#waitwaitstats — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #waitwaitstats, aggregated by home.social.
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As of today, Bill Kurtis has made 599 overall appearances on all broadcasted Wait Wait shows (including Best Ofs and any repeats) as scorekeeper since he first filled in for Carl Kasell in August 2012.
That means that his appearance on this week's show before retiring will be his 600th.
What I don't have captured are the second shows that Wait Wait tapes when traveling outside of Chicago. I don't have a full count for those, since those do get counted on NPR's Wait Wait site.
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As of today, Bill Kurtis has made 599 overall appearances on all broadcasted Wait Wait shows (including Best Ofs and any repeats) as scorekeeper since he first filled in for Carl Kasell in August 2012.
That means that his appearance on this week's show before retiring will be his 600th.
What I don't have captured are the second shows that Wait Wait tapes when traveling outside of Chicago. I don't have a full count for those, since those do get counted on NPR's Wait Wait site.
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As of today, Bill Kurtis has made 599 overall appearances on all broadcasted Wait Wait shows (including Best Ofs and any repeats) as scorekeeper since he first filled in for Carl Kasell in August 2012.
That means that his appearance on this week's show before retiring will be his 600th.
What I don't have captured are the second shows that Wait Wait tapes when traveling outside of Chicago. I don't have a full count for those, since those do get counted on NPR's Wait Wait site.
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As of today, Bill Kurtis has made 599 overall appearances on all broadcasted Wait Wait shows (including Best Ofs and any repeats) as scorekeeper since he first filled in for Carl Kasell in August 2012.
That means that his appearance on this week's show before retiring will be his 600th.
What I don't have captured are the second shows that Wait Wait tapes when traveling outside of Chicago. I don't have a full count for those, since those do get counted on NPR's Wait Wait site.
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As of today, Bill Kurtis has made 599 overall appearances on all broadcasted Wait Wait shows (including Best Ofs and any repeats) as scorekeeper since he first filled in for Carl Kasell in August 2012.
That means that his appearance on this week's show before retiring will be his 600th.
What I don't have captured are the second shows that Wait Wait tapes when traveling outside of Chicago. I don't have a full count for those, since those do get counted on NPR's Wait Wait site.
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Interesting to see a spike in traffic on the Wait Wait Stats Page for a certain person's page during the NPR+ special event with Peter Sagal and Bill Kurtis.
Not saying who it is as it's still under wraps, as it were. 🙃
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Interesting to see a spike in traffic on the Wait Wait Stats Page for a certain person's page during the NPR+ special event with Peter Sagal and Bill Kurtis.
Not saying who it is as it's still under wraps, as it were. 🙃
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Interesting to see a spike in traffic on the Wait Wait Stats Page for a certain person's page during the NPR+ special event with Peter Sagal and Bill Kurtis.
Not saying who it is as it's still under wraps, as it were. 🙃
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Interesting to see a spike in traffic on the Wait Wait Stats Page for a certain person's page during the NPR+ special event with Peter Sagal and Bill Kurtis.
Not saying who it is as it's still under wraps, as it were. 🙃
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Interesting to see a spike in traffic on the Wait Wait Stats Page for a certain person's page during the NPR+ special event with Peter Sagal and Bill Kurtis.
Not saying who it is as it's still under wraps, as it were. 🙃
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CW: Wait Wait Don't Tell Me Spoilers
The last time that a Not My Job guest has not won the prize for the listener contestant was when Gary Oldman answered zero questions correct back in 2024-09-21.
On this week's show, Ron Burgundy (Will Ferrell) only answered one question correct.
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CW: Wait Wait Don't Tell Me Spoilers
The last time that a Not My Job guest has not won the prize for the listener contestant was when Gary Oldman answered zero questions correct back in 2024-09-21.
On this week's show, Ron Burgundy (Will Ferrell) only answered one question correct.
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CW: Wait Wait Don't Tell Me Spoilers
The last time that a Not My Job guest has not won the prize for the listener contestant was when Gary Oldman answered zero questions correct back in 2024-09-21.
On this week's show, Ron Burgundy (Will Ferrell) only answered one question correct.
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CW: Wait Wait Don't Tell Me Spoilers
The last time that a Not My Job guest has not won the prize for the listener contestant was when Gary Oldman answered zero questions correct back in 2024-09-21.
On this week's show, Ron Burgundy (Will Ferrell) only answered one question correct.
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CW: Wait Wait Don't Tell Me Spoilers
The last time that a Not My Job guest has not won the prize for the listener contestant was when Gary Oldman answered zero questions correct back in 2024-09-21.
On this week's show, Ron Burgundy (Will Ferrell) only answered one question correct.
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Just finished upgrading the two application/database servers that host the Wait Wait Stats Project from Debian 12 to 13.
