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.

Note that both of these papers [the New York Post and the New York Daily News] are big sellers in a city whose residents like to go around saying they'd never live anyplace else on account of they'd miss the opera.

All the shopping malls and restaurants and airports are riddled with low-fidelity loudspeakers, which apparently have developed the ability to reproduce by themselves; these are all connected to a special programming service called Music That Nobody Really Likes, and you cannot get away from it.

Sometimes you panic and find yourself emitting remarks so profoundly inane that you would be embarrassed to say them to your dog. Your dog would look at you and think to itself, 'I may lick myself in public, but I'd never say anything as stupid as that.'

Although it was constructed in 1536, the New York subway system boasts an annual maintenance budget of nearly $8, currently stolen, and it does a remarkable job of getting New Yorkers from Point A to an indeterminate location somewhere in the tunnel leading to point B.

A long memory is the most subversive idea in America. A tautology is a thing which is tautological. A witty saying proves nothing, but saying something pointless gets people's attention. If your kids look like you, it's hereditory. If they look like the neighbor, it's the environment. Although golf was originally restricted to wealthy, overweight Protestants, today it's open to anybody who owns hideous clothing.

During bomb drills, we students were told to crouch under our desks. Apparently the desks used in classrooms in the fifties were made of an exceptionally missile-resistant variety of wood. During the Cold War years I often wondered why it never occurred to our defense planners to protect the entire nation from nuclear attack by simply covering it, from sea to shining sea, with a huge Strategic Classroom Desk.