id string | title string | link string | desc string | summary string | pubDate string | pubFormatted string | enc_len string | enc_type string | audio_url string | transcript string |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
2a6755d2-3b0f-11eb-a672-2b121585a5e6 | The Circleville Poison Pen Letters Mystery | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/the-circleville-poison-pen-letters-mystery | For 20 years, a tiny town in Ohio was held enrapt by the prolific author of a series of unhinged letters. By the time they abruptly stopped, the letters – which revealed terrible secrets – had claimed a life and sent a possibly innocent man to prison. | For 20 years, a tiny town in Ohio was held enrapt by the prolific author of a series of unhinged letters. By the time they abruptly stopped, the letters – which revealed terrible secrets – had claimed a life and sent a possibly innocent man to prison. | Tue, 11 Jan 2022 10:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2022, tm_mon=1, tm_mday=11, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=11, tm_isdst=0) | 49242791 | audio/mpeg | "This July, don't miss an entire summer of surprises on Disney Plus with Disney's High School Musical, the series season three Zombies, three Doctor Strange in the multiverse of Madness, and the wonderful summer of Mickey Mouse. Plus new episodes of Marvel Studios, ms. Marvel and National Geographics. America the Beautiful. From the award winning producers of Planet Earth, Frozen Planet, and the Disney nature films, america the Beautiful takes viewers on a tour of the most spectacular and visually arresting regions of our great nation. All these and more streaming this month on Disney Plus. Hey, everybody. If you want a great website, you want to do it yourself with no must, no fuss. Turn to Squarespace. They have everything to sell anything. They have the tools that you need to get your business off the ground, including ecommerce templates, inventory management, a simple checkout process, and secure payments. And if you're into analytics, hold on to your hats, because Squarespace has everything that you need. Just head to Squarespace.com SYSK and you can get a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code S YSK to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Welcome to stuff you should know a production of iHeartRadio. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles to be Chuck Bryant, and we can hear Jerry Clears a bell, so she's here with us. And this, of course, is stuff you should know. True crime? Yeah, I'd say sort of, but no, it really is true crime. It's just not necessarily murdery. No, but it's stalky, and I hadn't really realized it until I saw it spelled out a few times. But this is a huge stalking case. One of the weirdest, creepiest, most mysterious stalking cases of all time. Yes, but I think I know who did it. Hold it. Wait. Save it, because we'll definitely have that combo. Okay. Yeah, I think this is one of those. What is it? Occam's razor. Is that the most obvious thing? We did an episode on that, remember? Yeah, a gazillion years ago. But I think this is one of those where it is a lot less mysterious when you kind of just look at it at its face. Right. So in other words, you think the cat did it. The cat did do it. Always. So we're talking about this mystery, usually called in its full title, the Circleville Ohio Poison Pen Letters, and it is a weird, unsolved mystery case. In fact, it came into the widest public awareness thanks to that TV show Unsolved Mysteries back in the early 90s. They loved it, and a lot of their info was based on this journalist and private investigator named Martin Yant, who had already been investigating it by then. But it is a really weird, odd, true crime mystery. And yes, it is true crime, even though you're right, it doesn't have murder involved. There's no serial killer or anything like that. But it is bizarre and it is weird, and it is still unsolved to this day. Yeah, there's a death. It's not a murder, though. I don't want to ruin it. So before we get too far into it, I want to give some shout outs to some of the sources for this one. Unsolved Mysteries their website, a couple of CBS websites. Mental Floss thought catalog, historic mysteries list first had some good stuff and then true Crimes times. Had some good stuff. And then also there are a couple of podcast sites that have already covered this that if this floats your boat, go check out the Whatever Remains podcast coverage of this. And there's also one called Invisible Ships podcast that covered this too. And we use some of their info from their sites, too. Yes, and this is one of those that's a little frustrating to research because there's a lot of different conflicting information, and it's kind of hard to get to the real facts. But some of it's not the biggest deal. It's just like, oh, I saw that this was this and I mean, right off the bat, for instance, in Circleville, Ohio, these mystery letters started coming to Mary Gillespie. But then I saw sites that say, oh, no, the superintendent received letters before Mary Gillispie even. Is that right? Yeah. So who knows? It doesn't really damage the main storyline. Like, nothing contradicts it, such to where I was like, well, I don't even know what I've just read then, right? I don't even know what's true anymore. But all this just as a way of setting up, if there are things that are slightly off, it's because it's just hard to get the real like, we didn't have the case file in front of us. So most of the coverage of this mystery does start with Mary Golispy receiving her first letter. And Mary Golispy was a local bus driver in Circleville, Ohio. And Circleville, Ohio, is a tiny little town about 2020, 5 miles south of Columbus, Ohio, the capital of Ohio. A school bus driver, by the way, which is very key. Yes, thank you for that. And so this is a small town, and Mary Gillespie was a small town person who just kind of typically minded her own business, from what I could tell, generally well thought of, if she was ever thought of at all by other people. And she got this first letter, and it was written in this kind of weird blocky handwriting, and it was a rather alarming letter for anybody to get because it basically said, I know that you're having an affair with the superintendent of the West Fall School District, which you're an employee of, and if you don't stop, bad things are going to start happening to you. Right. His name was Gordon Massey, said they were watching her. The superintendent was Gordon Massey that she was having an affair with. Right? Yes. As opposed to who the letter writer. It would be no mystery if we need the letter writer. Hey, if I were listening to this podcast I would have been confused just then. So I was looking out for that version of me that's out there listening. Oh goodness, I hope that person isn't listening. So they said that they were watching and quote, this is no joke. So these letters start coming in. Almost all of them had that same blocky letter meaning basically capital letters. Some did not though, and we'll get into that a little bit more later. But the lion's share of them had this one kind of writing style that was very signature, clearly kind of written by the same person. Yeah. And so Mary, she hides these letters for a little while, obviously didn't even tell her husband at first and then eventually says Ron. And there are a bunch of just norm core names in here. So it might get a little confusing with like the Ron's and the Mary's and the Paul's. But she told her husband Ron, she said, listen, I've been getting these letters and here's what they say. And the letters are saying that I need to tell the school board about this or they will out me basically on how you would out someone in the 70s, which is on the radio CB by putting up billboards and signs. This would be your modern social media threat, I guess. Yeah, I guess so. And so Ron said, well I think Mary said, listen, I think, I know these are coming from this other guy, David. He's another school bus driver. David Longbury. And he tried to come on to me and I rebuffed him and I think that's who's writing this? From what I could tell, Mary kept the letters to herself until Ron started getting letters himself that basically said, your wife was having an affair with Gordon Massey and you better make them stop or else I'm going to tell everybody. And so that's when she turned to David's like, oh yeah, I forgot to tell you about these letters and that I've been accused of having an affair. I'm totally not having an affair though, but what are we going to do about these letters? So they loop in, as you would do, some family members. Ron's sister Karen, who will become a key player, and her husband Paul Fresh Hour was their last name, married last name. He would become a key player. He was a prison guard. And not just a little side factoid about him is the prison movie Brewbaker with Robert Redford. He was in that movie, they filmed it nearby and he was cast as an extra, as a prison guard because he was a real prison guard. He was a real prison guard. And another fun fact about Paul Freshow is in the late sixty s at the prison he was a guard at, it was overrun by an inmate riot and he was held prisoner for, like, 30 hours by the inmates. Well, he was a natural for Brewbaker then. He was. So by the time these letters started coming through, he was no longer a prison guard. He was a quality inspector at the local Anheuser Bush bottling plant. But I took from the fact that he was a former prison guard, that they wanted to get some muscle involved, and they went to him to ask him to write the letters. That was how I took it. Yeah. And he worked and this kind of becomes key later on. He worked about 50 to 60 hours a week and had a pretty decent commute to and from. So the long and short of that is he was gone at work a lot of the time. Right. So Paul said, okay, of course I'll help you guys out. And he sent a letter, at least one, to David Longberry, the other bus driver that had made advances on Mary and who they suspected was the writer of these letters, and said, hey, buster, we know what you're doing. You better stop. If you don't, bad things are going to happen to you, so cool off. Essentially, I'm paraphrasing here in the 70s kind of way, and it seems like it worked because for a few weeks, the letters that have been started to come, like, hard and fast just dried up at first. Yeah. Because he said, Stop what you're doing, because I'm about to ruin go on. The image and the style that you're used to. That's right. And who wouldn't stop writing letters if received with that threat? Yeah. Because they thought they had this anonymous letter writer dead to rights, and he was going to be scared off now because ultimately, if it was this guy who, from Ron Gillispie's point of view, what? He was being told by his wife that she wasn't having an affair, this guy was making this up because she had resisted his advances. If you tell somebody, look, stop. We know that you're doing this, of course they're going to stop. The jig is up. So they did think that had handled it, especially when those letters dried up for a few weeks, but not too long after that, they were rather dismayed because rather than just letters now, there were signs being posted around town that were saying essentially the same thing. Yeah. They were saying not only that, but they were saying that Gordon Massey, superintendent not letterwriter, was involved romantically with the Golissa's twelve year old daughter, Tracy. Right. So, of course, dad sees this. Ron starts driving around, tearing these signs down before the break of dawn, so no one would see these things. And this just sort of went on for a while. There were these letters that would come and go. I think about a little more than a year went by, and in August of 77, mary's like, I got to get out of here. I'm going to go to Florida with my sister in laws, with your sister Karen and a couple of other friends. Later on, people said that was a cover up for maybe going down to meet Gordon Massey in Florida, but I don't think that's true. I think she went down with her friends. Oh, really? Yeah. Do you think that's true? I think we might have different people in mind on who did this then. Okay. We'll get to that, though. Okay. That will be the exciting reveal at the end. I can't wait. Man it was Gordon Matthew, the letter writer. Back at home, Ron answers the phone. It was a person claiming to be the letter writer on the other end. He said that he recognized the voice, he got mad, he got his gun and tells the kids, I'm going to take care of this problem once and for all. And a few hours later, Ron is dead. Dead. D-E-A-D. But he wasn't dead, like, from a stab wound or no one had broken his neck or anything like that. He was dead from a car accident. He had run into, I believe, a tree. He'd run off the road, driven about 30ft at a high speed and run into a tree. It was the 70s, so he very well might not have even had a seatbelt installed in his car, but at the very least, he didn't have it on. Yeah, the pickup truck, he was half thrown from the cab, which is grizzly, and he died at the site. Like, he wasn't pronounced dead at the hospital or on the way to the hospital. They pronounced him dead on the site. He was super dead of massive internal injuries. And so there were a couple of really fishy things about all this. Number one, the intersection where he died at, it was not far from his house, so he knew this intersection very well. The weather was fine, it was nighttime, but it wasn't, like, raining out or anything like that. And his gun was found to have had one round missing and it had been fired. It wasn't just missing. Like the gun had been fired and no shell casing was found. So in between the time that he stormed out of his house to apparently confront the letter writer and the time he was found dead, he had discharged his gun and they had no idea at whom where it was discharged, under what circumstances. They just knew that he had shot his gun once. So it was not a revolver? Not that I know of, because I've seen multiple places that they did not find a shell casing. So it sounds like it was an automatic or semi automatic. All right, so that some people might say is fishy. The other thing that other people say is fishy. I don't find any of this fishy, by the way, is that they ruled a drunken driving accident. Other people friends would say, like, Brian didn't even drink that much. We didn't see him drinking that day. But you can't argue with science. And he had twice the legal limit in his blood alcohol content. I don't think amuse I think he drank up some courage to go confront someone and wrecked his car and died. Yeah. Something that gets left out of this is that this was a really dark period in Ron Gillispie's life. Like, he was driving around for hours before work every day, finding these signs, at the very least, looking for him if he couldn't find them. Like, he didn't sleep very well. It makes a lot of sense that he would have taken up drinking when he was otherwise a teenager. He was being told by this person that his wife was having an affair, even though she swore that she wasn't. It was a bad time for him. So he had a really rough last year or so of his life, and then he died badly as well, too. It was not a good end for Ron Gillispie. And there was a bit of a scandal after that because apparently Paul Fresh hour said that he suspected it was foul play and that the sheriff on the case, basically the local law enforcement guy who would see this case through its entirety was a guy named Dwight Ragcliffe. He was the sheriff. And Paul Fresher claims that at first, Sheriff Racliffe agreed with him, that it seemed like there was something fishing in, that foul play might have been involved. But then after that, he suddenly changes his story. Sheriff Radcliffe does, and like you said, it gets ruled in accident, especially after the coroner comes back with a point 16 blood alcohol content for Ron Gillespie. That's right. And Radcliffe said there was initially some kind of suspect that I know you did too. Looked high and low. I don't think it's literally ever been released to sheriff Radcliffe initially had in for questioning, but apparently this person even went so far as to take a polygraph test and got away with it. I don't know if it was one of the who knows? I don't know if it's any of the key suspects that we'll talk about later or not. And I don't think we'll ever know who that was. But there was a suspect, and that was sort of dismissed out of hand once the DUI alcohol reading came back and the polygraph test was passed. Yeah, the one person I saw floated as potentially who it was was David Longberry, that bus driver. That's who I figured. Yeah. But yeah, it's never been documented. I'm not even positive that it's documented that Sheriff Radcliffe actually did any of this, like a polygraph and all that stuff he said he did. So Ron is dead. Chuck the Circleville Letter Writer has claimed a life, a human life has been snuffed out that otherwise probably wouldn't have been had. The Circleville Letter Writer not started writing this terrible letter campaign. That's right. You want to take a break and pick back up afterwards? Let's do it. Okay. What if you were a gigantic snack food maker and you had to wrestle a massively, complex supply chain to satisfy cravings from Tokyo to Toledo? So you partner with IBM Consulting to bring together data and workflow so that every driver and merchandiser can serve up jalapeno, sesame and chocolate cover goodness with real time, data driven precision. Let's create supply chains that have an appetite for performance. IBM let's create. Learn more at IBM. Comconsulting. Hey, that's the sound of another sale on Shopify, the all in one commerce platform to start, run and grow your business, isn't it, Chuck? That's right. Shopify gives entrepreneurs the resources once reserved for big business, so upstart startups and established businesses alike can sell everywhere, synchronize online and in person sales, and effortlessly stay informed. Scaling your business is a journey of endless possibility. You can reach customers online and across social networks with an ever growing suite of channel integrations and apps, including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, and more. You can synchronize your online and in person sales so you gain insights as you grow with detailed reporting of conversion rates, profit margins, and beyond. It's more than a store. Shopify grows with you. So just go to shopify. comStuff all lowercase for a free 14 day trial and get full access to Shopify's entire suite of features. Grow your business with Shopify today. Go to Shopify.com stuff right now. Incredible story of what seems to be a large military transport plane that's crashed in a remote region south of Ankara, Turkey. Witnesses authorities are on the hunt for a suspect after two men went to blows atop a fireworks bars, wrecked cars, and destruction. Witnesses claim an unknown assailant left from the tram and evaded the scene after a high speed carjack. The identity of this man stills unknown. What do you know about the Sierra program? Reckless mystery, man. You guys sent in when you can officially send anyone else. Great, man. I got an urgent locate and destroy Sierra six stone, asset of considerable baxi agency. That could be fine. The man's got some street cred. Have something they really want. What's? Your gut. It'll be my funeral you're going to next. I'm about to put a hit so big on your boys that even his most loyal allies won't hesitate to drop a time. Nameless assassins with limited morality. What could possibly go wrong this summer? From the directors of Endgame and Captain America winter Soldier. You hurt me. I mean, my ego is a little bruised. Ryan Gosling, Chris Evans, Ana De Armas and Billy Bob Thornton want to make an omelet? You got to kill some people. The uncatchable meets the unstoppable. They can kill anybody. Maybe not anybody. The Gray Man. Only on Netflix. July 22. Rated PG 13. May be inappropriate for children under 13. All right, so ron is gone. And it's about the same time that Karen and Paul are having a rough go of it as well. And the feeling I got was they didn't have a great marriage. It wasn't because of the Circleville stuff, but they began to divorce, and Karen had cheated on him. Karen, she didn't get the house, she didn't get the kids, and ended up living in a trailer on Mary's property after Ron was gone. And this was like Karen was not she didn't take any of this well. Right. Everything I saw was that Karen lived in a constant state of upset and anger at Paul because of this divorce, even though she was the one that cheated. Right. Just put that in your hat. Like, put a pin in that and save it for later. Put it in your hat and smoke it. Right. So one of the things that came out of this close contact where Karen was living on a trailer in Mary's property is that supposedly during this time, after Ron died, mary admitted that she actually was having an affair with Gordon Massey. But don't judge her too harshly yet, because it didn't start until after the letter writing campaign started. The letters were BS all along. You know what I think? What? I think she had had an affair with him before and stopped and then started back up. Okay. That's possible. That's my feeling. I think she had an affair with him. Maybe it was off and on. Who knows? Maybe it was pretty much constant. And then at some point, Gordon Massey left his wife or his wife left him. I got the impression his wife might have left him and that Mary was not necessarily his only fling, his only mistress, and that after that and after Ron died, she felt comfortable saying that they were having an affair. But it started after the letter writing campaign. That's my take on it. Well, supposedly, the superintendent had I don't know if it was verified or not, but was accused of having affairs with quite a few of the female bus drivers. Yeah, that's what I was saying. Yeah. Not just Mary. No, but I mean specifically bus drivers. I got you. Okay. Yeah. I think the Circleville letter writer basically intimated that or outright set it in some of the letters. Right. Yeah. Okay. Gordon I just think it's interesting that he has the thing for bus drivers, is what I'm trying to say. Yeah. It is a real thing, isn't it? I guess so. Those yellow buses, he can't turn them down. Maybe so. Okay, so we've got Mary admitting that she is having or has had an affair with Gordon Massey. Bronze dead, paul and Karen are splitting up, and we start to reach into the 1980s, and not only were the signs continuing, the letters were continuing, the postcards were continuing. People who had nothing to do with Mary or Karen or Paul or Gordon we're getting letters like, the businesses were getting letters. I saw one that was addressed to a barber shop, and it said, Dear public. And then it went into this tirade about Gordon and Mary. So a lot of people were getting letters in this town about this stuff, and then things kind of stepped up tremendously in February of 1983. Yeah. And by the way, I think all of these letters were still being postmarked from Columbus, Ohio. Yeah. And that's kind of a key detail that we can't overlook is that they're all being mailed in Columbus, what, like, half hour away or so? Something like that. Yeah. Okay, so they weren't being mailed from that town. Right. So Mary is doing her job. She's still a bus driver. Six years later, despite all this stuff, she's still taking those kids to school, bless her heart, and she sees a sign on her route that I have seen, and this is one of those dumb details. I've seen it was on a post. I've seen it was attached to a fence. But