The Perfect Show Scot Maupin

This episode Scot dives into the world of compliments, via the story of a pair of pink shoes. What’s so special about pink shoes? Scot explores how they act as a magnet for compliments, and what is even going on there. 
 
Scot also ventures into some new territory by going to a local punk show and meeting a band there. Hear his voyage into live music for the first time since college, and discover a strong connection between pink shoes and punk shows that wasn’t obvious at the beginning.
 
Special thanks to listener Steven, Jeff Clemens (https://twitter.com/jclemy) , and of course Nicole, Jerry, Julio and Israel, aka Rival Squad for the interview and introduction to punk.
 
You can find them online here:
https://linktr.ee/rival_squad
Bandcamp: https://rivalsquad.bandcamp.com/
Spotify: https://sptfy.com/LDLD
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/_rivalsquad_/
 
Other music from this episode by:
 
Mikesville - https://www.fiverr.com/mikesville
 
Brrrrravo - https://www.fiverr.com/brrrrravo
 
Avishka31 - https://www.fiverr.com/avishka31
 
Steveaik7 - https://www.fiverr.com/steveaik7
 
Gelyanov - https://www.fiverr.com/gelyanov
 
Trappy 808 - https://www.fiverr.com/trappy808_
 
Dawnshire - https://www.fiverr.com/dawnshire
 
Bastereon - https://www.fiverr.com/bastereon
 
Nearbysound - https://www.fiverr.com/nearbysound
 
Aandy Valentine - https://www.fiverr.com/aandyvalentine
 
From the Free Music Archive and used under a Creative Commons License:
 
Komiku - https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Komiku
School - https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Komiku/Captain_Glouglous_Incredible_Week_Soundtrack/mall_1328/
 
AI-Generated Transcript:


Speaker 1: 0:22
Hi and welcome to the Perfect Show. I'm your host, scott Moppen. I'm what you might call a perfection prospector, sifting through life looking for little things or experiences that could be considered perfect. Join me each episode as I examine one topic that I'm presenting as a little nugget of perfection. I'm tremendously fascinated by compliments. Not in the way where you compliment me I drop everything and like go on, tell me more, but in the way that I contend a successful compliment pulls off the closest you can come to a real magic trick. Now, I don't believe in magical powers, but I do believe in the power of compliments. I've seen them change moods or shift whole situations. I've seen compliments stop fights and also open locked doors kind of like magic words. Actually, on today's episode of the podcast, I want to explore compliments and the energy they produce, and one surprising lightning rod I found to attract that energy A simple pair of pink shoes. So what am I talking about with compliments producing energy? Well, I'm saying what happens for me anyway. When someone gives me a compliment, especially when it's unexpected, it gives me a little, almost literal zip of energy. It feels like a little extra charge just runs through my system. That term brightens someone's day, that is what it can seem like, and after a compliment you might see someone perk up, some walk a little straighter or smile in some way. That's why I compare them to magic words. You say them and sometimes there's an immediate, noticeable real world effect. But some physicists out there may be shouting, scott, that would put you at odds with the law of conservation of energy, which says energy can neither be created nor destroyed, only converted from one form to another. And that's a good point. Also, thanks for listening, weird pedantic physicist guy. I don't think we're at odds with the law of conservation of energy because I think it's not actually creating any energy, merely transferring it, like the law says. All genuinely human compliments start with one thing in common attention. That attention is then the energy that gets transferred to the other person through the compliment. You notice someone's new haircut or nicely matched outfit,

For this episode, Scot talks sports! One sport in particular. A Japanese sport that may be new to you. It’s the wonderful game of Park Golf, and we give it a glowing deep dive. 
Small club, big ball, rubber tee, and you’re ready to hit the course. Listen to stories about Park Golf from Japan and adventures I have in America.
I talk with Kris Beyer Jones from Destroyer Park Golf for an interview with the first park golf course in America, and some of my usual unusual hijinks with my friends Jeff Clemens and Alex Yocum.  
Find Destroyer Park Golf at https://destroyerparkgolf.com/
Find the International Park Golf Association of America (IPGAA) at https://ipgaa.com/
Find Wormburner Park Golf at https://www.wormburnerparkgolf.com/
And find the Japanese Park Golf Association at https://www.parkgolf.or.jp/
 
