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Sesame Street DVD Deemed Adult-Only Entertainment
theodp writes "The earliest episodes of Sesame Street are being made available on DVD, but the NYT notes Volumes 1 and 2 carry a rather strange warning: 'These early 'Sesame Street' episodes are intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today's preschool child.' So why are they unsuitable for toddlers in 2007? Well, in the parody 'Monsterpiece Theater,' Alistair Cookie — played by Cookie Monster — used to appear with a pipe, which he later gobbled. 'That modeled the wrong behavior,' explained a Sesame Street executive producer, adding that 'we might not be able to create a character like Oscar [the Grouch] now.'"
I...um.....*ahem*.......well......ACK!
I honestly do not even know where to begin. My God! This is absolute madness.... political correctness run amok and almost even worse than the religious right's labeling of Bert and Ernie as homosexuals. As one who leans left particularly after the last six years, this sort of thing is a shock back to more centrist practicality and honesty. Shame on the current producers for corrupting the original vision of Sesame Street and creating revisionist history. Oscar the Grouch was *grouchy*, as advertised. So what? Cookie Monster ate the pipe.... so what? It is as it was a vision of the time and a reflection on the changing times of a decade from the 60's to the 70's.
I don't have a problem with things changing, rather I revel in it. However, it makes me sad to see people label what made us who we are unacceptable to todays youth. Parents are far too restrictive with what their kids do, afraid to let them get dirty by playing outside, indoctrinating them with germaphobia from the earliest age, relabeling childrens characters as dangerous pedophiles or attempting to smear them with homosexual labels. The things we used to do as kids would likely get us arrested these days (12 year olds playing with homemade fireworks, carrying shotguns down the street and out to the field to go hunting, swinging from ropes into swimming holes infested with all manner of dangerous wildlife and more).
I don't know what that says of our society but kids watching Sesame Street was just part of the culture and are we now going to be afraid of who we are?
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From the we-must-censor-the-past department...
What about the guy in 101 Dalmations? He's smoking his pipe in almost every scene. I don't really pay much attention to Disney cartoons, maybe they have released a "special edition" that removes the pipe?
Life. The observant parent will keep their child shielded until about the age of 47.
No, really: WTF?!?!
proud caffeine whore
They should label _all_ DVDs as adult-only, as the Cookie Monster always was an anxious overeater, and that's also a bad role model, I suppose.
Besides, most monsters were naked, if I remember it correctly. And even if you can forgive that in a furry monster, what about a frog?
I guess we have to look again to Sesame Street, seeing the videos backwards if needed. Probably we'll find much evil lurking there, that probably could go a long way to explain why we are so fucked up as grown-ups. Hmmm... perhaps there is material there for a good lawsuit.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
Is why my children were never able to become interested in Sesame Street - while as a 5-year-old in the late-sixties, I loved it.
In subtle ways, it began to condescend and pander. The muppets, in particular, suffered from the loss of Kermit and Henson.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
'These early 'Sesame Street' episodes are intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today's preschool child.'
No, they aren't. The early episodes, as with the middle episodes and the late episodes and indeed with every episode ever filmed, were intended for children. Yes there were some nods here and there to the adults, but the episodes are intended for children.
I despise smoking - really can't stand it. That said, I've made absolutely no attempt to show non-smoking only films to my kids. I seem to remember Ghostbusters for example, has Ray dropping a cigarette out of his mouth at the sight of a ghost and our kids love Ghostbusters.
I love the standards at work - apparently lying is fine. Just not smoking a comedy pipe.
Cheers,
Ian
Why is it that shows like Power Rangers are acceptable for slightly older kids, then? They clearly demonstrate an approach to the world seems destined to create a legion of Stormtroopers for Darth Vader's next galactic conquest, where head-to-toe uniforms obscure all trace of personality and violence succeeds above all else. A (very) weak argument could be made that violent kids' shows are aimed at a more mature audience, but many six and seven year olds have pre-school brothers and sisters who are exposed to this stuff "accidentally."