either way, there was a sign that had incriminating stuff about her. Once again, it threatened the life of her daughter, which was a big one. So this is when she actually got out to take down and she took down the whole thing because it was kind of an odd looking set up. And what she realized when she got home was that it was a booby trapped sign that had a gun, a 25 caliber handgun, and a little container that allegedly was supposed to go off if someone were to come by and kind of yank that sign down without much care. Yeah. Like, I think maybe some string was connected to the back of the sign, and it went to the trigger, maybe, or something like that. But it was designed to elicit an angry response, and apparently she didn't take it down in anger, and it saved her life. But there's a gun now. Ron died, probably from his own accidental driving. This is totally different. This is attempted murder, and this is like an entirely new ball game. This isn't just, like, harassing somebody or stalking somebody. This now is attempted murder. There's a loaded gun that was set up to go off on Mary. So, of course, the police get a hold of this gun, and they see pretty quickly that somebody's attempted to file the serial number off of it, but they haven't done a very good job of it. And they hand it over to the Bureau of Criminal Investigation, the state investigators, and they say, oh, yeah, this is easy. Watch this. And they get a piece of blank paper and a nice crayon, and they rub it over it, and sure enough, there's the serial number that wasn't properly filed down, and they can now trace the gun. That's right. And they traced it back to a guy who worked at anheuser Bush, and he said, you know what? That was my gun. But I sold it for $35 to Paul Fresh Hour. Yeah, my coworker. I guess we'll sort of reveal what we think as we go since we're doing that. I don't think that sign was supposed to go off and kill anyone. I think it was a rigged booby trap, like a fake booby trap. I know who you think it was, all right? I know who you think it was. Hold on to that. Put a pin in your hat. So Paul Fresher, the guy who was Mary and Ron's brotherinlaw, Karen's ex husband, his gun has now been found in a booby trapped sign from The Circleville Letter Writer. That is a big deal. And so the police start asking Paul some questions, like, why is your gun in a booby trap that was attached to a sign from The Circleville Letter Writer? And Paul says, hey, man, I have no idea. Anybody could have put that there. That gun was stolen a long time ago. And they say, Well, Paul, did you report this to our local sheriff's department? And Paul says, no, I never got around to and they say, Paul, you should probably come downtown with us. That's right. And he went downtown with Sheriff Radcliffe. And the sheriff said, hey, I've seen a few cop TV shows in my day. I've seen McCloud, so let's get a handwriting test going. And he was like, well, okay, where's your forensic expert? And he goes, we don't have one. So like I said, I've seen TV. So I'm going to make up some of my own tests, and I'm going to tell you to write some of this stuff. I'm going to tell you to copy these letters. I'm going to read some of them to you, and you need to write down what I'm saying, and that's going to be the proof. And that's basically what happened. He basically said, you know what? It looks like a match to me. At least pretty much. And so I'm going to arrest you on charges of attempted murder. And he was released on bond and, interestingly, checked himself into a mental health center proactively to get examined, because I think at first he thought about using a reason of insanity plea and wanted to, I guess, support that, play some groundwork. Yeah. But he got out of that, and he changed his mind later on. Yes. So one other thing that I think pushed Sheriff Ragcliffe into arresting Paul, in addition to that janky handwriting test, was Karen Fresh Hour. Paul's Strange wife, during an interview, told the sheriff, not only do I think that Paul is The Circleville Letter Writer, I actually found letters before hidden in our house addressed to other people in that same weird handwriting. And Sheriff said, did you keep these letters? Can I see them? And she's like, no, I didn't keep them. I don't like clutter or whatever. But that definitely helped. Push the sheriff into arresting Paul. So before Paul knows it, he's on trial in October of 1983 for attempted murder because of that booby trapped gun. And at the trial, one of the things that really sunk him was that they allowed the letters to be introduced not in any kind of, like, criminal capacity, like he wasn't charged with harassment or stalking or anything like that. They just basically used it to paint him as a weirdo and a harassing crackpot and that the letters gave some sort of roundabout motive or at least suggested that he was the person who boobytrapped that sign, because the letters were connected to the sign, we're connected to the gun. We're connected to Paul fresh hour. And without the letters, it was just the gun and Paul Fresher. So it was a huge coup for the prosecutors to be able to introduce those letters. And then the handwriting analyst took over, right? Yeah. The handwriting analyst confirmed two of them that they at least believed. And I think we did a full episode on that, didn't we, on handwriting analysis, that he wrote those. The other bad thing that he had going against him was that he had taken the day off of work the day that the boobytrap sign was discovered. A little bit fishy for someone who works so much, or at the very least, if he was innocent, which I think very bad luck for him, that he had happen to take that day off of work. Yeah. It's very coincidental, don't you think? Well, sure. Okay. Of course you can't say it's not a coincidence, right? But he either took the day off to do the booby trap, or it was just a bad coincidence. Wait, he just said, you can't say it's coincidence. I said, you have to say it's coincidence. Okay. Unless he did it. Okay. I got you. I don't think he did it. All right. I think there's a third alternative that we'll talk about later. It's all building. I'm so excited, man. So he said in court, like, hey, listen, the sheriff gave me this test. He told me to copy the letters, and I just took that to mean to try and imitate the writing. And none of this was even above board. He's like, he's no letter writing expert. He shouldn't have been conducting this junk science test. And here was some other interesting tidbit. Mary said that, hey, listen, another bus driver said that she went past that intersection where that sign was boobytrapped earlier that day, and there was a dude there who did not look like Paul at all, and there was an El Camino there. Yellow, yellow El Camino. And Paul doesn't drive that. And so I don't think it's him, because look what's going on here. He's getting railroaded by the supposed handwriting and the fact that it was his gun, and that's really just circumstantial evidence. So not only was official that there was a strange man spotted 20 minutes before Mary found this booby trap sign at the very spot the booby trap sign was put up. But also, Chuck, it turns out that if you see there is a suspect, a possible suspect whose brother had a yellow El Camino, and that person turned out to be Karen Fresh Hour. Yeah, I saw other places. It was not a brother or a boyfriend. I saw that, too. Well, no, it was another relative who had the El Camino because the brother would have been Royce. I guess you could have two brothers, right? Yes. And a brother or a relative could have been a boyfriend, too. We're talking about central Ohio. What I think, and this is furthering my case here a little bit is because this guy I don't think we mentioned when the school bus went by, he apparently turned around real quick and acted like he was peeing or something to not be identified. I think that was Karen's boyfriend driving her relatives. Got you. Okay. I like where you're going with that, though. Throw them off the case or whatever. I got it off the case. Nip them off the case. That's right. So that was never introduced, right? No, not in court, I don't think. Right. Yeah. So the fact that that wasn't introduced, the fact that they had Paul's gun, they introduced the letters. His coworker at Anheuser Bush said, yeah, I saw him. The gun, the personnel records at Anheuser Bush said he wasn't there that day. The jury took two and a half hours and came back with a guilty plea and Paul Fresh Hour, who may not have ever written one of these letters or boobytrapped this gun or this sign, I had no motive. That's another one, too, which we'll talk about in a second. He was sentenced to seven to 25 years in Ohio State Prison for attempted murder in 1983. He was convicted and sentenced. That's right. And he remained there for many years. He was denied. He was a great prisoner when that seven years came up. He was eligible for parole in 1990. And these letters kept coming while he was in jail, even though there's no way that he could have written these and had them postmarked from Columbus, from prison. He was even put in solitary for a while because they said, these letters are coming. And they clearly weren't coming from him, but that was still the fact that they were still coming. At his parole hearing, they said, no, these letters are coming, so we're going to keep you in here. Imagine that. Imagine being like, I'm innocent and somebody else out there is proving that I'm innocent because these letters are still coming. But you're taking is that somehow I'm doing he got a letter in prison. Yes. So you're going to keep me in. And then after he was denied parole that first time, he was up for it after seven years in prison. He got a letter from The Circleville Letter Writer saying, now, when are you going to believe you aren't going to get out of there? I told you two years ago, when we set them up, they stay set up. Don't you listen at all? So he got a taunting letter after he was denied parole because the letters were still going on. Yes. I wonder who wrote that. So he finally did get out in 1994 after eleven years in prison. Ten to eleven years in prison for attempted murder. And he set up a website, and this is like the mid 90s, so that was like a big deal. He probably crystal links or something, but he set up a website that was dedicated to this case and professing his innocence and everything. And you said something that I want to circle back to, and that was motive. He didn't really have one. No, that is something that everyone has struggled with, even like the prosecutors couldn't quite say why he would have done this, that it doesn't make any sense. That there's really nothing he didn't have anything to gain from Mary being found out or whether she had an affair or not. He had nothing to gain from her dying if he set up that booby trap. Yeah. It just didn't make any sense. And when you have, like, you have motive, opportunity and means, and he had opportunity and he had means, but he never had motive, and that was a really big deal. And the fact that he had a really good alibi despite all of that, for almost all the day, and yet he was still convicted and spent more than ten years in prison for it very sad. We should also mention that there was a letter sent not only to Paul in prison, but while he was still in jail. There was a letter sent to Unsolved Mysteries, the TV show. That's right. And they were doing a segment about it and it said, Forget Circleville, Ohio, do nothing to hurt Sheriff Radcliffe. If you come to Ohio, Ul sickos will pay. Signed, the circle will writer. I don't know if it's the first time it was signed as such. Well, we'll get to it. Some of the letters are signed W over the years, and those are the ones that weren't written quite in that blocky style, but that will come back. That letter demonstrates something that's really characteristic of The Circleville letters, and that almost the only punctuation in them are colons. Not semicolons, not periods, not even ellipses. You know that annoying thing that people do where rather than commas or periods, they just use ellipses, and sometimes like multiple ellipses at once. This person used colons like that. So in a single letter, there could be scores of colons just littering the letter. And they did this in this letter to Unsolved Mysteries as well, which you don't see people doing that with colon. So I feel like that suggests that every single letter that used colons was definitely written by the same person. The only issue I will take with any of that is that I like to use the Ellipsis. I've never seen you want to use Ellipsis. I may not have used them with you. Okay. Wow. You're a whole different person that I never knew before. Yeah, I like Ellipses. I think it says a lot. It can be a very effective tool and I like it. I don't do, like, eight dots in a row. I use the standard three. Okay, no, I know what you mean. So you're using it as a device to basically say, just pause and think about what I just said or the ball in your court or yeah, something like that. Okay. It's not at all what I'm talking about. I'm talking about using an Ellipse, rather, where a comma should be, where a period should be, where even a hyphen should be. Using an Ellipse for that is irrelevantingly. Bad to read. Yeah, my mom does that. Okay, well, I don't mean to insult you or your family. No, you don't. It's definitely weird. And it's the thing because it's not just one. My mom will put, like, eight or nine dots in between phrases and sentences and emails. I don't know, maybe. I'm not sure what that is. And if you were in generation while she was typing it, each dot would be like, what am I going to say next? All right, well, let's take our final break here and we will talk a little bit more about these darn letters right after this. What if you were a global bank who wanted to supercharge your audit system so you tap IBM to UNSILO your data and with the help of AI, start crunching a year's worth of transactions against thousands of compliance controls. Now you're making smarter decisions, faster operating costs are lower, and everyone from your auditors to your bankers feels like a million bucks. Let's create smarter ways of putting your data to work. IBM let's create. Learn more@ibm.com. Hey, that's the sound of another sale on Shopify, the all in one commerce platform to start, run and grow your business, isn't it, Chuck? That's right. Shopify gives entrepreneurs the resources once reserved for big business, so upstart startups and established businesses alike can sell everywhere, synchronize online and in person sales, and effortlessly stay informed. Scaling your business is a journey of endless possibility. You can reach customers online and across social networks with an ever growing suite of channel integrations and apps, including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, and more. You can synchronize your online and in person sales, so you gain insights as you grow with detailed reporting of conversion rates, profit margins, and beyond. It's more than a store. Shopify grows with you. So just go to shopify. comStuff all lowercase for a free 14 day trial, and get full access to Shopify's entire suite. Of features. Grow your business with shopify today. Go to shopify.com stuff right now. Incredible story of what seems to be a large military transport plane that's crashed in a remote region south of Ankara, Turkey. Witnesses authorities are on the hunt for a suspect after two men went to blows atop a fireworks park, wreck cars and destruction. Witnesses claim an unknown assailant left from the tram and evaded the scene after a high speed carjack. The identity of this man, still unknown. What do you know about the Sierra program? Reckless mystery, man. You guys send in when you can officially send anyone else. Great, man. I got an urgent locate and destroy Sierra six stone. Asset of considerable value to the agency. That could be fun. The man's got some street cred. Has something they really want. What's? Your gut. It's going to be my funeral you're going to next. I'm about to put a hit so big on your boy's head that even his most loyal allies won't hesitate to drop a time. Nameless assassins with limited morality. What could possibly go wrong this summer? From the directors of Endgame and Captain America winter Soldier. You hurt me. I mean, my ego is a little bruised. Ryan Gosling, Chris Evans, Anna Dearness and Billy Bob Thornton want to make an omelet? You got to kill some people. The uncatchable meets the unstoppable. They can kill anybody. Maybe not anybody. The Gray Man. Only on Netflix. July 22. Rated PG 13. May be inappropriate for children under 13. Okay, so one thing about this mystery, Chuck, is it would be, like, remarkable and noteworthy even if it were just limited to Mary and her family receiving these threatening letters. And there being some signs, hundreds and hundreds. Yeah, that's not at all what it was like. As a matter of fact, I saw more than 1000 letters in multiple places. More than 1000 letters. Postcards and signs were mailed or put up around circleville and even central Ohio in general over the years. And the whole letter writing campaign lasted for almost 20 years, more than 18 years of these letters. And they alleged everything from murder to affairs to complaints about the Ohio politics. They just were all over the place. So it's a really weird case. Even more so than, like, the core case that we're talking about. It's even stranger and more rambling than that. Yeah. Like you said, they expanded far beyond the Golispe family. Some accused the sheriff of being involved in a cover up about Ron's death. Some were about just other noteworthy people in town, or not noteworthy people who just had an affair with this person. And you're the local doctor or you're the local county coroner. Right. You've been abusing children. And the weird thing is, a lot of this stuff was actually true. So it was like, is someone just really attentive and exposing these things? What's going on there? Yeah, and I think the town lived in a bit of a state of fear that they were going to get targeted next, and all of their worst secrets were going to come out because, like you said, the county coroner, a guy named Doctor Ray Carroll, he apparently had previously been accused of inappropriate contact with children in a letter, right? No, in general. Oh, okay. But most people didn't know about this. It was like a secret from his past. And this letter writer brought this up, and years later, I think he may have lost his medical license. The state medical board charged him with eight counts of gross immorality, including stuff that involved children in 1993. So this letter writer seemed to be correct about that. There's another one that they were never proven correct about. That was just maybe the most scandalous accusation they ever made, and it was directed at the prosecutor in Paul Freshowers case, a guy named Roger Klein. Yeah. They said that, I know you killed that woman who was pregnant. She was a schoolteacher, and I'm going to dig up their body and mail the bones to the cops unless you admit it. And I think this was never sort of went anywhere. Right. It was just one of those accusations. No. And Roger Klein ended up continuing along the career path up to being an appeals court judge when he retired a few years back. But the accusation was that he was having an affair with the schoolteacher, got her pregnant, and then killed her and by proxy, their unborn child. And there was a schoolteacher named Vicky Coke who was murdered and whose murder was never solved. And I've seen in a couple of places that Roger Klein was proven to have had an affair with her, but I could not find that, like, roundly proven. The upshot of all of this is this was exposed in one of the letters. So the coroner and Ron Gillispie's death is exposed in a letter and targeted Roger Klein, the prosecutor in Paul Freshow's case, gets a letter of his own, and he's targeted. So it wasn't just Mary and her affair with Gordon Massey that was the full subject of these letters. Other people were targeted as well. That's right. So there's a couple of more people we should mention, I guess, before we get to our final verdicts. And they're both children of key players. One was William Massey. This is Superintendent Massey's son. I mentioned some of those earlier letters were written in a kind of different style of handwriting, and they were signed with a W. Some people say it could have been William Massey writing these and actually signing them. He was a grade school I'm sorry, I think high school student at the time. Teenager. Yeah. So just throwing that out there. And then there is Mark Fresh Hour, who was Karen and Sue's son, who went with the dad, got custody. So I'm not sure what kind of say they had. But I know that Mark did not go see his dad in prison one time and generally is sort of believed to have been on Mom's side through all this. Yeah. So I'm glad you line those up, because, like, I get the Christie book. We're just basically introducing characters who are now suspects at the very end of this whole thing. Yeah. And interestingly, Mark, in September 2002, was found dead from a self inflicted gunshot wound floating in a river. So some people say that this was guilt because he was a part of this thing. His mom, Karen, said, no, he had been battling depression. Nothing to see here. So let's talk about the person that brings up, then that is related. Marc Fresh Hour having to do with the case against his father is everyone says that if he did this, it was at the behest of his mother, Karen, Mark, Paul's ex wife, and that it was Karen who was actually the Circleville letter writer who basically used this whole campaign to set her ex husband Paul up. Right. Well, what do you think? Are you getting into what you think? No, I'm just going over one of the subjects. What do you think? Well, here's what I think. If that's where we are, sure. All right. We have other suspects to talk about, but sure. Well, it'll all come out in this. Okay. And I think that the original letter was sent, in fact, by David Longberry, the bus driver who Mary Gillispie refuted, and I think he got jealous. I think he wrote quite a few of those first letters because they are all about other bus drivers and they are all about the school system, and it's a lot of insider baseball knowledge. He wrote the first one. Then. I think Karen used that skin to start writing letters of her own when she became obsessed with getting back at her husband, soon to be ex husband. And I think she did enlist her son Mark. I think she enlisted her ex boyfriend, or I'm sorry, her boyfriend, who said supposedly match the description of the guy in the El Camino. I think that it was all her. That Martin Yant guy, the investigator said, in my 22 years as a journalist, I don't think I've ever met an individual so consumed with so much irrational hatred for another and a willingness to say anything, no matter how provably false, to defame him about her ex husband. And I think it was all her. And then I think all these other weird letters, I think people of Ohio just started writing these as ways to expose people. Okay. That's what I think. Like you said, that's Martin Jan's take on it. He knows probably more than anybody about this case aside from Paul Fresh Hour, who, by the way, he thinks that it yeah, he thinks that it started out as David Longberry and was followed up by Karen Fresh Hour to set up. Yeah, that was Martin Yan's theory. So you're in good company. You're in good company. You and Martin Yann agree on that? And, I mean, there is a lot to base it on. Like, Karen and or her son had access to Paul's gun, so that she had the means, the