Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and today we're continuing our vault episodes for this week. On Tuesday, we ran the Invention of the Spoon Part one. Now here's part two. This episode originally aired March eleven. We hope you enjoy Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind production of My Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back continuing the spoon challenge. This is part two of our talk about spoons. If you haven't listened to part one from Tuesday of this week, you should go back and do that one first. But yeah, we're here to shove more spoons in your brain. Yeah we have. We have. We quite a lot of cool stuff in this one as well. We've got more stuff on ancient Chinese spoons. We have some Chinese poetry, we've got vampires, we've got spoon magic, a little spoon pop culture. Uh yeah, loads of fun. So let's dive right in. Sure. So, in the last episode we talked about the spoon as an invention the way that we might not usually think about such a simple household object. And we talked about some of the archaeological research on the earliest spoons, like how artifacts that could be interpreted as spoons show up in rare and isolated instances back into the Paleolithic, but that after the Neolithic Revolution, when a settled existence based on farming becomes common, spoons start to proliferate in the archaeological record, and that there's some I think, very clear reasons for that. For one thing, we talked about a paper from twenty nineteen by Stefanovitch at All arguing that many of these Neolithic bone spoons were probably used for feeding babies, and that as such they might well reflect a broader historical change in the options available for the care and feeding of young children when you had things like animal milk and cereal grains that had emerged as as food stuffs from from again that Neolithic agricultural revolution, so you'd have a sort of new regime of society is based on gruel and spoon tech. And then of course we talked about the spoons of ancient Egypt in China, and I guess I wanted to pick up today with the subject of ancient spoons in China, and so one source I I looked to here was a book called Fermentations and Food Science. This is by uh Shing Sung Huong, published by Cambridge University Press in the year two thousand. This is part of a series on Science and Civilization in China edited by Joseph Needham. I think we've referred to some of the books in the series before. Yes, his name Rings of Belfisher. And so the first passage about spoons in this book comes in the context of a question about the known practice of ancient Chinese cooking. That would be the parching of cooked grain. And this is this was a food tradition that wouldn't have been limited to ancient China. Number of cultures would serve parched grains of a certain kind. This would basically just mean like cooking the water content out of a grain that had already been cooked, perhaps by boiling or something. And so in this context, Huong writes that quote, since the ancient Chinese did not have ovens, one way to parch the grain would be to stir it in a heated pot. This stirring was probably done with a spoon or ladle called p The earliest reference to this instrument is found in The she Ching, which states, quote, Messy is the stew in the pot, bent is the thorn wood spoon. Now a note on that source. The The she Ching is also known as the Classic of Poetry, or sometimes the Book of Odes. It has a number of names. I don't know which one you're most familiar with, Rob, but it's I'm sure you've come across this work before. It's one of the earliest, perhaps the earliest surviving collection of Chinese poetry. It's roughly hundred to three thousand years old. I believe traditionally said to have been compiled by Confucius, but I think modern scholars dispute that authorship claim. But anyway, I got really curious about this line because I didn't understand what this meant. Messi is the stew in the pot, bent is the thornwood spoon. I was like, what does that mean? So I went looking for the source to see the context, and this led me down, Uh, an interesting rabbit trail. I hope you're you're willing to go on a on a digression about ancient Chinese poetry with me. So I found another translation. This is an English translation by William Jennings that appears to have been a very common early translation. And I'm sure some stuff is getting lost because it has some amount of meter and rhyme in English, which I which I would assume means that that a good bit is getting sort of reshaped meaning wise across the languages. But it'll hopefully be at least close enough to get the gist of the poem. And so if I have identified the right poem here, this line is from a poem that in translation is called the Neglected Eastern States. And the poem seems to be spoken by a court official living in the East, who is apparently lamenting that once he had it great, and he lived a life of luxury, but now he is in the East. He's in the Eastern States, and he has really hit the skids. Times are tough in the Eastern States. Like one of the quatrains, here is here in the East. The sons of nobles for service hard remain unpaid. There in the West, the sons of nobles are in most gorgeous garb delayed. So the thing being set up here is here in the East. Times are tough in the West, things are or at least used to be really nice, and so we were back in the West, he would have it nice and instead he's or living tough. Right, And so this line about the spoon and the William Jennings translation here, I think it goes like this, once sucked we from well laid in trenchers and thornwood spoons bent to the loads. So if I'm interpreting that right, I think the idea is once like our stew was so rich and so awesome that it literally bent the spoons that we were trying to use to stir and eat it. Oh wow, just so loaded down with deliciousness that the spoons are breaking off left and right. Okay, I've never heard of comparison like that before, but that's pretty good. I mean, it seems it seems like the kind of thing that you would have seen in um, like American advertisements for like chunky soups, you know, because um think is maybe we're getting a little out of it now, but it seems like for a long time that was like the staple like chunky style soups, uh and advertisements for really just almost saw lad soups that it looks like you would have you would lose some spoons in. This was the real stu soup currency of the nineties. I remember, like Campbell's would really emphasize in their ads back then, this is no thin, watery broth anymore. This is soup that is so thick you could like lay mortar with it. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It was actually, I guess a little a little bit of like a cultural shock to me when I first started having more broth based soups at some point in my life, you know, and uh, and and realized that, well, you know that there's a rich tradition of soups and they over the world, and they don't all have to be this thick, you know, they don't have to be like corn starch by weight. Yeah. I don't think I've ever broke well, you know, I think I have broken spoons often in uh, like take out fair before. You know, I can't specifically remember it. You know, you get like a cheap spoon and you have like kind of a thick um like I don't know, potato salad or something like that. You try and spoon it out. You may lose a spoon in there. It's true. This raises a question I've never considered before, but in the creation of disposable utensils, I guess you have a choice, you know, so you're making a cheap plastic spoon. Do you go more towards it bends when it reaches it's it's stress limit, or do you go more towards its snaps and breaks when it reaches its stress limit. I feel like I've had some plastic spoons that managed to do both. Like it was both flimsy and brittle in a way, it was a miracle of material sciences, Like how did they how did it fail in all categories? It might as well be sponge, sugar or something. But okay, anyway back to this uh, this poem from the the she Ching Uh. In the end, there was one thing I thought that was pretty interesting in this poem, which is that the speaker starts looking to the constellations up in the sky, but picks up again on the utensil imagery from the beginning of the poem, but referring to to the constellations. So the last part of the poem goes like the US there in the south, the sieve is shining, yet not for sifting. Was it made there in the north appears the ladle, yet narrow liquor will it laid? The southward there the sieve be shining here points its tongue beyond the rest. Though northward there appear the ladle. It hoists its handle in the west. Now, I really don't know exactly what to make of that, but it struck me as as very curious. I wondered if you had thoughts on that, Like, obviously I guess there are some constellations in the sky that are regularly compared to household items, particularly kitchen items. I mean that like the Big Dipper being ladle of sorts. Yeah, I mean that's what That's where my mind goes. Not not knowing anything about the origin of this or any interpretations of it, just it seems like just a beautiful way of saying, Hey, there's a there's a big spoon in the sky, but you can't eat with it. We're looking at well. Also the idea that so even the ladle the stars hoist its handle in the west, it's almost like, oh, that is only for people of the Western States to reach down and ladle their skies to with. Though I don't know, maybe maybe I'm reading that