They’re evolving! Whales have been born with legs.
WHAT’S IN STORE
This was not a generation that wanted Salisbury steak TV dinners with Jell-O and Cool Whip for dessert, so Coulombe began adjusting the selection in his Pronto Markets toward more exotic and international foods. Then he began phasing out many of the drugstore offerings that were holdovers from the Rexall days. And because he’d read an article about a correlation between the number of years a person spent in school and the amount of alcohol they consumed, he stocked his stores with a wide variety of beers, wines, and liquor.
By then he’d also adopted the strategy of renting existing buildings in less-than-prime locations to save money. One early store in Pasadena, for example, was in a building that had once been a bottling plant. These locations were larger than his original Pronto Markets, and they gave him plenty of room to expand his offerings.
Coulombe wanted his stores to be fun places that customers looked forward to visiting. He thought back to his vacation in the Caribbean and thought a South Seas/tiki theme would be interesting, so he gave his stores a makeover and changed the name to Trader Joe’s.
The next big change came in 1970, when Coulombe read an issue of Scientific American that sparked his interest in health food and vitamins. He began incorporating these products into the store’s offerings, and rejiggering existing products to make them healthier, turning Trader Joe’s into a “health food on top of a liquor store,” as he put it.
MOVING ON
By the late 1970s, the Trader Joe’s chain had grown to 27 stores in and around Los Angeles. Its low prices and unique offerings had developed a cult following among the “overeducated, underpaid” clientele that Coulombe sought. But Trader Joe’s was still a strictly Southern California phenomenon. It might have remained so forever, were it not for the fact that Coloumbe had started thinking about his own mortality. He was pushing 50, and he’d already lost friends to heart attacks. He realized that if he were to die suddenly, inheritance taxes might eat up as much as half of his business. That was more than he could stand, so he decided to sell Trader Joe’s.
Part 2 of the story is on page 327.
Paul Winchell, voice of Tigger, held 30 patents, including one for an artificial heart.
THE GÄVLE GOAT
Here’s the story of the only Christmas tradition that involves arson (that we know of).
If You Build It…
Beginning on Advent, which marks the beginning of the holiday season by some Christian churches, members of the Southern Merchants (local businesspeople) in Gävle, Sweden, build a 43-foot-high yule goat out of straw over a metal skeleton. It spends the month of December in the Slottstorget, a historic square located in the center of the city. A yule goat, by the way, is a centuries-old Christmas symbol in northern Europe, kind of like Santa. Its most common incarnation is as a Christmas tree ornament.
The gigantic goat tradition goes back to 1966. The story goes that a local Gävle advertising guru named Stig Gavlén convinced a local businessman named Harry Ström to put up the money. Then Gavlén convinced his brother, the local fire chief, to build it. That first goat was over four stories tall and weighed 6,000 pounds. It took dozens of firefighters several days to complete it.
Setting the goat ablaze took only a minute or two.
…They Will Burn It
For some unknown reason, an arsonist destroyed the first Gävle Goat within mere hours of its dedication ceremony. Ström (the businessman) demanded his money back. Fortunately, the goat was insured. Unfortunately, the prank kicked off another annual tradition: The Southern Merchants try to keep the goat safe; arsonists try to destroy it. And more often than not, the arsonists win. Despite this, the Southern Merchants dutifully build a new goat in Slottstorget every Advent…and hope he doesn’t go up in flames. “It’s not fair,” said one of the townspeople. “All the children are always sad. It’s a sad feeling around the town.”
This macabre cycle of birth and destruction has become something of a spectacle around the world. Will the Gävle Goat survive Christmas? To keep tabs, you can watch his progress on a 24-hour webcam (courtesy of Gävle’s tourism board). He’s even got his own Twitter account and Spotify list. (Favorite songs: Elton John’s “I’m Still Standing” and the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive.” Least favorite songs: anything with the words “fire” or “burn” in the title.)
Goat-and-Mouse
As of December 2017, the goat’s been damaged 37 times since 1966. If he meets his doom prior to Saint Lucia, a holiday on December 13, he’s rebuilt. After that date, the city makes do without the goat until the following year. This game of cat-and-mouse gets more elaborate every year. Some highlights:
•In 1976 a student drove his Volvo through the goat’s back legs, collapsing him. Since then, he’s been protected by a metal barrier.
•One particularly cold winter night, the goat’s security team decided to warm up at a nearby tavern. They’d only just received their drinks when they looked out the window and saw the goat ablaze.
•In 2005 two men dressed as Santa Claus and the Gingerbread Man took out the goat Rambo-style with a flaming arrow.
•In 2010 one of the goat’s security guards told an interesting tale: He was approached by two pranksters who offered him 50,000 kronor (about $6,000) to abandon his post for a few minutes. Their plan was to “kidnap” the goat with a helicopter and fly him to Stockholm and drop him in a public square.
•In 2011 organizers sprayed the goat with water, assuming it would freeze and keep the goat safe. When the weather warmed up, the ice melted, and the goat was burned down on December 2.
