anandtranslated updated

Puritanism and male supremacy

Head counts and Democracy

On Sport ...and (a bit) on reality TV

something i wrote a long time ago.

Sport allows us to observe the naked soul of man. No pretenses, no facades, no excuses. Men trying to do stuff, competing, failing, succeeding, doubting,choking, panicking, scratching through, living up.

Sport ultimately is enriching to its participants. It forces the best of them to look inside themselves at a very young age. Of course, they may not like the answers, but it leaves them better equipped to handle reality.

It is an interesting exercise to compare sport to its mass media counterpart - the moving, talking picture and all its forms ranging from movies to reality television. Some of the more thoughtful of the thespians have remarked that making your living by pretending to be someone else is inherently dissatisfying and degrading to self.

While movies can be great art, reality television in almost all its forms is inherently vile. It promises to celebritize everyone with giving out two minutes of manufactured fame. Admittedly, there are exceptions, but on closer look, the ones which are good are similar to sport with the camera being a capturer of action, not the creator.

Again, not all sport does all that. Women's gymnastics seems to be nothing more than using children for misplaced national pride. The bat and ball games, though not popular as their ball only cousins, have more of the real life components interwoven into them than just pure athletic ability and hence are more human, more interesting.

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Hoping for a great series.

Religulous - the wait is over...

The posters are brilliant. :-)

A Statement from Bill Maher

.... it has been my pleasure over the last decade and a half to make organized religion one of my favorite targets. I often explained to people, “I don’t need to make fun of religion, it makes fun of itself.” And, then I go ahead and make fun of it too, just for laughs.


With religious fanatics like George Bush and Osama bin Laden now taking over the world, it seemed to me in recent years that this issue — this cause of debunking the man behind the curtain — needed to have a larger, more insistent and focused forum than late night television. I wanted to make a documentary, and I wanted it to be funny. In fact, since there is nothing more ridiculous than the ancient mythological stories that live on as today’s religions, this movie would try to be a real knee slapper. Unless, of course, you’re religious, then you might not like it.


As a comedian, religion has always interested me — it was the single easiest subject to make jokes about. I think that tells us something: comedians look for things that don’t make sense, that are illogical.

Even as a young comedian, routines I did that got the biggest laughs and got me invited back on the Tonight Show were the religious ones — like the one about being half Catholic and half Jewish and bringing a lawyer into confession: “Bless me father for I have sinned — and I think you know Mr. Cohen . . .”

Politics is a rich area, but even politicians, although they promise some ridiculous stuff, don’t approach the level of, for example, the Mormon practice of promising couples a planet to rule over in the after life if they have a really good marriage on earth. They give you a planet — kinda like when someone gives you a certificate that says a star has been named after you — except here, they really give you the star!

Join me in the final battle between intelligence and stupidity that will decide the future of humanity. Coming soon to a house of false idols near you.

–Bill Maher