A porn star + Bollywood = Box office success?

Unlike an earlier post, this one is about sex in Hindi movies.  So, there!

In a way, perhaps it is a continuation of my recent posts on the 25 years that it has been since I left India.  Bollywood and sex are only props for me, eh!  Or, perhaps the idea that "sex" sells :)

Earlier today, a Wall Street Journal tweet caught my attention, which led me to read this piece there on Ekta Kapoor who "Pitches Dirtier Bollywood."

Her big-screen efforts display plenty of skin and sex, in contrast to the "no-kissing, song-and-dance-routine" Bollywood films that have dominated the box office for years.

Plenty of skin and sex?  That is quite a change from the India I left behind in 1987!  As I noted in that earlier post, "Women with a lot of skin exposed was not the way Indian movies were made." Even the poster for the notorious "Her Nights" had only the man all exposed--well, his upper body!

As the Guardian notes:

"It was only 25 years ago that you couldn't show a kiss on screen in Bollywood," said Pankaj Kothari, who runs a talent management agency in Mumbai. "They would show two flowers 'kissing' instead. If the director wanted to suggest a sex scene, they would include a shot of a bedside lamp going dark."

 Yep, that is how it was done then.  Symbolic representations.  No real stuff.  But, I was okay with that--it was like reading where one had to rely on on our own imaginations.  Often, it turns out that our imaginations are way more exciting than whatever is real.

The WSJ adds:

Ms. Kapoor has now signed up Sunny Leone, a Canadian porn actress of Indian origin, for an upcoming horror flick.
"For me, it's another branch and another expression of doing films without [mainstream] actors," said Ms. Kapoor. "That's why we've signed on Sunny Leone. Clearly she is not in the star bracket but definitely in the controversial bracket." She added: "I warn you, don't expect anything cerebral out of it."

At least there is one way in which Bollywood has not changed then: nothing cerebral in its movies!  I watched Bengali or Malayalam movies with subtitles, or the rare Tamil movie, to activate my brain cells.  Bollywood was only to look stare at good looking women--Hema Malini or Rekha or Zeenat Aman, back in my days.

Back to the Guardian:

Leone had to learn Hindi for the film but didn't have to dig too deep to research her character: she plays a porn actor who is tasked by the intelligence agencies with luring in a deadly assassin with her charms.
The film is due to open this weekend at 1,300 screens with the equivalent of an 18 certificate. But is India ready? Manish Dubey, editor at the Bollywood channel UTV Stars, thinks so. "The days of a bikini providing titillation are gone. We are now moving towards bold acts which include love making scenes, going semi-nude and bold dialogues," he said, adding: "Nothing can be deemed 'shocking' for today's audience."

Hmmmm, I am not sure whether this is particularly a good development.  Semi-nudity here in the US, for instance, is pretty much a boring pedestrian sight on hot summer days.  Public displays of affection don't even make us pause to look.  So, unless it is full frontal nudity, there is nothing to write home about.  But, in India, I would think that such depictions will be far removed from everyday life.  But then, in everyday life people don't go around singing and dancing and running from tree to tree either.  Oh well; not my problem!

So, will the new film with a porn actress break any new ground?

But does Jism 2 really offer anything new? It doesn't break any cinematic new ground, said Dubey – it has just capitalised on its unique selling point: having a porn star lead. "The bottom line is that flesh display in the film will be the same [as in other films] but the 'expectation' of getting more flesh would be high with the result that it might benefit them at the box office."

Aha, the good ol' bait and switch, it seems like--draw more attention by talking about sex and a porn actress in order to sell more tickets.  Hey, PT Barnum, you were right, yet again!

The WSJ notes that Ekta Kapoor's father was a movie star in his days--Jeetendra.  As Johnny Carson often quipped, "I did not know that!"

Here is one of my favorites from a Jeetendra movie (I didn't know it was a Jeetendra movie until I googled!)

