ALISON STEWART, host:
And thanks for joining us for THE BRYANT PARK PROJECT from NPR News. We bring you news, information and today, a little bit of history. I'm Alison Stewart.
LUKE BURBANK, host:
And I'm Luke Burbank. It's Thursday, October 4th.
(Soundbite of movie, "Planet of the Apes")
Mr. CHARLTON HESTON (Actor): (As George Taylor) You maniacs. You blew it up. Ah, damn you. Damn you all to hell.
BURBANK: That scene always gets me. Charlton Heston is 83 today. Some places saying 83, some places saying 84. But Trish McKinney just gave me the three sign. The official BPP number, we're going with 83.
STEWART: Well, happy birthday, Charlton Heston - and also to Stuttering John. I just felt like I had to throw that in. He's 42.
BURBANK: Stuttering John Melendez, who doesn't stutter anymore. He went and worked for Jay Leno and doesn't stutter anymore.
STEWART: Yeah. Coming up on THE BRYANT PARK PROJECT zoo, no - we're kidding. Don't write us.
BURBANK: No, never.
STEWART: Don't write us.
BURBANK: Never ever.
STEWART: All right. Really coming up on the show: We're going to talk about these new oil company ads. I don't know if you were watching "60 Minutes" on Sunday, but there was a two-and-a-half-minute ad for Chevron, which had such high production value. It was like a Hollywood movie. We're going to dig a little deeper into oil advertising.
BURBANK: Yeah. Public image of oil companies, I think. You've probably been hearing about this veto that President Bush made yesterday. It was only his fourth during his time as president. And he was vetoing this thing called S-CHIP, which is an insurance program aimed at poor kids, but also some middle-class kids. It's the kind of story you hear a lot about in the news and you wonder, wait, is this something I'm supposed to care about? Well, we're going to ask NPR's own Julie Rovner, and she's going to try to make us care.
STEWART: And here's where the history comes in: 1957, 50 years ago today, the Soviets launched Sputnik. We started noticing all kinds of really interesting things happened in the year 1957. So we'll check out what's up with '57. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
