Good day, Gainesville. We hope you’ve somehow managed to stay dry during Gainesville’s temperamental weather as of late. In any event, it’s another week, another Thursday and another edition of Darts and Laurels.
This week’s been abuzz with the debut of Caitlyn Jenner, formerly Bruce Jenner. Usually we try to award a dart or laurel for feats of incredible awesomeness or deeds of vile villainy/mind-numbing stupidity, but today we’re going to award a laurel to the producers of Family Guy for picking up the phone and calling it on the Caitlyn Jenner developments, which shook the tabloid world earlier this week.
You see way back in 2009, when most of the Alligator’s current readership was probably still in high school, the adult cartoon series aired an episode whereupon two of the show’s most popular characters, Stewie and Brian, seemingly predict Jenner’s recent announcement. The 2009 clip had a short discussion between the two where it was revealed by Stewie that Bruce Jenner had given birth to Brody Jenner.
“Bruce Jenner is a man,” Brian tells Stewie.
“No, Brian,” Stewie replies. “That’s what the press would have you believe, but he’s not. Bruce Jenner is a woman — an elegant, beautiful, Dutch woman.”
Granted, Jenner’s Dutch heritage has never been made a manifest truth, but the clip remains an impressive feat of prescience by an animated talking baby.
Meanwhile, we see fit to award a dart to a certain petition that’s been circulating since Caitlyn Jenner’s debut. Posted on Change.org, a call has been put out to revoke Jenner’s Olympic gold medal from the 1976 Montreal Olympic Games.
“We congratulate Ms. Jenner on these new developments and wish her the best,” the petition states. “However, this creates somewhat of a problem as Ms. Jenner (as talented as she is) claims that she has always believed herself to be truly female, and therefore, was in violation of committee rules regarding women competing in men’s sports and vice versa.”
The petition had 6,874 signatures as of press time.
We’d like to make the point that Jenner had never moved forward with her gender nor was she taking any kind of hormone therapy during the decathlon. In fact, had she been taking hormone therapy at the time she’d have probably been at a disadvantage against her competitors, thereby rendering this discussion rather moot.
But don’t just take our word for the matter. Try the New York Supreme Court, which ruled in 1977 that trans women are wholly permitted to participate in Olympic sports, further rendering this matter moot and earning the petition a dart from us for being painfully irrelevant and ignorant.
Outside of buzzing trans discussion, some of the richest and most successful people in the world made it big after dropping out of college. Perhaps foremost among them is Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft and undisputedly one of the richest men in the world. But rather than offhandedly allowing his legacy to be an example for college skeptics to casually drop out of school, he’s gone on record with a blog post urging kids to stay in school and graduate.
Gates believes that not enough students are finishing their education, and views his own success story as an exception to the rule.
“Although I dropped out of college and got lucky pursuing a career in software, getting a degree is a much surer path to success,” he wrote on his blog.
Well, we can’t very well be a college newspaper if we didn’t believe in the virtues of education and freedom from ignorance, so for this enlightening statement on the issue we’ll award Mr. Gates a laurel.
[A version of this story ran on page 4 on 6/4/15]
