Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - The Days Of The Week

Episode Date: September 14, 2026

Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin explore why the days of the week are secretly incredibly fascinating.Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode.Come hang out with us on the SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5Visit http://sifpod.store/ to get shirts and posters celebrating the show. Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinsifpod

The days of the week, known for being seven, famous for being Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, etc. Nobody thinks much about them, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why the days of the week are secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Hey there, Cipelopods. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode, a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name's Alex Schmidt and I'm not alone. I'm joined by my co-host Katie Golden. Katie. Yes. What is your relationship to? That's normal.

That's normal. That one really hit me. What is your relationship to or opinion of the days of the week? Well, you know, it's kind of an everyday sort of thing for me. And I once had, when I was a little tiny, small, small. Katie. I had a friend and I was, I don't know, I was like four or five. She had some kind of complicated name like Gwendolyn and then I was like, no, your name is Wednesday. And she would say, no, no, my name is not Wednesday. It's whatever it was, Gwendolyn or Wendellin or Worcestercher.

Wandafer. Yeah, I don't, I don't remember exactly what her name was because I had like, I was like, No, no, no. Your name is Wednesday because that's, you know, that's what I can do. Look, I can do Wednesday. I cannot, I'm four years old. I'm not going to do Gwendolyn. That's not going to happen. She was also four and was very patient with me. And I don't know what happened to that friend. We lost touch. Maybe she decided to make friends with four-year-olds who could pronounce her complicated name. But as a child, I figured that the best way to name someone was just, like the closest day of the week to what their actual name is. So. And I guess you were doing that. Did you know about the Adams family character Wednesday Adams? Or were you just pulling? No clue.

No idea. Yeah, cool. No idea. No, it had nothing to do with that. And then when I was older, I think I felt a little validated by that because it's like, aha, see, it is a name. I was right. I was right to ignore the, uh,

self-determination of my four-year-old friend. In case folks are curious, there's a nursery rhyme about Monday's child, Tuesdays, child, Wednesday's child, et cetera. And apparently the Adams family character is named after the line Wednesday's child is full of woe. So that's it. That's why in the show. Yeah. That's amazing. I love that, though. Yep. And then they can take it. It's fine. Yeah. What about you? How do you feel about the days of the week, Alex? When I sat and thought about it. I realized my biggest feeling about the days of the week is that Monday is podcast day in terms of releases. Like it's been that throughout SIF for me and it's really like encoded into my head. And also that we usually tape Thursdays. It's mostly that or the times that Baby Schmidt

has a weekly little baby class like a swimming class. That's it. And this is deeply SIF all seven days of the week are pretty important in people's lives. So thank you to Serial Thron on the Discord for this great suggestion. And on most episodes, we lead with fascinating numbers and statistics, but this topic's so numerical, all the numbers are just in the takeaways. So all takeaways this week. Wow. And the first one is mega takeaway number one. The English names for the seven days of the week are a very messy combination of the moon, the sun, medieval Norse mythology, and ancient Roman mythology. Yeah, because I don't understand. and our calendar, to be honest with you.

To me, it seems like it's mostly vibes. A lot of vibes, yeah. Yeah, and primarily based on a calendar from the Roman Empire. It was called the Julian calendar. And then what we call the Gregorian calendar was a pretty minor update, mostly adding leap days in the specific way we have them. Right. Okay.

So it's pretty much Roman stuff. And then it makes sense that Roman mythology got into the days of the week. Do most cultures have seven days per week? Or is that specifically kind of the Roman calendar? Well, I have a big takeaway about it. And it's primarily places that were influenced by Jewish, Christian, and Muslim culture, which includes the Romans, especially spreading Christianity. So, yeah, it's relatively specific to that.

And then most countries where this podcast is popular, if they speak English, they're probably part of that. And so it fits, yeah. Okay, okay. This is going to be such a mind-bending up. episode and also it's going to be a lot of like giant cultural trends where we don't have a specific year or inventor or something. People just coalesced around these things. So there's not, there's not like a John Week who invented the week. John Week?

Yeah. They hurt my Dwag. So I'm going to go get them. There are basically four different sources for these seven names for days of the week in English. The sun, the moon, and then one day is named after Roman mythology, four days named after Norse mythology. All right. And then it's also more complicated than that. This is a huge mind-binding takeaway.

I love it. The key sources are digital resources from two different museums. There's the Viking Ship Museum, which is in Denmark, and the two. town of Rochkila. Oh, I've been there. Oh, good. Yeah. They are so helpful with this, especially because a language like Danish is very tied to the

North stuff we got some of this from. And the other one is the Royal Museum's Greenwich in England. I have not been there. I weirdly have been to the Greenwich Dateline, and I think we poke through the museum. So look at us. Hey. But yeah, we'll do a later takeaway about why there are seven days of the week at all. That's a perfect question.

And for now, why does basically every English speaker use names like Monday and Tuesday? The simplest answer is that Norse culture drove a lot of this. Because as we'll talk about throughout the episode, the English language is a massive different influences. And Germanic and Norse is a big one. There's also French coming into it too. But starting around 500 AD, there were seafaring trading people in Scandinavia, and in parts of Northern Europe, like modern Denmark and Germany, they develop a written culture where there's stories and worship involving many gods.

And four Norse gods are the origin of four of our Day of the Week names. Tuesday through Friday are honoring Norse deities. Really? Okay. I can guess Thor's day because Thor. Exactly. Thursday is Thor. Yeah. And then two is for.

or, you know, twos, good old twos, god of getting things in pairs. I guess it's like a Janus or a Gemini kind of thing. Yeah, cool, cool, cool, yeah. Right, right, right. English speakers, they have really anglicized the names pretty aggressively. It's hard to pick out some of the Norse gods in these. But yeah, Thor is Thursday. That's the clearest one.

Tuesday honors a god called tier. Usually the anglicized Latin alphabet spelling is T-Y-R, tier. Okay. And then Wednesday, it's hard to tell, but it honors Odin. Oh, Wednesday, Odin's Day, Odin's Day, Odin's Day. Odin's Day, Wednesday. I see it, I hear it. Yeah, and apparently in especially more Germanic pronunciations of Odin, it would be more like

Orden, you know? And so that kind of morphed and shifted. Again, there's no inventor, no date, but it became Wednesday. All right. So like the All-Father, the leader of the Norse gods, his name led to Wednesday Adams. He got Humday, though. That seems weird for the like, the Orden Father. Imagine if a week started on a Wednesday.

