At the top of the list is John Levine. Lisa Hancock seems like a > good possibility.
Thank you for the kind words, but I wouldn't be able to do it.
Unfortunately, moderating a newsgroup has become a pretty tough challenge these days. There's the technical considerations to keep the basic functionality and archives going along. Then there's the massive amount of spam, viruses, etc to be filtered out, as well as off-topic and nasty messages.
It might be helpful to have multiple moderators to share the load. I think the world-war-II newsgroup does that, with incoming messages routed around to the different moderators.
Hopefully Pat will be with us for a long time to come.