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in free postage when you visit stamps.com and use the promo code CultureFest. I'm Julia Turner,

and this is the Slate Culture Gab Fest, Curb Appeal edition.

It's Wednesday, June 20th, 2012, and on today's program, we're going to talk about HGTV's

House Hunters and the shocking revelation that it is not a journalistically accurate portrait

of the home buying process. We're going to have Catherine Bowers on to talk about Zubiquity,

a new book about the parallels between human and animal disease. And finally, we're going to talk about it, people, the song

of the summer, possibly the meme of the century, call me maybe, the new hit from Carly Ray Jepson,

Canadian songstress. Joining me today is Slate's film critic, Dana Stevens. Hi, Dana. Hey, Julia.

And joining us by phone is Stephen McCaff from the Ghent Bureau. Hey, Steve. Hey, Julia. How's it going?

Good. Very good. All right. Let's hop right in. The HGTV show House Hunters is one of its big hits.

It typically showcases a couple or other homebuyer looking at a home and purchasing it.

And it, in a half-hour show, has a very tidy structure where the couple looks at three houses, assesses the pros and cons of the three houses, and then purchases the house

they like best, and then we close with a shot of them moved in, extolling the virtues of the

house that they have moved into. Last week, it was revealed by someone who'd been on the show

that, in fact, much of this was bogus, that the producers of the show only booked her once

she had already bought the house,

...