I'm gonna start my own kid's show, Darwin Street. It will feature lots of colorful characters doing dangerous, emulatable things. If your kid kills himself doing something he saw on the show, we didn't need him in the gene pool anyway. Better yet, video tape whatever your kid did to off himself and you might win something in our sister show, America's Funniest Home Fatalities.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Values have changed. Cartoons from the 1930's to the 1960's are hard to find in their original incarnations because of violence and racial insensitivity.
It's only a matter of time before the Cookie Monster becomes the Carrot Stick and Broccoli Floret Monster, Big Bird becomes Avian American of Special Stature, and Oscar the Grouch becomes Differently Tempered Oscar with Alternate Housing Preferences. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
In history, the winners get to write the history books. This is usually applied to military winners, but since war is so un-PC these days, it's the cultural war winners who write the books. Right now the winners are the PC nanny-staters who, in spite of their message of tolerance, are some of the most intolerant people on earth for those buck their orthodoxy.
Good heavens Miss Sakamoto - you're beautiful!
Sesame Street? I give the kids in my life copies of Peewee's Playhouse. You want adult content? Innuendo? Sexuality? You got it! Best kid's show ever made.
Problem is that people forget that kids are actually pretty damned intelligent. Give them credit for smarts.
Three Squirrels
There is nothing wrong with letting your kids see inappropriate behavior (eg. smoking or living in garbage cans), so long as they know not to do it themselves. They get to know what is right and wrong by internalizing a set of "values". They won't build up these values without some exposure. They also need to be able to talk about stuff too.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
And the pussification of America continues.
...Rob
The American Dream isn't an SUV and a house in the suburbs; it's Don't Tread On Me.
Yes
Linux Zealots: Smarter than Mac Zealots, but still zealots.
Accidents happen. With 300 million people in America, a 1 in 1 million chance hits 300 people a year. Each year a few children tragically drown in pools, so we've scared parents about pools, and criminalized pools (in terms of liability) without fences and fences around fences. Every child's death is a tragedy, but locking up parents that make decisions that we don't like has done far more damage than good.
Parents told that a small spanking is child abuse. Children with working single mothers going home to an empty house is an unfortunately economic reality, but if some accident happens, we arrest the parent for child endangerment.
Bad things can happen, but the modern small family size combined with an overzealous judiciary and Departments of Child Services has resulted where we want to criminalize anything going wrong.
Instead of blaming parents, look at a legal culture that expects nothing bad to happen to a child and determines a person's entire worth on the success of their children. When families with children had 4-5 children, you expected most to come out alright but occasionally something bad happens. In families of 1-2 children, anything bad is a catastrophe.
Far more harm is being done to children by overprotection than the risks of life. But its hard to blame parents when if they get hit with the 1 in a million accident (that affects dozens of children a year), they can go to jail and have their other children taken away from them.
Let's see, woman that don't breastfeed are told that they endanger their children. Women that do may be criminally charged if they don't follow the social standard in the US... A poor woman was jailed because she couldn't see a Doctor and didn't realize that the child was malnourished from breast-feeding (mathematically rare, but real and if you criminalize 2% of all women)... The breast-feeding ones make the headlines, but the push towards criminalizing parents if kids do anything wrong, including pranks and petty vandalism add up. It's hard to be a parent, because your child is a natural explorer and risk taker, and you normally just have to make sure no unreasonable danger is present. However, if a child falls and hurts himself, you can be sure that child services will show up and decide that anything you failed to do to "child-proof" your home (as if children aren't a natural part of the home) is criminal neglect, it's hard to put the fault entirely on parents.
Being a parent in today's age is really tough, because in the back of your mind IS busybodies that will decide that you are a negligent parent for letting your child see something that is a natural part of life. Parents have been condemned/charged if the child sees them engage in sexual acts, while co-sleeping is a natural if unpopular approach to parenting. These choices are all reasonable, whether I would make them for my child or not, but the criminalization of anything outside the norm for parenting takes some of the fun out of it.
It's not the parents... it's the system of do-gooders that make life hell on parents.
Wikipedia states that they cut about a minute out of the "Big Bird in China" DVD where Big Bird goes around asking if anyone speaks American...
