The Dark Legacy of Sea Monkeys

Despite all the fun cartoons on the packaging featuring tiny humanoid sea creatures having wacky fun and wearing clothes, Sea Monkeys are just brine shrimp. But the story of Sea Monkeys and their inventor is actually pretty surprising -- and quite dark.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm crazy C. B. Wilson. So, Tracy,
did you have sea monkeys when you were a kid.
I did not have sea monkeys personally, but when I started, well,

(00:22):
hang on, hang on. When I started at how Stuff Works,
which is now really almost a decade ago, you're making
the most astonished face. For some reason, we had an
office set of sea monkeys for a while. I thought,
for sure this is because of some kind of article
on the site, but I cannot find said articles, so
now I think maybe we just had sea monkeys for fun.

(00:44):
I had lots of batches of sea monkeys when I
was a kid, more than a few packets for purchased
throughout the years. I've been debating over getting more lately.
But uh, I had one superhardy batch of them when
I was working in a library. They lived in a
little tank on my desk, and they propagated and kept
going for two years until a cold snap got them
when the library lost um power and so there was

(01:05):
no heat and it kind of got very very icy
in there. But despite all those fabulous packaging cartoons featuring
tiny humanoid sea creatures having wacky fun and wearing wacky clothes.
Sea monkeys are, as everybody knows, just Brian shrimp, and
they're even sometimes referred to as kind of an elaborate
hoax of marketing, uh, like a classic case of selling

(01:25):
a lot of sizzle with no real steak. But the
real story of sea monkeys and their inventor is actually
pretty surprising in some ways. It's kind of like, uh,
when we thought, oh, we'll talk about the people that
discovered the Verosa foca, that cute little lemur, and then
it turned out they had done some horrible things. It's
kind of similar in that regard, although it did not

(01:47):
come as a surprise to me this time, because I
knew you knew ahead of time and pursued it. Anyway, Yes, uh,
they are really interesting creatures to look at in my opinion,
even though they're not made king civilizations full of castles
and whatnot on your desk. I concur but I like
all of the creatures. So so we're gonna start with

(02:10):
the story of Harold von Brownhoot, which is the inventor
of sea monkeys. The man himself was as intriguing and
unbelievable as many of his inventions. He was born Harold
Nathan Brownhoot on March thirty one in Memphis, Tennessee, and
when he was still very young, the family moved to

(02:30):
New York City. Yeah, he has like a one of
those wild histories that kind of comes across as a
lot of tall tales, but a lot of it is substantiated,
although there are some question marky ones. As a young man,
he actually raced motorcycles as the Green Hornet, and later
on he would transition into managing talent. So if you've

(02:51):
ever seen and you may have only seen the cartoon
versions like divers that jump from great heights into impossibly
shallow bodies of water, or mentalists who can read minds
of and spoons, those are the kinds of acts that
he managed, and he was really at his heart a showman.
He was also ever the novelty man, and aside from

(03:11):
the novelty acts that he managed, he also sold novelty
products like invisible goldfish, guaranteeing their invisibility to consumers. He
also invented X ray spects, so those glasses that were
supposed to let you see through all manner of things. Yeah,
it's funny. And all of the research that I did,

(03:32):
particularly some of the more modern journalism pieces, Um, they'll
talk about how everyone, every kid that bought X rayspects
was trying to look through people's clothes, but if they
were questioned, they said it was like a much more No,
I'm trying to look through walls. But I don't know. Eventually,
Von Brown Hutt owned a hundred nine patents, and those

(03:53):
are for all kinds of novelties and other inventions, including
bulletproof fabrics and insect observation kits. People described him as eccentric,
similar to a cartoon character come to life. They also
described him as a sweet, older gentleman who could talk
your ear off at a wedding. But his story goes
way beyond sea monkeys. And while he said to have

(04:14):
turned down a licensing partnership with the company because of
other products in that company's catalog that he thought were
too risque, his own story actually has a pretty dark
streak running through it. But first, we're gonna talk a
little bit about the creatures that made him famous in
the toy and novelty world, and before we dig into
those brandy little pets. Do you want to do a

