Hola, Sneakers! Welcome to Episode 510 of your second favourite podcast!
Warning: Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings spoilers 1:01:00 and 1:25:00
This week: questionable start; sub-sub-basement; headphone hair; hillbilly elegy; Kuwaiti liniment; lyric amnesia; not Gilbert & Sullivan; fallings out; embouchure action; death by evil; story songs; astronauts and cave people; he’s Sherwood Schwartz; bad sitcoms; cokey comedy; rushing to heal; destructive role models; the Brady Bunch murders; best episode; monkey see, monkey shouldn’t; unsupervised destruction; crow cons; let’s talk about Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings; super San Fran; boring kaiju; bloated CGI slug-fest;s; friends without benefits; death dealt; murder everything; Y: The Last Man excitement; forgetful dragon; Dork Shadows: Hour of the Wolf; Question of the Week – Sneakers respond; melomalade; pruning up; new dad; applesauce, applesauce; chapless asses; you call that a mugging; and, finally, cheers!
Question of the Week: Is there something that had to give up that was hard to give up?
Sub-question of the Week: What is your favourite episode of a podcast you love?
Thanks for listening.
Have you seen it yet??? The Y: The Last Man trailer!
Check out those executive producer credits!
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I’d like to give a shout out to my fellow Sneaker Crystal who along with myself, co-represents of the Southern U.S. I truly enjoy your entries here on the site and along with our other fellow Sneakers, it’s good to know I’m not alone as we listen to Sneaky Dragon while doing our menial tasks. If there were ever a Sneaky Dragon Movie, I imagine a montage showing all of us listeners doing our tasks while listening, cutting from one to the next as we hear Dave and Ian doing the show as a VoiceOver.
I wrote early last time because I had to drive to Lubbock, Texas last Wednesday and help my daughter and her fiancé move. You’re both so comprehensive when you’re describing your Canadian landscape, I thought I’d share what a six hour drive looks like through West Texas. First you have to get out of the “Metroplex”, this is the string of cities you have to travel through when going west…Dallas, Arlington and Ft. Worth. Once you really get into the interstate travel you see endless wind turbines, 35 stories tall, owned by the Roscoe Wind Farms of Texas. These huge machines turn using wind power to generate clean wind energy, they’ve been growing through West Texas since around 2007. Then you start seeing the hundreds of oil pumps, all rotating and pumping in unison while smelling the rich smell of the oil fields. There’s cattle and enormous ranches, desert buttes and sagebrush that make you feel like you’re either in a Roadrunner cartoon or on Tatooine. If those oil pumps were moisture vaporators and I were driving a landspeeder it would be Tatooine. And there’s endless miles of red sand and dirt that blows everywhere. It’s dirty and hot but beautiful in it’s own rustic and unique way.
I’m watching “Y: The Last Man” through FX on HULU here, which we subscribe to, so I found the first episode and got right into it late Sunday Night/Early Monday Morning. How exciting for Pia to see her name on a major television series, I feel excited for her when I see her name on the credits. Very cool. Is there a way to go somewhere and rate the show or give it a review in some way? I never read the comic, but I’m now following the series and spreading the word as much as possible.
I was thinking that perhaps you and I could suggest some foods for Dave to seek out and try if he ever makes a trip to the south.
I will answer question #1 – things I had to give up that I hated to give up. I have a few, lol. Get ready for a whine-fest.
The first was sidewalks (age 6) – when I was 6 we moved from the city to the farm. In the city, my mom, little brother and I used to walk everywhere. When we moved to the farm, my mom was pretty busy, although I didn’t really appreciate that at the time; I missed our walks. She told me that we weren’t able to go on walks anymore because the roads by the farm had no sidewalks. That made me very sad that we had to give up our regular constitutionals because we did not have sidewalks anymore. I see now that I was just a gullible little fool (lol), but I ultimately grew up to love our new home on the farm and wouldn’t have traded it for all the sidewalks in the world.
The second was Prince Philip Games (age 14) – PPG is a collection of relay races played on ponies; back when I competed, the maximum age was 14. It was my first experience of being too old for something that I really, really had wanted to continue on with. I had developed a level of competency and experienced some real success competitively with it – and then I was too old. Not quite a decade after I aged out, they extended the age by forming an older age category, but it was already too late for me. Around that same time over in Europe, an all-ages competitive league was getting underway, but it took another three decades to get over here to the west coast of Canada. A bit late for me, sadly.
The third was Pony Club (age 21) – when I was young, PC ended on your 21st birthday. Fortunately for me, I was able to complete all my testing prior to the final age deadline, although I left it pretty late – snuck under the wire with two months to spare. About 10 years ago, PC was opened up to adults, but it took me until 2020 to rejoin (for a variety of reasons) – and sadly, it has been pretty much a washout due to Covid restrictions.
