On Saturday, Carnegie Mellon continued the tradition begun at Dickinson of
80s and 90s trash.  XBowl 3 saw fifteen teams competing for the title.
The field was very competitive and the results very close.  In fact, the
in the final round, the score was tied after 19 tossups.

Your winner is "Richard Mellon Scaife's Vast Right Wing Conspiracy",
from Case Western University who defeated "Pitt Big Bucks" with that last 
tossup (Answer: "The Tomorrow Show"). Pitt Big Bucks hit 3 whammys in the
final, going 0 for 30 on three bonuses.  I very much enjoyed seeing their
well-done recreations of that little red bastard. The other University of
Pitt team "Pitt No Whammys" was undefeated until a round 11 loss to
Richard Mellon.  Rounding out the rest of the Quarterfinals teams were
Marty Dunlap's "No Neck Monsters", PSU "Peaches in Regalia", the other
Case Western team "Kaabala-reading Chemical Mothers", and two Carnegie
Mellon teams, "Got Lucky" and "Men with Hats".

I owe a big and public thank you to Brian Hight at U Va., with whom I
traded questions with since our events were the same day.  We would have
had about four less rounds to work with without his questions.

Underscoring the need for careful labeling of scoresheets was a tabbing
error, which caused us to seed a team 8th when they actually should have
been 3rd.  We attempted to correct the error by making the playoff a
two-round affair and picking the finalists from both rounds' results, but
that left Marty's team with a 2-0 playoff performance but with one less
win than the other two teams that got into the final.  I wish we had the
error only minutes before some rooms had started reading.

I'd like to thank my tournament staff as well for keeping as sane as
possible during the day (Shannon, McElroy, Tom, Dwight, Felicia, Zimdars).
And since Felicia added her pi cents into the minority discussion, I'd
like to add that when I write questions, I purposely attempt to diversify
my trash packets.  Hence, good amount the women's sports questions, and
the other questions in the field that were directed towards specific
groups (did anyone get the Egyptian musicians before the Bangles clue?).

Hopefully, with the addition of Felicia and a few other new players, we
will be able to field an all-women panel at some point this year.

And speaking of women in College Bowl: one of our final round questions
was a result of a little drudge work I stumbled into.  With apologies to
the person whose secret I divulged, one bonus question I wrote dealt with
quiz-oriented shows with children/teens as contestants.  Besides Jeopardy
("Jep") and the Joker's Wild ("Joker, Joker, Joker") I stumbled onto a
show called the "Quiz Kids Challenge".  The only epidsode that I happened
to watch rerunning on the Game Show Network featured a 12-year old from
Maryland who introduced herself as Julie Singer.  She almost beat the
adults in that match, too.

If I'm still around in another year, perhaps we'll do XBowl 4: The Whammy
Invades Pittsburgh (only if Eric lets me call it that, seeing as the
Whammys are their idea).

Bill Tressler,
Carnegie Mellon College Bowl