I don't fly on Delta Airlines very often, so it was intriguing to see their inflight entertainment. I was oohing and aahing over the fact that they had live TV on the plane until my colleague Laura pointed out that Jet Blue had had that particular feature since Orville and Wilbur were in short pants. One thing Delta couldn't fix, however, was the quality of the television programming. Anyway, they had games you could play. Most you had to pay $5 for, and being indescribably cheap, I opted for the only free one, which was an in-flight trivia quiz that anyone in the plane could play simultaneously in competition with anyone else.

Admittedly, I had an advantage, since the quiz seemed to have been constructed by someone from Britain, a nation that has raised an obsession with trivia to stratospheric levels (by the way, stratosphere is, aptly, an answer to one of the questions). The spelling and the obscure soccer/football questions gave it away, although I had no idea that the Trent was the third longest river in England. I flew past (heh, heh) most of the other ten other passengers lunatic or bored enough to want to while away their time figuring out which emperor designed the Pantheon in Rome (it was the Hadrian by the way).

The guy in 38B decided to see whether he could best the system by randomly hitting the screen as quickly as possible when the question came up (thus potentially securing the maximum number of points), but he performed less well than average. (I'm sure there's an algorithm there somewhere; but the moral is, it's best to think and get it right for fewer points than hit the screen as soon as you can and get it wrong.)

It was Mike in 35D who provided the stiffest competition, and we went head to head over many rounds. In the end, however, I ended the flight as the top scorer and gained a pathetically large amount of satisfaction from it. My only consolation is that I'm not alone in my naked competitiveness.