Stuff You Should Know - How the Rosetta Stone Works

Episode Date: September 3, 2013

Sometimes providence smiles on historians. Thus is the case with the Rosetta stone, an ancient Egyptian tablet that served as the key for unlocking hieroglyphics, lost to time for a millennia. Learn about the international intrigue, rivalry to translate it and the luck that led to the founding of Egyptology. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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launch, use offer code SYSK to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Hey and welcome to the podcast, I'm Josh Clark, there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant and this is Stuff You Should Know. I do, I'm not at all hot, it's all these lamps in here, well Jerry's decorated, it's nice. It is nice, it's just like an Ikea catalog, Chuck, how many times have you been to Egypt? Nothing, that trip in high school, zero. Same here.

Yeah. And yet, we know an awful lot about Egypt. Yeah, it's popular. Especially ancient Egypt. Sure. Like I would wager that we probably know more about ancient Egypt than modern Egypt. Most people in the West. Is there modern Egypt?

There is and it's undergoing quite a bit of turmoil right now. Yeah, I know, I'm kidding. Oh, okay. I just wanted to make sure that you knew that Egypt was still around. Yes. Okay. Well, the reason that you and I know a lot about Egypt is thanks to a soft science, one of the humanities you would call it, called Egyptology, pretty on the nose name for the

study of ancient Egypt. Yeah, it's a real popular thing and has been for a while. A while but not too terribly long. I would say about the beginning of the 19th century and the reason that all of it was fostered and that all of it came about and that we, you and me know about Egypt was because of the discovery of a tablet known as the Rosetta Stone. That's right. But you can also go back even further and make the case that if it wasn't for Napoleon

Bonaparte, we may not understand Egypt to this day. Yeah, that little guy. He wasn't that little though. Is that right? Right. He was average height. Right. Why do people say that then?

Where did that come from? The doctor wrote down, I think upon his death that he was five foot two, but what a lot of people don't realize is that the doctor was using the French inch, which is longer than the British imperial inch. Really? So when you translate five foot two from the French inch to the imperial, he was six eight. He was about five, six, which is average height.

And the other reason why he was called like the little emperor by his armies was because compared to most of his bodyguards and his people, he had around him, he was shorter than them. Yeah. I guess when you're five, six, he wants some six, four dudes around you. Right. So but the idea that he was a very short man is not correct. Yeah, I'd always heard that, but I didn't know the story.

The French inch. There's your band name for the day. Although I typically don't like rhyming names. French inch doesn't rhyme. It just sounds similar. I wouldn't call it a rhyme. French an inch. Yeah.

French inch. Oh, the E in the eye. Yeah. That's nitpicky. Well, yeah. It's the vowels that rhyme. Not the consonants. Yeah.

But if you were Steve Malkmus and you put French at the end of a line and an inch at the end of another, it would be, it would be rhymy. But then you'd sell a lot of records. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Well, there was our pavement reference through the episode. That's becoming a daily thing too, isn't it?

So you want to get on with this? Yeah. We're going to be talking Rosetta Stone, not the language software, which neither one of us has ever used. No. We're talking about the real thing, which is actually bigger than I thought, you know. Many things are smaller for me, like when you see them in person. Mona Lisa.

Of course, Mona Lisa's small. I went to England. I was like, Big Ben? That ain't so big. Oh, really? Yeah. I don't think I had the impression of Big Ben, but okay. It was kind of underwhelmed.

Hmm. It definitely didn't seem big. Where is the Eiffel Tower? That is where I developed a fear of heights that still plagues me to this day, like it literally happened to me on the Eiffel Tower on the way up. Never had a fear of heights in my entire life. On the way down, I like was hanging on to the fence and it took me forever to get down because I was suddenly deathly afraid of high.

It just hit me. Just right. My brain changed. Yeah. How old were you? 17. Wow. Yeah.

I didn't go up to the top. I probably missed out. I didn't either. It was the first level that got me. Oh, really? Yeah. Wow. All right.

