S3 E38 Humpty Dumpty: An Analysis

SPEAKER_01 0:12

Good evening and welcome to the Comforting Voice podcast. I'm your host Shasta Ray, and I am joined in the studio by Emmy the Minimacaw. We're trying a different configuration tonight. So she did, in fact, see the cigar box. She tried to get to it. I didn't let her. We had to do the tea tag and fortune cookie slip draw independently of the recording, but I brought her own toy box down here. I put it where the cigar box used to sit, here on the desk. I put her snacks on there, her little cup of water, and she's gonna be occupied, I think. So you might get the sweet sounds of Bird in a Box ASMR. Good luck with that. I hope it works out for you. Okay, before we get rolling on tonight's episode, let's get cozy, let's get comfortable, let's kick back and settle in and figure out how it is we're gonna relax tonight. Are you here to hang out? Are you here to fall asleep? Whatever the case, find that sweet spot that you most like relaxing in. Adjust your pillow, get it all squished up in that perfect position so you're comfy. Maybe you just have your feet up, whatever the case, make sure that everything you need is at your fingertips. If you've got a beverage of choice, you've got it right there. Cold bottle of water, hot cup of tea, whatever you like. Make sure your listening device is set at that perfect volume so you don't have to mess with any of that either. And now you're ready to stretch. You're ready to go. So engage in a really good productive stretch. Reach through your arms and legs, really offload some of that stress from the day. Work through your fingers, wiggle your fingers, same with your toes, give them a good wiggle, and then release that stretch and all that tension of the day, that stress of the day, the yuck, it just goes away with the stretch. You engage in the stretch, you stop, stress is gone, wonderful thing. Follow that up with a deep breath of air. Inhale to about the count of four, hold it to about the count of three, take another quick little top off inhale, hold it for another count or two, and then try to exhale to about the count of eight if you can make it to eight. Six is good. You just want to exhale a little slower than the inhale process. And all of that, the stretch, that little inhale pattern, oh my gosh, it's like a total reset, and it helps prepare you to just drift off to sleep, if that's what you're here for. If you're not here to fall asleep, you're still gonna get relaxation benefit out of it. You're gonna shrug off stress of the day, that toxicity of the day, and you're ready for some positivity. All of that, and it didn't cost you a dime. Amazing. Alright, so the pickle chicken has already tired of its playground that I set up for it, and it hasn't even noticed its snacks. So here, right there. Look, it's your favorite. Okay, so your tea tag for tonight. Develop the power of listening. You've already got that one in the bag. You're part of the listener base. And your fortune cookie slip. You deserve to have a good time after a hard day's work. Yes, you do. The numbers off of the back of the fortune cookie slip for any of you that like to play the lotto or number games. Three, nine, seventeen, twenty-four, twenty-six, and thirty-four. Good luck if you play the lottery or number games. And we're gonna throw this in the archive receptacle. The bird's mouth is full. We're safe. Okie dokie. Tonight is a special edition of Join the Fun. This is the segment where we take a look at three different countries from our listener base, and we learn a little bit about each other, and tonight we're gonna do every country on my list still remaining that begins with the letter N, starting with Nicaragua. The rare double volcano lake, Nicaragua, is home to oh here's one of those words again. Omatepe, Omatepe Island, which is located in the middle of Lake Nicaragua. It is the world's largest island in a freshwater lake, and it's formed by two distinct volcanoes joined together by a narrow isthmus. Nicaragua is called the land of lakes and volcanoes. It holds the record for the most volcanoes in a single country in Central America, and you can actually go volcano boarding there. What is volcano boarding? It is sliding down black volcanic ash at speeds of up to fifty miles an hour. And last, the rare green flash. Because of its unique geography, Nicaragua is one of the best places in the world to catch the green flash at sunset. This is an optical phenomenon where a tiny spot of green light appears on the upper rim of the sun for a split second as it dips below the horizon. So if you're joining the fun from Nicaragua, you represent rugged volcanic resilience, the spirit of adventure, and a rare sun-kissed perspective