Silver people on the shoreline, let us be

I find that my iPad spreadsheet for reporting The Price Is Right statistics was not quite as perfectly designed as I would have liked. That'll happen. The problems are minor and amount to it being a bit of a nuisance to add extra weeks; the solution, I think, is using a scheme based on a month's worth of data at a time and accept that I need separate sheets for separate months. I suspect there's an elegant way to put a whole season in one spreadsheet, but I'm not yet clever enough in spreadsheet design to place them elegantly. I think I've got the scheme much better organized for May.

In any case, for the month of April, here taken to be the 4th of April through 30th April, with the 11th taken off as a rerun for some reason, here's the Showcase Showdown winners:

	First	Second	Third
Month	8	12	18
Season	89	101	96

I'm tempted to declare the whose showcase positioning a tie since, at a guess, those numbers just don't look substantially different to me. The lowest winning spin made absolutely no progress downward this month, which considering we're seven months through with the season is probably not so surprising; it's hard to picture much lower spins winning except by freak events. But just in case, here's the numbers:

	No Overspins	One Overspin	Two Overspins
Solo Win	60	30	5
Tied Win	65	55	-
Triple Tie	80	-	-

This doesn't include the show that aired today, by the way, the 3rd of May, which has to set some kind of record for non-live-episode turnaround because it's a Salute to Military Families episodes in which Carey mentions up top that it's the day after hearing the news about Osama bin Laden. From looking at the airdates, it appears they had planned on Monday to tape a show for the 23rd; the Memorial Day show they had scheduled to tape the 9th. Maybe they called in the connections to get a military-family audience for next week and bring them in early. It seems like quite a scramble, though.

Trivia: John Finley Wallace's salary of $25,000 per year to serve (on site) as chief engineer of the Panama Canal project made him the highest-paid United States government employee other than the President in 1904. It was also $10,000 more than Wallace was receiving as general manager of the Illinois Central. Source: The Path Between The Seas: The Creation Of The Panama Canal, David McCullough.

Currently Reading: The Making Of The President: 1960, Theodore H White.