Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Jigsaw Puzzles

Episode Date: August 5, 2020

Who doesn't love a good puzzle? Tune in to learn a few facts and figures about jigsaw puzzles right now. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey friends when you're staying at an Airbnb you might be like me wondering could my place be an Airbnb and if it could what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lisa in Manitoba who got the idea to Airbnb the backyard guest house over childhood home now The extra income helps pay her mortgage. So yeah, you might not realize it But you might have an Airbnb to find out what your place could be earning at air bnb.ca Hey and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and this is short stuff. Let's get started starting Now do you like puzzles? Sure, wait a minute. Is this like literal jigsaw puzzles? Okay. Yeah, I've got no problem with jigsaw puzzles That's as far as I like anything these days Chuck, don't you know the world's ending?

Well, I didn't mean like do you want to fight a puzzle? I mean Do you enjoy sitting down and doing a jigsaw puzzle? Yeah, sure I do. I mean it's been a while But yes, I like a good puzzle a jigsaw puzzle in particular. I like say like a very heartwarming one like maybe a jigsaw puzzle of a Thomas Kincaid painting Okay, or of flowers or kittens or something and nothing terribly hard just something like Occupying rather than challenging Yeah, I didn't do a lot of puzzles. I mean, I guess I did when I was a kid and then probably didn't for a long time We weren't a puzzle family really

But I did there was one week in college where a dude down the street for me a friend got a big puzzle and it was just one of those things in college where you've got time and three or four of us got together and drank a lot for like a week and did this huge puzzle and Just had so much fun and that's the last puzzle I've done except for you know doing little puzzles with my daughter That sounds like a fun fun. That's a great puzzle story for some reason It was a lot of fun I imagine that whole like weekend starting with the musical number where like your friend sticks his head out the front door

He's like it's here and you stick your head out and you're like it's here. It's here the puzzle finally here That's exactly how it went down. That's exactly how it went down. This is a lot of jibber jabber for a short stuff, isn't it? Yeah, so we should just go ahead and get to it and say that a man named Sir John Spillsbury They called him the Doughboy He was a engraver in England and a map maker in the mid 1700s and he gets credit in 1766 for creating the first jigsaw puzzle when he Put a map on a piece of wood cut it out. Yeah cut the countries out and said here you go teachers use this to teach Geography, I love things where it's just like there it is right there. That was the first time it ever happened

That's the beginning of it. There's your origin story It's nice and tidy so it was kind of a teaching tool at first but also people were like it's kind of fun putting the countries and let's do this at home too or At our friend's house over a long weekend while we drink So it kind of it kind of took off and then in very short order It also became a marketing tool to where companies would kind of you know, maybe give away a Jigsaw puzzle that was a photo of a mobile gas station or something like that So they became very ubiquitous pretty quickly

Yeah, and they still do stuff like that to promote your company They can be little marketing tools. I know Kodak has one that they sell That they say is the world's largest at 51,000 pieces plus 28 then a half feet by six point two five feet. None of those things are even close Yeah, it's not the biggest at all. No, they're really full of it Chuck. I think they can just say whatever they want They're Kodak. What are you gonna do? I guess so So yeah, so Kodak does sell that one. It's like 400 bucks and I mean, it's nothing to sneeze at it's a giant huge puzzle Our problem with it is that they call it the world's largest jigsaw puzzle and I'm guessing

It's not just us who have a problem with it But the people at the Guinness World Records Probably have a bit of a problem with it too either that or Kodak's lawyers were like we have to word this Just perfectly or else we could get in some trouble here because it turns out that this Kodak world's largest jigsaw puzzle is Fairly mediocre compared to some of the other jigsaw puzzles that are around that take that the cake for world's largest anything Yeah, there was one in 2018 in Dubai that Guinness recognized and It was an honor of the year of Zayed

