To the layman, Mario is but a simple plumber—unwittingly thrust into a strange world of sentient mushrooms and militant turtles, then suddenly expected to save a kingdom he’s never known because he was accidentally sucked down a pipe. And we never do find out whether the job he was originally contracted for paid restitution after subjecting him to an insanely unsafe workplace environment—let alone how he explained the seemingly impossible insurance claim upon returning to the

So, it’s officially spooky season. I don’t make the rules. This is just the way it goes, okay? We’ve got to go along with it, lest we incur the wrath of fully grown adult women who like to pretend they’re real-life witches just because they have a few crystals in their apartment. But yes, it is officially Halloween season. A season that I love. But mostly for completely gluttonous reasons. Those reasons? My yearly tradition of procuring a giant box of assorted, fun-sized choc

Hollywood has always been a town built on secrecy. Scripts are locked away in underground vaults. Actors are smuggled onto sets beneath tarps. Studio executives communicate exclusively through burner phones. Actresses pretend they didn’t have sex with Harvey Weinstein for five minutes of screen time in Jackie Brown. I digress. Marvel, in particular, guards its upcoming movies with the sort of security normally reserved for launch codes within the nuclear football, alien autop

They say the times, they are a-changing. I think. It’s pretty much impossible to decipher anything Bob Dylan says without the skilled linguists behind the translation of the Dead Sea Scrolls, or technology that hasn’t been invented yet. Seriously. Making sense of the Rosetta Stone from its original Egyptian hieroglyphs takes less laborious effort than trying to parse the lyrics of Dylan’s greatest hits. I think he does that shit on purpose, and I think he really speaks with t

Historians have long debated the great milestones of civilization: the wheel, fire, the printing press, sliced bread. All noble. All useful. Some even world-changing. Fleeting breaths of brilliance given form from a world of possibility. And then there is the dick pic. A perceived celebratory gesture, often rejected with scorn and disgust. But where did it begin? How did this come to be? From the very beginning? Inception? One can only imagine Adam, fresh off creation, strutt

(The following was originally published in November 2011.) You know what I could go an entire lifetime without ever experiencing again? BEING RUN OVER. Oh, and maybe Reality TV show, X-Factor. But mostly the first one. And I know what you’re all saying – “weren’t you already ran over in 2008 after enjoying a light lunch, tripping varying boisterous children in Blockbuster, and then procuring the underrated Season 2 of Dexter on DVD?” YES. I WAS. But if you are asking this ve