Who's Bill This Time
NPR
Saturday, September 27, 2014
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Bill Kurtis reads three quotes from the week's news: President O'Bomba; White House Intruder Alert; The Captain Says Farewell.
Transcript
BILL KURTIS, BYLINE: From NPR and WBEZ Chicago, this is WAIT WAIT ...DON'T TELL ME, the NPR News quiz. I'm Bill Kurtis. And here is your host at the Chase Bank Auditorium in downtown Chicago, Peter Sagal.
PETER SAGAL, HOST:
Thank you Bill.
(APPLAUSE)
SAGAL: Thank you everybody. Thank you. We do have, in fact, a great show for you today. We've got author Elizabeth Gilbert joining us later. You know her for her enormous bestseller "Eat, Pray, Love." Everybody read it, which led to a lot of eating and praying and loving. Well, actually this being America, everybody ate a lot and then they got drowsy and they promised to pray just as soon as they watch this next episode of "House Of Cards," and then we all fell asleep on the couch - but we tried.
It's a lot easier to follow our prescription for a good life, which is give us a call. The number is 1-888-WAIT-WAIT, that translates to 1-888-924-8924. It's time to welcome our first listener contestant. Hi, you're on WAIT WAIT ...DON'T TELL ME.
MATT CIPRIANO: Hey, there. How is going? This is Matt Cipriano from New York City.
SAGAL: Matt Cipriano?
CIPRIANO: That's right.
SAGAL: Well, it's nice to hear from you. Are you in New York, New York as they say? Manhattan? Or where are you?
CIPRIANO: Manhattan, midtown.
SAGAL: Oh, hey, that's awesome. Nobody, I thought, listens to our show in New York because nobody has any cars.
(LAUGHTER)
CIPRIANO: We don't but there's a whole lot of traffic with the U.N. this week.
SAGAL: Oh, yeah. I bet that's - I mean, is that - I imagine that can be extraordinarily annoying. You can't get anywhere with all the motorcades.
CIPRIANO: Oh, yeah.
SAGAL: So do you just not leave your apartment?
CIPRIANO: I try not to, but unfortunately I can't just walk to work.
SAGAL: Oh dang. Well, welcome to our show. It's great to have you. Let me introduce you to our panel this week. First, it's a humorist who will be hosting Storytellers On A Mission with Roy Blount Jr. at the Flynn Theater in Burlington, Vermont on November 1, I mean, it's Tom Bodett.
TOM BODETT: Hello, Matt.
(APPLAUSE)
SAGAL: Next, it's a recorder and blogger for the Houston Chronicle. It's Ms. Kyrie O'Connor.
(APPLAUSE)
SAGAL: And lastly, we're joined again by writer and comedian - Shelby Fero is here.
(APPLAUSE)
SAGAL: So Matt, welcome to the show. You're going to start us off, of course, with Who's Bill This Time. Bill Kurtis will re-create for you three quotations from the week's news. I bet you know the rules. They are if you correctly identify two of them, then that you win our prize - that is the voice of Scorekeeper Emeritus Carl Kasell on your voicemail. You ready to go?
CIPRIANO: Absolutely.
SAGAL: All right. Here's your first quote.
KURTIS: They're the coalition of the sort of willing.
SAGAL: That was a reporter for the Shreveport Times talking about the coalition of Arab nations that joined the U.S. to fight ISIS where this week?
CIPRIANO: Is it Syria?
SAGAL: It is Syria. Yes. Very good.
(SOUNDBITE OF BELL)
SAGAL: First of all, congratulations to those of you who have Syria in the who we going to bomb bingo. Fill in that space.
(LAUGHTER)
SAGAL: President Obama ordered the airstrikes this weeks on ISIS targets there right after turning his Nobel Peace Prize to the wall so the face on it would stop staring at him like that.
(APPLAUSE)
SAGAL: The president promises there will be no, quote, "boots on the ground," in this new war. We assume this means that when we inevitably have to to send in troops, they'll be wearing more sensible shoes. Given Obama is a Democrat, it'll probably be Birkenstocks.
(LAUGHTER)
SAGAL: So another war. You guys think this one's going to work out?
O'CONNOR: Oh, absolutely.
BODETT: What could go wrong?
SAGAL: Nothing I could think of.
SHELBY FERO: I mean, have we ever lost a war?
SAGAL: No, not really.
FERO: We even won the one against ourselves, kind of.
SAGAL: Yeah, sure. I think we get credit for that. You mean the Civil War?
FERO: Yeah. America won.
SAGAL: America, yeah. You know, yeah.
BODETT: Well, I mean, you haven't seen the axis of evil around lately have you?
SAGAL: That's true.
O'CONNOR: That's right.
BODETT: We got - what is it now? The network of death. Isn't that - that's what Obama called...
SAGAL: He called them the network of death.
