After the war, Prohibition was passed, and with liquor no longer legally available the nation plunged headlong into the Great Depression.

I have a friend named Doris who argues, on good authority, that the single biggest cause of global warming is menopause.

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.

The Japanese, implementing a complex, long-term, and ultimately successful strategy to dominate the U S consumer-electronics market, attacked Pearl Harbor.

In my experience, you run into trouble when you ask a group of beer-drinking men to perform any task more complex than remembering not to light the filter ends of cigarettes.

Once again we find ourselves enmeshed in the Holiday Season, that very special time of year when we join with our loved ones in sharing centuries-old traditions such as trying to find a parking space at the mall. We traditionally do this in my family by driving around the parking lot until we see a shopper emerge from the mall, then we follow her, in very much the same spirit as the Three Wise Men, who 2,000 years ago followed a star, week after week, until it led them to a parking space.

If Mozart had power tools, there's no telling how great his music might have been.