First Sighting of a Swimming Squirrel

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(Soundbite of music)

LUKE BURBANK, host:

Right now, any song I like is always Timberland.

ALISON STEWART, host:

I know. It really is, right?

BURBANK: How did you know who this is? Who is this, Jacob? Can you tell us? It's The Pack. And it's THE BRYANT PARK PROJECT from NPR News. Thank you so much for listening. I'm Luke Burbank.

STEWART: I'm Alison Stewart.

BURBANK: All right. If Mike Tyson's middle names were Oscar and Stanley, his initials would - think about this - be M-O-S-T.

STEWART: Hmm.

BURBANK: You know why that matters, Alison? God, we are just stretching here.

(Soundbite of laughter)

BURBANK: We got to come up with, like, 365 ways to introduce this segment, which we need to call The Most. We bring in the most e-mailed, the most viewed, the most printed out stories off of the Internet. We put them together for you in the segment that, as I've already spelled for you, is called The Most.

(Soundbite of music)

STEWART: First up, editor Tricia McKinney, who loves this story.

TRICIA McKINNEY: Yeah.

BURBANK: Oh, that's why we were doing initials…

STEWART: Yeah.

BURBANK: …in the intro.

McKINNEY: I guess. I don't know. Anyway, this is…

BURBANK: Apparently, the editor.

McKINNEY: …one of the most - yeah, whatever.

(Soundbite of laughter)

McKINNEY: This is one of the most e-mailed stories on USA Today, and it's called "Blame game: My name made me do it." It's based - it's about a study that psychologist in marketing at Yale and the University of California, San Diego - my alma mater - they have a study about the unconscious influence of names having a negative consequence on your life. So I know that's a little complicated. Here we go.

Apparently, if you're an MBA student and if your name begins with C or D, you're likely to get lower grades than if your name begins with A or B. And if you're a Major League Baseball player whose first or last name begins with the letter K, which means strike out, you are more likely to strike out. And this being published in the December issue of Psychological Science.

STEWART: I call it buncombes. I don't know.

BURBANK: I totally smell a rat. I mean, it seems to be so inconsistent. Like…

McKINNEY: Yes.

BURBANK: I mean, it's not like if you're - there was a study someone was talking about the meeting about - at one point, people were saying if your initials spelled B-A-D or something, then you would sort of have a shorter life expectancy.

STEWART: Yes.

McKINNEY: Yeah.

BURBANK: But this sounds totally random-like. And if you're a fisherman and you're second middle name initial is S…

McKINNEY: Well, it's kind of based on this other bunch of studies that talk about the name-letter effect that are supposedly causes people to make life choices based on names that resemble their own. So if your name starts with a T, you're more likely to but a Toyota, stuff like that.

(Soundbite of laughter)

McKINNEY: You know, you're likely to live in a state or a city resembling your name, have a career resembling your name or marry someone whose last name begins with the same letter as yours. None of which applies to my life, people always say.

STEWART: I would just say, buy you know what? Since we have you on the mic, can we get a little Australian Santa?

McKINNEY: Ho, ho, ho.

STEWART: Thank you.

(Soundbite of laughter)

BURBANK: Now, say Tina Sparkle.

McKINNEY: Tina Sparkle.

BURBANK: That's beautiful.

STEWART: We love that. We're always going to that.

BURBANK: Thank you, Trish.

STEWART: Thank you Tricia.

McKINNEY: Thanks.

STEWART: That's from yesterday (unintelligible).

BURBANK: Okay. All right. Well, you know what, what we do on the show is we take the, like, you know when parents teach you how to swim? Some actually put you in swimming lessons and with water wings. Some just throw you in the pool. That's what we did with our friend Angela(ph).

STEWART: Angela is a brand new producer. And we mean about two days.

(Soundbite of laughter)

BURBANK: Yeah. Like, she's only been here for like 12 hours and she's already producing hundreds of segments. And here, with The Most entry, hi, Angela.