of the world. Next on our list is Nigeria. First in Nigeria we've got Nigeria's film industry known as Nollywood. Nollywood produces more movies annually than almost any other country in the world. This is second only to India's Bollywood, and Nollywood produces roughly 50 films every single week. Nigeria is a language powerhouse. Nigeria is one of the most linguistically diverse places on earth. While English is the official language, there are over 500 indigenous languages spoke across the country, making it a literal treasure trove of human communication. Nigeria is known as home of the twins. The town of and I cannot pronounce this Igbo Aura, Igbo Ora in Nigeria is famously known as the twin capital of the world. It has an unusually high rate of twin births, which scientists believe might be linked to the local diet, specifically the high consumption of a native type of yam. So if you're joining the fun from Nigeria, you represent boundless creative input, a beautiful tapestry of human language, and a uniquely vibrant energy that celebrates life. And last on our list for join the fun this week is Norway. The sunless town, the town of Oh here we go with one of those words again. Ryukon Ryukon in Norway. It's spelled RJ U K A N Ryukon. The mountains are so steep that the town is in total shadow for six months of the year. To fix this, they installed giant computer controlled mirrors on the mountainside to reflect sunlight down into the town square so residents can enjoy light. And there is noble geography. So while the Nobel Peace Prize is famously awarded in Oslo, Norway, the other Nobel Prizes, physics and chemistry, etc, are awarded in Sweden. This is based on Alfred Noble's will that was written back in 1895. And last, they have an official knight of Norway, and it is a penguin. Norway's king's guard mascot is a king penguin named Sir Nils Olav. He lives at the Eidenberg Zoo, but he is an official Norwegian guard and has been knighted by the King of Norway. So if you're joining the fun from Norway, you represent ingenious innovation, a deep respect for peace, and a whimsical sense of humor that reminds us to take the world a little less seriously. That was fun. Oh my goodness. You know what I think we need to do is check in with Lon and see what he sent in for this week's Got a Minute.

SPEAKER_00 8:59

Boredom. Boredom is a mechanism for our mind to wander. It is the act of daydreaming. It is what makes us seek new things. Boredom generally is viewed as unpleasant, as a bad emotional situation, characterized by feelings of dissatisfaction, restlessness, sometimes even fatigue. For a bored person, fatigue mentally gets worse with the perception that time is slowing down. When you're waiting for those last ten minutes of work, they feel like an hour and a half, don't they? You're bored. Boredom is a great source of unhappiness and meaning. We desire to escape from boredom when in reality, like I mentioned, it is the mechanism that tells our mind to wander, that tells our mind to innovate, that tells our mind to seek wisdoms that we don't even know about yet. Boredom can actually improve our mental health. In this age of endless information, our brains are overloaded with info and distractions. The sheer wealth of capacity of information uses limited cognitive resources for productive activities. So, in other words, when we've got a constant reach at our fingertips, whether it be videos or audio or music or whatever that might be, it takes away from finding other things in our brain. Our brain is set up to use boredom. Boredom can increase our creativity, for example. It provides an opportunity to turn inward, thought time, study time, reflecting time. Boredom motivates a search for novelty. If we're bored, we are looking for something new. Those things around us are old and dusty in our in our mind anyway. So it is what makes us seek new boredom is that which encourages us to shift to our goals and projects that are more fulfilling than the ones that are right in front of us. And finally, boredom and self-control skills. Boredom actually affects our ability to focus and pay attention because interest is lost and we tend to wander. Among students, for example, boredom results in disengagement from class, and that leads to poor performance. They can feel bored when they lack the cognitive resources to focus. Learning to endure boredom at a young age is great preparation for developing self-control skills, regulating our own thoughts, emotions, and thoughts. Given these benefits, we should embrace boredom rather than looking for an escape, and we should also allow our mind to wander because boredom could be the opportunity for reflection on exactly what we want in this life. Thrive.