Monstar L
Right now the winners are the PC nanny-staters
"PC nanny staters" is usually a codeword used by the American right to complain about the American left.
But this isn't a left-vs-right issue. The right wing in the US has its very own "political correctness" (namely, conformance with Christian ideals) and its very own "nanny state" policies (ranging from school prayer to extrajudicial renditions).
So, if you want to contribute to this debate, why don't you start by avoiding slogans created by one party to smear the other one? Both the Democrats and the Republicans are to blame for this bullshit.
The trouble is, regardless of what children's program you decide to allow your children to watch, you need to be there with them anyway. This statement has been made time and time again but no one seems to listen. I always thought of shows like Sesame Street, Mr. Rogers, Mr.Wizard, Eureka's Castle, Pinwheel, Square One, The Electric Company, and a host of others as something that I could watch with my parents when I was younger. Honestly, they enjoyed it too because it gave us something to do as a family. The television is not a damn babysitter for chrissake!
Furthermore, truth is truth. The lessons taught by Sesame Street almost four decades ago still ring true today. Counting from one to ten, the alphabet, and Grover's spatial relations (near, far) aren't dated, they're classic. This is yet another example of individuals not wanting to take responsibility for their own actions and leaving it up to the government or similar-level authorities to decide how we should live life. And they have. So what if Cookie Monster had a pipe? Didn't look like he was actually smoking it. Kids knew better in my day anyway. Smoking is bad. Our parents only had to say it once and we listened--mostly because if they caught you smoking you got the crap beaten out of you and you didn't do it. It wasn't fucking abuse...it was discipline! That's not a dirty word! I should also point out that we were smart enough back then to know you couldn't eat a pipe, drop an anvil on someone's head and have them...you know...not die, or paint a picture of a tunnel on a rock and drive through it. Children are smarter than you think...and those very few who would perform these actions are merely subject to Darwin's Law.
If I (or anyone) had been told fifteen or more years ago what society was going to be like today, I do believe it would be scarier than anything the Cold War threw at us as we've gradually slid down the slippery slope of political correctness into an abysmal darkness where no longer can anyone do anything without worrying how it affects just one (or few) individual(s) thoughts, feelings, or condition.
I hate what our society has become. Take some damned responsibility (you lazy-ass fucktards) before 1984 really does arrive!
"I don't see any kids playing in the streets, ever, republican or otherwise. What are the causes behind this?"
Video games, every kid having their own computer, dvd, etc. Being "sent to your room" is no longer punishment - the real task is to get them to come out except for meals.
Protect the children from everything, then send them to Iraq to die.
:).
Sounds like a plan to me
I found a web site with detailed photos of changes done to Richard Scary illustrated children's books. It was fairly minor, but I consider it political correctness run amok in most instances (changes to gender roles, elimination of smoking, etc).
I've made an effort to find used children's books where I can, particularly pre-1970s, as these are unlikely to have been edited and also tend to show a wider range of behaviors and experiences (such as shooting & hunting and other "dangerous" behavior).
One of the few bright spots have been the original Curious George books; we've bought them new and they still show George and/or the Man in The Yellow Hat smoking a pipe. We've bought some of the new ones illustrated in the style of curious George and the only thing that seems to be altered are more non-white characters, which occasionally seem out of place in an apparently 1940s America.
Although in "Curious George at the Baseball Game" there's what I presume is an unintentionally ironic bit of multiculturalism -- George wreaks havoc at a ballgame and gets in trouble with a TV camera woman. She chases him and he hides, and then finds a lost little black boy. The TV camera woman catches them and then realizes the boy is lost and puts their images on the Jumbotron.
The irony is in the caption on the Jumbotron reads "IS THIS YOU BOY OR YOUR MONKEY?", with both George and the boy on the screen. A racist wouldn't have written it better on purpose.
But then released yet another version where they removed the shotgun and replaced it with a flashlight.
...and so, Romeo and Juliet lived happily ever after.
Hey, if they can do it to H.C. Andersen and the Grimm Brothers, they can do it to Shakespeare...