So anyway, where was I going? Oh, it's bigger than I thought it was. It is black basalt and it weighs about three quarters of a ton, 46 inches high,.5, 30 inches wide and 12 inches deep. And it's large. It's heavy. It's, you didn't write this, did you? No.

No. It's about the size of a heavy coffee table. Were you about to make fun of something? No. I was just going to say whoever wrote this referenced an LCD TV of medium size. Yeah. A medium screen LCD television. Oh, by the way, thank you to Teresa Dove, a fan request.

Oh, OK. Yeah. That's who requested this one? Yeah. OK. So it's larger than I thought and I learned a lot about this. I thought the Rosetta Stone, because I'm a dummy, was literally like, here's what our alphabet is and here's what everything means and now that you found it, you can decipher

everything. Yeah. I think I had the same impression as well until I read this. I thought it was like created as a key to hieroglyphics. Not at all. Not so. It was a government document, basically. It's a stela.

Yeah. Or stela. Stela is the plural. Yeah. And it's not just the Egyptians that use stela or stela. The Mayans have largely been figured out their language has from old stelae. Yeah. Well, and that's it.

Those are the two that use stelae. Yeah. In this case, it's an inscription carved in three different languages, Greek, hieroglyphics, and demonic with a T, not demonic. Yeah. Demotic. But since I'm from the south, I soften my T so it might sound like I'm saying demonic. Yeah.

And basically, it was in the three languages to ensure that everybody could read it because it was an official government decree. Not super exciting, though. No, it wasn't. Basically, what the Rosetta Stone says, and like you said, it's in three languages. There's a decree that says, essentially, that Ptolemy V is a great ruler and he is a righteous worshiper of all the right gods, so he's okay in our book. Yeah.

So the decree was made by some priests who gathered at Memphis and they inscribed the stone or had it inscribed and dated March 27th, 196 B.C. And it's not, it doesn't actually say March 27th in hieroglyphics. It says 18 Meshir, which on the Egyptian calendar translates to something like March 27th, and then they got the 196 because somewhere in there, it references the ninth year of Ptolemy V's reign, which is about 196. So that's where they got the date from what we would in the West equate it to. Yeah.

So, like we said, it doesn't say anything of particular interest. At the time, it was an important message, but it's not the Rosetta Stone because of what is transcribed upon that stone. No, it's the fact that it's in three different languages. Exactly. Yeah. So there's, like you said, hieroglyphics, Demotic, and Greek. And hieroglyphics were a sacred alphabet.

Yeah. They used that for really important stuff. See, I didn't know this either. I thought just any old thing they wanted to write was hieroglyph. No, that's what they had Demotic for, or Demotic. That was kind of like an abbreviated, shorthand, more vulgar version of hieroglyphics. Yeah. And in between that was hieratic, which was slightly more complicated than Demotic, but

less complicated and not sacred like hieroglyphics. Yeah. It was like a kind of a transition between Demotic and hieroglyphics. Yeah. It was cursive. Right. So you could use hieratic for like a business transaction, but if you were saying the king is a very righteous ruler and you mentioned the gods, you're going to use hieroglyphics.

That's right. So to have it written in Greek, Demotic, which was an offshoot of hieratic, which was an offshoot of hieroglyphics, and hieroglyphics, these priests that gathered and issued this decree that was written on the Rosetta Stone, they made sure that everyone in Egypt who was literate could read this one way or another. Yeah. And it was sort of not a stroke of luck. I mean, it was just smart thinking at the time, but ended up being a stroke of luck because

the three languages, I mean, without that, I don't think we may have never been able to figure out hieroglyphics. No, agreed. And they've been lost forever. Exactly. And that's not the only way that the Rosetta Stone was kind of a bit of fortune. But so the reason that it was lost was up until the fourth century AD, any average Egyptian could have read the Rosetta Stone one way or another.

