Year: 2015

Blog Posts

#FactCheck: First Three-Way Tie Under Bill Kurtis’s Watch?

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At the end of the Lightning Fill-in-the-Blank round on the show that aired on 2015-11-07, all three panelists, Paula Poundstone, Amy Dickinson and Peter Grosz wound up in a three-way tie. Bill Kurtis stated that it was the first time that has happened under his watch [source] (nb: Peter Grosz also stated that three-way ties have never happened either.) Of course, such statements make my Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! alarms go off big time and I had to see if that statement was correct. With that, I cracked open my favorite database tool for querying the Wait Wait Stats Page database and started pounding away at the data. The following is the query that I used to pull in panelist scoring data and filtered out shows that were repeats or Best Of shows (which don’t have panelist scores anyway) and only return results in …

Blog Posts

#FactCheck: First Three-Way Tie Going Into Lightning Round

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On the Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! show that aired on 2015-08-01, at the beginning of the Lightning Fill-in-the-Blank round, or Lightning round for short, Bill Kurtis made the following statement: I can; it’s easy. First time ever, a three-way tie. [Source] Upon hearing that, a Wait Wait Stats alarm went off in my mind, because I knew that such three-way ties had in fact happened in the past and weren’t all that rare. That said, I wanted to find out how many three-way ties have actually happened in the past several years. Also, I wanted to know if it was the first time Bill Kurtis presided over a game in which all three panelists were tied going into the Lightning round. Before I go into the actual nitty-gritty of how I got to my answer, below is a quick refresher of the structure …

Blog Posts

#FactCheck: Has Roxanne Roberts Answered All 8 Qs Correctly With Bill Kurtis as Scorekeeper?

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After Roxanne Roberts smoked through all 8 of the Lightning Fill-in-the-Blank questions on the Wait Wait show that aired during the weekend of 2015-06-06, Bill Kurtis mentioned that he has not witness such a feat since he’s become the official scorekeeper for Wait Wait in the past year. Although it is not common for a panelist to answer all eight Lightning round questions correctly, it has happened a number of times in the past few years. To be exactly, panelists have answered eight Lightning round questions correctly 15 times since 2010-01-01. Of those, Roxanne accomplished that feat 5 times. So, I decided to run a few queries against the Wait Wait Stats Page database and found that, since Bill Kurtis as become the official scorekeeper, no panelists have answered eight correctly in a single round. So, Bill Kurtis is correct with his qualified statement. Having said that, …

Blog Posts

Fact Check: The Number of Times Amy Dickinson Has Beaten Luke Burbank

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At the Live Wire! Radio taping this past Saturday, Amy Dickinson was one of a number of guests on the show. When Luke Burbank, the host of Live Wire!, introduced Amy on to the stage, he stated that Amy had beaten Luke 14 times on Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!. While I understand that the quip was done in jest and in a self-deprecating manner, my Wait Wait Stats portion of my brain went into overdrive and I started to wonder how many times Amy actually beat Luke. Before I go into the actual numbers, as taping of the second show started, I tweeted out a screenshot of both Luke’s and Amy’s current stats on the show: In case you were curious on how @AskingAmy fares against @lukeburbank on @waitwait. Both on @LiveWireRadio tonight. pic.twitter.com/tHbq5vMT1P — Linh Pham (@questionlp) May 31, 2015 In case …

Blog Posts

My Interview on “Little Red Bandwagon” with Some Wait Wait Talk

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In addition to running the Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me! Stats Page, I also run and manage an archive of sorts for (Wait Wait panelist) Luke Burbank’s podcast, Too Beautiful To Live, called the “Marsupial Gurgle” (it’s a TBTL in-joke). With the recent re-launch of the Marsupial Gurgle archive, I was invited to be on a guest on a podcast about TBTL called, Little Red Bandwagon. As part of being a guest on the podcast, the topic of Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me! came up and I discussed some of the behind the scenes bits regarding scoring and what-not. My segment on the show starts at around the 1:16:15 mark.

Blog Posts

Interactive Wait Wait Stats Infographic

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A couple of months ago, Erin Flachsbart sent me a message asking if I would be interested in helping out a project that she would like to start up. The project was to create an interactive infographic that was based on the Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me! panelist and show stats that I have been collecting (and continuing to collect) over the years. Over the course of the project, I provided Erin with database schema and database backups that she can go through and play with the data. I also provided some insights, and apologies for not having a lot of back data on panelist bluffs and show location information. With the project completed, Erin posted the awesome interactive infographic on her site at: mataglap.com/waitwait. I’m humbled to be able to assist in providing data and insights for the project. Thanks Erin!