I was checking Digg when I found this article about a Beer Pong table, I know what beer pong is since I played a mini match once with an American friend visiting Lebanon but what was weird in all this is that the guy who submited the article wrote “Or are they beirut tables? Either way, these kick ass. Only $125” as the article description.
I searched a little to find out how the hell did a game played by drunk American college students who don’t even know the location of Lebanon on the map has “Beirut” as its name and it turns out there are two explanations for this.
The first one involves Hezbollah! Remember how they bombed a Marine barrack in Lebanon, well those drunk Americans wanted the US army to bomb Hezbollah like they bomb the beers with the ping pong balls so they called the game Beirut. The other version of the story is that they used the name of our city for the Beer Pong game because The game “Libya,” named after Reagan’s 1986 air attacks on Quaddaffi’s Libya, didn’t quite roll off the tongue, so following a terrorist truck-bomb attack on a Marine barracks in Lebanon’s capital in 1986, “Libya” became “Beirut.”!
Note that apparently Beer Pong and “Beirut” have slightly different rules.