Long Island's Ineffective Plan To Ban Underage Beer Pong

Suffolk County lawmaker Tom Cilmi has his heart in the right place when he talks about curbing underage drinking on Long Island. But a plan to do so by outlawing the sale of beer pong "board games" implies he hasn't wrapped his head around the game or had the privilege of witnessing a boozy round.

Really, beer pong? A board game? It might be easier to enforce a ban on who-thought-of-this? products like "Drunken Hookup: The Drinking Game That Leads To Sex." But most drinking games only require apparatus found in every suburban basement. Even the most desperate wallflower hoping to make inroads with the popular kids by throwing a kegger while her parents are out of town would not be so clueless as to prepare for a beer pong (ahem, Beirut) tournament by heading out to the local CVS and buying a kit custom-made for the competition.

Teenagers and frat boys are crafty and easy to please. And abolishing drinking games would require getting rid of such tough-to-find innovations as:

Quarters

Playing Cards

Ping Pong tables

The State of the Union (whose accompanying drinking game is guaranteed to make you pass out even faster than the address itself)

Shoulders

And then there's Long Island itself: densely populated with families and their wayward youth, flat as a board and bereft of much else to do, home of the original suburb and the soul-sucking ennui bored city people insist suburbia produces, Lindsay Lohan's training ground.

It's tough to think of a place that would inspire underage drinking more! But Cilmi might want to combat it by forgetting about mythical beer pong board games and reducing the availability of beer.