Japan has a low crime rate, unless you count the fact that approximately every fifteen minutes the entire Cabinet gets indicted for taking bribes.

Many things have been written, including by me, linking humor and pain. Mostly, in my case, the humor part keeps me sane. If I spent all my hours writing things like "Fatal Distraction," I'd become a brooding, erratic melancholic. I'd be Raskolnikov.

The IRS spends God knows how much of your tax money on these toll-free information hotlines staffed by IRS employees, whose idea of a dynamite tax tip is that you should print neatly.

Take out the fortune before you eat the cookie.

Yet another spunky li'l NASA robot lands and begins transmitting back photographs of rocks that appear virtually identical to the rock photos beamed back by all the other spunky li'l NASA robots, thus confirming suspicions that the universe has a LOT of rocks in it.

I called a company and asked to speak to Bob. The person who answered said, "Bob is on vacation. Would you like to hold?

I was very pleased to get a Supreme Court justice suggesting a column, so I went and did a column about Beano. I went with my wife and another guy to a Mexican restaurant, which we thought would be the ultimate test for an antiflatulance product. There's a reason most of Mexico is located out of doors. And it worked. Several newspapers refused to run that column. But they did run advertisements for Beano.