Until recently, everything made sense. Like the worldview of a 19th-century physicist, all the pieces fit together in elegant Newtonian order, undisturbed by relativity, quantum mechanics, black holes, string theory, dark matter, and other monkey wrenches lying in wait. Such is case for the world of table tennis, which is also governed by laws which seem immutable until they suddenly change on you. Here is just one example of how the world got flip-turned upside-down at the hands of the International Table Tennis Federation (ITTF). On February 15, 2019, the ITTF issued a request for proposals to "Become the global 'Home of Table Tennis'!" With its current staff of 50 office workers was divided between Singapore and Lausanne, Switzerland, the ITTF explained that it wants to build a single global office, complete with a playing venue, training center and research laboratory, along with many other ambitious amenities, making it the "table tennis capital of the world." This press release, along with a snazzy two-minute video, gave a deadline of August 31, 2019 for cities to submit their proposals. After a four-month review of the bids, the ITTF announced January 15, 2020 as the date when documentation would be sent to the shortlisted parties. Here is where the orderly world starts to slip away into relativistic space-time continua. All was seemingly proceeding according to plan until Wednesday, when the Official ITTF Channel re-released the same snazzy two-minute video, uploading it to YouTube on December 18. Why would the ITTF re-release the video, which explicitly calls for bids, almost four months after the deadline for bids has passed? There are many possible explanations, just as there are potentially infinite parallel universes. To digress into the murky realm of baseless conjecture would be irresponsible journalism at its worst. It does seem evident, however, that the ITTF is holding the door at least slightly ajar for last-minute proposals. If you are a city near an international airport, and you have always secretly longed to be the global home of something, now is your chance! Things still may not make sense, and perhaps they never really did. Nonetheless, these are certainly exciting times in which to be living.

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