austin_dern (austin_dern) wrote,
austin_dern
austin_dern

I'd bring you diamond rings and things right to your door

February may be a short month (it is) but it had the appropriate four weeks' worth of The Price Is Right, so let me update my statistics. There are always going to be odd fluctuations and freak events keeping track of the Showcase Showdown winners, and the second week of February was the freakiest I remember: that week, eight of the ten Showcase Showdowns were won by the second spinner, and the third spinner won the other two (one of them with a $1.00 spin). I don't remember seeing the first (or any) spinner shut out like that before.

So the result is an abnormal imbalance that might leave the whole season kind of weird and yet which would support my original hypothesis that the second spinner had an advantage: for February 2010, the first spinner won the showcase 11 times, the second spinner won 19 times, and the third spinner won 10 times. For the season to date, this gives us 66 wins for the first spinner; 82 wins for the second spinner; and 74 wins for the third spinner.

In Showcases, the first-revealed won 12 times, the second-revealed won 6 times, and there were 2 cases of double overbids. One of those cases was the Valentine's Day show, oddly, which had been otherwise a perfect show for all the pricing games (played by teams) being won. There've also been a surprising to me number of cases of the first Showcase including a car and yet the Showcase being passed anyway. Something funny's going on there. In any case, ruling out the ``forces'' of who goes first --- a one-dollar bid (which one) or one person overbidding --- there were 7 cases where the first-revealed Showcase bid won, and 5 where ther second-revealed won. For the season, that's a total of 51 unforced first-revealed winners, and 23 second-revealed winners. That's actually balancing up a bit and reducing the distance between the piles, not that this is going to reverse the trend any.

One of the Showcase winners, by the way, was a guy who played Plinko, but failed utterly: he didn't get any of the small-prices right so that he had only the single Plinko chip to play with, and that one went to a $0 slot. You can't do worse than that, and yet, he got a Showcase featuring a car and won. Go figure.

Trivia: The initial order for episodes of Rocky And His Friends called for 52 episodes of the show, and therefore 104 segments of Rocky and Bullwinkle adventures in total. Source: The Moose That Roared: The Story Of Jay Ward, Bill Scott, A Flying Squirrel, And A Talking Moose, Keith Scott.

Currently Reading: The Wizard Lord, Lawrence Watt-Evans. You know, there's bits of this that make me feel he wrote this mostly to subvert The Tough Guide To Fantasyland. There's also a neat bit where the Wizard Lord, who's suspected of having gone evil --- which various archetypical heroes including are protagonist are supposed to deal with --- chats with The Swordsman from afar by remotely taking over the body of a rabbit, but calls off the conversation because the magic used for this will hurt the rabbit's throat if he talks too long. And would a person who's actually turning villain-grade evil be concerned about giving a rabbit a sore throat?

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