Ping Pong Balls, Lemons, and Other Lethal Objects

[illustration: well at least someone thinks Eileen is funny]
by J J Cohen

Yesterday the Cohen family met Eileen, Anna K. and her daughter, and Eileen's sister's partner and their triple progeny at Comet Ping Pong. I love this pizza restaurant/bar/ping pong parlor because ... well, where else do you find all three of those together?

As the list of attendees demonstrates, many present were in the age range of 5-12 (and all present acted as if they belonged within this range).

I note the presence of innocent minors because I want to record here publicly that:

1. Eileen repeatedly used her ping pong ball as a deadly missile, several times aiming the projectile with great force against me
2. When the meal of pizza was over and many abandoned crusts littered the kiddies' plates, Eileen gathered these fire-singed pieces of bread, wrapped them in a napkin, and placed them in her purse. She announced to all that she keeps them for riding the subway. If a crowded train should yield no possibility of sitting (she told the children), she tosses a crust into the middle of the aisle. As everyone scrambles to grab the thing, she quietly takes an empty seat.
3. Claiming she got the idea from a New Yorker cartoon, Eileen initiated a game in which we tried to name more than 100 ways to kill a person with a lemon. Favorites: bouncing the lemon off someone's head repeatedly; stuffing the seeds into all airholes to trigger suffocation; squeezing the juice into someone's eyes to blind them, removing and drying out the rind, and then stabbing that blind person a week later when the rind has hardened enough to use as a shank.

I blog all of these facts because when the day arrives when one of the children in attendance is arrested for murdering a stranger using a citrus fruit, or for putting an eye out with an errant ping pong ball, or for causing a riot on the DC Metro by strewing stale pizza remnants, I want the world to know who is to blame.