Coded messages in Radio Broadcasts?

Hell yes. In fact, I put ‘em there myself.

Well David Brooks needs a serious flogging as it appears he has just up and gone AWOL from his right mind entirely, and the ongoing saga of the Mandate Eating Virus that is Karl Rove is a cornucopia of delights, but for this very late evening, light fare and a bit of fun.

File this under: How I saved Mo Rocca and National Pulic Radio from infamy. Well, more infamy.

This is a true tale, s’welp me Jebus, and hope hearing it gives you the same, secret, conspiratorial, chuckly smile it gave me doing it.

Where to begin?

Today was a long day, and the latest in a long series. It’s really starting to wearing the treads off of my kittenish self, but tonight I got two -- count 'em, Two! -- little treats.

The first was from-me-to-me as I broke the exchequer and bought myself a single round of Johnny Walker Blue at a Loop hotel bar after work. Which I then sipped decadently and at my leisure as I sat and scribbled away with (gasp!) pen and paper. JW Blue is the stuff that’s a minimum of $30 a shot (and made a liquor cameo on "The West Wing"), and I'd always wanted to know what that tastes like.

It was…OK, but not orders of magnitude better than, say, a 15-year-old Abelour, a whole bottle of which can be procured for about what a shot-and-a-half of JW Blue'll set you back.

But WTF -- twas once in a Blue moon -- and it also put me on just the right bar seat just in time to hear the funniest damned banter between a young woman waiting on a lawyer and an moneyed old wolf waiting for just such a one as she. It was terrific fun to listen to them fence, but more delightful still since I was fiddling with a dating essay, and what the woman was saying could (and maybe will) be dropped word-for-word into the particular paragraph I was going over.

A gift to me from the Gods of sexual Parry and Thrust.

From thence I hied my ass over to the venerable Chase Auditorium where a friend of mine had gotten a couple of tickets to the taping of this week’s episode of “Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me!” as a late birthday gift to me. I like the show, and it tapes in Chicago, and Adam Effing West is the guest which week, so how cool is that?

Anyway, the show is live in front of a studio audience, but taped, so it’s only sort of half-live; sorta like Dick Cheney, but without the heart trouble and a hard-on to lay waste to half the globe.

So live-ish it may be, but afterwards they do a few “re-takes” where they re-record do-overs of some of the boo-boos, which is where the whole “me saving Mo Rocca from ignominy” comes in.

See, the “Prediction” for next week that the panel was asked to come up with was something like “What more prison-appropriate nickname will I. Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby now be using?” on which Mr. Rocca riffed for a little bit on a name based on a “Scooter gets prison raped by a muppet” theme.

Perfectly funny and entirely inappropriate, so they made him do it over, and he suddenly couldn’t think of a thing that would work…

…which is when he turned to the audience for help.

There were many calls for “Hooter” and “Looter” and so forth, but nothing with, um , zazz! And because I cannot keep my mouth shut in these situation (and because with Adam West as the guest, I was of a mind to ask myself, “What would Batman do?”) I waited for a lull -- because timing counts -- and shouted out, “Call him “I. Diddy!”

Which, I must humbly admit, did bring the house down (Although on mature reflection, I actually like the one that popped into my head on the way home -- "Lewis Leaky" -- better), and which Mr. Rocca adopted like rich, childless WASPS going after Chinese babies. So when you hear it this Saturday morning on NPR, you’ll know that your ol' pal driftglass snuck one over the plate.

Would I ever do such a thing again?

Hard to say. So much more satisfying to go Kaiser Sose after popping my head out: “And then, like that, he's gone. Underground. Nobody's ever seen him since.” :-)

But either way, as Paul Harvey says, now you know…the rest of the story.