Episode 5: The Danish Cookie Tin

Join us in this episode of the Wisdom Teller podcast where we go hogwired! From Scandal water, John What’s his name, and a Hyde Park Homeless Horticulturist, to pert pearmongers, the Salem Witch trials, and a call for gentleness, it’s a bottomless tin-full of treasures!

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Recording in progress today! How are you? I'm good. How are you? I'm doing good. I'm so excited. Thank you, thank you, thank you for taking the time again so that we could do this and talk. We are not having an interview today because I had so many things that I wanted to talk with you about. And so today we're just going to have the chocolate sampler Danish cookie tin, everything but the kitchen sink episode and talk about a bunch of stuff. Is that okay with you?

SPEAKER_01 0:33

Yes, I'm so excited. I can't wait.

SPEAKER_00 0:35

Yay! Okay, so first things first, I have some addendums, ad hoc, and apologies. And actually, they're both apologies. So go for it. I want to apologize to both Jonathan Larson, may he rest in peace, and Lynn Manuel Miranda, because in my enthusiasm to talk about Tic-Tic Boom, the stage musical and the movie, I left entire words out of my sentences, which made it seem like the production is about Lynn Manuel Miranda. So here it goes. The stage musical Tic-Tick Boom is by Jonathan Larson. It's a mostly autobiographical story about Jonathan Larson's experience creating his passion project musical so he can get his foot in the door in the very competitive music industry. The movie Tic-Tick Boom is a film directed by Lynn Manuel Miranda about the same story. So apologies for that. Okay, that makes sense. Yes. So thank you.

SPEAKER_01 1:41

That makes sense. And then one of our listeners, hi Emily, if you're listening, said that it related to the play rent.

SPEAKER_00 1:50

Oh, yes. I'm so glad that you mentioned that. Yes, because when all of the work that Jonathan Larson did with this first opus that he was trying for to get in the door, this rock opera, he took all of the lessons he learned, what people would call failures that he didn't. He said, these are lessons learned. And he took them and he turned them into the musical rent, which is one of the best, most successful musical stage performances on Broadway of all time. So that's pretty amazing.

SPEAKER_01 2:27

It's yeah, it's incredible. It's so tragic that he didn't get to see it open, you know, that he passed before he saw his success. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:37

I know. And what's crazy is he passed the night before the Broadway debut of Rent. Oh my god.

SPEAKER_01 2:45

That's just heartbreaking. I know. I know. But it's it's wonderful. I love that play.

SPEAKER_00 2:50

Oh my gosh. Well, and as far as a legacy goes, wow, he really sets the literally set the stage for all of these people to benefit from his productions and his musicals. And yeah, so tick tick boom, please. You have to see. And then tell me how you think.

SPEAKER_01 3:05

I will.

SPEAKER_00 3:06

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 3:06

And then was there another one?

SPEAKER_00 3:08

Another part? Okay. I have a big one.

SPEAKER_01 3:11

It's okay. We forgive you. We love you.

SPEAKER_00 3:13

Okay, thank you. So this one goes to the entire Italian culture. Oh. Stereotyping and suggesting that the only job fields valued by Italian grandparents are doctors and lawyers. That is not a fair assessment. And it's solely based on my personal experience. And I have to say, even my grandparents would have been okay with an engineer or an architect or a politician or probably even a successful hotelier or uh master chef or restaurant owner or something like that. So apologies, the entire Italian culture does not necessarily feel that way. That was just my experience.

SPEAKER_01 3:56

But the funny part is when you said it, I was like, uh-huh. I know that was my experience too. But yes, I'm with you. And actually, we don't have lawyers in our family, just doctors and dentists.

SPEAKER_00 4:07

Doctors and dentists and pharmacists and people that were in kind of the healthcare field, except now socially accepted.

SPEAKER_01 4:16

Yes, yes. But I will say the younger generation I'm noticing is branching out and doing other things. We also have realtors in our family. And then one of my nephews is really branching out and doing so much work in business analytics. And I think it's so smart because it's what's current. He has moved with the times, in other words.

SPEAKER_00 4:39

That's kind of why hence the apology, because I thought even my own mom, she growing up, she kind of poo-pooed the standard fields. I told her I wanted to be a psychiatrist, and she said, Oh, you don't want to deal with people that are having mental health issues. And I said, Well, what about a veterinarian? And she said, You don't want to put your hand where things shouldn't be in animals. And then I said, I want to be a marine mammal biologist because my cousin was a marine scientist, a marine mammal researcher. And she said, What is that? And so she was like, No, do what you love. So it was more that generation, the depression era generation, I think. And I think it's become less and less over time. Yeah. Sorry, I think so.