Which is a year-long tribute to the person who founded the UAB Shake sorry the UAE. Yeah Shake Zayed bin Sultan al-Nayan Nice, I think I think I got it and this thing was 65 almost 66,000 square feet Yeah, that's um, that's pretty pretty impressive. Have you have you seen it? Yeah, it was pretty. It was awesome. I mean like the the pieces themselves are giant They're like about a foot or so square and you know, the whole thing was a little it was like kind of light cardboard But when put together it was quite impressive for sure

And Kodak's had 51,000 pieces in change there was one in Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam that the 1600 students at the University there put this thing together and it had over a half a million pieces Right So that was I think of a giant lotus flower, right? Beautiful. It is So there's definitely bigger puzzles than the one that Kodak's touting is the world's largest jigsaw puzzle But some people say okay, that's great. Yeah, that's really time-consuming

But any shmo with all of the pieces can put that thing together Other people and this is totally unsurprising to me that there's like a whole subculture of people who are like I want to be challenged by a jigsaw puzzle. Yeah, as it turns out You don't have to have a football field size jigsaw puzzle to be challenged You can do it with some very small surface areas. There's one in particular called ice puzzle nine That's just nine pieces, but it's possibly the hardest jigsaw puzzle on the planet All right, well, let's take a break there and we'll tell you more about ice puzzle nine right after this Hey friends when you're staying at an Airbnb

You might be like me wondering could my place be an Airbnb and if it could what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lisa in Manitoba who got the idea to Airbnb the backyard guest house over childhood home Now the extra income helps pay her mortgage. So yeah, you might not realize it But you might have an Airbnb to find out what your place could be earning at air bnb.ca Slash host on the podcast hey, dude the 90s called David Lacher and Christine Taylor stars of the cult classic show Hey, dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces We're gonna use hey, dude as our jumping off point But we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s

We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it It's a podcast packed with interviews co-stars friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever Do you remember going to blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy Blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s

Have you seen this thing? I have. Have you seen the video of someone putting it together? No, I saw a video of the guy putting jigsaw puzzle 23 together or 29 So this is a designer, and I think he did both of these named you a soccer and If you look at ice puzzle nine, it's a tray a blue tray. That's about as big as your two hands put together It's very small and it's only got those nine pieces and they're you know, they don't look like your standard puzzle pieces They're sort of you know, they can be flat in places in curvy just like a puzzle But like a jigsaw puzzle, but there's just something a little different and quite right when you look at it When you look at you think well, how hard could that be and then I went to a YouTube that showed a guy putting it together

And it was so easy and I was like how do people not get that? That's how easy it is and the only thing I can think of is that it's it's easy when you see someone doing it But very hard when you just have the puzzle pieces, huh? Okay. I must be because this famous Puzzler Chris Ramsey took him two hours and nine minutes and said that it was exhausting Right and he's yeah, he he doesn't seem to be the kind who would take like a dive for a puzzle maker like he seems legit, you know There's a there was another one. I saw a video called from a guy named the puzzle guy Who have you ever heard Croatian people talk speak English? I think this is the video I saw Okay, so that guy he was okay, he jigs he did jigsaw puzzle 29 to and he had some real trouble with it

In fact at the end of the the puzzle when he had the last two pieces He was explaining how we couldn't get them to fit when he accidentally got them to fit and was actually surprised that he finished the Puzzle is that when the exit really took hold? Yeah, but it's great man. I love I love that accident It's so great to Croatian people speak English if they just sound so just friendly and amiable It's awesome, but as he was putting this together one of the big problems with jigsaw puzzle 29 Which was also made by you a soccer as you were saying It has five corner pieces So one of the corner pieces actually fits into the inside of the puzzle and it just seems to be

Extraordinarily difficult to put together one of the reasons why it's tough is all the pieces are exactly the same It doesn't form a picture Or I should say they they look exactly the same not shape-wise, but but color-wise. They're this translucent blue or whatever So you just have to tell from the shape and then some of the shapes look like they should fit certain sizes of Like holes and that what they're called the shapes go in the holes in the spaces spaces But they just don't quite fit. It looks very maddening. It was maddening just to watch the video Yeah, yeah seeing ice puzzle nine. I wish I hadn't watched it and then I would have just bought it to see how I would do

And and I think and I don't want to give it away But when you put the last piece in it the idea is that you have to get all the pieces inside that tray It's not necessarily What you think of as a puzzle, which is they all fit perfectly together and form a perfect picture That's the only Kind of hint I will give is that you know, there can be space in that tray. They just got to all fit in there, right? Does that make sense? That's a good hint. I don't want to ruin it So speaking of ruining man, did you see the video of Dave Evans from Dorset, England who?