Huh? Blows your mind, right? Right. Right. If you start on the hump, it's like you're sledding or something. Right. It doesn't make sense. No.

Tuesday is dedicated to walking back up the hill, the boring part of sledding. Right. No. No. So, yeah, Tuesday is Tier. Tier's Day. Wednesday's Odin. O'Don's day.

Thursday, Thor. Thursday. And then Friday honors Frigg. Frigg. the queen of the Norse gods. Ah, Friggs day. All four of these, but especially Frigg, actually came up on the recent stuff, about the number 13, where there's a story where Loki kind of curses a banquet, and it's because Frig made fun of him partly, you know.

But all of these gods were major in Norse mythology. Odin and Frig are the king and the queen, kind of the leading. They have basically everything to do with fatherhood and motherhood and patriarchy and matriarchy. It's kind of like Zeus and Heron. when you, if you're trying to, you know, like in the Greek pantheon. Yeah, quite a bit. I guess the only big difference is that Zeus is the father and has all the lightning and thunder. And the Norse gave lightning and thunder to Thor, who is the son of Odin and Frigg.

Right. Well, you know, he's delegating. Actually, yeah. Yeah, like, how does Zeus carry on all these affairs while also doing all the weather? Yeah. Figure it out. Yeah. Yeah, and then Tear is probably the least famous to modern people, especially because he's not prominent in the Marvel Comics, Norse Pantheon.

I laugh, but that's true, isn't it? It really is true, yeah. So Teer was very famous, but also some of his background is fuzzy in the mythology. Various myths either said his father is Odin or his father is a giant, right? totally different. And then Tear, the one famous thing is that in the stories about Ragnarok, there's a prophecy that a giant wolf called Fenrir will kill and eat Odin. And Teir is like a brave and just either son or just fan of Odin.

And so he goes and binds Fenrir. He has to sacrifice a hand to Fenrir to calm him down and make him accept binding. Yeah. So Tears usually depicted being mighty and great. carrying a sword and also having just one hand. Yeah, I feel that. That's kind of like with my dog. Whenever she has to go to Betty Times, I have to give her a treat.

And sometimes she gets a little nibbley and kind of gets one of my fingers. It doesn't hurt or anything. But it is kind of a sacrifice on my part because then it gets a little bit of dog slobber on it. And then I got to wash my hands. Yeah, Katie is the tier of the podcasting and internet communication world, I think. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Yeah. Some little write-ups of the tear story, they say,

Teer lost his hand, but apparently the specifics are basically that he negotiated with the wolf and said, like, if I cut off and give you my hands and let you nibble on it, will you allow yourself to be bound? It wasn't like a combat accident. That's kind of chill, right? Like, you know, I feel like that's a good deal. And then also doesn't, for Frindrier, it's also like he's, he's going to escape someday.

that that's like that's the fate right like he will escape someday and then he odin because he was chained even though he got a hand to eat because it's similar to Greek mythology in that whole sort of like you trying to escape your fate is what causes the fate to happen in the first place sort of deal absolutely yeah he goes yeah then in the ragnerach story fenrir gets out anyway and eats out in anyway and you know there you go yeah yeah what are you going to do man sometimes you're the dog and sometimes you're the fire hydrant and sometimes you lose a hand and your godfather or guy worship gets eaten anyways by a giant wolf dog thing. So like especially tear jumps out to me because many or all of us

have never heard of him, right? And then many or all of us have always described Tuesday in a way that honors him, you know, funny, strange. And it's particularly amazing that these four names for days survived what happened in Norse culture where their pagan faith was replaced almost entirely by Christianity. That was by far the sea change was that Christianity took over. And apparently we're just pretty sure that the Christian missionaries who first came to Scandinavia, again, there's no inventor, there's no date, but they just said, let's just work on spreading the faith. They can keep in daily life calling the days these things because that's a whole another thing to change. Right. Like, we'll just work on making them Christian. Yeah, I mean,

you can't, like, you can't introduce too much change for people all once. Otherwise, they start getting annoyed and you don't want people annoyed. You want them to be like, yeah, I don't know, I guess this Christ guy sounds pretty chill. You don't want it to be like, oh, and now there's all these new rules and you've got to change all your calendars, even though you're already bought one that has a bunch of cute kitties on it. Right. Oh, especially because they're Scandinavian cats. So they're in. like a nice, cozy, what's that word, Higa kind of thing? Hig.

It's very Hig. Hig. Hig. Yeah. Super Hig. What is not Hig is to get rid of my calendar with the cats. That is very not Hig. Yes.

And then this is big in the English language, especially because I don't know if everybody knows there was a giant period of the history of the island of Britain where a lot of it was colonized and traded with and controlled by Norse leaders and people. I'll link about the common name in English history is the Dane Law, the idea that, oh, the Norse are running kind of all of Eastern England. It's fine. Whatever. Right.

Yeah. Well, you know, look, they're stinky because of all that time out at sea, not changing their clothes. You know, it's like you just kind of want to leave them that area, that region. Yeah, oddly that kind of came up. up on the stuff about wool, the main limit on the spread of Norse people was how much wool they could get from sheep to make sales for ships. Yeah. And they got stinky out there. They had very little clothing beyond the sales. You can't not get stinky when you're out there. It's just impossible. Yeah, we all stink. It's like we all poop. Yeah, sure. Yeah. Right. And if you're stuck on a ship, there's just, you know, there's no showers. Yeah. Beyond that, a few other historical processes led to all this. in English. One is that, you know, the Norse and Germanic people

received the entire concept of a seven-day week from the Roman Empire. And again, we'll talk later about especially Christian culture, making the Romans interested in that. So, like, the Roman Empire and then the former Roman Empire spread them the idea of the week is seven days. That's a cycle in your calendar. Right. And the Romans also gave them the idea of,

you should name most of the days after your gods. The Romans also had a pagan polytheistic religion. Yeah, exactly, which they got from the Greeks, which the Greeks probably got from some other dudes. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Which we all probably got from sort of our weird kind of chimp-like ancestors who had gods such as banana and leaf master. Right. And if banana would delegate the lightning and thunder, he could have more bananas.

What's he doing? Right, exactly. I think we used to be minions in the evolutionary tree. I mean, there's no proof we weren't. No, that's the missing link. Prove me wrong. Yeah, and so we also think a similar process happens in the, if people don't know in general, there's a whole Roman empire and culture before Romans start adopting Christianity, you know,

especially because just timeline-wise, Jesus was not around yet when the Roman Empire starts forming. He weren't born yet. Yeah, yeah. And so these like early Christians in the Roman Empire and in Greece and the Middle East and so on, apparently also those Christian churches did the same thing Christian missionaries did in Norse places. They said, let's just work on getting you into the faith. You can keep naming days after whoever. Yeah.