SPEAKER_01 5:24

But you're right about depression era. I mean, that really affected my grandmother. So her father was murdered on the front lawn in Ybor City when she was 16 years old by insane, quote unquote, the businessmen of the day. Tampa. Tampa, yeah, which you know, we don't need to go into detail. But yeah, she so she had wanted to be a nurse. And but she ended up having to go work at a department store to help pay for her family when she was 16. So she was very focused on having a secure career. And being from the depression era, she would save pieces of tinfoil. And if there was cheese, grated cheese with your pasta, she would put it back in the jar after. She wouldn't like she wouldn't throw it away or waste anything.

SPEAKER_00 6:20

Yes, that was really common in that era, trying to save as much as you could. And that's where the uh cucina povera came, at least for the Italians. And there's cucina povera in all different cultures, but cucina povera was the poverty kitchen, the poor kitchen. It was whatever scraps you could find. How could you take that and make it into something that was enough for four people or six people and have it be some kind of calories and nutrition? I think that was a really, really prominent in that time. I have a book that I want to mention later that we're going to talk about that era as well. I can't wait. I can't wait. So I have a bunch of interesting things that came up this week that I wanted to talk to you about and get your thoughts. I sent you an article about Brittany's most expensive house. And it wasn't that that caught my eye. It was about this really interesting man named Anders Fernstadt. Yes. Um, he's a man that's what they call in England rough sleeping, what we call homeless, on its porch. And it caught my eye because it's this massive 45-room house. It's got an indoor pool. The interior was covered in gold leaf. It's valued at $200 million, and it's overlooking Hyde Park in London, and it's abandoned. And I saw all these flowers on the porch and teddy bears and all kinds of things. I said it to you because they talk about Anders' story, but you said you saw it. You were there when you were just in Hyde Park. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 8:03

So when I was in London in Knightsbridge area, and I remember walking by this house and thinking, I wonder what this is, because it reminded me of when I visited Kensington Garden, there were so many flowers and teddy bears and things like that for Princess Diana in tribute. And so when I walked by this house, I thought, I wonder what royalty is here. And then you sent me the article, and I was like, oh my God, there's a rough sleeper here. You know, I like that term better better than homeless, although homeless was accurate as well. But I didn't realize that. I didn't see the tent. They talk in the article about that he has a tent made out of multiple umbrellas. But I didn't see that. I just saw all the flowers and I thought, oh wow, there's a tribute to somebody here. Like maybe somebody passed away. Or it's crazy that the house has been tied up in legal arguments over the last, I would say, six years, I think since 2020, right?

SPEAKER_00 9:09

Yes. And even before that, the history's crazy, and that's part of the story. And it's part of the story that somebody else was researching just about the house. And then another journalist got involved and was like, wait, who's the person that's living on the porch of the house? Which is why I sent it to you because we're always interested about people's stories and how did they get here. But the house part, it was a row of terrace houses, not just one house. And the prime minister of Lebanon bought them all, made them one house, and then he was assassinated in Beirut by a truck bomb in 2005 or six or something like that. And then it's owned by all these different people, and now it's registered to a company in the British Virgin Islands, which is an offshore banking system where people tend to put things that they don't want people to know about. But to me, what was way more interesting, and that's why I sent it to you, is that Anders he grew up in Sweden. He was an amateur gymnast and table tennis player. He went to study horticulture and plantsmanship at the Royal Botanical Garden in Edinburgh. Right. Which was wild because then I started to realize, oh, the flowers. And in the story, he talks about all those flowers. He ended up in the US, San Francisco. He met a New York Times journalist who he helped write a book about robots. And that person introduced him to the Economist Silicon Valley correspondent who helped him get a job at the Economist London desk as a fact checker. Yes. And he lived on an old sailboat he bought on eBay. And then there was this huge storm. And that's when he started rough sleeping, when it destroyed his boat. But his story was so crazy because it's in The Guardian. So I didn't write down the name of the story, but it is something like the most expensive house in London. And just the way he talks and speaks, he's so interesting in the things he observes.

SPEAKER_01 11:14

Just the way that he words things is very funny. And he got involved with horticulture because his mom inherited a home and wanted help with the garden. I think is how it happened. He did it for his mom. And then he just liked the idea of plantsmanship and how that sounded. And he's a real character. It's too bad I didn't meet him. Next time I go to London, I hope I go up to the porch and say hi.

SPEAKER_00 11:38

You know, that's what I was thinking. Maybe you can do a remote wisdom teller interview with him. That would be amazing. That would be so fun.

SPEAKER_01 11:46

Oh my god, that's it. Wisdom Teller International. I love this so much.

