Well, as I warned you would happen, it’s Saturday, and I’m doing a blog post, because I work today.  And, as I also warned you, I did in fact post my video The Superman Neutrino Hypothesis to YouTube yesterday afternoon, and I’ll embed it here, below this sentence.

As you’ll see when you watch it (or have seen, if you’ve already watched it), it’s just a bit of meandering, rather silly stuff, with me applying scientifically valid physical thoughts and questions (and making a few arithmetic errors along the way) to the nature of a comic book hero—the most archetypal comic book hero, though never one of my personal favorites—whose powers have always been rather puzzling to me.

Not that such puzzlement is surprising or unusual.  There’s no good explanation for most of the many powers superheroes have.  I think the closest I’ve seen to someone trying to give a “mundane” physical explanation for a superpower was when, in the first Spider-Man movie, they zoomed in on Peter Parker’s fingers and we saw squillions of tiny little gripping projections growing out of his fingers.  Presumably the same thing was happening with his toes.

But then, if that’s the explanation for his ability to stick to and climb walls, how does it work when he’s wearing gloves and boots?  Did he somehow design a special fabric so fine and porous that it would let this “stickiness” come through, undiminished?  How in the world did a teenager from Queens, however brilliant he might be, come up with such a thing?

At least Sam Raimi had the sense not to have Peter Parker just invent his webbing—which would be an almost Nobel-worthy breakthrough in materials science and engineering and possibly condensed matter physics—in his little house in a poor neighborhood in Queens.  Then again, Raimi still had to make the webbing come from Peter’s wrists, for valid, story-based reasons, but that fact is rather odd.  No spider secretes web from near the ends of its legs, but rather from glands in its posterior (or “abdomen”).

If Peter had developed a more natural bodily location for the production of his webbing, that would have made for an awkward superhero, huh?  Raimi was probably right not to do that.

Anyway, that’s pretty much all I have to talk about for today.  This is quite a departure for me in terms of post length, and I don’t know if people in general will be happy or disappointed that it’s so comparatively short.  It doesn’t matter much, either way, though.  I’m just not interested in writing much, today.  I’m not interested in doing much.  My back and legs have been acting up even worse than usual these past several days, and that’s saying something.  In addition, and possibly exacerbated by that pain, I’m almost always stressed out, whether at work or at the house or even during my commute, though the latter is perhaps the least stressful time.

It really gets old.  I’ve got to do something about all this; it’s just not worth the effort to keep going, especially when there’s really nothing at all to which to look forward.  My “epic quest” looks harder to carry out when my pain is so severe, though I’m trying to find ways to counter that.  Otherwise, I feel like just giving up on it, and on everything else, and just shutting down the game.

I guess we’ll see what happens.