Absolute Plumbing Services in Wesley Chapel FL
Absolute Plumbing Services
1401 Deerbourne Dr
Wesley Chapel, FL 33543
By Linda Ballou, NABBW’s Adventure Travel Associate
Hanalei Bay today. Linda Ballou photo
When I lived on the North Shore in 1978, there was...
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By Linda Ballou, NABBW’s Adventure Travel Associate
Po‘ipū Cost Walk. Linda Ballou photo.
Po‘ipū is the favored spot by visitors to the...
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By Linda Ballou, NABBW’s Adventure Travel Associate
As a young woman, I had dropped out of society and landed on the North Shore of Kaua‘i....
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Imagine you’re a filmmaker. You have an idea. It feels like a good one, a very good one. You start writing, and after multiple screenplay drafts,...
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Is Pixar the greatest animation studio in the history of film? Possibly. It can certainly compete with Disney, its quasi-parent, along with the...
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There’s an old belief that all little boys go dino-mad for a minute. I have no idea if that’s accurate, but I do know I was no exception. Back...
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The first time I saw Top Gun, I hated it. As a wee lad, I remember seeing it in a packed theater in 1986. I remember the whooshing of the jets, the...
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There aren’t many fictional characters that have as many character facets as Batman. You could go in a number of different directions beyond horror...
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By Linda Ballou, NABBW’s Adventure Travel Associate
Linda Ballou
The only thing certain about travel in 2022 is that it is uncertain. People...
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As you read this, somebody is working a soulless customer service job. They’re getting screamed at by a customer with an almost sociopathic lack of...
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Chicagoland Equipment & Supply (CES), a portfolio company of Cooper Management, LLC, and a leading supplier of equipment, supplies and service to...
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By Linda Ballou, NABBW’s Adventure Travel Associate
Winter on the Central Coasts means fewer tourists and plentiful wildlife. Birds and marine...
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There have been eleven movies made with the title Vengeance is Mine. The first of those films was made way back in 1912, proving that even in those...
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He was close. He thought he was ready, but at the last moment, he stepped away. Wait — let me back up and I’ll explain. To set the stage, last...
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Movie stars are good. Serious Actors are better. Best of all are That Guys.* Even if you’re a casual film viewer, you likely have a favorite That...
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We say that all lives have value. Do they? If so, what exactly is that value? To ponder a question like that is, at best, distasteful. At worst,...
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By Linda Ballou, NABBW’s Adventure Travel Associate
Smith River
Steaming temps in the inland valleys of Southern Oregon are sending smart...
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The Marvel Cinematic Universe is a trend-setter, and it’s kind of amazing considering the risks taken. Consider the lead of Iron Man was a troubled...
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I’m a genre nerd. While a thoughtful documentary or smart drama will capture my attention, nothing gets my nerd radar pinging faster than a film...
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Is it fair to call Nicolas Cage a film icon? Not in the religious sense of the word, but more the idea that an icon represents a concept.
Take a...
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The past is a distant country. The further away we travel from it, the more strange the customs feel and the more unlike our own times it becomes....
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Once upon a time, there was a director who got royally screwed. His name was (and continues to be) David Ayer, and his upbringing in South Central...
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No Sudden Move is streaming on HBO MAX
I adore crime movies, though some flavors more than others. About half of Quentin Tarantino’s filmography...
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Black Widow is streaming on Disney+
Prequels are terrible. That is, until they aren’t. It used to be that the idea of checking out the earlier...
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By Linda Ballou, NABBW’s Adventure Travel Associate
Every bend of the river beckons—every pool may bring better luck. Life should be like...
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False Positive is streaming on Hulu
In 2016, the World Health Organization estimated that around 830 women die on a daily basis due to complications...
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“The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It” is streaming on HBO Max
Much like life, franchises find a way. Sooner or later, they realize...
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“Plan B” is streaming on Hulu
A while back, Toni Morrison said, “All good art is political.” I think that’s about right, yet I’d...
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“The Dry” is streaming on Prime
We all have secrets. From the smallest to the most squalid, everyone has a moment, a decision that they...
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“Benny Loves You” is streaming on Prime
Back in the day, the vast majority of scary cinema didn’t exactly knock themselves out in terms...
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“North Hollywood” is Streaming On Demand.
A few years from now, my kid will graduate from high school. Before that happens, he’ll live...
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“Wrath of Man” is Streaming On Demand.
There aren’t that many movies that kicked off an entire sub-genre. I’ll concede that, prior to...
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“Stowaway” is streaming on Netflix
Life is fragile. It’s easy to forget that on an average day. Last Thursday, for example, many of us...
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Boys From County Hell is streaming on Shudder
As I write this, we’re well into springtime in Colorado’s Front Range.* The sun sets later, flowers...
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By Linda Ballou, NABBW’s Adventure Travel Associate
After eleven years, I decided it was time to deliver the fruitcake my mother had sent me in...
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“Crisis” is streaming on Prime
Years ago, I was driving to the low-pay, high-stress job I held at the time. I turned my head to check my...
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For the Sake of Vicious is streaming on Apple TV
There’s one aspect of filmmaking that’s never gotten the respect it deserves. Directors are...
