MIKE PESCA, HOST:
Now, on to our final game, Lightning Fill In The Blanks. Each of our players will have 60 seconds in which to answer as many fill-in-the-blank questions as he or she can, each correct answer worth two points. Bill, can you give us the scores?
BILL KURTIS: Mo has two, Faith has three, P.J. has four.
P J O'ROURKE: Goodness.
PESCA: So, Mo...
MO ROCCA: Yeah?
PESCA: ...With you in third place, you will be up first.
ROCCA: All right.
PESCA: The clock will start when I begin your first question. Fill in the blank. This week, officials announced that the Pentagon would suspend all efforts to get veterans to repay blank.
ROCCA: Bonuses.
PESCA: Yes.
(SOUNDBITE OF BELL)
PESCA: On Tuesday, Russia revealed the Satan 2, a new blank capable of destroying an area the size of Texas.
ROCCA: A missile.
PESCA: It is.
(SOUNDBITE OF BELL)
PESCA: On Sunday, Donald Trump got his first ever newspaper endorsement from a paper in blank.
ROCCA: Las Vegas.
PESCA: Yes.
(SOUNDBITE OF BELL)
PESCA: This week, police in Maine arrested a man named Asher Woodworth for blanking.
ROCCA: Asher Woodworth - for having a very annoying name.
(LAUGHTER)
PESCA: For dressing up as a tree and blocking traffic.
ROCCA: Oh.
(LAUGHTER)
PESCA: For the first time in 15 years, blank reported a drop in their annual sales.
ROCCA: Apple.
PESCA: Correct.
(SOUNDBITE OF BELL)
PESCA: On Sunday, the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor was awarded to blank.
ROCCA: Bill Murray.
PESCA: Yes.
(SOUNDBITE OF BELL)
PESCA: A New York Times review of the new show "Goliath..."
(SOUNDBITE OF GONG)
PESCA: ...Which called the plot structure, quote, "needlessly complicated" was corrected after it was revealed that the reviewer had blanked.
ROCCA: The reviewer had watched the wrong show.
PESCA: Well, he'd watch the episodes in the wrong order.
(LAUGHTER)
PESCA: The reviewer said "Goliath" was terrible, quote, "because the first episode leaves so much unanswered and the next jumps back in time to fill in the history of the case. And when the second episode ends, the story hasn't even caught up to where it started." The mistake has led readers to question the review, which called "Star Trek" a terrible space show. It's just these women named Carrie and Samantha drinking cosmos the whole time. How did Mo do, Bill?
KURTIS: He did a pretty good. Five right, 10 more points, total of 12. And that puts him in the lead.
PESCA: All right.
(APPLAUSE)
O'ROURKE: OK, Mo.
PESCA: Faith Salie, you're up next. You ready to play?
FAITH SALIE: Yes.
PESCA: OK. As coalition forces got closer, the Iraqi military evacuated more than a thousand people from villages around blank.
SALIE: Mosul.
PESCA: Right.
(SOUNDBITE OF BELL)
PESCA: This week, AT&T agreed to an $85 billion deal to acquire blank.
SALIE: Time Warner.
PESCA: Right.
(SOUNDBITE OF BELL)
PESCA: Following protests, French authorities began clearing a blank near Calais known as the Jungle.
SALIE: Oh, a camp.
PESCA: Yeah, a refugee camp.
(SOUNDBITE OF BELL)
PESCA: On Wednesday, central Italy was rocked by two consecutive blanks.
SALIE: Earthquakes.
PESCA: Yup.
(SOUNDBITE OF BELL)
PESCA: This week, the Australian census office learned that it could have solved a two-day outage of their official website by blank.
SALIE: By capturing some kangaroos.
PESCA: By turning their router off and then on again.
(LAUGHTER)
PESCA: On Thursday, Twitter announced it was shutting down its video blogging service, blank.
SALIE: Vine.
PESCA: Yup.
