Wait Wait

I usually listen to audiobooks on my walks, but sometimes a podcast is a nice diversion. My favorite is NPR’s “Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me!”

Described as a “weekly news quiz,” the show is hosted by Peter Sagal, who is joined by comedians every Sunday to go over happenings of the previous week. But this isn’t any old reading of the newspaper — instead, news items become games as callers have to answer multiple choice questions to guess what really happened, or complete the “Listener Limerick Challenge.”

Although I’m in the news business, my world is mostly local news so it’s fun to catch up on headlines across the nation.

If I didn’t listen to “Wait Wait” I never would have learned about the school picture fiasco in Greenwood, Indiana, where picture day fell on St. Patrick’s Day. The photo company used a green screen behind the kids to add different backgrounds, but students were dressed in green to celebrate the holiday. The result is hilarious because the green shirts became part of the background, resulting in children with only arms, legs and a floating head. One has a white picket fence running through his midsection. (If you want to see the images, do a search on Google. It’s really funny.)

This podcast makes me smile and sometimes laugh out loud. I’m sure not everyone would find the content as funny as I do, but for me it’s an entertaining distraction and I get to learn about obscure news.

Baker City was featured on an episode several years ago in a segment where panelists read three stories and the caller has to decide which one is the real news item. It was easy for me to mark the Baker City item as fake because there were little hints that only a local would know (such as the slightly wrong name of an elementary school). But for places I don’t know, sometimes it’s hard to judge truth versus fiction.

You can find “Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me!” anywhere you like to get podcasts.

— Lisa Britton, Go! editor