"Why did I stop midway through episode 2 [of 'True Detective']? It wasn't the sex. It was the mumbling."

"Between McConaughey and the other guy who looks too much like him (Woody Harrelson), it was way too much 2 guys mumbling. This show could not fill the aching gap left by 'Breaking Bad,' which we watched, all 60 episodes in just about exactly 60 days. In 'Breaking Bad,' not only was it easy to tell Aaron Paul and Bryan Cranston apart, but the 2 actors frequently spoke quite clearly."

That's what I wrote yesterday, and a reader sent me this spoof from "The Soup" which had us laughing here at Meadhouse at 5:50 a.m.:

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"Don’t get me wrong: I love a nice bouncy rack. And if a show has something smart to say about sex, bring it on."

But Emily Nussbaum has "turned prickly, and tired of trying to be... the Cool Girl: a good sport when something smells like macho nonsense."

She's writing about "True Detective," in a New Yorker piece titled "Cool Story, Bro/The shallow deep talk of 'True Detective.'" That's from March 3rd, before the season finale, which she writes about a week later in "The Disappointing Finale of 'True Detective.'"

I was reading those 2 things this morning after getting halfway through the second episode last night. I'd watched episode 1 in it's entirety a few days before. I'd noticed the critical attention the show was getting, and Matthew McConaughey had just won the Oscar, so I gave it a chance. Why did I stop midway through episode 2? It wasn't the sex. It was the mumbling. Between McConaughey and the other guy who looks too much like him (Woody Harrelson), it was way too much 2 guys mumbling. This show could not fill the aching gap left by "Breaking Bad," which we watched, all 60 episodes in just about exactly 60 days. In "Breaking Bad," not only was it easy to tell Aaron Paul and Bryan Cranston apart, but the 2 actors frequently spoke quite clearly.

"It is an article of faith among the religious right in America that we are in the midst of a war on religion (in which 'religion' usually means Christianity)..."

... but it's not true, argues Lawrence M. Krauss, who is a physicist and the director of the Origins Project. Along with Richard Dawkins, he's in a new documentary about atheists called "The Unbelievers." He notes that a movie about atheism isn't going to draw much of an audience, while there are some big blockbusters that are quite religious, notably the upcoming "Noah" and "Heaven Is For Real."

Ironically, Krauss is a scientist pushing science and rationality, but the evidence for his argument isn't very sound. Those who say that Hollywood is antagonistic to religion do not,  I think, premise their argument on the number and importance of movies with big religious themes versus movies about atheism. I think these people are looking at all the movies as well as the statements of movie people and seeing pervasive secularism.

No one can fault Hollywood for recognizing that religion, like violence, is often profitable at the box office. But this logic leads to a prevailing bias that reinforces a pervasive cultural tilt against unbelief and further embeds religious myths in the popular consciousness. It marginalizes those who would ridicule these myths in the same manner as we ridicule other aspects of our culture, from politics to sex.

Krauss is conflating irrational belief and religion. Of course, movie stories are full of irrational belief. These are stories of heroes and villains, supernatural disasters and magical solutions. It's fantasy. Even when the stories are sort of realistic, there's usually an element of new-ageish belief in one's true self and the power of dreams or whatever unscientific nonsense the scriptwriters think will make us laugh or cry or tingle. It's not a science lecture. But that doesn't make it traditional religion, and I think traditional religionists tend to deplore these substitutes for religion. Generally, movies don't invite us into either a life of old-school religion or science.

Krauss riffs on Matthew McConaughey's Oscar acceptance speech, which you can watch (after an ad) here. That's only one data point, of course, but how truly religious was it? Who knows? It was weird and folksy, and also silly and self-centered:

"We use transgender as an umbrella term that includes people who are transsexual, cross-dressers or otherwise gender non-conforming."

A definition in the sidebar of an article titled "The Heart Wants What It Wants" — supertitled "We Are as We Are" and "Dating Trans?," which is teased on the front page of this new website Ozy under the heading "Tricky Topic: Dating a Transgender Person/Have attitudes about the fluidity of gender migrated much on the T in LGBT?"

For a website with a 3-letter name, that's an awful lot of titles, dragging us this way and that. What caught my eye — among the many things clamoring to catch eyes — was that side-bar definition that I used for the post title. That made me think: Who's not under that umbrella? Only people who are gender-conforming, which in my book — who wants to be a conformist, a gender stereotype? — is an insult.

"Matthew McConaughey Cannot Stand Up By Himself."

Ha.