Tuesday, January 18, 2011
If there’s one topic you’re dreading even more than mortality, fresh off our grim double feature from last week, it’s probably ping-pong. We’ve managed to avoid the topic for two weeks, but you knew in your heart of hearts the hiatus wouldn’t last. Well, guess what? Party ends tonight. In the past few days, I’ve been poring over the storefronts of various ping-pong suppliers–which, yes, exist–in a search for answers. I need to reconstruct my paddle, and only the finest materials will suffice.
“Finest” isn’t the correct word. When I read that sentence aloud, for instance, I picture the kind of paddle Kanye would likely commission: a 48k whalebone affair encrusted in blood diamonds and the hair of newborn chinchillas. No, the better word is “right.” I need to locate the right materials. Best guess is I bought the paddle in 1997. That’s almost 15 years ago, and when equipment reaches that milestone intact, a second chance seems entirely reasonable.
My guidelines for vetting products are simple. Certainly I’m looking for reliability and the consensus of favorable peer reviews. But more than that, I’ve noticed a hearty strain of protectionism running through my selection criteria. Rubber sheets are being sorted by country of origin, in other words, rather than by customer rating. No way around it, really. Consider the “Double Happiness” brand–well-received, apparently, but the blatant Engrish led to some evocative imagery, like a wretched farmer tapping Commie sap from a Commie tree. With few, if any, options to buy American, it may be time to go Swedish. Upon further reflection, I suppose that’s more racist than protectionist.
The prospect of actually replacing the rubber is daunting, frankly, especially after I pulled up the listing for the recommended knife. Friggin’ thing is basically a scalpel, which freaked me out just a little bit. Browsing through the various glues on offer also yielded a fair number of horror stories, where beloved blades were utterly destroyed after just one application. I’m currently at a crossroads, and I’m leaning more toward selecting the rubber, then outsourcing the assembly to more capable hands. Yeah, it’d be neat to learn how to replace all this myself, but that said, I’m not embarking on an incredible journey of self-discovery here. I simply want to have two pieces of rubber glued and cut competently to a plank of wood.