Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, a production
Speaker 1: of iHeartRadio Habby Friday. I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm
Speaker 1: Holly Frye. I'm hoping that at this moment I have
Speaker 1: safely returned home from a successful trip to see the
Speaker 1: total solar eclipse a bunch of us. As we're recording this,
Speaker 1: we're going to go to Texas. By the time it
Speaker 1: comes out, we will have gone to Texas and come back.
Speaker 1: We selected a place in the path of totality that
Speaker 1: seemed like it had a better chance of not having
Speaker 1: cloud cover than like the parts of New England that
Speaker 1: the path of totality is going to go through, which
Speaker 1: would been much closer, and also places that we felt
Speaker 1: like we could get to in a reasonable way to
Speaker 1: do this last time total solar eclipse. Same essentially group
Speaker 1: of people. We went to Columbia, Missouri, and it was great,
Speaker 1: and we did have a little bit of cloud cover
Speaker 1: that was making us nervous, but the clouds cleared over
Speaker 1: the sun just in time for totality to happen. And
Speaker 1: this is why I don't really get behind the criticisms
Speaker 1: of the people who were like, well, this five eighty
Speaker 1: five BCE eclipse would have been so late in the
Speaker 1: day probably they wouldn't have even noticed that the eclipse happened.
Speaker 1: I think they would have noticed because the total solar
Speaker 1: eclipse did not feel like a cloud covering up the Sun. No,
Speaker 1: I have another thought, but keep going. Yeah, okay. The
Speaker 1: comparison between the eclipsed sun and not eclipsed son was
Speaker 1: a lot more dramatic than like a cloud blue in,
Speaker 1: even a big cloud blue in or a storm blue in.
Speaker 1: It became really eerily quiet, and then nighttime animals started
Speaker 1: making nighttime noises. It was really one of the It
Speaker 1: was just like a profound experience. This is fascinating to me. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't get moved by them like that. Well have
Speaker 1: you I have gone and traveled. Oh yes, okay, and
Speaker 1: I'm like neat. Yeah, and it's neat. But that's like
Speaker 1: then I'm ready to rock and roll. It's time to go.
Speaker 1: But I love that people get so excited about it.
Speaker 1: It's just one of those things where I'm like cool,
Speaker 1: because I love astronomy and stuff. You would think I
Speaker 1: would be like you, guys, everybody shut up, this is
Speaker 1: really important. But well, it's not a sculpture. It's not
Speaker 1: a piece of art. Vishal Lebron did not touch it.
Speaker 1: So yeah, that's I don't know. And I also like
Speaker 1: I do, especially in the wintertime, Like in the wintertime,
Speaker 1: a lot of times I will try to hike at
Speaker 1: the warmest point of the day, which a lot of
Speaker 1: times is going to be in the late afternoon. So
Speaker 1: a lot of times I am returning home from hiking
Speaker 1: as the sun is setting. And I still think, I
Speaker 1: still think that would have been something that would have
Speaker 1: been noticeable. So I just like, just me personally, I
Speaker 1: don't really agree with the argument that like probably the
Speaker 1: armies would not have noticed an eclipse, if eclipse if
Speaker 1: it was starting late in the day towards unde sunset.
Speaker 1: Now this is where my other thought comes in, Okay,
Speaker 1: because I hear you it is a dramatic like visual thing,
Speaker 1: but you're not fighting hand to hand combat when you're
Speaker 1: seeing them. I guess that's also true. Like that's that's
Speaker 1: the mitigator for me, is like if I were engaged
Speaker 1: in combat, I would be like, cool, it's dark. I
Speaker 1: don't have time to look at that, like I might die.
Speaker 1: But I don't know enough about how how their flavor
Speaker 1: of combat played out to know how much of that
Speaker 1: really was like what I'm envisioning largely from film and
Speaker 1: occasional woodcuts, versus like if they were just sitting around
Speaker 1: waiting for the next maneuver, Right, I don't know that
Speaker 1: would be that would be the shifter in that one.