wrong. Even the stars conspire against me and prevent me from having luxurious soups and fine roads. This really is an epic complainer poem. Well, you didn't have yelp reviews back then. This was how he had had to go about it. So anyway, I don't know. Maybe we'll have to come back and get some context on this poem in the future, but for now, back to the spoon, right, yeah, back to what Huang had to say about the pe heres, and that's written p I in English, but uh Huang writes that the p came in various sizes and shapes and were used as both cooking and serving utensils. The lee Chi records a P used in rituals and presumably also in entertaining. That was three to five ft long. That sounds too long to be practical. It's like for show almost right, Yeah, yeah, I mean you do find various serving performances and cultures around the world, so it makes sense, you know, get out of ridiculously long ladle here and have somebody who has practiced it. It's use enough that they're not going to make a huge mess. Yeah, exactly going on with Wong. It also mentions a different but equally long P, which is a two pronged fork. It was so named because its shape is similar to that of the constellation P now identified as Epsilon tari. So this is interesting again because this comes back to comparing the kitchen utensils to constellations in the poem. Yeah, yeah, this is interesting. Now. I don't know if this repeated association between constellations and cooking utensils is just a total coincidence based on what I happen to be reading here, or if there's something significant about that. But anyway, reading further in Fermentations and Food Science, um Huan goes on to say later that ancient Chinese text speak, of course of this long spoon P, which is which is an instrument to stir food while it's being cooked in a pot. But there's also apparently a small P, which Wong Wrights quote would be the equivalent of the modern spoon, which is used universally for conveying soup from a container, a caldron or bowl into one's mouth. But then you've also got this other thing thing that's a type of ladle called a show, and this is for distributing liquid like broth or wine, from a large pot into a smaller bowl. Now Huan goes onto catalog different types of spoons that appear in uh, you know, different periods in Chinese history, made out of different materials, different average lengths and stuff like that. One of the interesting ideas raised, and I think this connects to sort of connects to some things we've already talked about, was that early bronze spoons in ancient China appear to have had a sharp point, and this may have been used to cut meat. I could imagine maybe if you have, like I don't know exactly that this would be the use case. But if you had to, say, chunks of meat floating around in a soup or a stew, you could use the spoon to lift the soup or the stew into the mouth. But also maybe like press a piece of meat against the side of the bowl and cut it with the sharp point. M hmm. Yeah. This is interesting though it does raise the question like why would it be necessary to sharpen it, because as we all know, using metal spoons in our lives, uh, we can cut with the spoon even if it's not sharpened, um, and it you can certainly apply some pressure and use it, you know, certainly on things like stewed meat, stewed vegetables, you know, things that are not too tough. Um. And I don't know, I guess the the idea of of the spoon being sharpened in some way makes me feel a little nervous, a little anxious, you know, like I can just imagine things going wrong. I don't I don't want any sharpened spoons in my life. Well, your logic there may have been the one that won out in historical spoon to sign in ancient China, because Swong also says that the spoons tend to start taking a rounder form in the spring and autumn period, and then by the time of the Warring States period, you've got these like lacquered wooden spoons that start to become the dominant format. Yeah. Well, I mean I could see it being a trend for a little bit and then people bagging away from it, like like essentially it could have been a campaign, right are you tired of this happening to you? And you know, and imagine like the ad of somebody trying to cut meat with their spoon and it's just not working and cut their tongue off. Well, that that would be the follow up, right, are you're you're tired of cutting your tongue off with your sharpened spoon? But before that, it would be like, are you tired of having chunks of meat that just cannot be cut in half with your spoon? Try the sharpened spin blood's running down your chin. There he'll be a better way. Um. Well, we'll come back to very briefly a spin on this in a bed. I guess one thing that we're trying to drive home in these examples is that something like the spoon in invention, like the spoon has as every day as it is, you know it is. It is so close to our lives that we often forget about it. But it's also so close to our lives that it is susceptible to cultural pressure and uh in in various design trends. So even though the spoon, you might think, well, the spoon never changes, but of course the spoon does change. And I ran across a wonderful example of this. Uh. One interesting tidbit from the history of spoons, as related by B. Wilson in What Your Spoon Says about You from the Atlantic, and it concerns one small corner of the world during a particular stretch of time England in the seventeenth century. Okay, so this would have been the time during and after the English Civil War, right, So yeah, at this point set the setting here, the monarchy had been disposed of and Oliver Cromwell had risen to power. Now, the results in Commonwealth rule didn't last very long. M Like, Cromwell ruled from sixteen fifty three until his death in sixteen fifty eight, and at that point it pretty much collapsed under his son's leadership the following year. So that's not really a long time to to bust out a lot of spoons under your rule. But there are some interesting changes that took place. So before Cromwell rose to power, you saw a lot of these silver, proper British spoons that had fig shaped bowls and what Wilson describes as chunky hexagonal stems. Uh. They also described it as having a bowl like a tear drop quote widening towards the end that you put in your mouth. They tended to have decorative knops at the top. Knops were artistic flourishes that often featured things like humanoid forms, ladies, animals that sort of thing. But then again Cromwell comes to power, and under Cromwell's strict Puritan regime, this sort of spoon was no longer favorite all of a sudden. So you see the rise of Puritan spoons, which were quote simple shallow egg shaped spoons with flat stems and no decoration, no knops. And you could generally see this as part of like the Puritan impulse against representative art, right right, yeah, Now B. Wilson has a wonderful little passage. I want to read this. They write, quote, none of these decorative spoons found favor during the Commonwealth, when when excessive decoration of any kind, particularly religious, was disapproved of. The roundheads lopped the heads off spoons, just as they lopped off the king's head. It's a nice comparison there. Uh, that would be referring to Charles the First who was to be headed at the after losing the English Civil War. So anyway, these Puritans spoons suddenly, uh, they are the trend. But they were they weren't. They were not only plain, they were also hefty. They were big hunks of silver. Uh. And it's thought that this was a way for people to hoard their silver. That way when the local government came calling, which which they appear only would do, and say, hey, we need all your extra silver to pay for the town's defense. Well, you can say, the only silver I have are these silver utensils, and I need those to eat. Uh, so sorry, I'm going to hang onto these. So it was a way of having essential use silver in your house, just making sure that all of your silver was a part of your your eating utensils. Now, this is very interesting because it makes me wonder if this is antecedent too, or like somehow connected to this tradition I never really understood, but was still around in American families when I was growing up that like as a wedding present, people would be would be given an expensive set of silver, like the family silver, you know, special dining wear. But as far as I understood it, this was never to be used. It was just like it was like the most expensive stuff that you have in your house, and you just keep it in a drawer, You keep it stuck away, and maybe me you get it out to uh polish it and care for it, and occasionally maybe you eat with it, but certainly not not all the time. Now, again, the Commonwealth fell eventually, and then came the restoration, and as Charles the Second returns from exile, he brings with him a new spoon style, and as Wilson points out, the shift here was sudden. The triffid spoon takes over a deep, oval bowl spoon with a flat handle and a distinctive cleft shape at the end. Wilson writes, quote no British person had ever eaten from such a spoon before. In Britain, the first triffids are hallmarked sixteen sixty. Yet by six eighty they had spread through the entirety of Charles's kingdom and remained the dominant spoon type for forty years, killing off both the Puritan spoon and the fig shaped spoons that went before and their designs. Apparently, you know, it wasn't just about how they hold soup and gruel in this case, Uh, you know, it's also about how you hold the