Like there's no way to prove that's what happened. we just see that that's probably what happened because of how culture has worked. Also like aligning holidays to be a little more like, hey, this is around the time you usually do holidays. We'll light up our holidays with those holidays, even if it wasn't directly taking, like, I think we did this in our Christmas tree episode. It wasn't exactly the same holiday, but they would sort of try to make things align a little bit. precisely and yeah that was the really big thing christians did with calendars instead of changing what we call days of the weeks was to just pack it with holidays and saints days and feasts so you're not trying to control what each of the seven days is called you're just saying every day is christmas or st anthony's day or so on and so on right our second set of polytheistic gods here is the roman gods and in other european language that are not English, a lot of their names still got to be the names for Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.

And the Romans named those days after Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, and Venus. I think I know where this is going because I know some Italian. Yeah, Spanish, French, and Italian, the names for Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday honor Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, and Venus. in like their changing of Latin. So it's still going on. Yeah. Martadie,

mercolidie and Wednesday. There you go. Yeah. The pasta is ready to consume. If I know my Italian, that means I would really like to eat the God Jupiter soon. That's it, right? Almost. Yes.

So, and again, no invent. true no date. It's just how it ended up working. And then so Norse people heard about seven day week named after your gods and they said, okay, we'll just switch each of these to our gods instead of your gods. And apparently that's most clear with Tuesday and with Friday. Because Tuesday was named after the Roman god Mars, the god of war. They named it for this heroic warrior god tier instead. Another big guy with a sword, you know. Yeah. And then Friday went from Venus to Frigg because those were the only lady god days. It's ladies, you know, great.

Days for the ladies. Yeah, even though Venus and Frigg are pretty different goddesses, they just said, I don't know, let's do that. Right. And then the funny guess we have to make is we think the Norse had a hard time figuring out whether Jupiter's day, right? Jupiter is Zeus. Should Jupiter turn into Thor or into Odin? because Jupiter is the father god and the thunder lightning god.

Right, yeah. It's like trying to find Pokemon types, you know? Yeah, Jupiter's kind of two types. Like father and lightning is kind of two types, yeah. Right, right, dad and lightning. Yeah, he's electric and I guess dads are... Dad energy. Psychic, grass? I don't know.

Yeah. I think grass, mowing the lawn, you know. Right. There we go. So, yeah, the Norse said, okay, Jupiter has what we're going to call Thursday. And then we'll make the seemingly weird choice of turning Wednesday from being Mercury's day into Odin's Day. So the little funny messenger god into the All-Father.

The strongest connection might be both of them had a role in bringing souls to the afterlife. Like apparently one of Mercury's jobs was to lead souls to the start of the underworld, like the beginning of the trip and they go with other people from there. And apparently that influenced later Christian art of angels. They were winged and cherubic a little bit like Mercury. But either way, Odin had a role in leading people to Valhalla. So they seem to have fudged it that way. Okay.

Yeah. I mean, you know, it's like when you're, I don't know, doing fan casts of stuff or finding your Norseona. You know, you got to, you got to, you got to. Yeah, it's the intention that matters. I think you don't need an exact match. Norseona, yeah. You just find a Norseona.

It's cool. A Norseona. Yeah. You can be at the convention. You don't have to worry about it. Yeah. And yeah, amazingly, again, we're still just on these four days of the week so far. Saturday, Sunday, and Monday in English are not named for Norse gods.

And working backwards through those, Monday is named for the moon. Ah, okay. Its name is essentially from the English for moon. Yeah. In Italian, that makes sense because it's lunity, as in lunar. Yeah. Lunar day. Yeah, and apparently that's widespread across all of these European languages.

Like in Spanish, it's lunace for the moon. In Danish, it's manan, which connects to the Danish word for the moon. Then Sunday now, Sunday is a little more complicated because in European languages, they either named it after the sun or. Christian God. Hmm. Because Sunday is mass or church and a lot of Christian denominations. Yes.

Dominica is Sunday in Italian. So I'm assuming that is correlated to dominus, you know, the Latin Christian sort of like, you know, monotheistic word. Yes. Yeah. It literally means like the Lord's Day. Right. Yeah, it's a Lord way of describing Christian God. So yeah.

Buena Dominica. Yeah, and in Romance languages, that's huge. And then in Norse languages, they have mostly stuck with a sun-related name. And then English fell in the Norse way. I got really curious about Sunday, right? Is Sunday in English named for the sun or the word for someone's male child, S-O-N? And as you can apparently see from the spelling, like everything I could find said it's named after the sun and ignoring Jesus.

It's just named for the sun in the sky. It's about ignoring Jesus. Sundays the one day. Right. But Jesus needs a break sometimes, all those prayers. Like, he needs his, his, his hymn time. Right. And his football team.

Right. And what if I was like in the bonus, we'll tell you his favorite NFL team? And everybody's like, oh no, I hope it's my. team. That's actually what happens in the afterlife is you find out, like, whose sports team is the correct one. And the show The Good Place tells us it's the Jacksonville Jaguars. Yeah, that's right. Yeah.

That's a good show. That's a good show. Okay, so that's six of the days of the week. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday are Norse gods. And Sunday in English is the sun in many other languages. it's Christian God. Monday for pretty much all the European languages is the moon that just leaves Saturday. What's going on with Saturday?

I would guess it has to do with Saturn, right? Yes. It is named after not the planet, but the planet on the day are both named after the Roman Titan named Saturn. Right. And apparently Saturn is one of the relatively rare cases where Greek mythology didn't easily translate into Roman mythology. there's a weird thing where the Romans already had a god of agriculture and the harvest, a male god of agriculture and the harvest. But then they adopted the female Greek deity of that

and awkwardly shoved this agriculture god Saturn into the lore about the Greek Titan, Kronos. They awkwardly turned him into the titan who was the father of Zeus who tried to destroy Zeus. Okay, so Kronos was the father of, yeah, Zeus. Zeus was the Greek word. And then chronos became Saturn. Yes. And in an awkward way, like the Romans had a male agriculture god and said,

now you're Zeus's dad and you hate him. You're Jupiter's dad also is what we mean. Yeah. And Zeus became Jupiter, which is the... And Zeus to Jupiter almost nothing changed. But Saturn, they kind of just totally changed the resume and life story of an existing God. And there's a lot of,

like there's a lot of stories about titans, eating gods and trying to, you know, do that and then the gods coming back out of the Titans. That, you know, it's weird. It's a little weird. I'm going to say it right now. Greek mythology gets a little weird sometimes.