BODETT: You know, and I always thought that was AOL.
(LAUGHTER)
SAGAL: Yeah.
O'CONNOR: That's the network of the dying.
FERO: Timely AOL jab.
BODETT: We won't bomb them back to the Stone Age. We'll just get them back to, like, dial-up.
(LAUGHTER)
SAGAL: One of the big surprises of this new war was that in addition to bombing ISIS, which we knew we were going to do, we also - we were told bomb somebody that none of us have ever heard of before. That is the Khorasan group. People are like - what? - we bombed a hedge fund? That's great. Finally, a war everybody can get behind.
(LAUGHTER)
SAGAL: All right, Matt, you still with us?
CIPRIANO: Absolutely.
SAGAL: All right.
(LAUGHTER)
SAGAL: You can't leave your apartment. The U.N. has, like, blocked the streets. You're stuck with us.
(LAUGHTER)
CIPRIANO: Got the doors boarded up.
SAGAL: Yeah. Matt, your next quote is a headline from the Washington Examiner.
KURTIS: The White House will now lock the front door.
SAGAL: That extreme security protocol has been enacted because of what that happened last Friday?
CIPRIANO: The guy who jumped the fence with a tomahawk and walked in the front door.
SAGAL: Yes. He actually didn't have the tomahawk with him, but I will give you the point. Yes, that's true. He had a tomahawk earlier.
(APPLAUSE)
SAGAL: If he had a tomahawk, they would've stopped him. Since he didn't apparently have a tomahawk, they let him walk in I guess. You know, those movies "White House Down" and "Olympus Has Fallen" that came out that had these elaborate plots about attackers getting into the White House? Turns out, nope. All you have to do is jump the fence, run across the lawn, walk right in. That's what happened. That's what this guy did. Well, how did he do this? How did he manage to evade all the security? First, he tossed a steak over the fence to distract the dogs. And then he threw over some Colombian prostitutes to distract the Secret Service.
(LAUGHTER)
SAGAL: Like, come on. Over you go, Carmen.
(LAUGHTER)
SAGAL: One of the things we found out is that this guy was unusual because he got through the front door, but there are people - I think 60 is the number of people, who during Obama's presidency have jumped over the fence onto the White House grounds trying to get to the president. One of them, of course, was Mitt Romney because he was, like, I've tried everything else. Just let me go in for a second he said.
(LAUGHTER)
FERO: I mean, have you ever tried to hop a fence? It's decently hard.
BODETT: It is and that one outside the White House is tall.
O'CONNOR: Did you see that they've build a second fence now?
SAGAL: They have, yeah.
O'CONNOR: Yeah, but it's, like, this little, tiny - it's like a baby gate.
FERO: Did they build a small fence outside?
SAGAL: Turns out, of those 60 people, 54 were babies.
(LAUGHTER)
SAGAL: Matt, you're doing very well. Your last quote is from ESPN's Rick Reilly.
KURTIS: He says he's going to settle down and have a family. Him settling down, that's like an eagle deciding to take the bus.
(LAUGHTER)
SAGAL: Reilly was waxing somewhat sticky about a sports hero who was playing his last baseball game before retiring this weekend. Who is it?
CIPRIANO: Derek Jeter.
SAGAL: Derek Jeter. Yeah. Very good.
(APPLAUSE)
SAGAL: This is Derek Jeter's 20th and last season for the New York Yankees. It is a remarkable achievement. It is hard to be that evil for that long.
(LAUGHTER)
SAGAL: As I'm sure you know, you're a New Yorker, Jeter has been on a farewell tour all season long. Every time the Yankees go on the road the last three months, teams have been giving Jeter presents. For example, the Baltimore Orioles gave him crabs from the Chesapeake Bay.
(LAUGHTER)
SAGAL: The Minnesota Twins, trying to beat that, gave Jeter chlamydia.
(LAUGHTER)
SAGAL: Very thoughtful.
FERO: I'm sorry. I don't know baseball. Are the Twins just two twins?
SAGAL: Yeah. Basically. It's hard to hate him. That's the problem. And I say this as a Red Sox fan who hates the Yankees. He's had no major scandals. He doesn't show up in the tabloids. He seems like a genuine guy. But despite all that, we will do what Derek Jeter would've done in our place - apply ourselves, put our heads down, do the work and hate him anyway.
(LAUGHTER)
SAGAL: Bill, how did Matt do on our quiz?
KURTIS: Matt was perfect - 3 and 0.
SAGAL: Yeah. Well done.
(APPLAUSE)
SAGAL: Congratulations, Matt. Thanks for playing.
CIPRIANO: Oh, thanks so much.
SAGAL: Bye-bye.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "IT'S SO HARD TO SAY GOODBYE TO YESTERDAY")
BOYZ II MEN: (Singing) How do I say goodbye to what we had? The good times... Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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