Coulombe knew that if he tried to compete directly against them, it was just a matter of time until they drove him out of business. He had to think of a way to differentiate Pronto Market from the competition.
Coulombe was a voracious reader, and he’d recently read an article in Scientific American, of all places, that helped him decide on a strategy. The article pointed out that 60 percent of Americans who were eligible for college were taking advantage of that opportunity, up from 2 percent in the 1930s, when the country was still mired in the Great Depression and hardly anyone could afford a college education. He’d also read that Boeing was introducing the 747, an enormous new jet that was predicted to drive down the cost of air travel, making it possible for people with even modest incomes to see the world. “I wanted to appeal to the well-educated and people who were traveling more,” he told Forbes magazine in 1989, “like teachers, engineers and public administrators. Nobody was taking care of them.”
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