opportunity, and the motive, for sure. She definitely hated Paul fresh hour. She happened to throw away all those other letters that she had found. Supposedly, yeah. I think even if she wasn't the letter writer, at the very least, she was doing what she could to set Paul up or make sure Paul went to jail for this, even if she hadn't gone to the trouble of being the letter writer. Okay. And my final piece is she didn't come out with any of this stuff until after that divorce was started. Right? Yeah. Like, that all would have come out during the divorce proceedings because it was bitter and acrimonious, so she would have used anything she could have against him. So the fact that she didn't mention those things during the divorce proceedings is extra fishy. Is that what you're saying? No, she did mention them. I'm saying none of this was mentioned. Like, this whole time these letters were going on, none of it was mentioned until she started to get divorced. Okay? That's not what I saw. I saw she didn't mention it until Paul was starting to be railroaded toward prison, and the fact that she didn't talk about it during the divorce proceedings made it fishy. I saw. The other way is that she conveniently didn't mention any of this stuff until the divorce started to get ugly. I got you not mentioned it, but that's when she got involved. I think I got you. Okay. All right. So do you want to know who? I think there's a really good chance that what you just said is correct. I think it's entirely possible. I want to hear your take. I think it's also just as possible that the Circleville letter writer was Paul Fresh Hour, and here's why. I saw that a motive for him to write these initial letters. Someone's floated, I don't remember who that he was loyal to his wife at the time, and that his wife was the sister of Ron, who was being hurt by his wife Mary having an affair. So it's possible, whether it was his own idea or with Karen, he would have written these letters as a weird, roundabout way to get her to stop having this affair. Okay, so it is possible he did have motive, and then from that point on, he possibly had motive to keep it up as a way of grinding an axe. He accused sheriff Radcliffe of covering up Ron's death. The Cirqueville letter writer accused the sheriff of covering up Ron's death. The prosecutor in the case got his own letter. The guy who prosecuted Paul Fresher got his own super scandalous letter. The coroner who ruled it was an accident in Ron Gillespie's death got a super scandalous letter. These people were people that Paul Fresher would have had a problem with and no one else, none of the other suspects would have had a problem with. Also, apparently there was a letter, a handwriting analyst who was on a 2021 episode of 48 Hours who said these were written by one person, and that person was Paul Fresh hour based on his handwriting and apparently Whatever Remains podcast turned up. Apparently somebody got fingerprints off of some of the letters that were sent while Paul was in prison, and they had Paul's fingerprints on them. So there's a lot of stuff that incriminates Paul as well. It's entirely possible it was him. And the last thing is, the moment he got out of prison, right around the time he got out of prison, the letters just stopped altogether. Yes. I don't know I don't know what that means, though. Yeah, I mean, a lot of it's up for subjective interpretation. I think it's either multiple people, mainly David Longberry and Karen, or it was all Paul. That's my take. Well, I mean, who else could have been? It could have been Gordon Massey. Obviously. Okay, right. The original guy. Yeah. You got anything else? I got nothing else. Well, if you like this, there's a little bit more of this case, so there's probably a rabbit hole for you to jump down. Go search it on the Internet and listen to those other podcasts, Whatever Remains in Invisible Ships, and see what you think about theirs, too. And since I said that, it's time for listener mail or get on Reddit. Man. I'm not on reddit. Hardly at all. But sometimes stuff like this is a lot of fun because you get to see all these different people's takes and opinions. I saw this one guy who literally read the entire 160 something page thing that Paul had put out in the early 90s. Right. Man, you got more time than I do. Yeah, it's really detailed. I was looking through and I didn't make it through the whole thing. But if you're into that, go to their Unresolved Mysteries subreddit. That will be up your alley. All right. I'm going to call this flannon isles. Wave explained. Yeah. This is from Allison from Toronto. But I have to say that we got so many letters that said basically the same thing almost immediately after that episode that I think it's probably what happened. It seems pretty plausible to me. Hey, guys, love the podcast. You're the best. With regard to Flannel Niles mystery, I'd like to share how I envision it. How about this? The box on the cranes banging around. The two keepers don their weather gear and set off to secure it. The other stays behind from the elevated vantage point of the lighthouse, maybe while skinning the horizon with binoculars. Who knows? He spots that rogue wave coming toward the island in an attempt to warn and save his friends, bolts from the lighthouse without weather gear, maybe even knocks over that chair, only to be swept away with his friends in an attempt to save them. One wave, all three gone. I think he saw it coming and thought he had enough time to save them all. That is from Alison from Toronto and many other people who said basically the exact same thing. And it sounds pretty good to me. It really does. It's super plausible. And it didn't dawn on me at all, if that's a possibility. One wave or another. Sometimes when you're sitting here in front of the microphone, you don't have time to ruminate like you people do at home. No, the people want our defense. They want some more jokes. They want some more pizza insights. Yeah, they want another piece of us. Yes, but thank you. I mean, without the rest of everybody, we would be incomplete. So everybody else completes us, right? That's right. If you want to send us an email that completes us, we would appreciate that. You can send it to us at stuffpodcast. Wait, hold on. Chuck, who was that they wrote in? Allison from Toronto. Thank you. Allison from Toronto. And everybody else who wrote into you can send your email to stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts My heartratio, visit the iHeartRadio app apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. You want your kid eating the Best nutrition nation, right? And by that we mean your dog. Halo Elevate is natural science based nutrition guaranteed to support your dog's top five health needs better than leading brands. Find Halo Elevate at petco, pet supplies plus and select neighborhood pet stores." | |
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2017-09-16-sysk-handwriting.mp3 | SYSK Selects: How Handwriting Analysis Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-selects-how-handwriting-analysis-works | In this week's SYSK Select episode, one of the fields of forensic investigation, handwriting analysis is based on the principle of uniqueness - that each person writes in their own peculiar way. Learn about this interesting area of crime fighting and how | In this week's SYSK Select episode, one of the fields of forensic investigation, handwriting analysis is based on the principle of uniqueness - that each person writes in their own peculiar way. Learn about this interesting area of crime fighting and how | Sat, 16 Sep 2017 16:13:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2017, tm_mon=9, tm_mday=16, tm_hour=16, tm_min=13, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=259, tm_isdst=0) | 39452935 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, everybody, it's me, Josh. And for this week's Saturday select stuff you should know. I'm doing handwriting analysis. It's pretty awesome. It's from October 2013. And I just selected this one because I thought it dovetailed nicely with our Secret Service episode this week. So enjoy. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles to be Chuck Bryant and stuff. You should know. Jerry's over there. That's right. We're all here. Yeah. We're at the ready for yet another forensics podcast? Yes, we are. I thought we were done. No, I don't know that we're ever going to be done, Chuck. Not only are we never going to be finished, this one, like every other forensics episode we've ever done, traces back to Alfonsfertillon. Oh, is he the first? Dude, he's the guy. He did fingerprinting. He did facial characteristics. Yeah. Mug shots. Yeah, mug shots. And what's it called? The facial sketch artist tree. He did that, please. Sketches. Yeah. And crime scene photography, even. Maybe so it's entirely possible. Well, we owe a great debt to that man. Yeah. He was basically, like he had his finger on the pulse of, like, forensics, like every subdiscipline of the field of forensics. This guy virtually started it. That's a cool movie at a Paris police station. Yeah, it would be unless you were doing the research and found out he was kind of a jerk. Yeah, but who cares? Well, no, then you have to kind of beef his character up and maybe what is he, like, he was jilted or something like that? Sure. Does he need, like, an orphan to come into his life? Yeah, like they did with Gandhi. Remember that movie? Oh, yeah. Made him look like a saint. Wow. So I think at the very least, people, you may not be able to become forensics experts, but at the very least, you can watch all those TV shows now with a better understanding. Is that what we're trying to do? To help people better watch TV? Sure. Okay. Chuck. Yes. Have you ever written anything by hand? You laugh, but think about this, pal. There's a time that's coming when there's not going to be much need whatsoever for that. I know. There is currently a legitimate debate on whether or not to keep teaching cursive handwriting. Yeah, I think that the debate has been answered and the people who want to keep teaching cursive just haven't quite accepted their fate yet. That was the answer. No. Sure. Yeah. I was looking at copy books, which we'll talk about in a second. And apparently the whole point to teaching penmanship lies in an era where if you had good penmanship, that was a part of business. You needed to look respectable, put together, have good handwriting. Yeah. Your business transactions were carried out through handwriting, typically. And you needed to have good, clean handwriting. You said a lot about your character this is also at a time when people were burned to the stake for witchcraft. Sure. Shortly after. So maybe you don't put that much stock into it, but there was a point in time where handwriting counted. It doesn't count any longer. Yeah. And I'm not saying that I'm definitely not waving like, the flag of Glory over the corpse of Curse of Writing, right? Yeah, you are. I'm not. You're doing it right now. No, I don't mean to. And that's why I said I'm not doing that. But you put that flag down. Yeah. I guess what I'm saying is the writing is on the wall, as it were. I'm not necessarily about it was the last thing anyone ever wrote in Cursive was that Cursive is dead. Yeah. I can say that I don't write by hand that much anymore. And when I do now, I get weird with it. I leave out letters and have to go back and put them in. Same here. I'll write out of order. And even this word I put C additional. I left out, like, three letters and had to go back and put them in. But I do it really quickly. It's not like I'm stumped, but like, if I was writing curses, I'd be stumped. Yeah. I've tried to write cursive here, there, just to see if I still have it, and I do not. You lost it. I don't think I ever really had the Z. It's a tough one, the Z. Remember the Z? Yes. I could write a Z right now, but yeah, anyway, it's weird. It's almost like a Dyslexic thing happens now when I write. You would use this. You could spray paint Cursive z. I could do that right now. I think I'd be better at spray painting in Cursive z than writing it. Yeah, because it would be large. Yeah. The point is, Curse of is probably dead. Yeah. Writing things down by hand is becoming less and less what is that? I'm sorry, everyone. I don't mean to interrupt myself, but Chuck has held up one of his pages of notes and there's some weird writing on the back. What is that? Do you know what that is? No. My parents signatures. Because I was seeing if I could still duplicate them as I could back in high school. You used to do that? Sure. What for? You're a good kid in high school. Where did you need to know your parents signatures? Here's what I would do. I was a good kid, but I would skip school in class sometimes. What did I go fishing with? Rad. Okay. And that's the thing. I wasn't, like, doing drugs or drinking. I would skip school and go fishing. And then I would write notes and forge my parents signature, which is not right, kids. Yeah. But it wasn't like I was off being a vandal or anything. I was just catching some trout. Catching some trout and beating foxes in the head with a hammer. No. Huffing Scotchgard. But I used to really do my parents signatures spot on, and I was very proud of that. Yeah. So how is it how does it hold up completely before? Because I don't have what's called an exemplar. Yeah. My mom's little initial signature is still pretty right on DMT. DMV. But my father's I used to do that one a lot better. That's a fine signature. Can I see it one more time? Yeah. James Allen Bryant. That's a nice one. Yeah. All right. You've never forged your parent signature at all? No. Neither one of them. I may have tried. I remember even practicing. I think my dad seems like, just looking at it, it's highly duplicable, but it's not really you can tell that I I want to say the person, because I refer to myself in third person a lot, was trying to recreate it. Yeah. Just make a potato stamp and you're set. I've never tried that one. You got your signature for life with a potato stamp. You just carve out. Yeah. You never did that in craft class. You carve out something and press it on ink in a potato, and then press it on ink, and you basically can make your own stamp. Oh, it makes sense. Yeah. Okay. Potato stamps. No, we didn't make those. You missed out, buddy. Chuck yes. I feel like we've kind of covered a lot of points of handwriting analysis. Yeah. Little teasers before we start, too, I think we should point out that what we're talking about and I was just made to find on the Internet that when you search handwriting analysis, what comes up is actually graphology. Yeah, that comes up a lot. Which, if handwriting analysis, forensic handwriting analysis is really struggling forging ahead to become a science, graphology is quite happy to not be whatsoever. It's all very unscientific. Yeah. That's like, let me write down a sentence and you tell me what kind of person I am. Exactly. Like, if you write using small letters, you're actually afraid of the world and very self conscious, and you want to hide or disappear. Or another example is if the first letters in your first and last name are big, you have your signature. Yeah. You crave attention or you think overly of yourself. Yeah. None of this is founded at all whatsoever. It's hokum. Handwriting analysis, while still, as I said, struggling to be a science, is much less hokumb. It has one fatal flaw that's possibly not fatal, but it's the same flaw that fingerprint analysis has. Subjectivity. Subjectivity. Yeah, that's right. Which we'll talk about, but maybe now is a good time for a message. Okay, now we're back. Let's talk about handwriting analysis and handwriting in general. Chuckers okay, well, questions, documents is the legal term for what they're analyzing. Yeah. It's not just handwriting. It could be, like, forgeries. Yeah, dude, it could be a lot of stuff. These people question document examiners Qdes. They examine typewriting, computer printed documents, photocopies, decipherment of altered obliterated or charred documents. Yeah, but that's a tough one. Examination of inks and papers, erased entries, indented writings. Like you wrote something on a pad and ripped it up. Yeah. There's a whole division of people who just rub pencils on a piece of paper to see what comes up. Counterfeit currency and examination of commercially printed matter. So they're kind of all over the place. But the sexy stuff is and a lot of times in the private sector, it's not even for forensics. It's, hey, examine the signature on this document. Is it real? Did Mickey Mantle sign this? Baseball. Yeah, exactly. But what they're looking for and what the entire field of forensic handwriting analysis is based on is called the principle of uniqueness, which has been around since at least the 1920s. And it is the idea that everybody has their own brand of handwriting, and that while maybe you make cursive z in a certain way that I might make the same z in the same way, if you take all of the characteristics that you have and put them together, you form a unique package. Your handwriting is unique in that sense. So the individual weird characteristics might be similar to other people's weird individual characteristics, but you can't put 20 or 30 weird characteristics of handwriting together right. And compare it to anybody else's. And so, based on that, you should logically be able to look at one person's handwriting and compare it to a sample of another person's handwriting or the same person's handwriting and see whether they match or whether they were written by two different people based on the number of differences or similarities between the two samples. Boom. Yeah. So let's talk about handwriting. Yeah. And those are individual characteristics. Before that, you have what's called or everyone has an underlying style characteristic. And that is based on the fact that when you were a little snotnosed kid in school, they gave you what's called a copybook, which had I know we all remember this words on one line and then an empty line where you had to copy it and make it look like that. And depending on where you live and when you live and went to school, you're going to have a different copy book. So your underlying style characteristics are going to be based on this original copybook. That you might have some similarities with people like for me, that grew up in the mid seventy s and elementary school in Cab County, Georgia. Right, exactly. Because you use the same copy book. Yeah. What's awesome is a handwriting analyst could tell you what copy book you used or where you were from and when based on that structural analysis. Yeah. And I imagine teachers even informed that somewhat individual instruction. For sure. Yeah. Because the teacher is going to be like, that's not an R, and smack your knuckles and say, Try again. So the copy book, how we learn to actually write handwriting is based on or creates the style characteristics. Right. But then once we actually learn how to produce a letter using our hands, just through repetition, we start to add our own style to it. Those are the individual characteristics. We stop thinking about how to make the structure of a letter, and we're thinking about what we're actually writing about. Yeah. And when it comes to forensic examination, style characteristics aren't really what's important. Maybe that could help rule out certain geographic areas or something. But mainly what they're looking at are those individual characteristics. Right. That's kind of where the key is when you want to track down a perp. Yeah. Because like we said, the chances of the same person having the same set of individual characteristics impossible. Pretty much, yeah. And here's the thing. They're not just looking for similarities. They say in this article, it's probably easy for even a layman to look at two sentences and compare them and say, well, look, these letters are the same. What they're looking for are the differences. And therein lines. The key. Yeah. The differences in two different pieces of text. One is the exemplar, which is basically a comparison sample. The exemplar is a previous document that you've written in the past, written by a known author. Yeah. Like, hey, Chuck, we found this diary entry for you from five years ago. This will be your exemplar. Now, we want you to write some stuff now. Exactly. So that would be a requested exemplary if they ask you to write something now, but either way, they know that this came from you. So it's an exemplary an example document, and they use those to compare to the question document. So whenever you're talking handwriting analysis, you have to have two kinds of documents an exemplar and a question document. That's right. You want to talk about Lindberg for a minute? Yeah. The question document very frequently is a ransom note. That's right. And in the case of the Lindbergh baby, which Grandpa Simpson everybody knows kidnapped, or is that's what it was? There were 14 ransom notes. Yeah. Well, it depends on who you ask. A lot of people think Bruno Hopman was innocent. Maybe. And executed as an innocent man. But there was still 14 ransom notes. Still 14 notes, yeah. And when Bruno Hauptman came in, they couldn't find many exemplars from his past, so they said, well, let's just get him in custody and have him write some things down. Right. Putting it lightly, which that's fine. Good idea. Procedurally speaking, that's a requested exemplar. Yeah. All right. The thing is, the police had this guy, right, until he was exhausted over and over again. Apparently, he wasn't producing what they wanted him to produce. So they said, See this ransom note? Copy this. And the guy did it. And apparently every bit of handwriting analysis or sample that they got from this guy was coerced. Questionable. As questionable as the question document. That's right. But he was still convicted and executed, right? Yeah. And who knows if he was innocent or not? There's all kinds of varying opinions on the Internet, of course, but at the very least, the handwriting documents in his samples that he gave were definitely coerced and probably not the best thing to put your case on. That was an early obstacle that handwriting analysis had to overcome was creating procedures for the police to say, if you're going to request an exemplary, here's how you do it, here's what to ask for. Do not show them the question document. Don't ask them to copy, just have them write. That's why you should always cut your ransom note out from the funny papers and individual letters. Plus it looks cool and creepy. So what you're looking for, if you're going to compare things, is not, hey, look at this sentence and compare to this sentence, because that doesn't tell you much. You want numerous exemplars. You want like ten documents that you can compare to ten other documents. The reason behind that is because when you write something so you're writing a letter, when you start, you're all fresh faced and bushy tailed, and then as you go further down the page, you get a little more tired, a little more fatigued. Sure. And your writing starts to fall apart. So you're never going to write the same way twice, even within a document. Right. Which is a characteristic in and of itself. What's more, starting a word with the letter A, you're probably going to produce that A differently than an A that comes in the middle of a word. Yeah. Or at the end, right? Yeah, I do that for sure. And like, certain letters will connect, but only certain letters. Like, I might connect my T to my H in the middle of a word, but not at the beginning. Right. That kind of thing, yeah. So what are they looking for? Well, they're looking for several things. What are they looking