NPR has a weekly game show called “Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me” which they describe as “The Oddly Informative News Quiz” (and I’d say that’s a fairly apt description). There’re various panelists — P.J. O’Rourke, Paula Poundstone, Mo Rocca, and others — and either the host asks the panelists questions or listeners call in and the panelists ask listeners questions. It’s actually a lot of fun & mdash; a lot lighter than the usual NPR fare — and I’ve recently taken to ripping the episodes to mp3 to timeshift them.
One of their favorite games is “Bluff the Listener” where a listener calls in and hears a weird news story from three panelists. The catch is that two of the stories are fake and only one of them is real — and the user has to guess which. On last weekend’s show, they were playing a “best of” set of clips from years past. And, one clip in particular featured Roy Blount Jr and his telling of a news article about basketball player E.J. Junior (yes, his last name his “Junior”).
Spoilers below — including whether Blount’s story was the fake or real story that week.
Blount concocted a fabulous tale about how E.J. Junior had been named as father-of-the-year and a middle school was being named in his honor. Naturally, Junior’s son was also named “E.J.” and so the father was known as “E.J. Junior, Senior”. And, the middle school in question was a Junior High. I’m afraid that words alone can’t really do justice to Blount’s diction; however, as I already had the episode as a stand-alone mp3, I edited it down to just Blount’s pontification and uploaded this clip on the dedication of E.J. Junior Senior Junior High (1 min, 24 sec mp3).
Man, I must have listened to that clip a dozen times, but I laugh every time :). It’s too bad, though, the listener calls Blount “Ray” at the end (rather than “Roy”). D’oh!
PS Mad propz to Audacity, an open source sound editor (which is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux). I made use of it to trim the original 60:00 mp3 (the entire show) down to the (01:24) clip of Blount’s bit.
Coincidentally, “Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me” is taping in Boulder either this week or next. They’ve been playing announcements about it on NPR for the past couple weeks. Too bad it’s on a Thursday or I’d think about going.
That’s too bad that the taping is on a Thursday — you’d think they’d get a better crowd over a weekend :-/. Then again, it looks like weekday-tapings are their standard procedure, in order to leave time for editing before that weekend’s broadcast.
It’s not until August, babe. So try five weeks or so from now. :) But yeah… Thursday sucks. Especially since it doesn’t start until 8!
Although it could be worse – it could be on Friday and force us to choose between it or “Battlestar Galactica.”
You should also take a look at mp3splt – it will chop out a portion (by time index or frame) of and mp3 file or ogg vorbis file. That way – you don’t have to decode and re-encode.
But yes, Audacity r0x0rs my s0x0rs