Wait, Wait, don’t tell Gov. Napolitano… Bobby Knight gets mad
February 11th, 2008, 2:51 pm · Post a Comment · posted by Le Templar
Gov. Janet Napolitano speaks on KJZZ (91.5 FM), as posted at kjzz.org.
Gov. Janet Napolitano certainly enjoyed herself when she appeared on last week’s National Public Radio game show “Wait, Wait … Don’t Tell Me.” The show hosted by Peter Sagal was taped Thursday before an enthusiastic audience at the Mesa Arts Center. If you missed the broadcast over the weekend on KJZZ (91.5 FM), you can listen to the whole hourlong show or individual segments here.
Napolitano came on to for the weekly segment called “Not My Job,” in which a celebrity or politician chats for a little while with Sagal before answering three questions about some obscure subject. Napolitano laughed throughout her appearance in a rather full-throated manner that indicated she was entirely relaxed and not at all self-conscious about the likelihood of someone poking fun at her on a national broadcast. Perhaps she’s a big fan of the show.
For example, Sagal mistakenly referred to the second question as the last one, and Napolitano jumped in to correct him. She wasn’t taken aback at all when Sagal said bluntly, “You’re rather bossy, aren’t you, governor?” and she played along rather nicely.
During the chit-chat, Napolitano also continued the fiction that she’s never given any thought to her political career beyond the end of her last term as governor in 2010. But I’m sure this particular crowd easily let that slide.
The point of “Not My Job” is the subject of the three questions should be so distant from what the celebrity/politician does for a living, there’s almost no chance for her to know the answers and she must guess from among multiple choices offered for each question.
But I have to wonder if someone told the “Wait, Wait” producers that Napolitano considers herself to be a little bit of a sports geek, especially on the subjects of baseball, football and basketball. The three questions were about the well-known temper of Bobby Knight, the legendary college basketball coach with the most wins in history who retired from Texas Tech last week.
If anyone was trying to help Napolitano out, it didn’t work, as she missed all three questions (and didn’t win the program’s grand prize for a Glendale woman — having announcer Carl Kasell create a phone voice message for you).
A friend of mine pointed out Napolitano’s new political hero, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., correctly answered his three questions when he was on the show of Aug. 6, 2005. Does that make Obama a genius, or was Napolitano just unlucky?
