I don't want to dis anybody, but someone like Robert Parker. I first read a Spenser book maybe 20 years ago and then read every one that came out. I did that with Tony Hillerman too.

When I heated my home with oil, I used an average of 800 gallons a year. I have found that I can keep comfortably warm for an entire winter with slightly over half that quantity of beer.

I think I became funny because I grew up in the Bronx. I was small and weak and Jewish instead of large and fierce and Puerto Rican. You need something.

John Dorschner, one of our staff writers here at Tropic magazine at The Miami Herald, who is a good friend of mine and an excellent journalist, but a raving liberal, wrote a story about a group that periodically pops up saying that they're going to start their own country or start their own planet or go back to their original planet, or whatever. They were going to "create a libertarian society" on a floating platform in the Caribbean somewhere. I know there's never going to be a country on a floating anything, but if they want to talk about it, that's great.

Mother Nature clearly intended for us to get our food from the "patty" group, which includes hamburgers, fish sticks, and McNuggets- foods that have had all of their organs safely removed.

Actually, there are people from all ove - not just Latin America, certainly not just Cuba, but all over Europe, all over the United States. I like that. I like knowing a lot of different types of people. And I can afford to live in a relatively safe part of Miami.

We Americans live in a nation where the medical-care system is second to none in the world, unless you count maybe 25 or 30 little scuzzball countries like Scotland that we could vaporize in seconds if we felt like it.