One I'm deeply into is Doris Kearns Goodwin's "Team of Rivals." I was the only person in the US who hadn't read it.

I feel that nasal spray is a wondrous medical achievement, because it is supposed to relieve nasal congestion, and by gadfrey, it relieves nasal congestion. What I'm saying is that it actually works, which is something you can say about very few other aspects of the medical establishment.

Most recently I read Michael Lewis "Boomerang." The other guy I love is Bill Bryson.

I guess the negative thing that happens to me is that I'm old now. They said there was a generation I was too young for and now some will say there's probably 10 generations I'm too old for. They'll say, isn't he dead or retired or whatever? Or it just becomes fashionable to say "Oh he's not funny anymore," which, I don't know, maybe to them I'm not. I'm more likely to hear that now than I am to hear that I'm unacceptably risqué.

I played lead guitar in a band called The Federal Duck, which is the kind of name that was popular in the '60s as a result of controlled substances being in widespread use. Back then, there were no restrictions, in terms of talent, on who could make an album, so we made one, and it sounds like a group of people who have been given powerful but unfamiliar instruments as a therapy for a degenerative nerve disease.

England manufactures most of the world's airline food, as well as all the food you ever ate in your junior-high-school cafeteria.

We journalists... are also extremely impressed with scientists, and we will, frankly, print just about any wacky thing they tell us, especially if it involves outer space.