(04:37):
quick word from a sponsor. Yeah, we know it's early,
but we're trying to keep a big chunk of the
story together. Yeah, the next two sections are really his
two big inventions, and I want to keep those together,
So we'll be right back with those. So the exact
moment that inspired von Brown Hut to create sea monkeys

(04:58):
is a little bit unclear, not terribly, but there are
two different versions of the story that go around UH.
It's pretty universally accepted that this happened in nineteen fifty seven,
and in one version of the tale, he just noticed
brian shrimp in a bucket that were like part of
a uh bait bucket, and in another version he noticed
them being sold in a pet store as food for

(05:19):
other marine life. And the pet store story is by
far the more popular of the two. It's the one
that he told most often in his life, particularly later
in life. Any interviews that he gave which weren't a
whole lot, he always said it was a pet store.
In either case, he became completely fascinated by the idea
of Brian shrimp, and because they can naturally survive for

(05:41):
years and kind of a suspended animation, and while dried out,
they're easily packageable, which meant in his mind they could
be marketed and sold. Yeah. So, in nineteen sixty, Sea
Monkeys first appeared in comic book ads, although they had
not been christened with their famous name yet. In those
early ads they were marketed as Instant Life, and they

(06:01):
sold for a mere forty nine cents. Instant Life was
not an instant success, just did not grab the attention
of comic book readers the way he hoped that they would,
and so he put the product through a rebranding. Yeah. So,
if we have any comic book fans in our our
listener base, they might recognize the name Joe Orlando. He

(06:23):
was a comic book artist. He was an editor at
d C Comics, He was an associate publisher on Mad Magazine,
all at various stages of his career. He did a
lot of other really impressive things. And he was actually
the artist that was responsible for the art that accompanied
the upgraded Sea Monkey packaging. So those cartoons that we
know so well in which in many cases sparked imaginations
and lured in consumers, were his work with those cartoons

(06:47):
and a new name. Instant Life was relaunched as Sea
Monkeys in nineteen sixty four, and the name was inspired
by the Brian Stramp's long tale. I always wondered that,
and now I know. Yeah, and now the Brian trimp
that Harold on brown Hunt had first encountered, which was
our teamius Selina, are not quite the same ones that

(07:08):
are sold in Sea monkey kits. Yeah. He teamed up
with a marine biologist to first figure out how to
mix the nutrients and dry form that you could add
to tap water to create the ideal environment for his
instant life. Incidentally, the medium that he created to treat
tap water and make it into the sea monkey paradise
has never been duplicated by another lab despite various attempts,

(07:31):
so for a long time only Harold and his wife
Yolanda knew the formula. Even so, he was always working
on improvements right until the end of his life. Yeah.
They allegedly mixed those right on their like private property,
in the barrel, and then they would distribute them in
the packets. Uh. But then after they had figured out

(07:52):
this sort of perfect nutrient balanced mix, he further developed
these tiny marine critters to be really hardy, so like said,
they were not the Artemius selena that he had initially encountered.
So he and that same biologist worked for years to
constantly improve the product by cross breeding different species from
the genus Artemia until they got the breed that continues

(08:13):
the sea monkey line today, and that's now called Artemia NEOs,
which is n y O S. And that n y
o S stands for New York Oceanic Society, and that's
the lab where this species was developed. Trans Science was
the company Von Brownhood founded to manufacture sea monkeys, and
from the early nineteen sixties on, the company was always

(08:34):
promoting this amazing product. What's really funny is that if
you read trade publication ads for sea monkey stock, it's
almost identical in tone to the ads that were run
in comic books for direct sales. There's a lot of
all caps for emphasis. The overall vibe is one of excitement, excitement, excitement,
come to where the money is sea monkey country, which

(08:55):
is the ads that went out to retailers and sounded
a lot like the adds two buyers. Yeah, it was
kind of funny, and Von brown Hut was the copyman
behind all of this very enthusiastic verbiage. He uh, it's
his copy has this sort of wonderfully vaudevillian feel to it,
so it's like part huckster and part mad scientist and

(09:17):
all entertainer. Initially, the brick and mortar retail market had
eluded Von Brownhoot. Just before he brought his Sea Monkeys
to market, another company, Whammo, had tried an instant fish
toy as well, and that had not gone very well
because the product did not work, and that made the
entire retail arena petrified of doing anything similar. But once

