Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me!

Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me! (NPR's weekly news quiz show) was especially funny this morning. In one segment, contestants have to identify a quotation from the week's news. One of the quotations was "We're not winning, we're not losing," and the answer, of course, was President Bush speaking on the war in Iraq. To this, panelist Roy Blount, Jr., one of the funniest writers in America today, said, "So the war in Iraq is like kissing your sister."

You know, maybe this isn't as funny if you don't know the old adage about ties in football--they're like kissing your sister. Here's something I didn't know. According to Wikipedia (I wanted to be able to attribute this properly): "The earliest known use of the phrase was by Navy football coach Eddie Erdelatz after a scoreless tie against Duke in 1953."

And then (back to Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me), a question about Time naming "You" the 2006 "Person of the Year." Panelist Charlie Pierce said something about people putting that on a job résumé--"Time Magazine's Person of the Year (2006)."

Well, why not? That'd be more honest that George Deutsch, the Bush-appointed editor in NASA's public affairs office, who lied on his résumé about having graduated from college, or Todd Shriber, staffer for Rep. Denny Rehberg (Montana), who hired a couple of hackers to break into the computer files at Texas Christian University and change his college grades.

I missed the rest of the show. I was listening to the radio in the car, on the way to get a hair cut, and I got there, darn it.