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Godzilla vs. Kong is streaming on HBO Max
There are those of you who might scoff at the idea of intentionally watching a Godzilla movie. I’m not...
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Zack Snyder’s Justice League is streaming on HBO Max
Second chances don’t come around too often. That’s just as true in the movie business as...
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Boss Level is streaming on Hulu
In the world of Hollywood, it can take time for a genre to emerge. That’s mostly due to the overwhelming cowardice...
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Nomadland is streaming on Hulu
The nature of the world is to change. It’s always been so, despite our best efforts to push back against it. Some of...
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By Linda Ballou, NABBW’s Adventure Travel Associate
In writing Embrace of the Wild I hope to have turned the lemons of Covid-19 into...
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Welcome to the column for all carbon-based life-forms.
If you breathe oxygen, this is for you.
And if you live on a planet, especially Earth, well,...
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I was not initially familiar with the story of Englishwoman Lady Isabella Lucy Bird, so I didn’t know what to expect when I began reading Linda...
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The Little Things is streaming on HBOMax
Hey, you! You, the person who just dropped a few hundred bucks on screenwriting software and who bought a...
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Promising Young Woman is streaming on Prime
They said he came from a respectable family. Regarding his character, they said he was kind, loving, and...
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It’s Monday, and it’s time once again for The Video You Deserve.
Now, the past several videos we’ve featured have all been vintage stuff from...
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Hunted is streaming on Shudder
She didn’t want to go. It would mean leaving the safety of the village, leaving behind a world of predictability and...
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Mondays can be rough.
And so, every Monday, we give you a music video. A fun, funny music video. Something that’ll make you smile, make you laugh,...
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My kid Liam is around six months into his thirteenth year. He’s kind, smart, funny, and I can already see that he’ll go much further in life than...
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It’s Monday.
Yeah.
We feel you.
And so, every Monday, we give you a music video. A fun, funny music video. Something that’ll make you smile, make...
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If you’re reading this, you’re alive and you survived 2020. Trust me when I tell you, that’s good! We had an insanely acrimonious presidential...
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Wonder Woman 1984 is Streaming on HBO Max
To one degree or another, superheroes are all about symbolism. Despite having been originally designed as...
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It’s a wrap! 2020 is coming to a close. Adventure Travel Writer, Linda Ballou, shares highlights of her year in this interview with Adam Asher and...
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Hillbilly Elegy is streaming on Netflix
There’s a story many of us tell ourselves about poverty.* Poor people are poor due to their own actions or...
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All Joking Aside is streaming on Prime
When it comes to the arts, there’s nothing harder than stand-up comedy. Don’t get me wrong; to play...
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The Trial of the Chicago 7 is streaming on Netflix
There’s a long and semi-proud tradition in Hollywood of the courtroom movie. Some of them, such...
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By Linda Ballou, NABBW’s Adventure Travel Associate
The Mexican people call retired persons “Jubilants.” I was so busy I never thought much...
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Borat Subsequent Moviefilm is streaming on Prime
How does he do it? He must have the luck of Loki or some other trickster god on his side,...
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Enola Holmes is streaming on Netflix
Perhaps the best part of a movie, for me, is the first couple of seconds. By that point, I have a broad idea of...
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The Devil All the Time is streaming on Netflix
I’ve been to the South, but I’ve never been to The South. To clarify, years ago my wife and I took...
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Cuties is streaming on Netflix
Take a seat. Better yet, make a nice, hot cup of tea, pull up your nearest fainting couch, and get ready for some...
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Bill & Ted Face the Music is streaming on Prime
Let’s talk about trilogies. Specifically, how unbelievably hard they are to pull off. It’s...
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The One and Only Ivan is streaming on Disney+.
Once upon a time, there was a mall, located in a faraway land known as Tacoma. This mall wasn’t the...
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Project Power is streaming on Netflix
Next to westerns, there’s no other genre that has the flexibility that superheroes have in terms of...
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7500 is streaming on Amazon Prime
Americans are not good at empathy. We like to think we are, but the hard truth is, we suck at it. Why? Because...
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The Pool is streaming on Shudder.
There aren’t too many animals that genuinely scare me. Sure, I know that my place on the food chain isn’t...
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Sometimes, the best-case scenario is to be wrong. We all have our blind spots, right? I was wrong about Andy Samberg. Wrong as hell. For a while...
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The Old Guard is streaming on Netflix
So there I was, in the midst of a bout of pandemic depression. The old ways of coping were gone for the moment....
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Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga is streaming on Netflix
I like to think I’m a relatively knowledgeable guy. I read a number of...
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Listen, I’m not going to say that Kanye West dropped out of the race for President of the United States just because I announced I was running....
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I’m writing this on the morning of July 2. By now, we should have been a couple of months deep into the summer movie season. I’d be lying if I...
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Da 5 Bloods is streaming on Netflix
I’ve never served in the military. At the tail end of high school, recruiters from the Army bombarded my phone,...
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Everyone who’s into movies has a thing. A thing that is endlessly fascinating and that can be refracted through a thousand different lenses. One...
