Fun with corned beef

[@LogicalNiko]

The key that was left out was that the Van Gogh exhibit was traveling to the US for the first time and so he had snuck his fake ear exhibit into the museum the night before the exhibit opened to massive audiences. Thus the key of the prank was that he convinced tens of thousands of people that this was part of the exhibition.

[@stevensutton4677]

Who else is watching this at work instead of doing their Fly Paper Reports?

[@MarylandFarmer.]

Dear pentagon this week we have caught 37 black flies, 12 horse flies, and one bee (unknown species)

[@cheetahman79]

Procrastinating getting ready for school that starts in 30 minutes

[@KBRoller]

@@MarylandFarmer."It's fuzzy, but that is inconclusive. Will properly debrief the bee and report on its species status within 24 hours."

[@DukeDukeGo]

I'd argue people in the past were much more familiar with how organs look like. Not nessecarily human organs, but from slaughtered animals, and at least pigs look pretty similar on the inside. Maybe not in the city, but countryside and small towns it def wasn't uncommon to have at least some rabbits or chickens for meat. And even in the city you didn't have all that processed shit

[@lilywashere27]

Exactly! If nothing, they knew how body parts looked better than the average modern, young Western person does (I still have trouble distinguishing which chicken organs are which when I eat it! They all look brownish and spongy when cooked, so it's difficult to tell.)

[@aaronaaronsen3360]

This and also they were way less safety and health laws, so people tended to die a bit more. Also 1935 was no even 20 years after WW1 so probably there still were a lot of veterans there.

[@VoidHalo]

It probably depends on the era and whether you lived in the city, or a farm. At one point, people no doubt butchered their own animals. But I would expect professional butchers made the process more efficient. Being able to get every bit of meat you can. Or if you lived in the city, I imagine the meat was already butchered when tou got it. Before all of that, when everybody lived hand to mouth, it would have certainly been common to butcher your own meat. Can't pay for a butcher if you have no money. And you can't make mich money living hand to mouth.

[@webchimp]

Since this is about pranks and it's a Tom Scott video, it's a good time to mention that time he and a bunch of friends at uni cover all the lights outside York Castle one evening making it go dark.

[@sammarks9146]

The video that autoplayed after this was one with a chili recipe, including a history of the Chili Queens of San Antonio. I have never looked up a chile recipe in my life, but now, although I've watched every Tom Scott video I can get my eyes on, KZbin thinks I'm interested in all things beef.

[@deamon6681]

So here is your problem: You have auto play enabled.

[@FreakyRufus]

I have auto play disabled, BUT, the next up video for me is about Salisbury Steak being the first fad diet.

[@andrew-m]

To be fair, the video (at the time that I'm writing this) is titled "Fun with corned beef" so you're going to get some number of cooking videos recommended to you after watching this one. For me, there's three in the first 10 suggestions on the side of the webpage, while the second heading after "From Lateral with Tom Scott" is titled simply "Corned beef" and has those three followed by many more.

[@fonkbadonk5370]

One of the few times auto play lead to something good. I highly recommend binging Max's entire channel, at least if you're into food but also history in general. Start at the Garum and hard tack times a few years ago, as those two will crop up regularly :) *clack clack*

[@abigailcooling6604]

KZbin's now recommending me a corned beef recipe. Even though I have never, ever looked at a cooking channel on KZbin at all.

[@VinnieBartilucci]

As I learned it, the reason he'd done it was the showing was clogged with rubberneckers who'd read in the tabloids about his descent into madness and his ear action, and stood there so long the true art lovers couldn't get a look at the paintings. So he made this and placed it on the other side of the room, and it attracted the gawkers away.

[@ReyosBlackwood]

1:25 "Purely based on your professional reputation, I was thinking that it was some sort of scam." Uhhh okay XD

[@tielessin]

Could you put the question from the beginning into the description?

