YOU KNOW YOU'RE NOT LIVING IN A TABLE TENNIS NATION: When your best young player is giving interviews like this:

"If I didn't have straight A's, I wouldn't play table tennis. My parents told me I couldn't play table tennis if I didn't get straight A's," said Hsing, who did interviews in English and Mandarin Chinese.
She has applied to Stanford. She is considering applying to Princeton. She's also thinking about taking some time off before starting college to focus full time on her sport.
"I think it's something that would be really, really interesting to me," she said. "I thought it would be really cool because I usually don't play a lot of pro tours. I've only played one, and I think to just for one year just focus would be really, really fun."

Oh hey yeah, devoting one's self to one's sport might be fun! Or, you know, maybe she'll go to college and work on the school paper or something. Who knows. 

And straight As, shmaight As--if this was China she'd already be in table tennis school. We're never going to get anywhere in this country in table tennis with this level of support. IS THAT WHAT YOU WANT, AMERICA? A MORIBUND TABLE TENNIS PROGRAM? We'll never beat the Chinese that way!


EDIT TO ADD Ariel Hsing is close personal friends with Warren Buffet and Bill Gates, so it's not like she'd lack for support if she wanted it. The problem is that she isn't sure if she wants it and if this was a real table tennis nation that wouldn't even be a question. So AMERICA IS NOT A TABLE TENNIS NATION. I have proven it on my blog.

A THE DARK KNIGHT RISES REVIEW: By Alan David Doane. I am only lukewarm on the Nolan-Bale Batman project, and ADD seems to be on a similar wavelength, so I may agree with this review in large part whenever I end up seeing TDKR. I mean not to prejudge something, but: "In the end, after three overblown and undercooked Batman movies, the only thing we’ll remember, the only thing that felt right and transcended genre, was Heath Ledger’s Joker." <---strikes me as something accurate. Liam Neeson's Ra's definitely wasn't memorable, and Bane will have to be Lord Humungus levels of awesome to be memorable in that mask.