A Few Items

-- Ken Pomeroy has a blurb on the Wolfpack in his latest post:

For five consecutive halves they looked like the best team in the ACC. It can be a challenge to distinguish between an anomaly and a trend. But I’m going to put this one in the anomaly category and say that Engin Atsur cannot possibly mean that much to a team.

I'm sure some of y'all will disagree, but I don't.

-- Big Ten Wonk is talking ACC today and he includes a handy graphical illustration of each team's offensive and defensive efficiency in conference play. I mentioned this in a post earlier in the week, but the graph really hits the point home: Miami's defense is hellacious.

-- A tip of the hat to the excellent DC Sports Bog for alerting me to this piece about beer pong:

If you're anything like me, you spent hours playing beer pong in college. Chasing pingpong balls into the corners of rooms that haven't been cleaned since the Truman administration was a regular weekend occurrence.

I vividly remember pulling up a pingpong ball once that was covered in about 15 strands of hair. All of different length and colors. It almost made me throw up. But I survived and kept playing.

And now I credit my strong immune system to the fact that I was exposed to every pathogen known to man during these games. From the red party cup sharing, to the hands holding the balls (yeah, I know), to the nasty ball-washing cup, to the girls who seem to think the pingpong ball is going to dry faster if they blow on it -- beer pong and all it's accessories are basically one large Petri dish for germs. Usually, however, you're too drunk to notice.

Every now and then when I'm playing, I'll pull a ball out of a made cup only to find that there's still a hair on it (this is usually a clue it's time to change out the water cup). Or I'll be drinking a cup, and--what's that?--yep, there's a hair in my mouth. And inevitably, with the ball hitting the gound as much as it does, a pube finds its way onto it...that's always fun. A couple of George Washington students actually ran lab tests to see just what kinds of bacteria (and how much) the game exposes people to.

ClayNation: What were your results?

Morrissey: Disgusting. Our first move was to test the water cups using a statistical test which assesses the "most probable number" of a certain type of bacteria being present. Normally, using dilutions, some samples come up positive, some come up negative, and accordingly you can calculate the amount of bacteria present. When we first did this, every single one of the tubes came up positive, leading our teacher to exclaim that those levels were "dangerous."

When isolating, we found Enterobacteria present, which include strains like E. coli and salmonella. While this initially sounds really bad, take this with a grain of salt. Not all strains of bacteria are virulent. However, it's generally not a good idea to play Russian roulette with a potentially very pathogenic bacteria (see Taco Bell), so there most definitely is a risk involved. In general, the less bacteria you consume, the less likelihood of you becoming ill.