for? They're looking for letter form, which is like the curves, the size of the letters, but the relationship between a letter that's supposed to be small, like an S, and a letter that's supposed to be big, like maybe an H. Yes. Even the width within a single letter, maybe, right. The slant, the slope, whether or not, like I talked about, you connect certain letters together, links between them, and then, like we mentioned, where that letter falls. So if you want to analyze a lowercase A, and we should point out too, that apparently you can't analyze uppercase letters only. Is that right? You can analyze those, just okay. Uppercase and lowercase are like they yield nothing. That's right. Apparently. But let's say you have a letter a lowercase A. You want to find within the document an example of an A at the beginning, one in the middle, one at the end, and see how those compare to each other before you even compare it to the other exemplar. Yeah. Like just really thorough and detailed stuff. It really is. Sounds like very tedious work, too, which we'll get into in a second. Exactly how tedious it is. But yeah. The point is, if you are a handwriting analyst, you're not going to put an A at the beginning of a word next to an A or compare it to an A in the middle of the word. They're two different things as far as your concern. Yeah. You'll get laughed at if you do that in class. Line forms. Another thing. They look at how smooth it is, how dark it is, indicates what kind of pressure you're using on the paper, how quickly you're writing. Yeah. The speed formatting, of course, spacing between letters, spacing between words, where your margins are. Like, they'll give you a blank sheet of paper that's not lined and see, if you like most people, typically the sentence will go down if you don't have a line paper or what kind of margins you just instinctively use. Or if you're like a serial killer and you don't use margins. Yeah. That's crazy. Scribble all over the page. Yeah. They should just lock you up right there. Right, exactly. You're basically confessing to something horrible. If it is line paper, where if you make like, a lowercase Y, how does the bottom of the Y or the G or the curse of Z intersect with the line? How far down does it go? How big are your loops? Where do you cross your T? It mind numbingly details. Do you skip lines? Yeah. Do you dot your eyes with little hearts, that kind of thing? The bubble letters. I know some females. It's still sort of right that way. Yeah. Not with the hearts, but definitely. That very distinctive. I got a lot of love notes like that in my day. With the little heart eye? Yeah. And I would write back, like, the serial killer. Those were my love notes. It's like 20,000 words on a single piece. Yes, I do like you. As a matter of fact, I'm sitting outside of your house right now. I know what you're doing. Yeah. Just a big one longer run on it. Okay. So one thing that they will do here's, one method that they will use, is they will actually create tables. Yeah. Three tables in all is what you want. So you make your first table, you start with the letter A and you go through the question documents. Yeah. And this is all on the article, by the way. It even has the little tables. And the sample sentence they use is, I have your daughter. Yeah. It's kind of creepy. It was, but it was like, appropriately creepy. Why couldn't they just put, let's play some basketball? I hadn't even thought of that. It seemed like, yeah, of course I have your daughter. Okay, I know what that says, about three tables. So the first table, what they're going to do is go through all the question documents and they're going to start with the letter A. If the letter A is present in the documents sure. They're going to put all the letters that are present in the documents. So, for example, I have your daughter has two A's, right? Well, no. Yes, it does, but the sentence itself doesn't have all the letters of the alphabet. So you're going to go through and figure out what letters are present in your question document. Put those down one side. Then you're going to go through starting with the letter A and find every different letter A. So if there's a letter A that slants to the left, you're going to put that down next to A in row one. And then if you've come across another A that's nice to left, you're going to skip that one because you've already found it. The point is, you're going to create a table of every characteristically different example of a particular letter. Yeah. And they're doing this with digital cameras. Right. So in the article, they did it by hand. They tried to recreate what the weird letter looked like, but yeah, they're going to take a digital photo of just that letter and then compile it into a table. That's right. And at the end, what they are doing is comparing the tables, making sure they have a match for each letter in the exemplar. Right. Because they went through the question document. Then they did the exact same thing for the exemplar. Then they put the two tables together and created a third table. And from that third table, they should be able to see pretty clearly whether the two things were written by the same person. And so if you're an FBI analyst, you're going to come up with one of five possible outcomes. There's identification, where you're pretty much putting your career on the line or your professional reputation on the line. Say this is written by the same person. Right. There's may have, which means that the similarities outweigh the differences, but you're still not 100% sure identification level sure. Yeah. That's a real woofy way to go. Right. There's no conclusion, which is like the similarities and the differences are pretty much the same, or there's just not enough evidence there or enough material to go with. Then there's may not have, which is the differences outweigh the similarities, but you're still not sure. And then there's elimination, where you're sure that they weren't written by the same person, which is probably as equally a boldest statement as they were. Yeah. I imagine those are few and far between the identification and eliminations in a major case. Yeah. All right. So coming up, we have something on forgeries and simulation. Like if you're trying to sniff someone off the case. But first we have a message break. OK. So we're talking about simulation before we broke. And that's like a big part of this is if you give and I can't imagine, like, let's say someone like an officer picked you up and of course you didn't do anything, but they bring you into a room and they're like, we need some handwriting examples. Yeah. You can be freaked out, for sure, like how you're writing, and you're probably going to write weird. Or if you did do it, you might try and fool them by writing weird. And by weird, I mean different than you normally write. Yes. Not like using strange letters or something. Right, yeah. You're going to maybe write a little more slowly or just write like, bigger than you do or smaller than you do, or just different. I saw a picture of a ransom note. Not a ransom note, a stick up note, and it was obviously done with squiggly lines and words were purposely misspelled, so that if anybody ever did analyze the handwriting, what they had wouldn't match up to anyone's normal handwriting. That's a good idea. Yeah. So on the front end of the crime, you do the different handwriting. Right. That's not bad. I didn't mean to assist any would be bank robbers, but yeah, but after the fact, if they have the two things and you try to simulate a different writing, they're pretty good at trying to determine whether or not you've done that. They are. I mean, you can completely throw off handwriting analysis. Sure. Just where you get a no conclusion, at least. Right. But like you said, handwriting analysts do have ways they have ways of knowing whether you're simulating your handwriting. Yeah. And like you said, there'll be more pin lists, definitely be slower. And basically they'll root you out as not just writing naturally. Right. Like at a normal speed, even. Right. Because you're really putting a lot of thought into the words you're writing, rather than just writing like you have nothing to hide. Exactly. So this is all good and well and fine and it's a legitimate field. It's not always allowed in court, though, because, like you said, it's subjective. Yeah, I want to say, and I don't know why I developed an affinity for handwriting analysis, because I think fingerprinting is BS, frankly. And I remember saying pretty much that effect in the fingerprinting episode. For some reason, handwriting analysis struck me as more legit. Yeah. And I don't know why, but it did. And so I kind of looked around and found as recently as June, they had a major national conference for handwriting analysts. That aim was to further the science and the measurements in the field. Yeah. In Gaithersburg, Maryland. Measurement, Science and Standards and Forensic Handwriting Analysis Conference. Right. It's not a new field. Right. And they've subjected it to scientific testing over the years, like the principle of uniqueness, the founding principle of handwriting analysis. It's been tested many times. One of the favorite tests they like to do is to get identical twins to provide handwriting samples. Same DNA, same environmental factors, same physiology, all of these things that affect your handwriting. Because your handwriting is changed by the fine motor neurons that you have in your body. If you're an identical twin, you're going to be similar. You'd think your handwriting would be similar. No. Handwriting analyst routinely can tell the difference between twins. Penmanship wow. Yeah. So they have tested this stuff, and they are, I guess, aware that it's not a fully scientific field and they're taking steps to make it more scientific. Yeah. Because they want to, A, protect their jobs, and B, they want it to be like, at the end of the day, they want it to be allowed in court. They don't want to be offered for podcast, fodder, I imagine. Also, they don't want to put away any innocent people. Sure. So let's talk about another brilliant plan. If you want to be a forger of things, provide both exemplars yourself. Right. This is pretty amazing. And this guy had a killer name. Conrad Koju. Koju kujo kujao. Conrad Ku kujo. I think it's Kanrae Kuja. K-U-J-A-U-S. All right. Conrad Kuja. What's? Call him that? Yes. The Kuja. KUJ was a supposed collector of Nazi memorabilia. First of all, those people freak me out. Remember American Beauty? Yeah. So he was a collector of this stuff and a German publishing company. He approached them and said, you know what? I've got 60 handwritten journals written by Terfior himself. Yeah. They were found in a plane wreck. Just found them. And they seemed to be genuine, and they paid him $2.3 million. And the same company, the German newspaper also owned that publishing company. They printed stuff. They said, hey, let's syndicate this out. The London Times said, sure, we'll write about this. But they said, but you know what? We're the London Times. Let's get a handwriting analyst, check this stuff out. Three of them, they had three high end handwriting analysts analyzed the stuff, and all three of them said, yes, the same person wrote these samples, who wrote the diary. So, yeah, these are Hitler's diaries. Yeah, because they got the exemplars that were supposedly written by Hitler himself. Said it's the same thing. These are legit. Right. So Kudo walks away with cool 2.3 million in 19, $80, no less. And the world has 60 previously unknown journals from Adolf Hitler. We think within a year it was uncovered as a fraud. That's right. Thanks to the London Times, they used ultraviolet light examination and found out that the paper wasn't around until 1954. A little bit of a problem. Anyone that knows Hitler knows that he died in 1945. Open your eyes, Chuck. And then they did some more forensic tests and said the ink actually was applied on the paper about twelve months ago. Within the past year, and he's a fraud. And he wrote both sets, and I don't know why they didn't check. And they said, well, we need some real examples of Hitler's writing. And he's like, Here. No, I think that's what they did. I think he was just that lucky wow. That he had flooded the market with fake Hitler handwriting, and so that the authenticated samples that they used as exemplars just happened to be ones that he'd also forged. So it passed the handwriting analysis. Handwriting analysis came out on top in that instance, but it was still a fraud. It was still a forgery. Amazing. It came out on top as a technique, but overall, it took kind of a hit because it still failed. Unbelievable, yet believable. What about John mark Carr? Do you remember him? Oh, dude, man. And I got to admit, if there was ever a case of judging a book by its cover, when I saw that guy, I was like, Yep, he did it. He's the creepiest guy I've ever seen. He is creepy. You got that right. Yeah. But he was creepy for another reason, because, of course, we're talking about the John Bay Ramsay case. He falsely confessed to killing John Bennett Ramsay, which I think he did it to get a free ride from Thailand back to the US. Yeah, I think so. I think he'd like the attention and everything, too, but I think he just didn't have any money and wanted to get back to the state. So he confessed to John Banet's killing. Well, he's living as a trans woman now. He is. And apparently trying to recruit six year olds and younger, preferably brunette girls, for a sex cult, apparently. He's trying to find a sex cult. Yeah. I only saw this one article that was on several different networks in June of what was it like, 2010? And I didn't see anything else after that. I think that is very grown up of you to say, because it is hearsay. He had one accuser, and it was somebody who he was formerly close to, a girl he had been engaged to who was saying she was coming forward to try to protect people, but there was no follow up, no nothing weird. Who knows? Chuck, that was very good of you. But back to the handwriting part of this, they compared the ransom note to a couple of exemplars from his past. The Secret Service does a lot of this, by the way, and one was a high school yearbook that he signed, and one was a job application from Thailand. And they couldn't match it because it was inconclusive, because the high school year back yearbook was old and apparently in a, quote, artistic writing style quote. So I don't know what that means. I guess he did, like, in high school, you do those, like, bubble letters, right? Fill them in. Yeah. And then the job in Thailand, he use all uppercase letters and they couldn't compare that to the ransom notes. That was both upper and lower. Yeah, and then the DNA obviously sniffed him off the case. And he was not the guy. No, he was just weird. He was an odd duck. Yeah. I don't think they still never caught anyone, did they? No, they never arrested anybody. Yeah. I think last thing I heard was that the case was reopened and they thought they had enough evidence for the parents, but they didn't or something to indict them. Oh, yeah, that was a few years back. Yeah. Very sad. And I don't see why it was so hard to get these exemplars. Is it that tough to find handwriting examples from someone? Sure. Especially if they're not cooperating too. Well, I guess that's true. What do you have lying around that's got your handwriting on it? I got a bunch of notebooks and stuff with tons of stuff in there. Well, then you'd be an easy case. All right, well, I better not kidnap or kill anyone any time soon. Keep your nose clean. What else you got? I think that's about it for me. Well, there's the fish system. They're trying to bring this into the non subjective modern age, the forensic information system for handwriting that basically they take a large body of handwritten material, digitize it, and then plot it as arithmetic and geometric values. So basically it'll be a numeric database, sort of like a fingerprint database. So instead of just having like this big diary in a locker, you have an actual numeric value that you can compare it to. Now isn't that just using computers as like flak jacket from criticism? I mean, really the computers is carrying out program subjectivity, isn't it? Yeah, probably so, but it's really just a database. It's not saying that like any better way of doing things. And I just saw this from 2009, sort of the same thing in the Journal of Applied Cognitive Psychology. They did a test to see if people write differently when they're lying or not. And they do? Oh, yeah. They had them write truthful sentences and lies. And apparently you write differently when you lie. The content of the sentence, whether it's a lie or truthful, change the handwriting. Yeah. Wow, that's really interesting. Yeah. So I guess I could help with forensics for sure. It could act as a sort of secondary lie detector at least. Right? You could be like, I am the kidnapper. Right. Have them right there. But it's not for comparisons. Well, if it doesn't work out for comparison, you have a handwritten confession. Pretty cool. And there's no schooling for this, by the way. Really? Yeah, like most of this forensic stuff, it's all just like training. Yeah, but there's certification. Well, there's no college program. No, but I think you still have to become certified. I don't think you have to. I think, like, you can advertise on the Internet and just be Joe Schmo then writing analysts, that kind of thing. But I think there is a certification or accreditation out there. Okay. It says that the training period is a minimum of two years of full time training under the tutelage of a qualified expert, a wizard. So, yeah, forensics, the game continues. Nice. Let's see. You got anything else? No. We still have to cover shadow analysis and smell. Smelly people. Yes. If you want to know more about forensics, you should type that word into the search bar. It'll bring up this handwriting analysis article and a ton of other stuff. Just type in, like I said, to the search bar houseofworks.com. And since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail. Yeah, man. I'm going to call this email from a feminist lesbian. Okay. Self described. Guys, your timing is amazing. I'm listening to old episodes and I listened to microloans yesterday. It's amazing how lined up my universe is with you guys right now. So I guess she was into micro loans or something, right? I love you guys to the point where my mental tape, the dialogue that plays in one's head is sometimes even in your voice. As a northern feminist and lesbian, I was leery of two southern dudes educating me. But I poo poo all your critics. So she listened to us. She's like, what are these bumkins? Hay feed. Hay feed is going to teach me. I'm a feminist lesbian from the north. Yeah. Chipopou is that once you get the hand of your dry, wet and humor, you are the most awesome and epic truth tellers who have grace, dignity and a humility about your own mistakes and limitations that I find unparalleled. Man, you embrace all people's choices and lives and you are silly to boot. I must say that I just learned so much and I have fun. Whatever you're talking about relates to my life and your excellent teachers. I sit outside by the river in the back of my house. Draw or play sudoko. It's the most difficult word to pronounce. If you don't learn it right the first time, they'll puzzle that game. Right? Right. With some people, you predict what number is going to go and where. It's pretty neat. You should try it. It's challenging. Do you like crosswords? I love crosswords. You will like this. Really not the exact same thing by any stretch. It definitely includes some math, but you'll like it. If you like crosswords, give it a shot. Yeah. So she plays this out by the river and listens to us for hours after long days. In short, everyone needs to be nice because I am all knowing and I say you are wonderful. Words can hurt. You are kind, decent human beings first and foremost. And being in the public eye makes people forget that. So there. And that is from Corinne Shaw in western Mass. Nice. Thanks a lot. Corinne Shaw. That was a very nice letter. Thank you. Yeah, like, I picture her out there by the river, playing that sudoku weird game. Sudoku. Sudoku. It ends with a U. No, it ends with an O. No, it doesn't. Unless you misspelled it. Sudoku. She spelled it S-U-D-U-K-O suduko. I think it's sudoku. We'll agree to disagree. Again, thank you very much for that very nice letter. If you want to send us a very nice letter or criticism, we have a thick skin after all these years, you can tweet to us at SYSK podcast. We will tweet back at you, angrily, probably, and rally everybody else against you. You can join us on Facebook.com, where Chuck will comment on your post. Make you feel bad if you make us feel bad, right, Chuck? He's a master at that. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstofworks.com summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good it's Criminal Morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, Morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena Ercart and hairstylist Ash Kelly, this chart topping series will have you hooked before you know it. Listen to new episodes of Morbid one week early, only on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today." | |
