Hola, Sneakers. Welcome to Episode 436. Come for the compassionate caring, stay for the public distancing scolding.
David and Ian are still self-Sneaking, but that doesn’t mean they can’t talk: improff; math quiz; here come’s rhymin’ geography; musical no-how; best midnight musical show ever; record bucket challenge; boastie boys; the TP shortage EXPLAINED; too much is enough; flour power; yeast affection; pandemic merch; more stick, less carrot; stay the course; park violation; repulsive; home improvements; Easter egg hunt; Chicktalk™; egg wash; dressing duck; boogie duck down; Lost Wages; redundant magic; tricky tricks; Ian’s video series; toy audience; helpful ghosts; The Haunting of Hill House = scary; Lock and Key = lame; Question of the Week – Sneakers respond; short-term Kelly Girl; drug traffic; Star Wars geography; commercials care; governmental aid; anime boobs; horse girl wish fulfillment; and, finally, the Breakfight Club.
Thanks for listening.
Question of the Week: What Y/A series hooked you as a kid?
Sub-question: What’s something that everyone seems to know about, but you are mostly ignorant?
Ian mentioned a new video series he is doing and we’d love for you to watch it. Please like and subscribe, as they say!
Here is a sample of Night Music, that fabulous music show from the 90s. (Please note: Episode 201 means the first episode of the second season. There were definitely NOT over two hundred episodes of this show. [I wish!])
Here is one of John Prine’s best known songs – “Sam Stone” – about a returning Vietnam vet. The lines “There’s a hole in daddy’s arm where all the money goes./Jesus Christ died for nothin’, I suppose.” really gets me.
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This is for Dave, now that he’s heard Last Christmas
https://youtu.be/4e3e9GHU1aQ
I LOVED NIGHT MUSIC! And not just because it was hosted by my probable cousin, David Sanborn. (My father told me all the Sanborns in the U.S. were descended from three Sanborn brothers who came over from England in the 1600s.)
I’m pretty sure the show was produced by Lorne Michaels and it came on either right after SNL, or on Sunday nights. I was studying music then at the local community college and discovering that there was more great stuff to listen to than just heavy metal, so Night Music came along at the perfect time for me.
My favorite memories were of Debbie Harry and Hiram Bullock singing “Calmarie,” Karen Mantler and Her Cat Arnold doing, “I Wanna Be Good,” and the most memorable visual was of Conway Twitty singing while the Residents were bobbing around behind him. You can find all of those on YouTube. Have fun!
I’ve seen a lot of people with sparsely decorated homes say they haven’t put effort into their home environment because they spend all day at work. I feel that us work-from-home people have the advantage now because we have so many things that make staying inside much more pleasant and comfortable! I’d been thinking about what I could buy to help make my quarantining days better and honestly, I’m barely lacking in anything here. But I have bought a few things I should’ve bought a long time ago:
-A crane-arm and pop filter for my mic so I can podcast remotely better (you should have me on as a guest again!)
-A yoga mat so I can do more intense calisthenics and stretches at home
-A cold brew coffee pitcher so I can make it myself since I can no longer go to Starbucks
-A cable that attaches my laptop to my TV
-A pickling jar so I can make my own pickles
I also bought new shoes because what the hell, I saw some great shoes online and I wanted them!
The Sailor Scouts (which is the term they used for the English localization — Soldiers was the original Japanese term) that were the lesbian couple wasn’t just de-lesbianized in the North American dub; they were re-written as cousins. Very friendly cousins. There was also a villainous gay male couple, but for the North American dub, they turned the effeminate one into a woman, inadvertently creating a very cool strong female character. I was actually disappointed when I learned she was meant to be male.
The YA series that hooked me as a kid was Goosebumps. I have a hard time concentrating on prose so I struggle with reading, but I devoured those books. Which is why it sucked when they got banned from my school for being too violent. I might have talked about this on the show before? but it felt like a bad way to educate students: “hey, you should read a lot of books! No, not those ones!” I’m happy now to see Scholastic put out a Goosebumps reader’s guide for teachers.
Let’s get you back on the show ASAP, but only to talk about that pickling jar.
I also read some of the Trixie Belden books. Other girl-oriented series I read were Nancy Drew, Donna Parker and the Sue Barton nurse books. But what I really devoured were fantasy series like The Chronicles of Narnia, the Earthsea Cycle and The Harper Hall of Pern trilogy. I especially loved the sci-fi/fantasy books of Andre Norton.
