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(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
KURTIS: From NPR and WBEZ Chicago, this WAIT WAIT... DON'T TELL ME, the NPR news quiz. I'm Bill Kurtis. We are playing this week with Helen Hong, Tom Bodett and Paula Poundstone. Here again is your host at the Chase Bank Auditorium in downtown Chicago, Peter Sagal.
(APPLAUSE)
PETER SAGAL, HOST:
Thank you, Bill. Right now it's time for the WAIT WAIT... DON'T TELL ME Bluff the Listener game. Call 1-888-WAITWAIT to play our game on the air.
Hi. You are on WAIT WAIT... DON'T TELL ME.
KATE: Hello, Peter.
SAGAL: Hello. Who's this?
KATE: (Laughter) This is Kate (ph) from Lockhart, Texas.
SAGAL: Lockhart, Texas - now, I have never been to Lockhart, but I know it is legendary as the home of the best barbecue anywhere.
KATE: That's what they say, and they're not lying.
SAGAL: Right. Now, how is it that, like, in all of Texas - in all the country, the best barbecue ends up in one little town outside Austin?
KATE: It's tasty. That's all I can say. You got to check it out.
SAGAL: Yeah.
KATE: It's worth it. I had this moment where I went into a barbecue spot. And this guy came up and was like, I just drove from New York City to taste your barbecue. And then the guy behind the counter was like, you know we mail it, right?
(LAUGHTER)
SAGAL: Well, welcome to the show, Kate.
KATE: Thank you.
SAGAL: You are going to play our game in which you must try to tell truth from fiction.
Bill, what is Kate's topic?
KURTIS: One person's trash is another person's treasure.
SAGAL: Secondhand stores - great places to find treasures, old Life magazines with the original sexist ads, four-poster beds with the original bedbugs. This week, we heard about a particularly unique find in a secondhand store. Our panelists are going to tell you about it. Pick the real one; you'll win our prize, the voice of your choice on your voicemail. Are you ready to play?
KATE: I'm ready. And can I just say - Bill Kurtis, this one's for you.
KURTIS: Aw, gee, sweet. Thank you.
(APPLAUSE)
KATE: (Laughter).
SAGAL: All right, Kate, let's hear your first story of a secondhand find from Paula Poundstone.
PAULA POUNDSTONE: Elaine Jones perused the dusty aisles of Periwinkle's Curiosity and Rarities shop in Berwick-upon-Tweeds, England, looking for an antique cricket bat as a birthday gift for her husband Theodore.
Along the way, she found what appeared to be an innocuous thin piece of wood about the size of the palm of her hand. She wasn't sure how it was used, but there was something about it that made it hard to put down. Elaine purchased the wood for over 200 pounds. It seemed like a lot of money, but she was sure there would be lots of uses for it. Even as she carried it to the front of the shop, she couldn't help swiping her finger across the front of the board where it was darkened and worn from where other users had apparently done the same.
As she drove home, she took longer and longer glances at it in the seat beside her. She spent hours staring at the thing. She vaguely suspected she had a problem but was too ashamed to tell anyone.
(LAUGHTER)
POUNDSTONE: When Elaine sought the expertise of antiques expert David Cavel, she learned that the mesmerizing item she had purchased was very popular in the early 1800s. It was a tool for an eye exercise, and some people used it for meditation. They just stared at it. It was called an eyePad (ph), E-Y-E.
(LAUGHTER)
POUNDSTONE: E-Y-E-Pad. Some users found that swiping their finger across the front of it was somehow stimulating.
(LAUGHTER)
POUNDSTONE: They became so popular that it was considered acceptable to stare at the eyePad and ignore those around you.
(LAUGHTER)
SAGAL: The medieval eyePad, a piece of wood with a strange origin, found in a secondhand store in England.
Your next story of a secondhand treasure comes from Helen Hong.
HELEN HONG: If you've got a secret you don't want getting out, never put it in writing, never share it in a recording and never ever tell it to the Australian Government.