SPEAKER_00 11:50

The global version. Yay! Okay, so we have that. That kind of folded into the rest of this week because I was seeing so many new words and phrases and idioms and learning about the etymology, the origins of those words. It seemed like everything I'd come across. Now I know algorithms tend to do that, but even people, coincidentally, I'd be talking to somebody and they're like, oh, I heard the etymology of this word. Did you know this? And so I had a couple that I thought were really interesting. And then I was telling you about it, and then you were telling me you have some. So can I get started with mine, the ones I want to talk about? Okay, please. Because these were so interesting to me. So the first one is spill the tea. Do you use this phrase? Say it again. Spill the tea. No, I've never used that phrase. Okay, so spill the tea and cups of scandal water. Those are the two that I want to talk about because I've heard people who use spill the tea before, like spill the beans, right? Spill the beans, spill the tea. People use it when they want to gossip. So let's spill the tea. So I looked up the origins of it, and apparently the black drag culture and the LGBTQ ballroom scene is where it started. First of all, did you even know that LGBTQ had a ballroom scene? No, I didn't know. Yeah, I didn't either. So originally, I know, originally it had nothing to do with the beverage, nothing to do with tea. The T was the letter T, and it stood for truth. So spilling the T, spilling the truth. Oh, the first time it appeared in the mainstream was in the novel Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Did you read that? I did not.

SPEAKER_01 13:42

No, and that, but there was a movie of that as well, right?

SPEAKER_00 13:45

Yeah, there was. What was his name in it? I can't remember. I know.

SPEAKER_01 13:47

I was just trying to think. I could picture him.

SPEAKER_00 13:50

He's a really popular 80s actor.

SPEAKER_01 13:52

Yeah, everybody that's listening is probably shouting out the name.

SPEAKER_00 13:55

We'll think of it along the way, I bet.

SPEAKER_01 13:57

It'll be an addendum. Kevin Spacey? No.

SPEAKER_00 14:00

Oh, good try. Good try. But I know it's like John, Jonathan. No, he played Jonathan in the movie Serendipity, which I love, by the way. And he was really popular. Yeah. Wait.

SPEAKER_01 14:11

Oh, that was Sam? I love him. He's coming to Tampa. You mean the guy in Say Anything? Say anything. No, I said Serendipity. He's in that too, though, right? Yes. Yes.

SPEAKER_00 14:22

I love Serendipity, though. I thought he was the one that was in the movie in the Garden of War. John Kusack. John Kuzack. Thank you. We love you, John Kuzack. We're sorry.

SPEAKER_01 14:32

And his sister. Love his sister, Joan Kuzak.

SPEAKER_00 14:36

She's amazing. And wouldn't it be funny if it wasn't him and it was Kevin Spacey that was in it?

unknown 14:42

Oh my God.

SPEAKER_00 14:43

That would be hysterical.

SPEAKER_01 14:44

Maybe they were in it together.

SPEAKER_00 14:46

That's true. That is not mutually exclusive. So apparently in this novel, there's a character, Lady Chablis. She says she avoids certain people so they won't spill my tea. But then it evolved over time to change the to the beverage tea, blending in with the phrase to spill the beans. Okay. So that's spill the tea. I've heard that before. But this new one that I heard about is Scandalwater. And it's from the Victorian and Georgia era, the 18th and 19th century. And it's this historical parallel bridge to spill the tea. You want to hear about it? Yes.

SPEAKER_01 15:24

I love, I just love the way it sounds scandalwater.

SPEAKER_00 15:27

Yes, I agree. And the etymology of it's fantastic. I want to write a whole book about it. So, as we know from our American history and the Boston Tea Party, tea was majorly taxed and it was super expensive. And so it was a luxury. And when I think about that, I realize every day I drink so much tea, but then it was only for upper class women. And they would gather in these really secretive tea rooms away from the men for the sole purpose of sharing juicy local rumors. Oh, I love that. The inside joke was that the water that was used to brew the tea was responsible for the gossip because the women weren't. It had to be something. And then that evolved into the tea being the fuel for the gossip. And so it's also called scandal broth and chatter broth. Isn't that interesting? I love that so much. And how did that one come to your attention? One of the things that I want to talk with you about is Tom Reed Wilson. He's a British TV personality. And I had sent you a video of his he has a YouTube channel where he does a word of the day or a phrase of the day. And one of his phrases of the day was scandal water. Oh my God, I love that so much. Yeah. I know. I was so happy. Okay. So do you have time for one more before we go on here? Okay. So Sarah said this one to me because I don't remember why we were talking about another word, I think. But anyway, she said, Do you know that the word nice doesn't mean what it does now? And I thought, how far away could it be? Well, apparently it's really far away because it was a really bad insult when it first started. The word nice the word nice, I keep believing it. Yeah. So I looked up the etymology. The Latin root is nessius, which means ignorant or unaware. And that's how it started. Yeah. And then in the Middle Ages, around the 13th century or something like that, it came from old French into the English language because apparently a bunch of the English language came from old French. And it was used to describe people that were foolish, stupid, or clumsy.