Speaker 1: But I don't know. I guess yeah. Well, and then
Speaker 1: there's also the argument of like, there probably wasn't an
Speaker 1: eclipse like that. Some of the papers that I read
Speaker 1: doing research for this were very stride. They were like,
Speaker 1: the eclipse is a fiction. Yeah. I have more questions,
Speaker 1: but they're kind of personal in nature, and you might
Speaker 1: not want to answer them on the show. Well, we
Speaker 1: can clut them out if okay, because this is pure curiosity.
Speaker 1: I'm just I have been peppering portracy with questions today
Speaker 1: for I don't know if I'm just super tired, so
Speaker 1: I've become a toddler and I have a million ques.
Speaker 1: When you say an eclipse for you is a very
Speaker 1: profound experience, like profound in what way? Like what is
Speaker 1: your takeaway? Do you feel differently about the world or
Speaker 1: the cosmos in your place in it? Or is it
Speaker 1: profound just in like the starkness of its difference from
Speaker 1: day to day life. So I will confess that when
Speaker 1: I was in maybe third grade, there was a total
Speaker 1: annular eclipse that crossed North Carolina right where we lived,
Speaker 1: in the path of totality. And if I'm remembering this correctly,
Speaker 1: this happened during the school day. We all went outside
Speaker 1: and watched it with little pinhole cameras made of index cards.
Speaker 1: I also remember another solar eclipse that I feel like
Speaker 1: was maybe a partial solar eclipse that we did something
Speaker 1: similar in the yard at home because it was not
Speaker 1: a school day. Neither of those when I was a
Speaker 1: child really struck me as anything impressive at all, and
Speaker 1: I was like, as I don't know why you're out
Speaker 1: here making me look at these things through index cards.
Speaker 1: It's a shadow like why why I could be playing. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So then this one that was in twenty seventeen, which
Speaker 1: a group of us went to Columbia, Missouri together, I
Speaker 1: was sort of like, this just theme seems like a
Speaker 1: cool thing to do. At that point, I had not
Speaker 1: seen an actual total solar eclipse within the path of totality,
Speaker 1: and I had just seen this total annular eclipse before
Speaker 1: which that makes like a ring around there's still a
Speaker 1: ring of sun visible, and so I kind of went
Speaker 1: sort of like feeling like it would be a fun
Speaker 1: thing to do, an interesting and we went out to
Speaker 1: this It was sort of a wildlife preservation area and
Speaker 1: it was a whole group of us together. The people
Speaker 1: that I was with were all people who were very
Speaker 1: interested in what we were doing. One person background in
Speaker 1: a related field, gotcha, so like to this person personally,
Speaker 1: I think would have been particularly affected. So some of
Speaker 1: it was witnessing all the things that happened when the
Speaker 1: sun disappeared, right because we had picked a point, we
Speaker 1: were close to the longest duration of the totality, so
Speaker 1: there was enough time in the state of totality that
Speaker 1: like interesting things happened around us involving how the animals
Speaker 1: behaved to what we were doing. And then part of
Speaker 1: it was also like how much it struck other people
Speaker 1: that I was with, So I sort of by osmosis, right,
Speaker 1: you're part of the group dynamic. Yeah, And then also
Speaker 1: there's just the part of like witnessing this thing where
Speaker 1: these the fact that we have eclipses. It all only
Speaker 1: happens because of the position of the moon and the
Speaker 1: Earth and our relation to the sun, and if if
Speaker 1: that alignment was not what it is, we would not
Speaker 1: have them. So yeah, it was a lot of stuff together, gotcha, gotcha. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it just feels momentous. Yeah. I will also just have
Speaker 1: a note that I did try to find good pronunciation
Speaker 1: guidance for this episode, and boy, like some things I
Speaker 1: found Greek pronunciations for don't actually know whether the Greek
Speaker 1: pronunciation now would be remotely like right, the Greek pronunciation then.
Speaker 1: And also they were names of people that weren't necessarily
Speaker 1: in Greek to start with. And then similarly, sometimes there
Speaker 1: are Latin pronunciations that's maybe totally different, and then you'll
Speaker 1: have English pronunciations, and then sometimes just no pronunciations by
Speaker 1: anyone reputable seeming to say anything about any of this.
