24-hour quizbowl people

The following takes place between Noon Friday and 3 p.m. Monday …

I knew this weekend was going to turn into a cross between Insomniac and 24, given the very quick turnaround between the end of my shift Friday night and my very early Saturday morning flight to Chicago for the NAQT high school nationals. But in the midst of the trip, an episode of Airline got tacked on.

After a usual night at work that ended at 2 a.m., I did kill off a couple of hours at a couple of places before an early-morning stop at Waffle House en route to the airport. (Typical Dave Attell-type stuff.)

The tournament itself was, in the Donald's terms, "yuuge" with 96 teams and nearly 500 players (makes giving all-star awards to the top 10 scorers seem a lot more meaningful). It was also good seeing most of the usual suspects, some old foes from my undergrad days and matching names to faces of other people I've been meaning to meet. Oh yeah, I got to hang out for a little bit with $5 million moderator team of Ken Jennings and Kevin Olmstead as well.

I did wonder how they were going to fit 96 teams when there were only about 20 ballrooms and meeting rooms at the hotel. The answer: Converting nearly an entire floor of hotel rooms into game rooms by replacing beds with tables. You usually don't find a need to fit at least 10 people into a regular-sized double, and now we know why. (On the other hand, it wasn't much worse than my Myrtle Beach experience that involved squeezing everyone into an empty administrative office.)

You could call some of this the most boring episode of 24 ever since much of it was just spent reading questions and hanging out with people between rounds. On the other hand, that's what everyone, except Jack Bauer, seems to do during those 24 hours, so maybe just I'm just one of those revolving-door analysts, but unlike Chloe, didn't have a need to fire a gun at a charging assassin.

Saturday night, there was a side trip (just down the street to the former Rosemont Horizon) to see Game 2 of the Calder Cup Finals between the Chicago Wolves and Philadelphia Phantoms. It was nice to see some future Thrashers such as Kari Lehtonen for Chicago (and oddly enough, the Panthers' top prospect Jay Bouwmeester), but it was a sloppy, penalty-filled game that makes you long for the NHL if you cared to miss it. Philly won in the second overtime (we left after the first one).

The finals of the tournament on Sunday were an interesting sight to see as eventual champs Thomas Jefferson (who had slaughtered everyone the whole weekend) negged 10 times and still won the whole thing. Then they challenged a bunch of moderators to a match. With much of the quality moderator corps having written most of the questions, finding those blind to the question were few and far between. I thought I would've been drafted to play (meaning they'd really scraped the bottom of the barrel). But I had a flight to catch -- or so I thought.

My mid-afternoon flight Sunday was delayed when I got to O'Hare. No big deal, I thought. Just more time to grab something to eat (the Billy Goat Tavern has a stand at the airport -- same attitude and so-so food as the original place). But then came a second delay, then the official cancellation about the time the original flight would've landed in Atlanta. Thus came the mad dash from the gate to the United customer service center where my agent seemed to treat it as if everyone had just missed their flight and told us to go standby for the final flight of the day. However, whereas the canceled flight was on a 737, the last flight was on a modernized Buddy Holly plane. It's not a good sign when the gate agent says your chances of getting on are "very slim." Eventually I got a voucher to stay at an O'Hare area airport and got a standby seat on a late morning flight (instead of an early afternoon one I was rebooked on) and finally getting back home about 18 hours later than I expected. The one time I don't fly Delta or AirTran, and this is what I get.

Oh yeah, my cell phone died in the midst of this, but finding an outlet in the terminal was like trying to find the needle in the haystack. Now I know how cool it is that at least one terminal at the Atlanta airport has a bank of outlets designed for people to recharge cell phones and laptops.