SPEAKER_01 17:41

Well, how did it transition to you're a kind, wonderful person?

SPEAKER_00 17:45

Yeah, I'm so glad you asked. Yeah. Thank you. Somewhere between the 14th and the 16th centuries, it transitioned to someone who was fussy about their details, which then changed to refined, because I'm not fussy about my details, I'm refined. And then that changed to pleasant, agreeable, and kind, which is how we use it today when we're talking about someone who's nice. Oh, I love that so much. Thank you. Yes. So I'm educated. And now I feel bad saying people are nice because I know where it came from.

SPEAKER_01 18:20

But you mean it in the second way, in the latter way, the modern way. I think Bill Bryson wrote a book about the English language. We'll have to look that one up. Do you know what I'm talking about?

SPEAKER_00 18:32

Yeah, I thought you gave that to me.

SPEAKER_01 18:34

I may have. I love Bill Bryson. He wrote Walk in the Woods, A History of Everything. He's brilliant and funny.

SPEAKER_00 18:41

Yes. Maybe he'll be on our podcast. That would be great. That would be meaningful. So the Bill Bryson book is called The Mother Tongue. Yes. Yeah. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 18:50

And I just love hearing those words. I have a couple for you. You ready? Yes, tell me. So the phrase cool as a cucumber. I have wondered where did that come from? And it came from a poem called A New Song of New Similes by John Gay. Uh, it first appeared in 1732, and it was a light-hearted poem about heartbreak. And he's talking about his passion being rejected. And he goes through the whole poem with similes. But this one particular section, I'll read to you, it says, Okay, pert as a pear monger, I'd be if Molly were but kind. Cool as a cucumber could see the rest of womankind. But oh, she's fickle as the wind and various as the weather and changes like a woman's mind and light as any feather. So it's a long, much longer poem, but he's talking about this woman, Molly, who's just cool as a cucumber to him. It also turns out that cucumbers, since they have a very high water content, they remain noticeably cooler to the touch. So even on a hot day, they're about 10 to 20 degrees colder. So then over time, people adopted the physical trait as a metaphor to describe somebody who has a cool head or who doesn't get rattled in stressful situations.

SPEAKER_00 20:22

So the original cool as a cucumber, people actually took the science aspect of the cucumber that it stays cooler, and they just started applying it to this idiom that we use. Oh, he's cool as a cucumber, she's cool as a cucumber.

SPEAKER_01 20:40

Yeah, the first person to do it was this poet John Gang. Like the whole thing is similes. He says, My passion is as mustard strong. I sit all sober, sad. It has a ditty, the world says, long, like boys at Christmas mad. So the whole poem goes, and then when he describes her, he says, Cool as a cucumber could see the rest of womankind. The way I took it is all the rest of womankind, instead of mankind, all the rest of womankind could see just how cool as a cucumber she was towards him, towards him specifically.

SPEAKER_00 21:17

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, that's a great one. And what about pert as a pear monger? I know I've heard that before. I want to start using that.

SPEAKER_01 21:25

Pert as a pearmonger. I know. I want to look that up too. Like pear monger, what is that? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 21:29

I mean, like, dishmonger is the person that sells the fish at the most.

SPEAKER_01 21:33

Right. Right. So pear monger must sell the pears.

SPEAKER_00 21:36

Yeah. So, but what would why would they be pert as a pearmonger? Because pears are a hard fruit unless they're ripe.

SPEAKER_01 21:43

So it's pert and I think he knew a particular pear monger that was very pert. I don't know, making it up. I mean, maybe if you sold pears instead of fish, you'd be pert too. You know what I mean? Um, so the second one I want to tell you, it's really too complex. So it is just the cutest, funniest thing. A friend of mine is from Italy. And when he first arrived in the United States, he was educated in English speaking schools in Italy, but still some of the nuances of idioms were new to him. So when he arrived in the United States, instead of saying hog wild or haywire, he would say hogwire. He would warm up the two. You know what I mean? So I looked up Hogwild and Hawire. So Hogwild, the earliest printed record was in the Galveston Daily News in Galveston, Texas, in 1893. And it emerged as a Midwestern and Southern Americanism. People living in rural farming communities used it to describe how domesticated pigs would suddenly break into crazed, uncontrollable frenzy if they smelled food, got spooked, or escaped into the woods. And I don't know if you know that there's something called FRAP, frenetic random activity period that puppies go through. So you know how they get the zoomies and they zoom around.

SPEAKER_00 23:12

It's called FRAP. So I'm thank you. I wanted to know that it wasn't the technical term, it wasn't really zoomies. No, it's not.

