Hero: Tommy Kelly, defensive tackle for the Oakland Raiders.

After making an almost-goal line stand tackle late in the game, Kelly stood up with his uniform pants and compression shorts around his ankles. Luckily for TV viewers we only got a glimpse of his black jock strap and not the backside view. Kelly is a hero for pulling his pants up in record time. It’s a good thing he, as a pro athlete, has quick reactions and well-conditioned, fast-twitch muscles. All those squats came in handy.

Given the importance of not mooning tens of thousands of fans in person and millions on TV, perhaps this is a skill that should be added to the NFL Combine in the springtime. Pre-draft 40-yard dash times, bench press, Wonderlic scores, high jumps, cone drills and drawer hikes; that would be a good addition. Although, like the Wonderlic, I would hope they wouldn’t televise that test. …

Zero: Laser-pointer wielding fan seated in the end zone of Invesco Field at Mile High (dishonorable mention to Kelly for not buckling his belt).

Some almost-certainly drunk fan, right before the Kelly moon, caused a five-minute stoppage of play because he had to be an idiot and shine his dorky laser pointer at players on the field. Who uses laser pointers anyway? I mean, other than morons looking to make their equally dumb and drunk friends laugh when they make little red dots appear on people’s crotches.

It is poetic justice, though, that the chucklehead was too quick to pull his dork toy out of his pocket. Had he waited one more play, he would’ve gotten the chance to point the ultimate laugh maker at Kelly’s bare butt. Cue trombone: Wah waaaaah.

Granted, the Big Blue Boy Scout’s silver screen presence is in development hell, mostly thanks to a blood-sucking attorney who’s snookered the heirs of Superman’s creators into a lawsuit that helps almost no one but the former ambulance chaser himself.

Still, as long as Singer keeps his dumb ideas (Supes being a deadbeat dad, a peeping tom, and a wuss, among them …) in the Marvel Universe, I’ll be happy.

Zero: Forty-one percent of the people polled recently by the Wall Street Journal and NBC News, who have a favorable view of the “Tea Party.” This compares to 35 percent who favor Democrats and 28 percent who favor Republicans. My first question is whether this means it’s safe to be a Republican again. …

The GOP is better off without the masses who are gullible enough to fall for the hype machine built primarily to raise the profile (and bank figures) of self-aggrandizers such as Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck and any of their penny-ante wannabe acolytes at the local level.

My submission for the actual name of their band of self-assured zealots is The Dogmatic Party. These are people who would gladly cut off their noses to spite their faces, ears, and the bald spots they’ve worn into into their scalps from repeatedly shoving their heads into sandboxes (the ones with big walls meant to keep out nasty government overlords). I live in a town teeming with them. There’s not a tax on the books they look kindly upon. In recent years these wise, wise people have chosen not to pool their money through minor tax increases to improve their own crumbling streets or put textbooks in all their children’s classrooms (full disclosure: I work for the school district, and this is all I’m going to say on that subject). What I’ve observed of the Tea Party types is an irrational disdain for all taxes, complete distrust of anything quasi-governmental, and an ironic and/or paradoxical fervor for one-sided talk radio types.

This is not to say I don’t find myself agreeing with some aspects of their passion for freedom, liberty, small government, and personal responsibility. I probably have just as much in common with The Dogmatic Party as I do the Democratic Party. I’m very much middle of the road. Rush Limbaugh would call me wishy-washy, but it’s more of a case of being willing to listen to all sides before making up my mind — I don’t live with the delusion that those on the Right get to claim all definitions of the word. This probably comes from my born-and-bred Nebraska values mixing with an artist’s heart. Some things are black-and-white; many others are an array of gray tones.

The Dogmatic Party needs to wake up the fact that there is such a thing as nuance in this life and that only a fool thinks s/he is right all the time. No one gets things done well by alienating people with whom they could find common ground — if they tried.

Yes, end-of-the-year lists are a tired, hackneyed, predictable trope for any and all publications.

