Hola, Sneakers. Welcome to Episode 446 – only four more shows until our whopping big Episode 450!
This week: we’ve got notes; free range; reciprocity; Canadian vuvuzelas; hierarchical empathy; sensitive; true lies; alligator pie; junior readers; best review ever; ex-change; big pennies; pod covered; stand-in peppers; purity boobs; seasonal beaches; be a big jerk; original flavours; stubbies; Old Style; no molestation guaranteed; what? no beer; adrenaline related injuries; improv improvement; bad grooming; what Christopher Hitchens really meant; men kissing on stage; lesbian watchers; same old, dame old; Question of the Week – Sneakers respond; and much, much more! (It was a really long show this week!)
Thanks for listening.
Question of the Week: If you had a sibling, what was the most common thing you fought about?
Sub-question: Tell us about a childhood injury.
AND REMEMBER!!!
Don’t miss out on your chance to WIN WIN WIN
That’s right! Our 450th episode is fast approaching and we will be hosting our traditional Listeners’ Questions Episode! Every question gives you a chance in our GRAND PRIZE DRAW. The more questions you ask, the better your chances to win! So get to asking!
Send your list of questions by email to sneakyd@sneakydragon.com. If you’d like, record your questions, send us an audio file, and we’ll play it during the show. Fun, right???
Here is a sweet pic of a stubby beer bottle with the Old Style beer label that is so dear to Dave’s heart.
Muhammad Ali vs. a straw.
Not just peanut-flavoured peanut butter!
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Funny you should mention Australia for the “stubby” being very Australian-sounding because it has been kind of adopted as a term for beer whether it’s in a stubby bottle or a can, as is how most Aussies drink beer. From a slab (24 cans). I’m guessing it’s because most beers were stubbies back in the day though I do believe most everything now is a “long neck” like everywhere else, mostly Europe I think. The term is no doubt perpetuated by the “stubby holder”. The ubiquitous foam sleeve you can put your beer into, because boy do they condensate fast on a hot day! that is right up there with the mouse mat as the favourite promotional item everyone was printing terrible photos onto in the mid 90s, and probably still do today.
When I was 12 I was play wrestling with my cousin and broke a finger. When I came into school with a bandaged finger one of my fellow pupils thought it would be funny to give me a nick name to mock the fact that it was a relatively minor injury: from that day on I was known by the very un-pc nickname of ‘cripple’. It became used so much during my school years that the meaning was completely lost, I never took any offence to it and most of my friends used it without any real thought. No one I know calls me by that name anymore but now and then I meet someone who I know from my schooldays who will greet me with that name and then suddenly realise that to anyone else it would be considered very offensive!
The thing my siblings and I squabbled over the most had to do with watching TV. We only had one TV and we were constantly jockeying for the most comfortable seat in the living room. For 2 parents and 4 kids, we had 1 couch, 1 rocking chair, 1 basket chair and the floor. Sure, there were also 6 hard-backed dining room chairs, but those were for suckers and long-suffering Moms. Our house rule was: if you leave the room, you lose your spot. Then there was the battle over what to watch. This was before we had a TV with a remote. When our parents weren’t around, somebody would occasionally pull the channel changer knob right off the TV so no one else could change the channel. But then somebody else discovered you could use needle-nosed pliers to turn the metal stub thus thwarting the knob thief’s efforts. Fortunately my brothers and I could always agree on watching Star Trek. And we watched the Adam West Batman reruns so much after school that some of our baby sister’s first words were, “Na na na na na na na na…Batman!”
Ian, you know me so well. Your comment that maybe those killer crows “had just caws” did have me laughing.
P.S. About Googling “penies” and coming up with something unexpected. A relative has been asking me for advice on writing Hallmark TV movie scripts. I just did a search for “what length for an M.O.W.?” and got a bunch of pages about the ideal height to cut your grass.
Hi Chaps! I know you were joking at the end, and I suspect you were doing so from knowing some facts about the product in question, but it is true that we don’t call Slushies ‘Slushies’.
The brand name here is ‘Slush Puppies’ (as, according to a quick Google search, it is in the U.K.) I don’t know if Slushies are a specific 7-11 product, we don’t have 7-11 I the U.K.
As for broken bones, I’m with David in that I didn’t break anything as a kid – I first broke something (a compound fracture to my shoulder) falling off a bicycle on my way to work in my early 40’s!
Best wishes,
Paul
Having worked for Dr Pepper for 17 years I may be able to shed some light on your question about bottles. First though, we were always well aware of all the knock-off brands that tried to mimic Dr Pepper but here in Texas most loyalists were true to the original and nothing else. Even so, I enjoyed Ian’s rundown of the “Dr ______”, it brought back a flood of memories. Having been in the beverage industry all those years, the bottom line for any brand is the amount of shelf space purchased in stores by the local bottlers. The bottles are purchased by the bottler as is the “formula” used to create the product. The bottlers put everything together at a facility and ship enough product to the stores to fill the amount of shelf space they’ve bought. I’m sure there’s a sales team that could explain this further by way of an elaborate formula that provides the cost vs. profit margins, but that’s too exhausting, it’s all common sensical. The bottles, at least while I was in the business did continue to evolve in order to make room for more product on the shelves or in coolers, so we were always creating packaging to leverage the maximum product for the amount of space the bottlers sales team purchased. So it only makes sense that squattier bottles took up more room in a 6-Pack carrier than a taller, thinner bottle packed the same way in a 6-pack carrier. Expand this to larger cases, like 12oz. cans, and you get the same result, taller packaging that took up less space from the base up. This may be complete bullshit, but I do know we were continually developing packaging that made for more product on the shelves and in convenience store coolers.