Basically created the the I guess it was certified as the world's largest hand-cut wooden jigsaw puzzle No, so this guy this poor guy he he created a jigsaw puzzle an enormous one It was like 20 feet by 8 feet and if you're in the UK it's 6 meters by 2 and a half meters It was just this giant puzzle and he had it completed He he spent two weeks putting it together after assembling like cutting it and then it took him another two weeks Just to put it together and he had it in this giant piece of plywood in his workshop showing it off and And it somebody was filming it and it just collapsed and he walks into the frame

It just like About to lose his mind. He's just can't believe that just happened. I mean that moment was captured Yes, yeah that moment was captured on video and his reaction was captured on video It's worth it's worth checking out because you just agonized for the guy It took him another 16 days with a bunch of assistants to put it back together Well, here's another interesting record and this these are the records that kind of crack me up. There are two people Seemingly battling it out for the largest collection of jigsaw puzzles record Louisa

figure redo, I guess of Sao Paulo, Brazil and then Georgina Gil Lacuna of the Philippines Have over a thousand puzzles each and they keep kind of coming back and forth, right? And this is just such a weird record because the only thing you have to do is just buy more puzzles Yeah, that's it. That's all there is to it Yeah, like where does it end? I guess one of them's gonna have to kick the bucket. I Guess so but then someone else takes over the collection and they're like, I'm gonna buy eight more puzzles I'm winning you would hope so but but I mean like You would hope that your arch nemesis would have enough class to be like my puzzle collection must be destroyed upon my death. Oh

That's what you do. Yeah, just set it ablaze or Distributed in a bunch of different pieces to different people. No set it ablaze. Don't give it to children who need it. All right No, how about this Chuck if you're in favor of setting it ablaze you could give them to children in need But you have to stipulate in your will that a piece is taken from every single one of those puzzles and those pieces are set ablaze How about that? Yeah, that's the worst we've gotten a lot of hand me down puzzles Which is what happens when you have a kid and all of them are missing pieces Well, you should just know not to even take a hand me down puzzle cuz I know happen, you know So you want to talk about this last thing this 1,700 person puzzle sure

March of last year 2019 more than 1,700 people Got together to form the largest human jigsaw puzzle on record and this one was cool because it raised awareness for autism spectrum disorder and the piece itself that they formed out of human beings is the symbol for the autism speaks organization and I think there were I don't know if there was controversy but that was surely no one like got mad about this but The question did arise. Is it a puzzle if it's just a puzzle piece? Is it a puzzle piece if there's no puzzle for it to fit into you? Oh, well that too. Yeah And Guinness said, you know what this is everybody This is a largest human image

Record in other words everyone getting together and when you look at it from space, it looks like something else, right? Some marketing research assistants saved the day. Oh, yes. Yeah, I guess the last thing we have to say about jigsaw puzzles is that That one great Simpsons reference where there there's some people sitting at a bed and breakfast putting a jigsaw puzzle together It's clearly of a donkey and a woman puts a piece in of like the donkey's shoulder and says, oh, it's a donkey Right that's like oh, well, you're not watching what we do in the shadows. Are you? No, I'm saving it all up. I think all right. Well For the fans, just let me say that's like Jackie Daytona and his toothpick. Okay. There you go. I don't want to know anything else about it Well, thanks for joining us on short stuff everybody short stuff is out Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio's how stuff works for more podcasts from iHeartRadio

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