Hola, Sneakers! Welcome to the podcast that has its head on a swivel!
This week: the neighbour of the beast; your worship; murder ink; everybody limbo; motorhead; talking in the dark; dream logic; stone free; crisis management; rats!; scaredy-cats; Supermanimation; serial thrillers; on the rogue; Tracy takes; unheralded helpers; 50% fun; the PNE drops; ribs for your pleasure; Sweeney odd; don’t back down; home for the holidays; the hits played faster; original horror; Giallo-ty; Question of the Week – Sneakers respond; scam scheming scum; guest spider; Muppet art; hard work; TED man talking; talk sick; travelling coach; TED reckoning; we olde podcast; bile pics; Gras-phic content; and, finally, bad timing.
Question of the Week: What is your biggest irrational fear?
Sub-question of the Week: What is something you hate about the internet?
Thanks for listening.
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I admire Ian for his recognition of all genders in his use of the pronoun “they” or “theirs” when he refers to a person for whom he doesn’t specifically know the preferred pronoun. I try to do that, but it is very difficult to overcome ingrained language habits.
Also, I appreciate his willingness to sell his wonderful Diary Drawings, which are expressive and beautiful, and I’m looking forward to receiving mine.
One thing I hate about the internet is hate and how easily haters can find other haters to share their hateful ideas with. And that can lead to hateful actions. I’m looking forward to your apocalyptic Episode 666. How about a Top 6 song list on some aspect of the topic from Dave?
Seconded!
Thirded!
Dear Commander Dedrick, Major Boothby, and all the Sneaky Dragoons – greetings to you from your semiregular correspondent and parasocial friend.
Irrational fears and phobias are a fantastic conversation starter: everybody has them, and whilst they might feel like intimate secrets nobody minds, so sharing them is a bonding experience.
Alongside the standard male phobia of asking people for directions when driving a car, I have an avoidance phobia about phoning people. I wonder why… I’m generally happy talking to strangers and writing emails.. Perhaps with a phone call there’s an element of suspense – Will they answer or not? Are you wasting their time or interrupting them? If I have to leave a message will I mess up my monologue? Then there’s the lack of social cues in a phone call… maybe one of you has some insight into this one.
A couple of sisters worked in my old office. One of them had a very real phobia of masks so crippling and all consuming that she couldn’t leave home for the week around Halloween. This was a real and valid fear, and to take it lightly I suppose she’ll never get to attend one of those specialist parties for grown ups. You know, the ones in an abandoned stately home where the “Lord and Lady of the Manor” are really a couple of hard-up acting students from Bradford who’ve been hired by a hedge fund manager called Martin, and you have to find a taxi in Eastbourne at 5am but your phone is still in the ‘safe-room’. Or something.
So, yes, the other sister now – she was afflicted with an extreme phobia that was unlikely to ever cause her any problems whatsoever: that of killer whales.
Not quite in the same league are the phobias that could be classed as a disgust response:
– I personally hate the sound of cutlery clashing against itself:
– My sister hates “wet hands on newspaper”
– For another colleague it was the cold embrace of a shower curtain against his naked flesh
– The last but best was ‘the feeling of making breadcrumbs with flour and butter’
I went for a tour of the west of England with a friend once. Halfway up Glastonbury Tor – a small but steep hill with a turret on top – he froze. ‘I can’t go any further’, he said. ‘What?’ ‘I have to stop. The slope it’s… too much’. He’d suddenly been overcome by an acute fear of heights – unaffected by the fact that if he did fall the worst that would happen would be a short roll-to-a-stop. I like to think I treated him kindly, but It did come as a surprise… I think we all get a bit of a wobble in high places, but I didn’t realise it could strike in such seemingly controlled conditions.
What’s don’t I like about the internet? Perhaps that it holds up an amplifying mirror to our own worst instincts.
Some time ago, three homes in my neighborhood were each struck by lightning, one year after another during springtime and close enough to see from my house. Some damage was worse than the others but for three years in a row one house lost this shitty neighborhood lottery and was burned by the wrath of a Texas thunderstorm…and we lived in the middle of all three like some suburban Bermuda Triangle. It’s normal to fear a Texas lightning and thunderstorm or even a tornado but after seeing three homes go down like that it was hard to not think we were next. One convention of thinking would be that lightning never strikes the same place twice, so maybe we were safe by those thoughts.
Then we found out the real reason why this was happening. The builder in our neighborhood was using cheaper flexible gas lines in some of the homes when the standard was a more expensive NON CONDUCTIVE lead line. It seems that the flexible gas lines were made for homes in California that were prone to shifting, hence the flexible lines. They were being used here too and not because our land shifts but because they were cheaper than the lead gas lines, so into the attic we went. Luckily we had the non conductive lead gas lines that did not attract lightning, the three other homes had the flexible gas lines that DID attract the lightning and we all know hat happens when a bolt of electricity connects with gas…
Also, the lawyers are called.
This helped quell my irrational thoughts until my next door neighbor’s home was struck by lightning about three years ago. It only damaged their kitchen but I felt that fear creeping back after that happened. Texas just sucks in the spring and I’m confident in saying I’m not alone when it comes to fearing for my home, irrational or not.
There are lots of great qualities to having the internet and I think one of them is happening as I write this to friends in Canada! I never would have found thousands of fellow Marx Brothers fan without the internet. No Full Marx which means no Sneaky Dragon, so I still think the good outweighs the bad when looking at what I get from the good ‘ol Information Super Highway. (Aren’t you glad that name never caught on?) How about Interwebs? Still goofy.
What I do hate and I’ll echo Louise above, is the use of the internet to breed hate and misinformation. It’s that simple and like anything else it’s a tool that can be used for good or bad, we just have to be responsible for how we wield it. I’m sure the same things were said about the printing press ages ago…
Still cooking down here in the Lone Star Inferno but the end is in sight!
Warm and toasty tidings to all my Sneakers.
Say what you will about the trailer for the upcoming film “Saturday Night” but have you seen the poster?! It’s reminiscent of the hand-drawn illustrated National Lampoon style posters and really nails the era…
I love that style, something you don’t see these days.
See and read about it here:
https://www.worldofreel.com/blog/2024/8/13/first-poster-for-jason-reitmans-saturday-night