The fourth was a nightclub I used to go to in Vancouver called Luv-A-Fair (age 25-30ish) – it played a lot of ‘new’ music that I didn’t have access to elsewhere, but over time my friend group changed and I didn’t like going there by myself… and then sadly it closed. I still miss it.
The fifth was my Mustang (age 30ish) – from the time I was young, a family friend had a 1969 Mustang Mach I. I loved that car. When I turned 19, I received a small inheritance that allowed me to go out an buy a 1969 Mustang convertible. I drove that car for many years, including through two engine changes, but eventually my Dad was sick of it and engineered a situation where I had to park it over winter. I was busy putting myself through university, and didn’t have a lot of spare cash. I was blocked in my attempts to get it back on the road, and so now it sits. I periodically still have dreams of driving it. The rumble of that car’s engine was music to me, and the power was thrilling, if not sometimes downright dangerous.
The sixth was my horse-show career (age 31) – I had grown up riding competitively, with Olympic aspirations, and had represented my country internationally, and been invited to ride with the coach of the Canadian Olympic team in the west coast trials. I had put myself through university riding, training and showing horses for people. And then, in one year, I graduated from university, got a job, and lost all five of my competitive horses in about a five month period – one horse to major surgery, one to a car accident (both survived but were not able to regain their original competitive form), and others as clients horses to financial constraints (people were showing for a variety of reasons). So all of a sudden I had no horses, I now had a time consuming and non-horse related means of making an income, and very little time after work as I was still coaching riding after school… and my riding career just disappeared in a poof. If had originally thought it would be momentary, but whereas previously I could get on any horse and get it to do anything, now that ability seems to have vanished as well.
Man, this is whinier than I thought.
Last – my vitality (age 32) – before I got pregnant I was extremely fit and muscular. I never had great cardiovascular fitness, looking back, but as an equestrian, strength and skill are higher on the list, and I had those in spades. I can remember thinking pregnancy would be a breeze – billions had done it before me, what was the big deal? But it turns out I was not good at being pregnant. I developed pre-eclampsia, a not-well understood circulatory disorder that can end catastrophically; it was undiagnosed (and therefore untreated) for some strange reason for at least two months – and I guess by then, the damage was done. Prior to pregnancy, I had always had great blood pressure readings. Most people who have pre-eclampsia instantaneously recover as soon as the baby is delivered; the surgeon doing the C-section commented on my BP dropping once the baby was delivered. However, when I was in the recovery room, something went wrong and my BP went through the roof. I’ll never forget the look on the nurse’s face. She gave me an injection of morphine, but from then on, I’ve had to be medicated ever since to control it. My next pregnancy was even worse, health-wise, and since then I’ve always had this vision of me as a transparent, human shaped hourglass/sand-clock – but with only 5-20% of sand (energy) visible/accessible at any time, depending on the day. Maybe that’s just what getting older feels like, but for me it was such a rapid departure from the supreme level of fitness, health and vitality that I had previously had that it was a really tangible change in my being.
Oh boo hooo.
Anyway, other than all that, life is good, but I do miss those things that I once had. I am happy to have had them, though.
You asked for a favourite episode of a sit-com you love but on the webpage the question turned into an episode of a podcast. So I’ll answer both. Sneaky Dragon Listening Party fans might like to check out Strong Songs: A Podcast About Music. The genial host is musician/composer Kirk Hamilton who takes a deep technical dive into iconic songs from all genres of popular music from the past 60 years. Dave might be interesting in his analysis of “A Day In the Life” by the Beatles and “God Only Knows” by the Beach Boys. My favourite episode a breakdown of that goofiest of megahits, “Bohemian Rhapsody.”
One of my favourite sit-com episodes is from the Mary Tyler Moore Show. It’s not “Chuckles Bites the Dust” which is a classic, but “The Dinner Party” from 1973. Mary attempts to host an elegant dinner party for a congresswoman in her small apartment. This one guest stars Betty White as Sue Ann Nivens and Henry Winkler in his first primetime TV role as Rhoda’s recently sacked coworker. The characters keep bringing up Mary’s apparent history of throwing disastrous dinner parties so the stakes are high for this one to succeed. You can check it out on YouTube.
I was sorry to read of Norm Macdonald’s passing. I always enjoyed his work on SNL and his appearances on talk shows. He was one ironic iconoclast.
About five years ago I was diagnosed as a Type 2 Diabetic and the thought of giving up sugar in everything I ate was actually a blessing in disguise. Many would struggle with this but I found that by cutting sugar and glucose out of my diet actually made me feel better! Diabetes runs heavily in my family so I’m not alone, I’ve just had to get more creative with what I eat and focus on alternatives to anything with sugar. I remember when my doctor was telling me how to start and what to cut from my diet first, I asked her, “Can I still have coffee?” She replied “Yes, you can have all the coffee you want, just use a sweetener like Splenda or Equal.” So I always think that would have been the worst alternative, I’ll give anything up if I can still have my coffee in a mug that’s “half full.”