ANGELA ELLIS: Hello.

BURBANK: Where is this from?

ELLIS: So this is the most e-mailed story on BBC News, which is a strange spotting in a U.K. lake. And it was not the Loch Ness Monster, but a little red squirrel. And it was spotted about 300 yards from the shore. And he was just squirrel-paddling, when a group of tourists saw him and put out a rope, and the little squirrel hopped on and hitched a ride back to the shore. And the local Red Squirrel Group leader - which there is a local district, Red Squirrel Group in this area of Ullswater, said that this is the first time in his 15 years of studying red squirrels that he's ever seen anything like it.

BURBANK: I wonder what drove this little squirrel to…

STEWART: I wonder if he lost his water skis.

BURBANK: Oh.

STEWART: It's what it was. He was out there in that little boat.

ELLIS: He got there. Got stuck.

BURBANK: Good one, Ron Burgundy.

STEWART: His name is Nutty the Squirrel. He's 3 years old and he water skis. I love that movie. Angela, well done.

BURBANK: Yeah. Angela, welcome. Welcome to the pool. Good job.

STEWART: Good job, Angela.

ELLIS: Thank you (unintelligible).

STEWART: Rachel?

RACHEL MARTIN, host:

Okay. My turn?

STEWART: Yeah.

MARTIN: I'm going to tell you guys about this story. It's called - it's the second most e-mailed on the New York Times. It's Maureen Dowd's column this week. And she wants to kind of bring it back to politics and talk about Hillary. I don't think that's the most important part. The most important part is the study that she profiles by this guy named Ray Fisman, who's at Columbia. He's an economics professor. He did this two-year study, published last year, about dating, and basically, the results kind of bore out that scene in "Sex and the City." If any one watched this - Miranda goes speed-dating, and when she tells people she's a lawyer, they're not so much into her. But as soon as she says she's a flight attendant, they're all, ooh, you're sexy. You're a flight attendant.

BURBANK: Is Miranda the one whose face looks like a foot? Which one is that?

MARTIN: Hmm. I don't think so. That's mean.

BURBANK: Who's the…

MARTIN: I think you're trying to make some statement about - it helps to be perhaps (unintelligible)…

BURBANK: No. I just - I don't know the name of the characters.

MARTIN: Her face does not look like a foot. She's the redhead.

BURBANK: Okay. That's different. I was thinking of Sarah Jessica Parker.

MARTIN: I think very - I think she's attractive. Anyway, the whole gist of this…

STEWART: It took me 30 seconds to even respond to that.

MARTIN: …is that men like women who are smart but not super smart, and they like them when they're ambitious but not too ambitious.

STEWART: So that's the Maureen Dowd column.

MARTIN: That's the Maureen Dowd column, yeah.

STEWART: My most is the most searched term on Technorati, and it's Liberty Dollar. Technorati checks out all the blogs - the blogosphere on fire because this Liberty Dollar was out of Evansville. It was a private voluntary barter currency. They'd made up their own currency for the past seven years. And they federal government finally had it. And they went in and they raided the offices yesterday morning. They also raided the - where they kept the dyes for the Liberty Dollars, out of Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. And one of the reasons it's…

BURBANK: Does not surprise me that was being kept in Idaho.

MARTIN: Hey, ho.

STEWART: But one of the reasons it's also gotten quite a bit of traction on the blogs is that the Liberty Dollars, they put out a Ron Paul Dollar over the summer, so two tons of Ron Paul Dollars were seized. So stay tuned. It's about the FBI-Secret Service raid on the Liberty Dollars.

BURBANK: We're about to find out that we he raised the $4 million in one day, 2.5 was in Liberty Dollars.

(Soundbite of laughter)

STEWART: I think we may have to break out this story.

BURBANK: All right.

STEWART: I'm actually really fascinated by this.

BURBANK: We'll get to that.

Okay. So that does it for this edition of The Most. Tricia, Angela, Rachel, thank you.

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