Yeah, there's an iconic painting. I think it's Goya. Yes. Saturn eating his son, you know. People might know that. Yeah, it's like a man's body, but Saturn is like, horking it down like Guy Fieri and a hoagie with a haunted expression, just like Guy Fieri and a

hogi. Diner's drive-ins and deities. Yeah, there we go. Perfect. Sanders at a car with little flames on it going to eat his next child. Trademark, trademark, trademark, trademark, copyright, trademark. And we will never know the exact. details of how it all shook out. One way or another, English speakers came around to the Roman mythology name for what's Saturday instead of the strangely secular Norse name for what's

now Saturday. In English, we're calling it Saturday in a way that honors the Titan Saturn. And oddly does not probably honor the Jewish Sabbath, but there are some other languages where their word for Saturday is derived from Hebrew words for the Sabbath. German is a big example. I bet Italian is another one because Saturday and Italian is sabato. Yes. Yeah, that like the romance languages and German, even though it's very Norse influenced, German they have Samstag.

And later they also developed the word sonabend, which means the day before Sunday. But Samstag is also derived from the Sabbath. Yeah, that's so interesting. But the Norse, they did a different thing where it's not a god and not the Sabbath. The Viking Ship Museum calls the Norse name for Saturday, quote, the most inexplicable of all of the names for days of the week. Norse people called Saturday, at least in Old Norse, and it splits and varies as time goes on. But Old Norse, they called it Laogar-Dogger.

Laugar-Dagar. And I'm kind of over-emphasizing the last star, they'd say it more like Laug-Gar. Laugardogar dog. And that's a compound word. Laug means bath or hot water. Dog means day. So it basically translates to the day of the hot water, bath day, laundry day kind of thing. Yeah. Well, was that when they did that? We pretty much think it was either what they did or what they assumed everybody else was doing. Like in Norse culture, you would either do your laundry or take a relaxing bath. I'm thinking of like the spas in Iceland, you know, the geothermal stuff. Like some kind of chores or relaxation was the name for Saturday in Norse culture.

So not the sun, not the moon, not gods. It was, we're going to catch up on wash. That's, you know what? That makes sense. That's usually what I do on Saturdays. Bathe and do my laundry because. Yeah. Yeah.

No time during the week. Yeah, like it happens to kind of fit my life. Yeah. Sure. Like I used to shower almost daily. And then I had a sun and my world revolves around doing funny bits for him. So things like showering are not so important anymore. But I do make sure I get at least one a week.

I do shower more, but it's because I, like, had a discussion with Brenda about how weird I get if I don't shower for more than a day. We were like, okay, we'll make time for Alex to shower. I like how it's like how weird you get, not like how gross you get, but you get psychologically strange and feral. I do. I really do. Yeah, yeah. I get gross, of course, but like I also get mentally off. But, yeah, so apparently this wash day,

name lasted in a few Scandinavian languages such as Danish. They have a word that is derived from calling it the day of the hot water or something like it. But English is an extreme outlier where they didn't do Jewish Sabbath like German or the Romance languages. And they didn't do Wash Day like the Norse. We basically became the leading language of maintaining the Roman religious name for Saturday and honoring the titans Saturn who ate Jupiter? You know, Saturday is also a nice day to chow down on a hoagie and go like, my son, and then eat more of the hoagie. That's the head cannon I need to get through a hoagie, okay?

That's part of my thing. Yeah, so like one more time for especially English speakers, here's the origins of names for your days of the week. Starting with Monday, it's the moon, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Thursday, Friday, Norse, God's, Saturday, Roman Titan, Sunday, the sun. Hmm. So, moon, Norse, Norse, Norse, Norse, Norse, Roman sun. Hmm.

And you also might notice none of that is Christian at all. So. Right. And not Jewish either. It's like specifically in English. It's strange. Right. It's very secular.

And that way that breaks down. gets us into takeaway number two. In the year 1750, some English people shifted their calendar by 11 days and then tried to remove the pagan stuff from the names of days of the week. Hmm. Okay. There's kind of two stories. It's the British Parliament did successfully change the whole British calendar.

And then a group of Quakers in England tried to depaganize the names for days of the week. You know, you got to hand it to the Quakers. They're always trying to mix things up, you know. Yeah. That's earnestly pretty much why. They were a relatively new denomination and we're thinking creatively about the whole faith. Yeah. So they said, while we're at it, why are we honoring pagan gods most of the week every week?

Yeah, Quakers are interesting because they were like, they were kind of fanatics. So their positions would often be kind of religiously extreme. but then they also were very principled because of that and would come down on the right side of history a lot of the time because of how phonetically religious they were. But then other times they would be very strange. Absolutely. I think he's come up on a passive. I'm going to link about Benjamin Lay, who was basically the first abolitionist in U.S. history

and helped change the whole world for the better. He was Quaker. He did that because he's Quaker. But then also he was like staunchly vegetarian almost to the point of being uninterested. healthy because there weren't a lot of options in his era. Like he was very, very, very principled across the board. Right. Yeah.

And they gave us oats, an oatmeal. I always liked that guy. He's got a good hat. He does have a good hat, yeah. And, yeah, our key sources here, I'm going to link the past SIF about leap days because it plays into it. The main news sources are a well-researched article for the website of Encyclopedia Britannica. It's by writer Miles Hudson.

And then digital resources from the historical library at Swarthrow. more college in Pennsylvania. That's at Quaker School in Pennsylvania. One thing most history books just kind of handle for us is the dates when things happened. They use one dating system. But even just a few hundred years ago, countries would argue with each other about what day it was. Like they'd be on different calendar systems, even if they're neighbors. And in 1750, the British Empire said, we should start realigning our calendar with the rest of Europe. Britain had a different dating system than Europe for what day of history it was. That can get confusing.

It's so weird to think about and the details are kind of complicated. If you just look up like old style and new style dating, you'll get all the nitty gritty. But the basic issue was the Gregorian calendar. In 1582, a Catholic pope named Gregory the 13th said the Julian calendar's fine, but we're going to change it a little. I'm mainly going to add leap days. Right. Okay.

