movielib

Showtime, 9:00pm CDT. Repeated at 10:00pm CDT.

Penn and Teller return for a fourth season. Season premier:

I have always said the Boy Scouts can discriminate as they do (as much as I disapprove) because they are a private organization. I have known they get some government money but I didn't think it was of such significance that it should make a difference.

I'll be interested in P's&T's case.

It appears that early reports about the show expanding to an hour are false. The show is 30 minutes as always.

Next week: Prostitution.

Giantrobo

Finally, a show I can get behind.

DeanoBKN

Glad to see them back!

Michael Ballack

kvrdave

Let's just hope that this season is a vast improvement over last season.

Groucho

Here's the list of topics this season:

• Boy Scouts
• Astrology
• Capital Punishment
• sexual celibacy/abstinence-only sex education
• cryptozoology
• Ground Zero and what has come from it.
• Numbers (Surveys and polling)
• Pets being like people
• Prostitution
• Reparations
• Two-party political dominance

movieking

Sounds like it could be a good season. I am going to start watching some episodes from the first two seasons again shortly, since I have really started to miss them. Glad to see I'll have some new ones to throw in there as well.

Breakfast with Girls

It really is. Otherwise, the Boy Scouts are a fantastic organization. I voluntarily left one requirement shy of becoming an Eagle Scout because I became an atheist that year (at age 14) and wasn't willing to take an oath that I didn't believe in. (For those that don't know, the Eagle Scout ceremony is very religious, much more than the normal Scout oaths.)

Morf

They can be, but they don't have to. As an Eagle Scout, I can vouch that my Eagle ceremony wasn't any more religious than one of our regular award ceremonies. It was held at the local Methodist chuch, primarily because it had space for the guests.

Breakfast with Girls

Ah. Mine would have been, anyway.

Giantrobo

Hmm, kinda scraping the bottom of the barrel with some of those.

Deftones

Very good episode.

Red Dog

I'll probably wait a month or so to order SHOW and hope that SHOW/Comcast has the previous eps in On Demand.

movielib

Pretty good episode. I think they are trying not to repeat the laziness and sloppiness of much of last year, even when they had a good topic.

The Scouts are clearly discriminatory (nothing we didn't know) and, I think, reprehensible in their gay and atheist exclusion. They get more from government than I thought (mostly in the use of public buildings for free or virtually free) and that should be stopped as long as they discriminate the way they do. Still, I would not overturn the Supreme Court decision as they are predominantly a private group.

I had no idea the Mormons had gotten so involved.

As for the season, I think the line-up of topics is quite good. Aside from Pets Being Like People (which appears to me to be the lamest - but it could be funny), I don't think there's much in the way of weak-ass topics like about half of last year. I expect a vast improvement over Season 3.

BigDan

I didn't get to see the episode and don't know if this was mentioned, but when the Supreme Court decided a few years ago that public buildings couldn't discriminate against various groups wanting to use their space (i.e. if you open up the building for use by one group, you have to open it up for use for every group), it became very difficult to prevent a particular group from using a public space regardless of whether they discriminate without shutting down use of the space for everyone.

IIRC, anyway.

das Monkey

Eh, it was OK. I'm really tired of their "BS Expirements", though. That stuff with the 3 gay guys vs the 3 straight guys in knot-tying and tent-building clearly doesn't make much of a point (and they so much as admit it), and it just wastes screen time. They've been doing more and more of that nonsense since the beginning of last season.

I too didn't realize the Mormons were so involved. Hell, I didn't really know how religious it supposedly is. I was in Cub Scouts and Webelos, and religion was never brought up (I know it's not the same as BSA). Maybe it was an issue behind the scenes, but I certainly had no idea. That stuff was pretty informative and a tad disturbing.

Still, I'm not quite sure they're back to form yet.

das

Groucho

In the 1980's I moved from Colorado to Utah. The town I was in was small, so the only Boy Scout troop I could join was associated with a local Mormon ward. It was quite a culture shock since my old troop was run by parents out of the school. Religion was a big focus, and it tied back in to other Church activities. As a non-Mormon I was made to feel very much like an outsider, and eventually quit the scouts altogether.

MovieExchange

So what the hell happened to the season 3 DVD set?

movielib

My guess is that it is being held up over the controversial Holier Than Thou episode which has been MIA from "On Demand" since a couple of days after it aired. Just a guess.

kvrdave

The "experiment" was pretty lame. I basically agreed with them on the issue, but it wasn't much that I got very excited about. Probably because I always thought the Boy Scouts were pretty lame, anyway.

movielib

I agree about the "experiments." Occasionally they do work though. The Bottled Water one and the Signs from Heaven one were good but many of them are pretty pointless.

I just don't think they were so sloppy all over the map like last year. I think this episode was fairly coherent and put together more systematically. I certainly didn't feel as though they screwed up a potentially good topic like Endangered Species from last year.

Cusm

I feel the same way, and especially after watching Survivor Pearl Island and Lillian the scout master.

clckworang

Yeah, the experiments can be a little hit and miss. When they are good, they are very good. I still love the one from "the best" episode where they serve those people really cheap food and pass it off as really expensive stuff. But this time, I just didn't think it proved much of a point. But overall, I thought it was a good ep. Then again, I don't think I have seen anything from seasons 1 or 2, but I have been catching up with what they have on OnDemand.

Red Dog

Ah - so it was the Mormons behind all this. Now that explains a lot of the BSA nonsense.

I've always said that as a private organization, the BSA has the right to discriminate. However, the government financial support of the BSA is simply appalling. I had no idea what kind of money was involved.

at them ripping on that Hans guy, particularly at the end when he didn't help the old lady across the street.

Grimm1

The Mormon church uses Boy Scouts as their male youth program. So pretty much ever young male that is active in the church is automatically enrolled in Boy Scouts. But as mentioned above scouts in a Mormon troop aren't really the same as you would find in most other troops. It is kind of a mixture of church and scout related activities with the church always having the higher priority. The church also pays for the yearly dues for each scout so you could imagine that's probably a pretty sizable payment they get every year from the LDS church.

From what I've been told the church as a whole withdrew somewhat from the BSA when the gay and atheist stuff was being fought in the court. I guess this was just to flex their muscles a little to show how much they effect attendance at the county and statewide events. They also made it known that if the scouts allowed gays and atheists that they would withdraw completely from BSA and come up with their own youth program.

I'm sure the LDS church is not the only reason the BSA has a ban on gay and atheist scouts but it probably had a lot to do with it.