SPEAKER_01 23:21

It's called frenetic random activity period. So I think Hog Wild is a version of that. And then Haywire, the earliest printed record, was in the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Bureau of Forestry in 1905. And the context is the government workers published a bulletin titled Terms Used in Forestry and Logging. And it documented slang used by the workers. And they credited New England lumber camp loggers with creating, it was kind of an insult called a haywire outfit, which meant a very poorly equipped or dangerous or disorganized logging operation. And then later that shifted to go haywire. So over the next decade, the phrase evolved from describing bad companies to broken objects. And an anonymous writer for the Warren Evening Times newspaper in Pennsylvania printed the exact phrase go haywire for the first time in September of 1918.

SPEAKER_00 24:24

What? So why hay and why wires? Do we know that was that I don't know? I'll I'll put an addendum in that has to be an ad hoc because I really want to know what was one of those. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 24:37

Yeah. A hair wire. Isn't that interesting? So my friend called it hog wire, and I really like that better. Like you're going hog wild and haywire all at the same time. All the same time.

SPEAKER_00 24:49

That sounds really significant. That's like super zoomies. That's super zoomies. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 24:55

So I thought you would appreciate knowing that. And then don't ask me how. I think I was listening to music as I was researching that. And one of my favorite songs came on, which is Wishing Well by Terence Trent Darby. Do you remember this song? Yeah, of course. I love it so much. But when it came on and I looked at Spotify, it wasn't his name. It wasn't Terence Trent Darby listed. It was well, it was Sananda Maitreya. And so I think I'm pronouncing that correctly. And so I looked it up, and it turns out Terrence Trent Darby changed his name in 1995. He had a series of vivid dreams that revealed the name to him. And he described the feeling that the identity of Terrence Trent Darby had become associated with intense pressure and fame. And so he wanted a different name and a fresh identity. So he started using it in the 90s, but officially changed it in 2000, which I really didn't know until I saw on Spotify that it he wasn't listed as Terrence Trent Darby. And that wasn't actually his real name. I think his real name was Terrence Trent Howard, but he went by Terrence Trent Darby.

SPEAKER_00 26:07

That's so interesting the association people have with the names. Yeah. And when they change a name, it's like they get a fresh start. They can change because I know a number of people that have completely changed their names because they didn't want to associate with their past anymore. It seems like changing the name, changing the location, changing people that are around a person that can really help them get rid of a past that they don't want to deal with anymore.

SPEAKER_01 26:33

It seems to be his experience. There was a couple articles, there was something in The Guardian and Metro that that talk about his experience. Yeah, I thought it was really interesting.

SPEAKER_00 26:44

That reminds me of when I was trying to find Wild World by Kat Stevens. Do you remember that song? Ooh, baby, baby. Kat Stevens changed his name to that. But tell us about that reason. Tell about that. I didn't know that much about it except he changed his name to Yusuf Islam when he changed his religion. Yeah. And then and he has a bunch of beautiful new music under Yusuf Islam. Does yeah, there's one in particular. I'll have to remember what it is and get that over to you, and I can add it as an ad hoc. Kat Stevens, I love Peace Train.

SPEAKER_01 27:20

That's such a good one. Oh, that's a good one, too. He had a bunch of good ones. So I found this just now about haywire. It originally meant a soft wire for binding bales of hay, and it was a practical agricultural tool used to secure hay bales. The New England lumber camps gave rise to a more figurative meaning. Workers often use the haywire for makeshift repairs. And so it led to the phrase haywire outfit. And I think it's kind of like the idea of using band-aids and pipe cleaners to hold something together. I think when you were using haywire to fix something, it was like a shoddy outfit or a haywire outfit. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 28:08

Yes, that's interesting. So with lumbering and forestry, I wonder if they did it too, because if you don't cut down all of that dry stuff, it can catch fires. And the last thing you want is a fire in a lumber yard, right? So maybe that. Yes. Okay. So we're basically right now making up our own etymology for stuff.

SPEAKER_01 28:26

Don't you love it? I love that. Why couldn't we? It makes sense to me. It does. But yeah, this is the internet that says this. So you know it has to be true. It has to be true.

SPEAKER_00 28:38

Sarcasm. Sarcasm. While we're talking about agriculture and forestry and nature, I have a couple of books I wanted to tell you about. Can I tell you about that? Please.

SPEAKER_01 28:50

Yes, please do.

