In three minutes, 98 percent of all the matter there is or will ever be has been produced. We have a universe

Because time moves more slowly in Kid World ... it goes on for decades ... It is adult life that is over in a twinkling.

Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result -- eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly -- in you.

In three minutes, 98 percent of all the matter there is or will ever be has been produced. We have a universe

Every kid I knew had a father with a little stash of men's magazines which the father thought was secret and which the kid knew all about.

A significant fraction of thru-hikers reach Katahdin, then turn around and start back to Georgia. They just can't stop walking, which kind of makes you wonder.

I'm not a natural story-teller. Put a keyboard in front of me and I'm fine, but stand me up in front of an audience and I'm actually quite shy and reserved.