photo sent to us by Agata and Max

Happy birthday to Mirek! And our thanks to the people at the Institute of Archaeology, University of Wroclaw, Poland. This evening we received an email that reads:

“Dear Clonehenge, 

Greetings from Institute of Archaeology, University of Wroclaw, Poland.

Our friend Mirek, archaeologist, have a birthday today so we made this b-day card for him. We wish him all the best!

 This card is very personalized, cause Mirek is a great fan of neolithic, megaliths, aerial photography and of course Clonehenge and Ylvis song.

 Oh! This card is hiding a rebus. First letters of ‘Stonehenge’ word, with the part of ‘latawiec’ (‘kite’ in polish) gives ‘sto lat’* which means ‘100 years’, sentence used as ‘happy birthday!’.

 Many thanks,  Agata & Max”

It included the picture above and another with one person flying what appears to be a box kite while three others watch.

So let’s have a look at this paper Stonehenge model. It is elementary, of course, not much detail, and yet, look at the shapes of the stones–much closer to the real Stonehenge sarsen shapes than in your average paper cut-out. And they even included some fallen stones cleverly by showing lumps by the side of the big stones. For what it is, this is well and thoughtfully done. Plus there is the rebus. The card depicts Stonehenge and a kite, which in Polish is latawiec, so the otherwise inexplicable little post-it at the top left means to strike out all of the letters of Stonehenge except STO and all of the letters of latawiec except LAT, yielding, as the email says, Sto lat!, a traditional birthday greeting. Brilliant!

You have to wonder why smart people like that aren’t running Clonehenge instead of us!

We are honoured to know that there are Clonehenge fans in Poland, and honoured to be thought of and included in the celebration in this way. Agata and Max, you made our day, as we say here. Mirek (he is the one flying the kite), we wish you many happy returns!

And to all of our readers, happy henging!

*Discworld fans can discuss this revelation about sto lat at a later time!