spoon. I think we touched on this before, Like the way a spoon is designed not only has an influence on how you eat, it also influence is how you're going to interact with the spoon with your hand, how you're gonna hold it. So the triffid here could be held regally, uh, in a in a polite, you know, thoroughly English way. So that also appears to be part of it. You know, it's like there's a new rule. There are new uh you know, the restored rule. There there are new you know, new new ideas. We're going kind of going against the Puritan concepts of how we should interact with our food. And so the triffid here is is in in fashion uh, and it's going to uh have an influence on the way we we consume our soup or what have you. I didn't think to look this up ahead of time, but I realized, now there's got to be a John Dryden poem about triffid spoons. Then that just seemed perfect. Yeah, I mean, especially if it was, you know, this big of a deal, that's a sweeping change. Well, a quick Google search does not reveal anything, Alright. The next spoon I'd like to talk about is uh is something from Meso American history. Uh. So here's the thing. Spoons can, of course be decorative, and we find an interesting decorative spoon in the ritual spoon pendance of the old Mac people's This was the earliest known major Mesoamerican civilization. And if you visit the met in New York City, uh, you may be able to see one of these. I know they have them in their collection. Um maybe from some somewhere between the tenth and fourth century b c. E. I included a picture here for you to look at, Joe, so you can see what I'm talking about. You if you just you know, look, if you look one up and you didn't know what you're looking at, you might be forgiven for not recognizing this as a spoon. No. So it's got a spoon like depression in it, but if you were to flip it on its side, it almost looks kind of like a submarine. It's like a long cigar shape. And then it's got a big bulge, sort of cylindrical bulge in one section. Yeah, yeah it um, I see. It often described as as a T shaped pendent, but it also looks to me like a like a P, like a like like a big P with an extra stem on top um. And there is a there is a bowl area, but it's it's rather shallow. Uh So, in particular with the all Mac spoon pendance, these jade T shaped pendance are thought to have been used for ceremonial hallucinogenic consumption, and similar T shape pendance from the later Maya culture apparently signified the sacred breath. I was looking around for more information on these indran across. In November, paper from Andrew D. Turner published an Ancient meso America and the author here discusses UH an interesting possibility and that is UH that these UH spoons, with their what to our eyes look like a strange shape, they might be based off the basic shape of the iridescent shells of wing oysters. And if you look up a wing oyster, they do have this kind of p shape. So again going back to what we talked about in the in the first episode about the idea of shells being something that ancient people's would have used as spoons before the creation of spoons, and then in the creation of spoons, you know, fixing a shell to a stick, that sort of thing. Isn't it interesting that we we potentially see an example here of then actual invented spoons, actual artifacts mimicking directly than the natural shape of this shell that is no longer being used. Well, if there was a long running tradition of using natural you know, nature facts objects found in nature, like the shells of oysters, as spoons before you had a manufactory of artificial spoons, I can imagine that a spoon used in a specific religious or ritual context might be the one that you would most want to keep, like the old school spoon, you know, because we get into the religious or ritual mindset, we're often trying to recreate scenes of the past, or our imagination of scenes of the past. Yeah, yeah, I think so. And then of course throw into that as well the idea of the of the the instrument or the invention becoming a symbol and becoming because that's also what we see going on here potentially with these pendants as is, even if they're no longer being used to consume a particular substance, they become symbolic of of that that magical ritual or some sort of idea caught up in it. Now, from here this raises a question of For me, I was thinking, well, okay, now we've talked about spoons and their interaction with sacred affairs and political affairs, Um, but how about mythology and folklore. Well, given the place that the spoon holds in human lives back through ancient times, it shouldn't be surprising that it does occasionally become imbued with mythic and magical properties. For starters, the figure of the witch, or more any kind of magical um. Female presence is often associated with household items that take on magical properties. So the broom is a prime example of this in various tales, of which is we have the Baba Yaga's mortar and pestle that she uses to fly through the sky. Uh so you better believe there are some magical spoons out there as well. And I have just a few examples of these. Oh boy. So according to Spoon, Woman and Soul, the folk belief in Japanese Spoon by Wang, published in the Journal of dad Laian University, the spoon may take on magical associations in Japanese folk belief associated with quote, mountains, females, souls with a supernatural, magical power of birth, praying for peace, being healthy, and exorcism, etcetera. I was also reading an article by Gabby Thompson of Volgemuth about East German translations of fairy tales, and this is this is fascinating. This is kind of a tangent, but it's worth it. Um. The author points out that early East German versions of the brothers Grimm's fairy tales they've been very popular during the Third Reich, so great care was taken in translating them a new uh so that so as distress values considered important and remove those again for East German readers that they deemed quote harmful to a socialist education and hints modified. So here's an example. In the original Grimms of tales, ending of Rumpel still skin the best a imp becomes so I rate. They stomps his foot down so hard that his entire leg becomes stuck in the ground. And then he's even more enraged. He pushes down with both hands to to free himself from the earth, and in doing so uh rips his body in half. Okay, so just a really gory, just moral kombat type ending to Rumpel still Skin. But this would not do in the early East German translations. Um and and they they signed a couple of them. I think it's a Politz check and uh and uh co selec and they it ends up having this very kind of a Pucci ending to to reference the Simpsons instead of having Rumple steel Skin stomping and ripping his body in half. Instead quote, and he flew out of the window on a wooden spoon. And then that's the end. Yeah, is that the first mention of the wooden spoon? Um? I know, I'm not sure on that, but possibly yes. They just throw it in there like, oh yeah, by the way, he had a wooden spoon, and it's magic, and he flew away and nobody was ripped in half by their own anger. My home planet needs me hump Stealskin died on the way back to his home planet. Um. And by the way, that's also the name of the paper. And he flew out of the window on a wooden spoon. Um. So if you want to look it up, look that up. It's it's worth worth it. It's a it's a fascinating topic. Um. And And there are other examples of sanitized endings uh, such such as, uh, there's the Tail of the two Brothers, which in the Grimm's version ends with them burning a witch alive and a fire, but one of the sanitized versions ends with quote, the poison grew in her heart so much that she exploded. And in the other one, they hit her with a magic wand and just turned her to stone. Um. So it's interesting how these edits take place. I mean, these are very much like the the sanitized Nintendo fatalities that we've discussed in the show before. Alright, but back to spoons. Okay, more more magical spoons. Apparently in Albania there is a mushroom known as the witches spoon because it is said to grow where witch vomits. Good to know, I'm guessing I did not really research this any further. Was actually the full paper was behind a payball, so I wasn't able to to get at it. But I'm I'm guessing this is not a good mushroom. This is not a mushroom you want to eat. What makes you think that? I mean, if witches are vomiting it up, I don't think we want to go after it. But which is They're bad? So maybe what they vomited up is good. Okay, maybe, um, but don't do it on our account. Uh. Let's see. There are various folk magic practices that involve the use of spoons. The spoon is basically some sort of magical focus or something. Um. I ran across a Macedonian practice in which slips of paper with writing on them are burnt over a person's body in the bowl of a spoon. Now, you might remember, any of you who are listening to our Weird House Cinema episodes. You might remember in our Santo in the Treasure of of Dracula episodes. You might remember a book I brought up, Paul Barber's Vampires, Burial and Death, And Uh, I was looking in that book again. I may have to get a physical copy of this because uh they cover a late nineteenth century Prussian practice against vampires and then involved placing a bowl of cold water under the board on which a body, a dead body is lying, and placing a multitude of tin spoons on top of the body in order to prevent the dead from returning to unnatural life. And Barber notes that the spoon