"Okay. Tell me which letter of the alphabet you want me to fire."
They got the message, and everyone's favorite slum got a reprieve.
Frankly, I'm glad (and a little surprised) that they just didn't get rid of those old skits. A lot has changed since they were first filmed.
Seriously, what this "warning label" is really doing is sending a message to the millions of kids-now-adults who grew up with Sesame Street in the 70s: "we have analyzed what this stuff did to you and it ain't pretty." (even if they didn't do the analysis -- which I doubt they did -- that's still the undertone). Gee, thanks! On that note, I can say that gobbling tobacco pipes is really not as uncomfortable as it looks. This generation's award-winning children's programming is the next's NC-17 controversy.
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
I sort of like the idea that great people require "interesting upbringings" and the heavily filtered world we give to kids these days will just make more sheeple. You really do need to teach your kids more then to read, write and simple math. Much of the old stories (brothers grim and other fables) had violence, death, and loss. I think it might scare your children but when they grow up they need to deal with violence, death and loss. Thus they need soem grounding in how to deal with these. The vacuous entertainment they are presented is just too empty.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
I'm impressed to see someone get the point beyond the usual leftwing-rightwing dick woggling. Congratulations... regardless your political views, you have a valid point. Good job with it.
I say this having been a guy who went through the whole attempted feminization/mental castration that the school systems and modern PC world puts boys through. I also say it as someone who made it out (mostly) undamaged by their attempts. I was done with "schooling" by 15 and could've spent the next few years learning to run my parents' business, without missing 90% of the work day wasting away in a place where nothing new was taught or learned. Instead, I was forcefully kept in school because there wasn't enough demand for college level classes and my school had "no earlier than senior year" early graduation policy. While I was there I got to watch a bunch of hypocritical old people (henceforth known as "adults") tell a bunch of bored to death young adults/aka teenagers (henceforth known as "prisoners") how to live, how to think (or rather how not to ask questions that upset the status quo) and to continuously obey the clock, obey the authorities and beg for acceptance, forgiveness and permission to go shit and pee. (I more than once walked out of class to go pee when permission wasn't given. Most of my "compatriots" or "peers" didn't even have the balls to say it out loud... and probably damaged their bladders waiting for an hour to take a piss... but that isn't my problem, now is it? I set the example, they didn't follow it, too bad for them.)
The results are visible today. Those who toed the line and "grew up" are now raising a generation of even WEAKER offspring.
There is an upside. Unfortunately it isn't for those LIVING in the "West" it is for those looking to invade or conquer the "West".
If you are an enemy of the West, all you have to do is wait one more generation, when those who were tough have all died of old age, then come in and conquer the place with Super Soakers and BB guns. Why fight a bloody conflict with today's generation, when you can come in when their kids are grown up, and fight a group of castrated she-men and their wives... neither of which will put up more of a fight than your average comatose TV-zombie.
" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler
Stevie Wonder's performance of Superstition on Sesame Street kicks major ass.
Seems like those days are gone though. I mean, what the hell is wrong with introducing kids to really good music? At nearly 7 minutes, this has to be a Sesame Street record.
Kids do appreciate "adult" music. I was playing Portishead in the car yesterday, and my five year old made me shush so she could listen to Glory Box. And she also likes Daft Punk and Datarock.
Fuck all those "kids songs with stupid lyrics" ;-)
-- Trinity in high heels carrying a whip: The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism
Yes, any biological organism that reproduces is a parent, your argument is silly because it ignores the realities of parenting.
Parenting a toddler is physically exhausting, but generally involved very few decision if the system wasn't involved.
To suggest that the current President and First lady, or the former President and first lady, with 2 adult children or one high school aged child (when they entered office) are indicative of parents of small children (which is what the article was discussing) is absurd. The same is true of most of Congress, state legislatures, and governor's mansions.
People with power, whether they are parents or not, and most are, are generally 40-50, with their youngest child, often a single child or the younger of two, in their late teens to mid-twenties are NOT indicative of people with small children up to age 5, meaning people from the ages of 18 to 35.
