My four year-old and I have been playing a lot of LEGO Indiana Jones as of late. I find it amusing that he's learning all the character names and general storyline of the first three movies before having seen one actual frame. Ah, kids these days with their movie-inspired LEGO video games and loud rock-and-roll music.

At one point, a group of dark-uniformed characters jumped out at us while we were solving some LEGO-based puzzle and my son asked, "Who are they?" I easily replied, "Bad guys."

Apparently that wasn't specific enough. "Yeah, who are they?" I mean, there are tons of bad guys out there. Are they robots? Vampires? Door-to-door solicitors?

I thought for a beat knowing that whatever I said would create a formula. Bad guys = my next word. So I said, "Nazis."

I'm glad we weren't playing a video game based on some 90s action movie because saying Arabs or Israelis would have come back and bitten me at some point in the future. But I felt pretty safe with maligning Nazis as a group.

Later, we unlocked that character to play and the name it gave was "Enemy Soldier." That's about as helpful as "bad guy." Maybe it's more like "bad guy with a gun" but do we really need to be politically correct about Nazis? I mean, who's going to get offended by that? Other than aliens set on the genocide of humanity, Nazis are the only accepted group of villains we have left.

I can't wait for the fifth Indy movie -- "Indiana Jones Versus the Enemy Soldiers Led By That One Enemy Guy."

My relationship with superhero movies is a complicated one. One of those where even if I swear I'm done with the genre, I find myself drunk calling the video store to see if the latest "X-Men" is in stock. I recently watched "Spider-Man 3" because it was on TV and, while I didn't really enjoy the second one, I thought that maybe it would be different this time.

Spidey 3 suffers from what I like to call the Superhero Movie Muffin-Top Effect.

Basically, this is when a movie, usually a sequel, tries to cram a butt-load of character arcs and sub-plots into a two-hour pair of proverbial pants. It doesn't all fit and so the excess fat unattractively hangs out.

This seems to happen frequently with superhero movies where the fanboy demographic demands their favorite minor character be rendered on screen. "X-Men," "Spider-Man," and "Batman" have all sported this fashion faux-pas.

In this movie, the Muffin-Top Effect starts with the typical hero-turns-dark-in-part-three plot. It then adds [not one, but] two villains (Sandman and Venom), each with their own backstory and character arc. Then the movie attempts to jam a love triangle (Peter, M.J., and Gwen) into its ill-fitting jeans. And let us not forget Green Goblin Jr.'s redemption sub-plot.

That's five plot lines ungracefully wedged into 139 minutes. That's really five too many for me at this point.

Oh, Spider-Man, I thought you changed! I thought you were different than the others. I thought...oh! "Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer" is on...

Because sometimes you can't round-up, here is my comic book round-down of recently-read comics.

I made a promise to myself when I was in high school. I told myself that I would continue skateboarding even when I was really old...like 30 or something.

I haven't been able to stay true to the spirit of the rule -- that I would be skating every day of my life, but last night I was able to fulfill the letter of the law of my adolescent pledge.

A friend took me to a nearby basement ramp for what he deemed "Old Man Skate Night." Basically it consists of a bunch of guys skating and hanging out.

Since I'm really old...like over 30, I'm a bit sore today. Muscles that haven't been used since Bush Sr. was running the country said good morning to me.

Fortunately, that was the only promise I made to myself that I can remember. I'm just glad it wasn't something like I'll always have a two-foot vertical jump or that I would still collect He-Man action figures.

My first Thrasher