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It’s Monday.
Yeah.
We feel you.
And so, we’re debuting a new feature. This feature. And in this feature, every Monday, we’re going...
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The Lovebirds is streaming on Netflix
If you’re like me, you could use some quiet time. There’s something to be said for bringing back naps and...
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Time to Hunt is streaming on Netflix
We should be in the summer movie season right now. We should be bombarded by entertainment options: a little...
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You shouldn’t expect your kids to be into the same things you are. It certainly wasn’t the case with my father and me. Bill was a World War II...
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Sometimes the meaning of a life is revealed at the end of it. We’ve seen that in film for decades, and perhaps the best example of this is Citizen...
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The Willoughbys is streaming on Netflix
Once upon a time, there lived a parent. This parent had the colossal misfortune to be a) alive during a...
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By Linda Ballou, NABBW’s Adventure Travel Associate
When I am not adventuring on horseback through pristine country, hiking some of the...
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Extraction is streaming on Netflix now.
Not all action movies are created equally. You know that, and you know there’s a wide world of difference...
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The Room is currently streaming on Shudder.
Some people love home renovation projects. Can’t get enough of them. I am not one of those people, due...
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Coffee & Kareem is streaming on Netflix.
We can’t help what we find funny. Who knows where it comes from in the first place? We all have those...
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Spenser Confidential is streaming on Netflix.
Gather round, children, and let Graybeard Tim regale you with tales of the Long Ago Times! Back in the...
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DreamWorks’ Trolls World Tour, which was originally set to open in theaters on Apr 10, will now be released digitally on the same day!
Trolls World...
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Although Coachella 2020 has been postponed due to current events, music fans can still experience the festival through the documentary...
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Portrait of a Lady on Fire is streaming on Hulu.
Connections are everything. We all know that humans are social animals. We all know that there’s...
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By Linda Ballou, NABBW’s Adventure Travel Associate
On my visit to South Africa in 2015, I was surprised to learn that there are too many...
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The Platform is streaming on Netflix now.
It’s hard enough for a quality film to break through to audiences under normal circumstances. The Motion...
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We’re all scared. Can you blame us? There’s a pandemic cutting through every corner of the world. The guy who’s supposed to be in charge...
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The internet has given us a great deal. From my laptop or phone, I have access to several lifetimes’ worth of information and culture. I can order...
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By Linda Ballou, NABBW’s Adventure Travel Associate
From the extreme arid red center of Australia, our Overseas Adventure Travel group flew to...
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The good news is, we’re in a golden age of horror movies. Back in the old days, horror wasn’t taken seriously as a genre. If you liked a good...
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Not long ago on my birthday, I decided to do something for myself. To celebrate my inevitable march toward old age and the grave, a drive in the...
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The ultimate Australian experience with Overseas Adventure Travel is a journey through a maze of micro-climates, multi-cultures and natural wonders....
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Who can say how we’ll react during a crisis? We all want to believe that, when the moment comes, we’ll step up. We’ll perform admirably and be...
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I like it when something cool comes from something damaged and terrible. For example, the DC Extended Universe. Initially, they were not off to a...
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A common belief is that movie critics love to trash movies. It’s thought that we critical types, after emerging from coffins buried in consecrated...
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If you’re a regular viewer of movies, you know you can track the seasons by the kinds of movies playing. Are the theaters jam-packed with big, loud...
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We never really reckoned with World War I, not in any meaningful sense. For a while there it was called The War to End All Wars, despite the fact...
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There are two incontrovertible facts: the first is that Louisa May Alcott was a fascinating human being. Her parents were Transcendentalists. She...
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As many of us do, the arrival of the year’s end is a time for me to look back. If I were to sum it up, 2019 was all about surprise. Putting aside...
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In the beginning, there was the Word…or a bunch of words, anyway. They began with, “It is a period of civil war. Rebel spaceships, striking...
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If you’re currently married or you were ever married, I’ve got news for you: your marriage is insane. I hate to be the one to tell you, but there...
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Making a movie is hard. Making a good movie? That’s really hard. Making a good mystery? These days that appears to be damn near impossible, given...
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What is cinema? Is cinema only cinema when you’re watching it in a movie theater? While their methods have changed throughout the years, ultimately...
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One of the keenest pleasures found in moviegoing is that of competence porn. A great comedy can flood your brain with endorphins, a solid horror...
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“Someday, even the experts will figure out, that crime is not caused by rap music…or even my music, but by a power structure of self-absorbed...
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Sometimes it feels like franchises never end. There’s a bunch of films in the Fast and Furious series, the James Bond movies have been trucking...
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Anything can be funny, right? There are two schools of thought, there. The first is the theory that anything has the potential to be amusing. Comedy...
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Skirt the crowds and beat the summer heat in Yosemite with a stay at Tenaya Lodge, an all-inclusive resort with hot and cold pools and a complete spa...
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Scott Beck and Bryan Woods aren’t slowing down.
The duo, who grew up making indie films since their teen years in Bettendorf, Iowa, and currently...
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While I was working on my list of comics to order from Previews last month I noticed a surprising change to two Marvel series I was ordering.
I was...
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