Des Moines is like your typical American city; it's just these concentric circles of malls, built outward from the city.

It is a curious feature of our existance that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it.

When you tell an Iowan a joke, you can see a kind of race going on between his brain and his expression.

The best that can be said for Norwegian television is that it gives you the sensation of a coma without the worry and inconvenience.

We forget just how painfully dim the world was before electricity. A candle, a good candle, provides barely a hundredth of the illumination of a single 100 watt light bulb.

If you can imagine a man having a vasectomy without anesthetic to the sound of frantic sitar-playing, you will have some idea of what popular Turkish music is like.

The human diet consists of just nine plants: corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, cassava, sorghum, millet, beans, barley, rye and oats.