Earlier this week, a friend pointed me to an alleged review of Alias creator JJ Abrams' script for the upcoming, yet to be made, new Superman movie. Friday, he points me in the direction of an online petition to prevent the script from being filmed. At this point, I e-mailed him that I was declaring a moritorium on information about the Superman movie. Not just from him; if I happen to come across a news item about the movie during my too-frequent daily web crawls, I'll skip right over it. Because if I start paying attention now, I'm going to have to listen to somewhere in the neighborhood of eighteen months or so of whining, bleating, moaning, wailing, and gnashing of teeth about how Hollywood/Warner Bros/DC Comics/director Brett Ratner/JJ Abrams/producer Jon Peters/Criminal George W. Bush/Osama bin Laden/Kermit the Frog are responsible for trashing the great, brilliant, wonderful, fantastic, perfect American Icon that is Superman, and what a horrible, awful, miserable, evil crime against humanity it is that this movie should ever see the light of the inside of a darkened movie theater, yadda, yadda, yadda. As if this is the most important thing in a world where the Criminal Bush is stumping for a war nobody wants in order to bolster his political clout and wholeheartedly supporting the commercial rape of our national forests.

I mean, there's a petition, for God's sake. On the Internet. As if, first of all, anyone pays attention to those anyway. Say this petition collects a thousand "signatures," never mind that since they're electronic without any real verification anyway they might as well not count at all. Say a thousand real people actually sign it. Most movie theaters seat, what, three or four hundred people? So those signatures represent, what, the equivalent of three or so empty theaters around the world for one showing of the movie? Say each signature represents ten people. How many theaters are there in the country? We're probably talking about the equivalent of one or two unsold tickets at a fraction of the theaters around the country. And it bothers me on some level that there is this small but vocal group of people that would probably be willing to write their Congressman to stop production of this script before they'd protest Criminal Bush's Healthy Forest Initiative.