It's the week after Christmas, and I'm stuck in a silent, tomb-like office because I haven't got a whit of vacation time to call my own. So what's a boy to do on this hazy, occasionally rainy winter day in Los Angeles (highs in the upper 60s)?

Check his favorite web sites, that's what.

So anyway, at comicscontinuum.com, they have a picture of Christian Bale in his costume for the new Batman movie ("Batman Begins"), which comes out this summer. I'm disappointed. See, just like the four Bat movies that came before, they're putting Bale in some kind of rubber armor.

Sure, there are no fake nipples on it, but it's still rubber armor. When will these people learn that Batman's just a guy? That he wears a cloth costume? That one of the really cool things that would happen in a fight between old Bats and the Joker is that the costume could be ripped and the rich guy inside could bleed and get hurt?

Well, not with the rubber armor, he won't. Sigh. I am excited about the new movie. It looks cool and dark. Sure, my wife thinks that the world should cool it with Bat-movies for a while, and she's right, but it mostly looks good. And Chicago stands in for Gotham City, which makes sense.

The rubber armor just bums me out. Is it possible that the new movie is just going to make for more drab Bat-filmmaking?