SPEAKER_00 28:51

Okay. Because I want to know if you read them because you read everything. And so I was curious if you read these. But if not, there are two that I would love to put on my list. One is called Yesteryear by Carl Claire Burke. No, I'm going to put it on my list. Yeah, it's been on a couple of the best new books of 2026 lists. It's about a trad wife homesteader influencer, which is a mouthful. And I have to admit, I've heard those labels before, but I thought, what exactly is this? And so Trad Wife is Trad Wives are online influencers, or they don't have to be online, but they're influenced by the online influencers that embraces historical gender roles. So submitting to her husband's leadership or focusing on homemaking or staying out of the corporate workforce. And they tend to dress with the 1950s vintage kind of styles.

SPEAKER_01 29:52

I've never heard of that trad wife.

SPEAKER_00 29:54

Trad wife.

SPEAKER_01 29:55

Yeah, yeah. Trad wife.

SPEAKER_00 29:57

And then the homesteader lifestyle focuses on agricultural self-sufficiency. So things like living on a farm and growing organic crops and raising chickens and preserving food for the winter. That's the homesteader. So this woman is a trad wife homesteader influencer. So imagine the two combining. She wakes up in 1855 and she has to live in the pre-modern ways that she promoted and celebrated on in 2026. Oh my God, I have to read it. I'm so what a great idea for a book. I thought that was brilliant too. Very interesting because the handmaid's tale and some of those other books talk about a future, a dystopian future that isn't so different from the elements of the dystopian past, especially when it came to women. So I really want to check that one out.

SPEAKER_01 30:59

That's really interesting. What's the other one?

SPEAKER_00 31:01

The other one is called Land by Maggie O'Farrell. Did you read that? No. Okay, so Maggie O'Farrell, she wrote Hamnet. Did you read or see that? Oh no, but I've heard wonderful things about it. So Hamnet is the story of William Shakespeare's son, but mostly his wife Anne. She has this supernatural intuition. She's a natural healer. She walks with a falcon and she's connected with plants and nature. And the stage version of Hamnet was playing at the Royal Shakespeare Company West End stage. So I thought maybe you saw that when you were in London.

SPEAKER_01 31:39

Oh my god. The last time I was in London, not the last time, but the time before I went to the globe, but I did not see it. That sounds amazing. What have you seen that at the globe? As you like it. As you like it. It was so wonderful. And you saw it at the globe, theater where Shakespeare himself himself did the production. I know. And the seats, you know, it's wooden benches. I mean, you're in Shakespeare Times, sitting there watching it. It feels like you're from that time and it looks that way. The building itself looks from that era.

SPEAKER_00 32:16

What an experience. Well, yeah. So this one, so Hamlet started out playing at the Royal Shakespeare Company West End stage, and then they made it into a movie. Okay, so Maggie O'Farrell, she wrote Hamlet, and it's about a time after the Irish potato famine in the 1840s. They called that the Great Hunger. And I've heard of this, but I didn't know the details of it. And I still don't know the details. But basically, a fungus destroyed Ireland's potato crops. And something like 60% of the people in Ireland, they got their main food from potatoes. And the way that they survived was through potatoes. So when the fungus destroyed the country's potato crops, there's a reason they called it the Irish Potato Famine and the Great Hunger. But for this novel, after the Irish potato famine, a father and son are working on creating a map of Ireland. And the way they're doing that is by moving around Ireland to create it. And they have a bewitched, enchanted encounter in the woods that changes their whole life. Oh my God, that sounds wonderful. Oh, that's such I can't wait to read them. Yes, that's what I was thinking too.

SPEAKER_01 33:34

I am reading a book right now that is lovely. And I did get it in London at the Daunt bookstore, which is lovely. It's called The Librarianist. And it's about a retired librarian that volunteers at an old folks' home and makes all these relationships and connections. And then it takes you back into the story of his own life. And I am at the part where they go back and they start talking about his life. It's really well written, it carries you through quickly. You want to see what's going to happen. I totally recommend it.

SPEAKER_00 34:10

Okay, that's a great one. The story to that a little bit reminds me of this new movie that's out called The Magnificent Life. Oh, did you see it? Have you heard of it? No. Okay, so it's animated, but beautifully animated. It's about a man who is a writer in France. And I think it takes place, it looks like the turn of the maybe the turn of the 19th century. And he is asked to write a story about his life. And as he starts writing it, his younger self, as a very young boy, comes back to visit him. And he and the young boy have this adventure together. His younger self, Marcel, I think his name is. And together they write the story. And it seems really good. I just bought it and I'm going to watch it tonight. It's out right now. Yes, you can stream it, but I bought it from iTunes from Apple TV. I watched the trailer a hundred times and I think it looks like one that I would want to keep.

SPEAKER_01 35:16

Oh, I want to see that. Okay. I'm so glad you told me that. Back to the book Land. When you were talking about the potato famine and the crops and how they relied on the crops, it made me think about the witch trials in Salem. In a toxicology class that I took, I heard that the issue back then was that the rye crops were infested with a fungus that produced ergoamine, which is a toxin that caused people to act in unusual ways. And so they attributed it to witchcraft, but it was actually a toxin in the food.