The fact is, the baby boomers have pulled every ladder up behind them as they have gotten older. They have made parenting impossible... modern car seats are total disasters because they have to deal with the dangerous cars we've created... Air bags are nice tools for adults, but a disaster for small children. When I was a child I rode in the front seat next to my mother, because car seats could go in the front seat. If I dropped something, my mom could pick it up. My son can't ride in the front seat, so if he drops something, he screams because my wife can't grab something off the floor and hand it to him because he's in the back seat.
However, the baby boomers, when they had small children, had cars built around their needs. As they got older, not only did the market accommodate their new needs (no small children, teenage drivers), but the government changed regulations that made cars safer for older "parents" at the expense of younger parents. People decry the explosion of SUVs, but when you can't fit more than two car seats in the back, because they are no longer safe in the middle seat, and cars with side impact air bags require children up to age five to be in booster seats, what does a young family do? Once you have two kids, if you drive a sedan, you can't transport a friend's child (common things when I was a kid), so you need a mini-van or an SUV to have sufficient seating. If you have a third kid, you can't transport them without a mini-van. My wife carpools to work with a friend, and they pop the two kids into car seats in the back seats. Now both expecting child two, they either have to stop carpooling, or get mini-vans, because cars can't support three children, let alone four.
If you think that the powers that be with one or two children in private school HAVE ANY UNDERSTANDING what a typical family with 2-4 young children go through is absurd, but to say that they are the same because they are parents suggests that President Bush and I have a lot in common because we are both white males, it's silly.
Everyone is a parent or a biological dead-end, roping them all together as those a family with 3 small children HAS ANYTHING IN COMMON with a family with two teenage children (and 15 more years of raises and wealth accumulation behind them) is absurd. The system is run by people with teenage children terrified that anything will happen to them because they only have one or two kids and can't have more. The system is run on top of people with small children that hope nothing goes wrong but lack the resources to do anything about it.
To illustrate the point, consider the following question: If you could guarantee your children would survive to 30, but they would drop 20 IQ points and be financially dependent on your forever, if you are in your 40s and have two teenage children, you'd agree and say that it's because you'd love your children. If you ask a 25 year old couple struggling with the bills with two children and deciding on a third if they'd make that change to avoid a 5% chance of losing a child by 18, you might get a different answer. I love my son to
I don't really get what's so "liberal" about this kind of inane overprotection of children from images of real adults. Sesame Street was a completely liberal invention: government TV to help raise children by presenting a friendly urban street with diverse, idiosyncratic neighbors. Dehumanizing it and refusing to trust parents to help their children interpret the images is pretty weird, but it's not "liberal".
--
make install -not war
I see a lot of this revisionism as pandering to the religious right, and conservatives in general.
Actually no. The religious right is against things they think are wrong. No religion suggests grouchiness is wrong. Also, no mainstream Christian religions have a prohibition on pipe-smoking.
The anti-smoking nazis are almost universally leftists.
They want to control your behavior. They know better than you so they will make your life choices for you. They know what your money should be spent on, so they'll take it from you. They know how every industry should be run, so they regulate it.
They know how every child should be raised, so they're there with bureaucrats to "help" it be done right. Home visits, "soft" censorship of TV, mandatory government education with all alternatives discouraged, textbooks scoured of anything that any interest group could possibly object to, prohibitions on games of "tag" and other "violent" games, and the sexual-harassment panda are all tools their toolbox.
Conservatives support individual freedom and limited government in general. The "religious right" wants to live their lives without having to bow to the totalitarian left's new government rules.
There may have been a time when the "religious right" wanted more than that, but that was before leftists gained control of every institution in society: government, education, media, non-profits, courtrooms, and increasingly corporations and churches. Now folks on the "religious right" are struggling to keep themselves from being made second-class citizens in the new big-government leftist "utopia".