The “Taxi” episode with Jim’s driving test you mentioned is a classic, I’ll back you up on that one, I loved “Taxi” ever since it was on primetime. You also mentioned something about catching coins in your hand off your elbow and I distinctly remember a “Happy Days” episode with a guy doing that, but why? All I remember was the next day in school everyone was trying it because we saw it the night before on “Happy Days.”
I was such a sitcom junkie in the 70’s and 80’s and it’s funny you mentioned “The Beverly Hillbillies” last time. We were just trying to explain it to my 21 year old stepson last week along with many other sitcoms of the time. He really didn’t grasp the silly nature of most of these shows since he didn’t grow up with them like we did, but it was fun to explain the harmless nature of the way sitcom were back then. My all-time favorite was an episode of “Cheers” from 1987 titled “Cheers:The Motion Picture.” When I was young, I loved it when live audience studio-shot sitcoms would go out into the real world and shoot part of the show on film, it seemed more real to me and enhanced the show. “Happy Days” did it quite a bit and I loved when that happened. In this “Cheers” episode, after Woody’s Uncle has a bad experience in Boston the family urges Woody to move back home to Indiana. The gang at Cheers decides to make a movie film featuring Woody in everyday life and how safe he is among his friends in Boston. The funny part is watching these great sitcom actors doing their best to “act bad” on this home movie they’re making for Woody, it’s hysterical how uncomfortably bad they are on film. The great part is that they go everywhere with Woody, places you’ve only heard about and it’s all on an 8mm movie film. You see Carla’s house, Cliff on his mail route, Frasier at his psychiatric office and best of all, Norm at the Hungry Heifer. They even yell “NORM!” when he walks in there. The film is so horribly bad that Diane re-edits the film and sends her avant grade edit to Woody’s family which makes it even worse. Woody is about to leave when the family receives a simple letter from a Cheers patron who just happens to be the old man who’s always sitting at the opposite end of the bar.
I am struggling to give up saying “yes” to taking on more responsibilities and starting new projects. I like being included in activities because it makes me feel valued, and I excel at what I do. The downside is that when I have too much on my plate, I stress about all the work, and then find it hard to get anything done. I recognize that I tend to stretch myself too thin (I really do hate to disappoint people), and I am trying to work on this… but, guys, the struggle is real.
Picking one favorite episode from one favorite sitcom is a difficult choice to make. It is like being asked to pick one, just one, favorite Beatles song. Some of the episodes that did come to mind when I thinking about this question are 1) the episode of the Beverly Hillbillies where Granny confuses a movie being filmed with the south rising again. Granny captures the actor portraying Grant and they end up drunk and form a bond. 2) The episode of Bewitched where Serena kidnaps Boyce and Hart so that they can perform at the Cosmos Cotillion. 3) The episode of the Mary Tyler Moore Show where they attend the funeral of Chuckles the Clown. 4) The episode of I Dream of Jeannie where Jeannie blinks up some talent for a singing group (portrayed by Boyce and Hart) and she plays the drums with them. 5) The episode of Seinfeld where a Junior Mint saves a guy’s life… and there are many more.
Dave asked about the watermelon preserves. I think it is a food item that is dying out in the south. You can find a jar in some stores, but it isn’t like going to the grocery store and finding 30 million brands of grape jam. You might find one if you are lucky. I’ve read that Martha Washington used to make this preserve for George and her family, so it is an older recipe… and I’ve also read that it was extremely popular during the Great Depression because it helped to stretch food. It is probably like squirrel in that it has fallen out of fashion and out of the collective memory of the community. Forty years ago, squirrel was a common food staple around the south, but not so much now.
I’ll close with one fun TV fact. Sharon Tate was one of the secretary’s at the Beverly Hills Bank on the Beverly Hillbillies. I’ve read that she even dated Max Baer, Jr. for a while (the guy who played Jethro.)
Have a great week!
Is it true Max Baer Jr. was also a porn actor in later years? If true, soooo many jokes spring to mind….
Edward, I hadn’t heard that, but it wouldn’t surprise me. I’ve heard that he was kind of a jerk to people and bitter about being typecast as Jethro. I think he ending producing and directing a movie adaptation of the Ode to Billie Jo song. And he had a failed attempt at trying to construct a Beverly Hillbillies-themed casino…
I think the porn rumor about Baer was a celebrity urban myth, like the one about The Beaver, Jerry Mathers being killed in Viet Nam.