SPEAKER_00 35:55

Wow. Yeah. That's crazy because when you think about those times, people would use any excuse to say somebody was a witch. And it was just an incredibly horrible time.

SPEAKER_01 36:10

So I looked it up right now. It says in Salem, some of the accused experience discoloration and edema of the skin from this, it's called gangrenous ergoitism, results from vasoconstrictive effects of the ergoamine toxin resulting in desquamation and necrosis of tissue. And so some of the people in Salem experienced this discoloration and edema of the skin. And it was described as the witch's mark. And then there's something called convulsive ergoitism that causes distortion of the trunk and limbs and painful dystonia of the fingers. So, like uh scrunching and binding of the fingers and wrists. And they had feelings of delirium and lethargy and mania. So court records of the Salem witch trials tell of these symptoms that resembled an ergoitism, including temporary blindness, deafness, burning cessations, visions like a ball of fire, and multitudes of white glittering robes. So it was like a toxin in the food that caused these problems for people that were then attributed because people didn't have an explanation, they were attributed to witchcraft.

SPEAKER_00 37:28

Wow. Multitudes of white glimmering robes that they saw. That's an interesting element. Yeah. I wonder if that had anything to do with the graphic images of witches that came around that period. Because if you think about it, they always had this colored green skin or white skin. And they had kind of these gnarly hands. I wonder if that had anything to do with it. I wonder too.

SPEAKER_01 37:55

What I read to you was from the JAMA Network Journal of American Medical Association. It's a well-known thing if you're in toxicology or in medicine or whatever. When you said the potato famine, it just reminded me of the consequences of infestation of crops for people. But back then, for people that were relying solely on potatoes as the primary staple, or in this case, rye having toxic reactions or toxin in the rye was devastating. It was catastrophic.

SPEAKER_00 38:29

Peanuts are one of the biggest sources of mycotoxins because of how they're stored, because they're stored in these giant silos of peanuts, and these mold toxins, these mycotoxins can build up. And those mycotoxins are really dangerous. And so people have to be careful. Mycotoxins appear in a bunch of things, but peanuts are the ones that got the bad rap because it's so prominent and they find traces of mycotoxins in peanut butters and in things that have peanuts in them. So people have to be really careful. Aside from this, did you know that I have a relative that was hung as a witch in the Salem Witch trials? No, I did not know that. Oh my God, really? Sarah Wilde. How did that story come to you? So I was up at the farm and I was in one of the rooms in the homestead that is this incredible museum of books and artwork and old photographs and contracts between the Indian chief at the time and one of the relatives that sold them the land in the farm. And there was something in there, a newer thing. It's a Connecticut magazine called The Nutmegger that my cousin had given in interview saying that his wife had done some research and found out that a relative, Sarah Wilde, was hung as a witch at the Salem Witch trials. And hers was because there was a woman in the village that didn't like her for many reasons. And so she had her arrested for wearing a scarf. She was arrested for wearing a scarf. They went ahead and let her out. She was in jail for a little bit. And then she got arrested again for fornication outside of marriage. She went to jail for a little bit and she came out. And Sarah Wilde knew that it was the woman that kept getting her in trouble. And so there was this animosity between them. And one day the woman woke up and she was screaming, saying that she saw Sarah Wilde at the foot of her bed, a vision in the middle of the night, which apparently this was a clear indicator at the time that somebody was a witch. If you saw them in a dream or if you saw them in your room during the night. Oh my gosh. And so she saw her at the foot of the bed. And the next day her best cow died. And so that combined with the fornication outside of marriage and the wearing of a scarf put her on trial. And she was hung with 18 other women as witch. And she has now her grave in Salem. Oh my gosh, that's awful. I mean, why can't you wear a scarf? What's wrong with wearing a scarf? Well, apparently at that time it was very sassy. You know, they covered up their neck in those times. You had to buy your neck and cover your neck, but she didn't want to. She was a little more free than that, or she wanted to be more free than that. So my gosh. That was but what's really amazing to me is when I started researching it, and you came across these too because you just mentioned it. The court records of those times are so detailed. Yeah. If you go back and you look at Sarah Wilde, you'll see all the court records of what she did and then her relatives, some of them got dragged into it with her, and they were hung at the same time. It's just uh, I think it's important for all of us to at least be aware of that history and not just as a time of when, oh yeah, some people were burnt as witches, but why they were burnt as witches and what it's atrocious, it really is atrocious.

SPEAKER_01 42:10

People could have said anything about anybody that they didn't like.

