BILL KURTIS, BYLINE: From NPR and WBEZ Chicago, this is WAIT WAIT ...DON'T TELL ME, the NPR News quiz. I'm just a girl standing in front of a boy asking him to love her, Bill Kurtis. And here's your host at the Chase Bank Auditorium in downtown Chicago, Peter Sagal.
PETER SAGAL, HOST:
Thank you Bill.
(APPLAUSE)
SAGAL: Thank you everybody. Great to see you. Good to be back with you. A few weeks ago we were joined on the show by George Clinton one of the founding fathers of funk, and he was great. He was not nearly as intimidating as you thought, am I right? So today's guest is Marky Ramone. He was the drummer for the great punk band the Ramones. We think of it as number two in the intermittent series we call interviews with musicians enjoyed by the people who beat us up in junior high.
(LAUGHTER)
SAGAL: He'll be joining us in a bit, but first it's your turn to play. Give us a call at 1-888-WAIT-WAIT, that's 1-888-924-8924.
It's time to welcome our first listener contestant. Hi, you're on WAIT WAIT ...DON'T TELL ME.
SAMRA BUFKINS: Hi, I'm Samra Bufkins from Denton, Texas.
SAGAL: You are whom?
BUFKINS: Samra, but you can call me Sam.
SAGAL: I shall. Samra? You said Samra? What's your last name?
BUFKINS: Bufkins.
SAGAL: Samra Bufkins.
BUFKINS: Yeah.
SAGAL: Wow.
BRIAN BABYLON: That's straight Texas.
SAGAL: I'm trying to figure out what do you sound like - you sound like a character from "Game Of Thrones" or curse in "Harry Potter."
(LAUGHTER)
SAGAL: Samra Bufkins.
BUFKINS: Well, my students would probably think I was a curse in "Harry Potter."
SAGAL: Oh, well, you're a teacher then?
BUFKINS: Yes. Yes.
SAGAL: What do you teach?
BUFKINS: I'm a lecturer in the Mayborn School of Journalism at the University of North Texas.
SAGAL: Oh, I see. That's exciting.
KURTIS: Oh my goodness. Wow.
SAGAL: So you're teaching the journalists of tomorrow?
BUFKINS: Mostly the PR people of tomorrow.
(LAUGHTER)
BABYLON: Which are the journalists of tomorrow.
BUFKINS: Right.
SAGAL: I've always wondered about this. I mean, can you give us - give me a lesson in PR. Give me like a principle of the art.
BUFKINS: Don't lie and make sure your fly's zipped.
(LAUGHTER)
SAGAL: Everybody on stage here just looked down.
KURTIS: Fortunately we're standing behind a podium.
SAGAL: Yeah. Well, welcome to the show Samra. Let me introduce you to our panel this week. First up, it's a writer for HBO's "Real Time With Bill Maher," it's Mr. Adam Felber.
(APPLAUSE)
ADAM FELBER: Hi, there Samra Bufkins.
BUFKINS: Hey, Adam. How you doing?
FELBER: Great.
SAGAL: Next, it's a comedian and the host of NPR's Ask Me Another. We welcome back Ophira Eisenberg.
(APPLAUSE)
OPHIRA EISENBERG, BYLINE: Hello, Samra.
SAGAL: Finally, a comedian who will be performing at the Laugh Factory in Hollywood, California on March 2, it's Brian Babylon.
BABYLON: Hey, let's do it.
(APPLAUSE)
SAGAL: So Samra, welcome to the show. You're going to launch this hour show with Who's Bill This Time? Bill Kurtis is going to read you three quotations from the week's news. Your job, of course, correctly identify or explain just two of them. Do that, you'll win our prize, scorekeeper Emeritus Carl Kasell's voice on your home answering machine. Are you ready to play?
BUFKINS: Let's do it.
SAGAL: Your first quote is from someone who clearly has not been paying attention lately.
KURTIS: I remain optimistic that Congress is going to work this out.
SAGAL: That was the secretary of a certain government agency which had its funding hotly debated this week. What agency?
BUFKINS: Oh that would - that would be the national - the security agency.
SAGAL: The security agency which takes care of security where.
BUFKINS: It keeps us - protecting us from terrorists.
SAGAL: Close enough, yes. It was the Department of Homeland Security.
(SOUNDBITE OF BELL)
BUFKINS: The last time DHS was shut down, it was because the Republicans blocked a bill funding the whole government. Now Democrats who complained bitterly about that are doing the same thing. Now while all this is happening, we should say an actual threat came from the Islamic group called al-Shabab, which means skewered meats of death.
(LAUGHTER)
SAGAL: And they said...
BABYLON: That sounds delicious. That sounded delicious right there.
SAGAL: It's like, we got shawarma, we got al-Shabab, we got - they said they would attack American malls. Al-Shabab...
FELBER: Until they accept their franchise in the food court.
SAGAL: Exactly.
LAUGHTER)
SAGAL: Bob's al-Shabab Hut.
FELBER: We will visit the infidels with delicious meats.
SAGAL: Looks like al-Shabab is launching a holy war against al-Sbarros.
(LAUGHTER)
SAGAL: Here is your next quote.
KURTIS: I'd like to bring people from right, left, red, blue, get them into a nice warm purple space.
SAGAL: That was somebody who hasn't yet said she is running for president, more or less starting to run for president in a big speech this week. Who was it?
BUFKINS: I would guess that it would be Hillary.
SAGAL: That's the person. Hillary Clinton.
(APPLAUSE)
SAGAL: Mrs. Clinton has not yet said that she's running for president, but based on that remark, she's either going to soon announce her campaign or just redecorate her living room.
(LAUGHTER)
FELBER: I got - she wants to get us into a nice, warm purple space.
SAGAL: Purple space, yeah.
EISENBERG: Nice.
FELBER: That's what her husband's been trying to get into for years.
(LAUGHTER)
BABYLON: Too soon?
FELBER: Too soon?
(LAUGHTER)
SAGAL: Anyway, Mrs. Clinton was speaking. She got $300,000 to speak at a conference of female tech execs in Silicon Valley. But despite massive press coverage, everybody descended on it, she did not announce for president. Maybe because somebody told her that presidents have to give speeches for free. Meanwhile - and this is the best part - the Washington Post revealed that Hillary is reaching out to people to help her with, quote, "her brand," including the advertising guy who came up with the don't mess with Texas campaign. These experts - and this is true - say Hillary needs to find the one word that will capture and summarize her essence. For Coca-Cola it's refreshing, for Volvo it's safe, for Bill Clinton it's horny.
(LAUGHTER)
SAGAL: But what's like the one word for Hillary? Maybe it's like, all right.
(LAUGHTER)
EISENBERG: Right. Thought so.
BABYLON: You know, I'm going to tell you this.
FELBER: Interesting.
BABYLON: You know what she needs to do?
SAGAL: What's she need to do?
BABYLON: She needs to flip her look. You know what I'm saying? All those boring ass pantsuits with the shoulder pads - I need to have - they need to put up a YouTube video of Bill Clinton in like a dressing room with like a little rom-com montage where she's changing outfits and her's just like, nuh-uh.
FELBER: Shaking his head yeah.
BABYLON: Are you kidding me? Mhmm.
SAGAL: And when he says mhmm, he's looking at a 25-year-old woman who just walked into the room.
EISENBERG: Exactly.
(LAUGHTER)
SAGAL: All right, here Sam, is your last quote.
KURTIS: You dirty gerbil.
(LAUGHTER)
SAGAL: A little history for you, a big shock in the world of history. That was a man named Hugh Burns, commenting on a New York Times article that says gerbils, not rats, it turns out, were probably responsible for what?
BUFKINS: The Black Death.
SAGAL: Yes. You know this. The Black Death.
KURTIS: Very good.
(SOUNDBITE OF BELL)
SAGAL: For centuries now, rats have been getting the blame for spreading the Black Death throughout Europe. This is because rats had been seen wearing little T-shirt saying keep calm and spread buboes. But according to a new scientific study, it wasn't the rats at all, it was gerbils. Specifically, giant gerbils from Asia. They study - these scientists did - ancient weather patterns and saw that outbreaks of plague occurred at the same time when the weather conditions were really good for Asian giant gerbils.
BABYLON: Wait a minute. What?
FELBER: Are you?
BABYLON: Germzilla, germzilla. I mean, what is a giant Asian gerbil? What is that?
SAGAL: Look, there's one behind you. A giant Asian gerbil is a species of gerbil and they believe, you see, that the plague - bubonic plague - began in central Asia. How did it get to Europe? Well, they used to think it was rats, but the rat - the plague happened at certain times, not at others. Well, what caused the plague to happen in this year and next year? Well, they've studied weather patterns and they now believe it coincided with exploding populations of giant Asian gerbils. So...
BABYLON: I get that. I'm more confused on what is a giant Asian gerbil. What does that look like?
FELBER: This theory only holds water if you believe in giant Asian gerbils, which I do not.
BABYLON: I know about...
SAGAL: Science, dude.
BABYLON: I know about small, you know, Kindercare preschool gerbils.
SAGAL: But this whole element of surprise is actually what contributed to the disaster because, you know, the giant Asian gerbils are running around, they get the plague from fleas. Some European says, oh wow, look at that giant gerbil. I must take this home and show it to all my friends.
BABYLON: Were the rats Asian?
SAGAL: No, the rats were black rats that had been blamed because we thought...
BABYLON: This is getting real racist.
EISENBERG: No, no, no.
BABYLON: It's getting real racist, man.
EISENBERG: It's getting ratcist.
BABYLON: It's getting ratcist. A lot of finger pointing at others. And first of all, it was the African-American plague - first of all.
SAGAL: Yeah, so it wasn't black rats, it was rates of color.
BABYLON: Rats of color, yeah.
(LAUGHTER)
SAGAL: Bill, how did Samra do?
KURTIS: Like a good journalist, 3-0. She's a winner.
SAGAL: Congratulations Samra. Well done.
BUFKINS: Thank you.
SAGAL: Thanks for playing, Samra. Bye-bye.
BUFKINS: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.