Speaker 1: So like, we did try, but I'm not gonna say
Speaker 1: that anything that we did would pass some kind of scrutiny.
Speaker 1: I say, a person who's say entire PhD is about,
Speaker 1: you know, this region of the world in the sixth
Speaker 1: century BC. Right, Well, I mean we have talked about
Speaker 1: pronunciation so many times, and it also comes down to you.
Speaker 1: I bet during the sixth century bce. Not everybody said
Speaker 1: it the same way. Yeah, yeah, we have. We We've
Speaker 1: gotten some pronunciation corrections recently from things that I'm like,
Speaker 1: I'm not sure what you are trying to tell me,
Speaker 1: because there are two at least pronunciations for the thing
Speaker 1: that you are rhyming it with, and I don't know
Speaker 1: which you are mirking with. Yeah, yeah, I mean that
Speaker 1: happens all the time. It's Yeah, there's a fun thing
Speaker 1: I've probably mentioned before, uh for my Star Wars dork,
Speaker 1: but Dave Felony, who is I forget his exact title,
Speaker 1: but he's, you know, the Grand Pooba of Star Wars
Speaker 1: creativity at this point. But he started doing a thing
Speaker 1: that I found really fascinating and kind of cool. Which
Speaker 1: is it like if he's being interviewed and a thing
Speaker 1: comes up that people have pronounced differently in Star Wars
Speaker 1: at various times in the course of the interview, he'll
Speaker 1: use both pronunciations. I love this because he's like they're
Speaker 1: both valid, and I like, that's fine, we all know
Speaker 1: what we're talking about. And I was like, oh, this
Speaker 1: is very genius. Yeah yeah, yeah. Some of the things
Speaker 1: we hear from folks about I are sort of equivalent
Speaker 1: to like the word wat er. Most of us in
Speaker 1: the US say it sort of similarly to water, right,
Speaker 1: which has a D in it and not a T,
Speaker 1: which is not how it's spelled. But then there's like
Speaker 1: variations on just that, Like there are people that say
Speaker 1: it more like water. Yeah, well I can't even do it.
Speaker 1: Uh so, Yeah, there's just there's so much difference in
Speaker 1: accents and how people's mouths work. I will once again
Speaker 1: invoke the great Facebook crayon war. Oh, people got so mad,
Speaker 1: which we had to. That word came up on a
Speaker 1: recent episode and it was on me and I was like,
Speaker 1: oh gosh, I hope this doesn't happen again. I know
Speaker 1: everybody says it differently. I say it crayon. My spouse
Speaker 1: says it closer to cryon, which is the pronunciation people
Speaker 1: got the most angry about when they were fighting about
Speaker 1: the pronunciation of crayon on our Facebook. This is so
Speaker 1: long ago, but was so dramatic. We both still remember
Speaker 1: it was. Really I was just like I did because
Speaker 1: we had done one on the history of Krayola creons,
Speaker 1: and I certainly didn't know what an incendi or topic. Well,
Speaker 1: I think the only thing that's happened recently that even
Speaker 1: compares to that is the fight p people had about
Speaker 1: whether The Velveteen Rabbit is an appropriate book for children
Speaker 1: and whether you should interpret it in a way that
Speaker 1: is happy or sad, and people got verbally violent about it.
Speaker 1: People feel ways about things. They sure do, they sure do,
Speaker 1: thats what's up? I'm you know. I always go the
Speaker 1: hippie route of like, both points are valid. Yes, we
Speaker 1: can all say it however we want, because nine times
Speaker 1: out of ten in context is perfectly clear what you're
Speaker 1: talking about. To just understand what the person meant, then
Speaker 1: mission accomplished. I also just love the variance of audio
Speaker 1: musicality of people saying things different ways. Oh me too,
Speaker 1: I think it's beautiful. Often when I'm like, oh, that's
Speaker 1: how you say that. That sounds pretty indifferent than the
Speaker 1: way I say it, or like, ooh that sounds really
Speaker 1: forceful and different than the way I've ever heard it.