tradition here is interesting because there are some other traditions of from from that region, uh that call for sharp options like knives or even thorns to be placed on top of the body to keep it from rising again. But in this case it's just a bunch of tin spoons with elaborate arrangements like this, and the sort of general physical recipes for magic. I mean, this is the kind of thing that always makes me wonder where does this come from? Is this derived from a series of past observations or practices that have been estranged from their original context over time, or or just accumulated more details over time, or did at some point did somebody just like get a vision and make this up? I don't know. I think I think the obvious case here is that is, of course, as a body lays out there, it is potentially going to swell and in doing so, or or there's gonna be some disturbance within as a you know, as as decomposition begins to take hold, that could cause spoons placed delicately on the body to fall from that body and clatter on the floor, thus alerting you that's something that's happening. But then who knows what other mystical attachments are involved there as well, you know, concerning metal, and you know, just all these various um magical ideas that might be imbued in the just the idea of a spoon or the idea of a knife. Now, Rob, you've also sent me a picture of the surface of Mars for this episode. I wonder what game. Are you at here? Yes, this is a two thousand and sixteen photo and uh you're listening out there. You can look it up as well. It was taken by NASA's Curiosity Rover, and it shows a formation on the surface of Mars that does look like a spoon. You know, you you look at it, and yeah, it looks like a spoon. For some reason, someone has disposed of a spoon on the surface of Mars, raising all sorts of questions. I mean, I think the obvious reason would be there's nothing to eat on Mars. I mean, what you what are you even gonna use that for? I mean, unless you catch that rat The Curiosity rover also saw and then you make a stew. But I don't know how you make a stew because it'd be hard to gather enough water. I guess you really have to, you know, get a lot of that frost out of the sand. Yeah. Well, I mean obviously the spoon would be for the face on Mars, so that it can eat soup. Uh So, Yeah, the face on Mars is more popular and and certainly attracts more conspiracy thinking, but the spoon is also impressive. But just like the face, this is just a trick of the shadows. Uh. And in this case, it's a trick of the shadows on a vent effect. That's a rock shaped by wind. So basically you have just a a this this strange rock formation that is photographs in just such a way that the shadows make it look like a spoon. So look it up. It's it's it's amusing, Okay, secondary use Wait a minute. No, the spoon is to be placed on top of the face on Mars to make sure that the face doesn't move. That's true. Maybe that is what the That was the real purpose of this mission. Bring a spoon to Mars, place it to top the face so that we can keep tabs on it. All right, Um, we're reaching the end here. But I did want to touch touch base regarding some just some I guess spoon pop culture uh notes here. Um, I don't know if you've ever seen this joke, but there is a there's a wonderful video, the horribly slow murder with the extremely inefficient weapon. I have not seen it. I'm opening it now. Well, Um, it's it's it's it's long enough. You probably want to watch it later. But basically, a person is pursued by someone with a spoon, and they are hitting them with the spoon, attempting to kill them, but it ends up taking a long time. It's an extremely inefficient weapon, and so it takes the murderer the entirety of both their lives to pull it off. Okay, this looks very good Chaotic Rampage American Pictures Presents. Yeah, so so, yeah, that's some fun, some fun viewing for later on. Now. Just talk of killing somebody with a spoon, or certainly cutting out their heart with a spoon, that springs to mind Robin Hood's Prints of Thieves. You might remember the exchange between the guy that gives and the Sheriff of Nottingham. Uh in part because he had too tremendous actors there. You had Alan Rickman and Michael Wincott in those roles, respectively. And the discussion is about why you would use a spoon to kill someone. Uh. Yeah, Michael Wincott's character does not quite understand that. Yeah, he's like a spoon, why not an axe? And of course, uh, Alan Rickman's a sheriff of nodding. M says, because it's dull, you twit, it'll hurt more. Uh so fun fun roles in that film. Uh, the bad guys were a lot of fun in that Um. Let's see worth noting that the Ticks battle cry was spoon. In the Dark Tower series, the Crimson King, in his original mortal form, kills himself by swallowing a sharpened spoon, which seems to be part of a magical transformation that allows him to become this immortal being with godlike powers. Uh. And of course this raises the question, how about how about the spoon as an actual murder weapon? Are there any accounts of this? Well, there's a Bustle article about it by Sage Young published in twenty fifteen, and at least a couple of cases of spoons as weapons and even murder weapons have emerged. In two thousand four a man in the UK was acquitted of murder after he struck another man in the back of the head with a dessert spoon, And in two thousand fourteen, a Florida man was executed. Um he'd been on death row and one of his crimes was killing a prison guard with a sharpened spoon. I don't think that completely counts because this was not sharpened for culinary purposes. But it was of course sharpened in order to make a makeshift murder weapon and makeshift knife. But still it goes to show that, yes, you you can kill someone with a spoon. I don't know if you can cut their heart out, but you can certainly in someone's life now Rob. A number of listeners over the years, I believe, have asked us to cover the sport, especially we got this request several times on invention and I don't think we ever took anyone up on it. No, And uh, you know, honestly, I want to I want to keep it that way. I think that, um, we should do our part to erase the sport from history. I think we should declare it forbidden technology that that serves no purpose. Um, Like, have you ever used a sport and or been forced to use a sport and said this is this is great? Can I get some of these from my house? Can I get Can I get metal sports that I can use like it? No? Nobody does that. I'm anti sport. Have you ever did you ever have a pocket knife that had a spork in it? I don't think I did. I never had one of those really thick boy scout knives. With all the with all the extra things in them. Um. Oh, so you've never used a metal spork. I would say a metal spork is more defensible than the plastic sport, which is barely distinct, which is, I mean, pretty much the same as a plastic spoon. Yeah, um, I know, I do. We do have a couple of plastic implements that we sometimes refer to as spoon a forks, and it is a it is a fork on one side and one of the edge blades, one of the edge prongs of the fork, uh is is basically a butter knife. And then on the other end you have a spoon so that I like, like the spoon remains pure, and we can combine the fork and the knife into one implement and we just have to switch back and forth. I think that's called a sporf a sport. I'll send the word at least. Okay, well I would. I'm I'm marginally pro sporf, but I'm still anti sport. Well, maybe we should let the listeners go and then we can further discuss your the ethics of your holy war against the sport. Okay, yeah, I don't know. Maybe there's some compelling arguments out there for sports that I'm not aware of, UM, but I frankly doubt it. Somehow I feel that a plastic sport is the only uh utensil appropriate for the eating of the Texas specialty, the Freedo pie served in the freed Do's bag, despite the fact that there's nothing in a Freedo pie that requires the ties to pierce it. Um. Yeah, well that does sound plausible. UM. I've I remember having those in UM as part of the school lunch at one point when I was a kid, UM where they would just take the Freedo bag and they would just just like a lump of of meat that they drop in there. Yeah. Nothing feels better in your hand than just like holding a bag with something warm inside it. Uh. All right, Well, you know, I think it's it's time for us to wrap this one up. We're gonna go ahead and close the case on this fine assortment of spoons. We're going to take that case, so we're gonna we're gonna store it away and we're not gonna get it out again until there's a special occasion. But in the meantime, if you have some thoughts on spoons, the invention of spoons, the use of spoons. We would we would really love to hear from you, like, especially if it's something you know, regional, something cultural, something that's important to do you or your family that's been passed down some some kid bit about the history of spoons that we missed here, your thoughts even on sports, so we will we will entertain them. Um. And also in the meantime, I want to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. Core episodes published in the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Um. Usually we publish artifact on Wednesday's, listener mail on Monday's and Friday's we do Weird How cinema episodes and a vault episode a rerun on the weekend's Huge Thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch for us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows,

Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and today we're continuing our vault episodes for this week. On Tuesday, we ran the Invention of the Spoon Part one. Now here's part two. This episode originally aired March eleven. We hope you enjoy Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind production of My Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back continuing the spoon challenge. This is part two of our talk about spoons. If you haven't listened to part one from Tuesday of this week, you should go back and do that one first. But yeah, we're here to shove more spoons in your brain. Yeah we have. We have. We quite a lot of cool stuff in this one as well. We've got more stuff on ancient Chinese spoons. We have some Chinese poetry, we've got vampires, we've got spoon magic, a little spoon pop culture. Uh yeah, loads of fun. So let's dive right in. Sure. So, in the last episode we talked about the spoon as an invention the way that we might not usually think about such a simple household object. And we talked about some of the archaeological research on the earliest spoons, like how artifacts that could be interpreted as spoons show up in rare and isolated instances back into the Paleolithic, but that after the Neolithic Revolution, when a settled existence based on farming becomes common, spoons start to proliferate in the archaeological record, and that there's some I think, very clear reasons for that. For one thing, we talked about a paper from twenty nineteen by Stefanovitch at All arguing that many of these Neolithic bone spoons were probably used for feeding babies, and that as such they might well reflect a broader historical change in the options available for the care and feeding of young children when you had things like animal milk and cereal grains that had emerged as as food stuffs from from again that Neolithic agricultural revolution, so you'd have a sort of new regime of society is based on gruel and spoon tech. And then of course we talked about the spoons of ancient Egypt in China, and I guess I wanted to pick up today with the subject of ancient spoons in China, and so one source I I looked to here was a book called Fermentations and Food Science. This is by uh Shing Sung Huong, published by Cambridge University Press in the year two thousand. This is part of a series on Science and Civilization in China edited by Joseph Needham. I think we've referred to some of the books in the series before. Yes, his name Rings of Belfisher. And so the first passage about spoons in this book comes in the context of a question about the known practice of ancient Chinese cooking. That would be the parching of cooked grain. And this is this was a food tradition that wouldn't have been limited to ancient China. Number of cultures would serve parched grains of a certain kind. This would basically just mean like cooking the water content out of a grain that had already been cooked, perhaps by boiling or something. And so in this context, Huong writes that quote, since the ancient Chinese did not have ovens, one way to parch the grain would be to stir it in a heated pot. This stirring was probably done with a spoon or ladle called p The earliest reference to this instrument is found in The she Ching, which states, quote, Messy is the stew in the pot, bent is the thorn wood spoon. Now a note on that source. The The she Ching is also known as the Classic of Poetry, or sometimes the Book of Odes. It has a number of names. I don't know which one you're most familiar with, Rob, but it's I'm sure you've come across this work before. It's one of the earliest, perhaps the earliest surviving collection of Chinese poetry. It's roughly hundred to three thousand years old. I believe traditionally said to have been compiled by Confucius, but I think modern scholars dispute that authorship claim. But anyway, I got really curious about this line because I didn't understand what this meant. Messi is the stew in the pot, bent is the thornwood spoon. I was like, what does that mean? So I went looking for the source to see the context, and this led me down, Uh, an interesting rabbit trail. I hope you're you're willing to go on a on a digression about ancient Chinese poetry with me. So I found another translation. This is an English translation by William Jennings that appears to have been a very common early translation. And I'm sure some stuff is getting lost because it has some amount of meter and rhyme in English, which I which I would assume means that that a good bit is getting sort of reshaped meaning wise across the languages. But it'll hopefully be at least close enough to get the gist of the poem. And so if I have identified the right poem here, this line is from a poem that in translation is called the Neglected Eastern States. And the poem seems to be spoken by a court official living in the East, who is apparently lamenting that once he had it great, and he lived a life of luxury, but now he is in the East. He's in the Eastern States, and he has really hit the skids. Times are tough in the Eastern States. Like one of the quatrains, here is here in the East. The sons of nobles for service hard remain unpaid. There in the West, the sons of nobles are in most gorgeous garb delayed. So the thing being set up here is here in the East. Times are tough in the West, things are or at least used to be really nice, and so we were back in the West, he would have it nice and instead he's or living tough. Right, And so this line about the spoon and the William Jennings translation here, I think it goes like this, once sucked we from well laid in trenchers and thornwood spoons bent to the loads. So if I'm interpreting that right, I think the idea is once like our stew was so rich and so awesome that it literally bent the spoons that we were trying to use to stir and eat it. Oh wow, just so loaded down with deliciousness that the spoons are breaking off left and right. Okay, I've never heard of comparison like that before, but that's pretty good. I mean, it seems it seems like the kind of thing that you would have seen in um, like American advertisements for like chunky soups, you know, because um think is maybe we're getting a little out of it now, but it seems like for a long time that was like the staple like chunky style soups, uh and advertisements for really just almost saw lad soups that it looks like you would have you would lose some spoons in. This was the real stu soup currency of the nineties. I remember, like Campbell's would really emphasize in their ads back then, this is no thin, watery broth anymore. This is soup that is so thick you could like lay mortar with it. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It was actually, I guess a little a little bit of like a cultural shock to me when I first started having more broth based soups at some point in my life, you know, and uh, and and realized that, well, you know that there's a rich tradition of soups and they over the world, and they don't all have to be this thick, you know, they don't have to be like corn starch by weight. Yeah. I don't think I've ever broke well, you know, I think I have broken spoons often in uh, like take out fair before. You know, I can't specifically remember it. You know, you get like a cheap spoon and you have like kind of a thick um like I don't know, potato salad or something like that. You try and spoon it out. You may lose a spoon in there. It's true. This raises a question I've never considered before, but in the creation of disposable utensils, I guess you have a choice, you know, so you're making a cheap plastic spoon. Do you go more towards it bends when it reaches it's it's stress limit, or do you go more towards its snaps and breaks when it reaches its stress limit. I feel like I've had some plastic spoons that managed to do both. Like it was both flimsy and brittle in a way, it was a miracle of material sciences, Like how did they how did it fail in all categories? It might as well be sponge, sugar or something. But okay, anyway back to this uh, this poem from the the she Ching Uh. In the end, there was one thing I thought that was pretty interesting in this poem, which is that the speaker starts looking to the constellations up in the sky, but picks up again on the utensil imagery from the beginning of the poem, but referring to to the constellations. So the last part of the poem goes like the US there in the south, the sieve is shining, yet not for sifting. Was it made there in the north appears the ladle, yet narrow liquor will it laid? The southward there the sieve be shining here points its tongue beyond the rest. Though northward there appear the ladle. It hoists its handle in the west. Now, I really don't know exactly what to make of that, but it struck me as as very curious. I wondered if you had thoughts on that, Like, obviously I guess there are some constellations in the sky that are regularly compared to household items, particularly kitchen items. I mean that like the Big Dipper being ladle of sorts. Yeah, I mean that's what That's where my mind goes. Not not knowing anything about the origin of this or any interpretations of it, just it seems like just a beautiful way of saying, Hey, there's a there's a big spoon in the sky, but you can't eat with it. We're looking at well. Also the idea that so even the ladle the stars hoist its handle in the west, it's almost like, oh, that is only for people of the Western States to reach down and ladle their skies to with. Though I don't know, maybe maybe I'm reading that