Radio Tasty

by Kieran Healy on April 1, 2007

After a moderately funny NPR April Fool’s piece on banning ringtones in New York, this sponsor announcement made me laugh out loud.

On the news headlines that followed, the lead item was that the U.S. was scrambling to complete a huge free trade deal (“the biggest since NAFTA”) with North Korea.

{ 9 comments }

1

MikeJ 04.01.07 at 11:00 pm

Funnier without the punchline in the URL.

2

Orin Kerr 04.02.07 at 3:02 am

I agree with MikeJ. Still, seriously funny.

3

Kieran Healy 04.02.07 at 3:11 am

OK, OK, I changed it to take the punchline out of the filename.

4

Jacob T. Levy 04.02.07 at 12:34 pm

Getting to it after the URL change, I’ll just say: yep, that’s damn funny.

5

Dave MB 04.02.07 at 6:34 pm

The ring-tone thing was my favorite AF of the day, closely followed by an announcement on the “News From Ireland” on WFUV about a 700M euro bridge to connect Dublin and Liverpool, to be named after Bertie Ahearn. All Things Considered had something totally lame about statues to commemorate towns with stupid names in Kentucky. Unless it somehow got better at the end, but I couldn’t imagine how. They’re usually much better — I particularly liked the one a few years ago about maple sugar producers being outcompeted by people in the Marianas Islands melting down maple furniture. That one fooled me a lot longer than it should have, given that I live in maple country.

Any chance that the stupid Jane Austen piece in the Sunday Times was actually an AF?

6

jackd 04.02.07 at 9:06 pm

[hangs head]
I never twigged to the ringtone story.

But I was listening to the Indigenous Sculpture Society story with my 9yo daughter, and we got a big kick out of it. The giveaway (for me) was the three bushels of monkey fur. She, of course, found the misunderstanding of Elephant Butte to be hilarious.

7

willie mink 04.02.07 at 10:36 pm

Thanks, I laughed too, pretty clever of someone at NPR. Too bad the rest of their content is so milquetoast and toady. Lap-doggish.

They used to be more independent, but now their news reporting just goes along with the crowd, so that the jovial-but-smug pretense to superiority is just that, a pretense. If you’re interested in this sort of high-toned malfeasance, there’s a blog, NPR Check, that does a great job of covering the network’s more egregious missteps:

http://nprcheck.blogspot.com/

8

Jon H 04.03.07 at 3:47 am

“On The Media” had an April Fools’ piece about a new sitcom called “Jihad To Be There”, about a bunch of incompetent terrorists in a training camp.

9

David 04.05.07 at 4:10 am

this is pretty funny too, but no audio/video:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/04/the-sheep-albedo-feedbacki/#more-429

A companion song for the “On the Media” bit could be “How do you solve a problem like Sharia?”

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