COMMENTS & CURIOSITIES:

Ever heard of cow tipping? Not a lot of it goes on around here.

A gaggle of high school or college kids sneak onto a farm field in the dead of night, creep up on an unsuspecting bovine, give it a good shove and tip it over thus, “cow tipping.”

Needless to say, there is usually alcohol involved. Which only goes to show you that you’d be amazed what people will do when no one is around, with or without cows.

The first I heard of it was from my wife, an Army brat who grew up on posts around the world.

She had stories from her misspent youth of sneaking up on unsuspecting cows in and around Stuttgart in Germany and Fort Hood in Texas and tipping them.

There was usually alcohol involved. Over the years, I began to hear other stories of cow tipping from other people, all roughly the same — sneak out to pasture, tip the cow, run like hell, alcohol involved.

The litany of cow tipping stories came back to me this week when I saw a promotion on the website of this very publication — an animated cow tipping game.

Tip 20 virtual cows and you win a gift card to Applebee’s restaurant. Cute ad, but it also renewed both my memory and skepticism about cow tipping.

True, I don’t know anything about cows. If there were any of them in the Bronx, where I came from, I missed them.

Still and all, this whole cow-tipping thing doesn’t seem right. I have seen pictures of cows, and they look big. On the very rare occasions when I have been near one or more cows, they are wired and skittish, which leads me to believe that it would be really hard to sneak up on them.

But what I think is of no importance. I went to the Internet and got the straight poop on cows from people who know about these things.

First of all, there is a boatload of opinions from farmers and other cow-literate people, most of whom said that this is all pish-tosh, the rural version of an urban myth, because of one simple fact — cows don’t sleep standing up.

They sleep lying down, with their front legs folded under them. With half a ton of chubby cow in that position, you’d need a snowplow to tip it over. Interestingly though, other experts said that while cows do doze standing up, which would make it a little more feasible to tip them, but a lot less feasible to sneak up on them.

For those who like a little science with their cow tipping, Margo Lillie, a professor of zoology at the University of British Columbia, actually studied the physics of cow tipping.

She discovered, and I’m not going to ask how, that the average cow tipping requires 2,910 Newtons, which equals the pushing force of 4.43 people.

Finding .43 of a person at the tail end of a rager on a Friday night could be tough, but I assume you can just substitute a fifth person. By the way, the ideal angle at which to shove is 23.4 degrees.

According to Lillie, tipping with just two people would be feasible, but complicated.

“The static physics of the issue say that two people might be able to tip a cow,” Lillie said, “But the cow would have to be tipped quickly. The cow’s center of mass would have to be pushed over its hoof before the cow could react.”

Oh, like we didn’t know that.

Then there was Matt Semke, an engineering student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln who wrote a paper that matches Lillie’s conclusions — i.e., it’s possible to tip a cow with two people, but the ideal number is just more than four tippers.

To demonstrate that he had even more time on his hands than Lillie, Matt calculated the individual centers of mass for the cow’s head, body and four legs, and reached the conclusion that in no case could one person generate enough “push” to do the tipping. At the end of the day, both Lillie and Matt are skeptical, and I have to go with the experts.

What have we learned from all this? Nothing, as always.

But if you have a verifiable case of cow tipping, you know where to find me. I’m going to need names, dates and the approximate mass of the cow.

If you want to try, remember — 4.43 people, and make sure you’re pushing at 23.4 degrees. Good luck. Let me know how it turns out. Moo. I gotta go.

PETER BUFFA is a former Costa Mesa mayor. His column runs Sundays. He may be reached at ptrb4@aol.com.