wrong. Even the stars conspire against me and prevent me from having luxurious soups and fine roads. This really is an epic complainer poem. Well, you didn't have yelp reviews back then. This was how he had had to go about it. So anyway, I don't know. Maybe we'll have to come back and get some context on this poem in the future, but for now, back to the spoon, right, yeah, back to what Huang had to say about the pe heres, and that's written p I in English, but uh Huang writes that the p came in various sizes and shapes and were used as both cooking and serving utensils. The lee Chi records a P used in rituals and presumably also in entertaining. That was three to five ft long. That sounds too long to be practical. It's like for show almost right, Yeah, yeah, I mean you do find various serving performances and cultures around the world, so it makes sense, you know, get out of ridiculously long ladle here and have somebody who has practiced it. It's use enough that they're not going to make a huge mess. Yeah, exactly going on with Wong. It also mentions a different but equally long P, which is a two pronged fork. It was so named because its shape is similar to that of the constellation P now identified as Epsilon tari. So this is interesting again because this comes back to comparing the kitchen utensils to constellations in the poem. Yeah, yeah, this is interesting. Now. I don't know if this repeated association between constellations and cooking utensils is just a total coincidence based on what I happen to be reading here, or if there's something significant about that. But anyway, reading further in Fermentations and Food Science, um Huan goes on to say later that ancient Chinese text speak, of course of this long spoon P, which is which is an instrument to stir food while it's being cooked in a pot. But there's also apparently a small P, which Wong Wrights quote would be the equivalent of the modern spoon, which is used universally for conveying soup from a container, a caldron or bowl into one's mouth. But then you've also got this other thing thing that's a type of ladle called a show, and this is for distributing liquid like broth or wine, from a large pot into a smaller bowl. Now Huan goes onto catalog different types of spoons that appear in uh, you know, different periods in Chinese history, made out of different materials, different average lengths and stuff like that. One of the interesting ideas raised, and I think this connects to sort of connects to some things we've already talked about, was that early bronze spoons in ancient China appear to have had a sharp point, and this may have been used to cut meat. I could imagine maybe if you have, like I don't know exactly that this would be the use case. But if you had to, say, chunks of meat floating around in a soup or a stew, you could use the spoon to lift the soup or the stew into the mouth. But also maybe like press a piece of meat against the side of the bowl and cut it with the sharp point. M hmm. Yeah. This is interesting though it does raise the question like why would it be necessary to sharpen it, because as we all know, using metal spoons in our lives, uh, we can cut with the spoon even if it's not sharpened, um, and it you can certainly apply some pressure and use it, you know, certainly on things like stewed meat, stewed vegetables, you know, things that are not too tough. Um. And I don't know, I guess the the idea of of the spoon being sharpened in some way makes me feel a little nervous, a little anxious, you know, like I can just imagine things going wrong. I don't I don't want any sharpened spoons in my life. Well, your logic there may have been the one that won out in historical spoon to sign in ancient China, because Swong also says that the spoons tend to start taking a rounder form in the spring and autumn period, and then by the time of the Warring States period, you've got these like lacquered wooden spoons that start to become the dominant format. Yeah. Well, I mean I could see it being a trend for a little bit and then people bagging away from it, like like essentially it could have been a campaign, right are you tired of this happening to you? And you know, and imagine like the ad of somebody trying to cut meat with their spoon and it's just not working and cut their tongue off. Well, that that would be the follow up, right, are you're you're tired of cutting your tongue off with your sharpened spoon? But before that, it would be like, are you tired of having chunks of meat that just cannot be cut in half with your spoon? Try the sharpened spin blood's running down your chin. There he'll be a better way. Um. Well, we'll come back to very briefly a spin on this in a bed. I guess one thing that we're trying to drive home in these examples is that something like the spoon in invention, like the spoon has as every day as it is, you know it is. It is so close to our lives that we often forget about it. But it's also so close to our lives that it is susceptible to cultural pressure and uh in in various design trends. So even though the spoon, you might think, well, the spoon never changes, but of course the spoon does change. And I ran across a wonderful example of this. Uh. One interesting tidbit from the history of spoons, as related by B. Wilson in What Your Spoon Says about You from the Atlantic, and it concerns one small corner of the world during a particular stretch of time England in the seventeenth century. Okay, so this would have been the time during and after the English Civil War, right, So yeah, at this point set the setting here, the monarchy had been disposed of and Oliver Cromwell had risen to power. Now, the results in Commonwealth rule didn't last very long. M Like, Cromwell ruled from sixteen fifty three until his death in sixteen fifty eight, and at that point it pretty much collapsed under his son's leadership the following year. So that's not really a long time to to bust out a lot of spoons under your rule. But there are some interesting changes that took place. So before Cromwell rose to power, you saw a lot of these silver, proper British spoons that had fig shaped bowls and what Wilson describes as chunky hexagonal stems. Uh. They also described it as having a bowl like a tear drop quote widening towards the end that you put in your mouth. They tended to have decorative knops at the top. Knops were artistic flourishes that often featured things like humanoid forms, ladies, animals that sort of thing. But then again Cromwell comes to power, and under Cromwell's strict Puritan regime, this sort of spoon was no longer favorite all of a sudden. So you see the rise of Puritan spoons, which were quote simple shallow egg shaped spoons with flat stems and no decoration, no knops. And you could generally see this as part of like the Puritan impulse against representative art, right right, yeah, Now B. Wilson has a wonderful little passage. I want to read this. They write, quote, none of these decorative spoons found favor during the Commonwealth, when when excessive decoration of any kind, particularly religious, was disapproved of. The roundheads lopped the heads off spoons, just as they lopped off the king's head. It's a nice comparison there. Uh, that would be referring to Charles the First who was to be headed at the after losing the English Civil War. So anyway, these Puritans spoons suddenly, uh, they are the trend. But they were they weren't. They were not only plain, they were also hefty. They were big hunks of silver. Uh. And it's thought that this was a way for people to hoard their silver. That way when the local government came calling, which which they appear only would do, and say, hey, we need all your extra silver to pay for the town's defense. Well, you can say, the only silver I have are these silver utensils, and I need those to eat. Uh, so sorry, I'm going to hang onto these. So it was a way of having essential use silver in your house, just making sure that all of your silver was a part of your your eating utensils. Now, this is very interesting because it makes me wonder if this is antecedent too, or like somehow connected to this tradition I never really understood, but was still around in American families when I was growing up that like as a wedding present, people would be would be given an expensive set of silver, like the family silver, you know, special dining wear. But as far as I understood it, this was never to be used. It was just like it was like the most expensive stuff that you have in your house, and you just keep it in a drawer, You keep it stuck away, and maybe me you get it out to uh polish it and care for it, and occasionally maybe you eat with it, but certainly not not all the time. Now, again, the Commonwealth fell eventually, and then came the restoration, and as Charles the Second returns from exile, he brings with him a new spoon style, and as Wilson points out, the shift here was sudden. The triffid spoon takes over a deep, oval bowl spoon with a flat handle and a distinctive cleft shape at the end. Wilson writes, quote no British person had ever eaten from such a spoon before. In Britain, the first triffids are hallmarked sixteen sixty. Yet by six eighty they had spread through the entirety of Charles's kingdom and remained the dominant spoon type for forty years, killing off both the Puritan spoon and the fig shaped spoons that went before and their designs. Apparently, you know, it wasn't just about how they hold soup and gruel in this case, Uh, you know, it's also about how you hold the