No one knows, incidentally, why Australia's spiders are so extravagantly toxic; capturing small insects and injecting them with enough poison to drop a horse would appear to be the most literal case of overkill. Still, it does mean that everyone gives them lots of space.

Columbus real achievement was managing to cross the ocean successfully in both directions. Though an accomplished enough mariner, he was not terribly good at a great deal else, especially geography, the skill that would seem most vital in an explorer.

When you sit in a chair, you are not actually sitting there, but levitating above it at a height of one angstrom (a hundred millionth of a centimetre), your electrons and its electrons implacably opposed to any closer intimacy.

Language is more fashion than science, and matters of usage, spelling and pronunciation tend to wander around like hemlines.

I could spend my life arriving each evening in a new city.

Boston's freeway system is insane. It was clearly designed by a person who had spent his childhood crashing toy trains.

Every dog on the face of the earth wants me dead.