I know Elise will get a kick out of this one.

I’m finishing a lengthy project and trying to keep my brain awake. I don’t have broadcast tv and music would be too distracting. So I snagged the latest episode of “Smallville.”

I’ve only watched this show once before, when Elise and I were trapped at a Best Buy waiting to get an MP3 jack installed on my car (a night which would have made Kafka grab for the pills) and the only dvd in the waiting area was a box set of “Smallville”. Season 3? 4? I dunno. We spent most of the night laughing. Seriously, this show feels like one of those godawful fan movies you see on youtube. Y’know, where some die-hard Green Lantern obsessive has built a life size Power Battery in his backyard and dances around in ill-fitting costumes with his friends? Lots of close-ups, handheld camerawork and music swiped from “Dark Knight”.

Yeah, that’s “Smallville”.

I was kind of curious about this episode since it features the “Justice Society of America.” Basically, all the original superheroes from the DC universe (an explanation from I09 if you give a damn). I like fake archeology. The lore of a show is often more interesting than the show itself.”Lost” can be like that, or “Fringe”. The deep background that goes into the story.

On “Smallville”…not so much.

First of all, everyone playing a superhero is doing a (bad) Christian Bale impression. Batman growls at people. Hawkman? A

guy in a wing suit? No. Green Arrow? Come on. Hawkman is paticularly funny. You can tell the writers (Geoff Jones, who writes the comic as well and is generally a sharp fellow) really wanted to avoid Hawkman looking like, well, a dork in a wingsuit. So he basically snarls and glares at everyone. Mind you, he’s played by Michael Shanks, a guy who actually has some chops so it’s kind of fun to watch at least.

The costumes. Damn. Ok, look, if you’re going to have a 15 year old girl in skin-tight star spangled leather carrying a giant glowing rod of power, people are going to laugh. And cringe. The main villain looked like a silvery Perez Hilton but more emo. His weapon of choice? Very fakey looking icicles. Yes, a master of temperature who can apparently freeze people solid, and he stabs his quarry with icicles. Subtle.

The production design is kind of fun. The whole show is dripping in primary colors. Every set seems to have stained glass windows, plus eerie mood-lighting. It’s always raining, like “Daredevil” amounts of rain. The street scenes have steam and fog swirling about. It’s a perfectly superhero comic setting. Like you’d love to just drop your action figures in.

At one point it’s revealed that some kind of secret organization called “Checkmate” is behind all the badness. Their secret evil base is covered in giant stickers of chessboards and chesspieces. It’s like Dr. Evil threw a garage sale.

The writing is, hmmm.

Geoff Jones is a peach of a guy by all accounts. I dig his Green Lantern stuff immensely. He’s taken a character mired in decades of mediocre stories and created this utterly crazy space opera about a whole spectrum of colored lantern corps. It’s some of the best superhero stuff out there, gutsy and fun.

But here, here I think he’s writing in a very small box.

Smallville’s whole conceit, that Clark Kent is “not yet ready” to be Superman has kind of worn thin after, oh, nine years. Tom Welling is older than I am. I think he’s good to go.

The show serves so many masters it must be just bizarre to write. First, there are the hard core “Smallville” fans. Whom, I learned a long time ago, are legion. They don’t read the comics that much, which is kind of weird, but they love the show. Then there’s the “cuteboi/cutegoil” contingent. Then the hard core nerds (ahem) who check in from time to time to roll their eyes (ahem-ahem) at the goings on and clamber back under our collective rock. Oh and kids.

So the solution, at least what Johns seems to be going for, is camp. Smallville is as camp as anything Adam West and Burt Ward were “biff” “Bam” and “Pow”-ing back in the 60’s. The characters don’t speak their lines, they INTONE them. People say things like “I consider you humans my family” and ice powered villains yell things like “Anyone up for ICE CREAM?”

The climactic fight was right out of those classic punch-ups that Batman and Robin would have with “Big Top” and his “Roustabout” minions. By way of some matrix bullet-time and about a metric ton of Adobe After-Effects.

The direction on the show feeds into all this. The camera is constantly swooping and sweeping about, always in motion, flashing on important plot points (AH! A Chesspiece! Ah! A portrait!) back and forth and back again. It’s condescending in one way, but it’s also trying so hard to keep you informed of every nuance. No straggling, no dawdling, keep up kids.

It’s all just so…quaint. It’s like Werther’s original, it’s grandpa candy that’s not too good, not too bad and yet sticky sweet nostalgia all the same. This is the way superheroes have been done for decades.

Then a few years ago came “Batman Begins” and then “Iron Man” and all of a sudden everything got so gosh-darn serious. Even the Tim Burton flicks were gaudy spectacles and the Superman of the Richard Donner films would feel right at home in “Smallville” with all it’s winking humor and “aw shucks” charm.

