Episode 182: The Best of 2012
The Dinner Party Download
American Public Media
4.6 • 821 Ratings
🗓️ 3 January 2013
⏱️ 51 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week, a look back at our best moments of 2012: Jon Hamm dives into dark matter… Ed Asner answers your etiquette questions (and his cellphone)… We toast a historic Niagara fall… Folk rock icon Rodriguez rises from the dead… Alison Pill (“The Newsroom”) lists her favorite behind-the-scenes stories… Ramblin’ man Todd Snider recalls his brush with Nascar celebrity… And country singer Iris DeMent takes us home with a dinner party soundtrack…Plus “pretzel dumplings,” lucky underwear, and an OCD joke from James Franco.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the dinner party. This is your icebreaker. |
| 0:05.0 | All right, here's a joke. I have CDO. That's actually OCD, but in alphabetical order, just like it should be. |
| 0:15.0 | I'm Rico Gallagliano. |
| 0:21.4 | I'm Brendan Francis Nunes. |
| 0:22.8 | And from APM American Public Media, this is The Dinner Party, the culture show that gives |
| 0:27.6 | you an edge in your weekend conversations. |
| 0:29.3 | You just got a joke from actor James Franco, and we selected it to kick off this, our |
| 0:33.9 | Best of 2012 episode. |
| 0:36.3 | Yes, believe it or not, that was the cream of this year's |
| 0:39.8 | joke crop. The summer's drought affected even the joke crops. Apparently. But don't fret, |
| 0:44.5 | we have real chuckles ahead. They come courtesy of guests like John Hamm, Ed Asner, |
| 0:48.8 | Angelica Houston, country music legend Iris Dement, and others. Yes, it's an hour of our |
| 0:52.9 | favorite moments of the year featuring conversation, food, cocktails, songs, and more. But first, as at any dinner party, |
| 0:59.7 | we start with small talk. Now, usually at this point in the show, we bring in a journalist to tell |
| 1:06.8 | us about one little odd news item to talk about at dinner parties this weekend. Yes, but for a best-of show, one story is a paltry amount. |
| 1:14.3 | So here is a rich, overloaded plateful of our favorite stories of the year, |
| 1:18.1 | starting with this one from Sadie Stein of the literary magazine, The Paris Review, |
| 1:22.6 | who excitedly told us, |
| 1:24.2 | The best word ever has been declared. |
| 1:26.8 | The best word ever. It was crowdsourced. A blogger, Ted McCag, has been running a bracket for the past couple of months, and it came down to Gurkin versus Diphtong. Okay. And the winner. Yes. Diphthong. Whoa. See. Okay. Well, you have to keep in mind. That's kind of lame. Well, it's a great word. |
| 1:44.1 | It's a grammatical term. |
| 1:45.5 | Yeah, so the best word is a word that describes a word. |
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