SPEAKER_00 42:13

That's true. That was a way to get rid of them, right? Wow, wow, wow. So, on a little more uplifting note than the Caitlin Witch to have a lot of people. Please. Sorry. I wanted to talk about other words, but not from an etymology perspective. I wanted to talk about gentleness and tenderness. And this is a big old jumble dump, so bear with me. I sent you a video that my sister sent to me where Tom Reed Wilson, I mentioned him before, he's a British TV personality, and we love our British televisions. We do, we do. He talks about mental health challenges in this interview, and he talks about feeling like he has obsidian in his chest. And obsidian is this extremely hard black volcanic rock. If it breaks, it makes these super sharp shards. And he said something that really made me think. He said that his family also has that obsidian in the middle of their chest. And the fact that they recognize each other has it makes them more gentle with each other. And he said also more celebratory because they too have experienced it and they know what it feels like. And that's empathy. And we were talking about that in our interview with you in episode three. So those thoughts about gentleness also then made me think about our guest from episode four, Shannon, whose website for her children's art studio, The Wonder Studio, it has a word of the year from 2020, which was tenderness.

SPEAKER_01 43:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 43:53

And I wanted to ask her these questions, but we ran out of time. So I'm going to talk with you about that. Okay. This really got me thinking about society and humanity now. And I feel like gentleness and tenderness seem to be reserved for only babies or baby animals or fragile, vulnerable things. And to me, society appears at least to neglect or resist or avoid being tender with each other when we're adults. To me, anyway, that's what it seems. And it seems it's much more likely that we'll see people being aggressive or assertive or rough or brutish or in your face, especially now. We tend to see those more in the wild with behaviors and expressions. So I have three questions that I wanted to talk about. Okay. The first one is do you think tenderness and gentleness are valuable now in society, or can they be considered harmful and dangerous? What do you think about that?

SPEAKER_01 44:57

I think tenderness and gentleness are more valuable now than ever. I really do. The only way that I can see that they'd be harmful is if somebody is tender and gentle in a world that's not tender and gentle back, they might suffer. But I think I really cherish and value the tender people, the people who can take a breath, an extra moment to put themselves in other people's shoes and to be softer with each other. And yeah, I think it's a nice way to be tender and uh and gentle. Why be another way? Why be harsh?

SPEAKER_00 45:41

Well, that's what I was wondering. I'm wondering if in these times, for some people, being tender and gentle might be seen as a vulnerability. I think that there might be a perception that if they're tender and gentle, that equals weak and vulnerable. And if they're weak and vulnerable, then they're going to be prey or preyed upon. And so I'm, I was just reflecting on and thinking about. I wonder if that's why some people aren't tender, that they feel like they have to put on this aggressive, assertive, rough or brutish kind of facade. Maybe for some people it's not a facade because they worry that they don't want to be taken advantage of or they don't want to be preyed upon.

SPEAKER_01 46:26

I think that's why. I think that people maybe don't want to be vulnerable and they equate gentleness and tenderness with vulnerability, but vulnerability is not weak, right? It's it's a strong thing to be vulnerable. But yeah, I think that people have built up barnacles. I call them barnacles on themselves so that they can stay safe. But I do think, you know, I have a meditation group, and that group is very gentle with each other. So it's nice to have a little haven of places where people are gentle, but I do wish people more people would be gentle. I personally I respond better to gentleness myself.

SPEAKER_00 47:09

And so in the Buddhist group, when you talk about people being more gentle with each other, do you mean that they give each other grace when they make mistakes? Or do you mean they're just kinder or softer? Or how does that manifest when you talk about them being gentle with each other?

SPEAKER_01 47:24

Yeah, it manifests as they listen, they have compassion. The way they speak to each other is just kind, not rough, you know. I don't, I don't know. It's just an energy, it's an energy of gentleness. They also give each other grace. There's not, there's not an edge to it.

SPEAKER_00 47:46

I was wondering, too, if the 2020 version of tenderness that Shannon had, maybe that had to do with COVID as well, because people were really assertive and aggressive and in each other's faces and not forgiving and not very graceful or not very tender with each other at that time.

SPEAKER_01 48:06

Yeah, I bet that's why she had it there at that time. I could talk to you all day long, but I'm gonna have to wrap up.

SPEAKER_00 48:15

Is there any other thing before we wrap up? Well, one more thing. Maybe for homework, I am going to ponder how we can display more tenderness and gentleness and kindness either without feeling vulnerable or with being okay with feeling vulnerable. Because I think really it's one of the only things that and helping each other that's going to make sure humanity stays humane. I think so too.

SPEAKER_01 48:41

I think so too. And as always, it is such a pleasure to talk with you. And I loved all our different topics and all the idioms and all the talk about authors and plays and books. So thank you so much.

SPEAKER_00 48:55

Thank you. Have a beautiful day. Thank you. Bye. Bye.