Superheroes are serious business now. Billion dollar franchises with top-name directors. Get the tone wrong and you get “Superman Returns”. In only the span of a decade “Smallville” went from teenage reinvention of the mythos to campy retro-fun. An interesting transition.

I guess I come not to hate “Smallville” but to wonder at it.

Ok, that’s nearly 1000 words (982) spilled. File is done rendering, my fingers are hot for typing again and this makes it 1000 and four.

What was before there was a before to be before?

Ow, brain cramp.

Some of the sharpest knives in the drawer contemplate the question of what came before the big bang, and what that means for the future of our universe.

One of these brilliant fellows, Neil Turok, talks about the Big Bang and Africa. Amazing food for your head meats.

Anthony Bourdain and Bill Murray. Two irascible types, sharing a meal. Just listen to Murray talk about home and food. The guy says less with more. A valuable lesson.

Just…just watch.

What a stupid policy “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” is, and always has been.

At the core, it asks military personnel to lie about one of their most basic facts of personhood. Asking them to lie in a culture built around honor, that’s lovely.

It is a policy that has cost the military upwards of 13,000 personnel since 1993. A policy that has cost the country nearly a quarter of a billion dollars to boot.

It is a policy that means when military personnel come home from serving abroad they don’t get to reunite with their loved ones. No kiss from a partner, no embrace at the depot. They must hide that, be shamed into the shadows lest their “gayness” somehow destroy “unit morale”

“Unit Morale” ranks right up there with “traditional marriage” as simple code words for bigotry. The same code words used to keep African-Americans out of the military or prevent “mixed-marriage” at the dawn of the 20th century. When the words come out of the mouths of the GOP dinosaurs, realize that they’re simply too cowardly to own their own predjudice. Hell, Fred Phelps may be a vile old spider, but the man and his family wear their stupidity on their sleeves.

So, speaking of vile, old and stupidity, here comes John “Sore Loser” McCain. Back during his failed run at the presidency (y’know, where he failed and lost) he was all for repealing DADT, as long as the military brass supported the idea.

Today, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Mike Mullen (the brassiest of the brass) stated unequivocally, well, this…

“Mr. Chairman, speaking for myself and myself only, it is my personal belief that allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly would be the right thing to do.

No matter how I look at the issue, I cannot escape being troubled by the fact that we have in place a policy which forces young men and women to lie about who they are in order to defend their fellow citizens.

For me, personally, it comes down to integrity — theirs as individuals and ours as an institution. I also believe that the great young men and women of our military can and would accommodate such a change, I never underestimate their ability to adapt.”

That’s pretty clear language, yes? Not a lot of wiggle room there. End the policy, lets all go watch some “Queer as Folk” and embrace change, right?

Oh, wait a minute. John McCain need to have a temper tantrum.

Yes, that’s John McCain, throwing whatever shreds of dignity he has onto a bonfire and dancing around in the flickering firelight.

Why the shift? Besides simply being a mealy-mouthed jerk, McCain is fending off a couple of primary challengers in his home state. Appearing to shift to the right, against this guy and this guy is typical GOP knife-fight thinking.

DADT will be repealed, it will come slowly and steadily. Expect a lot of friday at 4:30pm announcements over the next few months from the administration. They want this to be a win, but a quiet one. Mainly because of the antics of a sore loser sourpuss like John McCain.

He needs a talking point, so he’ll happily get one on the backs of thousands of US military personnel suffering under this ridiculous law.

The man is a thug and whatever respect you might have had for him due to his POW years should fall by the wayside when you see how callous he is about the lives of his fellow soldiers.

John McCain. Honorless.

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

-Anonymous

Elise and I were a little goofy after a long week.

Hence…this.

A little thing Chris and I made for a contest here in town. Bit of an audio landscape really. Thanks to Adam for giving a nice kabuki performance.

CHICAGO (AP)—Friends of Animals posted an open letter to U.S. figure skater Johnny Weir criticizing him for having fox fur on one of his costumes and asking him to stop wearing fur.

“I totally get the dirtiness of the fur industry and how terrible it is to animals. But it’s not something that’s the No. 1 priority in my life,” Weir said on Tuesday. “There are humans dying everyday. There are thousands if not millions of homeless people in New York City. Look at what just happened in Haiti.

“I tend to focus my energy, if there is a cause, on humans. While that may be callous and bad of me, it’s my choice.”

…

Yes. Yes. Yes. A thousand times YES.

I think it was Penn Jillette who said you could murder a thousand hobos in primetime and get a handful of complaints, but step on a bug and people are going to be out for blood.

Focus on humans. Really, the foxes aren’t going to help with earthquake relief.