In the mid-90’s when Dr Pepper was bought by Cadbury Beverages, a massive bottling company was created throughout the midwest and the south called The American Bottling Company. This huge company bought quite a few small, independent bottlers in a number of cities to help them stay in business. One such independent bottler was in Cleveland and it was called Cotton Club Beverages. Once Cotton Club was part of the larger American Bottler Company, they were allowed to reach out to us for anything that would help their brand. So we went up to Cleveland and saw how much local brand loyalty Cleveland had for the Cotton Club beverages. We sat down with the owners, who had been in business since the 20’s, and created a plan to redesign all their packaging so it had what was called “A Family Presence” on the shelves in the Cleveland market. All these guys wanted was for all their flavors to have a cohesive design and style so it looked better to the public. As it was, all their flavors had been designed at different times by different designers and had no relationship to one another. I immediately started sketching what I thought it should look like and these guys were so happy for our help solving their problem that we were immediately tasked with their package designs. Months later, we were in production and sent the new designs to their bottler to use for all their beverages. Their most popular flavor was called “Red Chief” or “Big Chief” (I can’t remember which) and had a Native American Indian on the label. It tasted like Big Red, a flavor you didn’t mention in that immense pantheon of flavors which kind of tastes like bubble gum. I could never stand the stuff, but it’s pretty popular here in Dr Pepper country.
Here is an example of the packaging we did for Cotton Club’s Cherry Strawberry Soda:
https://www.buehlers.com/shop/cotton_club_soda_cherry_strawberry/p/8016162
The flavor with the Native American Indian was called Cherikee Red and was the only flavor that DIDN’T want us to redesign. I can’t say I blame them, look at this beautiful label…
https://www.walmart.com/ip/Cherikee-Red-Cherry-Soda-2-L/187458599
Childhood injury: taking a tray of cookies out of the oven with an oven mitt that turned out to have a rather large hole in it. I got a nasty burn, and even today am paranoid about making sure my oven mitts are always in good shape.
I’m proud to say that my only brother and I never fought, if anything was remotely close to a fight it was most likely a simple misunderstanding. I’m seven years older than my brother and I don’t think there’s anyone closer to me than him. I took care of him when my parents both worked during the summer and to this day I’m still taking care of him. Over the past decade, my brother has become disabled and is almost completely blind, so I call him every day and he’s only 45 minutes from me if he needs me for anything.
When I was in 7th grade, my friend two houses down from me and I were playing kickball. As I slid into third base, which was a thin board on the sidewalk, my left foot bent underneath me and I fell down hard on my ankle breaking it. I heard it snap. My Mom came out to call me in so I could go with my folks to shop for a new television. I told her I couldn’t walk but she made me walk home on my injured ankle and it hurt like hell. A few nights before this happened, I played sick to get out of a boring P.T.A. meeting at the school which also meant I’d miss “Happy Days.” When my folks returned home from the P.T.A. meeting, I was outside playing, so they thought I was pulling the same stunt from earlier in the week to get out of television shopping. They went shopping and I didn’t move from the sofa. I laid there and watched my ankle swell up in pain, so when my folks returned home we took off to the E.R. and had my ankle cast along with a nice new pair of crutches. About two months later I was good as new but only after I quit kickball for life.
Ian and David, that was the most hilarious start to the show, maybe ever! I was LOL-ing so hard! I just needed you to know it, and that in these weird confusing times those laughs are the best thing! So thank you!!!
In answer to this week’s questions, i have two younger sisters and we were fairly reasonable I guess, not too much fighting, although middle sister always had my number and knew how to get under my skin. Still does, come to think of it! As we got into our teens, the worst quarrels were probably over her borrowing my clothes without asking and getting them stained or ripped, clothes I’d bought myself with my hard-earned dollars from McDonald’s.
My worst injury as a kid was a broken left arm, at age 11, which happened in a fall from a friend’s horse . When I rode him into a ring to do some small jumps, he went one way; I went the other. My friend helped me up, and we walked to the stable to return our horses, me cradling the arm, I was thinking I didn’t want to tell my Dad who was relaxing after his golf game in the clubhouse. I was afraid of what would happen, that I might have to go to a doctor and get a shot! I don’t know why this was the big concern. I’d had a lot of shots two years before when I contracted diptheria, and I survived all those! Anyway, my oblivious Dad drove me home later, and my then oblivious Mom didn’t seem too concerned either. We lived in Brazil then, and had a live-in cook whom I adored. SHE is the one who took one look at me and told my two oblivious parents my arm was surely broken, and to get me to the doc, and they obliged. I’ve had two broken arms since, and thankfully, none required the dreaded shots!!!
The end! Thanks gentlemen!
Hello again gentlemen!
You were wondering what got me LOL-ing so hard in this episode… I just cracked up from the beginning when you, Ian, said you had a weird topic you wanted to talk about…and David, you piped up with such a random, “Oh, I hope it’s about salamanders!” Ian: “Well, it is now!” SO wonderful!
And it just went on from there, I laughed hard, too, at the lying as a kid stories (I remember a couple whoppers I told and then was concerned with being outed… ( I think I made up an older brother once, too, and said he’d died).
Ian’s Alligator Pie “win” was just hilarious in that retelling, perfectly timed and I loved it, too! I’ve listened to these stories several times… laughing out loud still!
Sadly, I don’t recall any more on the topic of salamanders, however. 🙂