Hola, Sneakers! Welcome to Episode 509 of the podcast too good to be a podcast.
This week: closer; phoning it in; essential candy; zero taste; the universal sign of dead; meeting hate; numerical confusion; phone sex; phone money; bumbling; tuna for bumblebees; back in time…again; plastic people; comedy violence; flashbacked; recommended: Mr. and Mrs. Murder; the Joe Rogan factor; that snake is so done; consssssssssensual; eventually you’re a meme; the scales of acting; recommended: The Chair; clumsy humanization; reading mood; YA-deprived; recommended: Dream Horse; battery; virtual horror; asking for it; strangely popular; pear nectar; tomato ghosts; remembering Millennium; the hallway of mail or the closet door of treachery; Question of the Week – Sneakers respond; a reward for good acting; morning drain; that most important weapon; David D.enial; love your parents; out of the love loop; to be fair to me; our three day-long episodes; recommended: Francis Ford Coppola’s restoration of The Cotton Club; bummer memory; wrong title; and, finally, love tractor.
Question of the Week: Have you ever canned anything?
Sub-question of the Week: What’s your favourite biography?
Sub-sub-question of the Week: Where do you listen to your podcasts? (We imagine on a tractor like Régis.)
Thanks for listening.
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My favorite item to can is watermelon rind preserves because it reminds me of my grandpa. I fondly remember him bringing watermelons over to the house to share. Mom would cut the flesh off the rind, dice the rind, peel the skin, and put the rinds into a storage bag for him. As I type this I can mentally picture him standing at his stove, cooking up the rinds, pouring in sugar, stirring them with love. He lived to the ripe old age of 97; but every time I spread some preserves across a hot, buttered English muffin, I feel like I am connected to him. <3 If you’ve not heard of this type of perserve, it is similar to marmalade in that you are candying the rind, but it is much sweeter.
Some people have bibles that are stuffed with bookmarks, dog-eared pages, and lots of sticky notes marking places that they want to frequently reference. I, on the other hand, have a sticky-note stuffed biography that I keep in a stack of books by my bed. Even the sticky notes are color-coordinated to make it faster to find certain sections. The biography is about Meriwether Lewis and it was written by Richard Dillon. Dillon was a renowned, award-winning Western historian, educator, author, and most importantly, librarian. He set out to write a biography about a great American explorer, but ended up becoming fascinated with the mystery surrounding his death. And since I have family buried out beside Lewis, I am fascinated with his story. Side note: in the 1960s, he was asked to give the commencement speech at Vanderbilt’s Peabody College. His speech was about Meriwether Lewis and how Lewis embodied excellence. At the end, he charged some young, unnamed, future librarian to pick up the mantle of his research, discover new sources, and find out the truth about Lewis’s death. When I first read his speech (which is archived at the State Library), I felt like it was directed at me, and yes, that makes his biography about Lewis even more meaningful to me.
I have the Pocket Casts app on my cell phone, and that is how I listen to your podcast. Normally, I listen to Sneaky Dragon while driving in my car— on my way to work, while driving to pick up my son from school, while driving him to my parents to watch while I finish up my workday, and then on the way home. At 20 to 30 minute intervals, it is normally Wednesday evening before I finish the podcast. This week, however, instead of watching Dark Shadows, I listened to the podcast while cleaning my house on Sunday, which is why you are getting a more timely response from me. I suppose this means that since I have finished the episode, I’ll have to listen to a downloaded audiobook from our library’s digital lending collection while driving this week.
I am watching Dark Shadows as I type this. I am way, way behind David, but I am up to episode 519. I am appreciative of the opportunity to try to play catch up. Have a wonderful week, and I plan to write shorter responses next week.
I’ve never canned anything but my Dad and my Grandmother did plenty when he was growing up as well as when I used to visit my Grandmother. My Dad grew up on a farm that grew everything so canning was an every day way of life. I called him earlier to ask him in preparation for this question and he said, “What DIDN’T we can? I think at times we had enough to feed a small army.” You’ll recall the story about her stealing the apples to make apple-everything a few weeks ago…that was just the start of what my Grandma had in jars in that little basement of hers. I remember everything from beets to red raspberries to relish in those jars and so much more. My favorite was the thinly sliced cucumbers in something that was probably as simple as vinegar and some sugar. When they were properly canned and opened after the process was done, I’d put these cucumbers all over my salad for a sour/sweet taste, God I loved those. Dad used the red raspberries over ice cream like syrup almost. Whenever we visited my Grandmother she’d send us back to Texas with a box full of jars filled with everything, the strict orders were to send them back to her….her version of recycling. I never canned anything but I sure enjoyed the results of a lot of hard work.
