THE THROWING STUFF

The discus is one of those weird sporting events. It's like they ran out of real sports to do so this guy's just going to toss a plate around for a while.

And what are they aiming at? Nothing. All they want to do is get that plate far, far away. Really, if that's the attitude - why pick it up?

I guess that the first discus was just a extraordinarily hot plate. The guy picks it up and he's like "Whoa! That is reallllly hot!", tosses it to one side, hands burning. People pick up on this, think it could fit into this Olympic Games thing they're trying to organise. Suddenly you've got a whole new sport - plate tossing. They've already got the ball tossing (shot-put) and the stick tossing (javelin) so why not, y'know?

But, let's be honest, "plate tossing" doesn’t sound much like a sport. Sounds more like something you'd do at a Greek wedding. So they all get together to come up with a good sporting name for this new event. Rowdy meeting, all the people from the Olympic village (which, by the way, was a real village back then) talking over one another, coming up with names and rules. The mayor of the Olympic village calls the meeting to order and he's like "Everyone settle down, we need to discuss this sensibly."

And there you go - discuss. The sport is named.

I threw a broken video cassette in my bin last night. They're still deciding if that should be an Olympic sport. I'm proposing we call it the "chatter". Maybe the "babble".