Speaker 1: I love those Yeah, yeah, not everybody does. No. I
Speaker 1: follow a bunch of through hikers on TikTok because while
Speaker 1: I do not think I will ever through hike anything
Speaker 1: difficult myself, I do like to watch other people doing
Speaker 1: it and the different ways the people will say the
Speaker 1: thing I say as the Appalachian Trail, and sometimes fighting words. Yes,
Speaker 1: sometimes there will be people that talk about how they're
Speaker 1: on day fourteen, and a lot of them I've noticed
Speaker 1: just start saying the at so that they won't have
Speaker 1: to deal with it. But like, no matter how anybody
Speaker 1: says it, there will be a bunch of people in
Speaker 1: the comments being ugly about it. And I'm like, this
Speaker 1: person is walking, do you understand how far they are
Speaker 1: going to walk? What if this was not what we
Speaker 1: were focused on? I feel like this, I mean, we're
Speaker 1: getting now into the shades of like why do people
Speaker 1: have to yell at each other on the internet? But
Speaker 1: like my variation on this recently, it's not about pronunciation
Speaker 1: but about various cooking accounts and like the refusal to
Speaker 1: acknowledge that people have different taste oh, in different ways
Speaker 1: of preparing things right, And it'll be like, I'm listen,
Speaker 1: if you ever just are bored and need entertainment and
Speaker 1: like your television's broken, go to the New York Times
Speaker 1: cooking post and watch people yell at each other under
Speaker 1: them because it's literally like it's not even like ooh,
Speaker 1: I didn't like this. It's like I made this and
Speaker 1: it was garbage and I hate you and I'm not subscribing.
Speaker 1: Like it literally escalates to this like wild level in seconds.
Speaker 1: And then you know, if someone goes, I made this
Speaker 1: and I actually thought it was pretty good, there's a
Speaker 1: herd of people who want to tell them that they
Speaker 1: clearly have the palette of like a badger and they
Speaker 1: shouldn't be allowed in a kitchen. And like it's never
Speaker 1: just like, oh, I don't that doesn't work for me.
Speaker 1: It's always like, and you are a monster and you're bad. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: you probably cook with crayons. I know. This is one
Speaker 1: of the ways that I feel really conflicted about like
Speaker 1: where we are and the ability to communicate with each other,
Speaker 1: because I think the Internet and social media have made
Speaker 1: it possible for people who did not have a community
Speaker 1: before to find a community. Yeah, but it's also made
Speaker 1: it so much easier to just be ugly, and ugliness
Speaker 1: is such a big part of like the internet culture
Speaker 1: at this point, and I don't love it. I'm like, hey,
Speaker 1: what if we all remembered we're all on the same
Speaker 1: planet with the same sun and the same moon. We're
Speaker 1: all here together. We're all trapped on one rock hurdling
Speaker 1: through space. Be cool, and that's where we'll end this half.
Speaker 1: We talked about Milton Bradley and the Checkered Game of
Speaker 1: Life this week. Yep, there have been so many versions
Speaker 1: of this game, even in the modern versions where I'm like, yikes, yeah,
Speaker 1: there was on the original. On some of the original
Speaker 1: versions there was a square you could land on that
Speaker 1: kind of encouraged things like playing the stock market and
Speaker 1: speculation that got taken off. And even in the modern ones,
Speaker 1: I remember, and then I thought I may have misremembered
Speaker 1: and been experiencing a cerebral event something that I then
Speaker 1: went and looked at ads, and it was in the ads,
Speaker 1: which is that you used to get sent to a
Speaker 1: poor farm, which is sucky. That's yeah, the whole thing
Speaker 1: is sucky. The newer versions of Life are a trip
Speaker 1: because like, you don't get cash you used to, like
Speaker 1: I remember Life being one of those games like Monopoly
Speaker 1: where you would get lots of paper involved, and now
Speaker 1: the newer ones have you get like a debit card essentially,
Speaker 1: and it's like I think they even have a partnership
Speaker 1: with Visa. Yeah, and it's like about They always say
Speaker 1: that it is about teaching kids financial responsibility, but it's
Speaker 1: also like, I don't know, the whole thing is weird anymore.
