What Is It? Game 119

Hooray! It's time for our collaboration with the perpetually perplexing What is it? Blog - Yes, this tool above is a tong, but can you guess its specific use?

Two prizes: First person to guess correctly and the person who submitted the funniest yet ultimately incorrect guess will win T-shirts from the Neatorama Shop. You must submit your entries before the correct answer is revealed on the What is it? Blog (duh!). Contest rules are simple: Place your guess in the comment section. One guess per comment, please. You can enter as many guesses as you'd like. Please post no URL or web links - doing so will forfeit your entry.

For more clues, don't forget to check out the What is it? Blog. Good luck!

Update 12/14/09 - the answer is: These were marked "18th Century Brass Pipe Tongs", they were hung by the fireplace and used to pick up hot coals to light the old clay smoking pipes. Congrats to canem who got it right first and Fuzz for making me ROFLMAO with the guess of "royal log" remover.

They are indeed tongs, but more likely to be used for picking up sugar cubes for coffee (saw it in a movie once). It has a hinge so it's definately no tuning fork. (Apparently there is a fault in the comments....when writing this I only see the first three posts before this...)
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Looks like a pair of coal tongs, used for picking up live coals to restack them in the fireplace, add a lump of coal to a fire, or to transfer live coals to something else, such as putting them into a bedwarmer.
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Tweezers.
Had one for years- but since my body stopped growing all those extra's every time I pulled them out, I finally sold mine on ebay a year ago or so.

Is used tweeze off or out all those third and fourth legs and arms and to tweeze out all those over-extra digits and eyes.
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This was from back before they had flush toilets. Mr or Ms Royalty would do their thing in a pot. Then the servant would come in and use these tongs to remove the royal log. It was a bit trickier on the morning following taco night, but the servants got good at it.
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They are a set of ceremonial tongs used by Freemasons. Should you find yourself having dinner at a masonic lodge (or the home of a lodge's primate) and encounter a an overcooked lump of something foul and unchewable in your stew, called a 'grimsby', know that it was placed there deliberately to test you. (If you are not at a Masonic lodge, it may simply be the result of careless cookery.) You must approach your host, hopping on one foot, and perform the secret Masonic handshake. He is obliged to hand over the tongs, and you must then use them to extract the grimsby. Alternately, you may attempt to swallow the grimsby without comment. But your host knows it was in there, and that you didn't follow proper procedure, so don't expect to be invited back!
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It may sound horrible... but I read a story by Stephen King where he described such a device used by 19th century doctors to hold the head of white mice while operating without anestethic...
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One thing that sucks about most of these contests is that often there's no indication of size...add a ruler, or a coin to the photo, FFS!
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Coal tongs for sure. Christ, I remember the coal man delivering coal to our cellar when I was a kid in the 60's. Coal tongs were always brass.
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that looks like a tuning fork... we use those in physics class
we actually played twinkle twinkle little star today with tuning forks for the last day of classes :D
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Well.
The story started with an old man on a mountain. Every Wednesday and Saturday he would walk down to the river to get some more water. On Wednesdays, he would meet a snake, who would continually bother him until he got back in his home. The old man's home also got struck by lightning alot. He had long ago realized this issue, but had no idea what to do. One Saturday, he brought a metal object down to the river, and left it at a tree trunk. The next Wednesday, he picked it up, and went home with it. The snake saw, and asked what it was for, but the old man told him he had three shots to guess what it was, then he would show the snake.
"Tongs?"
"No."
"Dowsing rod?"
"Nope."
"Some sort of probe?"
"Not even close."
"What is it then?!"
The old man then proceeded to bludgeon the snake to death.
The End
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