Yes, they’re subjective to a fault.

Yes, they’re invariably filled with elitist snobbery to trumpet the painfully precious sophistication of the writer(s).

But can we force ourselves to stay away from them?

Oh, no.

Actually, I’m getting pretty good at avoiding the annual lists of pop culture tripe. I think the older I get, the shorter a mere year seems. So these December check-ins with coolness really aren’t much different from the dozens of Top 10 lists that circulate through the Twitterverse on a given day.

That said, best-of-the-decade lists are something else altogether. I’m not old enough to think a 10-year span is too short, and in many cases, this kind of list can take me back to events that I remember well and fondly. This is especially true of music lists, because nothing comes so close to a functioning time machine as a well-stocked iPod.

Rolling Stone’s latest edition features not only the top 100 songs of the aughts, but also the top 100 albums, the decade in review, and the top eight artists (don’t know why they picked that number; maybe newly standard-sized mag is on a page budget). There’s something there for just about everyone. I liked the fact that U2 got so much love, skipped right over all the R&B and rap, and scanned quizzically their reasons for rating Bruce Springsteen so high. Sorry, I just don’t get him at all (they did call him a “working-class superhero” so there’s a nice, if obligatory, tie-in to the zeitgeist of this site, yada, yada). I also got to realize how the decade that brought me into my 30s also brought me to a stage of diminished hipness: I only recognized about 35 percent of the artists on that list (mainly from their appearances on Saturday Night Live), and probably own the music of less than 10 percent. I am so not cool.

Y’know … thanks a lot, Rolling Stone. You should get a zero designation, too, for making me realize this.

Zero: Mel Gibson, for being a crap-tacular father. MSNBC’s gossip columnist reports (yeah, yeah, I know; gossip …) that ol’ Mel — and I mean ol’ — somehow managed to sire another child, who’s now six weeks old, and goes days without so much as seeing the baby, much less deigning to change a diaper or help feed her. What a stud.

If he happened to be away because of work, that would be one thing — as long as it was temporary, short-lived and unavoidable — but reportedly this is the way his SEVEN other children were raised: by someone else.

How much do you wanna bet a collection of “Lethal Weapon,” “Mad Max” and “Braveheart” DVDs was among the personal effects hauled to the trash by one Kate Gosselin?

Once upon a time, I had a big problem with Batman: The Brave and the Bold, because it’s so Silver-Age-y and diametrically opposed to what Batman has been over the last 25 years, but I’ve come to terms with it. The show is played more for camp and fun than it is brooding darkness. I still think they could have chosen almost any other DC character to go Silver Age with and I’d have been much more OK with it, but taking the show for what it is — and no, I’m not going to say “It is what it is” because that is the single most meaningless phrase since “government spending restraint” — it’s a well-made show with clever writing, interesting character design, and great voice acting. Although I still can’t get past Diedrich Bader as Batman when all I can think of is this or this.

Overall, though, I’m exceedingly pleased to see DC doing great work on its direct-to-video animated projects as well as the fact that they’re getting some love at Wired.

Excelsior! … Oh, wait, that’s for someone else … .

Zero: Today’s Zero goes to my own lack of geographical and geopolitical knowledge, which prompted me, upon reading this headline — Abu Dhabi Bails Out Dubai With $10 Billion — to ask: “Wait, aren’t those two places the same thing?” Duh.

Today, I think the president pulled off the amazing trick of making Americans proud both of him and our country, and making the world proud of us by extension of our leader’s vision. I’m not a big Obama guy (I think we should only elect presidents who are over 60 years of age because any younger, and people are still in mistake-making mode rather than enjoying a position of wisdom for having made those mistakes and then risen above them), but today I am pleased to agree with him.

Apparently CNN doesn’t see things that way. Barely 15 hours after the big speech, the “Worldwide Leader in News” doesn’t have a single link to a story about the president’s speech on its home page. Oh, sure, there’s worthy stuff in its place, such as “Amazing Race success secrets” (because we all need them), and “Whatever happened to Hitler’s body?” (as if anyone cares).

