Hola, Sneakers! Welcome to Sneaky Dragon – the podcast that noticed you!
This week: opportunity nots; unknown pleasures; bus stopped; remains to be seen; ant musings; it’s the pits; here comes Rubble; spin-offs; executive decisions; Ian has issues with Paddington in Peru; Toad Hell; body horror; basic Black; Dead Set against it; island life; cafeteria society; girl power; trumpet sounds; Shenand’oh; musical uke; Peanuts Interlude I; Dave’s trip Part 2; a bend in the river; hot slot; rocky road; route-less; completely trucked; tee-pee’d; a Dollop of Trollope – the unpack Fanny version; good eats; Winslow learners; completely Frey-ed; cliff hangers; woods walkers; Zip to eat; a grand day oout; #not me; cold bathing; wafer form; well, well, well; card dealer; ghosts of Mary’s; good spirits; cult club; the Wright stuff; Peanuts Interlude II; Question of the Week – Sneakers respond; it’s good to be bad; puzzle peace; over easy; paper tiger; Mary, Mary; and, finally, delicious pape.
Question of the Week: Have you ever found Nature overwhelming?
Sub-question of the Week: How often do you clean out your fridge?
Thanks for listening.
A little stop-motion Paddington:
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Hi Dave and Ian, I do find Nature overwhelming indeed – one time I was up the West Coast of South Africa and taking a walk on the edge of a lake. I got stuck in quicksand! Or quickmud. There was a warning sign and everything – though nowhere near where I was, and I hadn’t seen it. I was out of phone reception, far from a human being, and among the reeds, in the water, stuck – brilliant. I got pretty scared but then I did that tippy-over thing and clambered out once I’d managed to dislodge both legs at once. Look, I don’t mind that that happened, it gave me a mildly entertaining story, but I do mind that one of the most commonly regurgitated remarks of our time is “remember when we were kids and we thought that quicksand was a real issue we’d face some day? Hahahaha too many movies”. Anyhow, I wrote in around this time last year about the holiday I invented as a kid, and it’s nearly April 29th once again, so happy Greenpot, Dave and Ian, happy Greenpot one and all!
The “more-paul” is why Simon & Garfunkel broke up.
You know what makes me feel overwhelmed? When they show those sized diagrams that start out with how big Earth is compared to the moon then it moves right to show how big the sun is compared to Earth. It moves through all our planets in the solar system getting larger and larger and eventually it shows you a star that a million of our suns could fit inside of and you look back at Earth and it’s just a speck.
Then I’m walking at night and I look at the moon and how big it looks in the sky compared to me and I realize how big everything is beyond that in space, that reminds me how overwhelming everything is. Scaling it back to the surface, being in the mountains was overwhelming to me when we visited Colorado. Looking out at an endless Pacific Ocean in San Diego can really put things into perspective too. We’re huge as a collective intellect but physically, we’re barely here in the universe.
And then I’m reminded of this scene from “National Lampoon’s Animal House” with the GREAT Donald Sutherland:
https://youtu.be/M4eS2SceeFk?feature=shared&t=108
I’d like to think Susan and I are pretty neat and tidy around the house, particularly the kitchen. We clean out the fridge quite frequently and have it down to a science so that it doesn’t have too much time to thaw out. This includes all the shelves, drawers and the rotating lazy susan (not my wife) we have on the second shelf. If we have any energy left, we move to the microwave, stovetop and oven to clean them too. For the record, I clean a mean bathroom and usually while listening to Sneaky Dragon. I’m due to clean our main bathroom this weekend so odds are while I’m listening to you read this I’m probably cleaning the bathroom. I’ll let you know.
How are you guys feeling about the upcoming Thunderbolts* movie? Andor Season 2? How about that new Fantastic Four trailer?
Now that’s overwhelming….
All Good Things to you both and to all our wonderful Sneakers in the wild.
I had a very similar experience to that David described on my visit to the Grand Canyon. I’d spent months being wowed by the scale of American Stuff, and was prepared for a knee-wobbling encounter with the Canyon. Instead… it kind of bypassed my wonder circuits. Cognitively, I knew the canyon was mind-bogglingly vast, but in person it looked… flat. And I think that’s the thing that makes it hard to appreciate: Beyond the edge you’re standing on, everything you’re looking at is so far away that there are no perspective cues – no difference between left and right eyes, no change in aerial perspective… the result is that it might as well be painted on a billboard, and my guess is that this is how our brains interpret it.
The C19th Romantic painters like Caspar David Freidrich were obsessed with what they called ‘The Sublime’ – that mixed sense of horror and awe that we get when confronted by a scene of overwhelming beauty. My closest brush with this feeling was on a wonderful visit to Lake Como, Italy, and the stunning scenery revealed by a trip up a funicular railway. The saturated colours were straight out of a studio Ghibli movie. Gorgeous.
Following up on Ed’s comment of a couple of minutes ago, I remember feeling overwhelmed as a kid seeing the classic Eames film ‘Powers of Ten’, a zoom out from a picnic to the vast infinitude of space. The first chapter of Olaf Stapledon’s 1937 novel ‘Star Maker’ contains a highly effective literary version of this zoom out. It was a great comfort when that feeling of dread at our own insignificance in the universe was acknowledged by ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy’ in the section on the ‘Total Perspective Vortex’.
Sending all your highly significant sneakers every best wish,
Peter.
Links!
Powers of Ten:
https://youtu.be/0fKBhvDjuy0?si=tGu2O6zzF8xSVGSV
Star Maker:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/525304.Star_Maker
And as a bonus, following on from that Paddington clip: Flat World! An ingenious blend of 2D drawings animated in 3D.
We don’t get many thunderstorms in our part of Canada due to our geography — maybe one or two brief ones a year. So when I experience a big one with lots of lightning and thunder and hail, I find it quite overwhelming and unnerving. I remember experiencing two huge storms in particular — one in Alberta and another in Ontario — which were really…er…striking.
It’s been a while since I’ve done a “take everything out” fridge cleaning. I’ll usually only down a shelf or wash out a crisper drawer if there’s visible evidence of crumbs or spillage. I’m better at doing a weekly sweep for moldy cheese and liquefied lettuce as those go in the green bin for the city to take away and turn into compost. Our freezer tends to fill up with ziplock bags of meat scraps intended to go into a soup or stir fry. Usually there’s a date on it, but “when in doubt, we throw it out.”