Name: The Bizarro History of Black Friday: (AND 2017 CENSUS!)
Uploaded: 2020-04-13T16:15:58.000Z
Duration: 3 min 52 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Good morning, John. It's—it's Black Friday. Of course.

Uh, you know, it's the day in which all Americans

And it's really interesting to me that we all do this.

But very few people actually know the story of how Black Friday began.

One of the first acts of that Congress was

to create something called the lighthouse service.

Now, lighthouses have, of course, prevented the deaths of countless sailors over millennia,

And back in the day, it was impossible, basically,

to tell the world that a lighthouse was going to be down for maintenance,

in sailors being lured into a false sense of security:

They thought there would be a lighthouse there;

and then dashed upon the rocks and everybody dies.

This was a real problem, so in the mid-1800s,

The lighthouse service decided to pick one day a year

in which all of the lighthouses would go down for maintenance and

and everyone would know that that was Lighthouse Maintenance Day, basically.

because they figured that was something everyone would remember

and also, it's a day on which there would be less commercial shipping traffic.

people started conflating that maintenance day

with a kind of Day of Rememberance for fallen sailors.

One, to remind everyone that this was indeed the day when you couldn't count on the lighthouses;

And two, to remember all of the sailors and fishermen who has been lost at sea.

Over several decades, this tradition spread down the coast,

And then eventually, across the entire United States,

many people not really knowing why they were turning their lights off,

just knowing that it was sort of a nice cozy thing to do on the day after Thanksgiving.

and of course, lighthouse maintenance is done during the day,

lighthouses are one of the only lights that actually gets turned on.

except for the part about the lighthouse service

being one of the first things that was created by the first Congress of the U.S..

Black Friday, actually, on which Christmas shopping begins,

And so all companies are like, "No, we must have your dollars,"

Things from your favorite creators, including us,

but also CGP Grey, and Kurtzgesagt, and Minute Physics.

But also, we're launching a store for Vi Hart *today*.

So Vi Hart merch, for the first time ever, is going on sale today.

We've also got 500 signed copies of Turtles All The Way Down that we snagged from Penguin,

So most of those are sold out in the real world,

and we're selling them along with a tuatara pin and a turtle sticker pack.

because we literally need to, like, make room in the warehouse.

I thought that that was always a made-up thing

And no, we need to—there's not enough space in the warehouse.

Also, we're doing, like, a last sale of VidCon merch,

so if you didn't get VidCon merch when you were there,

It's on super-sale, and then we're not going to have it anymore.

Speaking of VidCon, there's a 10% discount on all VidCon ticket types,

if you put in the coupon code "TURKEYTIME".

During the Project for Awesome this year,

we're doing that before the Project for Awesome,

me and John did a photo shoot in which we got real silly,

the theme is "Silly brother, serious brother."

I'm wearing that shirt right now, actually.

It's good, and all proceeds go to the Foundation to Decrease World Suck,

We just launched a new project called SciShow Finds,

which is like "cool things you can get for the science-y loving people in your life."

Basically, it's just stuff that I would like to get.

And finally, every year, John and I do a census of Nerdfighteria,

if you want to turn off all your lights and get cozy this Black Friday,

it's actually—kind of sounds like a lovely thing.

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The Bizarro History of Black Friday: (AND 2017 CENSUS!)

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