We finally found out what this strange ball is for, but not after some crazy, wild guesses.

Early Saturday morning at 7:30 I arrived at Holy Trinity School in Poughkeepsie for my son's soccer pictures. Needless to say, getting a six-year-old to eat breakfast and put on his soccer uniform this early in the morning isn't a great way to start the day.

Standing with the other bleary-eyed parents in the gymnasium at Holy Trinity School in Poughkeepsie, a strange sight caught my eye. Hanging over us was a large plastic ball with a hole cut out and a line running right through the center. I immediately commented on how it looked amazingly like the Death Star from "Star Wars."

Other parents also noticed the ball, and we all started wondering aloud what it actually was. Guesses included a Wi-Fi booster, a digital TV projector, a smoke detector and even some sort of fog machine.

It turns out we were all wrong.

Being a person who just can't let things like this go, I spent the rest of the morning on Google trying to find out what this strange ball actually is. It turns out, it's a sophisticated digital speaker, specially designed for spaces that have a large echo. The $4,000 speaker is made to be used on high ceilings in ice rinks, gymnasiums and night clubs where echoing can be a problem.

So it's not the Death Star after all.

But now that that's settled, one mystery still remains: How does a Catholic school afford to buy a $4,000 speaker?

 

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