SPEAKER_01 12:37

Okay, well, there you go. And as you can tell by the title of tonight's episode, I was a little bit bored. I I decided to take that boredom and uh see where it would lead. And uh it led to tremendous things, or however he phrased that. Anyway, we're gonna talk about Humpty Dumpty again, guys, because I mean how many of you tuned in to the Humpty Dumpty episode and had fun with that? That was awesome. That was the long-awaited Humpty Dumpty episode. And so really the question I I personally had to ask myself was what can Humpty Dumpty do for you? No, wait a minute. That's not what I asked myself. I asked myself, what in the heck is a Humpty Dumpty? That's what I asked myself. And um and then when Lon actually found out that the Humpty Dumpty chapter was upon us, he got very excited and he let me know immediately that that is his personal favorite poem ever written about a canon. And I was like, you know, it is my personal favorite poem ever written about a canon, but then how did this egg thing come into play? Where did this turn around? I too had heard the the canon explanation of Humpty Dumpty's existence. So I decided to dig a little bit deeper, and I I wanted to present to the truth about Humpty Dumpty, because I mean this is Humpty Dumpty we're talking about. Does anyone know who Humpty Dumpty really is or was? We need to find out. So tonight we are gonna tear that egg apart and find out what in the heck is Humpty Dumpty. Okay, so here's the spoiler alert, as you may have already guessed, he wasn't always an egg, and he may not have been a canon. I have found references to a riddle, a cannon, a drink, a king, a person, and of course the infamous egg shape. Okay, so let's see, where do we even start? Let's start in the year 1797, and this is when the first printed version appeared in Juvenile Amusements by Samuel Arnold. It was a riddle, actually, and it was written just a little bit different than what we know it as. Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall, fourscore men and fourscore more could not make Humpty Dumpty where he was before. So fourscore would be around 160 people. The original version didn't mention King's horses at all, and the riddle wasn't what is Humpty Dumpty, it was likely just a way to test a child's imagination. No one ever actually solved the riddle because at the time it was just a silly nonsense image meant to provoke a laugh. Now the end result, so that was the beginning of Humpty Dumpty, end shape was with Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass. Lewis Carroll was the one that actually put an egg shape onto Humpty Dumpty, and that's how it got so famous that way. That was in 1871. So before 1871, Humpty Dumpty was just a personified, likely, humanoid type, clumsy character. Lewis Carroll, in his brilliance, gave the egg shape, and that just stuck forever. Now, the theory of the cannon. This would have been the siege of Colchester, and the theory is that during the English Civil War, which would have been in 1648, and that would have been more than a hundred years before the poem, Royalists were defending Colchester. They mounted a massive heavy cannon that they nicknamed Humpty Dumpty on the wall of a church. Now enemy fire is said to have knocked the cannon out of the wall, the cannon fell, and it was so heavy that even a massive crew of men couldn't hoist it back up. But why this is dismissed as maybe not part of the origins or the answer to the riddle is because this is actually a retroactive legend. There is actually zero contemporary evidence that there was ever a canon that was ever called Humpty Dumpty, and historians view this as a twentieth century invention, people trying to find serious historical meaning for a silly rhyme that may never have actually had a meaning. But interestingly enough, there was a cocktail, there was a drink, and in the seventeenth century, Humpty Dumpty was slang for a potent alcoholic drink made of boiled ale and brandy. And eventually Humpty Dumpty was slang for a short, stout person that drank a lot and that would stumble around, and hand in hand with that, a Humpty Dumpty was also a short, stout person that was clumsy, which I would imagine stemmed from the drunk theory because drunk people stumble around, they're clumsy. So this theory has been dismissed because while Humpty Dumpty was slang for a drink, there's no direct link between the drink and the rhyme in that period of literature. It's likely a coincidence, people just simply liked the words they're silly. There's another theory that it was a reference to King Richard III. The theory is that