Before the Wait Wait show started last week in Seattle, I was talking to a couple of folks that worked behind the scenes and there was a mention of the pre-Sandwich Monday era.
I think there are several other eras that can be defined for the show:
The Pre-Peter Sagal Hosting Era
The Pre-Regular Live Tapings at Bank One (later Chase) Auditorium Era
@qlp there was the pre-Live show era January 2000 when Chris Eisenberg of KCPW Salt Lake convinced the staff it would be neat to do a show in front of a live audience. No one had thought of that before. Chris is a genius.
I was honored to be invited to Washington, DC to be at the taping of the former. The folks at Wait Wait gave me essentially a front row seat in front of Carl Kasell and Peter Sagal.
The new location map feature for the Wait Wait Stats Page has been deployed to production. I have also published a development update blog post with other things that I'm working on.
I've been working on getting my #WaitWait Stats API to work with #Pydantic 2 and was wondering why it was erroring out on one specific endpoint.
Turns out, it was a bug I introduced back when I was trying to optimize the wwdtm library and, if there was no data returned from a query, the key would be set to an empty list.
The problem? It's supposed to be an empty dictionary.
@qlp My subjective experience of the lockdown shows was that they were okay*, but got better. Probably because they still retained the collective experience of the early shows and have better tech these days. Some were crazy funny and hopefully someone recorded the screen for posterity.
Thanks for keeping the stats and being willing to answer questions from random fans!
*meaning still worth the time, but I understood why they missed a live audience
@ronpar I do agree that they were okay to kinda good. There was one that I would mark as fantastic, but I'm pretty darn bias for a certain reason 😉
I'm always like chatting with other Wait Wait fans and happy to answer any questions that I can. Getting access to the early shows will hopefully allow me to answer some that I hadn't been able to answer before.
I have wrapped up listening to the Dan Coffey hosting era of Wait Wait Don't Tell Me! and will begin listening to the Peter Sagal hosting era this coming week.
@MeTwitt Yep, my guess is that the person who would have uploaded and/or scheduled publishing the Best Of show was out or something didn't work on the publishing side. I downloaded the audio from their site to collect the info.
A while back, I had submitted a request to the #NPR archival team to see if I could get access to the #WaitWaitDontTellMe episodes from 1998 and 1999 to help fill in the various blanks that I have in my data.
Unfortunately, after getting and replying to a few e-mails, I kind of hit a dead-end. Most shows at that time would have been saved on to DAT or reels that haven't been digitized or catalogued.
Since then, they have included a few segments from those shows in the special podcast episodes for #WaitWait's 20th anniversary in 2018 and subsequent Best Of episodes.
Maybe they were able to digitize and catalogue those episodes. I just submitted another request to see if I can get access to those episodes.
Please note that, even if I do get all of the recording from those two years, I may not be allowed to publish them for anyone else without permission from the appropriate rights holders.
I'm just over here listening to Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! like it's 1999. 😅
While listening to the show that aired on January 9, 1999, at the end of the Not My Job segment that asked the NPR guests questions about Elvis Presley, Cael Kasell (RIP) did his version of Elvis singing "Love me tender".
Been working on incorporating a feature for the Wait Wait Stats Page that was requested about 2 years ago: adding a map showing the location of the venue when viewing the location details page.
While the addition of the feature was simple, getting the coordinates for all of the venues is what took the longest for me to get around to collecting and entering. Also, I needed to extend the backing library to return that data.
I have published a new blog post that provides an overview of the changes to the #WaitWaitStats projects that I have been working on to support decimal (non-integer) panelist scores.
While the code has been published for the Stats library, API, Graphs, Reports and Stats applications, I have not published the new versions to production yet. I hope to do so in the coming week.
Blog Post - Wait Wait Stats Update: Decimal Scores
After taking a bit of a break from listening through the first two years of Wait Wait Don't Tell Me! (which I finished listening through all of the 1998 shows I have audio for), I finished listening through (and entering data for) January and February 1999 this weekend.
While I won't be able to match that pace going forward, I'm still going to aim for listening to and entering data at least 2 shows a week going forward.
I also fixed a little bug in the Stats Library where sorting of panelists based on their scores should have been using their new decimal scores column instead of the integer scores column. Oops.
With the relevation that panelists can have non-integer scores at the start of the Lightning Fill-in-the-Blank segment from #WaitWaitDontTellMe shows back in 1998, I had to update the #WaitWait Stats library and family of applications. I've provided some details and links to the new versions in a new blog post.
I completely forgot that Wait Wait Don't Tell Me! 20th anniversary special show was taped 5 years ago today.
I was there, with some thanks to the folks at Wait Wait, and was presented with a signed poster from all of the panelists, Bill Kurtis, Peter Sagal and the crew behind the scenes that were there! They shipped it to me, so I wouldn't have had to haul it back home.
If you ever wondered the difference between notes taking during a live taping of Wait Wait Don't Tell Me and notes taken while listening to the edited version? Here are the notes for the edited and the live version respectively.
I have finished listening to almost every episode of #WaitWait from January 1998 through the end of July 1998. I'm still missing the audio file for May 23, 1998 and hope to get it from the archives in the coming weeks.
It's interesting to see how they tweak the format of each show and some of the segments, including when segments like Not My Job and Lightning Fill-in-the-Blank make their debuts.
If you would like to browse through the shows, notes and other tidbits that I've collected, they are now available at: https://stats.wwdt.me/shows/1998/
If you have been a #WaitWaitDontTellMe listener for a while, you would know that a winning listener contestant would get a custom message or greeting from Carl Kasell (#RIP), Bill Kurtis, and/or a panelist of their choosing.
That wasn't always the case. The earliest shows didn't have much of anything to give away, and there was mentions about a #WaitWait t-shirt. It wasn't until the listener contestant won the News Etymology segment on the show that aired February 28, 1998 did the prize become getting Carl Kasell's custom message on their answering machine or voicemail!
