Ping-pong isn’t our only contention. My cousin and I were always combative… perhaps excessively combative. It might be as slight as who could consume food faster or just plain consume a higher quantity… whom could eat slower or in smaller amounts. It did not matter. If there was a means one mortal could trump the other in something, we’d contend.
Regrettably, the tiny abode my wife and I bought does not have a lot of space for the many ways my cousin and I like to compete. Following much calculation, we finally settled on a pool table with a table tennis conversion top. Essentially this gives us the ability to play either pool or ping pong on one table in the same space.
So now our infamous competition proceeds. Naturally, he constantly kvetches that it isn’t the real thing. Even though he normally bests me in pocket billiards, every single instance we set the table tennis conversion top upon the pool table, it appears his game errs.
To put it plainly, I think it’s because I am just plain the greater table tennis player. But unfortunately, he has too many rationalizations. The height isn’t right. The dimensions are incorrect. The list proceeds on. So I got out the measuring tape. The dimensions and elevation were right on to the official table tennis dimensions. Then he claimed the table caused the wrong bounce; that somehow the pool table below affected the speed and height of the bounce.
So we investigated the official bounce measurement (indeed, there’s an official bounce measurement). It is for every 30 centimeters of drop, there should be a 23 centimeters bounce. We tested the bounce in over a dozen placements on the conversion top. In every spot the ball bounced virtually perfectly straight up and almost precisely 23 centimeters high. So you see, ping pong conversion tops do a perfectly respectable job duplicating a good game of ping pong. And my first cousin has no excuses. I am simply the greater ping pong player.
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