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Panel Round

PETER SAGAL, HOST:

Mr. and Mrs. Null weren't the only ones who had problems this year. The CIA did as well. Here's our panel trying to figure it all out.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)

SAGAL: Paula, the CIA recently completed a successful week of training using some school buses they borrowed from a school district in Virginia nearby. They returned the buses in great condition, except they forgot something in one of the buses. What?

POUNDSTONE: A waterboarding...

SAGAL: No.

(LAUGHTER)

POUNDSTONE: ...Chair.

SAGAL: No, I'll give you a hint. To be fair to the CIA, we've all done it. You know the feeling - you lock your car, you walk away. All of a sudden you're like, oh, no, and you start looking in your pockets. And then the car explodes.

(LAUGHTER)

POUNDSTONE: Oh, they left a bomb in there?

SAGAL: They left explosives in the school bus…

(SOUNDBITE OF BELL)

SAGAL: …Is what they did.

POUNDSTONE: Oh, jeez.

SAGAL: So the CIA was training bomb-sniffing dogs, which means they had to use explosives, which they hid in these school buses and let the dogs find. Great. But they kind of forgot one little package of plastic explosive. The dog tried to tell them, but the CIA had fired all their bark translators.

(LAUGHTER)

TOM BODETT: Lassie would have written it in the mashed potatoes.

SAGAL: Apparently, yeah. So anyway, the bus was used after the CIA gave it back to drive kids around for two days before a school maintenance worker found the explosives and realized it just wasn't the same brand of plastic explosive that the school district used.

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: The CIA says that nobody was ever in danger because when is the last time anything the CIA did actually worked?

(LAUGHTER)

GROSZ: They're just probably kids on the school bus like kicking it and, like, shoving each other into it and sticking pencils into it.

SAGAL: It was actually - it was hidden in the engine compartment...

POUNDSTONE: Oh.

SAGAL: ...Which is where they had put it.

GROSZ: That’s so much safer.

SAGAL: Yeah.

(LAUGHTER)

GROSZ: That's great.

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