The caching proxy in front of them was already upgraded to Debian 13 a while back, but I was more cautious about upgrading the backend servers.
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CW: Wait Wait Don't Tell Me Spoilers
At the end of the Lightning Fill In The Blank segment on this week's Wait Wait, all three panelists started and ended in a three-way tie.
Bill Kurtis said, "Well, in my 12 years here, we've never had a three-way tie."
Until today's show, Bill has been the scorekeeper on four shows where all three panelists ended in a three-way tie: 2014-09-06, 2015-11-07, 2019-03-09, and 2023-07-22.
Alzo Slade was the guest scorekeeper on the 2025-12-13 show where another three-way tie happened.
Lightning Fill In The Blank Ending in a Three-Way Tie: https://reports.wwdt.me/shows/lightning-round-ending-three-way-tie
I'll give Bill the benefit of the doubt here as this was the first time he's been a scorekeeper on a show where the panelists started and ended in a three-way tie.
Before Bill became a scorekeeper on the show, there was one instance of that back in 2003-03-22 when Carl Kasell was the scorekeeper.
Lightning Fill In The Blank Starting and Ending in a Three-Way Tie: https://reports.wwdt.me/shows/lightning-round-starting-ending-three-way-tie
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CW: Slight Wait Wait Don't Tell Me Spoilers
Joyelle Nicole Johnson said answering 5 Lightning Fill In The Blank questions correct was the most she's gotten right.
She has actually answered 6 questions correct three times before this week's show:
Nov 23 2024: https://stats.wwdt.me/shows/2024/11/23
Dec 14 2024: https://stats.wwdt.me/shows/2024/12/14
May 3 2025: https://stats.wwdt.me/shows/2025/5/3
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If you've every wondered what special introductions Bill Kurtis has used at the start of each show, you can check them out in the "Scorekeeper Introductions" page on the Wait Wait Report Site.
https://reports.wwdt.me/scorekeepers/scorekeeper-introductions
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I guess if Flickr can have it's MODE, so can the Wait Wait Stats Project. Okay, it's not a festival, but it does have to deal with statistics 🙃
Wait Wait Stats Updates: Mode Edition
https://linhpham.org/blog/2026/wait-wait-stats-updates-mode-edition/
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It's time for another update for the Wait Wait Stats Project, including a new (optional) higher contrast dark theme and getting closer to official Python 3.14 support across the project.
https://linhpham.org/blog/2026/wait-wait-stats-update-february-2026/
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I guess it's time for the last #WaitWaitStatsProject update blog post of 2025!
https://linhpham.org/blog/2025/wait-wait-stats-update-december-2025/
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I know our minds like to make patterns out of things that may or may not exist (at least, ones that only exist along a very long span of time).
So, it's funny to see something that looks like a pixelated question mark and a pixelated exclamation mark in this chart of #WaitWaitDontTellMe shows recorded in Chicago (purple), Away (yellow) and home/remote studios (green).
https://graphs.wwdt.me/locations/all-locations-shows-heatmap
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As with last year, I will be doing a Wait Wait Stats Wrapped for 2025. This time around, I will be waiting until after the last regular show of the year (2025-12-20) airs before collecting data and publishing the Wrapped infographic.
If you are interested in checking out last year's Wait Wait Stats Wrapped, the images are available on Flickr
https://flickr.com/photos/questionlp/albums/72177720322647930/
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Just a short blog post with updates to the Wait Wait Graphs and Wait Wait Reports Sites to fix an issue where shows with an all men panel were not getting counted correctly.
I found the issue after entering information for this week's #WaitWaitDontTellMe 🤦
https://linhpham.org/blog/2025/wait-wait-stats-update-november-2025/
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It's only been a week since the last Wait Wait Stats Project update blog post, but there have been a couple of updates to the web apps, API and upgrading production from Python 3.12 to 3.13.
https://linhpham.org/blog/2025/wait-wait-stats-update-october-2025-part-two/
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I've posted some updates to the Wait Wait Stats Project on my blog, including a change in how panelist scores are displayed:
https://linhpham.org/blog/2025/wait-wait-stats-update-october-2025/
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I think I might be well situated to migrating from MySQL 8.x to MariaDB 11.x or even 12.x when it comes time to redo my Wait Wait Stats production servers.
Earlier this month, I stood up a VM with Debian 13 and MariaDB 11.8 (stable release train) and ran all of the tests I've written for all of the Wait Wait Stats Projects sites without errors. I also compared the JSON output of several API endpoints that return a lot of computed data and they matched the output from an instance of the API running against a MySQL 8.4 database.
Just finished doing the same with a VM with Debian 13 and MariaDB 12.0 (rolling release train) and all of the tests ran without errors. I still need to verify the JSON output to make sure there aren't any inconsistencies.