41280d08-53a3-11e8-bdec-6b678dd7db67 | The Legend of Betsy Ross | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/the-legend-of-betsy-ross | Betsy Ross is an American icon to many, the seamstress who sewed the first U.S. flag because of a personal commission from George Washington. But is it true? Sort of. Learn all about this fascinating story today. | Betsy Ross is an American icon to many, the seamstress who sewed the first U.S. flag because of a personal commission from George Washington. But is it true? Sort of. Learn all about this fascinating story today. | Thu, 24 Jan 2019 14:53:31 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=1, tm_mday=24, tm_hour=14, tm_min=53, tm_sec=31, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=24, tm_isdst=0) | 40799997 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from Howstuckworkscom Yankee Doodle hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles Spear to 76. Brian it and Jerry Bicentennial. Baby Rowland. And I'm Josh. Like I said, Jerry wishes she was a bicentennial baby. Yes, she does. Both of you all do. I know, man. I'd be five years younger. Yeah, that's exactly where I am. Squarely in the Bicentennial baby year. Oh, that's right. I demand people refer to me as such when I'm out in public. Dr. Bicentennial Baby Clark, Esquire. Yeah. So how are you feeling? Pretty good. Good, man. We should probably say thank you to all the people who came out for our West Coast joint. Yeah, that's a good idea. Chuck last week. So big thanks to Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco for Stuff You Should Know shows and then everyone who came out for movie crushing into the world live. Yes. Thank you to everybody for all those jams. We had, like, really good crowds and good responses everywhere we went. How did you thing go? I was drunk in wine country. It went really well. I was tense and on stage in Cafe Dew. Nord. Actually, it went well when I went out, so it includes like, a presentation, like a visual, audio visual thing, and I could not get it to start working for a good 15 seconds. Oh, my gosh. Which in my mind was a good 15 minutes. And I was like, if you've all ever wanted to see someone die of fright on stage, oh, man. But I got it working, and it went well from there. But the thing that got me the most was they sat around for 30 more minutes after the show asking questions, so they were really into it, and it meant a lot to me. That's great. Thank you. I haven't been to Brooklyn yet, but this will come out after the Brooklyn show, and I'm just going to no, actually, it'll come out probably the day of the Brooklyn show. I'll hold my thanks for that. We'll see how it goes. Brooklyn great. Congratulations. How did yours go with busy Phillips? It was good. It was fun. She's super nice, and I only made a couple of really terrible jokes, and I will cut those out. Oh, you got to leave them in. Are they that bad? Yes, they were pretty bad. Okay. Like dad jokes or like, super offensive jokes? No one which evidently Emily said I said the wrong word, which explains why it made no sense because she even asked me yesterday. She was like, what was up with that one joke? I was like, what? And I told her, and she's like, no, that's not what you said. I was like, oh, I don't say it here, but it explained a lot. You got to tell me later. Okay, yeah, I'll totally tell you. Okay, cool. But what about the other one? Was it a bad joke? No, just dumb. Okay. Got to keep the image up. I know what you mean, man. Sure. But otherwise it'll be although I got the file today and the last 20 minutes of it aren't there. So I emailed them and they're like, please tell me this is not all. So it may be a truncated version. I don't know. We'll see. The lost episode is what they call it. I know. Okay, well, good, congratulations. I'm glad. Aside from the file snafu and those two bad jokes. Right. Otherwise it was great. And we're going to go back out on the road sometime soon, we decided this year, right? Yeah. We're figuring it out. Hopefully another like, nine is shows. Yeah. Over the course of this year. Sure. Places we've never been, places we have been. Who knows? We're going to mix it up. Yeah. So keep an eye out for that. We've learned. Now we're just straight up going to put that in the beginnings of episodes. No messing around anymore. No messing around. Okay. So all of that, of course, segues quite nicely into the story of Betsy Ross and the American flags origin fraud. I don't know if that's necessarily true. I don't think that's the official historical stance, but I think a better way to say it, Chuck, is questioned and just a great story for history, so who cares if it's true? Yeah, lay off, Putts. No, the person who's, like, said fraud. I guess so. Well, I mean, let's get into this because the first thing that you will probably say if you're a Betsy Ross believer she was a real person, by the way. Yeah. I think the first thing a lot of our listeners around the world will say was, who is Betsy Ross? Sure. Well, she is credited, which is where I was going with the sort of creation, design and sewing of the first flag, thanks to a lot of things, but certainly held up by a very famous painting called The Birth of Our Nation's Flag by Charles Weisberger. Very famous painting. Yeah, but it's one of those paintings. It's like super old timing where there's a lot of written explanation painted into the painting. I just find that there's nothing more old timey than that. You want to read that? Well, sure. I wasn't expecting this. He says something along the line. He looks like he just won an award. Yeah, well, I don't have anything prepared. He said the National Standard was made by Betsy Ross in 1776 at Philadelphia in the room represented in this picture. That's a lot of words, but it goes on. Still, the committee Robert Morrison, Honorable George Ross, accompanied by General George Washington, called upon the celebrated woman and together with her suggestions produced our beautiful emblem of liberty. So what are you guys doing this weekend? I was thinking about maybe going roller skating. I know it hasn't been invented yet because it's only 1870 something. 1893 and he actually wrote out 1870 something. 1893. I know. And then he said, how about this new country? Pretty neat, right? And it just kind of trails off from there. It just ends there. It's a really worthy painting, frankly. It is very worthy. But that helps sort of cement the idea that Betsy Ross was, in fact, the designer and creator, seamstress, I guess, for the first flag. Well, I'm going to take issue on behalf of some of our more historically astute listeners and say, I don't think she's credited with designing the flag. I think that's the one thing that everybody agrees on is that she is not given credit for designing it. She's given credit for physically creating the first Flight and then helping with some troubleshooting in the early design. Oh, you should go to an elementary school. Why, are they teaching otherwise? Sure. Is that right? Yeah. It's all created 100% by Betsy Ross fraud. It's not true. What? Which part is not true? The thing you said or the thing I just said? Neither one. Okay. But we should talk about the real Betsy Ross, because she was a real lady. She's not an apparition or a visage. She was born in 1752 on New Year's Day. She's a New Year's Day baby, supposedly. I think that's documented. Yeah, probably. Okay. Elizabeth Griscom was her name. Born to Samuel and Rebecca in Pennsylvania. And her great grandpappy, Andrew Griscom, was a very notable Philadelphian. He was one of the first settlers and a carpenter and built, apparently, a lot of Philadelphia's first buildings. Yeah, that's pretty prominent for that time, because this is when the whole place is being settled, and it's being settled by Quakers. Pennsylvania is a Quaker settlement, and that's how Elizabeth Kriscom, aka Betsy Ross, which makes you think, like, she robbed banks later in life and went on the Lamb and changed her name. Not true. You'll see, it'll all become apparent in a second. But she was raised as a strict Quaker in Pennsylvania. Right. One of nine children who grew to adulthood. But her parents had 17 kids. Dude, that is so many kids, man. Well, the quickest take, like, keeping their faith going by multiplying seriously. I mean, that's, like, how a lot of religious groups, they do at two fold. They reproduce a lot, and they also try to make sure that their members who are born into their groups marry other members born into the group so that they will raise more Quakers or what have you, whatever the religious group is. And actually, Betsy ran a foul of this later on, as we'll see. She was a bit of a rebel. Yeah. And also, I imagine Samuel, as a Quaker was like, you know, it's very fun procreation. And his wife was like, It's not as fun for me. And he's like, sure. It is. Such a great 18th century quicker impression. Maybe the best I've ever heard. Chuck, this is the one thing we're allowed to do that's good. The Quakers actually had a really liberal society. Like, there was a lot of equality. They were a very peaceful group, and still are. They're pacifists through and through. But they also were really strict morally. Like, if you were in a play, you could be fine 20 shillings and spend ten days in jail for being in a play, because it was just kind of frivolous and not very religious. But on the other hand, they all drank like fish. You just weren't allowed to sell it to, like, the Native Americans, because they equated that with corrupting them. None of them Quakers. Oh, yeah, sure. Nice view. I think we used to work with one, didn't we? Yeah. So I think we know the same Quakers. Probably. But now I'm wondering, first of all, I was about to shout out the name that was like, Should I not? Then I was like, why wouldn't I? I just made the whole thing happen. Why would I? Yeah, exactly. And then you thought fraud. Well, some people like to keep their stuff personal, so I'm not going to do that under the table. Quaker is what that is. But they're also called the Society of Friends, I think is the greatest name for any religious group of all time. Right. Founded by six year olds. Society of Best Wins. All right. So they're in Pennsylvania. The one thing that we do know is that her nickname was Betsy. And when she was about 15, she did learn to sew very well. She was an apprentice to an upholster named John Webster, and this is where she learned her craft. Right. You always hear of Betsy Ross being a seamstress, right? She was not a seamstress. She was, like you just said, an upholster, which involves a lot more than, say, dressmaking. As a matter of fact, I'm sure she did make clothes here. There. She knew how to. But mostly her stuff was on, like, sewing curtains and tablecloths and rugs and other textiles rather than, like, actual clothing. So she was in a pollster through and through. So is seamstress specifically clothing? That's the impression I have. Interesting. I feel like such a fraud because I didn't look up the difference between the two, but that's my take on it. No, I'm going to find out. Also took umbrellas, Venetian blinds and flags. That's something an upholstery would have made back in the 18th century. Apparently, seamstress is any woman who sews. Okay. Anything. Well, then I wonder if a pollster is a specialty of a seamstress, then, yeah, probably so. Okay. And what is a man who sews called a seamster? Maybe never thought about that. And if he's in the union, he's a seamster. Teamster. Oh, dad. I know. It's gotten really bad. Maybe we'll have Jerry cut that out to keep my public inventory. So while she was doing this work, she met a man named John Ross. Note the last name. And he was also an apprentice, and he was good at it. And he opened his own shop. He came from a well connected family. And his actual Uncle George, who you might have recognized from that painting, george Ross Jr. He signed the Declaration of Independence. Right. That's legit. Yeah, he was big time. He was, I think, a representative for Pennsylvania and the legislature, either Pennsylvania or New Jersey, one of the two. He was a big wig. If he's hanging out with George Washington and Betsy Ross's upholstery shop, then he was a big wig. That's right. A big powdered wig. By the way, her marriage to John Ross, it didn't last very long, although it was kind of marked by that younger age radicalism where she so John Ross was an Anglican, right? Yeah. He wasn't a Quaker, which was bad. Right. So they fell in love. He was in a pollster as well. And John Ross and Betsy, later Betsy Ross, when they met and fell in love, they had to elope to New Jersey, which everybody does. They eloped to New Jersey because her parents were like, you cannot do that. And she said, Well, I'm doing it. And they said, well, then you're out. And she went off and got married. And she was excommunicated. It's not the way, I think, that's specifically Catholic, but she was kicked out of the Quakers and her family disowned her. So she definitely loved the guy and went off and followed her heart. And they made sweet upholstery together because he opened his own shop, actually. Yeah. It's really sad, though. I mean, it's great that they found each other, but anytime someone's, like, expelled and disowned by their family, it's just sort of over. Religion is a sad thing. Yeah, it is. For any reason, really. Like bringing shame or dishonor. It's like it's your family that's supposed to be there for you no matter what. But it doesn't always work out that way. Which, Chuck, means that family is what you make of it. I thought family. What was it? Never trust family. Never trust family. But specifically blood family. Okay. So the Revolutionary War comes along, and in Philadelphia, people were kind of getting together, forming militias in order to defend the city in case things went down. Right. And no one knows for sure what was going on with John and Betsy, but we do know that he died. We just don't know quite how. Yeah. They think maybe it was either an accident or a death from being in the militia or there's supposedly a family rumor that he may have suffered from mental illness and may have died as a result of some complication from that. Yes. It's really sad, though, because that was obviously her true love enough to leave her family in religion. And she was widowed in 1776, just three years later. After they got married. Yes. So it was just three years after, right? Yeah. Okay. So when she was a widow, that radicalism I mentioned earlier started to kick in. She went back to Quakerism, if she ever left. I've never seen that she began attending, like, Anglican mass or anything, but she went back to the Quakers, but she joined a specific group of Quakers called the Free Quakers, or fighting Quakers, who are like, yeah, we're Quakers, but we also are not crazy into Pacifism because we want trap. Yeah. We will. Shove me back. Show me and see what happens. And that was what they wore on their shirts. Oh, man. But the reason that they were anti Pacifist is because they wanted to support independence, and there was going to be a fight, a struggle for independence, and you couldn't really side with one side and be a pacifist. Basically, yeah. Remember our Pacifism episode? That was a good one. Yeah, that was a good one. So she was once again unlucky and loved. She got married again to a man named Joseph Ashburn. He died in prison in Britain, and then she finally got married a third time to a man named John Claypool, and she was married to him until he died. But this was like 20 years this time. You want to know how she and John Claypool met? At her second husband's funeral? Almost. Okay. He showed up a bar afterward. John Claypool. Even sooner than that. John Claypool was imprisoned with Joseph Ashburn over in Great Britain. And after he got out, he made his way over to America, and he's the one who brought Betsy Ross the news that her husband had died. And then I guess he was like, so you're doing all right. Can I be of any assistance for you? And rather than just being there for her, he took away the for her, and he was just there. I wonder if he was like, by the way, your husband's last words were, totally, you should go marry my wife. That's what they used to do back in the day. So she worked as an upholster until she died at the age of 84 and 1836. She had five little girls, which is kind of great. And aside from that, that's kind of what we know about Betsy Ross as far as the facts go. Yeah. That's about where they run out, and you might say listener. Well, guys, you left out the most important one, the most important fact, the story of pursuing the American flag. Well, we're going to stick by what we just said and say that we just ran out of facts, which means it's pretty good time for a message break, don't you think? Charles agreed. We'll be right back. Okay, so it's about here that we should kind of go over the Betsy Ross legend, because what we just described is an 18th, early 19th century American woman who is a Quaker and an upholster and her love life and her children her offspring. Yeah, that's it. That's all we've got. So the flag story, for those of you who aren't familiar with this, is that when Betsy Ross was hanging around for upholstery shop one day in Philadelphia, and I believe 1776, I think June 1776 is when they say it happened. Three men came in that trio, including George Washington, george Ross, who was remember, her first husband's uncle, and then a man named Robert Morris, who was a wealthy man known as the financier of the Revolution and considered one of the founders of the US. Financial system. These three come in very important men. And as legend goes, betsy Ross recognized George Washington immediately. And they said, Ms. Ross, we need your help. We're part of the Continental Congress's Flag Committee, and we've been tasked with coming up with a flag. Will you help us create this flag? And she basically said, Let me see what you got. Yeah. She said, well, first of all, my husband passed away six months ago, so why are you bothering me of all people, right? And Uncle George was like, I know, but you're still family. You still got Ross on your name, and this will make for a good story later. So she looks at the design and she said, this is not bad. She said, but you may want to change the proportions a bit. And this is kind of the one thing that I think most historians do agree on, is that her one big change design wise was changing the star from a six pointer to a five pointer. Right. If you agree that Betsy Ross did have a hand in making the original flag, then you would probably say, that's probably correct. And apparently just because it was easier on her to cut. Yeah, I think, though, that they were saying, like, five pointed stars will be harder than a six point star. She said no, and whipped out her scissors and cut up some either cloth or paper and showed them how easy it was. And they're like, oh, that's beautiful. And George West was like, Are we still talking about this? Can we go? He's like, Why am I in the poultry shop? Why am I in the story? It doesn't even make sense that I would be here. Oh, save that. Okay. So they said, sure, that's fine. Easier to cut. You've proved it. Even though George Ross was over there trying to cut the six and prove her wrong, the sun went down, came back up, he was missing a fingertip. And so they said, that's fine, let's just do it. And they draw up the new sketch, they incorporate her new star, and they said, Get to it, kind lady. And she did, and it was a big flag. It wasn't like this was when they were going to fly out in public, so it wasn't like a little tester flag, right. So it took a while, and what it would take a few days, maybe. And she finally says, here's what I've got. And they say, this is great. Let's see how it looks on the mast of a ship. They hoisted it up a ship and they said, all right, I think we're good to go here, everyone. Tadao. Basically, that's it. You know what just occurred to me, Chuck, is how closely our history episodes resemble drunk history episodes. I know it's a for sober. Right? So the flag is it's been proven on this master of the ship, it looks beautiful. And they go back to Betsy Ross and they say, betsy, we're going to need a lot more of these. The implication is commerce takes over and Betsy becomes wealthy and secures her place as one of the important figures of early American history. That's right. Here's the thing, though, is there is no proof or evidence that this happened. This all comes from a story that her grandson William can be told in 1870. So she's been passed away for what, 30 years? Almost close to 40. Yeah, between 30 and 40. But it wasn't like she died 150 years before when her grandson wrote it down. He had known her in his lifetime. Yes. And he said that his aunt had told him this ten years before. Right. And said, Listen, she told me this story. He recounted it probably in a much nicer way than we just did. And he told us in a speech at the Pennsylvania Historical Society, and this was 1876 is right around the corner, and everyone's getting all hot and bothered by the upcoming celebration. Right. And I think everyone just sort of, well, we'll get to the reasons why, but everyone definitely bought into this. This is great, let's run with it. Right? And so here's about where historians say, okay, all right, so William can be produced. This story in a speech to the Historical Society. It took place 100 years after the thing happened, almost 40 years after Betsy Ross died. It's family lore, and apparently they got other people from the family to come testify. Like, yes, they've heard this story multiple times in very similar iterations. It's like the story of how our ancestor or grandmother, Anne, or whatever she was to them, sewed the first American flag, and they said, okay, we don't think that the Ross and Claypool families are liars by any stretch. They're not? No. They just didn't make it up. Right. That's kind of what's it called when you give somebody the benefit of the doubt. Benefit of the doubt. That's the benefit of the doubt that historians tend to give the family so that they're not just like liars who made this up, but it is family lore, and so historians kind of approach it with a little bit of a grain of salt. The thing is, there's no other family in the United States who's saying, actually, it was our grandmother who made the first American flag or my grandfather was at that meeting, and he was the one who came up with the stars. There's nothing like that. There's no other competing stories to this family story. The reason why historians take away the grain of salt is because, again, like you said, there's just no documentary evidence whatsoever to show that it ever did take place. Yeah. And there are a few flags here, red flags that is about why this may not be true. What I think is that it is a version of the truth. And then history tells wraps a good story around it. Right. There was no record of a flag committee being formed. The fact that George Washington was there is just doubtful in and of itself, as a huge superstar army general and American hero, that he would be like, we're kind of kidding around when he's like, why am I here? But why would he have been there, like, in person? Not only that, this was recounted by William Canby as a congressional committee for the flag. And there's two problems with that. One. George Washington wasn't a member of Congress. Right. So, again, why would they send him along with this committee? And then, secondly, Congress never in any way, shape, or form, on paper at least, took up the flag, the details of the flag, until 1777, a full year after the story supposedly took place. That's right. There are a few things working in her favor here. It is verified that she was paid a pretty good sum of money that same year by the Pennsylvania State Navy Board. Okay. I saw that she did make flags for the Pennsylvania Navy. Well, this is where it gets all murky because there's another man, which we'll get into. Let's put a pin in that, though, okay. Of that guy for now. Okay. Alright. Cause we're getting pretty fast and furious. And there's also a painting supposedly dating to a different painting that shows her sewing an American flag, but I don't think they have officially authenticated that. It's from 1850. 118 51. Yeah. Okay. But here's what I don't understand. If there was a painting in 1851, supposedly none of this happened until the Camby story. Yeah. Like when the big meeting took place. Well, that's when William Can be told that family story. But the fact that there's a painting that predates his speech by 19 years showing the same thing oh, sure. That lends support to his story, for sure. All right. But it's still that's an 1851 painting depicting something that happened 75 years prior. Right? Oh, yeah. I'm sorry. My math was I forgot. 