The thing I have learned, especially in the Internet age, probably the easiest thing in the world is to declare that something is not funny. I mean it's not actually humor to say something is not funny, but it is viewed by a lot of people - and by that I mean mainly snarky young Internet men - as a kind of humor in and of itself is putting down other people's efforts at humor. And I don't care that much anymore about that because I know how easy that is to do.

You have to be careful on the deck, because of the "hatches," which are holes placed around a sailboat at random to increase the insurance rates.

I also saw a huge expansion of the Internet, with many major corporations, afraid of being left behind, spending hundreds of millions of dollars to develop World Wide Web sites in a frantic scramble to reach the vast new consumer market of Web use

Don't get me wrong. I like Disney World. The rest rooms are clean enough for neurosurgery, and the employees say things like "Howdy, folks!" and actually seem to mean it. You wonder: Where do they get these people? My guess: 1952. I think old Walt realized, way back then, that there would eventually be a shortage of cheerful people, so he put all the residents of south western Nebraska into a giant freezer with a huge picture of Jiminy Cricket on the outside, and the corporation has been thawing them out as needed ever since.

The central point of this final chapter is that - follow my logic carefully here - unless you die, you will continue to get older. (It's insights like this that separate the professional book author from the person with a real job.)

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.

I hate rap music, which to me sounds like a bunch of angry men shouting, possibly because the person who was supposed to provide them with a melody never showed up.