But after that, Egypt, it left the pharaonic stage, Cleopatra was the last pharaoh of Egypt, and then it came to be ruled by the Greeks later on, the Romans, the Ptolemites, and a bunch of different foreigners or different groups. And with these groups came the introduction of new gods and the suppression of old gods. And since hieroglyphics were very much religious in nature, they're sacred or holy, but associated with those old gods, hieroglyphics itself came to be cut off, stop, suppressed. Yeah, especially Christianity, they tended to want to get rid of other competing gods and languages that are tied to those gods.

Right, but luckily we still had Demotic. That's right, and Demotic wasn't taboo. That eventually became what's known as Coptic, and Coptic used some Greek, and then a little bit of still of the hieroglyphic symbols. So there's still like this, just a little bit, very tenuous link between Coptic and hieroglyphics. But then Coptic is lost, it's pushed out by Arabic. Yeah, and then that was like way gone, goodbye, hieroglyphics.

That's it. That was like that hieroglyphics is no longer understood by anyone walking planet Earth. And that means that all of the ancient Egyptian civilization itself was lost. Yeah, a thousand years. Aside from its structures, the thought put into it, the reasoning behind it, all of the explanations, all of the inscriptions, all the writing, all over these ancient buildings are understood by no one now. And then as a result of that, the buildings themselves, the last vestiges of this ancient

civilization are deconstructed and used for the next wave by new rulers. And so ancient Egyptian culture is lost to the mists of time. Yeah, wow. Thanks. Very nice. Yeah, there was no love lost. They were basically like, we don't need this language anymore. We don't need these sacred buildings anymore.

They're pagan anyway. Yeah, let's tear them all down, build up new ones. And oddly, the Rosetta Stone was actually used as a buttress in a wall of a new building. Yes. It was part of the construction. Right. That's how this is another way that this is all just stroke of luck after stroke of luck.

So the first stroke of luck, as you pointed out, is that they just happened to decree that this thing be written in three languages. Yeah. Okay. Same message in three languages. Then it's used for a building, a wall, right? Yeah. Then it happens to be discovered by some French who are marooned in Egypt because they got

crushed by the British right when they tried to invade. Yeah. I guess let's talk about that first. Okay. The French thought, hey, we need to get a stronghold on India eventually. And Napoleon said, I think a good way to do that is to start a little further away in, let's say, Egypt. Let's cut off the Brits' access to the Nile River, and that'll really help our cause.

Unfortunately, the Brits had a great navy and pretty much destroyed all their ships and stranded them in Egypt for, what, 19 years? Yeah. Yeah. And so for the French whose ships were now at the bottom of Abukir Bay, they decided that they really kind of needed to set themselves to creating forts. Yeah. Like since we're here.

Right. And it wasn't just military that was there. Part of this invasion, this strategy that Napoleon had come up with to take over Egypt was kind of a hearts and minds strategy too. And so he created something called the Institute of Egypt, also known as the Scientific and Artistic Commission, a mineralogist, mathematicians, art historians, a lot of engineers, chemists, like all of these people from the letters and sciences brought together to understand and study Egypt.

Yeah. They were actually given military rank, but they weren't. I think that was just more of a here, just so we'll call you military. Right. Like they weren't from military backgrounds. So they're thinkers. But they were among this invading force that was left stranded in France. So as the real military guys were building the forts, the people from the Institute of

Egypt start studying Egypt. Yeah. I guess they were the first Egyptologists. Yeah. Oh boy. It was close. They definitely were. And it was very covert operation.

Like they weren't really allowed to talk about what they were doing that much, except to just say, hey, we're following Napoleon's orders acting on behalf of the good of the French Republic. Right. That's what we're doing. Don't ask any questions. Yeah. Don't ask why I have this measuring tape out or why I'm transcribing things from Papyrus.

But they did become, I guess, embedded with the local population as well to help learn as much as they could. And so it's under this climate that a French soldier one day finds this very polished black stone that's inscribed and something about it told him that it was pretty important. So he took it to these early Egyptologists, the French, and said, you guys think this is important? And they said, yes. Yeah.