[@knssoftware6018]

Our UK corned beef is not the same as US. UK corned beef = US bully beef. US corned beef = UK salted beef. Using the wrong one would not have even fooled an Egyptian!

[@bagel_deficient]

I've never seen or heard of bully beef but it appears to be Spam made of beef instead of pork?

[@timothymclean]

Okay, that makes a lot more sense. I haven't heard of bully beef either, but -corned- salted beef does _not_ look like ear.

[@WBenIB]

I'm enjoying these Latearl clips.

[@galacticmechanic1]

Given that we all use considerably more expensive LED bulbs today, that prank could cost you a couple hundred to replace.

[@MercenaryPen]

given that this prank was perpetrated against a hotel- it would probably cost them substantially more than a couple hundred to replace all the missing bulbs

[@phoenixearthling]

This show/podcast (I mostly listen to it on Google Podcasts), I have to say, has changed the way I think, in some ways. I think more laterally now! (Maybe I could have phrased that differently to sound smarter)

[@rachelblaquiere9134]

Can't believe I had the exact same wrong Tutenkhamun idea at the exact same time as Tom.

[@timothymclean]

3:38: "I thought it was gonna be him pretending it was Einstein's brain or something like that." That would be one heck of a con, considering Einstein was still using it in 1935.

[@MagicHasArrived]

4:55 "slither of time" 🐍

[@VoidHalo]

They did meat man on Bob's Burgers. The kids made a man out of old mincemeat and made a stop motion movie with it.

[@woo545]

My orange tabby is name (Foux) Roux after Van Gogh (his nickname for crazy redhead) because his ear is clipped.

[@themoviedealers]

In college we manually forwarded all the dormitory phones (there must have been 200 of them) to the office of the guy running the University radio station.

[@robertwilloughby8050]

I thought it was the Coogee shark case and it was an arm!

[@erictaylor5462]

Never ask, "Why corned beef." instead ask, "Why not corned beef?"

[@cykkm]

0:35 "I'm a big Hugh Troy fan" sounds dangerous. Doubly so when said with such a serious face.

[@mryodak]

I thought it would be franz ferdinand spillage.

[@nikitaavdeev9681]

He did a little trolling

[@VoidHalo]

Ironically, even anatomy students don't get to see the organs as they naturally are. The body is preserved with formalin, which makes tissue soft and rubbery. There's a great video showing an unpreserved brain, and it's so soft that it can't even support its own weight. It's like gelatin. In your head, It has to float in cerebrospinal fluid to keep from deforming under its own weight. But after it's preserved, you can slice a brain like a loaf of bread. And this is how all anatomy students will see the brain in class during a cadaver dissection. I took anatomy and physiology in school. That's why I know this. I also had a friend who was a mortician and would often keep him company at work during the late nights. Helping to prep a body for a funeral in the morning. Good times.

[@GimpyChinaman]

Where are the destructive dogs promised in the video description? Did they eat the fake ear?

[@benzymatic]

Hugh Troy would have loved KZbin lol

[@ayaanamin3339]

nice

[@SteinGauslaaStrindhaug]

0:20 Sounds like modern art or some performance art thing...

[@SteinGauslaaStrindhaug]

3:00 ok, not art... But what is it shaped like... From what I remember corned beef has a sort of grainy meat texture and would even if dried up would look rather meaty; so it must be an imitation of some internal organ (or perhaps a body part that is skinned). And I would actually think that most people know hows what kidneys and livers at the time (not necessarily human versions, but cattle offal was much more common to prepare and eat yourself a hundred years ago than today); so it would have to be some organ that is not normally eaten like a (skinned) penis or testicles (both of which would be sufficiently weird and morbid to draw a crowd), or if it is regularly eaten, actually has a similar texture to corned beef like a tongue, or muscle tissue, or perhaps it could have been pressed into a bulbous shape and claimed to be a tumor? If it was painted or covered in something to hide it's normal corned beef texture I don't understand why it even would be made of meat at all; because then you could have made it out of more or less anything... unless you were going to eat it... in which case it probably wouldn't be stored in a velvet lined box since that would indicate it's dried up and not fresh. Besides having fresh human meat would be much more suspicious (and probably illegal) than having an old preserved sample, which could be claimed to be an ancient relic from a saint or something; or perhaps just a morbid memento of some long dead famous person, like Napoleon or whatever.

