FOGHAT 2004 Gratitude


Besides the thanks I owe to the six teams who competed in FOGHAT at
Rolla this year, I owe huge amounts of gratitude to the following
folks for their essential roles in making this year's tournament a
success.

Question Writers and Editors:  Ben Lea as he has for the last four
FOGHATs provided his excellent sports questions, research assistance
and hawk-like swooping on sports stories that mention the word
"squirrel."  Charlie Steinhice, John Kilby and Jason Schwengler each
contributed a fine packet to the set.  Ben, Jason, Craig Barker and
Rob Wright helped with editing, readthroughs and/or fact checking. 
Also, Jason's infant son Jacob cried when I read Jason a couple of the
harder toss-ups providing very valuable predictive feedback.  Finally,
all the teams at Big Lots at UTC provided a fine play test group for
the set.

Tournament Staff:  Ben Lea, Paul Nelson and Rob Wright all moderated
and kept score during the tournament and each did an excellent job. 
Matt Crook did an absolutely amazing job as chief statistician. 
Despite technical difficulties (i.e. my laptop refused to talk to my
printer), Matt was able to have live records, toss-up scoring leaders
and "punt return" stats viewable to the teams.  He did all this by
writing them on a chalkboard and did all this in the neatest
handwriting I have ever seen anywhere.  Finally, none of this would
have been possible without the UMR ACO who secured the fine rooms in
the half-scale shadows of UMR's Stonehenge, made sure the campus
Barney Fifes had the rooms open on time and then set up the buzzers in
a hurry so we could start almost exactly on time.

Prize Donations:  Ben Lea (Ricky Williams poster and the Jar Jar
game), Delano Barnes (a copy of Gymkata I gave to Ben Lea as question
writing "payment") and Brandon Chapman (Detroit Shock hat) were all
kind enough to donate FOGHAT prizes.  Brian Hight, who did not donate
a prize, also pitched in by getting married near the Lewisville, TX
Big Lots, which had Morimoto's Asian Spicy Sauce in stock.

Tournament Advertising:  Charlie Steinhice provided kind words about
the FOGHAT question set on this message board last week that probably
did not change our field size, but were appreciated nonetheless.  More
impressively, Sean Phillips and some other Wash U folks did their part
by holding up a sign saying "Foghat Rules" behind Ron Reagan Jr's head
during Hardball pre-debate coverage a few weeks ago.

Thanks again to everyone listed above.  FOGHAT wouldn't have been
possible without your contributions.

Jeremy White

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