We fell short of our Fall Fundraiser goal of 2,500 donations. Help us catch up ⏩ Give Now
Small Talk

Small talk: Snoring, Google-, no mankinis

Marketplace Contributor Jul 22, 2011
HTML EMBED:
COPY
Small Talk

Small talk: Snoring, Google-, no mankinis

Marketplace Contributor Jul 22, 2011
HTML EMBED:
COPY

Kai Ryssdal: Finally now on a Friday, enough with the real news. A minute now for the stuff that didn’t quite make the headlines. Courtesy of Brendan Francis Newnam, Rico Gagliano and the rest of the Marketplace staff.


Rico Gagliano: Ethan Lindsey, producer of the Marketplace Morning Report, what story are you going to be talking about this weekend?

Ethan Lindsey: There’s a chain of hotels, the Crowne Plaza, they’re hiring snore patrols to come check on noisy sleepers.

Gagliano: They like, rouse you out of bed or something?

Lindsey: They’re going to walk floor by floor, listening for a egregious snorers, knock on doors, and tell them to quiet down.

Gagliano: That is like the worst part-time job I can imagine. ‘What do you do for a living?’ ‘I wake people up who pay to sleep.’

Lindsey: I perform the same job that a little tab on your nose does.

Brendan Newnam: Paddy Hirsch, senior editor for Marketplace, what story are you going to be talking about this weekend?

Paddy Hirsch: I’m going to talk about this poor, unfortunate guy who had a Google account and went to check his mail one day and found that his entire Google account has been erased — seven years of history on Google, correspondence, documents, the whole nine yards. No trace.

Newnam: Did he contact Google?

Hirsch: He did and they were extremely unhelpful. In fact, they haven’t been helpful at all.

Newnam: You know, actually, erasing seven years of your life isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Maybe this is like Google time travel. It lets you go back in time and fix mistakes and make better investments.

Hirsch: Yeah, that’s Google++. Right?

Newnam: Google-.

Newnam: Stacey Vanek-Smith, senior reporter for Marketplace, what’s your story?

Stacey Vanek-Smith: Well Brendan, I think you might have to cancel your trip to Cornwall.

Newnam: To Cornwall? I didn’t know I was going.

Vanek-Smith: Yeah, there’s a beach town in the British county of Cornwall. They’ve launched this “No Nonsense” campaign. So they’re cracking down on drinking and they’ve confiscated a man’s mankini. You can no longer wear a mankini.

Newnam: So a mankini is like that male bathing suit/thong that Borat made famous. Right?

Vanek-Smith: Slingshot. Looks a little bit like a slingshot.

Newnam: Well, I’m glad you told me before I packed because that was taking up all this room in the coin pocket of my jeans.


Ryssdal: There’s oh so much more where that came from. It’s a podcast Rico and Brendan do called Dinner Party Download.

There’s a lot happening in the world.  Through it all, Marketplace is here for you. 

You rely on Marketplace to break down the world’s events and tell you how it affects you in a fact-based, approachable way. We rely on your financial support to keep making that possible. 

Your donation today powers the independent journalism that you rely on. For just $5/month, you can help sustain Marketplace so we can keep reporting on the things that matter to you.