Yeah. that's just a small edit. Yeah, and necessary because the calendar was starting to kind of drift from what seasons we perceive should be in which months. But until he did that, most of Europe used a calendar from the time of Julius Caesar, which to us is, you know, 2,000 years ago. And it was pitched to him by an ancient astronomer named Socigenese of Alexandria. It was a pretty good 365-day calendar, and Gregory updated it a little. Okay. Thanks, Greg. Yeah, and like many countries ran with it, but one that did not is England.

Because Gregory is doing this in 1582, and that's bad timing with Henry the 8th deciding he needs to do whatever marrying and killing he wants to do with wives. Yeah. Henry had done that just a few decades earlier. So for entirely political reasons, England said, we are not on the Pope's calendar, so we're still on the Julian calendar. He was forming the Church of England. Yeah, which is a fine thing. But it, for ultimately more than 150 years, ended up on a different dating system from, you know, next door countries. Yeah. I mean, but also his reason for doing it was essentially like he wanted to get back on King Tinder. Yes.

I hear there's more Catherine's out there. You know, and then you get some more Catharines. And yeah, it's cool. The Tinder we're going to use to burn you when you are no longer in favor. No, I do think, I believe they were beheaded. I don't know. I don't remember. It was also he did not kill all of his wives.

It was only two of them, right? Yeah, that's right. Some of them were allowed to live and, you know. Which is more than zero and more than one, which is weird. But it wasn't like all of his wives. Some of his wives died of natural causes and some of them just like pieced out and he didn't kill them. Yeah. And I've always found it strange that of the six of them there were only three kind of first names between them.

Three Catherine's, two Anne's and a Jane. It's kind of repetitive, you know. Yeah, I mean, Catherine was a very popular name. We covered that in our Catherine episode. Yeah. This ties into so many tips. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, so entirely because Henry needed to make sure politically everybody knew he was separate, England starts having a different calendar from its neighbors. And after more than 150 years, they had drifted a full 11 days apart from the way the rest of Europe did dates. And there's also a second issue where like the calendars are the same, but England had retained a weird old practice of New Year's days.

day being in the middle of March. So you, you change the year number in the middle of March all of a sudden instead of January 1st. So the British said, let's fix both these things. And in what you and me think is the year 1750, they said, we're going to make both changes and we're going to give everybody plenty of notice. In the year 1752, England will go to sleep on the night of September 2nd and wake up on the day of September 14th. We'll just skip ahead. And then it's fixed. Whoa. Were they all ordered to make like zooming noises like they're rushing into the future? Yeah, back to the future cosplay. Yeah, yeah, it's cool. Yeah. What did people think about this?

So that's a fascinating question it turns out. Miles Hudson writes about this for Botanica. Basically people like joked about it or groused about it but went with it. And there was an accidental sparking of a huge historical myth about violent riots in opposition to it. There's a myth about so-called calendar riots in England. And apparently it's all based on a satirical work by a writer named Lord Chesterfield and satirical work by the artist William Hogarth, just getting overinterpreted as facts. But nobody actually like burned down England over it. Right, right.

But you can find like sources claiming they did. So it was like a war of the worlds type thing. Yeah, everybody just got on with it. And so in the process of England saying, hey, in a year or two, we're completely jumping the calendar ahead, a group of Quakers said, well, let's think about the whole calendar. Like, this is an opportunity to make all kinds of changes, right? Like, that's such a fundamental change. Yeah, yeah. Like, now's our opportunity to have it be Wednesday is Oates Day and Thursday is Quaken Day.

waking and quaking. And they, yeah, apparently, especially then, but even now, they didn't really call themselves Quakers. One of their founders is a guy named George Fox, and one time he told someone to quake before God's authority. And then kind of primarily their opponents started calling them Quakers, but they called themselves the Society of Friends. Right. Aw, cute. It's so cute. And in modern times, it's usually called the Religious. religious society of friends to clarify that it's a faith, you know. Right. In 1750, they had only been around for about 100 years, which is new in denomination terms, you know.

Yeah. And they said, hey, we're always trying to find a form of Christianity that's like not limited by old doctrines and creeds. It's more guided by each individual's inner light. And some of them said, hey, my inner light and my thinking says most of the days of the week shouldn't be named for pagan gods that are essentially blasphemous. Right. And they also felt that the months were trouble, too.

All of our month's names are from the Julianian calendar, and most of them refer to Roman gods or Roman emperors who got deified after they died. Right. Like Julius, July. Yeah, in August, too, his successor, yeah. Augustus. So the Quakers said, we're changing all of the names of the days of the week, and we only object to the names for January through August, but let's change all those two. and their simple move was to make it all numerical. Oh.

So Sunday they started calling first day, Monday they called second day on up to seventh day. That's it. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Sure. And then it was first month, second month, up to 12th month for the months. And I find this story fascinating because it had almost no cultural impacts and kind of predicted where we're going in history.

Like, especially as things have computerized, we make date. numerical more than ever before. Right. But the Quakers didn't convince us to drop any of the pagan stuff. We still say all of it. Yeah. I mean, because Thursday is just, that's just fun to say. They made Sunday the first day, which is also relatively Christian, yeah.

Right. Yeah. Casual sixth day does not roll off the tongue, like casual fry. Not at all. Uh-uh. Yeah. Yeah. Taco Tuesday?

What would that be like? Taco. Thirds day, fourths day. Taco third day. Taco third day, no. And in English, third day sounds too much like Thursday, and there's separate things. You know, I don't like it. Right, yeah.

Third day. No. Yeah, so like if you've ever just sort of wondered, hey, why are these pagan names? It's because they have really just been people's habit. And it's been sort of impossible to break the habit. And we've basically turned dates into math as much as possible while all. retaining the Roman and Norse stuff. Yeah, we like naming things.

They're just nice names to us, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. And folks, that's a ton about essentially just the names of the days of the week. There's so much there. We are going to take a quick break and then explore how a week existed in the first place. Alrighty. I'm excited.

We're back and we have two very different takeaways at remaining in the main show here. Mega takeaway number three. the origin of a week that is seven days long seems to be Babylonian astronomy plus Jewish religion. Okay. This is just a really solid theory that makes sense because, again, no inventors, no dates. But Babylonian astronomers observed stuff. Okay. Yeah, because I figured it can't just be totally subjective.

Yeah, like it isn't just a number we pulled. Yeah. Right. We weren't just like, we're going to have seven of them. Seven of what? Excuse me? You know, seven days. Yeah, and this oddly is quite relevant to the recent SIF about the planet Mercury.

