Speaking of food, English cuisine has received a lot of unfair criticism over the years, but the truth is that it can be a very pleasant surprise to the connoisseur of severely overcooked livestock organs served in lukewarm puddles of congealed grease. England manufactures most of the world's airline food, as well as all the food you ever ate in your junior-high-school cafeteria.

Funny, isn't it? The airlines go to all that trouble to keep you from taking a gun on board, then they just hand you a dinner roll you could kill a musk ox with.

Bad grammar is the leading cause of slow, painful death in North America.

Violence and smut are of course everywhere on the airwaves. You cannot turn on your television without seeing them, although sometimes you have to hunt around.

The president, apparently, was so totally unaware of where his foreign policy was that he had to appoint a distinguished commission to help him locate it, and when the commissioners called him in to testify, he told them, essentially, that he couldn't remember what it looked like. Now, if Richard Nixon had claimed something like that you would at least have had the comfort of knowing he was lying. You could trust Nixon that way. But with this president, you have this nagging feeling that he's telling the truth.

I have seen women walk right past a TV set with a football game on and - this always amazes me - not stop to watch, even if the TV is showing replays of what we call a "good hit," which is a tackle that causes at least one major internal organ to actually fly out of a player's body.

In foreign countries such as Italy, the government puts strict-looking speed limit signs everywhere, but nobody ever sees them because light does not travel fast enough to catch the Italian drivers.