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Who's Carl This Time?

CARL KASELL: From NPR and WBEZ-Chicago, this is WAIT WAIT...DON'T TELL ME!, the NPR News quiz. I'm Carl Kasell, and here's your host at the Chase Bank Auditorium in downtown Chicago, Peter Sagal.

PETER SAGAL, HOST:

Thank you, Carl.

(APPLAUSE)

SAGAL: Thank you everybody. Thank you so much. We have a great show for you today. Later on, we've got Melinda Gates joining us, talking about...

(APPLAUSE)

SAGAL: Yes. Talking about the good work she does with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Now, right out front, we know the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation sponsors NPR and this show specifically, but that had nothing to do with why she's on the show.

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: No, she's here because there is nothing more hilarious than her foundation's work to fight poverty and disease worldwide.

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: Oh, and by the way, a little planning note for you. Mark your calendar. Next week, we will be having an uproarious chat with Lumber Liquidators.

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: But no charge for your call. The number is 1-888-Wait-Wait, that's 1-888-924-8924. Hi, you're on WAIT WAIT...DON'T TELL ME!

ANGIE BERTUCCI: Hi, this is Angie, calling from Santa Barbara, California.

SAGAL: Hey, how are things in beautiful Santa Barbara?

BERTUCCI: It's gorgeous here.

SAGAL: It really is. It's almost unfair how gorgeous it is.

BERTUCCI: Yeah.

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: I've always thought of Santa Barbara that Santa Barbara is what everybody thinks L.A. is supposed to be but it isn't, Santa Barbara is.

(LAUGHTER)

BERTUCCI: Yeah, I mean, it's rough.

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: Well, welcome to the show, Angie. Let me introduce you to our panel today. First up, it's one of the women behind the Washington Post's Reliable Source column, it's Roxanne Roberts.

BERTUCCI: Hi, Roxanne.

ROXANNE ROBERTS: Hi, Angie.

(APPLAUSE)

SAGAL: Next, a writer, performer, and occasional beaver mascot on Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report," Mr. Peter Grosz.

(APPLAUSE)

PETER GROSZ: Hi.

BERTUCCI: Hi, Peter.

SAGAL: And finally, it's a correspondent for "CBS Sunday Morning" and the host of "My Grandmother's Ravioli," airing Wednesdays on the Cooking Channel, Mr. Mo Rocca is here.

(APPLAUSE)

BERTUCCI: Hi, Mo.

MO ROCCA: Hi, Angie.

SAGAL: Well, Angie, you're going to play Who's Carl This Time. Of course, Carl Kasell is going to read you three quotations from the week's news. If you can correctly identify or explain two of them, you'll win our prize, Carl's voice on your home answering machine. Are you ready to go?

BERTUCCI: Oh, yeah.

SAGAL: All right. Your first quote is from Oprah Winfrey. She was talking about the time she and Lance Armstrong got together in a hotel room in Texas.

(LAUGHTER)

KASELL: He was thoughtful. He was serious. He certainly had prepared himself for this moment. I would say he met the moment. At the end of it, we both were pretty exhausted.

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: So, what were they doing, Oprah and Lance, that was so draining?

BERTUCCI: Was that the thing with him confessing to Oprah about the doping?

SAGAL: Yes, it was, very good.

(SOUNDBITE OF BELL)

(APPLAUSE)

SAGAL: He finally came clean.

ROCCA: No one knows exactly what went on in that room with Oprah and Lance Armstrong, but we do know that she biked all the way back to L.A. after the interview.

SAGAL: Yeah.

(LAUGHTER)

ROCCA: Very quickly.

SAGAL: Very quickly. Yes.

GROSZ: He gave her like six pints of his blood.

SAGAL: Yeah.

(LAUGHTER)

ROBERTS: Maybe he just bit her neck.

SAGAL: That's all he did.

(LAUGHTER)

ROCCA: That would do it.

SAGAL: Until now, Lance Armstrong has viciously attacked anyone who accused him of doping. It's such a reflex with him, he responded to Oprah's first question by punching her.

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: But by the end, he came clean. He confessed to injecting pretty much the contents of an entire Walgreens into his own posterior.

ROBERTS: Don't you think coming clean is a little bit of an oxymoron?

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: Yeah. Why did he choose to make his confession on the Oprah Network?

ROCCA: Because Oprah could absolve you of your sins.

(LAUGHTER)

ROCCA: No, I mean she's...

SAGAL: She has that power.

ROCCA: She has that power.

SAGAL: Like the medieval church?

ROCCA: Yeah.

SAGAL: She can give you...

GROSZ: She's Poprah.

ROCCA: She's Poprah.

ROBERTS: Or maybe...

ROCCA: Yes.

(LAUGHTER)

(APPLAUSE)

ROBERTS: I thought it was because no one would be watching.

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: Well there's that. Oprah's OWN network.

GROSZ: He's going to give like seven amazing interviews in a row, and everyone's going to be like "He's a seven-time champion of apologizing."

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: I know.

GROSZ: He does this better than anybody.

SAGAL: So things are not going well for Lance Armstrong. This week, the IOC asked him to give back his Bronze Medal from the 2000 Summer Olympics. That's in addition to the seven Tour de France wins he's already given up.

GROSZ: He has to give back all of his yellow shirts.

SAGAL: Yes.

GROSZ: Any shirt of his that's yellow.

SAGAL: Also, he had to give back his mansion, his jet and his exciting romantic relationships with singer Sheryl Crow and various models. From now on, retroactively, he spent the years from 2002 to 2010 cruising Craigslist personal ads and hitting on cute baristas, to no effect at all.

(LAUGHTER)

GROSZ: Yeah, he was just like a bike messenger.

SAGAL: Yeah.

GROSZ: Who dated baristas. "Oh, here comes that bike weirdo." Hey, my name's Lance, guys.

(LAUGHTER)

GROSZ: My band's playing tonight, if you guys want to come on over. I liked you better when you were doping, Armstrong.

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: All right, very good, here is your next quote.

KASELL: She was the most beautiful girl I ever met.

SAGAL: That was somebody talking about his beautiful girlfriend, who tragically died of either cancer or a car accident, or both.

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: Except it turns out she didn't exist. Who was it?

BERTUCCI: Oh, I want to say Tio.

SAGAL: Yeah, Te'o.

BERTUCCI: Te'o.

SAGAL: Manti Te'o is his name, the Notre Dame football player.

(SOUNDBITE OF BELL)

SAGAL: Very good.

(APPLAUSE)

SAGAL: As everybody knows, as much as we love sports, Americans don't care about athletes, not really, unless they're triumphing over the loss of something: a wife, a parent, a testicle.

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: And that may explain why Notre Dame star linebacker Manti Te'o told everyone the heartbreaking story of his gorgeous girlfriend, Lennay Kekua, and how she died of cancer and a car crash, right in the middle of their season. But in what turns out to be the best news for nerds ever, sometimes even star football players make up their girlfriends.

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: Ms. Kekua had everything a guy could want, except an actual existence. After Deadspin broke the story, Te'o said he was the victim of a terrible hoax. He should have suspected something, he said, when his girlfriend, who he now says he never actually met, told him she was dying but he shouldn't visit her ever because she was washing her hair every minute of every day.

(LAUGHTER)

ROCCA: Listen. No, stop it. Stop it. The guy, I'm convinced that he's a victim.

SAGAL: You are?

ROCCA: Yeah, my girlfriend Siri and I were talking about this.

SAGAL: Really?

(LAUGHTER)

(APPLAUSE)

ROCCA: You know, and Sir's aunt, Betty Crocker agrees with us.

SAGAL: Yeah.

(LAUGHTER)

ROCCA: This is terrible.

SAGAL: Now, a lot of people are saying that, you know, whatever this means for what happened this season and who he was fooling or whether he was fooled, this guy was supposed to go into the NFL, right, and make a million dollars. I mean, is this going to affect his draft chances? And people are saying no, the NFL has standards. They don't care if your girlfriend is imaginary, as long as you cheat on her. That's the standard.

(LAUGHTER)

ROCCA: Well, he should do very well in fantasy football, right?

GROSZ: Yes, exactly.

(LAUGHTER)

(APPLAUSE)

ROCCA: We should look at the bright side in all of this: somebody isn't dead.

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: That's true.

GROSZ: That is true.

(APPLAUSE)

SAGAL: It's like we just saved a life, really.

ROCCA: I mean it's kind of nice.

GROSZ: That's what he should say, "I saved an innocent girl's life today."

(LAUGHTER)

GROSZ: And why is everybody worried about whether I did or didn't make her up.

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: All right, Angie, your last quote is somebody, finally, after seven years of silence and anticipation, saying something at his workplace. And the immortal words were?

KASELL: Well, he did not.

SAGAL: So who broke the long silence with those four words?

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: He was sitting there with eight other people, who all look at him with surprise, we can only assume.

BERTUCCI: Is this another sports question?

SAGAL: Oh, no.

(LAUGHTER)

ROCCA: It's a different kind of uniform.

SAGAL: Well maybe you didn't hear about this. You've already won; I'll tell you. It was Clarence Thomas.

BERTUCCI: Oh, the Supreme Court justice.

SAGAL: Yeah, it's been seven years since Clarence Thomas last spoke during Supreme Court oral arguments. This week, he finally said something. It was, as you heard Carl recreate, "Well, he did not." What did he mean?

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: So we wanted to get some perspective on this landmark day in the Supreme Court, so joining us now is NPR's legal affairs correspondent, Nina Totenberg. Nina, great to talk to you again.

(APPLAUSE)

NINA TOTENBERG: My pleasure.

SAGAL: So, Nina, it must have been so exciting for you to finally hear Clarence Thomas speak from the bench. What was it like in the room?

TOTENBERG: I wasn't there.

SAGAL: You weren't there?

(LAUGHTER)

TOTENBERG: No. It's even worse than that. I was not only not there I wasn't paying any attention whatsoever. My husband was having a hip replacement. I'm at the hospital with him while he's in surgery and my cell phone goes off and it says, "Clarence Thomas spoke in oral argument." And I'm not there. He waited seven years to do this to me.

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: Wow. The worst thing about that, for me, Nina, that you weren't there, is that this robbed you of your first chance really, I guess since 2006, to do your Clarence Thomas impersonation on one of your regular, you know, reports.

TOTENBERG: This is true. And I would have then had to have said - what are those words? No, he did not.

SAGAL: I want to set it up for you, because I want you to do it on our show.

TOTENBERG: OK, all right.

SAGAL: Since you can't do it on NPR News. Well, he did not.

TOTENBERG: Well, he did not. OK. Justice Thomas? Well, he did not.

SAGAL: There we go, ladies and gentlemen, Nina Totenberg.

(APPLAUSE)

ROCCA: Can I just say, it's too bad he didn't - it would have nice if he's going to speak this infrequently, to add a little sass and say maybe, "oh no, he didn't."

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: Nina Totenberg, the immortal and legendary legal affairs correspondent.

(APPLAUSE)

SAGAL: Thank you so much.

GROSZ: We hope your husband feels better.

SAGAL: Yeah, give our best to your husband, and hope he recovers soon.

TOTENBERG: Yeah, I should have let him ring the bell that I bought for him today. I went to the hardware store and bought him a bell, so he can ring it upstairs and call me. Hey, David, ring the bell.

(LAUGHTER)

TOTENBERG: Oh, we moved you. I forgot; you don't have it.

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: Wait a minute. Wait a minute. You moved him someplace and forgot where he was?

TOTENBERG: Yeah, I got him in the chair...

DAVID REINES: Whoever this is, I'm being tortured.

(LAUGHTER)

(APPLAUSE)

REINES: Please help me.

(LAUGHTER)

TOTENBERG: OK, guys.

SAGAL: Bye-bye, Nina.

TOTENBERG: ...on the radio.

SAGAL: Nice to talk to you.

TOTENBERG: Bye.

SAGAL: She never laughs like that on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.

GROSZ: No.

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: Carl, how did Angie do on our quiz?

KASELL: Angie, you're a winner. You had two correct answers, so I'll be doing the message on your voicemail or home answering machine.

BERTUCCI: Awesome.

SAGAL: Yay.

(APPLAUSE)

BERTUCCI: Thank you guys.

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