And that one and other ones we've talked about the idea of seven classical planets, which is the sun, the moon, and the five planets of the solar system that can be seen with the eye. Babylonians saw that, and that got them excited about the number seven. Ah, yes. That was the non-pulling it out of your butt reason. They got excited about seven. They said, if we can see seven special things, seven must be important. Like, here we go.

Sure. Yeah, like seven really shiny objects in the sky. You know. Yeah. Yeah. Makes sense. Why not just have seven hours a day then? Yeah, that would make sense.

We just didn't do it. Oh, well. Seven hours a day, seven days a week, seven weeks a month, seven months, seven months. seven months a year. Yeah, I did it. On the bonus show, we'll talk about people who tried to make the number 10, the made number for all that as much as possible, which makes a little more sense.

Key sources here, there's digital resources from the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, also from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and then referencing the explanatory supplement to the Astronomical Almanac, which is a publication of researchers working for the U.S. and UK governments. and then another reference book called The History of Astronomy by astrophysicist Heather Cooper and astronomer Nigel Henbest. Yeah, looking back many thousands of years here, Babylonian astronomers were some of the first people to record

all five of the planets in the solar system that we can see from Earth without any gear. And they may not have understood that their planets, they just understood the movements and the times we see them are interesting and unlike other stuff. So that's Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter. and Saturn. Right, because stars are so far away that they kind of just move as the Earth moves,

whereas these other planets are much closer, and so they move much differently. They also, they have their own orbit around the sun, and so because they're so much closer, they're not sort of, like the other stars, maybe there's some, like, movement, but it's so minor you wouldn't observe that from Earth with just your eyes or a telescope. That's right, yeah. And they were also apparently the main people that like finish noticing all five of these. And so the Babylonians were building on other cultures even before them. Babylon sounds ancient because it is.

We have a record of Babylonians writing in the year 1,700 BC. And not only are they writing about the movements of Venus, they are writing about it in a way that references an older record we don't have. So like even before the Babylonians, other months. Mesopotamians were observing the planets. And according to the Royal Museum's Greenwich, a culture called the Acadians might have been the first to say, let's make the number seven important as a unit of time because there seemed to be a sun, moon, and five interesting things.

Did you say the Acadians? So they came up with the seven. Seven is cool. Yeah, in the history of astronomy, they say that around 2,300 BC, a king named Sargon in Akkad, made at least one declaration about seven days are a unit of time worth thinking about at all. Right. So he was sort of the Jim Carrey of his time in that one movie where he's obsessed with the number 23. I like how much we think about that movie. And then Jim Carrey is most famous. for like Ace Ventura and the mask and stuff, you know? I don't know what those are.

I just remember the movie The Number 23 starring James Carey. The Truman Show is about that guy not knowing about 23 yet. Again, I don't know what these other movies you're talking about. James Carey, I believe, was in the number 23. He's also on Sonic the Hedgehog. Right. Because we talked about that on a sift, so you know that. Yeah, yeah. Right. Yeah, and so we think the Babylonians really ran with and built on and promoted the seven classical planets as a thing. And then also they were one of many cultures to observe that if you fudge it, you can divide a lunar cycle of days by seven. Wow. Okay. Huh.

Because it's not, it doesn't really divide by seven. No. But a lunar cycle is about either 27, 28, or 29 days, depending on how you count it and also your location. It's usually 29 days, 12 hours, 44 minutes or so. Mm-hmm. Okay. So it's like, if you just kind of like, you know, whiff it a little bit, you can kind of nudge the week into the lunar cycle. Yeah. And then the other thing you can fudge and nudge is how many sets of seven days there are in a solar year.

How many weeks are there in a year? I forgot because I don't think about much. I had to look it up, but like rule of thumb is 52 weeks. Right. But 52 times seven is 364. So you need a 365th day and then sometimes a leap day. I see. Okay. So you can kind of fudge it. You can be like, yeah, that's kind of. 52 weeks in a year, sure. It's like the telomere days, right? Like where it's the junk days to make things even out. Our DNA have junk proteins called telomeres. So that like when things, it's just like, you know,

if you think that fudging things is just like a human invention, no, down to our DNA. You need a few fudge proteins so that when your DNA gets copied, there can be some mistakes made without everything getting messed up. Yeah, and that's kind of how we've treated time and a lot of calendar systems all over the world. Like, yeah, we'll throw on some extras, so it makes sense. So, yeah, like people in Mesopotamia said there's seven classical planets. You can kind of get four groups of seven in a lunar cycle.

You can kind of get 52 groups of seven in a solar cycle. Seven must be magic. and then we think that that somehow led to the creation story in the book of Genesis. This one we truly have no date or inventor. And if you believe the Bible is real, the Hebrew Bible or Christian Bible, then your story is that seven days in a week became important because that's all real. But either way, like the creation myth in Genesis is a seven-day cycle where the Lord rests the seventh day. Right. Okay.

But that came from sort of this early obsession with the number seven. Yeah, if it's from just human practices inventing that, it's because of how especially Mesopotamian astronomers thought about the universe in time. Right, right. And then also that directly led to the Christian Bible, which is its own thing, but mostly the same creation methanesis. And so those cultures really locked in the idea that a seven-day cycle of time matters at all. Is this something that is sort of following a single lineage of thought or do a lot of creation myths involve the seven day or like seven days being significant?

Or is it just mostly one region where you can follow the kind of movement of culture? It's really just the one region for the most part. Okay. Interesting. Islam, their calendar was very influenced by this. I had not known much about it. the like the first Islamic calendar, it has 12 lunar months and only runs 354 or five days for a year. But then it has a seven day week with Arabic names for each of the seven days because it's influenced by the story. But across the rest of the world, past and present, the calendars that develop do not emphasize a seven day week and often don't have weeks at all.

Okay. Hmm. The, like, just a few examples out of many. In ancient China, the calendar subdivided lunar months into totally different stuff from seven-day weeks. Each lunar month is broken into three periods called Sion. And the three Sion, it's a 10-day period, another 10-day period, and then a third period lasting until the lunar month ends. So that's usually eight or nine days. Like, no, really no weeks at all.

and the version of weeks is not seven days. And it's like the lunar calendar, so it's all based on basically just purely on the lunar cycle? Yeah, entirely lunar, yeah. And then ancient Egypt's calendar, they had more of a solar calendar, but their 30-day months of the civil calendar were split into 10-day weeks. There's an ancient calendar system in what's now India that was popular, where it was sets of months, an occasional leap month to fix it all. and they only subdivided months in half. They got split into what are sort of like 15-day weeks, but really just half months. And then the most famous calendar makers in the Americas were the Mayans.

