On this week’s Stay at Home edition of the NPR quiz show Wait, Wait...Don't Tell Me!, the guest contestant for the 'Not My Job' segment is Dan Riskin who is an evolutionary biologist and, of all things, a bat expert. And why have a bat expert as a guest? It’s because they’ve been significantly in the news for their relation to coronavirus. The conversation with host Peter Sagal is totally weird and shockingly great fun.
Fun, too -- well, for me, especially -- is the quiz about the beverage Tab. My dad had a small weight problem, and his one concession was diet soda. And for reasons unknown to man, the only one he liked was Tab. At one point, Tab changed its original formulation with saccharine to using cyclamates – and when it was discovered that that could cause cancer, it was announced it would be taken off the mark. My dad, who was a doctor and for fun read medical journals almost every night, had read the Tab studies. And he said that the amount of cyclamates that one would have to ingest to get cancer was SO massive that, as he put it, your kidneys would go out first, and you’d die from that. And he only drank one bottle a day. So, before Tab could leave the grocery shelves, our family had the mission that every time anyone went into a grocery store, we had to buy as much Tab as we could. It was bizarre but sort of fun – at a time when everyone was avoiding Tab – to see the reaction of people when showing up at the checkout register with a cart full of Tab. I think we all did this for about a month or two. And once Tab went off the market (until it could eventually be reformulated again), we had about a three year supply of Tab with cyclmates in our storage room! (When the new Tab hit the markets, my dad didn’t care for the flavor as much, so he stuck with what we had. After that eventually ran out, he did move on to the new formulation, but only reluctantly…)
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AuthorRobert J. Elisberg is a political commentator, screenwriter, novelist, tech writer and also some other things that I just tend to keep forgetting. Feedspot Badge of Honor
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