I’ve noticed that one thing about parents is that no matter what stage your child is in, the parents who have older children always tell you the next stage is worse.

If Charles Lindbergh, flying with no instruments other than a bologna sandwich, managed to cross the Atlantic and land safely on a runway completely covered with French people, why are today's airplanes, which are equipped with radar and computers and individualized liquor bottles, unable to cope with fog?

I regularly read Internet user groups filled with messages from people trying to solve software incompatibility problems that, in terms of complexity, make the U.S. Tax Code look like Dr. Seuss.

I did all this stuff that was illegal when I was a kid. I drank beer when I was 15. I smoked cigarettes when I was 13. I drove to New York City when I was 14 - don't tell my son. Those things were against the law, but I did them anyway. I didn't become a heroin addict, although I probably could have gotten heroin somehow. I don't think my son would buy heroin at any price. He knows what it is, and he knows how stupid it is.

The weightlifting competition I saw was the women's 63 kg class. I'm not sure whether this means the actual women weighed 63 kg or the weights they lifted weighed 63 kg. Or possibly the temperature in the weightlifting hall was 63 kg. There's no way to know for sure without finding out what a "kg" is, and my belief, as an American, is that if I have to start understanding the metric system, then the terrorists have won.

Tokyo is huge. Something like 15 million people live there, and my estimate is that at any given moment, 14.7 million of them are lost.

maybe somebody finally shot the dog.