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
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 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.
On Wait! Wait! Don't Tell Me they discussed the surge in popularity of Women's College Basketball and mentioned that as recently as 2 years ago the Women couldn't use the term #MarchMadness
A panelist then joked something around the lines of, "The NCAA would have made them use the term 'March Hysteria' back then."
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.
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".
Great. So the hacked toothbrush "story" was referenced during the Listener Limerick Challenge segment on this week's Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!. Since the show was taped on Thursday, no corrections or edits were included to correct the story.
I'm adding a note to the entry for this week's show on the Stats Page.
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.
After a couple of months of not listening to Wait Wait Don't Tell Me shows from 1998-1999, I have listened to and entered in data for the last two shows of September 1998.
Will hopefully have October and maybe some of November done in the next week or so.
I'm 43, Asian (so not white), male (😶), shops on Amazon yet feels bad about it, determined to make my next car electric, and has the same active ingredients as a name brand Democrat.
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.