The late Alan Dundes really skewered the football world with his analysis of football as ritualized, homosexual combat games. While the football world vigorously denied the idea, a lot of academics and common viewers though it more then a plausible thought.

He wrote it a long time ago...yet if players are still piling on, slapping each others butts and starting each play by putting both hands up another guy's ass...yeah, it's more then sort of gay. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

I played high school sports (not football) at a big California sports factory that produced a few Heisman winners. I recall making fun of the football players for the ass-grabbing and their reaction was not only highly agitated but highly homophobic. Lucky for me they couldn't beat me up but a few tried.

If today's high school football players are better about it (their own gayness in the game) now -- good for them. Maybe homophobia is on the decline and that's a good thing.

BTW, wouldn't it be more appropriate for Eric Anderson, of Bath University, to study the gayness of rugby? My god, if there's a sport to shame American football with it's gayness, symbolic or real, it has to be rugby given its repressed Victorian backdrop. It's too bad Alan Dundes isn't around to analyze rugby...but then there was probably no goat to have doing so at least not in the U.S.

Or the article was written by a Clintonite.

Oh sure it's a tongue-in-cheek laugher but big bad Bill Clinton is the hands down winner. He'd crush Judi Giuliani with a smile and a wink while copping a feel right in front of Rudy and no one would the better. This is exactly why Salon did show Bill's photo, it would have been too obvious.

My god I miss Bill Clinton as POTUS. There was once a surplus, the economy was humming, there wasn't a brutal, endless/needless war (and $$$ drain), Kyoto would be in effect and my god, the ultimate Top Spouse would spawn forward and eventually take his very job. It doesn't get any more powerful then that. Rudy and his wife are ninnies compared the B & H. Oh wait, was that that point? Never mind....

Really, if Salon was a Republican rag like the National Review or Fox News, this report would make sense...but it's not. Sure the planted question is wrong just like telling your wive her butt doesn't look big in those pants or your husband he's a stallion.

We have a winless, endless, morally corrupt war that is going to cost in the TRILLIONS, a flogging of the constitution, sanctioned torture, imperial looting, a stolen 2000 presidential campaign, global warming and a straight-up fascist admin running the country and you're writing about Hillary planting a question?

Give me a freakin' break. Com'n Salon, go after some red meat and grow a pair.

To add to that...seems like both are self-absorbed selfish yuppie climbers. While it's easy to be sympathetic to pain, seems like a lot of it's brought on by the the controlled high-roller everything now mentality. DTMFA

First off, the WASPy powers that were in 1960s weren't scared of Kennedy so much as the 25% of population that were of the same faith that could be mobilized.

Second, the LDS today is 1.5% of the U.S. population and more in tune with the powers that be in its lock-step conservativism and weirdness. The population scares no one and the ideology is perfect for the far right except for the drinking thing.

Third, who gives a flying f*ck if Mitt Romney is a mormon. The more important issue is that he's a GOP man-whore who will shill for anyone and has the moral flexibility of an American corporate CEO, which he happens to be, and as expressed in his ever flip-flopping positions. Apparently he's of the thinking that switching from pro-choice to pro-life is like switching ad firms and shifting to another market.

Romney's speech will mean nothing and have the tone and verbage of a CEO announcing a product recall. Idiot.

Morrissey is the perfect metaphor to what happened to Britpop and his racially charged outburst pretty much proves this. Dude got old, fat and hairy and like a real POHMer who couldn't go with the flow so he cocked off like some viceroy sipping tea in India in the 1920s.

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad to see the old, fat, hairy Morrissey out and about again. He's a great reality check and reminder that at a certain point you should just shut up and stop whining...and that the good ol' days are gone.

As for the rest of the review, not bad but 2 pages too long and probably an exercise of a gentle, tortured, American, upper-class anglo-wannabe looking for some kind of exclusive angle to existence since there's nothing else to grasp on to. Like Morrissey today, that's a little sad really...but if it brings joy, go for it.

By W backing corn/ethanol he makes ag-biz very happy while keeping his buddy's in big oil happy with a delivery system status quo (gas stations). The average American will the 2-way shaft, as taxpayers on subsidies and as consumers at the pump. W couldn't do the math but his henchmen sure could.