Speaker 1: I don't think we played a lot of the Game
Speaker 1: of Life. I mean I have played it before, but
Speaker 1: I feel like it was a game that like somebody
Speaker 1: who baby sat us at or something like. I don't
Speaker 1: think it was a game we had at home. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean I wonder too, because like the Game of Life, historically,
Speaker 1: as we grew up playing, it was very gendered. Right.
Speaker 1: You had a car that was either pink or blue
Speaker 1: if you were a boy or a girl, and you
Speaker 1: had little pegs that represented you and the other people
Speaker 1: in your family that were all either pink or blue
Speaker 1: for the same reasons. And I'm like, that's not really
Speaker 1: today that I mean, are there other colors I haven't investigated.
Speaker 1: I don't have no idea, But I also one. I
Speaker 1: did love the ad campaigns for the Game of Life
Speaker 1: because they're preposterously funny. Right, It's like a ten year
Speaker 1: old going I had twins and just like a lot
Speaker 1: Oh yeah. I also just have the get Lucky with
Speaker 1: the Game of Life jingle on in my head on repeat.
Speaker 1: The whole time we've been recording this. Oh yeah, mine
Speaker 1: is you can be a winner at the Game of Life.
Speaker 1: Oh I forgot that one. I love that one. That
Speaker 1: was my favorite, even though the actual ad is probably
Speaker 1: one of my less favorites in terms of how it
Speaker 1: plays out. But it's very funny. I will say this though,
Speaker 1: which makes me sound like I was a ruthless child,
Speaker 1: and I was in some ways because I did not
Speaker 1: want to play the Game of Life. Okay, I was
Speaker 1: a monopoly kid because I wanted to destroy all I wanted.
Speaker 1: I was that monster child that wanted to build up
Speaker 1: every one of my properties to the point where like
Speaker 1: Dubai would look on with envy. And then I wanted
Speaker 1: to charge people. I remember charging somebody who did not
Speaker 1: have the money to pay me when they landed on
Speaker 1: my square. I was like, you can keep playing. I'm
Speaker 1: not going to bank, but you will be racking up interest.
Speaker 1: What a monstrous kid. So I in my memory, my
Speaker 1: paternal grandmother had two board games at her house when
Speaker 1: my brother, cousin and I were of the age to
Speaker 1: play them, and those were Battleship and Monopoly, and my brother, no,
Speaker 1: my cousin, and I would gang up on my brother.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, alliances and and upset him so much. Sorry, sorry, Matt,
Speaker 1: I'm very sorry that that Rad and I were so
Speaker 1: bad to you playing Monopoly as children. I feel like
Speaker 1: that's always how it went. It was always me and
Speaker 1: my cousin ganging up on my brother, and then my
Speaker 1: grandmother would be like, y'a'll be nice. But that's not
Speaker 1: how that works. Those don't foster niceness. No. Well, and
Speaker 1: that whole game has its own story of it being
Speaker 1: a game originally that was about the grossness of capitalism
Speaker 1: that then became a game that celebrates capitalism. There's a
Speaker 1: whole that's a whole other story. Yeah, there's lots of
Speaker 1: other work out there on there. That article from The
Speaker 1: New Yorker that Jim Lapour wrote, who is a history professor,
Speaker 1: made an interesting point that I hadn't considered about the
Speaker 1: game of life, which is that you're not the way
Speaker 1: you're competing with other players is not in a way
Speaker 1: that directly impacts them. You're on your own journey and
Speaker 1: you're just trying to get through your stuff fastest, unlike
Speaker 1: something like Monopoly, where it is a little more ruthless
Speaker 1: and like you're trying to take down other people, and
Speaker 1: I was like, oh, that's an interesting thing I had
Speaker 1: not thought about. Although, of course, in the actual game
Speaker 1: of real world life, if your only goal is to
Speaker 1: acquire wealth, you are probably going to take down other people.