My 25-year education about America started with ...

As a fresh off the boat (metaphorically!) student in the US, twenty-five years ago, I picked up quite a bit of Americana from Johnny Carson's show.  It was a funny way to quickly learn about America and its quirks.  It also helped that, in the apartment, all we students from South Asia had was the old antenna-TV, which meant that there was no cable channels to surf to.

I still remember Carson, and the LA Times columnist Jack Smith in his columns, often joking about Bakersfield, about which I had no idea then, only to later I end up in that city for almost a decade :)



It was difficult to tear away from Carson.  That late in the evening, I was never keen on watching Ted Koppel and do grad school discussions all over again.

Immigration now is of a completely different flavor.  On the one hand, incoming students are way more familiar with the US than I ever was at a comparable age.  The phenomenal level of global inter-connectedness along with India having opened up its economy to the external world mean that America is no stranger to the newbies.

At the same time, it seems to be increasingly possible for newbies to be comfortable within their own preferences and not explore the American quirks.  Students (and others too) can easily stay with their compatriots, shop for Indian groceries, watch Indian movies and shows, socialize with Indians from work or otherwise, ...

I prefer the experience I had, I think.  Though, as I get older, the idea of moving to a new place seems terribly scary.    If only we had throughout our lives the courage that seems exclusive to the youth!

The last bearded American president

It was Benjamin Harrison--the 23rd President.  We have not had a bearded president since the end of the 19th century!

He was a Republican. 

Like the famous bearded President, Lincoln, who was the first ever President to sport a beard, and was also a Republican.

Anyway, other old beards as Presidents?

Ulysses Grant, Rutherford Hayes, who seems to have had quite an unkempt beard, and James Garfield ... and all were Republicans.

Not a single bearded Democratic president! 

None, nada, zilch, zippo ...

A few had mustaches.  Seriously, one would have expected the other way around--that bearded presidents would be Democrats.

But, even Uncle Sam sports a beard!

Unfortunately, it does not look like we will anymore have presidents with beards--Republican or Democract.  Why are they so afraid of beards?

Oh well, I suppose it is only Sarah "mama grizzly" Palin who has enough cojones to grow one ... muahahaha

Seven Minutes of Terror: D-Day approaches

NASA's coverage of Curiosity's descent through the Martian atmosphere on to its surface will begin at 8:30 p.m.(Pacific Time) Sunday night and go until 1:00 a.m. Monday morning. 

a

The Colbert Report
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Indi(r)a taught me about free speech

As I noted earlier, 25 years ago, I was getting ready to leave for the US.

August 15th will mark the anniversary of my own "tryst with destiny"

In 1987, the Singapore Airlines flight that I was on took off from Madras (as Chennai was known then) a little before the midnight that made made the transition from the 14th to the 15th--similar to India's birth at midnight.  Quite dramatic, eh!

As the US immigration stamp from that old passport shows, I landed in Los Angeles on August 15th, 1987 and since then have only been a tourist in the old country where I had my wonderful formative years.

To borrow from Salman Rushdie, I, too, am one of "midnight's children."

Living here, and having grown up in an independent India, I have not experienced anything other free speech--but for a brief two-year period from the summer of 1975, when the then Prime Minister of India, Indira Gandhi, decided that she had had enough with the opposition to her views. Well, with the exception of my awful colleagues who prefer that I shut up!

In particular, Gandhi disagreed with the court’s ruling that voided her election victory.  To add salt to her political wounds, the court further declared her ineligible for elections for an additional six years.

Instead of resigning from office, a la Richard "I'm not a crook" Nixon, Indira Gandhi blazed her own ignominious trail.  In June 1975, Gandhi cited national security concerns and essentially suspended the constitution itself.

One of the chilling effects it had was on free speech.

Prior to this declaration of Emergency, for instance, the open grounds—the  “maidan”—close to our home was the site of political meetings almost every other day.  The loudspeakers provided us with a fantastic political theatre of sorts—after all, this was before television reached all far corners of India. 

