DreamWeaver

Move over, Tony Stark. There's a new superhero in red - and his team - ready to save the world. And he jingles.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPLiBxhoug0

Loving Alec Baldwin - surprisingly bad*ss vocal performance - Hugh Jackman as his sidekick, and the snuck-in Galaxy Quest refs...

Have been looking a little further into it. As well as training to physical perfection, Bruce also gained knowledge of forensics and multiple scientific analytical disciplines.

One could circumvent this by having your Batmen (or, considering the attrition rate the theories above are incurring, perhaps we should call them "Blasters"?) trained only in evidence gathering, hooked up via video/audio links to a centralised crime lab.

Unless you're going to go with one supergothgirlgenius on a continual caffeine drip-feed, that needs a team and a building. Rochester,NY recently installed a new crime lab for $30m plus $5m annual budget, which considering the case volume generated by,say,five to ten Batmen, would be perfectly adequate.

So if we can't do a perfectly accurate Batman (grapnel guns, the works) IRL, what could we conceivably deck our caped crusaders out with?

Let's start with this...

..combination weighted bulletproof arm glove, flashlight, laser pointer, HD camera, and 300,000 volt taser (though, to my mind, the discharge points are in the wrong place).

If you just banked it as investment certificates rather than putting it near Wall Street (no point in giving money to villains),you could probably clear roughly $30m annually off that in interest alone.

Alternatively, you pose as a Silicon Valley dotcom winner, sink the cash into military or tech based R&D-based companies with good track records, and just set the designers the odd what-if "theoretical research" project as a geek treat.

So then you have an income, a backstory, technical consultants, and a source for all those odd spares they just never have in at Radio Shack or Tyre Pros.

Of course, if we're looking at funding as many Batmen as possible, one parent funding company that sources/supplies gear to multiple costumed crusaders (remember the start of The Dark Knight?) would be a more efficient model. It also gives villains the unnerving idea that you really can be everywhere..

Noted this morning that the US Mega Millions jackpot now stands at $476m. Typically, my first thought was "I could be a superhero with that much..."

...but I believe in sharing the karma. And considering that dedicated nerds have united to work out how much it would cost to build a Death Star...

How many cities could get their own Batman for $476m?

Craft the hell out of grenades, stun grenades, and the -Regen Envenomed Daggers (which have even proved surprisingly useful against such behemoths as Mot and Ru-Paullu. Er, Ru-Wadelu.)

Hollywood being what it is, I for one look forward to a rash of thinly veiled clone teen-on-teen deathmatch movies.

Preferably High School Musical 4: Lipsync For Your Life.
Or Death Camp Rock.

*blink*

...we're gonna need a bigger cheese.

You FIEND, Wade! No-one can steal the power of FABULOSITY!

Today's biggest Twitter trend in the UK: "Otters that look like Benedict Cumberbatch."

http://redscharlach.tumblr.com/post/...-cumberbatch-a

This wins the internet. Clearly.

*wanders into thread about show she's never seen, mumbles something about FOX, Firefly, Futurama and crushing asinine morons to fine pink powder, wanders off again*

This thread needs moar love for Girl Genius.

Also, Penny & Aggie, which is usually SFW with occasional language and mature themes, but also bloody funny.

If the words "From the masterminds behind Jersey Shore" don't scare you, I think some of the questions show this potential monstrosity has set phasers to "mock"...

http://www.fandomcasting.com/

So - engage or evasive action?

I'm not a huge podcast follower, but enjoy Captain Painway's POPcast. (Blog and Twitter feed are equally funny and suit my turbonic data acquiring positronic brain). Geek culture, roller derby, fun stuff.
http://www.captainpainway.com/tag/podcast/

Technically my other favourite podcast's a VoDcast, but it helps stay fit, flexible and calm if I can't get to the gym or major yoga sessions. It also makes me want to calmly punch out its host on occasion, but that diverts my aggression from everything else.
http://itunes.apple.com/podcast/yogamazing/id79497140

In the eternal battle of Jedi vs Food... food won.

Quick-burgers are pretty hideous in any case (think White Castle, minus any final vestiges of flavour), and frankly food is NOT supposed to be that unpleasant dark-blue colour. Yick.

Oh, and if you're in France and eating burgers, even the indigenous variety... WHAT THE HECK ARE YOU THINKING?? Heave a brick and you'll at least hit two friteries and a crepe van...

More sleuthering tonight as Sherlock takes on the Hounds Of Baskerville, guest starring Russell "Being Human" Tovey...

One of my favourite Moriarties is the Kim Newman take in Professor Moriarty: Hound of the D'Urbervilles, who is at least as smart, curious, and dispassionate as Holmes, and also a consummate long game artist - though he has something of a blind spot when it comes to outwitting Miss Adler.

SPOILERS...

...which oddly leads me right into the episode. Because it must have taken an inhuman amount of effort for Steven Moffat not to cast Alex Kingston as Sherlock's more toothsome nemesis Irene Adler, a rather racier River Song.

Good points:
- The interplay between Cumberbatch, Freeman, and Lara Pulver as Miss - sorry, Mistress Irene Adler. Perfectly played to a tee, with Freeman's patented "I really don't know where the heck to look" expression used perfectly - especially when Irene demonstrates a novel way of stopping Sherlock reading you.

- The idea of casting Adler as a Domme actually works perfectly as a translation from the Victorian intrigue that surrounded stage actresses. Naughty but high-profile and with access to the highest levels of the land...

- Endlessly quotable wisecracks galore with Adler getting some of the best Moffat lines in history ("...mind you, he was upside-down at the time"), but Sherlock, Mycroft, Watson and even Lestrade all well-supplied throughout the show ("So, how many times DID he fall out of the window?" "It was all such a blur, I lost count.")

- Unpredictability - you'd better be paying close attention. The Moff's trick of throwing in one or two spoilers as perfectly innocuous comments or gags is back.

Bad points:
- how the cliffhanger from last season gets resolved.

- Irene Adler needing rescuing - including from her sexual preferences? Wrong. If you want to give Sherlock a little closure and satisfaction, better ways of handling it.

- the opening sequence where we catch up on Sherlock and John's adventures is frequently hilarious but also confusing and stuffed with red herrings. Not ALL red herrings, though.

Further reading:
The game is evidently afoot: Watson's blog, Sherlock's website and Irene's Twitter are all live and out there, hooked to a network of other sites. BBC probably don't have Spielberg's resources to run a full Alternate Reality Game (and Cloudmaker was a hell of a lot better than AI which spawned it) but could well have some entertaining puzzles coming up.