His speech on political correctness, delivered 16 February 1999, Ames Courtroom, Austin Hall, Harvard University Law School:
http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/charltonhestonculturalwar.htm
*I remember my son when he was five, explaining to his kindergarten class what his father did for a living. "My Daddy," he said, "pretends to be people." There have been quite a few of them. Prophets from the Old and New Testaments, a couple of Christian saints, generals of various nationalities and different centuries, several kings, three American presidents, a French cardinal and two geniuses, including Michelangelo. If you want the ceiling re-painted I'll do my best. There always seem to be a lot of different fellows up here. I'm never sure which one of them gets to talk. Right now, I guess I'm the guy.
As I pondered our visit tonight it struck me: if my Creator gave me the gift to connect you with the hearts and minds of those great men, then I want to use that same gift now to re-connect you with your own sense of liberty, your own freedom of thought, your own compass for what is right.*
Dedicating the memorial at Gettysburg, Abraham Lincoln said of America, "We are now engaged in a great Civil War, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure."
Those words are true again. I believe that we are again engaged in a great civil war, a cultural war that's about to hijack your birthright to think and say what lives in your heart. I'm sure you no longer trust the pulsing lifeblood of liberty inside you, the stuff that made this country rise from wilderness into the miracle that it is.
Let me back up a little. About a year or two ago, I became president of the National Rifle Association, which protects the right to keep and bear arms of American citizens. I ran for office. I was elected, and now I serve. I serve as a moving target for the media who've called me everything from "ridiculous" and "duped" to a "brain-injured, senile, crazy old man." I know, I'm pretty old, but I sure Lord ain't senile.
As I've stood in the crosshairs of those who target Second Amendment freedoms, I've realized that firearms are -- are not the only issue. No, it's much, much bigger than that. I've come to understand that a cultural war is raging across our land, in which, with Orwellian fervor, certain accepted thoughts and speech are mandated.
For example, I marched for civil rights with Dr. King in 1963 -- and long before Hollywood found it acceptable, I may say. But when I told an audience last year that white pride is just as valid as black pride or red pride or anyone else's pride, they called me a racist.
I've worked with brilliantly talented homosexuals all my life -- throughout my whole career. But when I told an audience that gay rights should extend no further than your rights or my rights, I was called a homophobe.
I served in World War II against the Axis powers. But during a speech, when I drew an analogy between singling out the innocent Jews and singling out innocent gun owners, I was called an anti-Semite.
Everyone I know knows I would never raise a closed fist against my country. But when I asked an audience to oppose this cultural persecution I'm talking about, I was compared to Timothy McVeigh.
From Time magazine to friends and colleagues, they're essentially saying, "Chuck, how dare you speak your mind like that. You are using language not authorized for public consumption."
But I am not afraid. If Americans believed in political correctness, we'd still be King George's boys -- subjects bound to the British crown.
In his book, "The End of Sanity," Martin Gross writes that
"blatantly irrational behavior is rapidly being established as the norm in almost every area of human endeavor. There seem to be new customs, new rules, new anti-intellectual theories regularly twisted on us --
I started smoking pipe tobacco when I was 24 (2 yrs ago). I had completely forgotten about that Sesame Street bit where Cookie Monster ate the pipe. I had wondered all along why I was tempted to eat my pipes after finishing a bowl, turns out it was Sesame Street's fault. Damn you Sesame Street!
Hehe. It's interesting you should pick that example. Here's one person's interpretation, which pretty much matches what went through my mind when I reread it as an adult:
Now don't go criticizing this (or me) without reading context, which makes the whole thing a lot more interesting. Here, for comparison, is that same person's precis of the story itself:
Now go take another look at Babar.
That Babar link explains that the children surveyed don't care about whatever deeper significance may or may not be linking in the tales - they simply enjoy the stories. Scholarship has moved a long way from the time when it was believed that the messages people take away from a story are the exact same ones that we put in. It's a pity so many people still think that other people are mindless robots and run around trying to protect children from Alistair Cookie. Instead of protecting them from being checked in and out of the TV as though it were a daycare, and a society that in so many ways encourages this kind of parenting and makes it difficult to do otherwise.
