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Bluff The Listener

CARL KASELL: From NPR and WBEZ-Chicago, this is WAIT WAIT...DON'T TELL ME!, the NPR News quiz. I'm Carl Kasell. We're playing his week with Brian Babylon, Kyrie O'Connor, and Tom Bodett. And, here again is your host, filling in for Peter Sagal, at the Chase Bank Auditorium in downtown Chicago, Drew Carey.

(APPLAUSE)

DREW CAREY, HOST:

Thanks, Carl. Once again, I'm sorry I'm not Peter. Now it's time for the WAIT WAIT...DON'T TELL ME! Bluff the Listener game. Call 1-888-Wait-Wait to play our game on air. Hi, you're on WAIT WAIT...DON'T TELL ME!

LOUIS SCRIMA: Hi, this is Louis Scrima from Boston, Massachusetts.

CAREY: Hi, Louis, what's going on? Welcome to WAIT WAIT.

SCRIMA: Nothing much.

CAREY: What do you do for a living, Louis?

SCRIMA: I do human resources and labor relations.

CAREY: Oh, I did human resources on "The Drew Carey Show." I hope you're better at it than I was.

SCRIMA: You were a model.

(LAUGHTER)

CAREY: Well, it's nice to have you with us, Lou. You're going to play our game in which you must try to tell truth from fiction. What's the topic, Carl?

KASELL: That'll learn ya.

(LAUGHTER)

CAREY: Modern times call for modern parenting. These days, parents have to find new and even more horrible ways to discipline their children. Our panelists are going to read you three stories of parents inflicting modern forms of punishment on their kids. Guess the real one and you'll win Carl's voice on your voicemail. First up, Kyrie O'Connor.

KYRIE O'CONNOR: It's a new media world out there, and that new world has all new ways for parents to mortify kids. A Wisconsin couple took the psychologist full employment program to new levels this week. To punish their daughter for being rude, they took away her cell phone for a week.

So far, OK. But then the parents shot goofy photos of themselves - think crossed eyes, gang signs, duck face, and posted them on her Facebook page. Not enough? The girl's awful, awful, awful brother told her story on Reddit and congratulated his parents, concluding "Doing it right." Somewhere in Wisconsin, there is a young girl about to clue her parents in to her brother's secret stash of porn.

(LAUGHTER)

CAREY: That was the parental Facebook postings story from Kyrie O'Connor. Your next story of parents bringing down the hammer comes from Brian Babylon. Brian?

BRIAN BABYLON: Last month, Rebecca Scrack of Studio City, California got a call from her daughter Nicki's school. It turns out, young Nicki was taking pictures of her classmates using an app called Zit Pic and posting them online. Zit Pic takes perfectly normal photos of junior high students and makes them even more worse and awkward by adding giant red zits and a hint of mustaches on their upper lip.

(LAUGHTER)

BABYLON: When Rebecca found out, she did what any mom in southern California would do; she turned to Hollywood for help. Quote, "I really wanted to teach her a lesson, so I called my close friend Rich Baker, a special effects makeup artist who worked on movies like 'Men in Black' and my favorite movie of all time, Eddie Murphy's 'The Nutty Professor II: The Klumps.'"

(LAUGHTER)

BABYLON: The makeup adhered right on the skin. It looked like she had not washed her face in five years. One of the zits actually had a zit on top of it.

(LAUGHTER)

BABYLON: After a weekend of this public humiliation, young Nicki Scrack got the message. She has since joined the Science Club.

(LAUGHTER)

CAREY: So that was the Zit Pic app story from Brian Babylon. Your last story of time out in the age of technology comes from Tom Bodett. Tom?

TOM BODETT: Oscar Corson was a good kid. Everybody said so. "He's a good kid," said his teachers at Maplewood New Jersey High School, "I wish we had more like him." "He's a good kid," said his soccer coach, minister, flight instructor, French tutor and paper route manager.

(LAUGHTER)

BODETT: "He's a good kid," said his parents, Rich and Kim, who rewarded their good kid's good kidness on his 16th birthday with a brand new, powder blue, BMW Z4. And then it went bad.

(LAUGHTER)

BODETT: He climbed behind the wheel and I saw him change from Frodo into Gollum before the engine warmed up.

(LAUGHTER)

BODETT: He and his precious burned rubber out of the driveway and didn't come home for 12 hours. There was a crease in the door, four speeding tickets and a reckless driving citation for turning donuts on the school soccer field. "The kid's a jerk," said his teachers. "Total buttcheek," said his soccer coach.

(LAUGHTER)

BODETT: The next morning, Oscar woke up to another surprise in the driveway. His parents had bolted a lighted signboard to the roof of his Beamer like you'd see on a pizza delivery car. But instead of advertising pizza, the sign glares "Am I driving like an ass? Call my parents," followed by the Corson's phone number.

(LAUGHTER)

BODETT: "It was a clear case of automobile poisoning," said Kim. "This should be the antidote." Maybe. The Z4 hasn't left the driveway in two weeks and Oscar has been seen helping old ladies on and off the city bus on his way to and from school. "He's a good kid," said Metro bus driver David Schneider.

(LAUGHTER)

BODETT: "I wish we had more like him."

(LAUGHTER)

(APPLAUSE)

CAREY: All right, Louis, you've got Kyrie with the parenting Facebook where they put their pictures on the kid's Facebook page, Brian with the Zit Pic app, and Tom with the good kid with a Z4 that probably should have been a 3 series. What's the real story?

SCRIMA: Oh boy, they're all very intriguing parenting strategies. I think I'm going to go with two, because it's the only one that has some basis in reality.

(LAUGHTER)

CAREY: All right, number two, the story about the Zit Pic app.

(LAUGHTER)

CAREY: To find out the correct answer, we spoke with the journalist who covered the real story.

CHRIS MATYSZCZYK: They posted shots on their teen daughter's Facebook page. The father is cross-eyed. The mother looks like she's drunk far too much gin. I guess the parents thought they were being modern and amusing.

CAREY: That was Chris Matyszczyk, creator of CNET news blog. I'm sorry, Lou, but Kyrie O'Connor had the real answer. So sorry.

BODETT: Sorry, Louis. You just have to go back to beating your children.

SCRIMA: Yeah.

(LAUGHTER)

CAREY: I didn't believe Brian because the family thought "The Klumps" was better than "Men in Black."

BODETT: Yeah.

(LAUGHTER)

CAREY: Louis, thanks for playing with us. Take care, OK.

SCRIMA: You're welcome. Thank you.

CAREY: Bye-bye.

SCRIMA: Bye-bye.

(APPLAUSE)

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

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