D.R. Smith

A few weeks ago, a YouTube video popped up called "Car Bomb In West Los Angeles" in which it appears that some sort of crane-like robot (an extra Transformer that didn't quite make Michael Bay's cut?) pulls an unidentified object out of the trunk of a car. At about the four minute mark in the video, the robot sets the thing off to the side of a building, and a loud noise is heard,...

As a journalist working in L.A., you're bound to get your share of interesting/ridiculous phone calls. (One P.R. agent, for example, recently tried to get me to run a picture of Lindsay Lohan on her way to rehab because the actress wore a particular brand of designer hats in the picture that they were trying to promote.) Few, however, were as strange as the call I got yesterday. A female with a strange muffled...

Had Las Vegas been imagined by a bunch of nerds instead of alcoholics and real estate speculators, it'd probably look a lot like Comic-Con. Far more than the name suggests, Comic-Con is not simply a comic book convention anymore. Over the course of two decades, it's become a four-day PG-13 style orgy of audiovisual overstimulation combined with an obscene amount of stuff - comics, movies, games, costumes, posters, gadgets, paintings, and tens of thousands...