spoon. I think we touched on this before, Like the way a spoon is designed not only has an influence on how you eat, it also influence is how you're going to interact with the spoon with your hand, how you're gonna hold it. So the triffid here could be held regally, uh, in a in a polite, you know, thoroughly English way. So that also appears to be part of it. You know, it's like there's a new rule. There are new uh you know, the restored rule. There there are new you know, new new ideas. We're going kind of going against the Puritan concepts of how we should interact with our food. And so the triffid here is is in in fashion uh, and it's going to uh have an influence on the way we we consume our soup or what have you. I didn't think to look this up ahead of time, but I realized, now there's got to be a John Dryden poem about triffid spoons. Then that just seemed perfect. Yeah, I mean, especially if it was, you know, this big of a deal, that's a sweeping change. Well, a quick Google search does not reveal anything, Alright. The next spoon I'd like to talk about is uh is something from Meso American history. Uh. So here's the thing. Spoons can, of course be decorative, and we find an interesting decorative spoon in the ritual spoon pendance of the old Mac people's This was the earliest known major Mesoamerican civilization. And if you visit the met in New York City, uh, you may be able to see one of these. I know they have them in their collection. Um maybe from some somewhere between the tenth and fourth century b c. E. I included a picture here for you to look at, Joe, so you can see what I'm talking about. You if you just you know, look, if you look one up and you didn't know what you're looking at, you might be forgiven for not recognizing this as a spoon. No. So it's got a spoon like depression in it, but if you were to flip it on its side, it almost looks kind of like a submarine. It's like a long cigar shape. And then it's got a big bulge, sort of cylindrical bulge in one section. Yeah, yeah it um, I see. It often described as as a T shaped pendent, but it also looks to me like a like a P, like a like like a big P with an extra stem on top um. And there is a there is a bowl area, but it's it's rather shallow. Uh So, in particular with the all Mac spoon pendance, these jade T shaped pendance are thought to have been used for ceremonial hallucinogenic consumption, and similar T shape pendance from the later Maya culture apparently signified the sacred breath. I was looking around for more information on these indran across. In November, paper from Andrew D. Turner published an Ancient meso America and the author here discusses UH an interesting possibility and that is UH that these UH spoons, with their what to our eyes look like a strange shape, they might be based off the basic shape of the iridescent shells of wing oysters. And if you look up a wing oyster, they do have this kind of p shape. So again going back to what we talked about in the in the first episode about the idea of shells being something that ancient people's would have used as spoons before the creation of spoons, and then in the creation of spoons, you know, fixing a shell to a stick, that sort of thing. Isn't it interesting that we we potentially see an example here of then actual invented spoons, actual artifacts mimicking directly than the natural shape of this shell that is no longer being used. Well, if there was a long running tradition of using natural you know, nature facts objects found in nature, like the shells of oysters, as spoons before you had a manufactory of artificial spoons, I can imagine that a spoon used in a specific religious or ritual context might be the one that you would most want to keep, like the old school spoon, you know, because we get into the religious or ritual mindset, we're often trying to recreate scenes of the past, or our imagination of scenes of the past. Yeah, yeah, I think so. And then of course throw into that as well the idea of the of the the instrument or the invention becoming a symbol and becoming because that's also what we see going on here potentially with these pendants as is, even if they're no longer being used to consume a particular substance, they become symbolic of of that that magical ritual or some sort of idea caught up in it. Now, from here this raises a question of For me, I was thinking, well, okay, now we've talked about spoons and their interaction with sacred affairs and political affairs, Um, but how about mythology and folklore. Well, given the place that the spoon holds in human lives back through ancient times, it shouldn't be surprising that it does occasionally become imbued with mythic and magical properties. For starters, the figure of the witch, or more any kind of magical um. Female presence is often associated with household items that take on magical properties. So the broom is a prime example of this in various tales, of which is we have the Baba Yaga's mortar and pestle that she uses to fly through the sky. Uh so you better believe there are some magical spoons out there as well. And I have just a few examples of these. Oh boy. So according to Spoon, Woman and Soul, the folk belief in Japanese Spoon by Wang, published in the Journal of dad Laian University, the spoon may take on magical associations in Japanese folk belief associated with quote, mountains, females, souls with a supernatural, magical power of birth, praying for peace, being healthy, and exorcism, etcetera. I was also reading an article by Gabby Thompson of Volgemuth about East German translations of fairy tales, and this is this is fascinating. This is kind of a tangent, but it's worth it. Um. The author points out that early East German versions of the brothers Grimm's fairy tales they've been very popular during the Third Reich, so great care was taken in translating them a new uh so that so as distress values considered important and remove those again for East German readers that they deemed quote harmful to a socialist education and hints modified. So here's an example. In the original Grimms of tales, ending of Rumpel still skin the best a imp becomes so I rate. They stomps his foot down so hard that his entire leg becomes stuck in the ground. And then he's even more enraged. He pushes down with both hands to to free himself from the earth, and in doing so uh rips his body in half. Okay, so just a really gory, just moral kombat type ending to Rumpel still Skin. But this would not do in the early East German translations. Um and and they they signed a couple of them. I think it's a Politz check and uh and uh co selec and they it ends up having this very kind of a Pucci ending to to reference the Simpsons instead of having Rumple steel Skin stomping and ripping his body in half. Instead quote, and he flew out of the window on a wooden spoon. And then that's the end. Yeah, is that the first mention of the wooden spoon? Um? I know, I'm not sure on that, but possibly yes. They just throw it in there like, oh yeah, by the way, he had a wooden spoon, and it's magic, and he flew away and nobody was ripped in half by their own anger. My home planet needs me hump Stealskin died on the way back to his home planet. Um. And by the way, that's also the name of the paper. And he flew out of the window on a wooden spoon. Um. So if you want to look it up, look that up. It's it's worth worth it. It's a it's a fascinating topic. Um. And And there are other examples of sanitized endings uh, such such as, uh, there's the Tail of the two Brothers, which in the Grimm's version ends with them burning a witch alive and a fire, but one of the sanitized versions ends with quote, the poison grew in her heart so much that she exploded. And in the other one, they hit her with a magic wand and just turned her to stone. Um. So it's interesting how these edits take place. I mean, these are very much like the the sanitized Nintendo fatalities that we've discussed in the show before. Alright, but back to spoons. Okay, more more magical spoons. Apparently in Albania there is a mushroom known as the witches spoon because it is said to grow where witch vomits. Good to know, I'm guessing I did not really research this any further. Was actually the full paper was behind a payball, so I wasn't able to to get at it. But I'm I'm guessing this is not a good mushroom. This is not a mushroom you want to eat. What makes you think that? I mean, if witches are vomiting it up, I don't think we want to go after it. But which is They're bad? So maybe what they vomited up is good. Okay, maybe, um, but don't do it on our account. Uh. Let's see. There are various folk magic practices that involve the use of spoons. The spoon is basically some sort of magical focus or something. Um. I ran across a Macedonian practice in which slips of paper with writing on them are burnt over a person's body in the bowl of a spoon. Now, you might remember, any of you who are listening to our Weird House Cinema episodes. You might remember in our Santo in the Treasure of of Dracula episodes. You might remember a book I brought up, Paul Barber's Vampires, Burial and Death, And Uh, I was looking in that book again. I may have to get a physical copy of this because uh they cover a late nineteenth century Prussian practice against vampires and then involved placing a bowl of cold water under the board on which a body, a dead body is lying, and placing a multitude of tin spoons on top of the body in order to prevent the dead from returning to unnatural life. And Barber notes that the spoon