Check out all pics, videos, and transcript on the webpage for this episode: 
https://perfectshowpodcast.com/14-park-golf/
Music from this episode by:
 
Avishka31 - https://www.fiverr.com/avishka31
Bastereon - https://www.fiverr.com/bastereon
Brrrrravo - https://www.fiverr.com/brrrrravo
dawnshire - https://www.fiverr.com/dawnshire
desparee - https://www.fiverr.com/desparee
Gelyanov - https://www.fiverr.com/gelyanov
Gui Moraes - https://www.fiverr.com/guimoraes
Isehgal - https://www.fiverr.com/isehgal
kgrapofficial - https://www.fiverr.com/kgrapofficial
Nearbysound - https://www.fiverr.com/nearbysound
rito_shopify - https://www.fiverr.com/rito_shopify
Yashchaware - https://www.fiverr.com/yashchaware
Aandy Valentine - https://www.fiverr.com/aandyvalentine
From the Free Music Archive and used under a Creative Commons License:
Komiku - https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Komiku
School - https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Komiku/Captain_Glouglous_Incredible_Week_Soundtrack/mall_1328/
 
AI-Generated Transcript:
 
Speaker 1: 0:23
Hi and welcome to the Perfect Show. I am your host, scott Moppen. I'm what you might call a perfection prospector, sifting through life looking for little things or experiences that can be considered perfect. Join me each episode as I examine one topic that I'm presenting as a little nugget of perfection Ah, sports. I'm not much of a sports guy anymore. I mean, I certainly had my phases both as a player and as a fan, both in my childhood. That was the end of that sentence. Both of those were in my childhood. That's why it's weird to me that I found a totally new sport and then became an avid player and fan of it completely in my adulthood. This sport may be new to you too, and if it is, please allow me to proudly introduce you to the game of park golf. Throughout my childhood I had played, and then quit, a number of sports, or rather, I would often hit a ceiling on both my natural athletic ability and my willingness to practice things past when they stopped being fun. But as a kid I had done t-ball and then baseball, soccer for a little bit early on, basketball for a bit later, and then track in seventh grade as well. All of those were over by high school, though, where I was on the high school tennis team for one year as a freshman before not making the team again my sophomore year. You know what sophomore me thought of that Whatever, because you know what sophomore me thought of pretty much everything Whatever. But on the fan side of things, as a child growing up in a suburb of Kansas City, I was of course, into the Royals for baseball and the Chiefs for football. Basketball was trickier since there was no pro team nearby. I think the Chicago Bulls were the closest to us geographically, but the Kansas J-hawks were in Lawrence, just a half hour from us, and they pretty much filled all the same fandom needs that a pro team would Now like a lot of things. That all changed when I went to Japan, but first I remember trying to keep up in absurd ways having my dad record football games and then mail me the tapes, but that stopped pretty quickly. The only game that NHK,

In this episode we examine what happens at sea in the middle of the night, culminating in a crazy night in a Frankenstein-themed nightclub. Join Scot on a discussion of boats, water, staying up all night, and then join him aboard a ship in the middle water and in the middle of the night for this topic.
 
Check out all pics, videos, and transcript on the webpage for this episode: https://perfectshowpodcast.com/13-cruise-ship-3am/
 
Music from this episode by:
 
Simon Carryer - https://www.simoncarryer.com/
 
Bastereon - https://www.fiverr.com/bastereon
 
Brrrrravo - https://www.fiverr.com/brrrrravo
 
kgrapofficial - https://www.fiverr.com/kgrapofficial
 
dawnshire - https://www.fiverr.com/dawnshire
 
desparee - https://www.fiverr.com/desparee
 
rito_shopify - https://www.fiverr.com/rito_shopify
 
Aandy Valentine - https://www.fiverr.com/aandyvalentine
 
From the Free Music Archive and used under a Creative Commons License:
 
Komiku - "School" - https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Komiku/Captain_Glouglous_Incredible_Week_Soundtrack/school/
 
AI-Generated Transcript:


Speaker 2: 0:24
Hi and welcome to the Perfect Show. I'm your host, scott Moppen, and what you might call a perfection prospector, sifting through life looking for little things or experiences that can be considered perfect. Join me each episode as I present one topic that I'm presenting as a little nugget of perfection. I've always been a very land-based human. I grew up in Kansas where, from the right vantage point, you can see oceans of land, with waves of crops blowing in the wind Really the only form of ocean I knew growing up. Other people tell me that looking out over the water makes them feel at ease and gives them a calm sense of peace or serenity, but I've never really felt that. To me, oceans are the home of monsters who can all breathe where I can't, which is not really the calmest or most peaceful thought. That's why it's strange that I'd want to make an episode about basically surrounding myself with nothing but water on the biggest boat I could ever imagine and about finding perfection on that ship in the middle of the night. I think being surrounded by water affects people differently. Some people find peace out in the open water, others the water gives them a different energy and brings chaos. But, like getting seasick, you don't really know how you'll react until it's too late to do much about it. I talked with a friend recently who told me about having this feeling, but even more so she told me the scientific name for it it's called the Lassophobia and it's the intense fear of large bodies of water. I don't think I'm at that level at all, but it was interesting to hear her talk about her intense feelings around water, because I recognize so much that I have, just on a smaller scale. So I said I didn't like water, and that's true. But boats are a different thing. I like a boat, though I haven't really been on that many In my earliest memories of any boat at all. I'm sitting on Smithville Lake in Missouri with Grandpa Moppen, and maybe Grandma or Dad were there too. But fishing was one of my grandpa's passions and he shared it with my sister and me from a very young age. I'm not sure how many other boats I had even gone on, and what gets included under the classification of boat. The Kansas City area has a couple of examples that I don't know if I should really count. At Worlds of Fun, the big theme park in the area, I rode on a mock riverboat that was really just being pulled along on an underwater track at the park so that one seems borderline. Probably shouldn't count it, but what feels completely out of the question are Kansas City's riverboat casinos. Now, to me gambling always seems to have the oddest hoops to jump that make it go from completely illegal, go to prison crime, to 100% A-OK, super profitable business. To go from a place where it's not allowed to one where it is, you may have to cross

This episode Scot revisits stories of the most amazing building he’s ever been to, the Taj Mahal, and the magic that happens to it during an Indian sunrise. 
Scot also looks more locally to see if there is anything around his area that can help recreate this experience and even complete a part of it he could never do in India.
Check out all pics, videos, and for the first time a rough transcript on the webpage for this episode: https://perfectshowpodcast.com/12-the-taj-mahal-at-sunrise/
 
Trappy808 - https://www.fiverr.com/trappy808_
 
Gopakumar1830 - https://www.fiverr.com/gopakumar1830
 
rito_shopify - https://www.fiverr.com/rito_shopify
 
Tushar Lall - https://youtu.be/Xrk6uRZK38w
 
mwmusic - https://www.fiverr.com/mwmusic
 
aarchirecords - https://www.fiverr.com/aarchirecords

Aandy Valentine - https://www.fiverr.com/aandyvalentine
 
Scot's India Sketchbook - https://photos.google.com/album/AF1QipM5Q-rMxYzFAzmzOWmUeXGw8RhLAzJ_yUolsQ-y
 
Floating Taj Sausalito official Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/tajmahalsausalitoofficial/
 
AI-Generated Transcript:

Speaker 1: 0:25
Hi and welcome to the Perfect Show. I'm your host, scott Moppen. I'm what you might call a perfection prospect, sifting through life looking for little things or experiences that can be considered perfect. Join me each episode as I examine one topic that I'm presenting as a little nugget of perfection. Photographs usually do a pretty good job of showing you what something looks like the colors, shapes, sort of giving you a sense of that thing. Photography is built around this idea. Tv and movies are built around this idea. Online shopping is built around this idea. Photographers and cinematographers know how to take the time to make something look so great it looks even better than the real thing. But then there are those things that are so amazing in person, so spectacular, that no photo ever does them justice. The best they can manage is a pale imitation. One of those things for me is the Taj Mahal. My mom was an elementary school art teacher for 40 years and we always had these gigantic books of different artists' work with huge, detailed pictures of their paintings. She would use them as resources in class to show students and for her own classes as she worked on her master's degree in the summers. Monet, dali, rockwell, picasso, gauguin, van Gogh, matisse I was flipping through all of them over and over again from an early age. We would also go regularly to the Nelson Atkins Art Museum in Kansas City, so I grew up seeing paintings both in books and in person a lot. It got me interested in art, eventually allowing me to enter college on an art scholarship, and pretty much affected everything in my life. During college I would have one art history course each semester, which would put me in a big auditorium twice a week looking at giant projections of paintings on a screen. One summer, while traveling through Chicago, I made a visit to the Chicago Institute of Art Museum where I got to see a traveling exhibit of Van Gogh paintings, including one that I had seen on screen in art history class and also in my mom's books. It was small in real life smaller than the giant screen projection, of course, but also smaller than the reproduction of it I had seen in the book. The real painting was smaller than a piece of printer paper, which really surprised me and modest. It wasn't showy at all. It was just a small painting of the sun setting over a wheat field. I didn't really pay much attention to it on the screen or the book, just flipped right past it, but there in person it stopped me in my tracks. I remember having the absurd initial reaction of thinking they shouldn't allow photos of this to be in books or online because you just lose so much the type of thing where it feels almost rude to show people the photograph of it first and let them think they've seen what the real thing is like. Pictures hadn't shown me

This episode is a special one. Scot is going to dive into the story of Morena, the place The Perfect Show’s studio is named after, and recounts the story of one of the most amazing places he ever found in Japan. 
 
The story wanders to Indian restaurants, Hokkaido festival life, and Dr. Pepper. 
 
This one’s been on the slate since the idea of this podcast first happened, and I’m excited to finally share it with you now. 
 
Bossa Nova Chirstmas Songs:
 
Marcela Mangabeira - All I Want For Christmas is You
https://youtu.be/ne2r3378-ZU
 
Monique Kessous - Last Christmas
https://youtu.be/Tp_yks2Fl7E
 
Tahta Menezes - Happy Christmas (War is Over)
https://youtu.be/US-9cddsu2Y
 
Here are links to Kisha Solomon’s two-part essay “Black in Spain: Beauty Standards and Exoticisms”
Part 1: https://www.lasmorenasdeespana.com/blog/black-in-spain-an-exotic-beauty
Part 2: https://www.lasmorenasdeespana.com/blog/morena-negra-whats-in-a-name
NEW:
The Perfect Show has a new website! Now find us at www.perfectshowpodcast.com and put images to any audio you are wondering about.
 
Special thanks for the cover song: 
 
Romaana Shakir - romaanashakir: https://www.fiverr.com/romaanashakir
 
Instrumental by Chevy71Corvette on Youtube - https://youtu.be/8zyhnWDhcrM
 
And for the Japanese segment:
 
Japanese Voice Over - araccyn: https://www.fiverr.com/araccyan
 
English Translation - nwcoast90: https://www.fiverr.com/nwcoast90
 
Original Piano Composition - steveaik7: https://www.fiverr.com/steveaik7



Music from this episode by:
 
mikesville - https://www.fiverr.com/mikesville
 
nikas_music - https://www.fiverr.com/nikas_music
 
brrrrravo - https://www.fiverr.com/brrrrravo
 
dawnshire - https://www.fiverr.com/dawnshire
 
adam_mejghi - https://www.fiverr.com/adam_mejghi
 
Desparee - https://www.fiverr.com/desparee
 
Lofi_rob - https://www.fiverr.com/lofi_rob
 
Aandy Valentine - https://www.fiverr.com/aandyvalentine
 
From the Free Music Archive and used under a Creative Commons License:

Komiku - https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Komiku
 
AI-Generated Transcript:
 
