Have a ball, boys.

I was going to blog today about this study showing how short bursts of intense exercise can help with stress reduction, but I can't get this absurd article from ABC news about "sack tapping" out of my head, so I'm going to share that with you instead.

In the game of "sack tapping" or "ball tapping," as it is called, a boy will try to slap or flick the groin of another boy to inflict discomfort or pain.

The "game" has gotten out of hand, however, according to Dr. Scott Wheeler, a pediatric urologist in Minnesota.

In recent years he's seen an increasing number of young boys coming in with serious damage to the testicles because of a "tap" that hit too hard.

Although I, like 50% of the people reading this, am well aware of what it feels like to have his family jewels smacked, I never knew the exact physiology of it:

The groin is one of the most sensitive parts of the body because it has such a rich supply of blood and nerves, says Dr. Aaron Katz , a urologist at Columbia University Medical Center in New York.

In the womb, the testicles form inside the body, so when they descend they take nerves from the abdomen with them.

"That's why when a guy gets hit in the balls, he feels it in his stomach as well," Katz says.

I think this is a little bit of sensationalism, to be honest. I remember guys smacking each other in the gonads back in high school twenty years ago. We called it "racking." But still, it might appear to be on the upswing.

Personally, I'm in favor of the activity. I was an idiot as a kid, but never dumb enough to do something like this as a sporting event. These guys strike me as buffoons and will probably continue to be buffoons into their adult lives. Keeping in mind that the article claims a hard enough blow can result in the need to remove the testicle, voluntary castration is just these guys' way of not introducing a lot of un-needed buffoon DNA into the gene pool.

It's Darwinism in action.