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Small talk: Snoring, Google-, no mankinis

The news that didn't quite make the headlines. This week: The snore patrol, man loses Google history, and no nonsense, no mankini.

Kai Ryssdal: Finally now on a Friday, enough with the real news. A minute now for the stuff that didn’t quite make the headlines. Courtesy of Brendan Francis Newnam, Rico Gagliano and the rest of the Marketplace staff.


Rico Gagliano: Ethan Lindsey, producer of the Marketplace Morning Report, what story are you going to be talking about this weekend?

Ethan Lindsey: There’s a chain of hotels, the Crowne Plaza, they’re hiring snore patrols to come check on noisy sleepers.

Gagliano: They like, rouse you out of bed or something?

Lindsey: They’re going to walk floor by floor, listening for a egregious snorers, knock on doors, and tell them to quiet down.

Gagliano: That is like the worst part-time job I can imagine. ‘What do you do for a living?’ ‘I wake people up who pay to sleep.’

Lindsey: I perform the same job that a little tab on your nose does.

Brendan Newnam: Paddy Hirsch, senior editor for Marketplace, what story are you going to be talking about this weekend?

Paddy Hirsch: I’m going to talk about this poor, unfortunate guy who had a Google account and went to check his mail one day and found that his entire Google account has been erased — seven years of history on Google, correspondence, documents, the whole nine yards. No trace.

Newnam: Did he contact Google?

Hirsch: He did and they were extremely unhelpful. In fact, they haven’t been helpful at all.

Newnam: You know, actually, erasing seven years of your life isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Maybe this is like Google time travel. It lets you go back in time and fix mistakes and make better investments.

Hirsch: Yeah, that’s Google++. Right?

Newnam: Google-.

Newnam: Stacey Vanek-Smith, senior reporter for Marketplace, what’s your story?

Stacey Vanek-Smith: Well Brendan, I think you might have to cancel your trip to Cornwall.

Newnam: To Cornwall? I didn’t know I was going.

Vanek-Smith: Yeah, there’s a beach town in the British county of Cornwall. They’ve launched this “No Nonsense” campaign. So they’re cracking down on drinking and they’ve confiscated a man’s mankini. You can no longer wear a mankini.

Newnam: So a mankini is like that male bathing suit/thong that Borat made famous. Right?

Vanek-Smith: Slingshot. Looks a little bit like a slingshot.

Newnam: Well, I’m glad you told me before I packed because that was taking up all this room in the coin pocket of my jeans.


Ryssdal: There’s oh so much more where that came from. It’s a podcast Rico and Brendan do called Dinner Party Download.

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