Kai Ryssdal: This final note of a Friday, a moment to step away from the news of the week and hear a bit of what didn’t make the headlines. Courtesy of Rico Gagliano, Brendan Francis Newnam and the rest of the Marketplace staff.
Rico Gagliano: Jennifer Collins, reporter. What story are you going to be talking about this weekend?
Jennifer Collins: So you’ve heard of these viral videos that show baseball fans demonstrating that a small and large cup of beer at their favorite stadiums hold basically the same amount of beer?
Gagliano: I have, actually. It’s kind of amazing.
Collins: So these intrepid reporters in Phoenix went down to their stadium to figure out that if you’re ordering small beers — two small beers — you get four ounces more liquid, $1 less.
Gagliano: Than a large beer.
Collins: Yes.
Gagliano: Let me ask you: Has baseball become less exciting, or something? I mean, it just seems like fans are having more fun during cost-ratio analyses than watching the game.
Brendan Newnam: Avishay Artsy, assistant producer of Marketplace. What’s your story?
Avishay Artsy: Microsoft has their newest version of Windows, Windows 8. And it’s got a feature that a lot of people are talking about. It’s an update to the blue screen of death.
Newnam: Which is when your computer freezes and it just goes all blue.
Artsy: Right. Except now they’ve updated it so you’ve got this frowny face emoticon, and then you have the words, “Your PC ran into a problem that it can’t handle, and now it needs to restart.”
Newnam: That does sound a little nicer. But you know, if the buzz around your new product is that its failure screen is updated, I think your company might need to restart.
Gagliano: Jonathan Karp, senior editor. What story are you going to be talking about this weekend?
Jonathan Karp: It’s legal in Canada to surf the Internet at work on the company’s loonie.
Gagliano: Another reason to move to Canada.
Karp: Absolutely. Franklin Andrews, a government bureaucrat, was apparently spending more than half of his day surfing the Internet. He was downloading lots of pornography.
Gagliano: Really?
Karp: But he got fired — and keep in mind, this is Canada — for time theft.
Gagliano: But it didn’t stick?
Karp: No, the court ruled that he had met all of his obligations. The government didn’t give him enough work, so he wasn’t stealing any time at all.
Gagliano: May I ask where did you find this story? On the Internet, perhaps? Are we not keeping you busy enough?
Karp: Talk to my boss about that.
Ryssdal: There’s more where that came from. It’s a podcast Brendan and Rico do called Dinner Party Download.