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Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of IHeart Radio.

Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.

My name is Robert Lamb.

And I'm Joe McCormick. We are currently in the midst of rerunning our episodes about The Harth from last year, which if you've been listening to the show for, well, at least a year, you know that these were episodes that talked about the central place that the hearth has long had in human domiciles, this place that is a source of heat, that can be a source of food, and is also kind of like the epicenter of culture for the immediate household. And also there are all these additional supernatural ideas associated with it. It becomes a gateway through which spirits might

enter into the home and so forth. Yeah. And so today's episode is going to be essentially kind of a

sidebar to all of that that was partially inspired by a recent visit that I made to New Orleans.

Travel there with my family and New Orleans, of course, is full of all sorts of interesting history.

And I was touring a mid-19th century home that had been restored and redecorated so that it would look like it did back in the day.

And, you know, there are all sorts of little details and technological innovations of the time period that are pretty fascinating.

But one in particular kind of caught my eye.

And it wasn't anything super advanced either.

It wasn't related to plumbing or ventilation. Well, a little bit to ventilation, as we'll discuss, but it wasn't like high tech of the day. In fact, it had some kind of antique aspects about it. It was a fire screen. It was a decorative piece on a little stand placed in front of the fireplace.

And I'm sure I've seen these before.

Like looking back, I'm like, oh, there's, here's one in this museum I went to and so forth.

I don't know that I've ever really looked at one and thought about it all that much.

But in this moment, I really was taken by it.

I don't think, why is that there?

Why would we have something between us and the fire? Because as we discussed in the hearth episodes, like everybody loves looking at a roaring fire, right? Why would you put something in front of it? And, you know, this question has some flaws in it as well as we'll get into. But that's what we're going to be talking about in this episode today. What was the design on the fire screen you saw it? Like, what did it look like?

It was like flowers or something. It was, I think that was part of it too. It was like, why would

you look at this when you could look at a fire, which is, you know, so enthralling and ever-changing

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