Thank you, CNN for quickly reminding us that we Americans are vapid chasers of gossip, trivia and reality TV. We needed to be put in our place before we got all respectable again.

Zero: Anyone who uses a font in their email signature that supposedly resembles hand-written script, such as Bradley Handwriting or Lucida Handwriting. These are ridiculous, hard to read, and on some level patronizing. This represents, for me, an expansion of my annoyance with bad type such as Comic Sans. If you use any of these, you’re a typographic dullard. In fact, here’s a top 10 list:

Basic Fonts That Make You Look Like A Doofus

1.       Comic Sans (see www.bancomicsans.com)

2.       Times New Roman (unless you’re hopelessly devoted to generic foods and dressing like an ’80s IBM employee, too)

3.       Arial (see No. 2)

4.       Cooper Black (unless your run a Mom and Pop tire store)

5.       Bookman (good only for podunk weekly newspapers)

6.       Bradley Handwriting (it’s NOT your handwriting)

7.       Lucida Handwriting (see No. 6)

8.      Impact (so over-used and ill-used, it’s actually an oxymoron)

9.      Papyrus (unless you’re trying to evoke pharaohs and pyramids, stay away; this is not “exotic,” just dumb)

10.   Courier (unless you, too, are an arcane relic. If so, please sell your computer to someone who will give it a better home)

Life is all about choices. Just as you choose to clothe yourself in something respectable, if not stylish, why not treat your own words with the same care and respect?

HERO: Bruce Wayne, who is making his way through time, back to Gotham City to (we assume) take his rightful place again as Batman. USA Today covered DC Comics’ announcement that second-best modern comics scribe Grant Morrison (barely behind Geoff Johns, if for no other reason than Johns’ work has more wide-eyed optimism) is going to take Batman on a journey like he’s never had before.

In case you missed it, Morrison’s dense, hard-to-comprehend, and ultimately off-target mega event from last year, Final Crisis, ended with Batman being hit by by Darkseid’s Omega Sanction eyebeams. These were obviously different from his usual Omega beams, which hit and kill their targets every time. The Omega Sanction was never fully explained and left us with a big question mark as it appeared both that Superman was left holding Batman’s instantly emaciated corpse and that Bruce also was sent back to prehistoric times, with a final panel showing him sans cowl, cape and shirt making crude cave drawings.

Well, now comes word that indeed Bruce was transported back to the “Late-Paleolithic Era,” according to Morrison. In Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne, a six-issue mini-series beginning in April, “Each of the stories is a twist on a different ‘pulp hero’ genre — so there’s the caveman story, the witchhunter/Puritan adventurer thing, the pirate Batman, the cowboy, the P.I. — as a nod toward those mad old 1950s comics with Caveman Batman and Viking Batman adventures,” Morrison told USA Today. “It’s Bruce Wayne’s ultimate challenge — Batman vs. history itself!”

Caveman Batman

On the surface, this sounds like it could be a cheese-fest that’s harder to swallow or follow than Final Crisis. But we have to remember Morrison is also the writer who gave us the modern masterpiece, All Star Superman. That mini-series, too, had some outlandish sounding concepts, but the way Morrison told them was sheer brilliance. And I think he has a greater affinity for Bats than Supes, so this is guaranteed not to be Weird Morrison. It’ll be Genius Morrison. After all, he’s been working on the larger story arc for Batman for four years now, including writing the new Batman and Robin title — which will bring its own interesting factor to the story now that Dick Grayson has more or less embraced being Batman, and Bruce’s bastard son (all definitions apply) is the new Robin, while Bruce’s old Robin — and adopted son — Tim Drake is now Red Robin. And he’s the only one keeping the faith that Bruce is really still alive.

There are so many angles to this story that, in my mind, it can’t miss. And I can’t wait.

