Ah, the flotsam and jetsam of television.

When it’s bad, it’s really bad. Thankfully, we have The Soup to act as a pop culture strainer, capturing the Very Best of the Very Worst. Of course you’ve seen The Soup, the E! channel’s weekly review of celebrity gaffes and reality-show low points.

But even if you’re not a connoisseur of truly terrible TV, there’s still one terrific reason to tune in: sardonic host Joel McHale, right, a 6′ 3″ vision of hotness served up as the emcee.

At first glance, he could be a stubbly J. Crew catalog model or a Brit Pop frontman or one of those guys who turn up in straight porn as randy plumbers and pizza deliverymen. He is, in fact, the perfect guy, a combo of playful sexiness and a wicked streak of humor.

That a channel like E! would present a wet-dream like this is something of a miracle. E!, after all, is a low-rent netlet whose content consists of a drip, drip, drip of studio press releases, inane celebrity news, fawning star profiles, dopey Hollywood crime documentaries, and staged true life series devoted to bottom-of-the-barrel “personalities.” E! makes FOX look like PBS. (read the full article)

Macbeth in the buff — why hadn’t anybody thought of it before?

The idea was as natural as …well, as Mickey Rooney turning to Judy Garland and bubbling “I know! Let’s set Shakespeare to music!” And Judy bubbling back “But lets do it in Swing!”

When a theater company in Arlington, Virginia decided to put on a Macbeth for the 21st Century, director Jose Carrasquillo wanted something tribal and violent, something suggestive of “an animal-like clan and society.”

“Twenty minutes,” decided the critic for the Washington City Paper. “That’s about how long it takes to get used to the nudity in José Carrasquillo’s eerie, intelligent, and visually arresting Macbeth.”

A tad more skittish about the balls-out production, with its cast of mostly male actors (give or take a few witches), was the reviewer for the A.P. wire service: “Folks in the front sometimes cringe and move back a few rows during intermission,” the scribe reported sheepishly. “One man watched the play with a programme in front of his eyes, blocking out the lower half of his field of vision.” (Awwwww, the poor fragile darling. What? Were all the showings of Evening sold out?) (read the full article)

There’s always a modicum of truth in humor.

Remember when the showbiz satire site Dateline: Hollywood “reported” that 2006′s homo-hot gladiator movie 300 was the “first gay porn movie to gross over 70 million dollars”?

We do. We laughed really hard. Almost as hard as when that same site’s front page screamed out: BRITNEY SPEARS ANNOUNCES PLANS TO EXPOSE ANUS!!

But back to the 300 lampoonery. Dateline: Hollywood’s pseudo feature on the film featured an “interview” with Don Fanaras, one of the film’s “producers.” Mr. Fanaras revealed how 300‘s core audience was “mostly men who are in denial that they are attracted to other men.” (read the full article)

What to wear for Gay Pride?

Drag and leather are classic, of course. But our favorite look has always been as nude as possible. As chest rippling and ass-out as the law allows.

And each year, God bless ‘em, all the new models come out, showing off their baby-oiled bods and a winter’s worth of crunches, squats and NFL-strength steroids.

Still, not all of us are content with traditional.

Back in the day, when Gay Pride was more march, than parade, the spirit of protest was in the air and everywhere. Laughing in the face of enforced heterosexualism and defying the pearl-clutching propriety of those uptight and always mortified closet cases who imagined they were passing or fooling anyone — yes, that was the fire that lit up a thousand floats.

And you know? Look around. Everywhere your hear the sound of marching, charging feet, boy. Cause summer’s here and the time is right for fighting in the street, boy

And so we draw our inspiration and revolutionary costume this June from that S-T-A-U-N-C-H madwomen of the Hamptons, that lifelong debutante who had a way with any old rag wrapped around her head and fastened with a diamond broach, Edie Beale, as recreated by Christine Ebersole (to righteous Tony- winning acclaim) in the current Broadway musical, Grey Gardens. (read the full article)

They’re both nude. A man and a woman. Hip-deep in a jungle pond, their genitals thoughtfully concealed by gently swirling lily pads.

The woman’s long dark hair, as hair always does in these tableaux, carefully hides her breasts. Two giant white lotuses bloom beside the Biblical couple.

Yes, Virginia, this is Adam and Eve on their first date.

At least as it’s depicted at Cincinnati’s new 60,000 square foot Creation Museum — a museum that “brings the pages of the Bible to life.” And not just with animatronic dolls (left), but with a video of Adam and Eve in all their near-naked glory.

You read correctly, a video depicting how life as we know it really, really began (or so the museum claims): A solitary man. His magical rib. A miraculous mutation. A Wooo-man.

A snake … and then …

A career in porn?

Yep, porn creep strikes again, in God’s garden no less.

As so often befalls those associated with our country’s most sacred enterprises, sex and porn continue to have their way.

