Today's class was a special class. For once, it wasn't taking place in a classroom. Today, they were at the pool, for a very dumb reason that would become apparent quickly.

"Marco Polo was a Venetian merchant in the 1200s, a time when the Western people of Europe and the Eastern people of China didn't cross paths a whole lot. But Marco's dad and uncle were travelers, so when Marco was about 17, they took him on a twenty-four year trip to China and back. And just to keep that in perspective, you're in a pool listening to a cartoon character talk," Yakko said. "Don't worry, I think you break even."

"Nobody's really sure exactly what Marky Marc saw or what he did, because right when he got back to Venice, he ended up in the middle of a war with Genoa and was taken prisoner. While he was in jail, he told his neighbor all about everything he saw, like paper money and coal burning, things that hadn't made it to Europe yet. But like any speech-to-text device, his neighbor got things wrong, added in stuff that happened to him, and maybe some stories he just heard somewhere. So of course The Travels of Marco Polo became a huge hit, despite having worse citations than your typical Wikipedia page."

"Eventually, Marco got out of prison, then even later he died, and today we remember him best for the game he invented where a person closes their eyes in a pool, shouts out 'MARCO!' and tries to echo-locate people when they call back 'POLO!' and hopefully not running across a group of people trying to throw a ball into a goal, because they'll probably get trampled and drown."