Had the good fortune to get away this past weekend to Chattanooga, Tennessee for a quiz bowl thing there (for those of you who are reading who may not know me- and what are the odds of that?- one of my main hobbies is quiz bowl, sort of a team-based Jeopardy type thing, to give it a really simple explanation).

Flew out of Providence, though the airport is actually in Warwick (one of the many airports that pretend to be somewhere else; I suppose flying in to Windsor Locks CT, Covington KY, and Romulus, MI isn't as informative than flying into Hartford, Cincinnati, and Detroit, either way it's a bad vacation). Anyway, T. F. Green is everything Logan isn't: ample parking, easy to get to and leave from, generally clean and well maintained, and relatively safe.

Took Southwest to Nashville, Southwest Airlines being the "official" airline of the team I play on as three of us have relatively easy access to it (doesn't fly into Philly for our friend Chris, unfortunately). I like Southwest well enough, inasmuch as they're more or less the same as the other airlines, but with less pretense. I can see where some folks feel that's forced, but I don't mind the occasional flight attendant busting out in song over the p.a.

This was the first trip with multiple significant others, as on occasion a wife or girlfriend has made the trip (either to play or to see each other while working in different states). At one point all the wives and girlfriends were going to make the trip, but for various reasons (September 11 related and otherwise) it didn't work. Which was too bad, as the four of them could have played on their own team.

A historical note about my team and its names. Many years ago, at a tournament in Philly, Greg was hanging out with some folks when they stumbled across a list of gag porn movie titles in a weekly paper. One of the titles was A Gerbil Runs Through It, a take off of the fly fishing/homo-erotic brothers in conflict movie with Brad Pitt and Anthony Hopkins. That led to thinking of other movie titles you could do this with, and voila!

Names we've used inclue How Stella Got Her Gerbil Back, Riding in Cars with Gerbils, Il Gerbino, The English Gerbil, and Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Gerbil. There are others, but who can remember?

Tournament itself was fun, finished fourth (behind a team we'd beaten who had a better overall record) after losing a shootout semifinal... just as we did last year. On the positive side, we forced the shootout, rather than being forced into it. Perhaps next year we'll get into one and win it.

We've never gotten to do much sightseeing when we've gone to Chattanooga, but the one stop we did make was quality. A couple years ago we took in the gift shop of the Towing and Recovery Hall of Fame and Museum. Yes, it is just what it sounds like. We'd have had to pay to go in, but as we could see a fair portion of it from the gift shop area, we just bought some stuff and left (I still have my T shirt, one of the few that seemed to survive all my moving). We've not been to the aquarium (the largest fresh water one in the state/US/continent/world, can't remember which), the mall (largest in TN), the Creative Discovery Museum, Lookout Mountain and Rock City, or BellSouth Park, home to the Chattanooga Lookouts minor league baseball team (we have walked around the outside of historic Engel Stadium, the Lookouts' old home that's now a national historic site). At some point we're going to have to go early so we can take a day.

For that matter, we never seem to get much sightseeing done on any of these trips. I don't think we're missing much in Detroit (though we've managed a game at Comerica Park, seeing a Tigers-Twins game in 2000), but I'd like to have time to look around DC again. A future trip to DePauw University in Indiana will highlight a side trip to Notre Dame to take in a hockey game. In some sense it'll also be a family pilgrimage, given my dad's passion for Notre Dame football. We won't discuss how ND blew me off twice when I requested applications for undergrad and law school.

We did hit some "cultural" areas of Tennessee, including Davy Crockett's Smokehouse, which was like Cracker Barrel crossed with a honky tonk. Peanut shells on the floor, down home food, and faux coonskin caps for sale (I passed, considering it probably wouldn't fit). We also made our usual stop at Stuckey's, which is like Woolworth's crossed with a general store crossed with QVC. Small building with pumps out front, lunch counter, and a bunch of semi-worthless crap. If you're looking for a figurine of a bear wearing boxer shorts putting on a bathrobe, stop here. You can get Southern cusine (Moon Pies, Goo Goo Clusters, pecan rolls) on the cheap. Oddly, for a place that sells Moon Pies, they don't sell RC Cola.

Thinking more about the tournament, I managed to get honorable mentions for both my preliminary K-Tell Hell score (K-Tell Hell is kind of like Name that Tune, but using the actual songs) and my individual scoring for the tournament, where I finished 11th (though we think that's off based on our own stat keeping, and that I actually made the top 10, which would annoy me more except that it means I managed to avoid being saddled with one more piece of crap that I'd have to drag back here). My mention for the latter achievement also noted I was the highest scoring player at the tournament that does not wear glasses. Not that I don't need them; I'm sure most of you have seen me in my full body squint when sitting at a computer or trying to read something that's posted on a wall.

So, for all my trouble, the one prize I did take home was an incrediby ugly Jar Jar Binks mug, which will go well with the somewhat less hideous Jar Jar Binks lip balm dispenser I got last year. I feel that my eye for trashworthy prizes is somewhat vindicated given that both the Dr. Laura game and the Monopoly dot.com edition were given away, and I'd had both on my list of prizes for the regional last month (Dr. Laura was given away, the Monopoly was still too expensive).

Notable on the flight back was that Nashville's airport hires, in at least some capacity, Argenbright Inc., the same folks who brought you the Maginot Line-like security at Logan. That Shawn and Chris were stopped and had have their shoes x-rayed (without wearing them, of course) suggests that they're being more circumspect.

However, that they didn't even bother to look in the case of the buzzer system I was carrying on made me worry. The system is a self-contained briefcase which, when broken down for travel, has all sorts of wires inside. There also may be a battery (there's a switch for one, I think, unless I was looking at someone else's made by the same company), so consider that some artful work with Semtex could have nasty implications. NOT THAT I AM ADVOCATING SUCH A COURSE OF ACTION. I just think they could have at least opened the case and prodded a little, like they did in Providence.

Anyway, a fun trip overall, not least of which came from not having anyone complain about my snoring.