What I am mostly ignorant about are current video games. I’m not a gamer so I don’t know what the latest big titles are until they make their way into late night comedy monologues and sketches and/or people start showing up as characters from the games at Halloween.
Hey Ian and David,
I remember the 80s book craze which was ‘Choose Your Own Adventure.’ They were MASSIVE in my school for about 6 months. Later I started reading novelisations of the 70s era Dr Who’s. They were cheaply produced, but had good cover art and could be read in an afternoon – this being a time before the internet or even DVDs.
Later I loved the ‘Tomorrow When The War Began’ series by John Marsden.
As far as pop culture I somehow skipped over, I totally missed Lost, The Sopranos and lately managed to sidestep of the whole phenomenon of Marvel movies. I think it was because they started being released when my kids were young and getting to the movies became harder than it had been in my twenties. 10 years – and a lot of Iron Men/Captain Americas/Thors/Antmen/Avengers etc later – it seems too hard to invest in it all. Or maybe I have just slipped out of the demographic and am relegated to watch Downton Abbey reruns.
Hopefully there will be a Downton Abbey Choose Your Own Adventure book released and all will be fine in the universe.
Take care chaps.
Mick
I’ve never actually seen Kids in the Hall but have heard a lot about it over the years. I suppose now would be the ideal time to finally give it a watch (yep, just keep looking for those silver linings…)
As a kid I was into the Animorph books, a series about a group of kids who must thwart a global invasion of mind-controlling slug aliens by turning into various animals (an ability bestowed on them by nicer, centaur-like aliens). It may sound silly, but the series went to some pretty bizarre and dark places, with plenty of light body horror in the vivid descriptions of animal transformations, and a heavy focus on the psychological toll the war takes on the protagonists. I loved them at the time, but they came out at a very fast pace (seemingly every month or so, if I remember right), and somewhere along the line I lost track and never read to the end. Which is maybe just as well, because years later I discovered that the series had an infamously depressing ending, which was probably the last thing I needed to read as a kid.
Something of which I am mostly ignorant: modern TV. I often find myself overwhelmed by the sheer amount of choices available to us in the Golden Age of Television and end up sticking to only one or two favorites. It doesn’t help that Game of Thrones was pretty much the precise mathematical opposite of my cup of tea. On the other hand, I hear so much discussion about popular shows like that from friends/family/social media/random people on the street that sometimes I feel like I already know all about them and don’t need to actually bother watching them myself. So I guess it all evens out.
HI Ian and David!
First, Ian, this “No and… ” video is really good, fun to watch! Thanks for sharing it! I’ll have to find the next ones! And that’s a great Sparks hoodie!
Second, I was into Nancy Drew books as a kid in the 60’s. Read every one, I’m pretty sure. Also, I read a lot of biographies for children that seemed to be in a series for older elementary age kids. I enjoyed those so much, too.
Third, somehow I missed Bruce Springsteen’s rise in popularity back in the 80’s. Suddenly, he just seemed to appear and he was already known as “The Boss”… I didn’t know when or how that happened. A small thing, but it still mystifies me!
Thank you, gentlemen! I always appreciate you!
PS David, I do still have honeybees! Hopefully, there will be a good honey harvest this summer. We’ve had a couple seasons that were not so great, but I have a good feeling about this year! 🙂
As a kid, before I really got into comics, I read the entire Oz series..but you guys knew that already. I had friends who read Encyclopedia Brown and the Hardy Boys, but I guess I liked the fantasy reading better that Oz had to offer. If there was anything else I read faithfully, it was the collections of various comic strips like The Peanuts, Beetle Bailey, Hägar the Horrible and The Wizard of Id.
Something everyone knows about but me? Simple. Sports. My office is all sports nuts, Texas sports nuts and I just gloss over when they start up. They know it too and on occasion will ask me if I know what they’re talking about. I do however, like baseball. I’m not a die hard fan but I do enjoy the game, especially my Chicago Cubs. I’d rather be at a game in person than watch on television though, I think I get that from my Dad who used to take me to games when I was young.
