The Silicates also taught her how to look aesthetic while kneeling in a corner for long periods of time, a pastime that topped her list of stupid tasks.

The first writer to attempt a script was Barry Morrow, who’d won an Oscar for Rain Man. He wrote a kind of existential road trip with Mario as a smart older brother and Luigi as his naive savant sibling. It sounded so familiar that production staff nicknamed it “Drain Man”.

Once, I remember, my father soaked a bit of cottonwool for him with some brown drops containing opium and, chucking aimlessly, recommended that he see a dentist. “The whole is stronger than its parts,” he answered with awkward gruffness, “ergo I will vanquish my tooth.”

Alcohol is one way of feeling more powerful and is a Stage 1 mode highly relevant to Nonnus.

Groucho himself insisted that he was named for a character in the comic strip Knocko the Monk, which inspired the craze for nicknames ending in “o”; in fact, there was a character in that strip named “Groucho”. However, he is the only Marx or Marx associate who defended this theory, and as he is not an unbiased witness, few biographers take the claim seriously.

When I visited the Museum of Death on Hollywood Boulevard and mentioned my upcoming interview to the nice couple who run the place, they told me they’d been friendly with “Ken” for years and that he had cursed them no fewer than three times (in one instance via their answering machine).

His mental blocks were dissolving like salt in water. His mind was incredible. Beautiful. Sensual. I wanted him, just as an Earth salmon ready to spawn felt driven to swim upstream, against all obstacles, to reach home and reproduce.

For example, Chinese screenings of Mission: Impossible 3 omitted a scene showing clothes drying on a clothesline in Shanghai because it was not a positive portrayal of Shanghai, despite the fact that the film was partially shot in Shanghai, where many people do not own dryers.

More events of defenestration have occurred in Prague during its history, but they are not usually called defenestrations of Prague.

Whenever the red button is pressed in some universe within the multiverse, that universe is deleted, and N successor universes are then created.