100 years. You forgot to carry the one. I did. But again, that painting is not, I don't think, fully authenticated. So who knows if that's true or not? One of those dirty, lying Ross Claypool family members did it in, like, 2012. You said less Claypool for a minute. I was about to run out of the room. Yes. I like Les Claypool. Huh. I'm not a primus guy, so I wouldn't call myself a primus guy either, but I like some of their songs. Yeah. Yeah. So, Chuck, you want to take another message break and then come back and get to it? Get to the truth about the flag? Sure. All right. Charles. So you said that there was another guy who kind of muddles the issue a little bit. And he does. But not fully. Because if little school kids are being taught that Betsy Ross did design the flag. That is an issue because this guy named Francis Hopkinson is given credit more than anybody else for having a hand in designing the first American flag. If not being the designer of the American flag. The sketch that this trio of the Congressional committee brought in, allegedly. Yeah. So the story the story I heard around the campfire of old Hopkinson was that he kind of was, in fact, the designer. He designed quite a few things back then for the United States. Right. And the first thing that he did was say, I want payment of a quarter cask of wine. But then he said, Actually, I want \u00a32700, which would be like half a million pounds today. Wow. Apparently, bureaucracy took over, and they batted it back and forth. And then we're like, well, no, we're paying you as sort of that working for a corporation and owning your own IP. And they were like, no, we're paying you anyway, this is ours. And when you look at what he filed for and this is where the naval thing comes in, it was for the naval flag of the United States is what he requested payment for. Right. Supposedly, the quarter cask of public wine was for the American flag, and the big old, like, 2700 pound bill was for the naval flag. And that's the only one that Congress responded to. They just totally ignored the first one, I guess. Yeah. But this is where I just get a little confused. Like, it was important, and that's kind of one of the keys here, too, is that they needed a flag. It wasn't just like I mean, there were practical reasons. It's not like we just want to fly a flag. Like in battle. Flags are very important as they were back then, because if you were a small Navy and you didn't have a flag that everyone knew as the United States would be basically, don't bomb me. Right, exactly. Don't shoot, I'm friendly with you, which we needed an able flag. Right. So there are a bunch of flags that you could find in revolutionary America at the time. There were some very famous ones that you would recognize today. The Washington Squadron. That's a good one. It is. It's a white flag with a green pine tree. An appeal to heaven, too. Right. Which is the point of that is to say that when you revolt. You're going above the king's head, because the king had the divine right, like they ruled by on behalf of heaven. So by revolting against the king, you were going to heaven, the king's boss, and saying, hey, we want to get rid of this guy. But the pine tree there was actually a revolt that took place a few years before the Boston Tea Party, even. It was the first revolt in the colonies against the king, the first actual revolt. And it was because the king said, I own this pine tree. I own that pine tree. I own this pine tree. And they were to make ships masts out of they were very valuable, but the king was keeping all the good ones. And so these mill owners just started cutting up the king's one as well. And the sheriff and I can't remember where it was, but came to arrest a mill owner, and some other mill owners came around, and they beat the sheriff up and chased them off, and that was the first actual act of rebellion in the colonies, and that's why the pine tree became a symbol of rebellion and revolution. Yeah. I didn't know that until today. It's a symbol of a pain in my butt if you're the King of England. But it's a pretty flag. It's all right. Okay. Are you a Gadstone flag person? No. Okay. Not that thing. That's too much controversy. That's the very famous don't tread on me flag. Right. Rattlesnake coiled up saying, don't mess with Texas. No, not Texas. Don't tread on me is what it says. Yeah. And then there's, of course, the Sons of Liberty flag. Nine vertical stripes, red and white. It's fine. This one took the one we stuck with, with the 13 stripes and 13 stars over the blue field in the upper left corner. There were different designs for that, including one that I think I might have liked better. Well, one time they had 13 stars forming a square, but then they had one where they were in an arch over 76, which I think would look kind of cool. That's a boss flag. Yeah. Yeah. I agreed for a little while. They had the American flag, the red and white stripes, 13 red and white stripes as a field on the flag, and then the canton, which is a square in the upper left corner, which can be up to a quarter of the size of the flag, and it's still considered a canton, was the Union Jack, the British flag? Yeah. It looks real weird. And they apparently were running into trouble flying that, too, because it was a little confusing, so they abandoned that. And as legend has it, that flag is what showed that they really needed an official United States flag. So that supposedly is what led to that Betsy Ross flag, which was 13 stars in a circle on a blue canton with the 13 alternating red and white stripes yes. I would say that at the very least, the Grand Union Flag, as it was known, with the Union Jack in the corner, was highly confusing in battle. Right. So Congress, it becomes clear to them that, yes, they need a flag. We need a national flag. But the big distinction between what actually happened and the story of Betsy Ross is that they didn't say anything about the flag until June 14, 1777, when they passed a flag resolution. And they just basically said, yeah, these are some things we want on the flag, and that's it. And that's the first time there's any trail, any paper trail of the United States actually thinking and talking about and discussing a flag. And we have every other change from then up to, I think, 1959 or 1960, from 1777 on to the mid 20th century, every change that was made because they documented it. But this alleged first Betsy Ross flag took place outside of that documented history. Well, they may not have known at the time that this was something important. Yeah, I guess so. Why does this happen? Well, there's a lot of reasons. One reason was, even way back in the 1870s, there was a notion that women were doing some great things and being overlooked, and they wanted to inspire young women and girls across the country to do great things as well. So what better way to do so than to sort of gussy up this Betsy Ross story? Right. There was also, like, a desire for you kind of referenced it earlier about the centennial coming up in 1876. There was, like, a real hunger in the United States, which was a relatively young country, to have its own mythology. That's what some of these stories that were being kind of generated and rehashed or put down on paper for maybe the first time, that's what they provided was this shared national history that the United States citizens were kind of, like, rallying behind. Yeah, that's a good example of why that would have taken off and become cemented. Yeah. The other thing that kind of cracks me up is the fact that George Washington was in the story himself. Right. Because apparently he was just such a legend at the time and just emblematic of what this country was and would be, is that he turned up in a lot of stories that he was never really at. Right. Because this is the time where people would just tell a story and be like, and guess who else was there. Maybe if they're losing the crowd, general George Washington himself, the crowd just gasps and sits up. Yeah, that's great if they're losing the crowd. And then, of course, the easiest explanation is that it's a simple story and it's easy to tell, and it's pretty streamlined, has a nice beginning, middle, and end, and it's much better than some weird convoluted retelling that no one would remember anyway. Right. So here's where Francis Hopkinson comes in the story. It's going to get a little muddy here, kid, but just wine. But then money. And then it was a naval flag. Let's see. I got a couple of things about the flag. So there's the study of flags, how they're made what they symbolize is called valexology. I thought it was flaggery. No, that's where you're starting to lose steam. Okay. Valexology. There's a great 99% invisible episode on flag. Yeah, that's right. I knew I heard that word. Yeah, it is. So the United States flag. There's 13 horizontal stripes. Seven red, six white, in case you ever want to win at trivia. The stripes are the 13 colonies, obviously, and the stars of the 50 states of the union. The red symbolizes hardiness and valor, not blood. White symbolizes purity and innocence. Blue represents vigilance, perseverance, and justice. And if you ever want to see a heck of a flag, go to the Smithsonian museum of American history. And you can see the star spangled banner, the flag that was flying over fort McKenry in 1814, when Francis Scott key looked up in the dawn's light and saw that it was still flying over there despite just a massive assault by the British. And was inspired to write the Star spangled banner, which became the national anthem in 1931. Of course, is what I meant. Amazing. So that's the flag and Betsy Ross go forth and tell the truth. And if you want to know more about Betsy Ross, you can read this article, a fine one by Ed Grabaneski. Actually onhouseofworks.com since I said that it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this really cool email from an Atari guy. This is thrilling. I thought so, too. Hey, guys. I love the show. I worked at Atari in the late seventy s. I ran the warehouse. In 1976, Warner Brothers purchased Atari from its founder, Nolan Bushnell. Nolan stayed on for a couple of years after that before departing in 78. Cartridges created to meet movie releases is probably one of the reasons he left. When I first heard that the et Cartridges had been buried, I laughed because I oversaw the burying of leftover Superman cartridges. That's great. For that first movie in 78 at the Sunnyvale, California landfill, which is right across the street from the building Iran. Something you would not be able to do today because of environmental restrictions like the Et. Cartridge. Superman would fly around, pick up Lois lane, and rescue her from some villains. The only problem, superman kept dropping her and she would plummet to the ground. That's a bug. It's so funny. It's just so similar to Et. The cartridge was rushed into production, was a huge flop. Thought you might find the Warner brothers tie interesting. Sure. That is from Gordon C. Ulig. Nice. Thanks a lot, Gordon. That was a good one. I see he runs his own it business now, too. Yeah, man, that's what happens. So if you want to get in touch with us, like Gordon did with a great story that kind of rounds out something we were talking about, we love those things. You can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on facebook. Comstynow. You can hang out with us on Instagram. I've got my own site. The Josh Clark Way. And then, as always, you can send us a nice email to stuffpodcasts@howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstepworks.com. Ah, summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good it's Criminal Morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, Morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena Ercart and hairstylist Ash Kelly, this charttopping series will have you hooked before you know it. Listen to new episodes of Morbid one week early, only on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today." | |
211ea8bc-121b-11eb-85ed-df49be9911eb | Short Stuff: Beast of Gevaudan | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-beast-of-gevaudan | The first truly international news story covered a beast that terrorized the French countryside, eviscerating dozens of villagers for three years in the 1760s. How about that? | The first truly international news story covered a beast that terrorized the French countryside, eviscerating dozens of villagers for three years in the 1760s. How about that? | Wed, 30 Jun 2021 13:08:30 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=6, tm_mday=30, tm_hour=13, tm_min=8, tm_sec=30, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=181, tm_isdst=0) | 12167548 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and it's just us, but that's okay because we know Dave here in spirit watching over us like this Obi Wan Kenobi esque type dude who kind of gently guides us in the directions he wants us to go without us realizing that, making us think that we have free will, but it ultimately just being an illusion. And this is the story of the Beast of Jeff Odin. That was a great who was that? Bella Legosi. Some creep just walked through my basement and put a little sleeping stuff on a napkin, put it in my face, and I woke up and now I'm recording. Was it jeff Bridges. And you're? Sandra Bullock. What? Have you ever seen the Vanishing? Was she in that? I saw the original version. I didn't see that. They were both very good on their own, for sure. One of those rare ones where the adaptation is as good as the original format. Halloween in August. July. Yeah. It will be out in July, I think. But yes, absolutely. We are talking about a horror show, horror movie horror. And the fact that it happened in the 18th century makes it even creepier. Totally. In exactly the same way that The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is still creepy and scary to this day because it takes place in 18th century upstate New York. This is creepy. Also in the exact same way, right, 1760s. We're talking about the south of France, but not like the lovely seaside of the south of France. This sounds like it's a little bit more of a small town of Jebu DA, and there is a lot of killing going on, and no one knows what's doing the killing, but they know it's terrible. Bodies are ripped to shreds, heads are missing, throats are ripped out, and I think about 100 people, give or take, because this is also legend were killed, but it really did happen, and people were freaked out, and we're like, there's a monster in these darwoods. Yeah. And they were understandably freaked out because those deaths were really, really grizzly and gruesome. And I mean, if this is a fairly sparsely populated area, if you lose 100 people over three years and some of them are having their heads pulled off and their entrails pulled out stir, it definitely is, and it definitely did. And they documented the first death in, I believe, June of 1764, and it was a 14 year old girl named Jean Boulet, and she was just basically being like little Bo Peep, tending to her livestock, her family's livestock out in the hills, and she was attacked and torn apart. And she was the first fatality, but apparently she was the second victim. And just a little before that, another young sheep herder was tending to their flock and was attacked, but their sheep banded together and chased off this beast of Jebudan and saved their life. That's right. And so more attacks are following. Dozens of people are dying. There are some women, mostly kids, a few lone dudes here and there, and described as a dog, like a wolf like creature, as big as a horse, though. And this was the time, this was 1760s, that they're talking real monsters here. They're not saying, like, it was probably a wolf. They're saying that it was some beast that they've really never witnessed before. Yeah, I mean, there was a pretty decent amount of superstition among the people who live there, I would guess, too. But then also, again, the fact that people are being torn to shreds and it's happening so frequently and their children are being killed, too, you can kind of understand how they would attribute this to a monster pretty much out of the gate. That's right. But we're going to take a break. We almost certainly know what this beast was now, and we're going to take a break and reveal it right after this. So, Chuck, one of the things I saw about this was that this is considered one of the first international media stories that it was reported on by the Avignon newspaper. And those reports made their way to the Paris newspapers, and then from there they spread to the rest of the world and that it was being written about and covered all over the world, from Europe all the way to Boston, from what I saw, and that this was really the first time. And that part of that media attention and media frenzy really kind of helped pump the story up into really huge proportions for a little while. Yes. So there's a book written by a man named JM. Smith, historian, and it's called and this one really annoys me because it's such a great title, did not need this colon. It should just be called Monsters of the Jebuda. Full stop, sure. But it's called Monsters of the Colon the Making of a Beast. I don't know why that colon annoys more than others. It's a better follow up subtitle and let's have a sandwich or something. Well, at least it's pertinent to the main title. You are always seconds away from saying, let's have a sandwich. Can we be honest? I'm a walking colon. Leading to that? You and Joey Tribiani. Oh, does he like sandwiches? That was always the favorite joke on friends. What's his favorite food? Sandwiches. Okay. So, yeah, these days, basically everyone agrees that it was a wolf back then. Apparently. This author argues there were certain social factors at play where France was not in the best way as a country, as a nation, after the war. Which war was that? Seven Years War. Yeah. The Seven Years War that they had fought and they sort of rallied around this story and came together a little bit. And this monster but it was a wolf. It was like, just to give an example, like, let's say your country faced a pandemic, how it would bring everybody together to kind of like defeat that pandemic and then everyone better off afterward on the other side. This is exactly what happened with the Beast of Jpudin. It brought France together and it really brought a lot of France together and that like King Louis the 15th got involved, started sending troops. There was a 2700 libra Tour Noir, which is a type of currency, French currency bounty, and I did the calculations that's 12 silver. That's a lot of silver reward I saw somewhere else that was basically like a year's wages for the average person in France at the time. So it was a substantial reward. And there were a lot of people looking for this wolf or this monster, this beast. It was very much like Jaws, but the fact that they couldn't find it and they actually did find one wolf and kill it and stuff it and send it off to Versailles and the killing still continued, it made this problem take on those really kind of supernatural proportions even more so. Are you saying that the one they killed in June of 1767 was not in fact the wolf? No, this was a different wolf that was killed before June 1767. I think everybody believes that in June of 1767, john Chestell did kill whatever. If it wasn't the one, it was the last of the ones that had been doing this. Well, this is just like Jaws then, because in Jaws they had the red herring shark that they killed. Yeah. And they wanted to cut it open and the mayor said, I'm not going to let you cut that thing open in front of everyone and let that child spill out of its guts. Yeah, and Richard Dreyfus said that there's no way that's the shark, because the shark we're looking for has teeth the size of a shot glass. It's one of my favorite lines. It is a great line, but sneaking and cut it up in the middle of the night and it's not the shark and this was not the wolf. I wonder though, like, how much Spielberg kind of took from this true life story to add to Joe, because now that you're pointing it out, there's a lot of similarities between the two. There were human remains. Oh, yeah. It was Richard Bell. Bellster. What is going on? I don't know, but they did find human remains in these wolves that were killed. So it really supports this idea that it was a group of wolves that were killing people and that even at the time, even in this place, this little area was overrun by wolves. There was a huge wolf problem and that's really what was the basis of all this attacks. Right. They did not find the Louisiana license plate Sportsman's Paradise. That will be my last Jaws reference. That's a trivia question right there, just waiting. True Jaws fans will be like, oh, yeah. But like we said, in 1767, they did. A man named Jeancashel, I guess, killed who everyone kind of agrees was the wolf, because the killing stopped after that. Right. And there was still debate on whether or not it could have been something else. I think wolf experts say. You know what? Back then, wolves would attack people much more than they do now in the heat of the moment with adrenaline going on. Wolves can be really puffy at certain times. They do. With their coats. They have really big bones and long limbs. People could easily exaggerate the size of this thing as maybe the size of a horse. Yeah, because over the years, there were a lot of things that were attributed to this. There was a Hyena Dawn, which is a prehistoric, giant hyena jackal type dog that would have just torn you to shreds, probably not that dire. Wolf, same situation that was long extinct. There was the idea that it was actually human, a serial killer who was actually on the prowl, but probably not it because they were just so prolific, if that was the case, that a human probably could not have carried out all these killings. And then there was also the idea that a human was involved, but that they were acting as a wolf whisperer, directing the wolves to kill like this. But then people said, no, it was probably just a lot of wolves or a lot of wolves here, and people were leaving their little kids out to ten livestock, which you just don't see anymore. And there's far fewer wolves. So that's all it was, just statistics coming back and tearing people to shreds and a wolf being a wolf. This would make for a good movie, I think the setting and everything lends itself to something that could be kind of cool. Yeah. And one other thing that's kind of cool about this is there were survivors who were attacked, and some of them were like little kids who fended off wolves. One girl did. She had a bayonet attached to a staff and used it to stab the wolf, and it was a beast of jebudan. And some lived to tell the tale, which is pretty cool. Wow. Yeah, definitely movie. Let's do it. Movie material. Chuck, you got anything else? No. Okay, well, then I'll see you later, everybody. Okay. All right. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts My HeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows." | |