(SOUNDBITE OF BELL)
PESCA: This week, Paul Beatty became the first blank to win the Man Booker Prize.
SALIE: American.
PESCA: Yup.
(SOUNDBITE OF BELL)
PESCA: On Tuesday, a woman in North Carolina won a million dollars in the lottery after blanking.
(SOUNDBITE OF GONG)
SALIE: After buying the lotto tickets to prove to her husband that they're a waste of money.
PESCA: She's right.
(LAUGHTER)
ROCCA: That's hilarious.
PESCA: Glenda Blackwell said she wanted to teach her husband a lesson. So when he asked her to pick up two Powerball tickets from the local corner store, she instead bought a scratch-off to show him that no one ever wins the lottery. Then she goes home. Glenda and her husband are shocked to discover they'd won a million dollars. Glenda says she is now eating her words and plans on spending the whole windfall on another of her husband's obsessions, which she always thought was a waste of money - helping out that nice Nigerian prince.
(LAUGHTER)
PESCA: OK, Bill, so how did Faith do?
KURTIS: Sounds like a Cubs score - seven right, 14 more points, a total of 17.
PESCA: Seventeen.
(APPLAUSE)
PESCA: Amazing. OK, Bill, so that means - what does P.J. need to do to win?
KURTIS: Seven to win.
PESCA: OK.
KURTIS: Big challenge.
PESCA: All right, P.J. O'Rourke...
O'ROURKE: What he needs to do is go back and finish college.
PESCA: (Laughter) This is for the game, P.J. This week, former Secretary of State Colin Powell announced he was endorsing blank.
O'ROURKE: Hillary Clinton.
PESCA: Right.
(SOUNDBITE OF BELL)
PESCA: On Tuesday, a judge approved a $14.7 billion deal to settle blank's emissions scandal.
O'ROURKE: Volkswagen's.
PESCA: Right.
(SOUNDBITE OF BELL)
PESCA: A genetic study published this week confirmed that the blank epidemic started years before patient zero...
O'ROURKE: AIDS.
PESCA: Right.
(SOUNDBITE OF BELL)
PESCA: A man leading police on a high-speed chase through the streets of Phoenix this week took a brief break to blank.
O'ROURKE: Tweet.
PESCA: Well, to order food from the In-N-Out drive through.
O'ROURKE: Oh, well.
PESCA: Yeah. According to a new report, two-thirds of the world's blanks could be gone by 2020.
O'ROURKE: Angry, old white guys?
(LAUGHTER)
PESCA: Animals. This week, a Kuwaiti man was caught cheating on his wife when a blank revealed their affair.
(SOUNDBITE OF GONG)
O'ROURKE: The goat was talking (laughter)...
PESCA: His pet parrot.
(LAUGHTER)
ROCCA: Wow.
O'ROURKE: (Laughter) I was very close.
PESCA: According to the man's wife, she had suspected that he'd been cheating on her for a while but had never been able to prove it...
O'ROURKE: But with a parrot?
PESCA: The parrot sang like a bird is what happened. All of that changed the day when she overheard the family parrot mimicking some of the flirtatious things her husband had been saying to his mistress. Those sorts of libidinal, lustful phrases that just drip with sensuality when they come out of the beak of a parrot. Like (imitating parrot) my loins ache with desire.
(LAUGHTER)
PESCA: (Imitating parrot) I want your body and a cracker.
(LAUGHTER)
SALIE: (Imitating parrot) My wife doesn't do that.
(LAUGHTER)
PESCA: Oh, Bill, the feathers are flying. Did P.J. do enough to win?
KURTIS: Well, no.
(LAUGHTER)
KURTIS: He got three right.
O'ROURKE: Told you, saw that coming.
KURTIS: Six more points, total of 10. But he couldn't catch Faith.
(APPLAUSE)
PESCA: Nope. All right. So Faith Salie is this week's champion. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