That was Lieutenant Pierre Francois Bouchard. And he took it to his boss and they said, okay, this is weird that this is built into a wall, but it's clearly something of note. Yeah. So they took a closer look at it and immediately they started to get to work on trying to transcribe it super difficult at the time and would prove to be difficult over the years. It eventually ended up in the hands of England, of course. But luckily the Institute of Egypt people made copies of it.

Yeah. I think that like etchings or plaster molds and things. I'm sure, yeah. But they had readable copies of the Rosetta Stone. So when they did give it up to the British, it wasn't entirely lost to them. That's right. And give it up as in not here, have this. It was more like here, we're taking this in the Treaty of Alexandria.

We're going to take this and a bunch of other stuff. So now basically you have the French and the British both have the Rosetta Stone. So one group that doesn't are the Egyptians, but we'll get to that later. Yeah. 2023 is already well underway, everybody, so don't wait any longer to level up your small business. And the way you can do that is by joining up with Stamps.com. That's right, because with Stamps.com, you're going to be able to print your own postage

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Once again, use promo code heart 20 through January 30 to receive 20% off your 2023 trip. And both of them recognize that this is a very, very important something. They know that it's some sort of decree. They recognize that it's in three different languages and I think it becomes obvious to them that this could be the key to understanding hieroglyphs which people have tried to understand. This is not new. People going back to a fellow named Horopalo who was a fifth century scholar supposedly he may not have actually existed.

He created basically what was a translation for hieroglyphs but it was a false translation as we'll see. But dating back basically from the moment that hieroglyphs were lost to history, people have tried to understand them. So this was the British and the French were aware of this like this may be the key to these mysterious hieroglyphs and this is important so we're going to try to translate it. Yeah well it became a race really because they didn't like each other very much and they both wanted to be the first ones to figure out what these hieroglyphs meant and how to

unlock this history and so they sent their best and their brightest on the English side, the British side. It was a scholar named Thomas Young. And then on the French side we had Jean-François Champollan who he was sort of born to do this apparently he was way into Egypt as a kid even and as a young child said I'm going to figure out hieroglyphs one day. He was even called the Egyptian because he had dark skin and dark hair and I think a magician like foretold his fame one day.

Yeah when he was born supposedly a magician said this guy's going to be famous. And he was. And yeah he was a very talented linguist he studied under a guy named Sylvester de Sussie. Yeah Antoine Isaac Sylvester de Sussie. He who would take a crack at the Rosetta Stone but he trained Champollion is that how we're saying it? Oh yeah sure. He trained him but Champollion quickly became went from student to master.

He applied for he applied to be a student at an institute in Paris and they were impressed enough with his application that they said how about you just skip the school part and come be on the faculty. Yeah that's pretty good. Yeah that's a talented linguist. Yeah they said the same thing when I applied to Georgia. Is that right? You just want to go and be an English teacher?

Yeah. I went meh. Oh really you turned it down huh? Sure I want to be a student. Oh gotcha. So before all this happens we have the Greek inscription transcribed which that was Reverend Stephen Watson in 1802 and I don't want to say it was no big deal but there were quite a few people that could have done this.

It wasn't like unlocking hieroglyphics. But it was a necessary part of the process so we want to give them as due. So we have a translation an accurate translation of what the Rosetta Stone says. So that's step one and if you have one translated then if you're a linguist I guess it sounds really difficult to do. I can't imagine the painstaking process of figuring out an alphabet. Yeah I mean think about how hard it is to translate a well known language into a language that you speak.

Imagine translating a language that's totally lost into something understandable. So we had the Greek and then eventually we had the Demotic as well. Yeah thanks to Antoine. And that same year at the same time a Swedish diplomat named Uckerblad also translated the Demotic. And they both went about it two different ways. I thought this was pretty interesting. So Dasasi figured out that there were two proper names at least in their Ptolemy and

Alexander and he used those to match up sounds and symbols. Uckerblad probably had the bigger breakthrough. He used a different technique. He recognized that there was something similar between Demotic and Coptic. And he was well schooled in Coptic which helped obviously. That was his big breakthrough. He figured out what words spelled love, temple and Greek and he used that to form basically this rough structure for Demotic based on his awareness of Coptic.

