Alas, between the long hours working with Tim Boggan on his latest History of U.S. Table Tennis volume, and catching up on things last night, I wasn't able to put together a blog for this morning - and now I'm due to go back to work with Tim. So no blog this morning. Back tomorrow with a nice feature blog, tentatively about the past, present, and future of our national level players. I'll leave you with this quote, which I said to Tim after finally finishing a page after spending an hour on it fixing up problems and making numerous changes to it: "Our short national nightmare is over. Let's start the next one." And here's two minutes and nineteen seconds of cats playing table tennis.

ITTF Proposal that Boosting No Longer Be Illegal
Here are new rules proposals that the ITTF will be considering at meetings during the upcoming World Championships. See #3, where they are considering adding the bolded parted part:

2.4.7 The racket covering shall be used without any physical, chemical or other treatment that may be considered harmful or unhealthy for the persons.

Rationale: 1. It is impossible to control boosters with the current equipment/procedures, so the actual rule cannot be enforced. 2. The main problem of the harmful substances in the way rubbers were collated to blades was mitigated with the introduction of the VOC controls.

I think this is a good idea, since (as I've blogged before), most top players are already boosting. (See more on this in my proposal below.) Making a rule that can't be enforced is silly as it simply penalizes those who refuse to join others in cheating, while forcing all players to face the reality that if they don't also cheat, they...

Table Tennis Inventions Needed
Today I'm going to turn some of you into rich inventors, and someday I'm going to regret all the hordes of money I gave away by not patenting all these inventions. But it's all for the greater good of table tennis, right? When you (or the big table tennis companies and distributors reading this) create these devices and are rolling in money, make sure to credit me with the idea! Here are some table tennis inventions we need you to create.

• Rackets with Different Speeds on Forehand and Backhand. This is a simple one - just put faster wood layers on one side, slower ones on the other. There's no rule against this. Not everybody wants the same speed on both sides, just as not everybody uses the same surface on both sides. For example, if you only spin steadily on the forehand while playing an aggressive backhand, you might want the forehand side to be slower. Or if you chop on the backhand while attacking with the forehand, you might want slower on the backhand. And so on. (Note - I'm told that some of the smaller manufacturers already make these - see comments below and my...

MRI Results
The results are in on the MRI on my shoulder on Friday. In layman's terms, the rotator cuff has a slight tear, but it's small enough that they call it "frayed." It's also badly inflamed, with some tendinitis and bursitis. The doctor showed me the pictures on a screen, and while I can't tell the difference between inflamed and normal, the small tear or fraying was obvious.

Now for the technical terms. Here are excerpts from the medical report - read these out loud. I'm not making fun of the doctor's terms, I'm in awe of them! And I thought "heavy no-spin" and "banana flip" were cool terms.

• Rotator Cuff: There is mild supraspinous tendinosis with bursai sided fraying and interstitial fissuring. Infraspinatus, teres minor, and subscapularis tendons are intact.
• Subacromial/Subdeltoid Bursa: Mild bursitis.
• Glenohumeral Joint: The inferior glenohumeral ligament is mildly T2 hyperintense and irregular at the humeral attachment.
• Labrum: There is subtle signal abnormality within the superior labrum from approximately 1 o'clock to the 9 o'...