Wait, wait... it was this parrot!

(Photo by Darcy Cheek)

One of my Saturday morning highlights is the NPR trivia show Wait, Wait ... Don't Tell Me.

It's a hilarious mix of current affairs and witty exchanges between the panellists.

My kids are puzzled when I laugh out loud in the car, and I sometimes gauge my own degree of currency by the number of questions I get right in its “Lightning Fill In The Blank” segment.

Only once, however, have I followed along only to discover that, indirectly at least, I am a contributor. And that happened Saturday.

Our story on the Brockville Police's most infamous dynamic entry, which was quickly taken up by other media agencies and snowballed into a Canadawide “Weird News” item in April 2013, on Saturday made it into Wait Wait's “Lightning Fill In The Blank.”

You can hear it right here, by scrolling down to "Lightning Fill In The Blank." It's at 3:13 during Amy Dickinson's turn, in which she goes for a running cape gag rather than guess that a woman's supposed cries for help were caused by a parrot named Gobbler.

Brockville is not mentioned, but Ontario is – and so is Gobbler, followed by a hilarious “made you do it” gag.

Of course, as we locals know, this story was funny at the time, but had a sad ending.

It makes me wonder, though, whether the usually sharp folks at Wait, Wait were deceived, by one of those occasional Google quirks, into thinking this April 2013 story actually happened last week, or whether Gobbler's run-in with Brockvile's finest had been lingering on some Wait, Wait waiting list for that long before getting airtime.

I ask this because the funniest bit of Lightning quirky news from Saturday morning's show, about a home robbery that happened in South Carolina while the entire neighbourhood was at a Neighbourhood Watch meeting, dated from the previous Thursday.

At any rate, I have no doubt Gobbler is looking down from his lofty perch and giggling, in the way parrots giggle, at how his Earthly fame endures.

And if the folks at Wait, Wait are reading this, know that this was the first of at least two run-ins between the Brockville Police and a parrot.

On Thursday, Sept. 3 of this year, police responded to calls about a woman yelling for help at the rear of a north-end restaurant, only to find a parrot mimicking different sounds in a back shed of the property.

There must be something in what we feed our birds...