Yeah that's only 11 letters. That's pretty impressive. Yeah. But I mean if you've got 11 letters it's a decent, I think they called it a skeletal outline. Right. I guess that's what you'd have. Well yeah I mean especially since Coptic was only what 22 plus a couple more from hieroglyphics.

Yeah it's like a big Wheel of Fortune game after that. So the thing is though this established connection now between Coptic and Demotic and then Demotic and hieroglyphics since they're side by side that kind of opened up this mentality that would be needed to finally crack the hieroglyphics for the Rosetta Stone. And Thomas Young was the first to really try it. He was the British guy and he got somewhat far but he gave up. Yeah. In 1814 his big breakthrough was figuring out what a cartouche was and that is they say

oval but it's a little more squared away with round edges but it's a loop basically with hieroglyphic characters in it and he figured out that these are not only proper names but royal names. Anything contained in a cartouche is a royal name which was a big breakthrough because he identified Ptolemy, the Pharaoh's name in one of the cartouches. Yeah. Cartouche. Cartouche.

Cartouche's and his queen Baronica was in there as well so he said, you know what, again I've got these two names now to work with but he was still working on Heropoulos false premise that hieroglyphics was not phonetic in nature and that was based just on symbols. Right. That's what Heropoulos' big contribution was to confuse a century's worth of scholars. How bad for young because he was on to something and if he wasn't using that the fake or not fake but just the poor system then he might have figured it out. Right.

This is the thing. Everyone believed Heropoulos because Heropoulos claimed that his translation was a direct translation from hieroglyphic. It was written in the fifth century AD right around the time we lost hieroglyphics so it was considered to be a primary source and basically completely reasonable. Yeah. But it was wrong. It was wrong because it said that hieroglyphics are symbolic so like if you see a cart, a

picture that looks like a cart next to a cat and then a lizard, what that should say under Heropoulos' translation is cart, cat, lizard. This kept throwing everybody off because it didn't make sense especially when compared to the Greek translation and the translation of Demotic it didn't make any sense whatsoever. So like you said, Jung gave up but he published his findings and you can really strongly make a case that had it not been for Jung's breakthrough, Champollion would not have cracked the Rosetta Stone. Which we should mention here that they should just accept each other as co-workers and colleagues

and get along. But there was a competition that existed this day of what country claims that they translated the Rosetta Stone. The French still say that Champollion was really the one. The Brits obviously say no, it was really Jung. Even when they displayed it in 1972, one of the few times it's left England or maybe the only time, they let France display it for like a year. They argued about the size of the photos of the two on both sides of it when in fact the

photos were the same size. Of Jung and Champollion. Yeah, not photos but portraits. Yeah, but the French were like, well no, Jung's is bigger, the Brits were like, no, his is bigger. And they were the same size. So they were really just, they never came to a common ground on who did it when in fact they both did.

But there were rumors apparently during that time that France was going to just steal the Rosetta Stone and keep it and not return it back to England. And this was in the 1970s, so it was not like a long time ago. So Champollion picked up in 1814 where Jung left off and started to think, you know what, I need to think more about this symbol thing that, like I don't know if he was on base after all, and that was actually the breakthrough. He got some old cartouches and he figured out that the last two letters and one of them were identical.

So that's a good thing because you know that it's the same letter. He figured out that it was the letter S. And then the first character was a circle and he said maybe that's the son. And in ancient Egypt, the sun god was Ra. And Coptic. Yeah. And so basically figured out that that name was Ramses. Yeah.