(09:42):
Sea Monkeys established themselves through direct sales, retailers started to
come around and wanted to have them in stores also,
and that at that point they really cemented Sea monkeys
in like the history of Kitch in the History of
toys In there was an attempt to bring Sea Monkeys
to television and it was written by Howie Mandel and

(10:02):
directed primarily by Sean McNamara, who would go on to
direct lots of shows for the Disney Channel. The show
was pretty abysmal, and it only lasted eleven episodes before cancelation. Yeah,
if you just want to like torture yourself for a
few minutes. You can find a lot of those on YouTube. Uh,
they're awful, They're really really awful. On October twenty nine,

(10:26):
more than four hundred million sea monkey eggs went into space.
They were on the same mission that made John Glenn
officially the oldest man to fly in space. So that
was the nine day STS ninety five mission aboard the
Space Shuttle Discovery. And during that mission, the tiny Brian
shrimp were exposed to radiation zero G and of course
the violent force of re entry. They were hatched eight

(10:48):
weeks after they came back to Earth and seemed completely
unaffected by all of that time away from Terra Firma
and the things that happened while they were in space. Yeah,
so they're it was kind of a fun will experiment.
It's that's one of those things that gets taught a
lot in elementary school classrooms when they're talking about sea
life and suspended animation. Uh. And the next thing we're

(11:09):
going to talk about is a very different type of
invention that Von Brown Hutt created and it was absolutely
not a novelty. It was a weapon called the Kyoga
Agent M five and the Kioga, which was marketed as
the Steel Cobra was intended, according to advertising, to be
a concealed weapon that you could deploy in the event
that you found yourself face to face with a mugger

(11:31):
or other attacker. The ad copy in magazine advertisements read
Kyoga the Steel Cobra is an automatic magnetically triggered steel
whip that is armed with a heavy caliber striking tip.
When every second counts, This instant action feature frees you
from the need to first locate a push button trigger
in order to fire it at your attacker. Because it

(11:53):
goes off by human reflex action alone. It always works
when needed. And there's actually a un of copy in
those ads. It's very wordy and it goes on to
extol the virtues of this small weapon, promising that the
steel coils can make contact through a leather jacket. It
also promises that a blow to the header jaw can

(12:13):
knock an attack her out cold. Basically, this was a
small trigger action, spring loaded baton that could be purchased
for plus postage in the early days. Yeah, and we'll
actually share a link to one of the ads for
it offering this deal. And early on in the life

(12:34):
of the Ka Yoga, Mr Brown Hunt was actually arrested
on illegal weapons charges when he tried to pass through
LaGuardia Airport security with a half dozen of them in
his briefcase, and he got out of the charges by saying, no,
this is not a weapon that's ever been listed as forbidden.
But it's an interesting side note to the story. In
Night One, Burt Reynolds used a ki yoga in the

(12:56):
film Sharky's Machine, and even though the movie me was
kind of a flop, it basically was a great advertisement
for this steel whip. Over years, prices for the kyoga
went up. It eventually retailed for fift and the advertising
shifted from that kind of aimed at women like this
is a great self defense tool to if you need

(13:17):
a gun but can't get a license. That was actual
copy that was used in their later advertising. And this
is going to lead us to kind of the dark
part of the story. So before we get to that,
let's have a word from a sponsor. So getting back
to uh Von Brown Huts and the kyoga, and we're
getting into kind of more modern history. But because this

(13:40):
person sort of fame and notoriety cemented a little bit
earlier in the century, he becomes a pretty fascinating figure,
and even though a lot of this revealed fairly recently,
it's pretty important to the story. So in the late
nineteen eighties, the kyoga catalyzed basically what became a public
image calamity for von Brown hut So. At the time,

(14:02):
the leader of the white supremacist group the Aryan Nations,
whose name was Richard Butler, was in trouble with the law.
He had been indicted by a federal Grand Sir jury
for seditious conspiracy to overthrow the government by violence. And
in a fundraising letter to his fellow white supremacists that

(14:22):
Butler sent out around this time, he included a brochure
for the kyoga. He also included messaging that the inventor
and manufacturer of the weapon had pledged twenty five dollars
to his defense fund against the federal charges for every
kyoga that was sold. Unsurprisingly, it did not take long
for journalists to get a hold of this information had