The Mayans had three simultaneous calendars, a civil calendar, a divine calendar, and then something called the long count for tracking sets of 52 solar years. The long count is where people got the made-up apocalypse stuff about the year 2012. And that was just because they kind of got lazy and stopped. King calendar after that, right? Partly and also one amazing thing about the Mayans is there are still like culturally Mayan people in especially rural Guatemala who are still tied to that. And apparently when they've been interviewed, they say that the whole long count thing

does not describe a coming apocalypse. It just describes like a shift in culture and time and the world. It's not going to be bad. But no, but didn't we have. We had some movies about that. So who am I going to believe? The actual people or movies. Yeah.

CGI a title wave and then talk to me. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. But those Mayan calendars, they subdivided themselves totally different ways from seven-day weeks. The civil calendar, the hob, it breaks out into a bunch of 20-day months plus an extra five-day month to make the solar calendar work.

No weeks in those months at all. And then the religious calendar called the sulking. It's 20 cycles each lasting 13 days. The sulking cycle is only 260 days long. If that has weeks, it's a 13-day long cycle because that's partly spiritual. But even then, it's a stretch to compare it to this Christian calendar at all. So it's a really specifically Jewish and Christian idea that combined with Mesopotamian and especially Babylonian observations of the solar system.

That's why anyone cares about a seven-day cycle at all. Right. It's interesting because it seems like it'd be more likely for the units of a day to be more similar across cultures because you have sunrise and sunset and that's pretty traceable. But something like a week is a lot more arbitrary. Exactly. Yeah, a day is so simple, at least with the way Earth and the Sun move with each other. And also lunar calendars, they tend to be like somewhat.

similar. Because yeah, sure, it's the moon. Right. But the seven-day thing was really invented out a whole cloth and then became just kind of the standard approach to the holy day for Jewish people and for Christian people. Was, yeah, once every seven days, sure. Great. Dropping a little thing here, you might get some thunder on Katie's End for the last by the show. Fun. Ooh. Yeah. It's vibey. Ooh. Because it's Thursday. It literally is Thursday when you're recording this. And for something completely totally different, change of pace. Let's wrap up with a

Last, mini takeaway number four. The cartoon cat Garfield. Yay. Was written to hate Mondays because Jim Davis wanted to write strips where physically painful things happened to Garfields. Oh. Well, it sounds like there could have been a whole different Garfield. Garfield hates Mondays for one reason that I expected and then a totally different

creative laziness reason. like just wanting to write physical pain for Garfield without people sweating it and without needing original punchlines when that happens. Right. So. I had assumed he didn't like Mondays because that's when John has to go to work and can't, you know, wait upon Garfield.

Aw. That's kind of sort of another reason. But this mini takeaway, it's all based on one interview with Jim Davis, who is a strange newspaper cartoonist. And also we actually talk about him a lot on the siff about Snoopy. Snoopy is a Peanuts character by Charles Schultz. But apparently the entire spark for Garfield was that Jim Davis saw how much Snoopy merchandise was purchased by consumers. And he said, can I put a cat on merchandise that would sell as well as the dog?

Right. So. Yeah, he's an interesting guy. Because, yeah, he's like, it's almost art in a sense where he's like, you know, can I, I'm going to intentionally make a market. cat. Yeah. And then he succeeded wildly. Yeah. Right. It's really smart. Yeah. It went so well in 1982, which is just a couple years after the creation and debut of Garfield. In 1982, Garfield was on the cover of People magazine. You sent me this. He's thriving Garfield. He's in a little chair, in a lounge chair. He's got a little Garfield teeny with a goldfish in it.

Yeah. And he's got sunglasses. And he is just relaxed and ready. to be interviewed. Yes. Yeah, he had TV specials within a couple years of existing. It's wild. Yeah. And so reporter Walter Shapiro interviewed Jim Davis. Many thanks to blogger Sean Cleefeld for preserving the whole interview and the image of the cover. It's awesome.

So thank you, Sean Cleefeld. But yeah, so Jim Davis made Garfield primarily and initially to sell merchandise. And then he found one other hook for merchandise besides the fact that it's a cat instead of dog. He realized, like, the messages on Snoopy merch are usually either positive or neutral or maybe like a tiny bit downbeat and sarcastic or something. So they had Garfield say snarky things. Right. Because he's a cat. It's just more snarky than Snoopy. Yeah. Because dogs are optimists

and cats are pessimists, as we all know. Yeah. And it seems like, you know, this wasn't how Jim Davis thought about it, but it also matters that Dilbert didn't exist yet because there just weren't that many strips about office work and a Monday to Friday job. So quoting Jim Davis, the very first products done had lines like, I hate Mondays, I'd like Mondays better if it started later, and things people did not want to say themselves, but they would let Garfield say it for them. You know what? That's so psychologically profound. Right. It's like when people clipped and posted Dilbert strips in their cubicle. It's just so slightly transgressive, it's allowed.

Yeah, yeah. Like when Dilbert is like, I'm going to commit a war crime. And you're like, yeah, you know what? That's so me. Yeah. In hindsight, Dogbert is just all of Scott Adams' horrible ideas that he had until he died. But people were like, it's a dog. He doesn't mean it.

But he meant every bit of it. He was horrible. Yeah. Yeah, man. The dog was a simulacrum for him. his worst instincts. Yeah, it's really bad. Yeah. For these parallel merchandise reasons, Jim Davis in one direction and another said,

okay, Garfield needs to hate Mondays because office workers do not like Mondays and they will buy merchandise related to that. Right. And then Jim Davis said, why does Garfield not like Mondays? Because he's a cat. Right. No, exactly. And I'm going to read a quote here that starts normalish and then to me turns horrifying.

Here is Jim Davis describing it. Quote, Garfield does not have a job. Garfield does not go to school. And every day is the same. Nevertheless, every Monday is just a reminder that his life is the same old, same old cycling again. Okay, that's all kind of normal. Great. Here's the rest of the quote.

It's not, but okay. Yeah. And for some reason, even though his life is pretty much the same every day, on Mondays specifically, awful things tend to happen to him physically. This is completely unsurprising knowing Jim Davis. Like he, when you actually look at some of his, like, cartoons, he can be kind of unhinged. Just like, consider existential dread and woe for Garfield. And it's like, yeah, I'm trying to sell cat merch, but also like, what if the cat? Cat wakes up and finds out his entire life is an illusion and nobody exists except for him.

