Behind the Scenes Minis: Head Canon Intrigues

00:00:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, A production of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. We talked about Unearthed all this week. We sure did.

00:00:22
Speaker 2: That quote darning tool or maybe not a darning tool that was found?

00:00:29
Speaker 1: Oh my goodness, Son Bendolin. It's very funny.

00:00:31
Speaker 2: And also if you see a picture of it, you might wonder why anybody described it as like a darning tool in the first place, because it does have a very suggestive visual appearance. I don't know if it looks that way from every angle, but from the photos that are, you know, accompanying articles about it, it does look very suggestive to me.

00:01:03
Speaker 1: I was tickled when at the end of the second one, the second episode, Uh huh, you read a listener mail that mentioned Star Trek, because I had a note in my notes that I take as we're talking about what might go behind the scenes about Star Trek, which is that I just was suddenly thinking about doctor Bones being horrified by trepanation. Oh yeah, and how completely like prehistoric the idea was. I forget what his exact line is, but he saves Chekhov from being trepanned when they're yeah back in the twentieth century, and I was.

00:01:43
Speaker 2: Like, yeah, nowadays. Trepenation to me brings up two immediate associations from literature slash television, and one of them is Outlander. There's an episode in Outlander where somebody has a head injury and clear wants to save them, and the way to save them is like relieving the pressure on their brain, and she knows what to ask for, which is a triphine, which is what the tool was called that was used to make the whole entrepidation. And the other I think the very first time I ever came across that term was reading the His Dark Materials. There's like a reference to a skull that's found that has has had a hole made in it, or I feel like early on in those books. I don't remember if it made it into the TV show or not, because I think if it had been, it would have been like one of the early seasons of the show, which is a while back now.

00:02:51
Speaker 1: I don't know where the first place I would have been. I feel like I had a either a science or a history teacher who had like a ghoulish moment of enjoying explaining that to us, while I was sure writhed in our desks.

00:03:04
Speaker 2: It's also possible that I learned about it in like some course that I don't remember now. I increasingly, as I get older, will realize that like I just have no I have no memory at all of some something that I will discover later. Oh No, I definitely was there when that happened. I interacted with that thing once before that. Yes, I'm also gonna pat myself on the back for you know, not breaking into any sort of song or giggle fits when we talked.

00:03:36
Speaker 1: About Cusco me, oh sure, sure. Emperor's New Groove one of my favorite Disney movies. Yeah, yeah.

00:03:43
Speaker 2: The thefts from the new Bedford Whaling Museum, whoo are just there's a couple of things that when I was researching that kind of made me go what. And one of them was the thefts from the new Bedford Whaling Museum, which I became aware of because a friend of mine sent me a link about one of the articles. And at that point, like it was some weeks after these thefts were discovered, and I was like, what, this whole story is just wild.

00:04:15
Speaker 1: It is like wild and just a.

00:04:18
Speaker 2: Lot of different ways. And the fact that apparently multiple like antique and collectable dealers were like, this piece just seems too nice for somebody to just be selling it to me. So like that, I was very captivated by that whole thing. And also I had seen the headlines about the sword believed to be a replica turning out to be real. Like I had seen those headlines, I had bookmarked them to look at them later, I did not realize that this was not just like a sword that somebody had somewhere. It was a sword in the collection of the Field Museum. And that was what made me get white. Wait this happened that the Field. That adds a whole new layer of me being fascinated by the story. Whoops, yeps.

00:05:13
Speaker 1: I also got a giggle about the heart shaped pendant that we talked about. Yeah, that was made of high quality materials but not high quality workmanship, and how this has led researchers to be like, oh, it may have been made for like a situation where it wouldn't be seen up close. And I was like, here's what this sounds like to me, Okay, And I'm obviously this is pure speculation. In my own ding Darnery, somebody's like idle child, by which I mean probably an adult child with more money than sense, thought that they were gonna make jewelry, and they bought really nice, expensive crafting supplies. Kind of made a piece of joke, like, yeah, that happens all the time, now, sure.

00:06:07
Speaker 2: Sure, I'm also like somebody's apprentice took from the wrong cabinet.

00:06:12
Speaker 1: Right, also very possible. These are my head canons of what really was going on with that.

00:06:17
Speaker 2: Yeah, one of the head canons that I often have when I think I've mentioned this before. Sometimes when I'm putting these together, I will find two news releases from two different universities about the same study. And most likely it's just that each university has their own PR department and each university like wants to send out the thing. But in my head, I always imagine that some sort of intense, maybe bitter rivalry toll among the coordinating universities and now they're not speaking to each other. I mean, aways possible, right, that's actually going to come up soon in a non unearthed episode, which you know, we'll talk more about when we get to that. Which is I just I have I've written a whole mental backstory about what I think happened, and why there is a discrepancy involving somebody's birth year. It is not a real thing. It is my own made up fantasy land. I feel like that's a thing that we as humans are prone to doing, is like filling in the gaps. Oh yeah, and that the important thing to remember is that, like try not to get mad about the gaps that your brain filled in when you don't actually know what happened.

00:07:50
Speaker 1: Right. I feel like this could be applied to a media literacy course. Yeah, because people think, like especially I mean, as you know, I'm a big star Wars nerd, and there's always so much speculation about what's going on behind the scenes, said Lucasfilm. And it's like usually the for any any situation of like seeming corporate intrigue or whatever, the explanation is usually really boring. Right, Oh no, they're pr people just like lost each other's email, or like they just decided they would each do their own or But I mean, it's fun to speculate, and it's a great way to be creative. But yeah, yeah, as long as you're not married to that as an expectation golden.

00:08:32
Speaker 2: Yeah, So, uh, I'm still enjoying putting these episodes together. This Uh, this time was a little bit unusual because I put these together while Holly was on vacation, and so often I will uh. I think there were a couple things that I had run into before you had left, and I think I had told you, Like the field was one of the things that I was.

00:08:54
Speaker 1: Like, do this thing happen at the field?

00:08:56
Speaker 2: But a bunch of this I worked on while you were not there, and so you did not get peppered with as many weird things that I stumbled across while working on them.

00:09:06
Speaker 1: Okay, cheese, yeah, yeah, milk. I had never been a milk drinker. Cheese, We'll eat it by the pound. Yeah, magic. Yeah.

00:09:19
Speaker 2: So Happy Friday, everybody. Whatever is coming up for you this weekend. I hope it's going to be great. We will be back with a Saturday Classic tomorrow. We will have a brand new episode on Monday. Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.