02b8d64c-3b0e-11eb-947e-c75b23dd2953 | Girl Scouts: More than cookie sellers | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/girl-scouts-more-than-cookie-sellers | We put our research to the test and it turns out the Girl Scouts is a great organization. | We put our research to the test and it turns out the Girl Scouts is a great organization. | Thu, 20 May 2021 11:36:13 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=5, tm_mday=20, tm_hour=11, tm_min=36, tm_sec=13, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=140, tm_isdst=0) | 48194962 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant and there's Trooper Jerry Rowland. Albert. There somewhere for Scout. This is stuff you should know. Be prepared. I am prepared ish. Yeah. I wonder if Jerry was a Girl Scout. I know we didn't get a chance to ask because it's all business with hers. She's just busy, busy, busy. I know she had to leave to go to a meeting, but my guess is that what do you think? Yes, I think there's actually a one in three chance that she was because, Chuck, that is the astounding stat that one and every three American adult women were a Girl Scout at some point in time. Yeah, I think they're currently around the 2.6 million level, and it varies between two and a half to 3 million, depending what's going on. And I think in recent years, numbers have gone down a little bit, and they're always trying to get those numbers up. But what I've seen is that it is remarkably steady, though it hovers around that same amount. And I've seen that that's the total number of Girl Scouts. I've also seen that that includes the adult volunteers, and that at any given time, there are about 1.7 million Girl Scouts active Girl Scouts in the United States, and that they usually hang in there for about four years is the average length of time, which is pretty good. That was longer than my Boy Scout or Cub Scout run? I can tell you. How long was your run? I think it was my shorter. Okay. I had a real problem at a young age of the idea of giving respect to elders just because they were old. I was like, no, I feel like there's a lot of old jerks out there who don't really deserve to be treated particularly special. Sure. That was my big issue with it. The problem is my dad was the den leader, and he decided to be a good role model and stick it out. Without you? Yes. But with me watching TV, like, in the house at the same time when they were having 10 meters. So the upshot of all this, long story short, is my dad doesn't really like me. Right. That's the upshot of most of your stories. My Cub scouting lasted one meeting. That was my tenure, because I went to a Cub Scout meeting, and I guess I went during the candy drive, and literally at the first meeting, they were like, here's a bunch of candy. You got to go sell this stuff. Right? And I kind of was just like, what? I don't want to do this. I don't even know what's going on yet. Why am I working for you? That's got to be an odd time to jump in feet first. You kind of want to ease into it a little more, I guess. So but I didn't do it. And maybe we'll do it on the Boy Scouts at some point, too, but my nephew Noah, who is now a grown adult who is getting married next weekend, actually oh, hey, congratulations, Noah. Yeah. No and Ellie are getting married, which is great, but he is now an adult college graduate. But he Scouted. He went all the way through. I always thought that was very cool, and that really shows a stick to it, whether you're a Boy Scout or a Girl Scout to go all the way through the whole process. So Noah is Scott's son, right? Correct. Yes. I'm not at all surprised that Noah made it Eagle Scout, because also, I'm sure that when Scott was born, they were like, just give this guy the Eagle badge. Now. He didn't Boy Scout either. He didn't need to. He was an Eagle Scout by birth. Well, and my dad raised his camping, so he was always just sort of like, you guys don't need to do that stuff because we do all that stuff anyway, right? Yeah. And plus, also there's some dues money. You know what I mean? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. That was sort of the thing. I think Girl Scouts dues money is $25 annually. They do have financial assistance, and then you have to pay for some other program stuff along the way. But that is a very low fee, and we'll get to this. But the reason is low is because those Girl Scouts can print money with those cookies. Yeah. I was not familiar with the Girl Scout cookies until I started researching this episode. Come on. They print money, man. They make, like, four $500 million a year off that thing. My friend. The gross revenue, I think, last year was $800 million I'm sorry. In 2019, 20% off. Okay. Yeah. And that's why those dues are so low, because they actually stay with the local councils, which we'll talk more about that. But speaking of Girl Scout cookies, I want to give a shout out to a couple of troops, one in particular, Troop 1492, because my friend Annabella King is a Girl Scout, a junior Girl Scout in that troop. Yes. She is the daughter of Yumi's very close friend, Wheezy, and she actually wrote a little bit about what it means to her to be a Girl Scout. If I could share a couple of passages, I think it really gets the point across. I would love to hear it. So Annabella says and she's been doing this for years by now she said she's working on her Star or her Silver Award, which there's bronze, silver, and gold. And these are, like, very prestigious awards for a Girl Scout to go after. So she said she's working on the silver one right now in parentheses. It's something really good to have on your resume, by the way. But she says that Girl Scouts is a great opportunity for greater jobs in life gives a pathway to pioneering your own business. They train you to be an entrepreneur in the early stages of life. And here's that cookie thing. Selling the cookies is the way they examine your skill and take note of the abilities you may have. It is also showing you what real life situations may be like. For example, when having a cookie stand out and advertising that you are selling something, you have to put in some enthusiasm. You can't just stand there and wait for others to come walking by. If interested, you have to grab their attention. She is an up and coming person. She also says that back when she was younger, so she's in the 7th grade. She was saying that to her before she was in the Scouts, that Girl Scouts were just annoying little girls selling cookies and stealing your money. But I have to say that is probably what a lot of people think as well. But Girl Scouts is something that impacts the community. It brings people together. I love that. I've also got a quote from our good friend John Hodgman, who was a Girl Scout, and he said, a Yale man never talks about the Girl Scouts. That's right. That's a great all purpose quote from Hodgeman. Yeah. And you know what? That's a joke that will be lost on many people because it's a call back to our Ivy League episode in 3D that not many people probably even got through because it was in. Sorry about that, Chuck. Yeah, sorry about the 3D episode, everybody. We have made sure that that will never, ever happen again. All right, should we go back to the early days of Girl Scouting? We should, but while we're at it, I want to give one more shout out to another Girl Scout troop I'm affiliated with. Two I want to shout out troops 17 107. That is my niece Mila, the movie Stars troop. Wow, that's great. I like to call it Troop Beverly Hills. Is Shelly Long the leader or not? Shelley Long. Shelley Long. And she is actually the leader. Yeah. That's wonderful. Yeah. All right, so let's go back in time, and congratulations to both of those young ladies for pursuing this, because what I learned from researching the Girl Scouts is that it is a pretty great organization, and they have tried to dig into controversies and stuff like that. And I'm not disparaging the Boy Scouts, they're great, too, or Scouts USA, but they have certainly had a little more controversy over the years. And the Girl Scouts well, one of the reason that the Girl Scouts tend to be controversial is because they're inclusive. That's the problem that people have with girls, because they can't let that other human being in. They're a little different than the other human beings in this trip. That's the controversy that comes up. Typically, yeah. They have always been more inclusive. I think in the 1950s, the girl Scouts desegregated. And it took all the way to 1000 1975, and a lot of pressure from the ACP for the Boy Scouts to do so. And also of note, Chuck, is by the time the Boy Scouts fully integrated their troops, the Girl Scouts were already on their first African American president. That's right. Having progressive from the outset. And then even though it took to the guess to integrate, they were inclusive of girls with disabilities, too, because the woman who founded the Girl Scouts, Juliet Gordon Lowe, she was deaf. She became deaf after an accident. So she made sure that girls with disabilities were included from the get go. That's right. And we want to shout out by name gloria D. Scott. First African American president of the Girl Scouts in 1975. But let's go back in time to Juliette Gordon Lowe, who was a Southern gal from Savannah, Georgia. Yeah, no, it sounded like a cross between Andy from the office doing a Southern thing and Kevin Stacey at midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Oh, boy. That was all the way around. Yes. Julie Gordonlow is from Savannah. She was raised in the south and came from I don't think it was like a rich family or anything, but a family that was doing well enough to where she got a really good education compared to some of her peers. And she ended up getting involved in a marriage that wasn't so great, a husband that was an alcoholic and a gambler and a philanderer. And their whole marriage and divorce saga lasted many, many years because it was a time where getting a divorce wasn't super easy. And then he had a stroke, and she thought she maybe should stay with him. But he had a mistress who he left his money to. He eventually died during divorce proceedings. But long story short, she ended up a widow and went to London, where she had a very fateful meeting at a luncheon party one day with Sir Robert Baden Powell. Yes. And this guy is the guy who co founded the Scouts, the Boy Scouts and the Girl Guides. At least back in the day, if you were a Girl Scout over in the UK, you were a member of the Girl Guides. But they're all affiliated under a single umbrella, basically a bunch of different Scouting groups around the world. And at first, Julia Lowe, her nickname was Daisy, by the way, she was a Scout leader, a troop leader for Girl Guides over in England. But when she moved back to the United States full time, she said, I'm going to set up my own shop, basically, based on my experience there. And she set up the first Girl Scout troop meeting in March of, I believe, and it included 18 girls. And the first registered Girl Scout was her niece, Daisy Gordon, who I think it was named after her. That's wonderful. And I think they were even called the Girl Guides at first. Oh, is that right? I think so. Okay. And I should have had that down cold, but I'm pretty sure that I saw that. But regardless, they either were Girl Scouts initially or became Girl Scouts. And just the whole thing appealed to her, teaching girls how to be self sufficient, how to know their way around a campfire, how to be meaningful to their community. There's a lot of community service involved that really all spoke to her. And these days you can get involved in the Girl Scouts if you're between five and 17 and they are broken down. Thusly Daisy Scouts, which I guess comes from Juliet's name. Right? Her nickname, yes. Daisy Scouts are the littlest, the most adorable, I imagine, cute brownies. I never knew that. I thought brownies was the first step in. So daisies come before brownies. Then you have your Junior Scouts, and then Girl Scouts rounded out with eleven to 17 year olds. And I believe they used to be cadets, seniors and ambassadors, but now those are the names that they take. I've seen them referred to still as cadets and seniors on the Girl Scout site. Okay. Do you still use that some? I guess so. But yeah, once you reach a certain age, I guess, eleven, they lump you in together with all of the older girls. That's right. The Daisies are five and six, like I said, and they meet with a couple of adult leaders. They earn pedals learning pedals, which is super awesome and sweet. I mean, this whole thing is overflowing with just sugary goodness. Well, yeah. And those pedals, too, they're based on the ten points of the Girl Scout law, which are things like be considerate and caring. So that's a pedal. Courageous and strong as a pedal, honest and fair, responsible for what you say and do. So it's like some pretty great character development from a very young age. Yes. And those ten laws are also represented by the Girl Scout dime, isn't that right? Yes. So you can get a free dime just by becoming a Girl Scout because one of the ceremonies is the ceremony of the dime. And that dime, $0.10, represents the ten points of the Girl Scout law. And the Girl Scouts are like, Wait a minute, I just gave you $25. They're like, you just learned your first life lesson, chump. Welcome to the Scouts. But regardless of which group you are on, you are earning these pedals, these badges, these patches in various ways. A lot of times it's by completing a craft project, sometimes an older group may present the American flag at a professional baseball game. Sometimes there's a lot of Stem activity these days. It started out sort of more, as you would think back in the 1930s, things like cooking and stuff like that. And I think they still don't shy away from that. But these days it's all about Stem. And getting girls into science, technology, engineering and math, and they're doing full on coding and stuff like that, so they really kind of rolled with the times. Yeah. And a lot of that develops over time. So, like, if you're a daisy, they'll start introducing you to that Stem stuff where it's like, this is a car. Draw a picture of a car, and it's kind of like automotive engineering. It's just the very beginnings of it. But then by the time you're like a brownie, you're building prototypes of a car that's of your own design, so it starts to progress pretty quickly. And then yeah, coding is a really big one, too, so there's like a foundation of those kind of things, but it just gets a little more advanced as the girl goes through the Scout ranks. Yeah. And I got to say, it really struck me today how brilliant the badge idea is for Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts and giving kids something to work for and, like, seeing them through to an end point of a goal so they can earn something, because kids really love to earn a little prize for accomplishing something. It's really meaningful. Yeah. Aside from these individual things that they can earn, there are also group service projects for the whole troop where you do a lot of community service. They might collect food and clothing for a homeless shelter, or they might decorate a nursing home over holidays and stuff like that. And the older they get, the more advanced these things are, and the more not autonomy, necessarily, but the more advanced these projects are that they can bite off. Yeah. And as they get older, they're expected to do projects on their own, community service projects. They do what are called journeys, where they learn about a new thing. And my friend Annabella says that this past winter no, this coming winter, they will likely buy a bunch of clothes and presents for two or three families who do not have enough money. We will then wrap the gifts, and someone brings it to that family. This is just one example. Sure. As they progress, and by the time they're in that final group of Girl Scouts from eleven to 17, they start to focus on potential careers and what these girls are interested in and what they might want to do, and then steering them toward that, whether it's eco action and environmentally friendly and cleaning up parks and stuff like that. But all of these service projects and all of this stuff is really all about just building skills as well as building confidence. Absolutely. And independence and selfreliance. And also just kind of being like a generally good person, too. Not self reliance or independence by taking advantage of exploiting other weaknesses, but becoming independent and self reliant while also being like a person of character and somebody you can trust. It's important. The second part is important, too. Yeah. That's Tech Bro camp that you were talking about, right? Or Farmer broke. Oh, boy. Let's take a break on that one and discuss whether we'll even edit that out. No, let's leave it. Okay. We'll be right back, everybody. I'm still laughing at that. That's good. That's a good sign. Chuck so, yes, there's a lot of focus on Stem careers now, or just even interest in Stem hobbies, like coding. But there's also still a very large emphasis on being outdoorsy, which is one of the original things that the Girl Scouts were into back when Juliet Gordon Lowe was the founder and still active. And she, like, poured herself into this, by the way. We really breezed past her biography. But she was a very interesting, very worthwhile human being with very little of that. When you're talking about somebody from 100 years ago, you're like and then we'll just kind of glaze over this because she was a proctor of her time now. She was a very progressive person who would fit in quite well today, I think. And she was just a good person, but she emphasized things like outdoorsiness, in addition to learning how to cook and run a home, that kind of stuff. So that whole emphasis is still around today with things like camping. That's still a big part of being a Girl Scout, is spending time at camp and spending time outdoors, too. Yeah. Brownies. I think by the time you're a Brownie and then a junior and then a full on Girl Scout, you definitely go on camping trips. You go on overnight trips. Sometimes they're at established camps. Sometimes it's a little more rustic kind of style, camping. Sometimes the Scout leaders can kind of bite off all of the responsibility if they're comfortable with that. And sometimes they go to places where they have what's called a core staff who are kind of doing meals and stuff like that. There's really no exact set way it can go down. But the point is to get these girls out in the woods, adventuring, building campfires, rock climbing, doing crafts, making s'mores. Just something that really speaks to me and that I really believe in, of course, because I grew up doing that stuff. And by the way, if you like s'mores like I do, I like S'mores. Anything? Sure. Me, too. You can thank the Girl Scouts for that because they are the ones with the first recorded recipe for S'mores. What did they visit? S'mores? Yes. I don't know if they invented it, but they told everybody else about it. Back in 1927, there was a Girl Scout handbook that had the first printed recipe for s'mores. It was so old timey, they were called some moors. It wasn't turned into a contraction until the never knew that's what it's for. I never thought about it. What? I don't know. I just called them s. Moores I never thought about the fact that it was a contraction. It stands for some mores some mores. Yeah, because once you have one, you want some more. Yes, but apparently in this 1927 article, it says that while they're called S'mores, just one is plenty filling. Basically, I'm paraphrasing. I got a level up recommendation for your S'more game. Okay. And I'm a more traditionalist. I don't like to get too fancy, but I have lately started. I'll get the garadelli dark chocolate caramel square. Instead of a regular old Hershey, I'll throw one of those dark chocolate caramels more squares in there, and it's really pretty good. The addition of the caramel is nice. Yeah. Basically. And I'm so sorry to the good people of Pennsylvania, but the Hershey chocolate is basically anything is a level up from that as long as it's not like the generic store brand version of chocolate. Not really good chocolate, to tell you the truth. There's so much better chocolate out there, especially if you travel eastward across the Atlantic. All the chocolate over there is amazing. And then if you keep going east and you hit Japan, all of their chocolate is amazing. And then you come back around, you're like, we're back to Hershey again. Although you hit Gary Delhi square first, and then you keep going eastward and you hit Pennsylvania and things get sad. Japan has good chocolate. Oh, yes. Meiji chocolate products. They make chocolate covered almonds, chocolate covered macadamia nuts, and you can get them here in the States. I'll get you some and you can take me forever. Okay. By the way, I should tell everyone you very sweetly sent a postcard to me with the Fred Rogers stamp, and you go here to start your stamp collection. Yes. I'm glad you got it, man. We should also mention quickly that if you do not have a Girl Scout troop near you, or if you just would rather freestyle it, you can become a Juliet, named after Juliet, obviously. And that is just sort of it seems like something you do on your own, maybe with your parents, so you can still earn badges and stuff like that and just pay a smaller fee. But you're not, I think, officially part of a troupe. No, but you're part of a council. And so we should say that the Girl Scout organizations are divided into councils, which I think, by my count, literally, I counted I went on the Wikipedia page and counted all the councils, and it was like 130. I can't believe I didn't write down the exact number after going to that trouble. But it's like 130 councils around the United States. That includes, like, Puerto Rico and a couple of other areas, but there's 130 councils, and then the councils are further divided into troops. And I don't remember what you said that made me think about to start talking about councils and troops. The Juliet. Oh, yes. But if you're a Juliette, if you're basically a solo Girl Scout, you can do all the same things that a Girl Scout does an adult mentor. But you're a member of the Council. You're just not a member of a troop. But, like, when the troops get together for a GMB or they go to camp, you might be affiliated with the troop or something. You've lived too far away to go to the weekly meetings, basically. Boy, I hope those Girl Scouts are nice to those Juliet. I hope so, too. It kind of made my stomach a little upset thinking about what it might be like for Juliet. I was thinking that a Juliet that takes a leadership position at, like, a council meeting or something like that deserves, like, double the patches, because you could really easily be like a shrinking violet in a situation like that. I know I would. You have that kind of, like, tenacity and self confidence to be yourself in front of a group that hangs out with one another every week, it seems like. Hats off to the Juliet, I guess, is what I'm saying. Yeah. I like the idea of Josh Clark going around the country to these meetings and just saying, raise your hand if you're a Juliet. Double that girl's patches. And then everyone's like, who is this guy? Who is that, dear? I don't think he's allowed here. Yeah, I didn't actually see that. Is it exclusively female leadership as far as the troops go, or can dad read the handbook by the River Valley Council? I'm not quite sure what area they are in charge of, but they had a handy handbook about you can be a male Girl Scout leader, but that's great. You can rely on the fact that there will always be a female co leader present with you. They would never leave you alone with the girls. Yes, that's good. I wasn't sure, but I figured there are plenty of dads who would want to be involved, especially if you're a single father, you wouldn't want to be shut out of something like that, that kind of fun activity. Yeah. They're so well known for being inclusive that they're like, no, we can do this. There's a way to do this. That's great. These days, and I think for a long time they have their uniform, which I think it used to be more of a full uniform, kind of head to toe, and now you kind of wear your regular clothes and you might have a sash or a vest or something or scorch. Is this house the word article? Did it even say that? Oh, it does. That's such an ugly word to hear. But seeing it written down, it's even worse somehow. It is. There was one other thing. I'm sorry, I want to give another shout out to a different sentence in this House Stuff Works article, because it is so, like, 2010 works. So it's talking about how one of the traditions of Girl Scouting is to take ashes from a campfire and save it until the next time you build a fire, and then you put those ashes in that fire. So there's this continuous kind of chain of fires, no matter where you build the fires or when. And then it says, if more than one Scout collects ashes, they're pooled before adding them to the campfire. As if anyone would have even thought about what might happen if more than one Scout collected ashes. As if they would say, no Scout is much more good looking and popular than you. Your ashes, you just dump them on the ground. Right now we're going to put only Jenny ashes in. Yeah, we don't want your garbage ashes. That was us. Yeah. I don't think I might have written this one. You did. I don't think I did. I don't think I did either. So speaking of inclusivity, the Latina population, by 2031 in three girls in the United States will be Latina, and it