This week, hundreds of classified top-secret documents were released to the public after they were discovered in two old filing cabinets at a secondhand shop in Canberra. The cabinets had previously belonged to the Australian Government, which had lost the keys to the locked drawers and sold them off in a government used furniture sale with top-secret files still inside.
(LAUGHTER)
HONG: Yes, apparently, the Australian Government operates very much like your senile Uncle Wilbur.
(LAUGHTER)
HONG: An unnamed person bought the cabinets, quote, "for small change" and took a power drill to the locks. Discovering the files inside, they handed them over to the Australian Broadcasting Corp., who began publishing some of the documents this week. Among the embarrassing revelations - a former prime minister consider denying welfare to anyone under the age of 30, calling them job snobs, and another consider removing the right of people to remain silent under police questioning - awkward.
(LAUGHTER)
HONG: Cabinet officials cannot believe they are being undone by actual cabinets.
(LAUGHTER, APPLAUSE)
SAGAL: A file cabinet filled with state secrets turns up in an Australian secondhand store.
And your last story of a thrift store find comes from Tom Bodett.
TOM BODETT: It seemed like Matilda Bruner had it all - a great house, plenty of friends and all the stardom that comes with being Berlin's most celebrated dominatrix.
(LAUGHTER)
BODETT: She dominated the entire field - till it said its safe word.
(LAUGHTER)
BODETT: But there was always something missing from Bruner's life, her beloved Doberman, Pinchy (ph). When she was a little girl, they played together. They growled at visitors together. And it appears his taste in collars always stuck with her.
(LAUGHTER)
BODETT: But when she'd gone away to summer camp as a little girl, she came back to find him gone. My parents said he'd gone to live on a farm somewhere, but I knew it was a lie. I tried replacing him once with a pet land crab. It wasn't the same, but the name Pinchy still worked.
(LAUGHTER)
BODETT: That might have been the end of a sad story if not for her impulsive stop at a roadside Saturday flea market. As Frau Bruner made her way along the tables piled with bric-a-brac, she found herself looking face to face with her beloved Pinchy. He had been expertly stuffed and mounted in a standing position. His lips were curled in a snarl, and he was wearing the collar I remembered.
(LAUGHTER)
BODETT: I knew it was my Pinchy.
Matilda has no idea how Pinchy ended up as taxidermy alongside a German byway. Maybe they tried to make him like this for me but thought he turned out too scary. Who knows? The important thing is he's mine now. And we sit to watch TV every night together. He was a Doberman. Now he is an ottoman.
(LAUGHTER, APPLAUSE)
SAGAL: So somebody somewhere in the world walked into a secondhand store and found something kind of surprising. Was it, from Paula Poundstone, an ancient medieval instrument known as an eyePad, designed for staring at over long periods of time; from Helen Hong, a file cabinet that was filled with top-secret state documents from the Australian Government or, from Tom Bodett, a German dominatrix finding her old beloved Pinchy stuffed and mounted.
KATE: Well, I - you know, from Texas, I would love to pick taxidermy, hands down anytime. But I got to go with number two.
SAGAL: You're going to go with number two, which of course was Helen's story - right...
KATE: Yes.
SAGAL: ...Of the Australian state documents. All right, that's your choice. You picked Helen's story. Well, we spoke to a reporter who covered this remarkable find.
TRAVIS ANDREWS: In Australia, someone bought...
(APPLAUSE)
ANDREWS: ...Two file cabinets filled with thousands of pages of top-secret government documents.
SAGAL: That was Travis Andrews. He's a reporter with The Washington Post, telling us about the cabinet of classified documents found in a thrift store in Australia.
Congratulations, Kate. You got it right.
KATE: Yay.
(APPLAUSE)
HONG: Yay.
SAGAL: You earned a point for Helen. And you've won our prize, the voice of choice on your voicemail.
KATE: (Laughter).
SAGAL: Kate, thank you so much for playing.
KATE: All right. Appreciate it. Thanks, guys.
SAGAL: Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THE LONELY LITTLE THRIFT STORE")
JONATHAN RICHMAN: (Singing) And the mothball smell to the hats in it is the lonely little thrift store, the hard-luck little thrift store where I go... Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.