Tag: Panelists

Blog Posts

New Panelist vs Panelist Report

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Over the past couple of months while continuing to work on code that would power the next projects for the Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! Stats Page, I wanted to figure out a way to see how well a panelist has fared against another panelist (say: Adam Felber vs Faith Salie and Luke Burbank vs Roxanne Roberts). After a number of sleepless nights, a lot more than I am willing to admit, I worked out how to pull the data from the Stats Page database and pieced together some of the logic behind it. Since the overall development on the code for the current version of the Stats Page has ceased and any work has moved over to the new data access libraries and web application frameworks written in Python, the new report would also have to be developed in Python. Thus, I started …

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Taking a Look at the Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! Panel Gender Mix

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Update: I have updated the tables with data to include data for all of 2017 and 2018; along with, data up through the show that taped on 2019-09-05. Ever since Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! started back in 1998, even when Peter Sagal was a panelist on the show and not the host, the panel consisted of three panelists. There would always be at minimum one female panelist on the panel, sometimes two. It wasn’t until the Wait Wait that aired in September 12, 2015 did the show have an all female panel consisting of Faith Salie, Roxanne Roberts and Paula Poundstone. Roughly one year and nine months later, on the June 10, 2017 show, Wait Wait would have their second all female panel, featuring Paula Poundstone, Faith Salie and Tracy Clayton. After the show aired and I finished collecting notes, I started to …

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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 …

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Minor Updates to Wait Wait Stats Page

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While listening to the last Thursday’s edition of Too Beautiful To Live, Luke Burbank made a snarky remark that he hasn’t won on Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! for something like 35 shows. Even though that comment was not intended to be a factual statement, it did make a light bulb flicker in my head. The panelist statistics box includes the last time that he or she last won or was tied for first place and it would take a bit of time to go through the full appearances list to count the number of shows since the panelist has won or tied for first. That afternoon, I started playing around with a couple of SQL queries to pull that information and filter out things like Best Of and repeat show appearances and got something that gave me a proper result. That night, I …

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When was the last time a panelist won?

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Ever wonder when was the last time that a panelist came in first place or tied for first after the Lightning Fill-in-the-Blank on Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!? Right now, the current version of the Stats Page does not include that information in the “Panelists Statistics” section of the page; but, it is something that I am planning on adding to the next version of the page. Until then, you can use this page to view that information, which will be updated periodically. Last Time Each Panelist Has Finished the Lightning Fill-in-the-Blank Round in First Place Panelist Show Adam Felber 2014-01-11 Alison Stewart 2009-01-31 Alonzo Bodden 2013-09-07 Amy Dickinson 2013-04-27 Brian Babylon 2012-03-10 Charlie Pierce 2013-11-23 Claudia Perry 2000-02-12 Evan Smith 2001-11-10 Faith Salie 2013-12-14 Jessi Klein 2013-10-12 Karen Grigsby Bates 2004-03-27 Kyrie O’Connor 2013-12-07 Luke Burbank 2012-11-03 Maz Jobrani 2011-12-17 Mo Rocca 2013-11-16 …