•A few hours after the dedication ceremony on opening day of the Gävle Goat’s 50th anniversary in 2016…someone burned it down. Despite the St. Lucia rule, frustrated organizers refused to build another one, so some high school students put up a smaller goat. That one only lasted until the wee hours of December 5, when it too was destroyed.
•If you’re wondering if all this goaticide is legal, it isn’t. In 2001 an American tourist named Lawrence Jones found that out the hard way when he got drunk and burned down the goat with his cigarette lighter. He told the arresting officer that his Swedish “friends” had told him it was a perfectly legal tradition. Jones spent 18 days in jail and was given a hefty fine. His lighter was confiscated as well.
Technically, escaping from prison isn’t illegal in Germany. (But if they catch you, they will send you back.)
A Christmas Miracle
After 2016’s opening day debacle, organizers pulled out all the stops to prevent a repeat. “The Gävle Goat lives a dangerous life,” goat spokesperson Maria Wallberg told National Geographic in 2017. “But we are full of hope that he will survive this year.” To ensure this, the goat’s straw was coated with a strong fire protectant; two menacing fences encircled him, and he was guarded around the clock by ex-cons from the Swedish reality show X-Cons. Lo and behold, the Gävle Goat made it all the way to January 2, when he was peacefully disassembled.
Will he survive next year? Stay tuned.
Sperm whales sleep by pointing themselves toward the surface and bobbing around.
THE FINAL ISSUE
These magazines were once publishing powerhouses…until they folded. Here’s who or what was on the cover of their very last print issues.
Newsweek (December 31, 2012)
As a nod to its past, the editors ran a vintage photo of its old offices, a Manhattan skyscraper called the Newsweek Building. As a nod to its future (as an online publication), the headline read, “#LASTPRINTISSUE.”
Life (May 2000)
The photo-based weekly newsmagazine ended its 36-year run on December 29, 1972, with an appropriate cover story: “The Year in Pictures 1972.” Life returned as a monthly in 1978. The last issue of that magazine featured a striking image of two adult hands holding a tiny premature baby—in other words, Life ended showing life beginning.
Nintendo Power (
December 2012)
The first issue of Nintendo Power back in 1988 featured a scene from the video game Super Mario Bros. 2, rendered in clay. The scene: Mario stomping on a mushroom and running away from his nemesis, King Koopa. The final issue featured a re-creation of the image from the first issue, except that the clay renderings were more lifelike.
George (January 2001)
John F. Kennedy Jr. was a celebrity from birth. Gossip columnists tracked his every move, and there was widespread speculation about what the handsome young playboy would eventually do with his life. After working as an assistant district attorney in New York for a while, Kennedy made his move: In 1995 he launched a glossy magazine called George, which combined political news and opinion with humor. (It was sort of like The Daily Show or Real Time before either of those TV shows existed.) Then Kennedy died in a plane crash in 1999, and the magazine couldn’t weather the loss of its leader—it folded a little over a year later. Its final cover: a photograph of John F. Kennedy Jr.
Playgirl (Winter 2016)
The internet revolutionized (or eliminated) a lot of industries, notably the pornography business. Anyone who wants to see pictures of naked people can easily obtain them on the internet, saving themselves the embarrassment of getting dirty magazines at a newsstand or in their mailbox. Playgirl, which featured images of naked men, began publication in 1973 and went out of business 43 years later, in 2016. Its final cover story (and image) was “Campus Hunks: the Boys of Ft. Lauderdale.”
What’s jamais vu? It’s the opposite of déjà vu: when something familiar feels unfamiliar.
Spin (September 2012)
New York indie rapper Azealia Banks, who had become nationally known after self-recording and releasing several singles, was on the cover. The power and scope of computers and the internet enabled Banks to do that…and competition from free-to-read music blogs on the internet sunk the print edition of Spin.
Self (February 2017)
As the internet became more mainstream, fewer people wanted to pay for health/beauty/fitness content when they could get it for free online. Self was a victim of that trend, and its ominous final cover model was Iskra Lawrence, a model who achieved fame via Instagram.
Jet (June 23, 2014)
One of the few general-interest magazines geared toward an African American audience, Jet ended its print edition after 63 years. On the cover of the final issue: a collage of 38 classic Jet covers that featured Nelson Mandela, Marvin Gaye, Prince, Jesse Jackson, Aretha Franklin, Spike Lee, Michael Jordan, and others, along with the headline “An American Icon.”
PC Magazine (January 2009):
The last issue of this major computer magazine offered a cover story about the latest and greatest PC operating system to date: Windows 7.
Photoplay (June 1980)
From the 1910s through the 1960s, Photoplay was one of the most popular movie fan magazines, publishing movie stills and Hollywood gossip. (It was a precursor of magazines like People and Us Weekly.) By 1980 far fewer people were going to the movies than in the 1940s, choosing to stay home and watch TV instead. It’s fitting, then, that gracing the cover of the last Photoplay were Charlene Tilton and Victoria Principal, stars of Dallas, the most popular television series at the time.
National Lampoon (November 1998)
Appropriately enough, it was “The Failure Issue.”
Did you know? Tonsils are lymph nodes.