And that was a huge breakthrough. And then he figured out the identical letters, the last two were S's, first one was Ra. And since he knew that it was in a cartouche, that it was a royal name, from that era the only person it could have been was Ramses. So that's how we cracked the code, like you say. Yeah, and cracked it in like, hey, this is a phonetic thing. He was wrong the whole time and apparently he fainted on the spot, which is dramatic. Yeah.

I'm kind of cute. He was French, sure. So out of that moment, Egyptology was fully born. Now we had a way to understand all the stuff that hadn't been destroyed in reviews as building material. It took a long time, though. It wasn't like they could just read it. It still took a lot of translating.

Oh, yeah. But they had the basis. Exactly. Yeah. All they'd done is transcribe one single Stella that had millennia's worth of things to like papyruses or papyri and building inscriptions and sarcophagi and all that stuff. Love letters. Yeah, whatever you have, sure.

And so Egyptology is born and now that it's understood at that moment, there's also a great desire to protect Egypt and all of its treasures. Yeah, and to get things right because previous to that, Napoleon and Gang did a pretty good job. But they also speculated a lot. Yeah, because they couldn't read hieroglyphs. Yeah, so they ended up correcting a lot of things about what they thought about Egypt. And like you said, they wanted to protect things because Egypt at the time was, I mean,

they were selling these things off to collectors left and right because A, they didn't know their true value and B, there was a market for it. Sure. Doctors during the Middle Ages who were just big dummies would use mummies from Egypt. They grind it up and use it to cure disease, which didn't work. And so there was this move to protect Egyptian antiquities from Egyptians. There was kind of this patriarchal mentality, especially among the British, that we need to get everything out of Egypt and into museums and into like the hands of us who will preserve

them and not sell them to Middle Ages doctors for curals. But to his credit, in my opinion, Champollion argued very strongly in favor of keeping them in a founding a museum in Egypt to store these, keeping them in Egypt. Yeah, I think he was a little bit of a control freak. He knew that he could care for things in the proper way. And I don't think he trusted even other museums at the time to care for things in the right way. And he was kind of right because a lot of it was destroyed.

Yeah, like apparently to preserve an ancient papyrus, you have to store it in a low humidity area in a chamber in a bamboo box container. And they didn't know this and they shipped them by seed to the UK and they all like crumbled the nothingness on the way dummies. So the Rosetta Sun still sits in the museum in London where it's been since 1802 except for the time it went to France briefly. And in 2003, Egypt was like, you know what? I want this thing back.

Not I. We want this thing back. And it's ours and I don't care who found it, it's ours. And England said in 2005, took him two years to build a replica and say, hey, how about this? I just like it. I guess at least they didn't try to pass it off as the real one. Well, yeah, that's true.

Cinema replica and they're like, I appreciate this. This is nice. But we really would like the real thing. And England said no. And not just England, but a lot of the big museums, the Louvre and a bunch of the world museums kind of all got together in support of one another and said, you know what, repatriation is we're not into it, we're just not going to give things back anymore because we can care for it best.

It belongs to the world now. And they just sort of banded together and said, we're keeping our stuff crazy. And that's I think where it's probably going to stay. They are trying to get it for a, I think in 2012, they tried to get it for the grand opening of the Grand Egypt Museum. It sounds like it didn't happen. But even then they said no, they'd want it for like three weeks and they said, nope. They're the guys of, I don't know if it's guys, but they said it'd be too dangerous to transport

it. That's the story they have, at least. Well, yeah. Yeah. So that's how museums work. Pillage and deny, pillage and deny. You got anything else? No, sir.

That is the Rosetta Stone, everybody. If you want to learn more about it, you should type that word, those words, R-O-S-E-T-T-A Stone in the search bar at House of Works, and it will bring up this article. And since I said search bar, it means it's time for a message break. 2023 is already well underway, everybody, so don't wait any longer to level up your small business. And the way you can do that is by joining up with stamps.com. That's right, because with stamps.com, you're going to be able to print your own postage

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trip. Now, Chuck, it's time for Listener Mail. Oh, no. How about instead administrative details? Okay. All right, for those of you who don't know, this is at the point where we read off the people who were nice enough to send us little gifts and trinkets and music and letters and all sorts of things.

