Year: 2016

Blog Posts

How Often Do Not My Job Guests Answer All Three Questions Correctly?

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After Michael Giacchino correctly answered all three of his Not My Job questions, Bill Kurtis mentioned that doing so was “a bit rare”. I wanted to go back and see how often Not My Job guests correctly answered all three Not My Job questions correctly. Thankfully, querying the Stats Page database for that wasn’t a very difficult task. The following is the query that I used to pull the data, grouping the results by year: Before I ran that query, I checked to see how many questions Bill Oakley answered correctly, as he is a bit of an exception to Not My Job guests. Earlier in 2016, Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me taped two shows when they visited Portland, Oregon; in which, Bill Oakley was the Not My Job guest for the second taping. Since the second show was not aired as a normal Wait …

Blog Posts

The Tale of Two Wait Wait Shows in Portland

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Back in February, I learned that Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! was coming back to Portland, Oregon to do a taping of the show in June. The last time Wait Wait was in Portland was in September 2011 and there had been a large demand of tickets; so, Wait Wait decided to have two tapings in Portland to feed the strong hunger for a local, live taping. When I found out that tickets we going to be on sale, I reached out to the Wait Wait gang to see if I snag a pair of tickets for the show. I later learned that there was going to be a second show in Portland that next night. I was lucky enough to get tickets for both shows and anxiously awaited for the days and weeks to pass, until it the night of the show. As with …

Blog Posts

Déjà Vu #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 2016-06-11, Bill Kurtis made a statement at the beginning of the Lightning Fill-in-the-Blank round stating that, for the first time in his tenure, that all three panelists were tied going into the Lightning round. The claim that it was the first time in his tenure as official judge and scorekeeper caused all of the mental alarms to go off. I knew that Bill has made that statement in the past and remembered that I wrote about it when happened, all the way back in 2015-08-01. In that blog post, I found that it had already happened two times, 2015-02-28 and 2013-03-09, while Bill Kurtis was judge and scorekeeper. Of the four total times there has been a three-way tie going into the Lightning round with Bill Kurtis was judge and scorekeeper, Brian Babylon …

Blog Posts

Throwback Thursday: Winning Carl Kasell’s Message on Wait Wait 5 Years Ago Today

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It all started over seven years ago when I sent in an e-mail to Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! asking if I could be a listener contestant and that it would make for an awesome birthday present and added a small note about my Wait Wait Stats Page. I later found out that I was selected to be the listener contestant for the Not My Job round when Monica Seles was on as the guest back in 2009. Unfortunately, she kind of goose egged and I didn’t get to win Carl Kasell’s voicemail message. Fast forwarding to April 2011, I got a call from one of the Wait Wait producers who asked me I wanted to be a listener contestant on the coming week’s taping. The producer kind of felt bad about the whole Monica Seles not scoring well on the game. So, I …

Blog Posts

Shows in Which Panelists Have the Same First Initial

 

Each of the panelists on the panel for the Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! show that aired on 2016-04-02 shared something in common: all three of their first initials were “A” (Adam, Amy and Alonzo). When my mind latched onto that, I started wondering if this was the first time something like that happened; or, was it a more common occurrence? So, I opened up my SQL management tool of choice and started working out the queries to get the information that I needed. The first query was to pull in all of the data from the show and panelist related tables and grab the first letter of the panelist names (first initial); then, I had to group the instances of the first initials together and only show the results that have a common panelist first initial count of 3. The query also filtered out …