Welcome to the dinner party download. This is your icebreaker.

Here's a joke. It's the only one I can think of that's not a dirty joke.

Okay, so a dog walks into the post office and says, I want to send a telegram.

And the guy says, okay, you know, what would you like to say?

And the dog says, I want to say, woof, woof, woof, woof, woof, woof, woof, woof,

and the man says, that's fine, but you know, for the same price, you can put another woof in there.

And the dog says, yeah, but that wouldn't make any sense.

I'm Brendan Francis Nuneum.

I'm Rico Gagliano.

And from 89.3 KPCC in Los Angeles, this is the dinner party download, the show that gives you talking points and bon moz to help you win your next dinner party.

This week's Icebreaker came from our guest of honor, New York Times reporter and author, Sarah Lyle.

We'll be speaking with her later, but first,

as with any dinner party, we start off with Small Talk.

You're going to be talking about the week's news at this weekend's party. Who better to tell

you which news is worth bringing up than the people who report it? So as usual, we talk to our colleagues over at Public Radio's business show, Marketplace.

As you can imagine, they were kind of busy this week.

Yes, covering the financial apocalypse is a full-time job,

but they were happy to talk with us about some other news stories.

Okay, so Betsy Streisand, senior editor at Marketplace,

whoever's lucky enough to attend a dinner party with you this weekend, what's a story that came across your desk that you're going to share with them?

Now, so I love this story about the fact that Microsoft, they have a $300 million campaign to try to get people to stop making fun of them.

They have the biggest business. You know, they own the computer business,

...