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The content below is from episode #171 of the Who’d a Thunk It? Podcast

RECOMMENDATION SEGMENT

  • This week I recommend PRINCESS MONONOKE
    • But I can’t help but think I just recently recommended this Studio Ghibli classic… so I will recommend a few more.
    • It’s just that I finally saw Prince3ss Mononoke in theaters and it was by far, the best viewing I have experienced of my favorite anime movie.
    • Princess Mononoke is one of the most awe inspiring things I have ever watched. I get emotional sometimes when I think about it. I whistle the theme song frequently and it will forever hold a special place in my heart.
      • But I recommend this too often LOL
  • So I would also like to recommend Knock at the Cabin Door by M. Night Shyamalan
    • Was this Night’s best movie? No… it wasn’t. Was it a perfect movie? No, it had some flaws for sure, but it DID get me to think about it days after watching it and that is, in my opinion, one of the best qualities a movie can have. And that is also, something M. Night Shyamalan always delivers.
    • Here’s the plot:
      • While vacationing at a remote cabin in the woods, a young girl and her parents are taken hostage by four armed strangers who demand they make an unthinkable choice to avert the apocalypse. Confused, scared and with limited access to the outside world, the family must decide what they believe before all is lost.
    • I think Dave Batista did a wonderful job of acting. Some critics that tear this movie to pieces, saying it was boring and shotty writing… praise Batista for his work in the movie.
    • My biggest critique: it could have been about half the runtime. This movie drags on for no reason.
  • And finally, I want to recommend, not just two titles this week, but a third, the short film from 2020: Opal
    • Like Knock at the Cabin Door, this is a scary one… but unlike Knock at the Cabin Door, it does NOT waste anytime… its a short film
  • Where my other 2 recommendations were relatively well-known with big marketing budgets and/or cult followings like Studio Ghibli, Opal is a pretty unknown gem.
  • You can watch it now on HBO Max, but I will warn you… it is F**king terrifying. At least, I think so.
  • The basic description is:
    • A curious girl investigates the cries she hears coming from a forbidden house across the street.
  • Jack Stauber directed and did the voices and sang every song in the 13 minute short movie
  • The claymation (a style of animation I typically shy away from) is what makes this truly horrifying. Shannon told me to stop watching it LOL.
  • I loved it.

NOW FOR THE MAIN EVENT

  • I’ve been going to and hosting poker games since I was just a kid.
    • I can vividly remember the first time my buddy’s stepdad Mark brought us to a living room poker night.
      • Some may say that was bad parenting skills, to take some pre-teens to a poker game consisting of smokers and beer guzzlers, but my buddy’s stepdad was a solid guy. He had his faults, but taking care of us kids was not one of them. I think because he carefully treated us like adults on occasion seriously helped us grow into men.
      • There was one of those old TVs with a wooden frame and they were watching the Baltimore Orioles game through the broadcasting fuzz and airborne Marlboro smoke.
      • That day I was taught how to play Texas Holdem. and I never forgot how cool it felt playing.
    • So that’s why this past weekend while I contemplated a good topic to cover for this week’s episode, I thought about the standard 52 deck of cards we used that day playing poker with my buddy’s stepdad Mark.
      • The very same deck of cards my friends and father inlaw play on about once a month in my own living room… and the same deck used by thousands of casinos all over the world.
      • The same deck is used by cheap and pro magicians. The same deck that is shuffled by old ladies day-in and day-out so they can beat their fellow old lady friends in their retirement homes.
    • Why is this particular deck of cards so popular?
      • Where did it come from?
      • Why are there kings, queens, jacks, and jokers?
  • PlayingCardDecks.com writes:

“…Playing cards have undergone a radical transformation since their first beginnings several centuries ago. Our modern playing cards evolved into a deck of 52 cards with four suits in red and black and with two Jokers by making a journey that took hundreds of years and involved travelling through many countries. In fact, the most significant elements that shaped today’s deck were produced by the different cultures and countries that playing cards travelled through in order to get to the present day.”