However, under Emergency, there was an eerie silence everywhere.  It was almost as if people’s tongues had been cut off.  Newspapers and magazines, especially those that were critical of Gandhi even prior to Emergency, often had blank columns because the government’s censors had axed out paragraphs that were considered a threat to internal stability.  Many dissenting journalists were imprisoned as well.  If five or more people wanted to meet and talk, special permission had to be obtained from the government beforehand—otherwise, they faced jail time for unlawful assembly! 

Even as a kid I was a political junkie, and this was the worst kind of withdrawal I could have then imagined! 

Fortunately, this Emergency did not last long.  It was lifted in March 1977, and soon after, Indira Gandhi and her party were voted out of office by overwhelming margins.  It was convincing proof that Indians—the educated and the illiterate alike—could not be silenced forever. 

Of course, this brief interlude is nothing compared to the story of India’s sibling-neighbor, Pakistan.  Democracy has always been fragile there, with military coups and other anti-democratic events occurring at regular intervals. 

One of the many victims of such political machinations was the poet-intellectual Faiz Ahmed Faiz.  Faiz was born a hundred years ago, in 1911, in the undivided India, and lived in the newly created Pakistan after the horrible partition in 1947.  However, his “speech” and political activities, like those of many Latin American literary-intellectuals, quickly landed him in trouble.

In 1951, Faiz was sentenced to four years in prison for his participation in a failed conspiracy to oust the government. Decades later, he was yet again on the wrong political side, after democracy yielded to military law in 1977.  Faiz was forced into exile.  He did return to Pakistan in 1982, and died two years later.

One of Faiz’s poems was about the importance of speaking out, which my immediate neighborhood knows all too well.  Here is the final verse from his poem, titled “Speak”:

Speak, this brief hour is long enough
Before the death of body and tongue:
Speak, 'cause the truth is not dead yet,
Speak, speak, whatever you must speak.

Faiz provides me one more reason to speak via this blog--my own maidan.

Worried about CO2 emissions? Story got more interesting today

One of the more surprising headlines of the day:

U.S. CO2 Emissions Fall to Lowest First-Quarter Level in 20 Years

Huh?

Really?

Apparently so:

Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from energy use in the first quarter of this year fell to their lowest level in the U.S. in 20 years, as demand shifted to natural gas-fired generation from coal-fired electricity due to record low gas prices, the energy department said.
Energy-related carbon emissions fell 8 percent from the same period a year ago to 1.134 billion metric tons (1.25 billion tons), according to the latest monthly energy review by the Energy Information Administration (EIA) - the energy department's statistics arm.

If only the "doubting Thomas" commenter, jayjames,  who didn't believe my arguments about coal plants closing and natural gas price decreasing actually knew what he/she was talking about!

If the news about CO2 emissions here in the US was a surprise, perhaps only a tad lower was this:

Earth sucking up increasing amounts of carbon dioxide

Huh?

Really?

Apparently so:

The Earth's ability to soak up man-made carbon dioxide emissions is a crucial yet poorly understood process with profound implications for climate change.
Among the questions that have vexed climate scientists is whether the planet can keep pace with humanity's production of greenhouse gases. The loss of this natural damper would carry dire consequences for global warming.
A study published in Thursday's edition of the journal Nature concludes that these reservoirs are continuing to increase their uptake of carbon — and show no sign of diminishing.
In an accounting of the global "carbon budget," researchers calculated that Earth's oceans, plants and soils had almost doubled their uptake of carbon each year for the last half-century. In 1960, these carbon sinks absorbed around 2.4 billion metric tons of carbon; in 2010, that figure had grown to around 5 billion metric tons.

Head spinning, you say?  Wait, there is more.