(14:44):
looked deeper into it, and the news was not great
Butler uh the sort of the first wave of problems
was when Butler, again head of the Arian Nations, confirmed
to the Spokesman Review, which is a paper out of Spokane,
Washington that yes, he von Brownhoot were friends, they had
known each other a long time, and that the inventor
had supported the Area Nations for quite a while. The

(15:06):
Washington Post ran a story soon after exposing even more
affiliations with hate groups. Not only was Harold von Brownhoot
a frequent attendee of the Arian Nations World Congress, he
also had ties to the Ku Klux Klan and had
helped an Ohio branch of the KKK purchased firearms. He
also published his own anti Zionist newsletter full of rather

(15:30):
terrifying and shocking rhetoric. It was I read a few
snippets of it, and I sent an instant message to Tracy,
and I was like, I don't want to say any
of these words on the air while we record. They're
just they're exactly the horrifying things you would imagine, perhaps
more graphic. Uh. In an odd snippet of detail, it

(15:50):
also came out that while attending these Area Nations gatherings,
Von brown Hutt often wore a clerical collar and claimed
to be an ordained priest. I was not able to
hunt down any confirmation that he was ever actually ordained
he may or may not have been, but I just
thought it was odd that he only lived that image
when he was sort of involved in these groups. So

(16:13):
the real irony in the Washington Post article was that
it also outed Von brown Hut as a Jew in
a completely bizarre twist. It appeared that a major funder
and friend of the anti Semitist movement was indeed Jewish
at least by birth, according to multiple friends of the
brown Hut family, and you would think that this would

(16:37):
mean that the Area Nations would want to sever ties
with him. But despite this revelation, he was still welcome
with the supremacist group. Most likely most people theorized due
to the funding that he continued to donate. He had
deep pockets and he gave them a lot of money.
In fact, he even ended up presiding over the funeral
of Richard Butler's wife long after this story broke, wearing,

(17:00):
of course, his full clerical ensemble. Throughout all the coverage
and the press about these allegations and plenty of people
corroborating them and photographs of him posing in his priestly
garb in front of a Nazi flag, von brown Huot
denied any racism or anti Semitism. But then in the
late nineteen eighties, he gave an interview to the Seattle

(17:22):
Times in which he openly made racial slurs against Korean
shop owners and then said, you know what side I'm on,
I don't make any bones about it. However, from that
point on, Von brown Hut basically refused to answer any
questions from reporters about his heritage or his stance on
racism or neo Nazism. It's also at about this time

(17:42):
that he left New York and moved to Maryland to
set up an animal preserve called the Montrose Wildlife Conservation
on a seventy acre property. Yeah. He uh. It's sort
of one of those weird contradictory image puzzle pieces that he,
you know, was involved with all these really horrible things.

(18:02):
He also really loved animals in nature and wanted to
like study and preserve them. It's very hard for me
to get my head around all of these contradictory pieces.
A lot easier to think of people who have those
sorts of views as like mustache twirling villains. Yeah. So
then when you're like, oh, but he was really quite
kind to animals, it's like well that it almost makes

(18:26):
it more distasteful because you can't kind of compartmentalize it
super easily. And like we said, a lot of people
described him as just this charming, eccentric, sweet cookie old
man as he got older. So it's it's a very
complex puzzle. Uh. In two thousand, a Los Angeles Times
article about von Brown Hunt relaid the news that there
have been two different distributors that had annulled their SeaMonkey

(18:48):
licenses because of their unease with Von Brown Hunt's personal politics.
First was Laray Limited. There's kind of a he said,
she said going on with this one, Von brown Hut
aimed that he wanted to end the business partnership because
Laramie was neglecting sea monkeys in favor of bigger sellers
like the super Soaker water gun. Al Davis, who was

(19:10):
an e v P at Laramie at the time, told
a much different story. He claimed that after hearing about
about Von Brown Hutt giving money to hate groups, he
called the inventor on it. So, according to the Davis
version of the story, Harold told him Hitler wasn't a
bad guy, he just received bad press. Yeah, that's a