is a really growing population. And the Girl Scouts of America. Recognize this? They've created Spanish language website. They have bilingual camps. They try to incorporate some of the culture into their meetings. And I think from 2011 to 2016, anna Maria Chavez served as the CEO, as the first woman of color. And today that is Judith Baddie, who is the CEO who was the first AfricanAmerican woman. She is a former scout herself from Nassau County, New York, which is just great. And I think a lot of times, if you Scouted when you were young, you grow up and try and pass along that tradition to your children and or at least try to get them involved and then serve as a Scout leader. Yeah, I think some really high number, like 25% of former Girl Scouts end up volunteering for Scouts when they have kids. That's right. And then you said that Judith Baddie was the first AfricanAmerican CEO. People are probably like, Wait a minute. You guys mentioned a woman named Gloria back in the 70s. She was the first African American president. CEO is a relatively new position for Girl Scouts, I think, in the 21st century, it was created. Can we talk about these cookies? Have we taken a second break yet? No, we should take a second break because I need to go gather some cookies to fortify myself before we start talking about cookies for, like, ten minutes. All right, go get a cookie, everybody. Okay, great. I'm ready. Cookie time. Like you said, 800 million in sales I have from 2018, and it was about the same in 2019, I think. Yeah. My friend, that is more than Oreo generates in a given year. That's amazing. And this idea goes way back in 1917, a Girl Scout troop baked some cookies. A troop from Muscogee, Oklahoma, shout out the high school cafeteria as their service project. And then in 1922, in their publication The American Girl, they gave out the recipe, and they basically said right away, hey, listen, we're. Going to make some money off these because people are crazy for these. You can make six or seven dozen of these for a little more than a quarter up to we're going to sell them for that amount per dozen. And they were like, this is how we're going to fund our organizations. And people loved them. I mean, it's become a part of American tradition. It's the Girl Scout cookie drive because that's the only place you can get these exact cookies. And people love them, including me. Yeah, they're good cookies. Of course, obviously. Without question. The Tag alongs are the best of the best by far. That is my number two. Oh, you're kidding. What is number one? The Dosi dough is my favorite, which is the peanut butter sandwich. I always find this hard to find. Are they out every year? Oh, yeah, they're the third most popular. Maybe I'm just like, no, I'm set on the Tag alongs and I've always skipped over the dosi dose. I'll have to try those. Those are your number one, huh? Number one is the dosi. Dosi. Doug Tagalong is my number two. And then I will rock a Samoa. Even though I'm not the biggest coconut fan, I will still rock up Samoa. Okay, so one of the things you'll see about Samoas, which were introduced in 1974, by the way, they are frequently called Caramel Delights, depending on where in the country you are, because there are two bakeries in the world, I guess, that are licensed to make Girl Scout cookies every year, and depending on the bakery, they're either producing Caramel Delights or Samoa. And I guess the bakery decides what they want to call it, and people will say that's the only difference. Those people are liars, liars, liars. There is actually a very big difference between Samoa and Caramel Delights. Samoa are made with dark chocolate. Caramel Delights are made with milk chocolate, which makes difference. Having only ever had Samoa, I have not truly lived yet, because I can imagine a Samoa with milk chocolate rather than dark chocolate is probably exponentially better, unless the milk chocolate they use is hershey's. Oh, you would rather have the milk chocolate? Yeah. Interesting. Yeah, totally. You're a dark chocolate guy, huh? I mean, I like all chocolate. I'm a chocolate lover, but I do like dark chocolate. I've developed a real taste for it in the past 15 years or so. Okay. Yeah, I just wouldn't even go near it when I was a kid. I think because I ate some baker's chocolate once, I learned a harsh lesson, even though it was the wrong lesson. But, yeah, I think it's an adult thing. Like you don't like Scotch when you're eight, but you love Scotch when you're 30. Yeah. When you're eight, you're totally a beer person. Sure. I think by popularity thin mints are lead the way with 25% of sales. Samosa number two at 19%, dosi does or number three at 16, and then Tagalongs come in at 13, and then you've got your Tree Foils at number seven I'm sorry, with 7%. And those are the short bread cookies, but they're still such a staple that I believe Tree Foils are one of the leading ones in production, at least. So Tree Foil or trefoil, if you've ever wondered what that means. Is it Tree Foil? I think both work. Man okay, I was just gently trying to put out the alternate. It's actually referring to the shape of the cookie. And remember we talked about in the Adidas versus Puma episode? The Adidas logo is a trefoil. It has three lobes. Well, that three lobe shape. It actually looks like four, but the bottom one is supposed to be kind of like a point. It refers to a clover that was part of the original logo for the Girl Scout cookies that was turned into it was kind of blown up and really kind of turned into this minimalist icon by a very famous and incredibly prolific logo designer named Saul Bass. Oh, yeah, he did the Hitchcock posters. He did everything credit. He did the Shining poster. The very famous the Shining poster. He did, manolent. Warner Bros. Kleenex, Dixie Cup, the Hannah Barbera Star, at and T United Way. I mean, basically everything. And one of the signature things about Saul Bass logos is the ones that he created in the still in use today. Like, they may have made them, like, three dimensional or changed the color slightly, but it's basically the same thing. That guy was that good, but he came up with this new updated trefoil version of the Girl Scout logo back in 79, and they're still using it today. And if you look closely, it is the three lobed clover that was part of the original logo makes up the hair of the girls. And there are three girls. The middle one is a girl of color. The other two are white, and they're all smiling and looking to the right toward the future, which is pretty cool if you think about it. I love that. I got something I want to play for you real quick. Okay. Tree Foil. All right. I'm sure I could find one that said trefoil. Go find one that says truck. You'll build a robot, I know you. You won't be defeated. So I was looking at one other thing about cookies real quick. I was looking at all of the cookies they ever came out with, and there were not a bunch that I was sad to miss, but I did see two that escaped my attention that I wish I had eaten. One where apple cinnamon from 1997 to 2001. Does that sound good? Love apple cinnamon. And another one were Savannah smiles, which I just missed because I wasn't paying attention. But they are lemon coolers that were out from 2012 to 2019. So if we have any clout with the girl scouts whatsoever. After this episode, I want to put in a personal request to bring back Apple Cinnamon and bring back Savannah Smiles. And what if they just sent you a VHS copy of the movie Savannah Smiles from 1980 something? I'd be okayish with it. Here's. The kind of neat thing about the Girl Scout cookie drive is they can earn badges. The cookie connection. Badges. Cookie biz. Badges. Dough charms. They can earn things, but it's not by selling the most, which is what happens at Pharma Bro Camp. The biggest markup and the most sales is what gets you your badges. There it is for setting a goal and accomplishing that goal, whatever it is. It could be for making a really great advertisement or poster, or maybe putting an advertisement in the local paper. It could be writing a story about the sale and getting that published or something. There are all kinds of cool ways to earn those cookie badges that don't, and I don't think any of them include, well, we sold the most, right? No, it's the local press that hops on who sold the most. But the Girl Scouts themselves, they're like, yes, you go out and sell it. But the point is setting goals, reaching goals, learning. Like, they have a digital it's basically like salesforce, but for Girl Scout cookies called Digital cookie, and these little girls are learning how to run that kind of stuff. It's more of a focus on entrepreneurship than anything else. And for a long time, I was very critical of Girl Scout cookie drives. I wasn't to the level where I was complaining that the Girl Scouts had set up on a public sidewalk or that somebody was selling their kids cookies for them at the office. It wasn't to that level or anything like that, but I was under the impression that the Girl Scouts of America was basically sending these kids out to basically send all the money back to the central group. And that's just mother. Yeah. Apparently almost all of it stays with the Councils, and that money goes back into the local troops. That it's really, like, self funding thing. I didn't really fully grasp that, and I also didn't realize how inclusive the Girl Scouts were. But now, I mean, I'm going to buy all the cookies all the time. You thought Queen Tagalong just sat on her throne of money? Pretty much, right? No, 70% goes to the councils, 30% goes back to the bakeries, and then about twelve to 17% goes to the actual individual troops from the Council. And that's why those annual dues are so low. $25 is most families can swing something like that a year, right. But they still do have financial assistance, if you can't, which is wonderful. So the Girl Scouts, like we said, and again, we're not trying to disparage Boy Scouts, but they have always been more inclusive. They have always had policies of nondiscrimination from very early on. And like you said, some of the controversy comes from people of a certain political persuasion, perhaps, that think the Girl Scouts are too independent and feminist oriented, and they're run by militants and lesbians. And the worst things that you could possibly say about a really great group like this, right. In the 70s, they had Betty Friedan, our old friend who we've spoken about before, very much a noted feminist. She sat on the board of directors, which was a great thing. But of course, that didn't assuage any fears that it was a feminist organization, because that was back when that was a dirty word. Now, are we in the third wave of feminism? I honestly don't know. I mean, the third wave has definitely come about, but I don't know if we've reached the fourth or not by now. Well, we'll do a show on that at some point, and we'll figure out all the waves. But the Girl Scouts have always been behind supporting legislation relevant to women, stuff like Title Nine, which we've talked about, which is equal funding for female sports activities and stuff like that in colleges. And it's just always encouraged young girls to be independent and to do their own thing because that's what it takes to succeed in the world. And I don't think they tag that as feminism necessarily, but they just said these are great traits to learn. So you can be an independent woman in America or all over the world, because they do have troops all over the world, we should mention. Yeah. And they're usually, like, raked over the coals whenever they salute or they support, like, a feminist leader, a feminist activist, often pro choice activists. They're usually one in the same or very often one in the same. And so the far right will just go crazy over that and say the Girl Scouts are, like, this brainwashing machine for producing leftist agenda kids. Right? Yeah. And that just doesn't seem to be the case whatsoever. I think really what it is is the far right seems to think of groups like that, like the Girl Scouts as having some sort of agenda and not realizing that the groups like the Girl Scouts have the values that they have, which tend to be counter far right, because mainstream America doesn't share the same values as far right. And these are fairly mainstream things like inclusivity equality, female independence. Those are pretty mainstream ideas. I guess that's all I have to say about that. And for those of you that want to write in note josh is saying far right. He's not saying all Republicans. It's a big difference. Thanks for that. But this is 2021, and 2020 was also basically the beginning of 2021, and the left jumped all over the Girl Scouts for tweeting out A. Congratulations to Amy Comey Barrett for becoming, I think, the fifth woman Supreme Court justice in history. Yeah, that's awesome. They even put the other women on there. It was like a Twitter card with all of the women Supreme Court justices pictures on there, but everybody on the left jumped all over them. So I think, just like the ACLU, if both sides are made edit you're right. You're doing everything right, then, yeah. The Girl Scouts is a non religiously affiliated secular group, but they do have my promise and my faith. Pin, which they say complements existing religious recognitions, allows girls to further strengthen the connection between their faith and Girl Scouts. And there is the phrase, on my honor, I will try and serve God in my country. But the official policy now for the GSUSA is that you can swap the word God out if you want, and you can just say serve the community or serve others or serve humanity, serve my country. Or you can just drop it all together if you want. Again, in the spirit of inclusivity, they also ruled it's okay to swap out my country for the socialist agenda, which, I mean, some people on the far right were like, see, there's a problem with that brainwashing machine. Also, that Gold Award, did you say that? Yummy's friend's daughter is going for that Gold Award? Or the silver? She is working on her silver. I will be surprised if she doesn't go for the gold. Well, only 5.5% of Girl Scouts who are eligible even get that gold. So it is very prestigious indeed. So let's hope that she can get there. Yeah. I want to wrap up with a couple of words from her. She said that she got to read one of her essays about going to see Wicked on Broadway, and she said, I can now say that I was literally on Broadway. Haha. She said I didn't win the competition, but out of all the girls who submitted their essays, I got in. That trip will stay with me forever. It is these small moments that will stay in my mind forever. Girl Scouts will always stay with you. You make friends and you learn new things in life. It is so fun and amazing. Amazing. And I guess my last thing is I want to shout out some famous Girl Scouts. I was listening to the podcast the other day with Jason Bateman and Sean Hayes and Smart Smartless. And they had Amy Sedarison, who is one of my favorite humans, and she was talking about being a Girl Scout, which is no surprise. So Amy Sudaris is a veteran. And by the way, one great Instagram follow if you don't follow her. Sally Ride, Venus Williams, Carrie Fisher, Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama, taylor Swift, Nancy Reagan, Gloria Steinem queen of Them lucille Ball, Natalie Merchant, Martha Stewart sheryl Crowe, katie Couric, Laura Bush, Dakota Fanning and many, many more. Yeah, you and I saw the same Good Housekeeping slide show. Apparently. No, it took so long to get did you say Natalie Merchant? She's got to get a shout out. Yeah, she was in there. Okay, good. I used to be a big 10,000 Maniacs fan. How could you not be? I'll bet they're one of those bands where if you went back and listened to them now, you'd be like, wow, they're even better than I liked, or that I realized back then. I still listen. Okay, well, there's a little tip for all you Girl Scouts out there, and Boy Scouts, too. Don't be shy. Start listening to 10,000 Maniacs and see what you think. Agreed. And thank you very much to our special guest, Annabella from Troop 1492 in Maryland. I hope we earned you a badge of some sort for this. Double or badges. I say double the badges, strangers. Double the badges. It's time for listener mail. This is Kiva plug many, many years ago. I think we started our team in 2007. I'm looking now. Yes, it was okay. Oh, no. 2009, we started a Kiva team. And for those who don't know, Kiva is a micro lending website. They are not perfect, but they do a pretty good job where you can donate very small amounts of money to entrepreneurs in developing nations and all over the world, not even developing nations exclusively anymore, to help people out, give them a leg up. And it's called microlending because ideally, they repay this money, and most of the loans do get repaid. And we started our team many years ago. And let me read this email first. Hey, guys. Recently decided to start the catalog from the beginning again and reach the 2009 episode. Who were the first Americans where we plugged the Kiva team for the first time? I thought it'd be a good enough reason to write in and request that you plugged the team again because it's been a while. There may be a lot of new listeners who discovered the podcast since then and aren't aware of the Kiva team. And this is from Lee Rondorf in Minnesota. So I appreciate the nudge. Lee. I am very proud to say this is amazing, dude. I haven't been to the site in a while. The stuff you should know. Kiva Team, since its inception, has loaned almost $9.3 million crazy. 341,000 loans, almost 12,000 members, and about 30 loans per member. That is spectacular. That beats my number, I got to tell you. It's amazing. And I got the reminder the other day to reload. I had about $100 in there, sitting there in my account. That's how it works. They'll give you the money back. It will be in your account, and then you can go relin that money. And I'm still working off that first deposit I made many years ago. That's nice. I've got to go look at my account, and it's been a while. I stopped getting those nudge emails because they really work when they come in. I'm like, oh, yeah, I need to go reblan that. So I got to go check it out and also figure out why I'm not getting those emails anymore. That's right. So we should encourage people to look into Kiva. If it's something you feel like you want to support, you can start with just a $25 loan to get your account started. And let's get this thing well over $10 million. And I meant to tell you, too, I refreshed our page a little bit. Oh, nice. We had some terrible old picture of us, like, in the video studio. Yeah, I remember that picture. So I updated that with a picture of us that we like to use. And I also just changed the name of the team to Stuff You Should Know and not Stuff You Should Know from Houseworkscom. Oh, wow, Chuck. Very nice. All modernize and streamline. Well, if you want to join our Kiva team, go to Kiva.org teamstepychnoght. Yeah. And although it does have underscores between Stuff You Should Know, but you can just go search teams for Stuff You Should Know and make sure you do it through our team. So we're all collected together. It's kind of nice. And we don't discriminate, whoever you are. We're as inclusive as the Girl Scouts are, so join up. And if you want to send us an email in the meantime, we always like to hear from everybody. You can send it off to Stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts My Heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows." | |
How Igloos Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-igloos-work | "Igloos were traditionally used by Inuit Indians as temporary shelter while on hunting and fishing t(...TRUNCATED) | "Igloos were traditionally used by Inuit Indians as temporary shelter while on hunting and fishing t(...TRUNCATED) | Tue, 29 Mar 2011 17:18:57 +0000 | "time.struct_time(tm_year=2011, tm_mon=3, tm_mday=29, tm_hour=17, tm_min=18, tm_sec=57, tm_wday=1, t(...TRUNCATED) | 26418013 | audio/mpeg | "\"Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know(...TRUNCATED) | ||
02a74cd8-3b0e-11eb-947e-13973fccffc0 | How Uranium Mining Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-uranium-mining-works | "Mining uranium is dangerous work. Not only does it involve mining, which is dangerous itself, urani(...TRUNCATED) | "Mining uranium is dangerous work. Not only does it involve mining, which is dangerous itself, urani(...TRUNCATED) | Thu, 06 May 2021 12:05:25 +0000 | "time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=5, tm_mday=6, tm_hour=12, tm_min=5, tm_sec=25, tm_wday=3, tm_(...TRUNCATED) | 47851386 | audio/mpeg | "\"Welcome to stuff you should know a production of iHeartRadio. Hi and welcome to the podcast. I'm (...TRUNCATED) | |
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2017-10-03-sysk-police-body-cameras-final.mp3 | How Police Body Cameras Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-police-body-cameras-work | "Cops wearing cameras is a new thing. So new that we aren't entirely sure of all the ramifications t(...TRUNCATED) | "Cops wearing cameras is a new thing. So new that we aren't entirely sure of all the ramifications t(...TRUNCATED) | Tue, 03 Oct 2017 14:03:00 +0000 | "time.struct_time(tm_year=2017, tm_mon=10, tm_mday=3, tm_hour=14, tm_min=3, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_(...TRUNCATED) | 42993033 | audio/mpeg | "\"With no fees or minimums on checking and savings accounts. Banking with Capital One is like the e(...TRUNCATED) | |
How Ocean Currents Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-ocean-currents-work | "It's easy to overlook the importance of ocean currents - they move along out at sea, while we stay (...TRUNCATED) | "It's easy to overlook the importance of ocean currents - they move along out at sea, while we stay (...TRUNCATED) | Thu, 04 Jun 2015 16:48:58 +0000 | "time.struct_time(tm_year=2015, tm_mon=6, tm_mday=4, tm_hour=16, tm_min=48, tm_sec=58, tm_wday=3, tm(...TRUNCATED) | 36942651 | audio/mpeg | "\"Welcome to stuff you should know from housetepworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh(...TRUNCATED) | ||
d6abc0c0-3620-11ea-822e-c3b29e1282ed | Short Stuff: Cramming | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-cramming | Cramming is no way to study. Learn why in today's short stuff. | Cramming is no way to study. Learn why in today's short stuff. | Wed, 09 Dec 2020 10:00:00 +0000 | "time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=12, tm_mday=9, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=2, tm_(...TRUNCATED) | 12766600 | audio/mpeg | "\"Hey, everybody. If you want a great website, you want to do it yourself. With no must, no fuss, t(...TRUNCATED) |
End of preview. Expand
in Data Studio
Dataset Card for "SYSK_Transcripts"
Transcriptions + Summaries of Stuff You Should Know. DOI 10.17605/OSF.IO/VM9NT
Dataset({
features: ['id', 'title', 'link', 'desc', 'summary', 'pubDate', 'pubFormatted', 'enc_len', 'enc_type', 'audio_url', 'transcript'],
num_rows: 1965
})
citation
@article{https://doi.org/10.17605/osf.io/vm9nt,
doi = {10.17605/OSF.IO/VM9NT},
url = {https://osf.io/vm9nt/},
author = {Pierson, Britt},
keywords = {audio processing, audio timestamp, corpus, dataset, natural language processing, nlp, podcast, podcasts trancripts, podcasts transcript, podcast transcript, podcast transcripts, sentiment analysis, transcript, transcripts, transcripts of podcast, transcripts of podcasts},
title = {"Stuff You Should Know" Podcast Transcripts - Full Dataset with Transcript of All Episodes (SYSK_Transcripts)},
publisher = {Open Science Framework},
year = {2022},
copyright = {CC-By Attribution 4.0 International}
}
- Downloads last month
- 6