My brain almost split open when you mentioned Night Music! I used to video tape the show when I was a teen, right along with everything else. When we got our first VCR I taped EVERYTHING. I taped Letterman, Night Flight, SCTV, Cheers, Entertainment Tonight…I was out of control. I also taped everything on the extra slow speed so I could get something like 8 hours onto one tape. I have no idea why I did this, I never really went back and watched any of these tapes and I still have some to this day. That might be fun to do now, watch some 35 year old shit on an old VCR. Maybe.
But let me tell you something about one of the performers on the Night Music YouTube clip you posted. Stevie Ray Vaughn, back in the day, was a Dallas local hero and he would just show up and play at clubs downtown in an area that’s still called “Deep Ellum.” (It’s called this because it’s all along Elm Street) My friends and I would just go down there every weekend back in the 80’s, in and out of the clubs and if Vaughn was in town, he’s just start playing somewhere. It was magnificent to watch him play, so much that other musicians would come to him just to jam with him. I remember Robert Cray showed up to play with Vaughn one weekend, I’ll never forget that. It was so great, the local radio stations started showing up too, trying to record anything they could for their shows. During our Spring Break in 1987, we went down to the Texas coast and over to South Padre Island….and there was Stevie Ray Vaughn playing on a huge stage right on the beach. Then Stevie’s brother Jimmy Vaughn showed up with his band The T-birds which was great until every fucking song started to sound like “Tough Enough.” Sadly, I’ll never forget the day Vaughn died in a helicopter accident, August 27th 1990, the same day I started my 17 year job with Dr Pepper. He was something, I’m so glad I was able to enjoy him during his local Dallas reign.
Hey sneakers, the thing that everyone seems to know about, but I’m mostly ignorant about is probably 99% of all pop culture. Musically, I’m pretty much stuck in the 70’s and early 80’s. I haven’t played a video game since Tomb Raider first came out. I’ve seen a few television shows, but most I’ve never seen or even heard of. I’ve never watched “Friends”, “Seinfeld”, “The Simpsons”, “Game of Thrones”. Part of the reason is because until recently, I never had cable or a satellite dish because of the cost. Now that I can stream movies and television shows, I just don’t seem to have the time to watch anything.
And, it’s more interesting when you say “I’ve never watched the Star Wars movies” than to say “I’ve watched a few Star Wars movies”, so now, I have to make it a point NOT to watch certain movies and tv shows. (By the way, I have watched a few Star Wars movies, but they were out of order, and I don’t get the whole Star Wars plot…not as interesting, right?)
I really love the MacDonald Hall books. They’re a series of novels about Bruno and Boots, two troublemakers at the prestigious MacDonald Hall boarding school. It’s been years since I’ve read them, but I recall many threats of expulsion, a curmudgeonly headmaster called The Fish, hijinks with some of the students at a Finish School across the road, and so on.
I googled Gordon Korman, the author. Apparently he wrote the first book in the series when he was in grade seven, and it was published when he was fourteen. He published five novels by the end of high school and just kept writing. According to his personal website, he’s written something like eighty books.
I had a few others of his books, but I think I stopped following his stuff when I started high school. I’d love to go back and see how they hold up.
As for the sub-question, far some
Sub-question: What’s something that everyone seems to know about, but you are mostly ignorant?
There is so much TV these days that I hear about but haven’t sat down and watched. I don’t like watching TV while doing something else, so it takes me forever to get through a series, and most of the time I don’t bother.
Also, my friends are talking about Star Trek: Deep Space 9 these days. I think I’ve seen one episode, and it was the one where they go back in time to the Enterprise and muck around with Tribbles.
I haven’t seen the original series of Star Trek either, come to think of it…
Cheers!
Gah, I wish I could edit comments. Sorry about that!
Uh, this is going off memory, because I listened to the episode last weekend. But I’m pretty happy that Stanley Park is shut down to cars. I was going to cycle around the seawall about two weeks ago, but it was so busy with pedestrians and cyclists that it would’ve been impossible to keep social isolation. And the vehicle traffic going into the park was excessive. With the road shut down and given over to cyclists, it’s become much more pleasant.
That said, I’d feel differently if I weren’t within easy walking distance of the park. And it /is/ huge and spacious. I just don’t know how you can make people spread out. And I’m happy to see the city take space from cars and give it to pedestrians and cyclists.
These days my usual methods of nourishment, like seeing my friends every Monday, or hanging out in coffeeshops, aren’t readily available to me. Being able to pop into Stanley Park and English Bay Beach has kept me saner than I’d be otherwise.
I hope you’re all doing OK. Cheers!