RUSH: Tom in Kennewick, Washington, I’m glad you waited, sir. Welcome to the EIB Network.
CALLER: Christmas dittos to you.
RUSH: Thank you. Thank you very much.
CALLER: I have a great Open Line Friday question for you. Do you still have, in your possession the gurgling wide-mouthed bass pitcher that you had on the Donahue show with you in the early nineties?
<a href=”http://mfile.akamai.com/5020/wma/rushlimb.download.akamai.com/5020/clips/06/12/gurglingcod.wma”></a>RUSH: Yeah, it’s up in the display case at the studio in the EIB Building in Manhattan. The gurgling cod. The gurgling cod was given to me as a gift when I first went to Boston, and it was sold in a department store, and I’m having a mental blocks trying to remember the name of the department store, but the reason they called it a gurgling cod is that it is a pitcher. It’s white porcelain I think, and you fill it half full with water, and pretend to be pouring. You don’t have to pour it out. Just before the water even begins to pour the water gurgles because of the acoustics and the shape of the vase and the shape of the gurgling cod, and it makes the funniest noise when you do this. That’s why they gave it to me and then we were making jokes about this is Senator Kennedy underwater and so forth, especially since it was given to me in Boston.
CALLER: Yes, I thought it was great, Rush. I’ve been wondering if you still had that.
RUSH: Yeah, where did you…? You must have been listening for a long time to have heard me do that on the radio.
CALLER: Well, actually I had to disobey my mother and listen to you on the radio because I told her about you, and she said, “You shouldn’t listen to him,” so I went ahead and did it anyway. I actually converted her over to you, but I started listening to you when you had about 250 radio stations in the early nineties.
RUSH: Yeah. That would have been the late eighties.
CALLER: I was a young skull full of mush.
RUSH: Well, I was just up there the other day and I just saw it in the display case. The display case is laid out so perfectly, Cookie has made it so beautiful, I don’t touch anything in it. It’s got some great things in there. I ought to get it back out of there and bring back to life the gurgling cod.
CALLER: (chuckles)
RUSH: Especially for those of you watching on the Dittocam, you can see it. It’s just funny. I don’t know why, but it is when you hear the noise that this thing makes. You have to make sure you don’t fill it. You can make the move toward pouring it without anything actually coming out of the gurgling cod, but as the water moves inside this thing — glug, glug, glug, glub — it gurgles, and it sounds like somebody trying to talk under water.
CALLER: It was great, and, you know, Rush, I just want to say thank you for being who you are. A lot of where my ideology and growing up has come from listening to you and from my parents. A lot of what I know about Ronaldus Magnus has come from you, and so I didn’t have a chance to call you Thanksgiving, but I just wanted to… Yyou know, my mom got me a subscription to your website yesterday, and we’re hooking it up, so I just want to say thank you, Rush.
RUSH: Well, that’s awfully kind of you. I thank you very much, but I have a question. You’ve intrigued me. When you were a young skull full of mush by your own admission mere moments ago on this program, your mother would not let you listen to this program. You had to sneak around your parent to do this, and now your mother is a convert. Could you tell me how this happened?
CALLER: Yeah. Actually, I gotta be careful because she’s listening right now as I’m talking to you, so —
RUSH: Well, then in that case, tell the truth, and then you can’t get in trouble. Well, I can’t say that.
CALLER: (laughing)
RUSH: It would have gotten Clinton in trouble a lot if he’d have told the truth. So yeah, go ahead. Give us the story.
CALLER: What happened I was over my grandmother’s house and I just kind of rolling around the radio dial, and I came across you and you had just finished playing the philanderer piece on Ted Kennedy, and I thought it was the funniest thing, and so I told my mom, and she said, “You’ve gotta listen to this guy. His name is Rush Limbaugh, and he’s the funniest thing and he’s making fun of Ted Kennedy.” She was like, “Oh, really.” So then she listened to you the next day, and when she got home from work she’s like, “”I don’t think you should be listening to him. He’s not a very nice man. He’s kind of dirty on some of his things.”
RUSH: (laughs)
CALLER: But I went ahead and listened to you anyway, something I don’t remember what it was, but she finally listened and realized that you were pretty good, too, so…
RUSH: Well, that’s good. She came around. I don’t know how I went from “not being a very nice man” to somebody that’s okay for you to listen to, but I will take it. Look, I appreciate all that you said. It sort of blows me away when people say those kind of things to me still, but I appreciate it more than you know. Thank you and thank your mom, and as a Christmas present, folks, from the archives, may as well dig it out: Ted Kennedy swimming around.
(Playing of the Philanderer spoof.)