Well, Happy Saturday morning all!! It is great to be here, and apparently this will be my life from now on. Where I was working, which I hated, closed down a week and a half ago. Bummer. However, when a door closes a window opens, so they say. I have been hired at another office, and will be working Monday through Friday, 9 to 4:30 - Rolls Royce hours. So, that worked well.....
Technology makes me think of tools, am I headed in the right direction, Cyn??

Nancy.

Congratulations Nancy! I am thrilled for you and so glad the hours are better!

Tools...well, yes, but not in the sense of carpenter tools and the like.

I am down to the last two days of my soft diet. Yippee. Better than the liquid diet, but still somewhat limited. I hate white bread. Ice cream, however, is fine with me! Ha.

Cynthia

I am still on my diet - lol. The plan is to be 'average' for my significant birthday, next year. Down about 16 lbs. so far on South Beach - and white bread and ice cream sounds yummy. I limit my carbs big time, but tonight may have some Pancetta Carbonara on whole wheat pasta. Any other carbs come from fruits and veggies. No taters. 8(

No wasn't thinking of carpenter's tools, exactly.

Nancy.

South Beach is actually one plan I like. The chicken with mushrooms and onions (I think) is a really yummy recipe. Very impressed that you are down 16 lbs. that takes a lot of work!

There are many many variations of this tool. It has changed some over the centuries, but it does endure.

Cynthia, who may have soup for lunch since I am tired of PB&J

I'm here but still pondering, congrats on your new job and working hours Nancy.

Annette

Yea me, and I still have a pot to pee in!!! lol.

Nancy.

There are so many different forms of this tool. Even chimpanzees use a form of it according to Jane Goodall.

Working on coming up with some fun clues, but so far haven't been terribly successful obviously. Time to polish silver. Maybe that will give me some ideas.

Cynthia

Hmmm...OK, so not warm. I was also thinking of part of a game.....

Nancy.

I'll have to reflect on this.
TM

Hand tools?

Annette

You do hold it in your hand, even though a few are said to be born with one elsewhere. ;)

Oyyyy.....

I guess I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed!!

Nancy.

LOL Tail ?

Annette

Sitting here stirring my hot chocolate and waiting to be able to give all of you stars before morning.

Cynthia

Oh crap, I was born with a plastic one in my mouth!! lol.

Nancy.

Heehee!

AHA!!! Through the fog am I seeing a spoon?

Annette

Can't help myself - and are they all 12, or what?? lol.

Nancy.

Here is a link that might be useful: Substitute!!!

I remember a certain president, who will remain unnamed here, being described as born with a silver foot in his mouth by the governor of his home state. :)

It seems pretty clear now that the answer rhymes with loons. Right?

I've been gone all day to our state's capitol to visit my sister and to attend a birthday party for a 90 year old mom of a friend. Seven total hours of driving has put us in need of some rest, so it's off to bed with us.

TM

Wow, hard to believe they were ever that young! Love the connection, Nancy! You are so clever.

So, yes, spoon is the answer.
**** for Nancy, Annette, and TM.

From The Atlantic:

Dr.Margorius/Shutterstock/Rebecca J. Rosen
Spoons -- along with their companions and rivals, chopsticks and forks -- are definitely a form of technology. Their functions include serving, measuring, and conveying food from plate to mouth, not to mention culinary spoons for stirring and scraping, skimming, lifting, and ladling. Every human society has spoons of one kind or another. In and of themselves, these utensils are mild-mannered -- certainly in comparison with the knife. Spoons are what we give babies -- whether ceremonial silver christening spoons or shallow plastic weaning spoons containing the first gummy mouthfuls of baby rice. Gripping a spoon in the fist is one of the earliest milestones in our development. Spoons are benign and domestic. Yet their construction and use has often reflected deep passions and fiercely held prejudices.

Spoons hold up a mirror to the surrounding culture precisely because they are so universal. There are fork cultures and there are chopstick cultures; but all the peoples of the world use spoons. The particular form they take is therefore very revealing: a pretty Chinese porcelain blue-and-white spoon for wonton soup is part of an entirely different culture of eating than a Russian spoon filled with sticky preserves or the ladle-like wooden spoons used in poor European households to eat soup from a communal pot, passed from mouth to mouth. Functionally, a spoon is an object that aids with ferrying food into the mouth. In the 1960s, Jane Goodall saw chimpanzees fashioning sort-of spoons from blades of grass, to make it easier for them to slurp up termites. In the distant past, humans lashed shells onto sticks and used them to consume foods too liquid to be eaten with fingers. The Roman word for spoon reflects this: cochleare, which comes from the word for shell. Romans used these little spoons for eating eggs or scooping out shellfish. For pottage-type dishes they had a larger spoon, the pear-shaped ligula.

At different periods, people favored various spoons, depending on what they most liked to eat. Mother-of-pearl egg spoons reflect the Edwardian fondness for a soft-boiled egg (mother-of-pearl or bone was used because egg yolk stains silver). Hanoverian mustard spoons hint at what a vital condiment this fiery fluid was in the English diet. The Georgians of the 18th century loved roasted bone marrow and devised a series of specialized silver spoons and scoops for eating it. Some of them were double-ended, with one end for small bones and another for large. The idea was to hold your piece of roasted bone in an elegant white napkin and use the implements to tease out the soft, fatty nuggets of marrow. Marrow spoons were akin to the complicated series of spoons, needles, and picks that accompany a French plateau de fruits de mer, a sumptuous seafood platter.