A second paper, published earlier in the week by the journal Nature Geoscience, provides insight into how the disposal service in the ocean is actually working. The surprising finding is that a handful of relatively concentrated spots in the Southern Ocean account for a high proportion, roughly 20 percent, of the entire oceanic carbon uptake.

So, can they keep absorbing at the same rates?

The obvious concern the paper raises is that climate change could disturb the existing pattern of winds and currents and shut down the hot spots, making the entire ocean less efficient as an absorber of carbon dioxide.
In principle, of course, things could go the other way too, with climate change perhaps creating more such hot spots and increasing the efficiency of the disposal service. But we know from the geological record that past jumps in the earth’s temperature have tended to raise the amount of carbon dioxide in the air, which then reinforced the warming trend. So that’s a pretty good reason to think that things will unfold the same way as a result of human-caused warming.

These reports about CO2, against the backdrop of the blackouts in India where the monsoon has failed as well, reminded me about this op-ed by the editor of Scientific American, in which he noted:

The most frightening prospect that Mr. Lenton has found is the vulnerability of the Indian monsoon. More than a billion people depend on this weather pattern each year for the rain it brings to crops. The monsoon, though, is being affected by two conflicting forces: the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is adding energy to the monsoons, making them more powerful. On the other hand, soot from fires and coal plants acts to blocks the sun’s energy, weakening the monsoons.

This opposition creates potential instability and the possibility that the atmospheric dynamics that bring the monsoons could change suddenly. Mr. Lenton’s analysis shows this could occur in a remarkably short time. The monsoons could be here one year, then gone the next year. 

Here today and gone tomorrow is not a bottom-line that is conducive to any long-term planning, is it?  The level of uncertainty that CO2 introduces ought to worry most of us outside the maniacal GOP!

India's blackout: Obama (and others) should rethink attacks on "outsourcing"

On the topic of two consecutive days of blackouts in India, perhaps the best editorial comment, of all the ones I read, came from The Onion. Yes, that same satirical publication that bills itself as America's Finest News Source said it best.  And it did that by merely presenting the facts (ht):

According to estimates, roughly one-third of a billion Indian citizens were left without power Wednesday after workers successfully repaired the nation's electrical grid and brought all of its systems back online. "Since restoring our infrastructure to 100 percent capacity following Monday and Tuesday's blackouts, vast swaths of India are now completely without access to electricity," said the country's power minister, Veerappa Moily, who confirmed that three out of every four residents lacked access to such basic amenities as lighting, food refrigeration, and the use of simple appliances now that the country's grid had fully recovered. "We are currently not monitoring the situation, as everything appears to be functioning normally again in India." Government officials also stated that the widespread power outage had in no way compromised their ability to provide adequate sanitation to 31 percent of India's citizens.

Because, 300 million Indians without electricity is "normal."  And, a sizable population lacking sanitation facilities is also "normal."

Neither sanitation nor the shortage of electricity in India (and in other countries too) is a new topic in this blog.   It is atrocious that governments in India and elsewhere do not give these issues the highest priority and, instead, divert precious resources to weapons, corruption, and populist schemes. 

Indians are past the critical fork in the road where they ought to have asked themselves an important question: To be poor without electricity, or not to be poor but in a slightly polluted world?  Idealists have, for all the correct reasons, been waging protests against projects to generate electricity from nuclear power, or from coal.  Against the backdrop of corruption and theft and dysfunctional governments, these protests have merely added to the problem without being any part of any solution at all.  But then, these are questions that Indians have to sort out by themselves. 

In trying to figure out how to make the best use of the crisis, India has to keep in mind three very, very inconvenient truths:

• Even "normally" hundreds of millions do not have access to electricity
• High Prices & High Subsidies = Bad Mix
• Coal High = Emissions Higher

Here, in the US, I hope that the massive blackout in India has at least served as a reminder to politicians like President Obama who point to countries like India as "our competitors" who are stealing "our" jobs through outsourcing.  If they continue with that rhetoric even after this blackout, it will be worse than Marie Antoinette's notorious "let them eat cake" comment (though, apparently she didn't really say that!)

