I wish I had thought of this back in my Rice University days:

When U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials learned that Rice University senior David Nichol had imported 26 fairly large boxes containing 13,000 plastic colored balls from China, they decided to investigate the contents due to the sheer bizarreness of the order.

“There are a lot of things about importing I didn’t know that I do now – about how you need to fill out certain forms and how you need to pick them up from (the Houston) ship channel,” Nichol said.

“I actually didn’t pick them up from the Port of Houston,” he said. “They were taken to (U.S.) Customs and Border Protection to be tested to make sure they were certified balls and not something else. I’m sure it was kind of sketchy to have 13,000 plastic balls shipped to Texas.”

Nichol’s excuse was pretty straightforward: He wanted to create a ball pit in his dorm room at Rice.

(h/t Sheila, via Texas Monthly)

I can’t tell which dorm this is, so it must be one of the new ones. Now I feel old. This totally would’ve worked at Lovett, had anyone dared. The closest thing I can remember from Lovett in the ’90s was the tower of Mountain Dew cans, which simply required superglue and a crapload of Mountain Dew cans (and, I guess, a lot of stomachaches from drinking all that Dew). There were also the two guys who never cleaned their room, to the point that you couldn’t see the floor at all by March or April. That’s not something you want to jump and roll around in, though (I hope).

I actually looked into this a few years ago (i.e. I Googled how much it would cost to buy a crapload of plastic balls to put in my house), but decided that it would be too expensive for a fairly minimal payoff. As in, I knew I’d get bored with it after a day or two. Also, I read somewhere that without regular maintenance, ball pits can become comfy homes for spiders and whatnot—but that’s incredibly apocryphal, so please don’t quote (or sue) me. This sort of thing works better in the close-quarters environment of a dorm.

One question lingers about the rules, though. No making out? Ever? Don’t tell me you’ve never….you know what, it’s your thing, but you’ll never have this opportunity again, dude.

Moving on, it turns out that Mr. Nichol had the same basic inspiration as me, but I salute him for taking the next step:

Mr. Nichol did express one specific hope for the future:

This is one thing. I really hope this isn’t how I’m totally remembered at Rice. I hope it’s for other things too, like when I was talking with classmates or telling them a joke, because this is one thing and not all of who I am. It might be a symbol of what I liked doing in my spare time, but it’s not the whole of my Rice experience.

I hope that proves to be true. As far as I know, no one from college remembers me solely as the guy who beat a Twinkie at the Turing test—although that project made Texas Monthly‘s top five list for Rice, too.

Image credits: Randall Munroe [CC BY-NC 2.5], via xkcd; Gouge/Stadler/Hostess, via twinkiesproject.org.