(19:31):
quote that gets used in a lot of different stories.
That's the first story that I saw it in, or
the earliest story that I saw it in, But it
gets reused a lot because it is in terms of
sound bite, like you kind of can't ask for a
better sensationalist quote. Another licensing mentor in the nineties nineties
involved the company Big Fund, which specializes in novelty key chains,
and they were working on like this little key chain

(19:54):
mini aquarium that you could put like one or two
sea monkeys in and carry them with you throughout the day.
And initially Von brown Hutt assured Big Fund president Alan
Dorfman that all of that bad press about him and
his ties to the Arian Nations was really just rumormongering
that was started by an enemy that he was having
legal issues with, and initially Dorfman accepted that explanation until

(20:16):
a few months down the road there was a New
York Times article that ran that identified the sea monkey
inventor as a speaker at that year's arians Aryan Nations Congress,
and so pretty quickly thereafter, the business arrangement was severed.
According to George c Atamian, who was an executive with
Educational Insights, when his company bought the license to sea

(20:39):
monkeys in the mid nineteen nineties. Von brown Hut had
agreed to cease all of these public political activities when
some are brought. The l A Times reporter who broke
the story of the business fallout because of von brown
Hut's political views, he pushed Atamian on the issue of
the inventor's involvement with the white supremacist move it. At

(21:01):
that point, the Educational Insights executive admitted that he had
never personally confronted von brown Hut, but that he would.
Attaian contact had brought a couple of weeks later, and
he said that he had confronted Von brown Hut and
that von brown Hut had denied his involvement, and that
in his mind that was all that was needed. Yeah,

(21:22):
there's a sort of a more complex it gets a
little soap opera element to that, and it's all in
the l A Times article, which will link to you.
There was actually one of his anti Zionist newsletters that
this reporter handed Attamian and another executive involved and said like, uh,
this is you know his work, this is the newsletter,
this is the stuff he's spreading, Like, are you really

(21:44):
comfortable working with this person, and they both independently are
said to have asked von brown Hut, did you write this?
And he said no, and the one guy said to him.
The evidence that made it completely believable when von brown
Hut denied his involvement was no, this is a man
who loves copy and he loves writing, and he really
prides himself and this newsletter is terribly written. So to me,

(22:06):
that's the evidence. It's almost like they're in a bit
of denial at that point about the person they're working with.
But UH. In two thousands three, Harold von brown Hutt
died after falling his home, and since that time there
has been sort of a constant stream of various legal
battles around Sea Monkeys and who has the rights and
whether they're paying Von brown Hut's widow her royalties, etcetera.

(22:28):
Nothing outside of like usual business jockeying. But that's just
what's going on with the company. After about it seems
that von brown Hutt kept his word to Atavian and
the rest of the leadership of Education Insights. UH. He
either seized his ties to the Aryan Nations or started

(22:49):
hiding his involvement the Anti Defamation League, who had amassed
a substantial dossier on his connections to hate groups up
to that point, doesn't really have anything else the track
after that. Yes, so he it does seem like he
kept his word, uh in that business deal where he
said he would no longer publicly be involved in any

(23:11):
of these hate groups. But Sea Monkey sales have made
Transcience and their various affiliates and licensees many millions of
dollars throughout the years, and National Sea Monkey Day is
May of the sixteenth, although we don't know where that started.
Is that like their own marketing thing or we do

(23:31):
not know? Uh. I was looking at one of those
like you know, wacky holiday each day websites where they
tracked these sorts of things, and they're like, we can't
figure out where this originated. If it was marketing or
just like a super fan that sort of spread the
word kind of like how talk like a Pirate Day
grew organically. They don't know if this was a similar
thing where it was like a fan group that started

(23:53):
it and it just kind of became accepted without anyone
questioning it. So that's a stupid Sea Monkey Day Number one.
I think if this were going on now, there would
not be any Oh, I will just stop having ties
to these white supremacy organizations like I think the uh

(24:13):
bad Press and fewer are on the part of the
internet would not let that stand. Yeah. I had a
similar thought while I was researching this, like, there's just
no way one he couldn't the odds of him having
been able to be involved in these sorts of activities
for so long without anybody realizing it or calling him