Are we doomed to lose friends as we get older?

If only I had remembered the wonderful lines from the final scene from "Stand by me" whenever I blog about friendship--mostly from the past!

"Friends come in and out of your life like busboys in a restaurant"
"I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve.  Jesus, does anyone?

Seriously, anyone?

But, why did the "White Tiger" deserve the Man Booker?

It has now become my habit to go to the local Goodwill Store during the summer downtime. 

I bought four  LPs and two books for a grand total of $4.72.  Neil Diamond's voice along with a little raspy background noise from the used LP seems to be a lot more exciting and real, compared to the sterile clarity from a CD.

Both the books I picked up are related to India, but in different ways.  Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's The Unknown Errors Of Our Lives   and Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger. 

As I started reading Divakaruni's collection of short stories, I remembered having read the first one in the book in The Atlantic (or was it the New Yorker?) a few years ago.  I liked that story a lot, but I remembered it all too well to re-read now.  I put away the book, and the rest of the stories will have to wait for another time later this summer.

Over the next couple of nights, I finished Adiga's White Tiger. 

Throughout, and especially after I was done with it, only one question remained: what made White Tiger so exceptional for it to have won the Man Booker Prize?

It is good fiction, and has a lot to offer when it comes to understanding contemporary India, yes.  But, the Man Booker?  Seriously?

I was often reminded of the parallels with Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games that I read a summer or two ago.  Both involve very similar styles of storytelling, and both describe the corrupted morals of everyday lives in India.  While one is focused on Bombay, the other is told by the protagonist based in Bangalore.  Perhaps the biggest difference is simply about the respective sizes--Chandra's yarn stretches way too long at more than 900 pages.

I wonder what I am missing in the White Tiger for me to question its inclusion in the Man Booker category!

Well, at least the LPs--especially the Neil Diamond one--were worth the trip to the store.

25 years ago, I was packing my bags to come to America!

I am rapidly nearing a historic marker in my life: 25 years since I came to the US in 1987.

There are a few--I readily admit, it is barely a few!--who seem to be happy that I chose to come to these United States.  It makes my day when they let me know, like how a newspaper reader (an endangered species?) did in an email ten days ago:

I met you several years ago at an orientation for prospective Western Oregon University students. We chatted briefly and I told you that I appreciated your opinion pieces in the Register-Guard. My son decided to attend the University of Oregon but I still remember our brief but enjoyable conversation. Yesterday I was reminded of that time after reading your piece on the Americans with Disabilities Act.
You hit the nail on the head in reminding readers how our government used to operate and why we need political parties that work together constructively. I cannot begin to tell you how the present dysfunctional Congress and the insulting level of political discourse trouble me. I am concerned for the future of my children and our country. Despite those frustrations I want to convey how much I appreciate your cogent writing and world view. I’m glad you chose to become an American citizen. We need more people like you.

There is a good chance that this reader does not know the phenomenal value his email added to my life.  Thanks!

I am glad, indeed, that I am here in the US.

Though, my decision to come to the US surprised quite a few who knew me well when I was young.  A few years ago, my father wrote in a letter to me:

You were a bit rebellious in your outlooks and attitudes!  ...You earlier had a liking for communist literature and Russian novels. ... But surprisingly you landed in USA for higher studies

So, yes, it was a surprise to them.

But, not to me.

I continue to be rebellious in my outlooks and attitudes, and march to my own drum beat, though, outwardly, I look "mainstream," which perhaps all the more is the reason why the self-proclaimed rebels get pissed-off at me?  I continue to like Russian literature--there is something unique about their interpretation of life.  Communist leanings? I suppose my father didn't know that it purged out of my system even halfway through my undergraduate studies.  It was a teenage infatuation. Am glad that the evil red was not a love in my adulthood!

