Hola, Sneakers! Welcome to Episode 416 – and THE ANNOUNCEMENT OF OUR CONTEST WINNER! So that’s pretty exciting.
This week on the show: a bard beginning; the big come on; burgers, eggs and potatoes; Dave guests; the genesis of the Bible; a disgusting sandwich; best plug ever; gritty milkshakes; the German potato salad list; Germans hate their food; smelly sandwich etiquette; fish boat food; grandparents love; narrowed lives; stretch your life muscles; bizzy, bizzy; the gift that keeps on gifting; back down The Black Hole; Question of the Week – Sneakers respond; eat the Nazis; scary hat; it’s the flying monkeys; kittlers; Halloween Scrooge; more scary movies; Ian reaches into the prize pants; and, finally, thematic.
Question of the Week: Tell us about something you’ve won.
Sub-question: What’s your favourite sci-fi novel?
Thanks for listening.
Here is the official image of the word cloud created by Brent Tannehill from the audio he carefully scanned of our show since its beginnings in the mid-1960s:
This is for Ian and you:
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Well, now I just feel like a fraud. I actually didn’t think my entry was eligible (30 words or less?) and sent it in thinking you wouldn’t include it in the draw. But I’m glad you liked it!
Hello Gents! The best thing I’ve won was dinner and free tickets to Star Trek The Experience when it was newly opened in the Las Vegas Hilton in the last century – I was with my sister, we had already visited as paying guests and were in the Fashion Show Mall on our last full day in Vegas when we saw a promotional event for the Star Trek attraction – there was a Klingon make up class, and a presentation by the VP of Paramount Theme Parks, with a Q & A – at the end of which there was a quiz for various prizes. One of the questions was one I had asked in the Q&A, but someone else beat me to it – and gave the wrong answer. I stepped in, gave the right answer and won the prize (which was two tickets to the Experience plus lunch at Quark’s Bar – we explained we couldn’t do lunch as we were flying back the next day, and they upgraded it to dinner! Nice way to finish our Vegas holiday. We even got the souvenir glass!
As for SF book – I can’t say it’s my favourite, but it’s one that has lingered in the mind – and which I can find very little about online. It was entitled “The Godwhale” and was by TJ Bass. It was a riff on the “Logan’s Run” idea of someone trying to escape from an enclosed civilisation – I found the book whilst on holiday at my grandparents in Ireland and haven’t seen it since!
Thanks for an excellent podcast, and for mentioning The Great Eastern some time ago – I emailed about it at the time and have just finished working my way through the archives!
I actually won two prizes from the same radio show when I was a kid. The show was Jim Lowe’s Library of Laughs on the Dallas Classical station WRR. The first contest I answered with my Dad’s help and won a gift certificate to a Dallas shoe store, the second prize was a Stan Freberg album. This was won by me sending a trivia question in to the show to be told on the air, if none of the listeners were able to answer it, I won the prize. That question was to name all five Marx Brothers by their given names. It was an appropriate question too since the D.J. played clips from the Marx Brothers’ album “The Original Voice Tracks.”
Much later, in 1999, I really won it big. The Pepsi promotion for The Phantom Menace was in full swing and a grocery store I would stop at after work had a full-size Yoda drawing. He was way up on a stack of Pepsi can packs with an entry box below. I must have taken several of those pads of entry slips and filled out as many as I could. I stuffed the box one morning on my way to work then left town for a family vacation. I figured that if I’d won the Yoda, there’d be a message on my phone waiting for me, but there wasn’t. About two days later, I stopped by the store after work and I noticed Yoda was still up on the Pepsi can packs! The drawing should have already happened while I was out of town so I asked the manager about it. He and another woman looked at me in astonishment, as if they both had forgotten something, then they both looked at the Yoda. The manager then dialed someone on the phone and as he did this, he looked over his shoulder and said, “Don’t go anywhere, we might just give him to you.” It was obvious they had forgotten to draw a name for this thing. The next thing I know they told me to go get a shopping buggy so we could get Yoda down and I could wheel him away! I helped get Yoda down and the woman reached inside the box just to see who’s name she would have picked…it was mine. So I took ‘ol Yoda and found out how difficult it was to get one of these things in a Camaro. He never made it into the house since my daughter was terrified of him, so he stayed wrapped up in the garage and he’s actually way much larger than Yoda should be. The ironic thing about this entire story is that only eight years later, I ended up working as an art director for the company that made all these life-size Star Wars characters!
https://www.hakes.com/Auction/ItemDetail/44083/STAR-WARS-EPISODE-I-YODA-STORE-DISPLAY-FIGURE
Not being an avid reader (excluding comics), the book that sticks in my mind the most is the time-traveling novel by James P. Hogan, “The Proteus Operation”. I’m a sucker for time travel stories and I’ve read this one twice. I also like biographies very much and having worked in a comic book, sci-fi bookstore, you’d think I’d have read more books…but it was usually comics.
My favourite sci-fi novel is Dune (1965). I like the collected works of other sci-fi authors, but for me, no other single book tops it in terms of universe-building and epic sweep. It predates Star Trek, 2001: a Space Odyssey, Star Wars, and Avatar and you can see its influence on them. It has now-typical sci-fi elements like interstellar travel, weird technology, preternatural mental abilities, genetic manipulation, and monstrous lifeforms. It’s an allegory for real-world issues like politics, religion, economics, and resource exploitation. And yet none of that bogs down a story that is full of action and intrigue. The other Dune novels get weaker as the series goes along, but the first one holds up even after five decades. I have a pet peeve about film and TV adaptations of Dune: when they cast actors in their 20s to play Paul Atreides. When will a producer finally have the guts to cast a 15-year-old in the part? The character’s rise to power against all odds at such a young age is an important part of the story.
My favorite science fiction novel is Neuromancer by William Gibson (with Dune a close second). Neuromancer isn’t merely the cyberpunk ideal of high tech with lowlifes, it’s a heist novel with lots of brilliant set pieces. But it’s the poetry of Gibson’s high-definition style that makes it rise above the rest. One of the few books I can read again and again.
Hi guys! Finally getting around to answering this good question!
I’ve won a few things in my life. In the late 70’s I was always the first in the office, so I’d play the early morning radio. From that I won first an IBC Root Beer can-style transistor radio for calling in first to identify the opening notes of the Monkees’ “Daydream Believer”. (That was a cinch; only needed 2 notes!) A few months later, I handily scooped up the brand new Sister Sledge album, “We are Family…!” by answering another question which I cannot recall.
There was a sweet win in 1998: a 3-day/night trip to the Atlantis resort in the Bahamas, including airfare from Key West where we lived at the time. That was nice.
In 2014 I won a radio station’s coffee mug and a bag of coffee beans for having the host’s favorite defense of why the 1960’s was the most transformative decade musically. It was my opinion, and I guess he agreed.
BUT, and this is a BIG BUT, my favorite win of all, was (drumroll please!!!) in the Fall of 2017. That was when the Sneaky Dragon Episode 350 “aired” taking questions from us fans, and my very own name was pulled from the hat, or the pants, or whatever you were using at the time! I won my choice of one of David’s great title cards on a T-shirt. My selection: “Peanuts Envy”! It makes me smile every time I wear it! And it makes other people say, “Whaaaaaat?…!
So, as always, Hip Hip Hooray for Sneaky Dragon!