RUSH: Let me remind you again what we’re doing here with our iPhone giveaway. Today we’re going to announce the first winner. We have ten iPhones. We’re giving away one of them each day starting today. We’ll take tomorrow off because it’s the Fourth of July. We’re running a best-of show. In fact, hang on a minute. I have just been sent the name of the first winner. Let me print it out. While waiting for the printer to belch out the name of the first winner, here’s what we’re doing. We have ten iPhones, and you can register to win one simply by signing up for a free e-mail newsletter that we send every afternoon after the program. It’s called Rush in a Hurry. It’s a little tidbit, little summary of what happened on the program. It will give you a little flavor what the full updated website later in the afternoon will look like. There are some links in it that you can go to for stories that were covered or monologues delivered, and it’s free. There’s no obligation whatsoever. We’re not going to give your e-mail address to solicitors. We’re not going to use it for that purpose. We’re doing this to highlight a feature of our website, which we’re very proud of. We had 155,000 signups yesterday on this. If you’ve already registered, don’t do it again. You don’t need to. If you registered long ago and if you’re a registered subscriber of the free newsletter, Rush in a Hurry, you don’t need to do anything else. You are as eligible as anybody who signed up yesterday.
Now, we’re giving away these iPhones. They’re eight-gigabyte iPhones. However, they cost money to operate, obviously. We are a class act. We do not give away things that cause our winners to go out and have to spend money. So here’s what we’re doing. For everybody who wins an iPhone, we’re buying you a two-year service contract with AT&T. We will send you a check, roughly $1500, that will cover the cost of a two-year contract, which is mandatory. You have to sign up for two years with AT&T when you get an iPhone. So you’ll get the $1500 check, you’ll get the iPhone, you’re going to get a year subscription to Rush 24/7, and if you’re a current subscriber, we’ll extend your subscription by a year so that you can make full use of the podcasting capacity of the site in conjunction with the phone. The phone works with iTunes and our podcasts of each day’s show, which are available soon, like an hour after the program at the latest. If things are working right, podcast gets downloaded, get it at iTunes, download it to your iPhone or your iPod, in this case the iPhone, and it’s all there.
I finally got a chance to play with mine a little bit yesterday afternoon and last night, and everything I had heard about this — well, I’d heard all the hype, and it is worth all the hype. But the one thing I heard bad about it was the phone aspect, ‘Ah, it’s a lousy phone. It’s not as good as other phones out there,’ and of course it’s got AT&T service, which is not the best. I have to tell you, now, this is just me, and just where I live, this is the best sounding phone I have. Now, I’m deaf, and I wear a cochlear implant, but this phone, and I don’t know why, but just the speaker in this phone, people sound clearer on this phone to me than any land line phone I’ve got or any other kind of phone. I’ve always got at least four bars of service, which is better than any other service I’ve had down here other than Verizon. I’m not going to tell you the worst, not into rapping people here, but some of them — (interruption) yeah, we live on an island. We don’t have a cell tower on the island. We have to rely on cell service from across the intracoastal waterway. But for me it’s been a delight, it’s been fun to learn to use. We think that you will like it, too, if you happen to win one of these ten.
Here I have it, right here in my formerly nicotine-stained fingers. We’re only going to mention last name initials, not full last names, but the first winner, Tom L. of North Platte, Nebraska, listening to us on the mighty KODY AM 1240. Tom may be hearing about this for the first time. We’re trying to get a hold of him by e-mail as we speak. We’ll have another winner on Thursday, and eight more after that for a total of ten. And again, there’s no charge to this, it’s a free newsletter that you register for, and that puts you in the pot, the drawing. You are immediately eligible whether you signed up a year ago for this or yesterday or today. Whoever the ten of you are that end up having one of these phones, you’re going to really dig it. The hype about it is hard to believe. There are some things that are going to be different for you like the virtual keyboard is going to take some time for people to get used to, but that happens. I’m typing with two thumbs now after only one day. The first day you start out hunt and peck with your index finger. I’m two thumbs now, and you just keep typing, it knows when you make a mistake, gives you the choices of the words you meant to type, hit space bar, bam, uses the one you want, you keep going.