Not if the game involves any degree of luck. Sure this does not apply to chess, but it surely would apply to backgammon -- nobody wins them all, no matter how good they are, and it happens quite frequently that someone makes the best possible decision at every point in the game, and still loses. This deserves a "Good Game" -- it acknowledges that there were some things that were out of the player's control that ultimately determined the outcome. Poker of course is particularly prone to this -- all those who play it know exactly what you mean if you say "I was good until the river." Telling someone "Good Game" after he just lost his entire chip stack to a 200:1 runner-runner suckout is hardly condescending.
Most games, including athletic competitions, involve some degree of luck. Environmental variables cannot be controlled, and some of them are not even visible to the players. You throw or kick the ball trusting that the wind will be blowing with the same speed and direction throughout that ball's flight -- what else can you do? When a sudden gust of wind pushes a kick two feet to the right of the upright and you miss the game-winning field goal, that's luck coming into play (unless you're indoors of course). This is why there is a "good" end of the field and a "bad" end to be kicking toward at any point in the game. The difference may not always be large, but it is there, and this is why teams switch sides at various points in the game.
Tennis is likewise prone to the vagaries of shifting and swirling wind, and also to patterns of light and shadow if played by natural light. Baseball has the same issues. Golf is not so prone to tricks of the light, but is very vulnerable to wind and rain -- and yesterday's weather often impacts the condition of the course even though it has changed since. There are no grounds crews to roll out tarps when the rain comes.
"Good Game" is a simple acknowledgment that, had a few variables been changed, the outcome of the contest may well have been different.
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
That's hardly a rebuttal, and actually just spam. I don't want to read what your manufactured religion wants me to read, I want a real Catholic or Christian to give me a piece of their mind.
Explain to me why homosexuality is so bad. Explain to me why the preacher dude wears a dress. Explain to me why I should care about the whole Jesus thing. Explain to me why God matters in today's and tomorrow's society. Most importantly, do it all in a pertinent and rational manner.
Succeed, and I might actually have several good reasons to join. So far all of the answers I've heard, have made absolutely no sense to me. All I see is a bunch of dumb people repeating words that aren't theirs, breaking their own rules, and cowering in a sea of pretty lies that somehow make their empty lives easier to bear. Prove me wrong, and I'll listen.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
I was raised Catholic, so here's my perspective: Homosexuality is not so bad according to Catholics and the Pope (well, John Paul II was very lenient, Benedict is more catious). Many don't believe this, so here's the Pope:
Although the particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin, it is a more or less strong tendency ordered to an intrinsic moral evil, and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder...It is deplorable that homosexual persons have been and are the object of violent malice in speech or in action. Such treatment deserves condemnation from the Church's pastors wherever it occurs. - Pope Benedict XVI
Condemnation of male homosexuality (girls don't get much of a mention in the bible and are free to munch carpet) extends from rules proscribed in Leviticus, which also call for the stoning to death of those that work on the sabbath and many other antiquated and unobserved rituals. Catholics study the bible the way it was meant to be studied, not literally but interpretively. Also, the new testament tells us that the old ways need not be heeded, only that we should accept Christ and his message, though others interpret this differently. Either way, we have stopped condemning sabbath violators to death as well as homosexuals.
The priest wears a robe as a part of a ritual symbolizing his loss of individuality among other things, which is also why the Pope often changes his name upon ordination - he sacrifices his individuality to become a representative of Christ on earth.
The whole Jesus thing is simply that he cast off the old rules (ie. Leviticus) to say there is only one rule, love your neighbour as you love yourself. You should care because what the world needs now, is love, sweet love.
Religion matters in this day and age because it is still a great way to explore the metaphysical. God matters because humanity matters, and God is just a metaphor for humanity as a whole.
All this said I am strongly (devoutly?) atheist, as I believe there is no mythical creator deity but simply that we are all gods, whose individual and collective achievements create mythical gods as time goes on. I do believe there is more to this universe than matter and time alone, such that science, numbers and even language are powerless to describe. That said, I read the works of the prophets in the bible, the koran, as I do the acts of the gods in the epic of Gilgamesh simply to enhance my wisdom with that of ages past. There is no need to condemn the bible if you just look at it as a nice poetry book, just condemn the acts of those who use ambiguous poetry as justification of their actions.