Hola, Sneakers! Welcome to Episode 545 of Sneaky Dragon, where it’s all about the subjunctive!
This week: choose your own podcast; school books; bad examples; redundant dinosaurs; bears vs. bees; Canadian goldfish traditions; clean raccoons; swear trek; jazz evolution; confusing economy; deathless youth; Close encounters; boiled horse; credit theft; pretend it’s an SCTV; getting laughs; the ride and groom; four star obituary; eternal wedding gifts; Ego-Bay; creative accounting; working television; tiger tamers; adult cartoons; a bunch of sex jokes; TV memory lane; hats of to Roy Huggins; pestering Steve McQueen; thoughts on Dr. Strange and the Multiverse of Madness; made to disorder; the multiverse of sanity; spider victim; don’t do that; discontinuity; unemotional damage; Dave recommends The Outfit, munch on; Top 5 Queen Songs Pt. 2; deeply disturbing rabbits; Question of the Week – Sneakers respond; gruesome comics; shrinking planet; carrying a human torch; deep doily dive; comical sad sack, and, finally, a tenuous existence.
Question of the Week: What is the weirdest phone call you’ve ever received?
Sub-question of the Week: What is the most awkward job you ever had?
Thanks for listening.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
I won’t bother with question #1 since I avoid the phone at all costs.
For question #2, if we are talking physically awkward, I’d say when I used to gallop racehorses – I read a study that said jockeys (and by extension, exercise riders) have to hold a static position longer than any other athlete. Balancing on two little stirrups perched high up on top of the horse’s back in a full crouch position for an extended period of time while you are covering ground at 40 mph on a two year old horse – awkward is just one of the words that describes that.
If you’re talking socially awkward, I’d say my very brief time spent as a census taker, where I had to go knock on stranger’s doors, then get invited into their houses to ask fairly personal questions about them – religion, income, etc. Then on to the next house to tell the neighbours all about it! JK
Most awkward job? Quick-change dresser for a one-man show by alternative comedian Frank Van Keeken at the Back Alley Theatre!
Maybe it’s not the weirdest phone call, but the I did receive a strange and, in retrospect, tragic phone call in the early 1990s from an RCMP officer. I took his name and number and called the RCMP switchboard to make sure he was legit. They said yes so I called him back. He was investigating the disappearance of an 18-year-old from BC. He told me she had been on the same New Year’s Day flight I took from Vancouver to Halifax. He said I was seated in near her row in the plane, but I didn’t remember seeing her on board or at the airport afterwards so I was of no help. Apparently, the teen phoned her family from the airport to say she was planning on checking into a hostel and then she vanished. Sadly, her remains were found in some woods later that year. I looked up the case and it’s still unsolved. There’s a $150,000 reward for information leading to a conviction. In an odd twist, the person who sold her the plane ticket was someone I knew. Back then, if someone couldn’t use a non-refundable ticket, they might sell it under the table. You didn’t have to show I.D. for a domestic flight. Your gender would just need to be the same as the name on the ticket. I always wondered if the teen hadn’t bought that ticket for that flight, would she have avoided running into her killer? Or did she meet them at a place she was heading to anyway and would the outcome have been the same?
I received a call at Dr Pepper once and the caller left this long message for me on voicemail. I didn’t know the guy and I guess he thought he had connected with someone he knew. I forgot his name but he mentioned he was calling from Yakima, Washington and went into this long one-sided conversation about how well the Seattle Seahawks were doing that season. He went on about football, the Super Bowl and more Seahawks stats for the entire message. He sounded like a really interesting guy, had he left his number I might have called him back. I kept that message on my phone as long as I could and played it just to listen to his enthusiasm when I needed to hear it. Too bad I know nothing about the Seahawks.