(24:34):
on it, although there were allegedly rumors throughout the toy
industry about him leading up to that, but there wasn't
any evidence. I guess that people knew it just wouldn't happen.
They would be outed so much more quickly and so
vocally and so publicly through social media that I think
it would be a lot different if this all went
down today. I also had no idea until uh I

(24:57):
got this outline from you, basically, which is kind of
weird because I feel like I know so many um like,
there are so many kind of urban legends about you know,
so and so CEO of this organization is a racist
and it's not actually a true thing, right, And in
this case where he really was having direct involvement with

(25:19):
all these white supremacist organizations. I had never heard anything
about it until this episode. Yeah, that l a Times
article which is a really good read um that we referenced,
referenced a couple of times. He even mentions at the beginning, like, oh,
I thought I was doing kind of a fluff piece
about nostalgia toys and you know, sort of kitch in

(25:42):
the modern era, and how there's this new wave of
interest in toys from the fifties and sixties and then
with minimal digging, and like he reached out to the
Anti Defamation League after he started hearing these things, and
they sent him a copy of this huge dossier that
they had a math. He was like, this is a
very different article than I started writing. Uh, we don't
know what that's like at all. Yeah, Yeah, it's a

(26:06):
it's so sort of mind blowing to me. This again,
it's the disparity of his image of being this sweet,
wacky guy, like a nutty inventor and a a little
bit of a flam flam man in some ways, and
then also being part of this just horrific thing and
that he was Jewish and part of all of this
is really hard for me to get my brain around.

(26:26):
But he is deceased, so no one can ask him,
and if he weren't, he probably would not want to
answer any of those questions anyway. Do you know if
his widow is still living. She is she was involved
in a legal action as recently is about e eleven
or twelve months ago, but she also will not answer
any questions about his background or his political views. So

(26:49):
it's pretty much all lockdown on all such discussion. It's
fascinating stuff. In other news, I have listener mail which
is not about white supremises. I was going to say, please,
don't all about white supremacy. It is related to UH
various namings of people that actually have two pieces of
listener man which are corrections to UH terminology that we used.

(27:11):
So the first one is from our listener Fancy. I
can't even describe how much I absolutely love that name.
Uh and she says, hi, Alli and Tracy. I enjoy
the podcast, but the use of a misnomer in the
recent Henry Hudson two part episode spurred me to send
this email of caution. In Henry Hudson Part two, you
discussed the ill fated sixteen ten to sixteen eleven voyage

(27:31):
of the Discovery, and you're repeatedly referred to Hudson's and
the crew's interactions with the local people around Hudson and
James Bays as being with Native Americans, and that's an
inaccurate term by local Canadian standards. Use of this term,
among others, gives rise to certain sensitivities in Canada. It
may be written by historians that we are referred to
as Indians are Native Americans, but both terms have their issues. Indians,

(27:54):
though still the legal term used in Canada, is now
a rather noticeable misnomer, which obviously now refers to people's
from India and Native Americans, doesn't suit those of us
with ancestral ties to Canada's indigenous peoples. Uh. And there
are growing social connotations to the word native, which can
include more than indigenous people, i e. It can be
applied to anyone born in a location for a variety

(28:17):
of reasons. The most common and accepted term to generally
refer to people's in questions is First Nations peoples, in
order to make it clear that what is being discussed
is a grouping distinct from the Inuit or the Metties,
the two other groupings that make up Canada's indigenous peoples.
This email may seem like a pedantic point, However, it
will benefit listeners to understand that certain terms and labels
come loaded with baggage in Canada, which can lead to misunderstandings.

(28:40):
This doesn't seem pedantic to me because this is a
very specific thing that like, I would not have known.
I have heard the term First Nations people's, but I
did not realize there was that divide in preference between
Native American which is usually used in the US. Yeah,
so so this is good info. Yeah, I would say
this is this is exactly the kind of correction that

(29:03):
we want because you and it's important to both of
us that we use the right terminology for people and
that we use the terminology that's the most respectful of
the people that we are talking about exactly. And while
we do our best, sometimes we're gonna mess that up.
And so learning the right way. I would much rather
learn the right way than to continue to be inadvertently

(29:25):
ignorant and say things that are potentially offensive. So, uh, yeah,
that that does not go into the annoying pedantry column,
not at um Like that's not at all like when
somebody argues with us about the dictionary definition of the word,
when the dictionary agrees with us, like, yeah, this is
the correction that we want to hear too, so we