  • Cards are typically made from paper… a pretty flimsy material that doesn’t last long and so there isn’t much in the archeological record about playing cards.
    • most historians believe cards originated from the East, likely Asia as far back as 1,000AD coming from the same time as tile games like dominoes and mahjong.
  • We do have hard historical evidence of playing cards in Europe dating back to the 1300s and 1400s so they are at least that old…
    • A Swiss monk dude named Johannes wrote a manuscript in 1377 that briefly mentions some playing cards and lists a few different games he knew could be played with them.
    • Ironically, some of the best evidence of playing cards from this era come from religious sermons that denounce gambling as sin.
      • They point to card games and dice as some of the worst offenders. These religious sermons are the reason we know the 52 deck card was used at least as early as the 1400s.

ITALY AND SPAIN

  • The suit signs in the first European decks of the 14th century were swords, clubs, cups, and coins, and very likely had their origin in Italy. They are referred to as the Latin Suits
  • The court cards from the late 14th century decks in Italy typically included a mounted king, a seated and crowned queen, plus a knave. The knave is a royal servant, although the character could also represent a “prince”, and would later be called a Jack to avoid confusion with the King.
  • At first cards were expensive to make and therefore reserved for Europe’s upperclass. They were handpainted and looked really cool!
    • But soon the plebs began to make their own versions in a much more efficient way. This lead to the popularity of cards spreading across all social classes in Italian and Spanish societies… and eventually card games popularity began to spread across borders.
    • The soldier class is typically seen as the class responsible for spreading cards all across Europe.

GERMANY

  • When cards made it to Germany, that notorious german engineering made the fad spread like wildfire.
    • The Germans got to work printing cards like mad, but not just on that flimsy paper.
    • They printed cards on wood and even copper.
    • But the Germans didn’t just print cards as the Italians and Spaniards, they put their own articistic flair on them.
      • Their own suits were acorns, leaves, hearts, and bells. They reflected the German rural way of life.
      • A throw back to a recent episode of Who’d a Thunk It?, one German suit was of hawk-bells to show the german people’s interest in Falconry.

FRENCH

  • That’s when the French came into the picture.
    • The French contribution to playing cards is most notably the current suits we use today: Hearts, Spades, Diamonds, and Clubs.
      • Translated to French: coeurs, piques, carreaux, and trefles
    • The second most notable contribution of the French was to break up the suits into two different colors: Black and Red.
      • The French also made their suit symbols more simplisitic and therefore easier to stencil onto cards. Where the Italian, Spanish, and even German suits had beautifully intricate suit symbols that required delicate artwork, the French created the simple symbols we use on cards today. The result:

“[Production was] a hundred times more quickly than using the traditional techniques of wood-cutting and engraving. With improved processes in manufacturing paper, and the development of better printing processes, including Gutenberg’s printing press (1440), the slower and more costly traditional woodcut techniques previously done by hand were replaced with a much more efficient production. For sheer practical reasons, the Germans lost their earlier dominance in the playing card market, as the French decks and their suits spread all over Europe, giving us the designs as we know them today.”

  • A historically intriguing aspect the French added to playing cards was that they attributed face cards (King, Queen, Jack, Joker) of each suit to actual historical figures.
    • King David (Spades), Alexander the Great (Clubs), Charlemagne (Hearts), and Julius Caesar (Diamonds),
      • They each represented  the four empires of Jews, Greeks, Franks, and Romans
    • For Queens they had the Greek goddess Pallas Athena (Spades), Judith (Hearts), Jacob’s wife Rachel (Diamonds), and Argine (Clubs). 
    • and for Jacks (then called Knaves) they had La Hire (Hearts), Charlemagne’s knight Ogier (Spades), Hector the hero of Troy (Diamonds), and King Arthur’s knight Lancelot (Clubs)