In our garden variety tale it’s Adam — er, Eric Linden (left), the hunky actor who plays Adam in Cincinnati Eden — who is currently under fire for associating himself with number one, S-E-X, and number two, S-F-X, a racy clothing company that depicts Linden in one of its ads showing off a T-shirt while he seems to be getting a blowjob. (read the full article)

And so the Sopranos ended last night with a whimper, not a bang.

And it was fantastic. Literally — including a perfectly believable report by one of the nastier comic relief characters, Paulie Walnuts, that one night when he was wandering alone he saw the Virgin Mary at the Bada-Bing strip club.

Love it!

So here’s my 2 cents on the ending, which I also LOVED.

The wisdom of it was the “two roads diverged in a yellow wood” paradox. And the point, as I see it, is that both possibilities are parallel — killed, not killed — and equally likely.

Ending the way it did the emphasis was on the tension of this sort of life, the precariousness of being a mobster. And then, after a step back, the precariousness of life for everyone. Death stalks us all, no? (read the full article)

Many things fall out of closets Рnot least of which are skeletons and homophobic pastors. But in the case of Michael Jackson we are expecting a a pi̱ata full of tightly wrapped craziness soon to hit the auction floor and explode.

The auction, set to be held on May 30 and 31, against the singer’s wishes, in — but how perfect — Las Vegas, will offer to the discerning connoisseur a lifetime’s accumulation of costumes, souvenirs and just plain shit. (read the full article)

Jesuses come and Jesuses go.

It is said each generation remakes God in its own image.

No surprise then that this Easter Sunday we have the Matthew Passion, a bold but, from all accounts, flawed Off-Broadway play that draws a parallel between Jesus, gay-bash victim Matthew Shepard, and an HIV+ gay man wracked by the guilt of having survived so long with AIDS.

In a a style reminiscent of Angels in America, the plot weaves in and out of the lives of the three men, with dream encounters between them ( the HIV man is acting a part in a play about Matthew Shepard), climaxing in a meeting of the three on the hill of the Crucifixion, above, with the two gay men cast as the thieves, one despairing of his life, the other filled with the promise of a better world to come. (read the full article)

Once again the tension is mounting. Oscar Eve is upon us.

The Smart Money, we are told, is on Helen Mirren. She is one of maybe three Sure Things set to look up from the stage of the Kodak Theater this Sunday into the full glow of Academy acclaim. The Smart Money is also on Dreamgirl Jennifer Hudson and — until just recently — Eddie Murphy.

Now readers, we know you’re just like us: longtime Academy-Award watchers, the kind of people who started rehearsing their Oscar speeches in the mirror at age six. We Nightcharmers know that Smart Money predictions and Shoo-Ins are a tradition of Oscar Night.

So is The Major Upset. (read the full article)

Muggles are the cwaziest people, as Elmer Fudd might say if he could ever get the hat with the earflaps off and forget about wabbits.

Elmer meet Harry (Daniel Radcliffe, at right), in a just released still from the upcoming summer release Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix .

As the quite teenaged Harry demonstrates, every boy has a magic wand in Potterville — but we’ve already gone on at rococo lengths about the nude cheek of stage actor Daniel.

Harry knows all about knuckleheaded Muggles and their small-minded ass-backward Dursley ways. He would not be surprised — as neither were we — to read a story that appeared today in the Washington Post:

Pentecostal chaplain in the Army has a crisis of faith, switches to Wiccan and is booted out of the military. (read the full article)

Somehow we knew “the Buff Boys of Boystown” would find their alliterative way into the Surreal and Continuing After-Death Life of Anna Nicole Smith.

West Hollywood’s finest appear in no more than a walk-on in this, the third act of The Prince and the Polegirl, and yet…

Who can look away when buns and pecs compete with each other for Most Outlandish Feature on a circuit boy’s body?

Who can not fully understand the mad lusting after such super-sized geegaws or why they would play so … definitive… so damning … a role in a certain paternity claim for the most fathered child in America?

From the wonderfully nasty newsletter popbitch : (read the full article)

Okay, so far its been 24/7 Anna Nicole.

Every cable news station has turned into Access Hollywood.

War in Iraq? Bombs over Iran? Who gives a hoot!

All we wanna know is did Zsa Zsa Gabor’s husband father Baby Dannielynn?

And so Nightcharm will scoop them all with 10 Totally True*, Totally Shocking Things About the Anna Nicole that Nobody Knew.

And when we say TRUE, we mean The Star true. We mean The Globe true! (At left, Anna does Marlyn in an ad for the animal-rights organization PETA.)

Here then are 10 things you’ll soon hear repeated — we’re sure — by the Inquiring Minds at 24/7 News, ever on the hunt to hike up ratings with new Anna Nicole tidbits. (read the full article)