The road leads back to you

Thought I'd forgotten about The Price Is Right for May? Nah, I just didn't have the space available last week. For the month of May --- here defined as the shows airing from 3 May through 28 May, which included for some reason a rerun on the 20th that isn't included in this tally --- the second spinner had a relatively awful month. With that poor performance the second spinner's early-season lead has finally vanished and with just a month (and a little change according to the weirdly complicated airdates schedule) the second and third spinners have tied up, although the first spinner isn't so far behind.

Period	1st Spinner	2nd Spinner	3rd Spinner
Month	14	9	15
Season	108	119	119

I only just started tracking what the lowest spins which won passage to the Showcase are; for the season through May the lowest winning spin against no overspins was 65 cents for an undisputed win (29 April) and 30 cents for a tie and spinoff win (2 December). (However, on the 31st of May --- which will be counted in the June statistics --- the first spinner won with 55 cents; second and third managed totals of just 40 and 50 cents. Weird.) The lowest winning spin against one overspin has been 40 cents this season (12 February). The lowest winning spin against two overspins is a modest 10 cents (30 December).

In the Showcase I'd almost think the show was trying to resurrect my hopeless hypothesis about the revelation order: while the first-revealed won ten times and the second-revealed six, in the unforced case where there were no overbids the first-revealed won only twice and the second-revealed four times. It was a relatiely vicious month for double overbids, though, with three double-overbids, bringing the total to nine for the season. Still, there was one double showcase winner, the 15th of May, and I didn't think to tally how many of those there were this season.

All cases:
Period	1st Revealed	2nd Revealed	Double Overbid
Month	10	6	3
Season	112	48	12
Unforced cases:
Period	1st Revealed	2nd Revealed
Month	2	4
Season	66	42

The 24th of May was an anti-perfect day --- all six pricing games were lost and a double overbid in the Showcase. The 25th was as bad for pricing games, although mercifully neither contestant overbid their showcase that time. (I need to double-check that season unforced case; I had written down 64 in my notes for the first-revealed winner, but that's incompatible with last month's season-to-date total plus May's.)

Trivia: The (disastrous) debut episode of ABC's 20/20 included a Geraldo Rivera piece about the killing of jackrabbits by greyhounds, an anchors' chat with California Governor Jerry Brown; comic Flip Wilson confessing he had spanked his daughter with a belt; a Sam Donaldson interview of Senator Ted Kennedy at Robert Kennedy's graveside (it was the tenth anniversary of Robert Kennedy's murder), and a clay-animated Jimmy Carter doll singing ``Georgia On My Mind''. Source: The House That Roone Built: The Inside Story Of ABC News, Marc Gunther.

Currently Reading: The Wide And Universal Theater: Shakespeare In Performance Then And Now, David Bevington.