Hmmmm, my own question, favorite biography. I’ve read “Harpo Speaks” more than once, it’s such a wonderful and honest journey from Harpo’s perspective. He wrote it with Rowland Barber very late in life so it takes into account much of the circulatory issues he had with his helth, which ultimately led to his passing. I also enjoyed “Growing Up with Chico” by his daughter Maxine Marx. She doesn’t pull any punches and pretty much sums up Chico exactly as everyone else saw him but in a roguish way, as if he couldn’t help himself. It’s all there, the gambling, all the assorted women and the gambling. I also enjoyed all the William Shatner biographies, “Star Trek Memories”, “Star Trek Movie Memories” and the “Get a Life” biography about the years of Trek conventions. I’ve lived much of that, so it was fun to read Shatner’s perspective. I was on a train in Chicago years ago and the guy next to me was reading one of Shatner’s books. I asked him what he thought about it and before I could tell him how much I enjoyed them all, he said, “They’re really infantile, such a mediocre class of writing….” So I left it at that.
‘Harpo Speaks’ is a great read. The first Marx-related book I read was Charlotte Chandler’s ‘Hello I Must be Going’ which I must have picked up shortly after its first paperback publication around 1979 and really enjoyed. On a side-note, the William Shatner / Ben Folds version of Pulp’s ‘Common People’ is a masterpiece!
I usually listen to Sneaky Dragon while I take a bath, hoping I don’t prune up too much by the time David’s done with Dark Shadows.
Seriously, I listen while I work around the house through my AirPods and iPhone. The noise canceling allows me to vacuum and still hear the show…let’s see Liam attempt that on a tractor! If I’m not done with the podcast after cleaning, I continue listening in my car while I’m out toy hunting at night…
It’s not an exciting weekend without Sneaky Dragon!
Hi Ian and Dave
As ever, I found this week’s conversation about past and present experiences with your parents insightful and moving. Both of you expressed your feelings very articulately and with great care and compassion, prompting me to reflect not only on my own childhood, but also on how some of the things I experienced then continue to influence my attitudes and behaviours to this day. It isn’t easy to go back to dark times, but it can often be worthwhile, and this week’s episode was genuinely helpful to me. Thank you very, very much for being so open and for sharing these memories and thoughts. I guess Sneaky Dragon, like life itself, isn’t all vampires and candy bars…
It’s quite hard to recommend biographies, as each person’s enjoyment of a particular book is bound to reflect their interest in the subject matter as much as the quality of the writing. However, George Plimpton’s book, ‘Truman Capote’ might just be the exception that proves the rule. Plimpton based his book on interviews with surviving friends of the late author and presents these in oral history style, so you get to hear the story through the words of a range of protagonists. Naturally, their accounts don’t always match up and the reader has to make decisions about who to believe, if anyone. I really enjoyed that aspect which gives the book something of the feel of a great mystery novel or movie that might extend its appeal beyond those who are already interested in Capote’s life and work.
Like Dave, I loved Mark Lewisohn’s ‘Tune In’ – yes, the nerd-tastic extended version – but it’s definitely aimed at confirmed Beatle nuts. I also really enjoyed Craig Brown’s recent ‘One, Two, Three, Four: The Beatles in Time’, which would be a better bet for the more casual fan. This owes a large debt to Lewisohn, but is less scholarly as well as much shorter, and hugely entertaining.
Sneaky Dragon arrives here on Sunday morning, which is perfect for me. I subscribe through Apple Podcasts and listen with earbuds on my phone, usually while doing household tasks such as cooking, baking bread, garden stuff or bike maintenance. One thing I never do is listen to you while trying to get to sleep, though I do this with plenty of other podcasts and radio shows. Somehow, it just wouldn’t feel right.
When I was growing up we had a peach tree, a cherry tree and two plum trees. Our neighbour had a pear tree, so we canned all those fruits. We also made strawberry and blueberry jam, and raspberry and blackberry jelly. My mom used to seal the jam and jellies with paraffin wax and whenever we opened a new jar, we kids would pop the wax into our mouths till it was soft enough to chew like gum. But using wax is not food safe so my sister now uses the water bath canning method for jams as well as tomato sauce.
Speaking of cans, the Clover Leaf canned fish label has a four-leaf clover logo on it. I associate it with good luck as in….you’re in luck that someone caught a fish and someone else preserved it in a can so you could eat it weeks, months or even years later.
I’m not into biographies, but I do read memoires by comedy writers like Trevor Noah, Mindy Kaling and Ali Wong as their books are BOUND to be funny.
Canning: I have canned quite a few things, and made jams and even tried marmalade once, but it turned out more like tarmalade so gave up on that. One of the things I like to make the most is apple sauce, but A) I need a lot of time to do that, which I don’t seem to have these days, and B) I really only like to use a particular kind of apple which is very hard to get a hold of due to its rarity. I did win the apple sauce competition three years in a row at the Aldergrove Fall Fair with this particular type so I figure I don’t have anything else to prove.
Biography: I really liked the biography of Zelda Fitzgerald that I read many years ago. I tried to read a biography of Winston Churchill, which I thought would have been interesting, but I could not get through it.
Listening to podcasts: I listen to the podcast when I clean the horse’s stalls in the morning before going to work. Our horses only live in at night in the fall/winter, so it’ll be another six weeks before I have a daily listening schedule.