After all the various twists and turns, in a fortnight, I will complete 25 years in the US--a long journey from Tanzania. 

Virgin Mary, Put Putin Away

That is the "Punk Prayer" that Pussy Riot sang, which pissed off Vlad the Impaler Putin and the Orthodox establishment.

Blogging about this here will not make any difference to the women who are being tried as if they are al-Qaeda terrorists who killed a couple of thousand civilians.  And, yet, as much as none of my other posts have made no difference at all, here I am carrying on in a Quixotic tradition.

Here is to hoping that even Putin will find the entire trial to be a farce, and will come up with some kind of a face-saving deal for himself, at least in response to the growing worldwide support for the protesters:

Pussy Riot's supports include fellow-dissidents in Russia, as well as Amnesty International, and Western musicians including Sting and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Two of the women have young children.

In the meanwhile, protest along we shall.

The complete lyrics of the Punk Prayer:

(choir)

Virgin Mary, Mother of God, put Putin away
Рut Putin away, put Putin away

(end chorus) ...
Black robe, golden epaulettes
All parishioners crawl to bow
The phantom of liberty is in heaven
Gay-pride sent to Siberia in chains

The head of the KGB, their chief saint,
Leads protesters to prison under escort
In order not to offend His Holiness
Women must give birth and love

Shit, shit, the Lord's shit!
Shit, shit, the Lord's shit!

(Chorus)

Virgin Mary, Mother of God, become a feminist
Become a feminist, become a feminist

(end chorus)

The Church’s praise of rotten dictators
The cross-bearer procession of black limousines
A teacher-preacher will meet you at school
Go to class - bring him money!

Patriarch Gundyaev believes in Putin
Bitch, better believe in God instead
The belt of the Virgin can’t replace mass-meetings
Mary, Mother of God, is with us in protest!

(Chorus)

Virgin Mary, Mother of God, put Putin away
Рut Putin away, put Putin away

(end chorus)

My genetic journey, from Tanzania to Eugene, via India

Nearly three years ago, I authored this column in the paper here, in which I described how the visit to Tanzania was a homecoming for me:. 

Tanzania offers a compelling argument for why it is home to humans — going back to hominids, who were human-like precursors to our kind. The evidence, in this case, includes the well-preserved footprints of hominids in northern Tanzania, estimated to be 3.75 million years old.

There was still something missing even after that trip, which I understood much later--to go beyond the theoretical argument, and get evidence of how I came to be from that African origins.

A few weeks ago, when I was reading an essay, I came across a reference to the Genographic Project, and I decided to participate in that as a kind of a belated birthday gift to myself (yes, I paid for my own gift, thank you very much.)  Because there was that payment to be made, I asked only for the "male" side of the history--after all, only males can get the male side of the story, given the Y chromosome.  Some time later, I would gift myself with the female side of the past as well.

Today, I got the results of the DNA analysis, which tell a story of my origins from Africa.  The genetic map shows how I got to India, all the way from Africa:

Compared to the tens of thousands of years that it took for the geographic movement out of Africa to India to happen, I came over to Los Angeles in 1987 after a mere day of air travel.  Perhaps those early ancestors would not have even dreamed about such a possibility?

Anyway, the report notes:

The man who gave rise to the first genetic marker in your lineage probably lived in northeast Africa in the region of the Rift Valley, perhaps in present-day Ethiopia, Kenya, or Tanzania, some 31,000 to 79,000 years ago. Scientists put the most likely date for when he lived at around 50,000 years ago. His descendants became the only lineage to survive outside of Africa, making him the common ancestor of every non-African man living today.

The place I visited in Tanzania was really, really, close enough to be the real, old, ancestral home--the home before Pattamadai, Sengottai, and Neyveli that I have often blogged about.

Anyway, from Tanzania (as I imagine the home!):

Your ancestors, having migrated north out of Africa into the Middle East, then traveled both east and west along this Central Asian superhighway. A smaller group continued moving north from the Middle East to Anatolia and the Balkans, trading familiar grasslands for forests and high country.

