Q Toon: The New Kid, the Sequel

In last week's cartoon, a gym teacher spoke to his class about the transgender girl forced by school district policy to enroll in the boys' physical education class. This week's cartoon follows the story into the school principal's office.

I don't know what electives schools offer in Phy Ed these days. Not being an athletic sort, I took both golf and ping pong in high school; they were quarter-credit classes. In golf class, offered only in months when we tend not to have snow, we did nothing but putt around a very miniature course in an area behind the school known as "the bowl." We never learned anything about teeing off or getting out of sand traps, or any of that. Perhaps on the day that stuff was on the syllabus, it rained.

In college, I took canoeing, in which I enjoyed paddling up river to Dundas to grab a quick beer (until the instructor told me to knock it off), and bowling. The latter class was held in the campus bowling alley and game room, where I could never hear the instructor over the incessant tintinnabulation of pinball games. It wasn't really the reason why I signed up for those particular classes, but I didn't need to shower either of after them.

The cartoon principal's suggestion of counting Video Games 101 toward the Physical Education requirement isn't really so far-fetched. There's the hand-eye coordination thing, after all, and I suppose it really builds up those thumb muscles. There's even a movement to include "egames" in the 2024 Paris Olympics.

[IOC President Thomas] Bach still needs convincing. He won an Olympic gold medal in fencing, which uses swords, and tried to draw a distinction.
“Of course every combat sport has its origins in a real fight among people,” he said. “But sport is the civilized expression about this. If you have egames where it’s about killing somebody, this cannot be brought into line with our Olympic values.”

Egames were a demonstration sport in the 2018 Asian Games, and are scheduled to be a “full-medal event” by the 2022 games. But the recent real-life killings at the video game tournament in Jacksonville, Florida may have put a damper on the movement to get them into the Olympics, at least for the time being.

But hey, if The Doctor can have a thirteenth regeneration, I guess anything is possible.