My job I left for Lone Star was at a toy store called Toys By Roy in the same mall and I think our number was one digit off from a nursery in town. I’d get calls all the time about how much peat moss or mulch we had in stock, so I knew right away it was the wrong number. I guess some callers really don’t listen to how you greet them when you answer because I’d say, “Toys By Roy, How may I help you?” and they’d just go right into asking me about potting soil. Once I had some fun with a caller who was asking how much our bags of mulch cost. I gave him some outrageous price that I knew was really high and he responded with, “It can’t be that expensive, are you sure your mulch is that much per bag?” I paused and whispered, “Hey man, it’s some really good shit.” Then promptly hung up. Closest I’ve ever come to being a dealer.
Right out of college I took on a freelance job with a company right here in McKinney where I live now. The company was called Tow Pro and back in 1990 McKinney was still small a good 45 minutes from Mesquite where I lived. This place made towing equipment that could be attached to a normal car which made it possible to tow another vehicle behind your car. These guys were trying to eliminate calling tow trucks or a third party when you had to tow a car and they thought they were going to revolutionize the industry. They wanted me to create a mascot for them and design some promotional stuff using the mascot but they also wanted me onsite so they could watch me do it in person. So I lugged all my art supplies up there and went to work. The owner was a bit of an eccentric and blared Christian talk radio throughout the tiny cramped office. I remember him digging an old business card out of his wallet and asking me to design the Tow Pro logo to look just like the one on the card, so I did my best to make it look just close enough without completely ripping it off. I worked mostly with his assistant, who hated the owner and insisted that the owner was trying to kill him with asbestos poisoning in the ceiling of his office. That was as awkward as it got for me when it came to onsite freelance, most everything else was done from home. My freelance relationships have been mostly straight forward even though I’ve done some crazy shit over the years for so many clients.
Ian, you got the Jim Hammond Human Torch Funko Pop? Was that an anniversary exclusive they did for Marvel’s 80th? I saw a Sub-Mariner alongside that Human Torch and I thought at the time, “Why wouldn’t they do an Invaders set?!” I loved The Invaders as a kid, why not do Cap & Bucky, Union Jack, Spitfire, The Whizzer and a little Toro to go with the Torch? Missed opportunity for doing a dead Hitler Pop too.
Sleep well all my fellow Sneakers and submit your questions for episode 550!!
I took a phone call from a terrorist once. This was back in the 1990s when I was working as press officer for Dundee University. The caller identified himself as Joe Quinn, who was the Scottish bureau chief for the Press Association. He said he wanted me to confirm a story he’d been told that one of the academic staff in the university’s politics department had received a parcel bomb in the mail that morning.
Something felt wrong from the start of the call. The guy sounded nervous and seemed to have trouble choosing his words – not at all like your average journalist, let alone the experienced reporter he claimed to be. The big reveal was when I offered to check the story and call him back. He wouldn’t leave a number and said he’d call me instead. That’s just not the way a real reporter would act.
Realising this could be very serious, I asked a colleague to alert the university mailroom while I looked up the actual Joe Quinn’s details and rang him. He picked up straight away and, unsurprisingly, sounded nothing like the guy I’d just been talking to. When it turned out the mailroom had also received a mysterious call asking about a bomb, the next step was to call the police.
As I remember it, the main university building was quickly evacuated while police and bomb experts carried out a search. They found a suspicious package that turned out to be a hoax bomb and was ultimately traced back to an anti-English outfit calling themselves the Scottish National Liberation Army. The group’s leaders were later prosecuted and jailed after targeting politicians and other public figures, mainly with other fake bombs, but also by sending parcels containing toxic chemicals disguised to look like cosmetics.
Known to the media as the ‘tartan terrorists’ the Scottish National Liberation Army turned out to be a small bunch of bigots and sociopaths whose repellent views and actions failed to have any lasting impact. But the experience made me realise that terrorists don’t actually have to be numerous or well-resourced to cause fear and disruption and, in the process, gain publicity for their cause. Sometimes, the threat of danger is all that’s required.