THE SCRABBLE SCANDAL
One of the most entertaining parts of a Scrabble game is bluffing your opponents by playing a made-up word to see if they’ll challenge it and look it up in the dictionary to see if it’s really there. It turns out that one of the biggest Scrabble fights ever was over which words should, and should not, appear in The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary.
WORDPLAY If you’re a serious Scrabble player and you played in the 1970s, you may remember that in those days, Funk & Wagnalls Standard College Dictionary was the reference work that American Scrabble tournaments used as a guide to which words were acceptable for play, and which ones weren’t. If a word appeared in Funk & Wagnalls, it was acceptable; if it didn’t, it wasn’t—as simple as that.
But Funk & Wagnalls had its problems, the most glaring of which was that many common words, such as “surreal” and “busload,” weren’t in it. “Smart” was in the dictionary, but “smarter” wasn’t. Foreign words aren’t allowed in the English-language version of Scrabble unless they’ve actually entered the English language—words like “chauffeur” and “sushi.” But quite a few foreign words appeared in Funk & Wagnalls, such as ja and bitte in German (“yes” and “please”), and oui in French (“yes”). That meant that these words were playable in Scrabble, but “smarter” was not. Idiosyncrasies like these drove hard-core Scrabble players nuts, and as Scrabble tournaments grew in seriousness and number throughout the 1970s, the need for a better dictionary became acute.
If a word appeared in Funk & Wagnalls, it was acceptable; if it didn’t, it wasn’t.
DO-IT-YOURSELF Selchow & Righter, the company that owned Scrabble, decided to create their own dictionary, and they worked with Merriam-Webster to do it. Their plan was to consult five different collegiate dictionaries—published by Funk & Wagnalls, Merriam-Webster, American Heritage, Webster, and Random House—and use them to compile a list of words and definitions for what became known as The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary. Any English word that appeared in at least one of the dictionaries would make it into the Scrabble dictionary and would therefore be acceptable in gameplay. The first edition of The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary was published in 1978.
The approach was straightforward, but the execution, it turns out, was flawed. Rather than hire a professional staff to compile the word list, Merriam-Webster relied heavily on lists created by members of the National Scrabble Association. These amateurs made plenty of mistakes, and so did Merriam-Webster staffers. Obscure words were misspelled, some foreign terms made it in, and some English words, like “granola” and “meltdown,” were left out, even though they appeared in all five of the dictionaries consulted. One dedicated Scrabble player named Joe Leonard eventually compiled a list of 5,500 words that should have made it into the Scrabble dictionary, but for some reason had not.
The horses on Disneyland’s King Arthur Carrousel are repainted every two years. Each horse takes 40 hours to paint.
SLURRED SPEECH The second edition of The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary, published in 1991, was a big improvement, but it ran into its own problems in 1993, when a Virginia woman named Judith Grad was playing with some friends who were Scrabble fanatics. They pointed out that both the old dictionary and the new one contained the word “jew.” Not as a proper noun meaning “Jewish person,” because proper nouns are not playable in Scrabble, but as a verb meaning “to bargain with someone in a miserly or petty way.” In other words, as an ethnic slur.
It turned out that there were plenty of other racist words in the dictionary—“wetback” and “spic,” for example—and that made Grad angry. She wrote to both Merriam-Webster and Milton Bradley, the division of Hasbro that had bought the American rights to Scrabble in the mid-1980s, to complain. They thanked her for her concern but refused to remove the offending words. “Slurs are part of the language, and reputable dictionaries record them as such,” Merriam-Webster replied.
Grad didn’t see the Scrabble dictionary as just another dictionary. It existed to support a game played by families, and also by children in schools, and she felt that ethnic slurs and other offensive terms had no business in such a book. She started a letter-writing campaign to get the dictionary changed, and as groups like the Anti-Defamation League joined the campaign, it eventually caught the attention of Hasbro chairman Alan Hassenfeld, who had fond memories of playing Scrabble with his mother. She would not have allowed the use of such words in their Scrabble games, and he didn’t see why his company should be in the business of promoting them, either. On his own, without con
sulting either Merriam-Webster or the National Scrabble Association, he announced that the offending words would be removed.
“Slurs are part of the language, and reputable dictionaries record them as such,” Merriam-Webster replied.
FIGHTIN’ WORDS When the third edition of The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary was published in 1996, 167 offending words had been taken out. Not just the ethnic slurs, but other words like “boobie,” “bazooms,” “nooky,” “fatso,” “peeing,” “fart,” “turd,” “gringo,” and even “jesuit.”
Most serious Scrabble players hated the changes: They saw Scrabble as just a game about words, and felt the sanitized dictionary as an arbitrary form of politically correct censorship that accomplished nothing. They began their own letter-writing campaigns to get the words on the “poo list,” as it would come to be known, reinstated. “There are huge numbers of words which may be offensive to one or another group. However, a book purporting to be a dictionary cannot pretend that these words do not exist,” one petition written by a woman named Hilda Siegel read.
Silent, and silenced: 75% of American silent movies are considered permanently lost.
167 offending words had been taken out. Not just the ethnic slurs, but words like “boobie,” “fatso,” “peeing,” “fart,” and even “jesuit.”
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