Penn & Teller: Bull!

Anyone get a chance to watch this Penn & Teller offering on Showtime?

The title is actually Bulls**t! A referrence to the many things that are just plain hokey, such as talking to the dead, fortune tellers, alien abductions, and the like.

Granted, I don't really care at all for Penn and Teller. In fact, I find them to be annoying and exceedingly obnoxious. However, curiosity got the best of me, so I watched one of their half-hour shows tonight. It was about Environmental Hysteria, featuring the blind leading the blind in a protest march against global warming and species extinction. A gathering of the minds, or mindless, as it was pointed out. Good intentions, but scientifically incorrect information that they were acting on. The real topping to the cake included ongoing interview cuts to Kate Loewe, the chief speaker and activist for Global Justice. Not to mention the conjured up petition against dihydrogen oxide, a major component of acid rain, a major contributor to erosion, and where accidental inhalation can kill you... in other words: H20 - water. Hundreds of marchers and protestors signed the petition. This was pure comedy in itself.

I don't have the words to describe this, but what Penn & Teller have put together in this little show is something I have been wanting to yell out at the top of my lungs for a long time. It's a no-nonsense, direct approach to challenging some of the baloney that we tend to encounter, the type of baloney supported by many all too trusting members of the public.

I highly recommend catching a glimpse of this show. There are some truly funny moments in there.

-Jim

No TV, but sounds like this show is worth watching.
Everynow and then I think about getting TV but then I watch a few minutes at a store and remember why we don't have one.

Wits'End

I'm impressed that you don't have TV. I don't know anyone that doesn't have it in this day and age. I have a Dish satellite and can barely find anything worthwhile to watch out of 150 channels. If it wasn't for war coverage on FoxNews, MSNBC or CNN, my TV would have been off for the last month.

Marty

Do a search on "Cold Reading" and you'll get an earful. Anybody can learn to be a psychic /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif There is a great article in one of the skeptical mags, sorry I can't find it right now, following the woman who was trained by them for that show and how guilty she felt as she was lying to the folks who were crying about lost loves and whatnot that she really didn't know anything about. GREAT reading for anybody who might be taken in.

Don't get me wrong, I still think life and the universe holds lots of mystery and fascinating things, but the lady with the bad accent that you pay $3.99 a minute to talk to on the phone is not one of them!

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Wits' End said:
No TV, but sounds like this show is worth watching.
Every now and then I think about getting TV but then I watch a few minutes at a store and remember why we don't have one.

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I was without a TV in college for several years and never missed it. Only have a TV with antennae now no cable or anything. Barely watch it. If I really want to see certain episodes or special events from cable (very rare) I just download them, if possible, and watch on my computer.

Think I might do that with the Pen and Teller special.

Although now I spend way too many hours on the computer so I don't know which is worse. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/icon3.gif

Well, if you find a place to download it can you post it here please?

Sure, but I get most of my downloads from Kazaa Lite. I'll post the sig2dat link if I can get it.

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Marty Weiner said:
...snip...I'm impressed that you don't have TV....snip...

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Marty,
I own one, but I almost never watch it - other than the first, oh, hour of the war, the last time I watched TV was keeping my daughter company during the Thanksgiving parade! I probably watch, oh, 8 hours of TV a year

The JOKE? I work for one of the major TV networks, and it's OK to have the TV on at work. Unless it's a show I'm involved in (about every 2-3 years), I don't watch!

This show is definitely worth a watch but not for children.
So far I've seen their shows on psychics and communicating with the dead, Feng Shui, second-hand smoking, breast and ***** enlargement, end of the world predictions, bottled water, alien adbuction, and child rearing.
Lots of laughs while they expose all of the junk science.
And for the non P&T fans, the show is really only hosted and narrated by them. Most of the segments are interviews or hidden camera segments without P&T.

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GJW said:
...
And for the non P&T fans, the show is really only hosted and narrated by them. Most of the segments are interviews or hidden camera segments without P&T.

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Good point! I don't think I would watch the show otherwise. Penn & Teller have a limited amount of camera time during the show. I was just suprised to see the amount of common sense that was being applied to, as GJW puts it, "junk science." Pure comedy...

I just saw the one on Ouija boards... that episode is a keeper. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif

-Jim

I don't have cable here, and only get 1 channel (KCPQ-13 Fox) so I just have the TV on for background sound during the morning & day, and maybe watch Voyager and DS-9 weekdays at night.

I'd guess that Pen & Teller might show up on HBO or the Comedy Channel once in awhile, but I've never actually seen them. They did a commercial for something (a telephone company, perhaps) a while back, so I'm pretty sure I know what they look like, but I've never seen them do a show.

Sounds like the South Park episode where one of the boys goes up against that guy on the Sci-Fi channel. The other side, or somehting like that, where he talks to people's dead family. All guess work for cold reading.

It was a funny episode.

-Jason

Never was a big fan of P&T, but anyone who exposes the PC-crowd's ignorant sheeple-mentality and the demogaguery of their so-called leaders have my vote.

Gonna program the old Tivo DVR to record Bullsh**[/i] tonight. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif

I have to say I have meet Penn and Teller in person and they are actually quite nice and reasonable people. They did 4 shows here in 2 days so we worked a lot together. It was really weird to be talking to Teller about technical needs and then later at dinner having them joke and talk about normal things. Penn is really tall, he is a bit odd and loud, but Teller is very normal.

I have met many many "stars" in this profession and they were some of the nicest.

Now I wish we had cable, we also don't watch much TV and where we are there are only 4 channels.

Plenty of similar online resources for Skeptics. Regardless of how accurate they are, I'm glad there is a vector through the mass media for showing people the world isn't as it's portrayed through most of the information they ingest.

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Brock said:
Penn is really tall...

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Yes he is!
I always assumed that he was average and that Teller was short but Teller is around 5'11" and Penn is 6'5" at least.
And both are as nice as can be.
I saw Penn playing bass at a local club and took some photographs of him which I took to their show later.
Penn was very, very gracious when I presented the photos to him after the show and the two stayed around until all autographs were signed and everyone that had wanted to meet them had.
The obnoxious stage bit is just that -- a bit.

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Marty Weiner said:
Wits'End

I'm impressed that you don't have TV. I don't know anyone that doesn't have it in this day and age. I have a Dish satellite and can barely find anything worthwhile to watch out of 150 channels. If it wasn't for war coverage on FoxNews, MSNBC or CNN, my TV would have been off for the last month.

Marty

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Off topic but, you don't care for the History, Discovery, National Geographic, or the Learning channel(s) at all?

Back before Bill Maher REALLY became an diot and got booted off TV, I used to tune in to Politically Incorrect so that I could get my daily dose of yelling at the TV and Bill. Penn was on as a guest one night. I was VERY impressed with his political knowledge and how articulate he was. He's conservative!! /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/thumbsup.gif ... and he also revealed that he has a Prince Albert... /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/ooo.gif

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guncollector said:
Never was a big fan of P&T, but anyone who exposes the PC-crowd's ignorant sheeple-mentality and the demogaguery of their so-called leaders have my vote.

Gonna program the old Tivo DVR to record Bullsh**[/i] tonight. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif

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i heard tivo tracks what you watch like internet spybots. have you heard this?

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tkl said:
i heard tivo tracks what you watch like internet spybots. have you heard this?

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Basically true.
It keeps track of things that you record and then on it's own, it records other things that it thinks you might like.
It also uses this info to receive targeted commercials and infomercials.
Nothing makes you have to watch them but you do have to go in and delete what you don't want.
I believe this whole feature can be turned off.