tradition here is interesting because there are some other traditions of from from that region, uh that call for sharp options like knives or even thorns to be placed on top of the body to keep it from rising again. But in this case it's just a bunch of tin spoons with elaborate arrangements like this, and the sort of general physical recipes for magic. I mean, this is the kind of thing that always makes me wonder where does this come from? Is this derived from a series of past observations or practices that have been estranged from their original context over time, or or just accumulated more details over time, or did at some point did somebody just like get a vision and make this up? I don't know. I think I think the obvious case here is that is, of course, as a body lays out there, it is potentially going to swell and in doing so, or or there's gonna be some disturbance within as a you know, as as decomposition begins to take hold, that could cause spoons placed delicately on the body to fall from that body and clatter on the floor, thus alerting you that's something that's happening. But then who knows what other mystical attachments are involved there as well, you know, concerning metal, and you know, just all these various um magical ideas that might be imbued in the just the idea of a spoon or the idea of a knife. Now, Rob, you've also sent me a picture of the surface of Mars for this episode. I wonder what game. Are you at here? Yes, this is a two thousand and sixteen photo and uh you're listening out there. You can look it up as well. It was taken by NASA's Curiosity Rover, and it shows a formation on the surface of Mars that does look like a spoon. You know, you you look at it, and yeah, it looks like a spoon. For some reason, someone has disposed of a spoon on the surface of Mars, raising all sorts of questions. I mean, I think the obvious reason would be there's nothing to eat on Mars. I mean, what you what are you even gonna use that for? I mean, unless you catch that rat The Curiosity rover also saw and then you make a stew. But I don't know how you make a stew because it'd be hard to gather enough water. I guess you really have to, you know, get a lot of that frost out of the sand. Yeah. Well, I mean obviously the spoon would be for the face on Mars, so that it can eat soup. Uh So, Yeah, the face on Mars is more popular and and certainly attracts more conspiracy thinking, but the spoon is also impressive. But just like the face, this is just a trick of the shadows. Uh. And in this case, it's a trick of the shadows on a vent effect. That's a rock shaped by wind. So basically you have just a a this this strange rock formation that is photographs in just such a way that the shadows make it look like a spoon. So look it up. It's it's it's amusing, Okay, secondary use Wait a minute. No, the spoon is to be placed on top of the face on Mars to make sure that the face doesn't move. That's true. Maybe that is what the That was the real purpose of this mission. Bring a spoon to Mars, place it to top the face so that we can keep tabs on it. All right, Um, we're reaching the end here. But I did want to touch touch base regarding some just some I guess spoon pop culture uh notes here. Um, I don't know if you've ever seen this joke, but there is a there's a wonderful video, the horribly slow murder with the extremely inefficient weapon. I have not seen it. I'm opening it now. Well, Um, it's it's it's it's long enough. You probably want to watch it later. But basically, a person is pursued by someone with a spoon, and they are hitting them with the spoon, attempting to kill them, but it ends up taking a long time. It's an extremely inefficient weapon, and so it takes the murderer the entirety of both their lives to pull it off. Okay, this looks very good Chaotic Rampage American Pictures Presents. Yeah, so so, yeah, that's some fun, some fun viewing for later on. Now. Just talk of killing somebody with a spoon, or certainly cutting out their heart with a spoon, that springs to mind Robin Hood's Prints of Thieves. You might remember the exchange between the guy that gives and the Sheriff of Nottingham. Uh in part because he had too tremendous actors there. You had Alan Rickman and Michael Wincott in those roles, respectively. And the discussion is about why you would use a spoon to kill someone. Uh. Yeah, Michael Wincott's character does not quite understand that. Yeah, he's like a spoon, why not an axe? And of course, uh, Alan Rickman's a sheriff of nodding. M says, because it's dull, you twit, it'll hurt more. Uh so fun fun roles in that film. Uh, the bad guys were a lot of fun in that Um. Let's see worth noting that the Ticks battle cry was spoon. In the Dark Tower series, the Crimson King, in his original mortal form, kills himself by swallowing a sharpened spoon, which seems to be part of a magical transformation that allows him to become this immortal being with godlike powers. Uh. And of course this raises the question, how about how about the spoon as an actual murder weapon? Are there any accounts of this? Well, there's a Bustle article about it by Sage Young published in twenty fifteen, and at least a couple of cases of spoons as weapons and even murder weapons have emerged. In two thousand four a man in the UK was acquitted of murder after he struck another man in the back of the head with a dessert spoon, And in two thousand fourteen, a Florida man was executed. Um he'd been on death row and one of his crimes was killing a prison guard with a sharpened spoon. I don't think that completely counts because this was not sharpened for culinary purposes. But it was of course sharpened in order to make a makeshift murder weapon and makeshift knife. But still it goes to show that, yes, you you can kill someone with a spoon. I don't know if you can cut their heart out, but you can certainly in someone's life now Rob. A number of listeners over the years, I believe, have asked us to cover the sport, especially we got this request several times on invention and I don't think we ever took anyone up on it. No, And uh, you know, honestly, I want to I want to keep it that way. I think that, um, we should do our part to erase the sport from history. I think we should declare it forbidden technology that that serves no purpose. Um, Like, have you ever used a sport and or been forced to use a sport and said this is this is great? Can I get some of these from my house? Can I get Can I get metal sports that I can use like it? No? Nobody does that. I'm anti sport. Have you ever did you ever have a pocket knife that had a spork in it? I don't think I did. I never had one of those really thick boy scout knives. With all the with all the extra things in them. Um. Oh, so you've never used a metal spork. I would say a metal spork is more defensible than the plastic sport, which is barely distinct, which is, I mean, pretty much the same as a plastic spoon. Yeah, um, I know, I do. We do have a couple of plastic implements that we sometimes refer to as spoon a forks, and it is a it is a fork on one side and one of the edge blades, one of the edge prongs of the fork, uh is is basically a butter knife. And then on the other end you have a spoon so that I like, like the spoon remains pure, and we can combine the fork and the knife into one implement and we just have to switch back and forth. I think that's called a sporf a sport. I'll send the word at least. Okay, well I would. I'm I'm marginally pro sporf, but I'm still anti sport. Well, maybe we should let the listeners go and then we can further discuss your the ethics of your holy war against the sport. Okay, yeah, I don't know. Maybe there's some compelling arguments out there for sports that I'm not aware of, UM, but I frankly doubt it. Somehow I feel that a plastic sport is the only uh utensil appropriate for the eating of the Texas specialty, the Freedo pie served in the freed Do's bag, despite the fact that there's nothing in a Freedo pie that requires the ties to pierce it. Um. Yeah, well that does sound plausible. UM. I've I remember having those in UM as part of the school lunch at one point when I was a kid, UM where they would just take the Freedo bag and they would just just like a lump of of meat that they drop in there. Yeah. Nothing feels better in your hand than just like holding a bag with something warm inside it. Uh. All right, Well, you know, I think it's it's time for us to wrap this one up. We're gonna go ahead and close the case on this fine assortment of spoons. We're going to take that case, so we're gonna we're gonna store it away and we're not gonna get it out again until there's a special occasion. But in the meantime, if you have some thoughts on spoons, the invention of spoons, the use of spoons. We would we would really love to hear from you, like, especially if it's something you know, regional, something cultural, something that's important to do you or your family that's been passed down some some kid bit about the history of spoons that we missed here, your thoughts even on sports, so we will we will entertain them. Um. And also in the meantime, I want to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. Core episodes published in the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Um. Usually we publish artifact on Wednesday's, listener mail on Monday's and Friday's we do Weird How cinema episodes and a vault episode a rerun on the weekend's Huge Thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch for us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows,