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 Brian Babylon, Roxanne Roberts and Bobcat Goldthwait. And, here again is your host, at U.S. Cellular Center Asheville in North Carolina, Peter Sagal.
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PETER SAGAL, HOST:
Thank you, Carl. In just a minute, Carl spends four hours on hold with Rhyme-Warner Cable customer service in 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. Right now, panel, some more questions for you from the week's news. Roxanne, historical vacation spots like Colonial Williamsburg give families a chance to live like people used to, in a simpler time, without the distractions of modern technology. Well now, to attract more families, they're adding what?
ROXANNE ROBERTS: Oh, it's got to be an app or a Twitter account or something like that, right?
SAGAL: Yeah, exactly right. They're adding modern technology.
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SAGAL: Maybe you've been to places like this, right? You walk around and everyone is in period dress, making hats or milking donkeys or whatever people used to do, talking to you like it's 1780. Now, though, they're adding iPad kiosks and dedicated apps. It makes sense, although last week some of the colonial people living there discovered one of their own with an iPad and burned her at the stake as a witch.
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SAGAL: You know, adding this technology, even if it's, you know, anachronistic, it does make certain things easier. Used to be if you're at Colonial Williamsburg and you wanted to sext someone, you'd have to go to the town etcher to wait eight hours while he completed a dirty woodcut.
BRIAN BABYLON: Of an ankle.
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SAGAL: Yes. Thus Anthony Weiner sending an etching of his ankle to a young woman he does not know.
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SAGAL: Bobcat. Bobcat?
BOBCAT GOLDTHWAIT: Peter?
SAGAL: Bobcat.
GOLDTHWAIT: You crazy minx, what?
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SAGAL: Researchers have, for the first time ever, inserted a what into a mouse?
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GOLDTHWAIT: I'm actually embarrassed on that one. They inserted a GPS.
SAGAL: No.
GOLDTHWAIT: An ear.
SAGAL: Just to mess with it, no. I'll give you a hint. The mouse no longer has to tie a little string around its little finger.
GOLDTHWAIT: A memory chip?
SAGAL: A memory. They inserted a memory into a mouse.
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SAGAL: This is true.
GOLDTHWAIT: And this is because mice were forgetting where they left their keys?
SAGAL: Apparently.
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SAGAL: No. Researchers at MIT, working in a specialized field of science known as "screwing around with animals," inserted a false memory into the brain of a mouse, so it remembers something that never actually happened to it!
ROBERTS: Is the false memory a memory of some other mouse's behavior or does the mouse think it's like a bear?
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GOLDTHWAIT: Yeah, do they give it like a...
SAGAL: That'd be hilarious to see.
GOLDTHWAIT: ...a monkey memory, yeah.
SAGAL: Yeah. I want a bear. I want a mouse like, you know, trying to knock salmon out of the air. That would be hilarious.
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SAGAL: No, it's a mouse memory.
ROBERTS: Breaking into a tent?
SAGAL: What they did was is they were able, through various incredibly technical things in the mouse's brain, convince it that something bad had happened to it in a particular container, even though nothing bad had ever happened to it in that container.
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SAGAL: Yeah, I know, it's sad, isn't it? It's sad but the idea is, like, if they put the mouse in the container it acted as if something bad had happened, even though it never had.
Did they ever think it was the mouse just didn't want to be in a container?
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SAGAL: So it is sad. You know, they didn't put in, like, a memory of a nice summer day or the time it kicked the hell out of a cat. No. Memory of getting an electric shock.
GOLDTHWAIT: Remember that time I won the Olympics?
SAGAL: Yeah.
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BABYLON: Oh, man, I would sell that too, I'm sorry ladies. You know what? I'll sell that to spouses. So if you have a husband who's kookie, if you have a wife that's kookie just give them a memory.
SAGAL: Of what?
BABYLON: Of where I was last night.
SAGAL: Oh.
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GOLDTHWAIT: Where were you?
BABYLON: Here at home.
SAGAL: There you are. Yup. Bobcat, according to a recent report from the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, more and more middle aged men are undergoing what procedure?
GOLDTHWAIT: I'm just going to go with liposuction?
SAGAL: No.
GOLDTHWAIT: Breast augmentation?
SAGAL: No. Some men want to put a little juice in their caboose.
GOLDTHWAIT: Oh, they're having butt implants?
SAGAL: Butt implants, yes.
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SAGAL: The demand for male posterior enhancement has more than doubled since 1997. The procedure involves sucking fat from your stomach and injecting it into your butt, which is the same way God created Eve I think.
GOLDTHWAIT: That's done with a machine.
SAGAL: Yeah, I know, yeah.
GOLDTHWAIT: Yeah.
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GOLDTHWAIT: Hey, I'm going to contest my answer.
SAGAL: Why? You were right? What are you contesting?
GOLDTHWAIT: Because part - no, but when I said liposuction, part of the procedure is sucking the fat out. I just didn't get the part of shoving it back in.
SAGAL: Putting it back in, yeah.
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SAGAL: You know what they should do? They should sell custom made butt implants with matching chairs so you can just lock in, you know.
ROBERTS: So what you're saying is somebody - some guy looks in the mirror and says, do these pants make my butt look too small?
SAGAL: Pretty much.
GOLDTHWAIT: Yeah.
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BABYLON: You know what? You don't need that surgery. All you need to do is wear some yoga pants.
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SAGAL: Really?
BABYLON: Oh, man, yoga pants are, like, something from Hogwarts. They just magically (makes noise).
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BABYLON: Yup.
GOLDTHWAIT: Well, I'll give you an idea how evolved I am as far as taking care of my body. I have no idea what yoga pants are. I don't know what they look like. I could be wearing them right now.
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BABYLON: I think they have a - I think they hooked up with the military. This is my theory.
SAGAL: Yeah.
BABYLON: I think that yoga pants establishment got with some military folk that had some special polymer in the butt part, or nanotechnology, I don't know...
SAGAL: You never know.
BABYLON: ...that gets all the meat from your thighs...
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BABYLON: ...and everywhere and just puts it in a pull compact, nice package.
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BABYLON: Science.
SAGAL: You bet.
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