Final matchup:  C. Montgomery Burns 3089,  Ralph 2951

Little Ralph put up a valiant fight, but in the end no one could withstand the onslaught of Charles Montgomery Burns. We couldn't tell if it was the dogs, or the bees, or the dogs with bees in their mouths, but whatever Burns threw at him, Ralph wilted. To show there's no hard feelings, Burns offered an advanced copy of his book, "Will There Ever Be a Rainbow?". Ralph, you may now commence eating your crayons. Boooo-urns! Booooo-urns!

Thanks to everyone who took the time to vote. What started as a small site for a group of friends ballooned into something we never expected. From the initial email to 17 people, we grew to 6000+ votes per day and over 120,000 unique visitors (according to our archaic web counters).

I hope it was as fun for you to read as it was for me to run. As for a sequel, nothing's been planned yet but stay tuned. If and when it happens, it'll be right here at www.roadtospringfield.com.

Until then, I leave you with two things: Monty's theme song and One Shining Moment....

Tale of the Tape
Burns		Ralph
104	Age	8
13323	Total votes received	13627
62.8%	Total winning margin	67.6%
Defeated (2) Moe 2339-1977 Defeated (3) Groundskeeper Willy 3211-3138 Defeated (4) Milhouse 3651-1546 Defeated (9) Fat Tony 4062-1218 Defeated (16) Kearny 60-1	Road to Final	Defeated (4) Barney 2551-1850 Defeated (1) Abe Simpson 3891-2389 Defeated (2) Sideshow Bob 3405-1578 Defeated (6) Martin Prince 3749-711 Defeated (14) Rod Flanders 31-1
The entire world	Reach	Up his nose
Three Stooges' Syndrome	Medical conditions	Multiple-personality disorder with occasional hallucinations
Smithers	Companion	Wiggle Puppy
Greed	Motivation	Leprechaun in head

Why was the site down?
I leave this to my astute Chief Technical Officer, Jake Page. But for the record, we never were contacted by any representatives of FOX for any reason.
Simple answer: My ISP blocked us while trying to stop a virus from spreading, and it took us a couple days to work around it.

Detailed answer: In order to limit the effects of the Code Red II worm on their network, my ISP blocked HTTP (i.e., incoming port 80) connections to customers' computers. After finding out this was not likely to change anytime soon, I got a friend to host the "roadtospringfield.com" domain and forward it back to my server (hence the redirect to "http://hogfat.netpork.com:81").

Party sites: If you have any good stories, send them to me at gregcollins73@hotmail.com. | Message board

Here's the skinny: We're here to determine the best supporting character. To be eligible, the character must have appeared in at least two episodes (for everyone asking, Poochie was seen at Scratchy's funeral in an episode airing after he died on his way back to his home planet). Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie are ineligible. Seedings were determined by a select committee (Greg Collins, Andy Collins, Viet Nguyen, Chris Galvin, Chris Aronchick, Mark Haubner) and were based on a combination of the following criteria: number of appearances, importance to storylines, comedic value, memorable lines, personal preference and the magic eight-ball sitting on my desk.

You will all pay for not voting Lenny!!!