Longfellow Detour Starts Saturday

Good morning, Back Bay! Here are five things you need to know today, Friday, July 19:

1. LONGFELLOW DETOUR: We wanted to remind you, even if you don't want to be reminded, that the detour for the Longfellow Bridge rehabilitation project will begin Saturday. Traffic heading from Boston to Cambridge will be detoured over the Craigie Bridge until September 2014.

2. BEAT THE HEAT: We spotted a lot of folks yesterday getting cool at the Frog Pond Wading Pool. It's going to be another hot one today. What will you be doing to beat the heat? Tell us in the comments.

3. GET THE PATCH NEWSLETTER: Have you signed up for the Back Bay Patch Daily Newsletter yet? Each morning you can get Back Bay Patch news delivered directly to your e-mail inbox. It's totally free, so if you like what you read here, sign up now!

4. THIS DAY IN HISTORY: On this day in 1799, during Napoleon Bonaparte's Egyptian campaign, a French soldier discovers a black basalt slab inscribed with ancient writing near the town of Rosetta, about 35 miles north of Alexandria. The irregularly shaped stone contained fragments of passages written in three different scripts: Greek, Egyptian hieroglyphics and Egyptian demotic. The ancient Greek on the Rosetta Stone told archaeologists that it was inscribed by priests honoring the king of Egypt, Ptolemy V, in the second century B.C. More startlingly, the Greek passage announced that the three scripts were all of identical meaning. The artifact thus held the key to solving the riddle of hieroglyphics, a written language that had been "dead" for nearly 2,000 years. Information courtesy of History.com.

5. TODAY'S FORECAST: Stop us if you've heard this before: hot, humid, high of 96. Partly cloudy tonight with a low of 77.