Penn & Teller's Bullshit!

I really enjoyed "Penn & Teller Get Killed" when I was like 13/14, but then again, I was like 13/14

i remember being like "oh wow" about all the references to the Velvet Underground they threw in there...

Yeah I'm pretty confused like everyone else as to what the point of the show is. I like Penn & Teller and think they're funny, but they only make half of the show funny, with the other half being some kind of patched-together debate between a well-spoken professor or scientist and some drugged-out halfwit they pull from the street, it's so intellectually dishonest that not even the hardcore skeptics can agree with the show's message. Which is too bad because I like these guys. But mostly the show just makes me mad, I wish they had like half the diligence of, say, Mythbusters.

i mean i think its biggest problem is that it shouldn't have gone six seasons. like it was pretty funny in the first two seasons watching them take down low hanging fruit like faith healers and psychics in the sense of "here's how these scams work."

i mean but also, just saw the list of eps, and like control+F "scientology" not found

i mean i think its biggest problem is that it shouldn't have gone six seasons. like it was pretty funny in the first two seasons watching them take down low hanging fruit like faith healers and psychics in the sense of "here's how these scams work."

OTM, I more or less jumped off around season 4

Ohhh man, "Penn and Teller Get Killed" was so bad. I saw it at age 20, but I probably would have liked it more at 13 & 14 when I was their #1 fan from their PBS show of my childhood and from their book How to Play With Your Food and How to Play in Traffic. It was just the worst "aren't I the coolest" shit, just the total shit Vegas ego of Penn Jillette jizzing in spurts for 90 minutes. Total fantasy of how they wish they were. The climax is Penn ranting at a psychic surgeon (in a public square iirc?) and taking him down with grand success in a storm of spittle-drenched vituperation. Big close-up of his pointing finger. Just ridiculous. But I still enjoy both of those books.

I am actually still a huge P&T nerd. I watched that British magic contest of theirs and I couldn't believe how pleasantly diplomatic Penn was being. It was a fun show, too – the cell phone fish trick was gross/awesome, and the bolo tie card guy was too great. Not sure why there were so many ppl going the neoclassical route when the goal was to fool ppl, but I appreciated it.

A guy did a trick from ancient Egypt ffs!

It was mainly because Magicians rarely get onto TV over here, so it got PT onto screens here, and also showed that there's roomfor more than one magician on TV (prev: Paul Daniels, now=Derren Brown)

I thought it was nice – Vegas could use some gentle 3,000 year old magic.

Abbbottt, that PBS special was so important for me growing up too. How old r u

I am 27.

Was it Penn & Teller: Don't Try This At Home or another one? (I'm 31)

It was their TV show "Behind the Scenes" abt art and shit!

It was defs a for kids show, too. I think my mom still thinks of them as kid show hosts.

Painting and Drawing: David Hockney, Wayne Thiebaud and Robert Gil De Montes
DAVID HOCKNEY, the world-famous artist whose work spans painting, drawing, book illustrations, photo-collage and set design, shows how modern artists play with the conventions of perspective, illusion of depth and the vanishing point. Artist WAYNE THIEBAUD shows how volume, shape, feeling and movement can transform a simple line into art. And MATT GROENING, creator of The Simpsons and Futurama, demonstrates the art of comic strips. ROBERT GIL DE MONTES, the celebrated painter, relies on the imaginative and unusual use of color to create art that reflects a keen awareness of his Mexican roots.

I want to watch this again!

lol i thought for a sec that was a bullshit episode abt art

also these guys are libertarians so basically, scum of the earth

p & t had a v good trick

first they told u to get a blank vhs ready to record

then they thought u how to get someone to pick a specific card from the deck, say ♣8

they said to invite your friend over, do this trick, get the card wrong, be sad & say "oh well, whatchu wanna do now, let's watch some tv i guess"

at that point u secretly play the footage they are about to tell u to record, which was a highly recognizable & serious newsreader finishing off a legit-sounding report and then saying, "and this just in: was this your card?" *holds up a GIANT ♣8 card out of nowhere*

I was infuriated by the episode where they claim that tap water tastes the same as bottled water. I can taste chlorine, you fat fuck.

they thought u oh my goodness

I remember seeing their book, and there was a page in it that had a fake recipe for some lovely looking dinner, except the result would be nothing like as successful if it was followed.

Basically, it was a prank for you to leave this somewhere where someone nosy would see it, go *ooh* and make a copy of it and do it at home, to failed result.

Made me think, "Where do these guys live?"

xp What has Penn's size got to do with his loathing of bottled water?

Just been watching P & Get Killed in youtube - the whole thing is there but I doubt you'd get past part 1. It's exactly how Abbott describes it. And they look spookily young. I did enjoy the Fool Us prog though, mostly because it seemed Penn had brought the rage down a notch or two. All the card tricks were amazing.

Apart from the guy that implied that he'd implanted a suggestion in JRoss' mind, who Penn called out (did he shout Bullshit or just Bull, there?) and pretty much explained the trick, all the acts got respect for what they did.

I guess Penn keeps the rage for people on the "bullshit" show trying to defraud people.

I remember seeing the ad for the P&T film in my (then current) copy of the "What Goes On" Velvet Underground App Soc mag, and wondered why we didn't get cool film like that over here.

has anyone seen the vegas show?

I agree that water matters. It matters when you drink it straight, and when you make coffee, and beer, and whiskey, and... water has taste, and it matters. HOWEVER they're right that bottled water is bullshit, at least the way we market and consume it most of the time.

Yeah but I can tell the difference between tap water and purified bottled water, and I suspect everyone else can too.

