“Gag me with a spoon!”*…
One weekend a year, the remote hamlet of Milan, Minn. — population 369 — is the center of the spooniverse.
The 11th annual Spoon Gathering, hosted earlier this month by the Milan Village Arts School, attracted more than 150 carvers from nearly 20 states and several foreign countries.These people are the rock stars of this fast-growing pastime. Their soundtrack is the chunk of a finely honed ax biting crisply into a log, the rasp of a file on steel. At once energetic and ruminative, analytical and philosophical, they transform raw wood into the humblest of human tools, a creation as ancient and elemental as a good bowl of bear meat stew…
Whittle on at “How a tiny Minnesota town became the wooden spoon capital of the country.”
* Valley girl speak, quoted in Frank Zappa’s “Valley Girl”
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As we dig in, we might recall that it was on this date in 1896 that William S. Hadaway, Jr. received the first U.S. patent for an electric stove. It provided a uniform surface distribution of heat from a one-ring spiral coiled conductor.
