There was suspense, there was hype, there was even a bit of trash talking this morning as the qualified participants in the CMEpalooza Bingo!! gathered in the Executive Suite at CMEpalooza HQ for our prize drawing. Five $100 prizes were in the offing – for that kind of scratch, you could buy four cases of Whatchamacallit bars.

In the end, the winners were appropriately dignified, the losers gracious, and the morning’s emcee was, well, competent. We tried for Small Wonder star Tiffany Brissette, but she never responded to Derek’s stalker-like email. We’ll set our sights lower next year.

Here are your now filthy-rich CME colleagues:

• Vanessa Gray, Director, Continuing Medical Education, Des Moines University Medicine and Health Sciences
• Jill Hays, Executive Director, Primary Care Network
• Allyson Baer, Program Manager, Data Analysis and Reporting, CE, American Society of Clinical Oncology
• Amanda Kaczerski, Senior Director, Educational Strategy & Design, Academy for Continued Healthcare Learning
• Noreen Duffey, CME Program Administrator, American College of Physicians

Congrats to our winners. To our losers (and everyone else), don’t forget that we’ll be giving away another $500 during our 4 p.m. session of CMEpalooza Fall. This one requires more skill than luck, so brush up on your industry knowledge.

B-I-N-G-O, B-I-N-G-O, B-I-N-G-O, and CMEpalooza Bingo!! is it’s Name-O.

Just a reminder to everyone to make sure to carve out some time this week to participate in our sponsor event and give yourself a pretty darn good chance to win a $100 Amazon gift card. If you need it, that is. If you have billions and billions of dollars of disposable income, you might want to put someone else’s name on your entry form to give them a chance. Just sayin’.

All the forms you need to play can be accessed by clicking on this link. You can get all the details on how to play by looking at Monday’s blog post. Entries are due this Sunday evening in the third quarter of whatever NFL game is on, or thereabouts.

There isn’t much out in the public forum these days that doesn’t raise your blood pressure.

Your team sucks! Your party sucks! You cheated! You lied! Lock her up! Impeach him! I would have gotten away with it if it weren’t for you meddling kids!

Perhaps that is why Derek and I try so hard to bring some levity and joy into your lives with this blog and CMEpalooza in general. I’ll give you an example. Last week during a conversation with one of the panel moderators for CMEpalooza Fall, she started telling me that, “We’re thinking of doing something a little quirky with our introductions, but we’re not sure if it’ll be OK. What we’d like to do is…”

I interrupted her before she got any further.

“Yes, yes, a million times yes. Do whatever quirky or unusual or odd thing you want. That’s what we do.”

I mean, really people, how many other otherwise serious events have panelists dress up like Star Wars characters?

You know what else we do at CMEpalooza that should both make you happy and is never replicated at another event, especially a free event? That’s right, we give away money. This fall, we’re actually giving away money twice, as you may have seen in last week’s post about our 4 pm ET session.

Today, though, marks the launch of our more traditional financial free-for-all. In the fall, we call this CMEpalooza Bingo!! The second exclamation point is just because it’s extra awesome.

The distribution of prize money will be a little bit different this year because, well, we just feel like it. There will be 5 winners, each getting $100 Amazon gift cards. That’s $500 in total for all of you math majors. Last fall, our giant hopper wasn’t big enough to hold all of the successful entries we got for CMEpalooza Bingo!! so we ordered a new one shipped all the way from Camden, NJ. Let’s put it to good use, people.

Here be the rules to CMEpalooza Bingo!!:

STEP 1: Download all of the necessary Bingo forms by clicking on this link. That will give you the Bingo board, the Bingo questions, and the Bingo answer sheet. You should also queue up our Sponsor page, which will give you direct links to all of the websites you will need to visit.

STEP 2: A successful entry involves completing a Bingo – it can be horizontal (that’s straight across), vertical (that’s up and down), or diagonal (that’s, um, diagonal).

Special note: For the second straight year, we have too many sponsors to fit onto a bingo board, so a successful entry also involves completing the clue for one of our two Gold sponsors – Med Learning Group or Academic CME. So a total of six (6) answers are necessary this year for a successful entry. That’s more time you can spend playing CMEpalooza Bingo!! and less time you need to spend doing your “real job.” You are welcome.

STEP 3: Email your completed form to me at scott@medcasewriter.com along with a witty subject line (witty subject line is optional). Entry deadline is 9:23 p.m. ET on Sunday, October 6. Yes, 9:23 p.m. ET. Why? No reason. It just is.

Go to it everyone.