Trivial Matters

On my trip to and from Las Vegas last week, I needed something to take my mind off the fact that I was in a Delta 757 airliner with its six-abreast “small seat, even smaller aisle” seating. Gotta tell ya, I re-e-eally dislike that plane.

Plus the fact that it has only two engines and if one fails half-way to the mainland (or back), we’ll have to try and complete the trip with just one engine. Kind of like donating one of your two kidneys – you really have to be careful after that.

Remember the movie “The High and the Mighty” starring John Wayne? Yeah … like that.

So anyway, whenever I’m on one of those planes, I turn on the “personal video screen” mounted on the back of the seat in front of me. If I’m sleepy, I tune it to the continuous moving map that shows the planes location at any given time.

 

Once in a while, however, I’ll play the Inflight Trivia Challenge against other passengers on my flight. The questions are pretty tough, and about 80% of the time I’m making a guess – sometimes educated, sometimes “out of the clear blue sky.”

That’s what I did on my outbound flight. I played the trivia game about an hour from landing. I didn’t think I did particularly well; that is, until I saw the closing tally. I actually had the second-highest score among all those who’d played the game throughout the flight.

"Giarc" (second from the top) ... that's me. "Craig" spelled backwards.

Wow. Except for that Robert guy who was seated up front, everybody else must be pretty … er, I don’t want to say dumb, so I’ll just say “less informed than I was.”