ZERO: Most of the climate-change “warrior zealots” gathering in Copenhagen, Denmark, this week. I’m not going to go where all the right-wing conspiracy theorists or science deniers keep going. Reading ALL the information about the stolen emails reveals that glaciers were made out of snow hills. And saying that man has no culpability in the changes to the atmosphere is irresponsible, flat-Earth talk. BUT that’s not to say everything should be taken at face value. This is a big planet, and we humans are a small, small part of the ecosystem.

The Rev. Al Gore

There are plenty of credible scientists out there who rightly continue to ask questions about our effect on the planet. So many, in fact, that for people such as Al Gore (who’s not a scientist but sure likes to play one — and cash in — on TV) to say it’s a closed issue is either hubris or mirror-image, reactionary zealotry.

For questions as big as these, any scientist truly committed to the scientific method would shy away from granite-encased proclamations — on either side of the issue. Scientists question and keep questioning. All the people on the left who like to make fun of End Times zealots who are inalterably convinced that scattered, disparate and unrelated verses in the Bible can be put together, jigsaw-puzzle style, to reveal all the secrets of the future need to take a look in the mirror at their own tectonically solid “convictions” about global warming.

What each side should realize is that they are the Bizarro versions of each other. John Hagee is Al Gore, and vice versa.

Religious nuts, meet your parallel-universe selves, the climate nuts. Each of you needs a new hobby.

I humbly suggest preparing yourselves for the imminent coming of Bruce Wayne, who will surely heal all that’s really, truly wrong with the world. Beginning in April.

HERO: Peter Gammons, for reportedly leaving ESPN in favor of the MLB Network. I’ll admit there’s a part of me that isn’t happy about a real journalist leaving an “independent” network for one that’s the mouthpiece of the a sports league (hello, NFL Network and your bunch of sellouts), but I’m frankly tired of ESPN’s over-hyped, too-glossy-for-their-own-good, catchphrase-centric, constantly cross-promoting, every-segment sponsored by a beer company, aren’t-we-cool cheapening of my sports-watching experience. Now, if I want to learn what Peter Gammons has found out about the Yankees and Red Sox the big leagues, I can just turn to the MLB Network. And I won’t have to be force-fed soccer.

ZERO: The bloodsuckers that run World Wrestling Entertainment. Edward Fatu, who most recently wrestled under the stage name Umaga, recently died of a heart attack. CNN reports that he had lots of issues with substance abuse and was kicked out of the WWE in June for flunking out of its wellness program. And at 6’4″ he didn’t really carry his 350 lbs. all that well. Clearly if anyone was at fault for his health problems, it was Fatu; we’re all responsible for ourselves before anyone else is. That said (and that’s enough criticism of someone who’s no longer living, anyway), my view is that for all the lip service the WWE pays to its wellness programs, drug testing, and “running a clean ship,” it’s clear to all but the dumbest of us that there’s a certain lifestyle that wrestlers live outside the ring, and even if they try to stay clean, I’m guessing there’s plenty of opportunity for falling off the sturdiest of wagons. Just look at the body count over the years.

I think the WWE owes some amount of guaranteed lifetime health coverage to anyone who ever makes it to the company’s big stage. The fact is, even though the “fighting” is choreographed, you don’t fake the jumps and falls and crashes through tables. If playing in the NFL does the physical damage of multiple car crashes, what does performing in a WWE ring three and four nights a week do?

After Fatu was cast aside last summer, he had no health insurance. Who would cover him? And with the damage done to his body, the bad habits he picked up while on the circuit and giant face tattoos that served him well in the ring  but don’t exactly allow for easy crossover into the rest of American life, what, exactly, was this guy going to do but spiral downward? And the WWE says, “Thanks for posing for those posters, helping us sell t-shirts and boost ratings, but now we’re washing our hands of you completely.” That may be legal and even defensible on a “we tried everything our policy manual calls for,” but it’s not right.

WWE, you get a zero.