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KC Shornima is the first panelist since June 1998 to answer all 8 Lightning Fill In The Blank questions correct on their first appearance on the panel.
You can see how well each panelist did on their first appearance on the panel with the linked report.
nb: The show that aired on June 6, 1998 was the first Wait Wait with the Lightning round when rules that are currently used.
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It's been a while since I tried out a build of Servo and pretty impressed that it's able to render the Wait Wait Stats Page (built using Bootstrap and self-hosted IBM Plex web fonts).
It's rendering normal text as bold and oblique and certain bits of text are slightly out of place (vertically) or wrapped when they shouldn't be.
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Always interesting to see traffic spiking up when Wait Wait Don't Tell Me does a show outside of Chicago, their fair city.
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It's nice to see that some of the changes that I've made to the queries I've written for the various #WaitWaitStatsProject libraries and sites aren't erroring out when the database is hosted on MariaDB 11.8 now.
I did run into some incompatibilities after I migrated to MySQL 8.x a while back, but slowly worked to fix them.
While I'm not going to immediately switch from MySQL 8.4 to MariaDB 11.8 in production, but it does open new options if/when that time comes.
I still need to dive deeper to make sure that there aren't any data inconsistencies, of course.
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Since the Wait Wait Stats App was mentioned a Data is Plural newsletter a while back, it's now considered "Fun" data on the Cornell University Library site. 😜
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Was listening to the end of the Lightning Fill In The Blank segment for the Wait Wait show that aired in 2007-06-30 (taped in Portland, Oregon by the way) and Carl Kasell first said that Adam Felber had a total of 16 points.
Later, when saying how well Amy Dickinson did, Carl said Adam had 18 points.
Since Carl had the correct total score the first time around, that is the score that was and still is recorded for Adam.
Of course, that interesting little bit has now been noted for the show's details page. 😅
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I've been blitzing through all of the regular #WaitWaitDontTellMe shows from 2006 and January 2007 so that I can take note of all of the segments and expand/correct data in the #WaitWaitStats database. This is what that chicken scratch looks like 😅
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I will be shifting my focus on updating the #WaitWaitStatsProject sites over to collecting and updating segment names and show descriptions.
This is in effort to provide more accurate data and to align segment names to the names used by the show and NPR.
https://linhpham.org/blog/2025/wait-wait-stats-segment-naming-updates/
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Compared to Maeve Higgins, Alonzo Bodden, the late P.J. O'Rourke, and Brian Babylon, Paula has lower loss percentage at 73.7% compared > 79% of the other panelists listed.
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You can sort based on column and set a minimum number of appearances to filter out panelists who have only appeared a handful of times.
I created this after Paula Poundstone mentioned that she's had the most losses on #WaitWaitDontTellMe.
While Paula has had the most total number of losses on Wait Wait, she does not have the highest loss percentage based on number of losses against number of appearances on the show.
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I've published a new live report on the Wait Wait Reports site that includes panelists' wins, draws and losses, including the corresponding percentages against all appearances with scores.
You can sort based on column and set a minimum number of appearances to filter out panelists who have only appeared a handful of times.
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Whoa! I just found out that Paula Poundstone gave me a shout out in the August issue of Ability Magazine regarding my Wait Wait Don't Tell Me recordkeeping!
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By the way, I have a graph that maps out each and every calendar day and how often a show aired on that day is a regular show, a Best Of show, a repeat, or a repeat Best Of show.
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Proof of concept is feeling cute, might delete later.
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I was able to publish another update to the #WaitWaitStatsPage (and the underlying Stats Library) that adds badges to guest, host, panelist and scorekeeper details that link their other appearances in other forms or roles.
For example: Tom Bodett as been a Not My Job guest, guest host, guest scorekeeper, and continues to be a panelist and his panelist details page has links to his other corresponding details pages.
By the way, the new retro/middle color theme is shown off in the screenshot 🙃
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There have been a flurry of updates to the Wait Wait Stats Project.
I've published a new blog post summarizing them.
Wait Wait Stats Updates: Adding More Randomness
https://blog.linh.social/2025/02/02/wait-wait-stats-updates-adding-more-randomness/
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On Christmas, I published new versions of the Wait Wait Stats Library, Stats API, and Stats Page to add support for multiple Bluff the Listener-like segments that were common during the show's first year.
I've published a blog post with additional details on the changes and links to each project's release notes.
Blog Post: Wait Wait Stats Update: December 2023
https://blog.linh.social/2023/12/29/wait-wait-stats-update-december-2023/
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Blog Post: Wait Wait Stats Update: Autumn 2023
https://blog.linh.social/2023/11/26/wait-wait-stats-update-autumn-2023/
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Blog Post: Wait Wait Stats Infrastructure Update
https://blog.linh.social/2023/01/23/wait-wait-stats-infrastructure-update/