First, The Secret has been promoted since, perhaps, 1936, when Dale Carnegie first published How to Win Friends and Influence People. Practically all of the self-help books published since then - some of which do have good things to say - have sprung from that. Just like Christianity (which was basically unconventional Jewish philosophy mixed with some Eastern mysticism) ideas from other sources have been mixed and added to Carnegie's stuff.

And yes, from what I've seen, this is a lousy rendition of the same ideas. That doesn't invalidate the ideas, but you don't have to drink from a polluted source. There are a lot of gurus out there, and you should look at them rationally. At least for me, this self-visualization is only the first step. The next, which many self-help people don't like to say too loud, is that you have to get off your ass and DO something.

Oprah isn't saying that at all, and yes, she's gotten very mercantile and materialist over the years. (The TV station where I work took a risk putting her on in the afternoons when her show first started...but they've been reaping rewards ever since. So has Oprah, and her Christmas "Favorite Things" shows would be enough to make a Scrooge out of Jesus.)

At least, at this point, Oprah hasn't asked her fans to drink the Kool-Aid. But it's a good idea to keep an eye on her, and Birkenhead joins a lot of people who are suspicious of Oprah's power and influence.

Football is for beer-swilling idiots. And it's dying faster than baseball. (Funny that Havrilesky, Ms. Starbucks, is interested in a sport that's just an excuse for selling overpriced beer. But I digress.)

There's a reason that ABC dropped Monday Night Football and threw it to their low-rent cousins at ESPN. The sport is no longer widely popular. It's more than the bunch of abusive, raping, gun-carrying millionaires on the field. Today there isn't a Howard Cosell to comment on it and try to keep it honest. The only people in the broadcast booth are paid-off media whores, there to praise the sport and its corporate owners and sponsors.

When it became difficult to get tickets to regular games, and impossible for civilians to get Super Bowl tickets (I think that happened in Super Bowl 2) the sport was no longer a sport of the people. It had become the rich masturbating for the rest of the rich, leaving ordinary people out of the party.

High school football is the junior version of this. I spent three semesters of college in a little mid-Missouri town, and the only thing the town had any pride in was its damned high school team, playing outside my bedroom window, depriving me of sleep, cheering This Year's Great White Hope. That guy, the quarterback of course, was the only one in the graduating class with a chance for a job better than gas station attendant. All that angst and hero adulation for a kid who happened to be the most violent punk in the school.

So, yes, Havrilesky, the big tough teens that seem to turn you all warm and runny aren't beloved by us normal human beings. In high school many of us were beaten up by them. Some of us were raped by them. (Males too). And it's harder to fall in love with their TV versions than the sluts of Wysterectomy Lane or the yuppies of What About Brian. So you'll have to just treasure that previously-worn jockstrap after this show is deservedly cancelled.

This is awfully late in the thread, and won't be read, but what the hell, here goes.

First off, "I was beaten up too," you're a coward by not using your name. Are you afraid I'll come after you, slam your head against a cinder block wall and go over your face with a cheese grater because you posted something nasty about me? Sorry, but that fate is reserved for Heather Havrilesky. After it's done to that supporter of rape and abuse, Anne Rice. (And that's not saying I'd do it; I'm not a physical guy.)

Now, as to what you said...if it's so lucrative, why did ABC drop it? Its ratings on TV were dropping. It was no longer competition on Monday night. The economics of the game you seem to love are complicated. (For instance, most teams blackmail their cities into building them big arenas, using the taxpayers' money, which never gets repaid and which doesn't make any compensating money for the city's businesses.) The only factor I wished to point out was that TV doesn't like running sports like football any more.

Second, it's the culture of violence of which football is the most "respectable" part that I complain about. To my eyes (which probably aren't yours, 'cause you have your NFL beer goggles on) they're thugs given pretty uniforms and salaries. At least when there was a Cosell, there was some discussion of this factor of the sport. (And Sports Illustrated, even to a dedicated foe of sports, has a high quantity of the most incisive writing in print today.) Nobody cares anymore, because most of the fans of football just don't know how to read.

Those high school games kept me up all night. This being a small town, there was nothing else to do but study and sleep after going to the boarding house after school. (Rolla, Missouri, if you need a specific reference.) That was the big moment for those yahoos.

Finally, I didn't say I was beaten up by a black football player. I was damn near raped by one. That is the essence of football, and high school; the timid and intelligent being killed and maimed by the football players and their whores. If you didn't see it, "I was beaten up too," you're not very perceptive.