A live taping of Says You!

[elfs]

Omaha and I last night went to the live Seattle taping of NPR's Says You! ^[wikipedia], "the game of words and whimsy, bluff and blunder!" It's just about my favorite game show-- okay, it's my only game show. The panel was the same as always, no guests, which was okay. This is NPR.

We had trouble finding parking, and I sent Omaha in ahead of me. Despite not having the tickets I had no trouble getting in. She'd told them that the other ticket was for "a man in a kilt." We arrived at Town Hall Seattle, a century-old building designed to be just what it says: a place for formal presentations.

Says You! is hardly a formal presentation. They did say that this was just about the biggest crowd they'd ever had at a taping, and Richard Sher, the host, said that he was surprised at how strong the audience's reaction was to some of the definitions. "What's the difference between a dish and a plate?" Well, obviously, the difference between a dish and a plate is that you eat off a plate, right? No, just the opposite: you eat off the dish, the plate is what's set under the dish. The audience was quite passionate that that is called the charger (French accent, please) and my distinction was the correct one. Arnie joked that the audience was going to rush the stage!

I was also annoyed by the use of the word "Boffin" to describe "an elderly naval officer," when everyone knows that a boffin is UK slang for 'scientist'. (Yes, I see that Richard's definition is listed as an archaism for mine in the Wikipedia entry.)

The Says You! Audience

The audience reeked of liberal NPR goodness. Stop The War buttons, Obama buttons, and just general all-around mid-20s to mid-70s tie-died, tattooed, and yet button-downed Seattle citizens. Of course, we're here for a game show, the primary draw of which is obscure vocabulary and high literary trivia, so we're not likely to have many NASCAR fans in the audience.

We discovered several things about the show: they tend to run long and cut out a lot, they pause and re-do whole segments, complete with the jokes, whenever sirens intrude on the soundscape (which they did, Town Hall being just next to Hospital District), and they tape two shows back to back. So when you listen to the show two weeks in a row, odds are good you're hearing the same audience in both tapings.

One of my strongest reactions the whole night was, "Wow, they're a lot older than they sound over the radio." I hope when I'm as old as some of them I'm still as on my 'A' game mentally as they were.

The assembly room was very hot. There's no artificial cooling in the place and only a few of the windows were open. There were also no water fountains in the place, and the 5-gallon water cooler stands ran out of supply early during the intermission.

It was a fun night but it ran very late; we originally intended to be out of there by 9:30, but the taping ran to 11:00. Omaha and I had lunch at the Broadway Grill (which was definitely off it's 'A' game), and I had the entertaining moment of hearing a man whine in the quintessential gay accent, "Why are we listening to this shit?" as the old Tiffany song, "I Think We're Alone Now," played overhead. Next to Omaha and I were couples, het and young, and one of the women was complaining, loudly and repeatedly, "I am not a slut!" Omaha think she protested too much.

Comments

[srmalloy.livejournal.com]

A casual troll through the Net turned up a book (Nineteenth-Century Attitudes: Men of Science by Sydney Ross) that presented the theory that the term entered RN use beginning with the voyage of Thomas Huxley aboard HMS Rattlesnake during its voyages in Australasian waters from 1846 to 1850. Messing with the midshipmen, his good spirits and lack of authority over them led them to become interested in his work, trawling up sea creatures, which the midshipmen took to calling 'buffons', after the name repeated on each volume of Huxley's set of Buffon's Natural History; after a while, Huxley himself started calling his specimens 'buffons'. The premise is that over time the term transferred from the specimens to the collector, then to any scientist working with the services, and underwent a vowel shift in the hundred years before it surfaced to be applied to the radar researchers.