Mother-of-pearl spoon (Wikimedia Commons/Rebecca J. Rosen)
The marrow spoon is obsolete (though the fashion for roasted bone marrow and parsley salad recently started by the London chef Fergus Henderson may yet bring it back). Other spoons, however, have succeeded in making the leap from specialist tool to universal implement, none more so than the teaspoon. The teaspoon first came into existence when the English started adding milk to their tea in the second half of the 17th century. It was needed to amalgamate the milk, sugar, and tea in the cup. It was a wealthy person's utensil, separate from the main dinnerware. On the face of it, it seems odd that the teaspoon should have made the leap from the rarefied atmosphere of an English tea table to cutlery drawers around the world. The utensils of the Japanese tea ceremony -- the bamboo tea scoop and whisk -- have not traveled in this way. Nor have other accoutrements of an English tea -- such as sugar tongs and tea strainers, which have remained the preserve of those who still enjoy the ritual of stopping for a full bone-china afternoon tea, complete with scones and cream: a dwindling band. You only rarely encounter anyone polite enough to use tea tongs now, not least because sugar cubes themselves have passed out of vogue. Yet teaspoons are still everywhere.

The teaspoon did not immediately travel the world. In 1741, the inventory of the French duc d'Orl�ans included 44 silver-gilt coffee spoons but not a single teaspoon. The French are still likely to use the smaller coffee spoon as a unit of measurement over the teaspoon (abbreviating it to cc, short for cuiller � caf�). But elsewhere the teaspoon reigns supreme, even when tea itself is not drunk. From the 19th century onward, the teaspoon became a basic element of flatware in the United States, despite the fact that coffee was more usually drunk; and thence, its influence spread. But why? How did the teaspoon make the leap into the mainstream culture while other specialist spoons did not, such as the Victorian berry spoon with its lacy trim or the small silver salt shovels that were made in profusion in the 18th century, some like mini-soupspoons, others like tiny ice-cream servers?
So, in extremis, one spoon can definitely be used for all meals, which is not to say that it will work equally well for all foods. Because the end result is always the same -- getting food in your mouth -- it is seldom recognized that an eating spoon can operate in at least two different ways. The bowl of the spoon can be a kind of cup, from whose edge liquids are drunk. Or it can be a shovel, designed for ferrying more solid mixtures. A very clear example of the spoon-as-shovel is the kafgeer, a large flat spoon used in Afghanistan for serving rice, rather like a spade. Throughout the Middle East, there are special shovels and spatulas for serving rice, and when you use them, you notice that they really do a much better job of picking up every grain than our rounded, oval spoons.

Similarly, when you look at early European spoons, you can detect radical differences in shape, reflecting different usage. From a nunnery on the remote Scottish island of Iona, medieval silver spoons have survived that have a distinctive leaf-shaped bowl: definitely a shovel, though a much smaller one than the Middle Eastern rice servers. These spoons would have been ideal for scooping up thick porridge, but not much good for liquid soup. For this, medieval spoon makers made large round spoons, whose bowls were too big to fit in the mouth, but just right for sipping.

Now, mostly, we don't think too hard about how spoons work. The reason for this is partly that the modern spoon with its ovoid bowl marks a compromise between the cup and the shovel. Pick a dessertspoon from your cutlery drawer. Could you use it to scoop up mouthfuls of pilaf, say? And could you use it to drink thin broth? The answer to both these questions should be yes. Your dessert-spoon is probably not perfect for either task: too shallow for soup, too deep and rounded for rice. But it will do. For John Emery, this compromise was not good enough. Emery was a spoon fanatic, a historian of cutlery who experimented in the 1970s with making replicas of historic spoons and testing what could and couldn't be eaten with them. From the perspective of function, he lamented the trifid and all its successors. In Emery's view, the compromise between cup and shovel was "seldom really satisfactory." And it was made still worse by the annoying habit food had of oscillating between the states of solid and liquid. Sometimes soup was thick and lumpy like porridge, and sometimes porridge was thin like soup. Etiquette told Emery to use one spoon; function, another.

So, slurp that ice cream, soup, tea, whatever and enjoy.

Cynthia

Good fun, Cyn - thanks!!

Nancy.

Thinking of tools and spoons ...
It occurred to me that a woodworker's gouge is a sort of spoon. Here's one actually called a spoon gouge being used to carve out what? --- a spoon!
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Also, there are all kinds of fishing spoons.

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Anyone have more?

Good one, Cynthia. Thanks for the hints that made it possible for us (me, at least) to get to the right answer.

TM

Nancy and TM, thanks! TM, I wish I were as good at clues as you always were. My subtle ones (liquid diet, scraping the bottom of the barrel, soup, and ice cream this week) don't seem to work very well. I will try to come up with something better for next Saturday-something that lends itself to fun clues. Of course, if I were clever, I would have been the one to post the link to The Who-that was a perfect clue Nancy!

Cynthia