Ping Pong and Lions.

I'm yet to met an adult who doesn't think that he or she is good at table tennis. You can test it for yourself. If you happen to find yourself in a garage or basement - or any hall or hotel which has a table - ask the person next to you whether they play:

"You mean Ping Pong?"
"Ah, that's not its proper name, but yes."
"To tell the truth, I'm pretty good at it. Surprisingly good, even. Well I was."

Question: What kind of sport is it that everyone thinks they're good at it, even though they don't play it? (And, more pointedly, what kind of trivialising contempt must people have for sports so considered?)

The thing is, I really am good at table tennis. Very good. Excellent even - even though you most probably couldn't tell this just by looking at me. (What were you expecting to see? I mean, what does a typical "great table tennis player" look like? Only genocidal racists would contend that green-tabletop legends like Guo Yuehua, Seiji Ono, Wang Liqin, and Mitsuru Kohno all look alike. And do I look that much like Jan-Ove Waldner, arguably the greatest TT player ever? Surprisingly, yes. But appearances can be deceiving - and people can be deceptive.

And so I am led to discuss briefly a documentary showing tonight on Channel 7 about "Christian the Lion" (so named, I speculate, because he was thrown to humans at an early age). A Lion Named Christian is a story about how two lesbian geologists adopted and domesticated a lion cub. (Actually, having not seen the show, I'm not sure about them being lesbian geologists.) Regardless, after being taught Latin, Rhetoric, and Rubgy, Christian the Lion was released back into the wild - thrown to the lions, so to speak. But rather than devour himself for the amusement of bloodthirsty hordes, he survived ethically for years. Devoutly eco-friendly and respectful of the rights of other animals, Christian recycled and ate his own faeces and conserved huge amounts of energy each day by sleeping. Equipped with a camera, he filmed his everyday successes and disappointments. Anyway, to cut the lion story short, after many years the two lesbians - or male flatmates, or alien triplets - sought out Christian to see whether he would recognise them.

What is my view of the film, given that I haven't actually watched it? My strong sense is that far from being just another example of the English "catsploitation" film, A Lion Named Christian represents a genuine watershed event in cinematic - and perhaps natural - history. Tens of thousands of years of mutual enmity and hostility between lions and humans hangs in the balance tonight. The rest,as they say, is documentary.

(Pursuing for a moment the theme of lions being thrown to humans, I note that immediately following the doco tonight is live coverage of the Wallabies versus the All Blacks in Tokyo.)