My Cousin and My Table Tennis Conversion Top
Ping-pong isn’t our exclusive competition. My cousin and I were always combative… perchance excessively competitive. It could be as trivial as who could consume food speedier or eat a higher quantity… whom could eat slower or less. It didn’t matter. If there was a way one mortal could trump the other in something, we’d compete.
Unfortunately, the tiny house my wife and I purchased doesn’t have a ton of space for the many manners my first cousin and I like to compete. After much deliberation, we finally settled on a pool table with one of the table tennis conversion tops. Fundamentally this affords us the ability to play either pool or ping pong on the same table in the same space.
Thus now my cousin and my infamous rivalry proceeds. Of course, he constantly kvetches that it is not the real thing. Even though he usually bests me in pocket billiards, each time we place the table tennis conversion top upon the pool table, it seems his game drifts.
To put it simply, I think it’s because I am just simply the superior table tennis player. But unfortunately, he has too many excuses. The elevation isn’t right. The proportions are incorrect. The list goes on. Thus I got out the measuring tape. The elevation and dimensions are spot on to the official table tennis proportions. Then he postulated the table caused the wrong bounce; that somehow the pool table below affected the velocity and height of the ball bounce.
So we investigated the official bounce measurement (yes, there’s an official bounce measurement). It is for each 30 cm of drop, there should be a 23 cm bounce. We tested the bounce in over a dozen positions on the conversion top. In each spot the ball bounced almost perfectly straight up and nearly exactly 23 centimeters high. So you see, ping pong conversion tops do a perfectly respectable job replicating a strong game of ping pong. And my cousin has no excuses. I’m simply the greater table tennis player.
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