And here we go. Go ahead. All right. One of my cool graphic prints, one of which was You Can't Take the Sky from Me from one of my favorite shows, Firefly. Nice. Yeah, very cool prints. Amy sent us a lovely carved wooden cicada from Timber Green Woods.

Yeah. Yeah. It's very cool. Anne McDonough sent us a Snoopy postcard and a handwritten letter of thanks. Very nice. Liz from New Zealand sent us a lot of stuff that's New Zealand candy, New Zealand chocolates, New Zealand chips, surfboard postcard, really lovely framed photos from her dad, Rudy Goldstein Photography.

It's on Facebook. It's our Goldstein photography, so check it out. Yeah, it's very cool. I have those on my desk. Sean Antoniak sent us some custom vinyls, some stickers from 811graphics.com, he and his brother. Yeah. Nice.

Have this company. It's cool stuff, like skater style stuff. Right. It's 811graphics.com, that's B-U-Y, costumes.com, sent us a full-size adult Gremlin costume, which Ben Bowlin wore all day yesterday in the office. That's what I hear. Yeah, Ben Bowlin from Stuff They Don't Want You to Know and Car Stuff, he's weird. Did you see that?

He emailed me and they did that. Did you actually see that? I haven't seen the picture of him, yeah. I put on the hand one day and tried to creep out Strickland, but he was like, that's not the first Gremlin hand. I've had him my shoulder. Cat teepee, Megan sent a cat teepee my way, because I have two cats. My big boy, Loran, gets in it now, we call it a spirit tent, and he just hangs out in

there and it's pretty neat, I mean, it's what you think, it's like a little small teepee for your kitty. That's very cute. So, if you have a cat, I would suggest you buying one. Let's see, Susan sent you a birthday card, it's a dog drinking beer. Yeah. That was nice. Kelly Clark sent us some t-shirts, and he is a handyman in Brooklyn, and he gifted

us two hours of handyman work to give to someone we know in Brooklyn. That is really, really cool. So I've actually texted our buddy Joe Randazzo, said, hey, you need any work done? We have two free hours of handyman work. So if you're in Brooklyn, you can go to notjusthandyman.com and give Kelly a call. He'll fix your sink or do whatever you need around the house, I guess. What's he gonna do for Joe? I don't know.

Joe didn't respond. We'll go to Hodgman next, I guess, and just work our way down the list. Although Hodgman can afford to pay people, we should give it to, like, someone else. Okay. I'll figure it out. Clive Fennessey gave us some really cool Panama Canal postcards. Yeah, those are neat. Rachel from Uber, have you heard of Uber?

It's sort of like a taxicab service now, but it's town cars, and they have an app and you can, like, say, just come get me now. Right. Yeah, Yumi was telling me about that. Yeah, they sent us Uber gift cards, and I will send you your gift code for us. Awesome. Like, 100 bucks in free. Wow.

That's a lot. I know somebody's gonna be going to the airport for free. Yeah. Kristen Curran has been taking us along with her on a tour of Europe, it seems, like. Yeah. We've got postcards from her from Edinburgh, Bruges, Amsterdam, Slovakia, Berlin, all over the place. Yeah.

So thanks for those. We also got something from Threadless, a self-designed t-shirt, big foot cradling and alien, Loch Ness monsters in the background. Yeah, there was also, like, a men in black and an abduction going on, all sorts of stuff. Very cool. And then Kira Neurin sent the wives some jewelry, and you can visit her store. Thank you very much, Kira, at caribouclassics.etsy.com. So that's our administrative details for now, right?

Yeah, part one. Part two, I guess, on the next episode. Yes, we will. Where we'll cover music and books. Nice. If you want to get in touch with us, you can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on facebook.com slash stuffyoushouldknow. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast.discovery.com, and you can join us at our home on the web,

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