[@SteinGauslaaStrindhaug]

5:20 Person with a very famous association with a body part... Vincent van Gogh and his ear?

[@SteinGauslaaStrindhaug]

I've heard some theories recently (think it was in a history podcast) that the cutting off his own ear thing might actually have been a lie to protect a friend who accidentally (or in a drunken rage) cut his ear off with a sword, perhaps in some sort of illegal duel or just drunken thing. It's one thing to be mad but to be able to slowly and deliberately slice off the whole ear; everything but part of the earlobe apparently; yourself in an act of self harm is rather extreme and somewhat unlikely. I could understand starting to cut it but it probably would very quickly be too painful to continue. And if he had impulsively cut it of very quickly in one slice; I would have assumed the logical way to do it would be to grab the earlobe and cut upwards which would not leave much of an earlobe at all (but possibly leave a bit of the top of the ear). Having part of an earlobe remaining (the presumably easiest part to cut off) and nothing of the cartilage; seems to suggest a cut from above, which is rather odd choice if you're doing it yourself. But as a fencing injury; it makes a lot of sense.

[@yellowstonejim]

Einstein's brain is a good guess Tom. All you have to explain is how Einstein lived another 20 years with out it.

[@shaunhouse8469]

Not only the wrong artist but Picasso was alive until the 1970s. I am so old my life overlaps with that of Pablo Picasso

[@PsychoSoldier01]

my first guess when I was watching this episode was "rasputin's penis" and i was actually really surprised when he said it wasn't a genital of any kind

[@lastnamefirstname8655]

clever prankster.

[@ajs41]

Sorry to complain, but why do Americans/(Canadians) continue to insist on pronouncing Van Gogh's name incorrectly? I know the British way of saying it isn't 100% right, but it's a lot closer to the correct Dutch pronunciation.

[@ChrisWar666]

Jesus saves! With your local building society 😁

[@somerandom138]

why tf did i think hitler 💀💀💀 i was a decade early

[@JimC]

Do that nowadays and it'd be treated as legitimate art and dubbed a profound commentary on how society treats artists or some such BS.

[@edwinhuang9244]

-Banana on a wall- The Comedian - 2019 Hold up, I'm getting news that the person who made The Comedian got sued for copyright infringement.

[@Squant]

I mean, it would be a commentary. Not the meat itself, but everybody's reaction to it.

[@sophiamarchildon3998]

Blind guess: Either made a model of the brain, or a sex organ.

[@sophiamarchildon3998]

Mid-guess 5:20 : The "hidden" hand of Napoleon?

[@ferretappreciator]

What did brian mean when he said "thats the most political way i can answer that question"? Like genuinely what does thay even mean

[@Connor-sj7uv]

Assuming he meant politically correct

[@anarchodin]

'political' and 'polite' have the same root, and for a very, very, _very_ long time they were more or less interchangeable.

[@sammarks9146]

"Political" also means something like 'tactful', ie, inoffensive.

[@ferretappreciator]

@@anarchodin thank you, that makes a lot of sense. I assume talking about genitals on Tom's show would be a little awkward lol

[@SylviaRustyFae]

​@@Connor-sj7uv I mean, its a very not PC way to describe genitals as just male or female; its way more PC to either use the medical term penile and vaginal reproductive systems, or juet say reproductive systems, or just say genitalia. The prob with describin genitals as male or female is it excludes around 2% of the population who are intersex and have what is defined medically as "ambiguous genitalia"

[@apocalypsepaul]