it is mocking King Richard III, who was hunchbacked, so he had kind of this weird shape appearance, and he fell. He was he apparently was killed in the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485, so that takes Humpty Dumpty even further back as far as like a historical reference that was then put into the poem in the 1700s, but this is dismissed because it's a weak theory. It relies on the assumption that a Humpty is a cruel nickname for a hunchback. And because the rhyme didn't appear until about 300 years later, it's unlikely that a nursery rhyme was oral tradition satire for a specific king three centuries without it ever having been written down somewhere in those three centuries. So that's how that was dispelled. So here's just a little bit of extra Humpty Dumpty trivia that I was able to find. The egg, Humpty Dumpty Egg, wasn't always white. Early illustrations after Lewis Carroll came up with it, Humpty Dumpty was sometimes depicted as a person sitting on a wall, a strange egg-shaped man in a suit, and he only really became a giant egg standard after the 20th century cartoons cemented the image. How it was changed to King's Horses, nobody really knows, but somewhere in the 1800s the phrase King's Horses was a common way to describe resources that were powerful but couldn't solve a simple problem. So that referred to fixing a broken fragile object with brute force. So that's kind of one of those opposites going on again. And I mean Lewis Carroll used a lot of those opposite kind of push and pull meanings and um double meanings and stuff like that in his humor. And then also with Lewis Carroll, he has Humpty Dumpty say, I'm not an egg. He kind of got insulted over that. It's a joke. Carroll knew he had created a paradox by turning a riddle character into a literal object. So there was some just kind of odd humor that's probably lost on us today because our heads just don't go there in that fashion. And don't forget, back in the day when all of this happened, there was no digital anything, there was no electronics, there's no radio, nothing. So people entertained themselves with poetry, riddles, stories, books, that sort of thing. There was also jokes of the day and references of the day that we just don't get now, right? So there could be something that we're totally lost on. It was just never written down, but maybe it was commonplace reference. I kind of leaned towards a couple of these, actually. So the verdict that I came up with doing some searches was that Humpty Dumpty, although popular belief, wasn't a canon. He wasn't a king, he wasn't a drink, and he definitely wasn't an egg. He was the physical manifestation of something that cannot be fixed. And maybe, maybe we keep telling this story, maybe he became popular because everybody has Humpty Dumpty moments, things that shatter and stay shattered. No matter how many horses and men we throw at the problem, there's those problems that happen that just can never be fixed again, right? Whether it's mundane or big, physical, situational, right? So there's some interesting, interesting food for thought for you on the simple concept of Humpty Dumpty. Oh my gosh. Now I gotta be honest with you, I've gotta kinda lean towards the canon thing in my own head. When they wrote the poem, Four Score Men and Four Score More could not make Humpty Dumpty where he was before. That kinda sounds more like a very large object that something happened to. So maybe the canon thing is correct. I don't know. To me, personally, I have to say that's the most logical, but there's just no evidence out there to back it up. So I think my new favorite theory is that it really is just an internal riddle. Humpty Dumpty is something that falls, it breaks, it gets shattered, and no matter what kind of force, no matter what kind of resources you have, you're never gonna write it again. So what does that mean to you? What are your humpty dumpty moments that you've had to get past and learn from in life? Are they things that you can laugh at? Are they big that you can't talk about yet? Is it still just a children's rhyme to you? I don't think there's any true wrong answer. Whatever Humpty Dumpty is to you, let's go with that as being the right answer. This has been so much fun tonight. Oh my gosh. But don't forget, we're not done with Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass. We're gonna be back on Friday. We're gonna have another super fun chapter. It is action-packed, it's crazy, you don't want to miss it. It's the lion and the unicorn. We'll catch you then. Sleep tight, good night, and bye bye, and you can see that.