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Panel Round Two

CARL KASELL: From NPR and WBEZ-Chicago, this is WAIT WAIT...DON'T TELL ME!, the NPR News quiz. I'm Carl Kasell. We're playing this week with Adam Felber, Amy Dickinson, and Brian Babylon. And here again is your host, at the Chase Bank Auditorium in downtown Chicago, Peter Sagal.

PETER SAGAL, HOST:

Thank you so much.

(APPLAUSE)

SAGAL: Thank you, Carl. In just a minute, Carl finally beats his favorite Nintendo 64 game: The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Rhyme.

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: It's our listener limerick challenge. If you'd like to play, give us a call at 1-888-Wait-Wait, that's 1-888-924-8924. But right now, panel, some more questions for you from the week's news.

Adam, during the campaign, the Obama team did extensive testing of the subject lines of their fundraising emails. They would test them all to see which got the best responses. And we've just learned the most successful email subject line they sent out said what?

ADAM FELBER: I am a Nigerian prince.

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: Finally, he admits it.

(APPLAUSE)

SAGAL: No, it wasn't that. It's surprisingly basic, when you consider all the things they could have said in the subject line.

FELBER: Free male enhancement.

(LAUGHTER)

FELBER: Please give.

SAGAL: No. I'll give you a hint. It's not just for horses anymore.

FELBER: Hey.

SAGAL: Hey.

(SOUNDBITE OF BELL)

SAGAL: That's all it said. It said "Hey."

FELBER: You're kidding me.

SAGAL: Out of all the things they tried, and they tried everything, the most successful email, the one that got the most positive fundraising responses was "Hey."

FELBER: Oh, that makes total sense.

SAGAL: They tried all these things. They tried "Michelle Time." They tried - this is a true one - "Hell yeah, I like Obamacare."

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: But no subject line raised more money than "Hey." It's a real, you know, dumbing down from the old "Change you can believe in" days of 2008.

BRIAN BABYLON: And it's a letdown.

SAGAL: How so?

BABYLON: I don't know about you guys, but I've been getting Obama spams for about two years.

SAGAL: Yeah.

BABYLON: You would always thing he was emailing you personally.

(LAUGHTER)

BABYLON: You would hope this was the time that Barry really cared and he was sending me a personal email. So I would reply back.

SAGAL: Really?

BABYLON: I replied back to every Barack Obama that he would send to me.

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: What did you say?

BABYLON: Oh, I would talk about the randomest things, like, "Man, you're not going to believe what happened to me today."

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: One of the subject lines, quote, "The VP goes PP," was not a fundraising email, just somebody let Joe Biden near the computer again.

(LAUGHTER)

(APPLAUSE)

SAGAL: Amy, the great apes may be more like us than we had realized. According to a new study, just like humans, apes tend to have what?

AMY DICKINSON: Just like humans, apes have...

SAGAL: Consider this: probably this is what happened to King Kong. It explains why he went out and picked up a hot, young blonde.

DICKINSON: Tired of their mates and find someone younger and more attractive.

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: That's one of the things they might do during the male ape's what?

DICKINSON: Oh, they have like a midlife crisis.

SAGAL: Exactly, it turns out apes have midlife crises.

DICKINSON: Oh, they drive like little cars.

(SOUNDBITE OF BELL)

SAGAL: Yeah, they do.

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: So if you go to the zoo and you see a great ape of some kind looking kind of depressed, it's probably because it's having a midlife crisis. According to researchers, when chimps hit 28 to 35 - that's the equivalent of about 50 for humans - they tend to get moody and depressed. They lose interest in things they used to enjoy. They don't fling their poo anymore, they just toss it aside, bored.

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: They blow their savings on flashy new red butts.

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: And yes, George is a little too curious about younger females now.

DICKINSON: Aww.

SAGAL: Some of the...

BABYLON: Wait a minute, Curious George was an ape?

SAGAL: He's a monkey.

BABYLON: You can't confuse me, man.

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: What did you think Curious George was?

BABYLON: I thought he was a chimp.

SAGAL: I'm sorry; chimps are apes. Monkeys are not apes. Chimps are apes.

BABYLON: OK, you know, I'm getting confused. Gorillas are totally different.

SAGAL: Gorillas are apes.

FELBER: You need to watch some of President Morsi's favorite movies.

BABYLON: Yeah, clearly.

(LAUGHTER)

(APPLAUSE)

FELBER: That will set you straight.

DICKINSON: So do the zoos like provide with younger female apes who are good listeners and think they're fascinating?

(LAUGHTER)

DICKINSON: For instance.

FELBER: We couldn't figure out what was wrong with him, he just kept signing "Bobo want trophy. Bobo want trophy."

(LAUGHTER)

(APPLAUSE)

SAGAL: Adam, to test if its new Galaxy Smartphone could withstand being sat on, Samsung designed the first ever what?

FELBER: Well it would have to be some sort of robotic butt.

SAGAL: Yes, in fact it's...

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: ...the world's first...

FELBER: I haven't read that particular story, but I have listened to this show.

SAGAL: Yeah, I know.

(SOUNDBITE OF BELL)

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: Either will do. It is, in fact, a robotic butt or robutt, I guess.

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: In a video released by Samsung, the robot butt repeatedly lowers and raises itself onto a Smartphone. The Samsung phone held up remarkably well, but in one instance, the robutt did butt-dial its mom, an Atari 2600.

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: This is scary. This is scary though. You know, you can understand robots taking away complex jobs from people. But this is sitting, we humans own sitting.

(LAUGHTER)

DICKINSON: We're good at that.

BABYLON: Kim Kardashian is out of work, man.

SAGAL: Yeah, apparently.

(LAUGHTER)

BABYLON: No, I meant that.

SAGAL: Yeah.

(LAUGHTER)

FELBER: I like robot butts and I can't deny.

BABYLON: You know what...

(LAUGHTER)

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.