Crystal ball is what I wish for you

[austin_dern]

Fresh month, fresh The Price Is Right report, with the table format that's proved so popular in the March scores. From the 5th of April through the 30th of April the Showcase winners broke down like this:

Period	1st Spinner	2nd Spinner	3rd Spinner
Month	12	14	14
Season	94	110	104

And don't tell me that isn't getting almost suspiciously uniform. Interestingly, to me, there was only one week (that of 19 April) when the third spinner won more than the first and second did, and only one week when the second spinner won more than the first and third, and no week when the first spinner came out ahead of second and third, which sounds like one of those logic puzles you get for recreational mathematics columns.

The lowest winning spin was 65 cents, achieved on the 6th and the 27th, the first time against one over-spin and the second against two good spins (55 and 35 cents, and man, it hurts to be the third spinner and only get up to 35 cents).

12 contestants spun a dollar, two of them in the same round, but only one contestant won a bonus spin (15 cents).

After some evening out of the Showcase revelation order we got back to the first-revealed being the winner much more often in general; it was more even if you consider the unforced cases where there wasn't an overbid or one-dollar bid or similar exceptional circumstance:

All cases:
Period	1st Revealed	2nd Revealed	Double Overbid
Month	12	7	1
Season	102	42	9
Unforced cases:
Period	1st Revealed	2nd Revealed
Month	8	6
Season	64	38

There was only the one double overbid in April; there also weren't any double showcase winners. Tough season.

Trivia: About eight hundred thousand of the Eiffel Tower's two and a half million rivets were set by hand. Source: Engineering In History, Richard Shelton Kirby, Sidney Withington, Arthur Burr Darling, Frederick Gridley Kilgour.

Currently Reading: Man Of High Fidelity: Edwin Howard Armstrong, Lawrence Lessing. Now, see, Armstrong read right after de Forest feels like coming to The Hero after spending time with His Villainous Twin. It's an easy read, though I wonder if there isn't a more recent biography. You'd think WNBC television having to resort to the Armstrong radio tower after the World Trade Center was destroyed would be such an irresistibly ironical moment that someone would have to write a book just to convey that scene.