Yeah but a lot of bottled water is from municipal water supplies.

People think they can taste the difference between a lot of things, but blind tests usually prove otherwise.

Almost always, in fact. The latest Freakonomics podcast was about wine. Just guess what they found.

More about wine: http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2008/11/expensive_wine_1.php

Ummm, even in a blind taste test I am sure I could tell the difference between "spring water" (which is usually just tap water, I guess) and purified water. I buy the 24-packs for home and used to accidentally get the spring water every once in a while before noticing how it tasted like tap water every time (you know, without really knowing what was on the label). It's not a placebo effect or anything. They literally do taste different.

No argument, they do. I know Houston tap water when I taste it, for sure. Ew.

But part of the experiment, for both the water and the wine, was presenting ordinary, inexpensive, or even outright crappy product to people as if it were the finest of the fine, and that influences people's opinion ENORMOUSLY, in every experiment ever done, like, in history.

Yeah but I don't know exactly what that proves. Most people who buy expensive wine do it for the image, like I would argue if you're on a date, you would get the expensive wine for reasons that have nothing to do with how it actually tastes. Our brains just naturally assume they taste better...that they don't doesn't really matter too much. Also, I am sure that if we blind tested, say, 128 kbps vs. 192 kbps MP3s on $20 headphones, most people would say the one labelled 192 'sounds better'. Actually, even on a good stereo I don't think most of your standard music fanatics could tell between say, 256 VBR and lossless. It doesn't really prove anything.

It proves humans are delusional. Which is good to remember if you deal with humans at all.

i'm still not sure that vinyl sounds better than CD tbh

Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't.

It doesn't if the CD is mastered properly (hint: most of them aren't)

I've heard vinyl rips to mp3 that sound better than the CD, or more flattering anyway. If you play around with wav files on a computer, you can hear sample bit-depth (word length?) empirically affect the perceived quality of the sound way more than sample frequency.

(these are all very important tradeoffs to someone wanting to fit as many high-quality-sounding fart noises on a floppy disk as possible)

p & t had a v good trick

first they told u to get a blank vhs ready to record

then they thought u how to get someone to pick a specific card from the deck, say ♣8

they said to invite your friend over, do this trick, get the card wrong, be sad & say "oh well, whatchu wanna do now, let's watch some tv i guess"

at that point u secretly play the footage they are about to tell u to record, which was a highly recognizable & serious newsreader finishing off a legit-sounding report and then saying, "and this just in: was this your card?" *holds up a GIANT ♣8 card out of nowhere*

Ha! They have so many variations on this. In How to Play with Your Food it was always 3 of clubs. They had a little pattern you could print out to send to your pizza place to design a 3 of clubs pizza to be delivered. "Is this your card?" Also they made a lot of "pizza trick" jokes which I didn't get at age 13 (also popcorn trick! rude stuff! I didn't even know erections existed!). They said a friend of theirs got a tattoo of three of clubs on the palm of his hand to do this trick. P hardcore!

I remember seeing their book, and there was a page in it that had a fake recipe for some lovely looking dinner, except the result would be nothing like as successful if it was followed.

Basically, it was a prank for you to leave this somewhere where someone nosy would see it, go *ooh* and make a copy of it and do it at home, to failed result.

Made me think, "Where do these guys live?"

lol – the recipe had you mix vinegar and baking powder. The best thing about this is you were supposed to fax it to people.

I like their stupid tricks and bad jokes so, so much better than I like "Bullshit"!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIU6ZNBxIRo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSiI0N_fjas

"Three of clubs" is classic, being an easily recogniseable 'medium' card

not like, say, nine or ten of hearts, where conj goes "Is this your card" and the guy goes "um, maybe, let me count the hearts..... yep!"

The point with bottled water isnt the taste, its the fact coca-cola amatil et al claim you have to buy bottled water because your tap water is full of germs and chemicals.

BULLSHIT. It is not, if you live in a westernised city. Bottled water otoh sits in storage and parking lots and shops in the sun and gets all gross and has been shown in tests to have far more ecoli and etc than tap water.

Dont buy bottled water, any of you. Just dont. It is a crime against everything, a problem created by coca cola to make money.

Then again, the first time I made a disprin with bottled water, I was like "whoa, it actually dissolves! As opposed to "go all clumpy and have to be stirred"".

The point with bottled water isnt the taste, its the fact coca-cola amatil et al claim you have to buy bottled water because your tap water is full of germs and chemicals.

Where do they claim this?

"In designing DASANI to be the best tasting water, we start with the local water supply, which is then filtered to remove impurities."

"Since [Aquafina's] state-of-the-art HydRO-7 purification system removes substances most other bottled waters leave in, you get pure water and perfect taste every time."

"Does Aquafina remove the substances like bacteria or gaseous compounds?
Our state-of-the-art HydRO-7™ purification system is designed to remove dissolved solids and organic compounds that may be present in the water. The reverse osmosis process we use removes these organic compounds, but we also employ other steps such as carbon filtration, ozonation, and Ultra Violet (UV) light as additional safeguards."

"Does the Aquafina purification process remove pharmaceuticals?

The Aquafina purification process uses the best technology available to purify water. It is an accredited and validated process that meets or exceeds government standards and has been verified by independent experts.

The seven-step RO-7 process includes reverse osmosis, ozonation and carbon filtration. Each of these steps - even individually - is designed to remove manufactured molecules such as pharmaceuticals, as well as naturally occurring substances such as heavy metals. When these steps are used together, as they are in our proprietary RO-7 process, they further ensure the purity of Aquafina."