Tag: Fact Check

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Lowest Scoring Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! Show

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During the Lightning Fill-in-the-Blank segment on the show that aired on April 29, 2017, Amy Dickinson commented that that show was lowest scoring show ever. At the start of the segment, Roy Blount Jr. had two points, Amy Dickinson had one, and Tom Bodett had four. When Amy made the comment, both Amy and Roy had correctly answered four questions each for a combined score of 19. Tom Bodett blitzed through his questions and had answered six correct; thus, bringing the grand total to 35 points. I was curious to see what is the lowest scoring show in Wait Waist… Don’t Tell Me! history; well, shows that included a Lightning Fill-in-the-Blank type round anyway. So, I started querying the database to weed out shows that I do not have panelist scores for, as well as Best Of and repeated shows. Based on the result of the above query, …

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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 …

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#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 …

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#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 …

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#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, …

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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 …