Speaker 1: 0:25
Hi and welcome to the Perfect Show. I'm your host, scott Moppen. I'm what you might call a perfection prospector, sifting through life looking for little things or experiences that could be considered perfect. Join me each episode as I examine one topic that I'm presenting as a little negative perfection. Hey there, this one is a really special topic to me. You may hear me say at the end of most of these episodes that they're recorded at Morena Studios, which is just a name I've given to my little setup here. But for this one, I want to tell you how I picked that name and where it came from. Today, I'd like to tell you the story of Morena. I think it's pretty natural to get homesick when you're living in another country for an extended period of time. Moving within the same country to a place with a different enough feel or culture can do it too. The thing at the heart of that homesick feeling is separation from an environment that you know and immersion in an unfamiliar one. When I left Kansas for Japan, I was pretty ready to go. I was ready to see the world and live on the other side of it and discover who I was going to become. But even if someone is completely ready for that change. I don't think there's any way of avoiding missing what you leave behind. People for sure. That's the big one for most of us, or I should say people, pets, loved ones let's just extend it to loved ones but also haunts, familiar environments, favorite foods and drinks, or even just commonly available foods that you may take for granted until you look around and they're suddenly not available anymore. One that got me in Kyushu was we found a vending machine out in Fukuoka City, one lone vending machine that, along with the more standard choices you would find in Japanese vending machines

Short episode trying something new where Scot puts out a call to action, calling on you to call in with some compliments. Tell me about the best ones you’ve ever gotten and tell me about the best ones you’ve ever given.
 
A short 4 minute episode to introduce the new Podcast Call-In Line at 616-737-3329. Call and leave me a voicemail that could get played on a later show!
 
That’s 616-737-3329, 616-PERFECZ
UPDATE:
I have made the episode this call-in was for, so I'm no longer taking calls, and the episode I used this for is ep 15 - Pink Shoes / Punk Shows. 
Check it out and be on the look out for more of these in the future.
Visit perfectshowpodcast.com for more.
 
Music on this episode by:
 
Noah Makes Music: https://www.fiverr.com/noahmakesmusic

Brrrrravo - https://www.fiverr.com/brrrrravo
 
AI-Generated Transcript:
 
Speaker 1: 0:23
Hey everybody, it's Scott and this is the Perfect Show. I'd like to try something new today and see if I can interact a little with you all. So I set up a call-in number and I'm looking for listeners to call in with responses to two questions First, what's the best compliment you've ever gotten? And second, what's the best compliment you've ever given. That's it. So that means to you call in and let me know your answer for either one or both of those questions. Tell me the compliment, tell me the story, if it needs a little context, but I want to hear it. I want to know about the best compliments you've given and about the best ones you've gotten. You call in, leave your name or however you want to be referred to in a short message that I may use on a future show. Mind that I'm thinking of for the show as a funny one, but funny, serious, long short. I want to hear whatever you got. So, about the phone number, you know how you can pick your number sometimes and the numbers on phones will spell out things if you're using old phones or texting T9 or whatever. Well, I got the Google voice number. That spells out 616-P-E-R-F-E-C-C. That's right, 616-737-3329. Don't call 616. Perfect. It's one number different than I was able to get, because, of course, all the ones that spell out perfect or already taken, I mean I didn't have some special early invite to Google voice. So we are 616 perfect Z no T 616-737-3329. Give it a call. Tell me about some compliments. Also, you might predict that if I don't get any calls I'll be sad and think I don't have any listeners. But no, no, no, no, no. Well, you'd be half right. I will be sad because it will only mean that my listeners are all clearly very terrible, rude people who never compliment each other. But that's okay. It just means you'll need whatever I'm making all that much more. So if you're hearing this, try not to wait until the last minute. I'm a procrastinator myself. I get it, but that compliment that just popped into your head when I asked about it just now. You're going to forget that one if you wait too long, and I really want to hear it. So just call up our shiny new voicemail at 616-737-3329. Maybe unsurprisingly, I make this show pretty slowly. So if you figure it's been a month and you are too late, you aren't Up until you see an episode that uses the compliment voicemails. It's still fair game, so call in and add your story to. I am working on the next episode already. It's almost done. So this isn't for that and that will be out sooner than a month. But this will be for a different episode later on. Hello there, this is Scott from the future In rejecting to let you know I have now finished that episode and it's episode 15 about pink shoes and punk shows. It should be in the same feed. You found this just five episodes later in the timeline. So the original window for calls has passed. But I'll try to do more of these down the road somewhere in the future, especially if I hear that this is the type of thing you'd like more of. That's it. I just wanted to jump in and say thanks for listening to the show and I