Speaker 1: That's a different matter. And there are also a number
Speaker 1: of awesome board games that are cooperative and everyone and
Speaker 1: playing is working together to achieva goal. Yes, yeah, that's
Speaker 1: I feel like. That is how I like to play
Speaker 1: video games now. Like I don't love the games where
Speaker 1: you just drop in and get you know, destroyed by
Speaker 1: somebody randomly, right, I really like the ones for a while.
Speaker 1: When when the first version of Battlefront two is out,
Speaker 1: I'm almost reluctant to bring up Battlefront because it's going
Speaker 1: through a little rough moment right now. But they used
Speaker 1: to have a setting that was called Play All Maps,
Speaker 1: and basically Brian and I would make sure we run
Speaker 1: the same team. We would hit play All Maps and
Speaker 1: we would spend like four hours just running around the
Speaker 1: Star Wars universe together, you know, trying to shoot droids,
Speaker 1: which was a very good date night for us. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I would like to do those again, but yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't. I don't so much want to fight with
Speaker 1: my friends in games the way I did when I
Speaker 1: was a kid. Now I've gotten to be such a
Speaker 1: hippie as an adult and like everybody be kind. Who
Speaker 1: can adopt the most cats? That will be my board game. Yeah.
Speaker 1: We So there's a game. I think it's called The
Speaker 1: Tea Dragon Society. I'm doing this for memory, and it's
Speaker 1: been a while since I've played. But it is a game.
Speaker 1: You have these little dragons and tea. It is a
Speaker 1: card game. And I was playing it with some friends
Speaker 1: and three of us were interested in, you know, having
Speaker 1: a good time with these adorable dragons and their tea
Speaker 1: and flowers and et cetera. And Friend number four sort
Speaker 1: of created an engine like he was actually playing the game,
Speaker 1: like playing it to win. He created an engine with
Speaker 1: the cards so that every turn he got all of
Speaker 1: the stuff. And we were just like, we are not
Speaker 1: we do not have the same goal for our This
Speaker 1: is not the same game. Noh. So anyway, I don't
Speaker 1: do many board games these days, not for lack of interest.
Speaker 1: It's just hard to like find a time when people
Speaker 1: I would want to play with can all be in
Speaker 1: the same place. Right. Uh, you know, we're all a
Speaker 1: little probably silly levels of busy, but maybe maybe that
Speaker 1: will be a mid year resolution for me. I'll add in, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I do. I do play some board So we've gotten
Speaker 1: requests for a history of board games episode that's like going,
Speaker 1: can I get a history of the sun? Yeah, and
Speaker 1: big this is maybe gonna be ironic since we just
Speaker 1: I just wrote six impossible episodes on etiquette manuals, which
Speaker 1: was like, admittedly from the beginning, like this is a
Speaker 1: very eurocentric etiquette manual thing. I feel like it would
Speaker 1: be a huge disservice to that topic to have it
Speaker 1: be really eurocentric. And I also don't feel like it's
Speaker 1: possible to be more global with it and have it
Speaker 1: fit into an episode. There's so much so like that
Speaker 1: is something that I've thought about and that's where I
Speaker 1: landed on it. Yeah, that's tricky. I hope if this
Speaker 1: is your weekend coming up, that you get to maybe
Speaker 1: play a game with somebody that you like playing with
Speaker 1: and that has similar objectives and approaches to those games
Speaker 1: to you. If it's not your time off coming up,
Speaker 1: we hope that you still get to have a good
Speaker 1: time and maybe play a game. Sometimes I can fit
Speaker 1: a game in on a weeknight. If you are trucking
Speaker 1: along through life and getting relaxation and being kind, we
Speaker 1: hope you reach happy old age. We will be right
Speaker 1: back here again tomorrow with a classic, and then on
Speaker 1: Monday there will be another brand new episode. Stuff You
Speaker 1: Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For
Speaker 1: more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.