And then from there,

Your next ancestor, a man born around 40,000 years ago in Iran or southern Central Asia, gave rise to a genetic marker known as M9, which marked a new lineage diverging from the M89 Middle Eastern Clan. His descendants, of which you are one, spent the next 30,000 years populating much of the planet.

Getting close to India ...

The man who gave rise to marker M20 was born in India or the Middle East. Your ancestors arrived in India around 30,000 years ago and represent the earliest significant settlement of India. For this reason, haplogroup L (M61) is known as the Indian Clan.
Although more than 50 percent of southern Indians carry marker M20 and are members of haplogroup L (M61), your ancestors were not the first people to reach India; descendants of an early wave of migration out of Africa that took place some 50,000 to 60,000 years ago had already settled in small groups along the southern coastline of the sub-continent.

So, there!  Everything else was easy, it seems like.

About that Y chromosome itself?  It is alive--through my nephews, now it is in Australia!

I was excited when I saw these elephants at Mikumi National Park, Tanzania. 

(Tragic) Photo of the Day

Caption at the source:

Officials have retrieved at least 30 charred bodies from the S-11 coach of the Chennai-bound 12622 Tamil Nadu Express, which caught fire at A view of Tamil Nadu Express' charred S-11 coach at the Nellore station

I feel terrible for the dead, the injured, and the friends and families of these people.  Awful!

My first (and only?) travel experience on the Tamil Nadu Express was a wonderfully delightful experience for the 17-year old that I was then.  But, life took a different turn after I reached the destination :(  As far as I know, it seems to be one cursed train!

Sex at the Olympics? Come again?

When you hold a hammer, well, everything in the world looks like it has be pounded, er, nailed, er ... damn!, it is so hard to get away from sex during these Olympics :)

I don't know how I missed this at Slate, when I blogged about the increasing sexualization of/at the Olympics:

[The] International Volleyball Federation announced back in March that it would no longer require women’s beach volleyball players to compete in bikinis. For the first time ever in Olympic competition—beach volleyball joined the program in 1996—female players will be allowed to wear shorts and sleeved, midriff-concealing tops.
The new regulations are meant to placate countries with conservative religious and cultural standards for women’s dress. They also threaten to deprive millions of male viewers of one of the sport’s main draws: buff, scantily clad female bodies glistening in the sun (or the London drizzle, as the case may be). But God bless the USA—the women on the American beach volleyball team have no intention of abandoning their skimpy swimsuits.

Why don't they want to ditch the skimpy bikinis?  Come on, don't be lazy; read the Slate piece :)

 So, bikinis it is:

A dance team in bathing suits skimpier for the women than the men jiggled for the sold—out crowd during timeouts, while rock music nearly drowned out the pealing of Big Ben. And, much to the relief of the British tabloids, the athletes wore their traditional bikinis despite the chill in the air that left the sand at 19 Celsius (67F) when the day started.

Don't worry--the skimpy bikinis did not affect the crowd's staying power :)

Talk of cold weather had created panic in the British press that the female players would go for long—sleeves instead of the standard bikinis a longtime but little used rule in international volleyball. But the Russians and Chinese were in the two—piece swimsuits for the opening match, and the Germans and Czechs did the same when they played an hour later.

But the beach party atmosphere was augmented by the dancers, who filled the downtime with kicklines and even one tango that ended up with the dance partners flopping suggestively in the sand.

No wonder most in the crowd of 15,000 the biggest—ever Olympic beach volleyball venue had trouble tearing themselves away.

Hey, with all this talk about sex at the Olympics, I wonder then whether the Olympics logo did indeed reveal that inner Freudian itch! Well, don't let your imaginations get a head ahead of you :)

I hope blogging on this theme doesn't become my habit until the ecstatic finish at the closing ceremony :)