ENGLAND

  • Taxes started to soar in France so card printers moved to Belgium where decks of cards found another rennaisance.
    • The Belgian printers spread cards all over Europe and most notably to England.
    • England was the first to call the French coeurs, piques, carreaux, and trefles the English version: hearts, spades, diamonds, and clubs
      • If you know a little French you will notice piques (pikes) and trefles (clovers) don’t translate to spades and clubs. For some unknown reason, the English took spades and clubs from the Italians.
    • Once again, I will quote PlayingCardDecks.com as they explain England’s unique contribution:

​”It is also to the English that we owe the place of honour given to the Ace of Spades, which has its roots in taxation laws. The English government passed an Act that cards could not leave the factory until they had proof that the required tax on playing cards had been paid. This initially involved hand stamping the Ace of Spades – probably because it was the top card. But to prevent tax evasion, in 1828 it was decided that from now on the Ace of Spades had to be purchased from the Commissioners for Stamp Duties, and that it had to be specially printed along with the manufacturer’s name and the amount of duty paid. As a result, the Ace of Spades tended to have elaborate designs along with the manufacturer’s name. Only in 1862 were approved manufacturers finally allowed to print their own Ace of Spades, but the fate of the signature Ace of Spades had been decided, and the practice of an ornate Ace with the manufacturer’s name was often continued. As a result, to this day it is the one card in a deck that typically gets special treatment and elaborate designs.”

AMERICA

  • Since the very first colonizers of the Americas there have been cards on the new world.
    • There is even evidence that Native Americans made their own decks with original suite symbols and designs once the introduction of playing cards became popular amongst the Native populations.

“One final innovation that we owe to the United States is the addition of the Jokers. The Joker was initially referred to as “the best bower”, which is terminology that originates in the popular trick-taking game of euchre, which was popular in the mid-19th century, and refers to the highest trump card. It is an innovation from around 1860 that designated a trump card that beat both the otherwise highest ranking right bower and left bower. The word euchre may even be an early ancestor of the word “Joker”. A variation of poker around 1875 is the first recorded instance of the Joker being used as a wild card. “

  • in short, Americans added the Joker card and also made cards at an even faster pace than Europe eventually

FUN FACTS

  • Now some fun facts about the playing cards
    • The first cards were made with ivory tiles.
      • Ivory tiles, wood, marbles, and other surfaces were used to make cards back in the day before paper became the standard medium for cards globally. 
    • Ace of Spades was painted on soldiers’ helmets to bring them good luck in WW2.
      • You would most probably have seen the Ace of Spades over the helmets of soldiers in movies. In the second World War. This was done because the Ace of Spades was known to bring good luck among the soldiers. It is believed that the mere presence of the painted helmet would help them fight fiercely. 
    • Cards were used as a means of important information in the 18th century.
      • The most heart-wrenching example can be given of the deadly hunger period during the 18th century; women who could not take care of their little ones would leave them out in the streets with notes written over cards, hoping people would take pity on them.
    • At casinos, cards are changed every now and then to make sure nobody cheats.
      • Casinos have to take precautionary measures to ensure that cards don’t become marked during play. They also need to ensure that cheaters don’t pull an extra card out of their sleeves and corrupt the game. Almost once every hour, used cards are changed with a new deck.
    • Playing some card games can increase problem-solving skills and immunity.
      • Playing card games could potentially enhance cognitive functions. It could improve one’s ability to think critically; more so, playing card games (like Bridge) can help increase immunity.
      • From WelshBridgeUnion.org: This was show in a study undertaken by Professor Marian Diamond from Berkeley University in 2000. Playing a game of bridge requires you to concentrate. This helps keeps your brain active and, apparently, helps boost your immune system. For the study, Professor Diamond used a group of 12 women in their 70s and 80s.
    • 52 cards in a deck symbolize the 52 weeks in a year
    • And my favorite fun fact about cards, the thing that makes them so cool and timeless:
      • There are roughly eight-hundred-quadrillion times more ways to shuffle a deck of cards than atoms on Earth.
      • No one has or likely ever will hold the exact same arrangement of 52 cards as you did during that game. It seems unbelievable, but there are somewhere in the range of 8×1067 ways to sort a deck of cards. That’s an 8 followed by 67 zeros.

CREDIT

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