Androgeny And The Yellow Dart

There are a lot of ways to skin a cat.  There are a lot of ways to spear a beaver.  But there no surefire way to tell a healthy bush from a very small tree.

It’s especially hard from 800 meters.

Such is the dilemma faced by the sprinter chicks of the world when stared down by someone who is way bigger, stronger, less attractive, and probably a lot more comfortable with logic and reason.

There’s a South African woman, she’s 18, named Caster Semenya who totally smoked the other women this summer in Berlin’s world championships.

She runs 800 meters a lot faster than they do.

She’s so much better than any other sprinters in sports bras that they came to a somewhat startling conclusion : She must be a man, baby!

The evidence, such that at is, goes like this :

1.  She’s much better than us and we’re all really good. (For Chicks)

2.  She looks more than a little like Michael Vick.

3. Michael Vick is, like,  totally a dude!

So now, Ms. (or Mr.) Semenya is faced with the somewhat unusual prospect of PROVING that she is, in fact a she.  I’d sugged dropping drawers as a sure-fire test.

She doesn’t do the pole vault, ya know.

Oddly, the good folks at Time magazine tell me that the whole man/woman thing is more complicated than that.

It seems, I’ve learned, that rather than a sort of binary 1 and 0 system (where the 1 fits nicely inside), gender is a sorta complicated deal.  People may be more or less male but it’s a sliding scale.

From this, to this to this.  See? All men.  But it’s a sliding scale.

The whole thing makes you wonder if perhaps Martina Navratilova wasn’t really John Denver in a tennis skirt.

It makes me wonder about a lot of dividing lines.

And it made Otis wonder about my Yellow Dart.

Now if you’ll notice on that well-placed INNOVA link, it clearly says that disc is a putter.  It doesn’t say “midrange” or “fairway driver” or even “putt and approach”.  Seriously.

Look again.

It just says putter dammit.

Otis, however, says nay.

You see, in a fit of creative energy, we decided to try a course we hadn’t in a long time.  We drove down 385 and played at Simpsonville City Park.  It took a solid 4 minutes to remember why we’re rarely there.

Apart from the longish drive, it also manages to suck worse than Gower in the rain.

So, to liven things up, I played the whole thing with a Dart.

Here then is Otis’ argument that the Dart is not a putter :

1.  It goes much further than his driver.

2. It has an unusually thin profile for a putter and looks more like a Gator.

3. A Gator is, like, totally a midrange disc.

You see the problem?

I’d like to trust the label on the damn disc.  But I don’t have another putter I can throw for a controlled 300 feet.

I’d like to trust my good buddy Otis.  But I once saw him tee of at Timmons #3, hold on too long, and release it 180 degrees the wrong way.  He f’n THREW IT BACKWARDS.

I’d like to trust my instincts.

I’d like to know what’s what.

And I’d like to see Michael Vick win Olympic gold.