(29:47):
can be better. Yes, and Fancy signs off as a
nitpicking First Nations Canadian. I do not see here that
way at all. That's exactly stuff we need to learn.
And now, so thank you because that's great insight that
I just did not ever come a cross, so I'm
glad to have it now. The other one, uh, is
sort of similar in vain. It comes from our listeners,
Sina uh, and she loves to listen to the show

(30:10):
on her commute, and she says, I enjoyed your episode
on the Verree Brothers. I grew up in Botswana and
just wanted to make a couple of corrections for you.
A person from Botswana is called a Matswana, and the
plural of that is Batswana, so that's I'm maybe pronouncing
it incorrectly, but it's a B a T, not a bot. Also,
the capital city of Gabarone is pronounced more like heborn

(30:31):
a with a guttural G. And the accident on the
final e. So I'm guessing Gaborna and I may be
still butchering that, but I'm trying my hardest. No way
you could have known either of those things, but now
you do exactly the same situation. We are glad to
have this knowledge. It was nice to hear a little
bit about Botswana in the podcast, since most people don't
even know it exists. I moved to the US in

(30:53):
and so I missed the repatriation of the stolen Matswana
man's body, and in fact had not heard of it
until You're casts uh. You also talked about snow globes
in the podcast, and I chuckled it that several years
ago my husband and I found a cute snow globe
in a Christmas store and decided we would start collecting
snow globes. Shortly thereafter, though, we became fairly enthused about
the fair trade and buying local concepts, and to our chagrin,

(31:16):
all snow globes are apparently made in China. Every time
I see a snow globe now, I run over and
pick it up, and invariably it has made in China.
On the bottom, I have yet to find a domestically
made snow globe or a fair trade one for that matter.
So if I do, we will resume our collection, but
for now we have stopped at one. Uh, thank you
so much, Sina. That's similarly, I would never have come
across that information, So it is super good to have

(31:40):
and now we know learning is half Knowing is half
the battle. I also, Uh, I went and searched. There's
a chain of stores called ten Thousand Villages which sells
um stuff from around the world from uh, like in
a fair trade Yeah. I think it's actually run by missionaries,

(32:01):
but I'm not sure. I went there immediately and searched
snow globes to see if they had any, and they
did not. They had various things that were globe shaped,
but none of them were snow globes. Yeah, that's one
of those things I had not ever really thought much about,
but I did start looking. We have a couple we're
not really collectors through like odds and ends that people
have got us bought us through the years, like usually

(32:23):
if they're related to something else that we like, and
I too discovered Nope, nothing seems to be local or
fair trade. They all have them made in China. Stamps
when they are all imported, so that is super cool.
Thanks to both of those listeners for really cool emails
giving us info that is good to have and that
we do not know except now we do. And when
you know better, you do better. If you would like

(32:46):
to write to us with exciting knowledge, you can do
that at History Podcast at how stock works dot com.
You can also connect with us on Twitter at misst
in history, at Facebook dot com, slash missed in History,
on tumbler at missed in History dot tumbler dot and
at pinterest dot com slash missed in History. You can
visit missed in History dot spreadshirt dot com if you
would like to purchase missed in History gear for yourself

(33:09):
or others. Even though now we're past the holiday season,
maybe you're like me and you drag your feet a
little and you still have some work to do. In
the gift range arena. You can also come to our
website missed in History dot com if you would like
to read show notes or see any of the archived episodes.
We have pretty much everything there. Show notes are from
when Tracy and I came on through the current episodes. Uh,

(33:32):
and we have the occasional blog post and like said,
all of that archived content. You can also visit our
parents site with how stuff works dot com if you'd
like to learn a little bit more or just explore
a little bit more about topic we talked about today.
You can type in the words classic toys and you
will get the Ultimate Classic Toy Quiz. It's a kind
of a fun way to cleanse your palette after talking

(33:53):
about a white supremacist. Uh. If you would like to
do that, or almost anything else, you can do at
at our two websites and Miston history dot com and
how stuff works dot com for more on this and
thousands of other topics. Is it how staff works dot com.

(34:14):
M