Anyways, here's this shirt where Garfield's grumpy and it says, hang in there, and then it's Garfield looking mad about it. Right. Yeah, it also turns out Garfield likes lasagna because the person Jim Davis likes lasagna and just, he just said, I mean, humans like lasagna. So that could probably be on March 2 and, you know, that's just kind of it. But it's so funny because it's like, why doesn't he like, Mondays, you could just be like, yeah, John has to go to work on Mondays.

And so he doesn't have John around to take care of him as much. So he doesn't like Mondays. Yeah. You know, it would have been easy. But no, it's like, it's a remind. You see, Garfield has nothing to differentiate one day from the next. And so life is an endless slog of nothing upon more nothing. And so Monday is a cruel reminder that for the rest of the world there are goals and dreams

and things that differentiate one day from the next, but for Garfield, there is nothing, an endless expanse of existence like a desert of his twisted and broken dreams. Anyways, here's a mug that has Garfield on it saying, I like lasagna. You're such a brilliant writer. This often happens on the inspectors, inspectors, where you find such a resonant and good way they could have done it.

It would be such a good, If like, you know, he complains about John and then it comes through that he loves John because he misses him every Monday. Although I guess John's a cartoonist, so he just worked from home. But anyway. Right. Give the reins of Garfield to me. Your thing is so much better, but instead, Jim Davis is just like, oh, life stinks. And then out loud told this interviewer, I make physical pain and suffering happen to Garfield on Mondays.

Yeah. And so he's telling him, I can write physical gag. where Garfield is squished or dropped or rolled up in window blinds or something. And then the automatic punchline I never even have to think about is I hate Mondays, right? Like that just solved an entire day of Jim Davis's seven-day work week of making cartoons. Yeah. Yeah. Just like have someone hit Garfield with their car and then Garfield goes, I hate Mondays as he's getting his bones set, you know? Yes. You don't even have to think.

to come up with a strip, you just say, okay, then Garfield, like, falls because Odie surprised him or something. And then the last panel is he says, I hate Mondays. Great. I'm going to lunch. Like, that is it. People think that we live in the slop era now. There has always been slop. It's been handcrafted, lovingly handcrafted by human people, but there's always been slop and there will always be slop because we are, we are slop. Slop is us. I'm putting that out of Garfield shirt. There we go. Slop is us.

We are slop, slop is us. Slop is forever. Folks, that is the main episode for this week. Welcome to the outro with fun features for you such as help remembering this episode with a run back through the big takeaways. Mega takeaway number one. The English names for the seven days of the week are a messy combination of Roman mythology, Norse mythology, the moon and the sun. Again, Monday is the moon.

Tuesday is tear. Wednesday is Odin. Thursday is Thor. Friday is Frigg. Saturday is the Roman Titan. Saturn, who was also an agricultural god that the Greek Titan cronis got shoved into. And Sunday is the sun, the celestial body, not Jesus Christ. That quite honestly could have been the whole show, you know, but we have other takeaways.

Takeaway number two in the year 1750. English people shifted their calendar by 11 days, and some Quakers tried to change naming the days of the week after pagan gods. Mega takeaway number three, the origin of a week that is seven days long, seems to be Babylonian astronomy, which built on the astronomy in Akkad and other Mesopotamian places, plus Jewish religion and a creation story influenced by that and relating to that. mini takeaway number four, the cartoon cat Garfield was written to hate Mondays because his creator Jim Davis wanted to make physically painful things happen to Garfield with an automatic punchline. And there are stats and numbers this week, but they were all plugged into those takeaways. So that's it. Those are the takeaways in the whole show.

Also, I said that's the main episode because there's more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now. if you support this show at maximum fun.org. Members are the reason this podcast exists, so members get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus show is two modern revolutions

and their creepy failed attempts to change the number and the names of the days of the week. They dropped the seven-day week and renamed it all. Visit sifpod.fod.fund for that bonus show for a library of more than 25 dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows and a catalog of all sorts of max fun bonus shows, it's special audio, it's just for members. Thank you to everybody who backs this podcast operation. And again, this topic reminded me that you folks are one of the central things in my week every week. And of course, I'm so thankful to every one of

you who makes us part of your Monday or any time of the week. But so many folks listen right away on Monday. It's truly wonderful. And because we try to reach you every week, we have more than 25 dozen bonus shows because we do that every week, too. Additional fun things, check out our research sources on this episode's page at maximum fun.org. A couple wonderful reference books came in this week. The explanatory supplement to the astronomical almanac is an incredibly dry-sounding text that's co-published by researchers and astronomers working for the U.S. and UK governments. It's mostly astronomy and timekeeping stuff. Another reference book with more history going on in it,

it's very simple and authoritative title, is The History of Astronomy, that was co-written by astrophysicist Heather Cooper and astronomer Nigel Hennbest. Heather Cooper has passed away, but the text lives on. And then tons of digital museum resources were the other big sources this week, especially the Viking Ship Museum that is in Hrashkilda in Denmark, also the Royal Museums Greenwich in England, the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, particularly helpful for Mayan calendar systems, the Metropolitan Museum of Art for Egyptian calendar making, and many other sources for others too. And then the one total outlier in our sources is a People magazine interview with cartoonist Jim Davis in 1982.

That page also features resources such as Native Dash, land.ca. I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this in Lenape Hoking, the traditional land of the Muncie-Lenape people and the Wappinger people, as well as the Mohican people, Skategoq people, and others. I'm also not far from the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. Their main facilities are in Washington, D.C., but also near me, it's in Manhattan, and just down the train from me. The New York one's so wonderful, go anytime you can. Also, Katie taped this in the country of Italy, and I want to acknowledge that in my location and and many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, native people are very much still here.

That feels worth doing on each episode and join the free SIF Discord, where we're sharing stories and resources about Native people and life. There is a link in this episode's description to join the Discord. We're also talking about this episode on the Discord, and hey, would you like a tip on another episode? Because each week I'm finding you something randomly, incredibly fascinating by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator. This week's pick is episode four. That is about the topic of grocery stores. One of many fun facts there, something called slotting fees has determined the items on the shelves and the economics of your store in such a fundamental way, and you never think about it or hear about it.

So I recommend that episode. I also recommend my co-host Katie Golden's weekly podcast Creature Feature about animals, science, and more. Our theme music is unbroken, unshaven by the Budo's band. Our show logo is by artists Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Susa for editing this episode. Special thanks to the Beacon Music Factory for taping support. Extra, extra special thanks go to our members. Thank you to all our listeners. I am thrilled to say we will be back next day of the moon with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then. Maximum Fun

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