English history consists largely of royal people getting their heads chopped off...Needless to say, this brand of history was a hit with our son.

Spiders so large they appear to be wearing the pelts of small mammals.

A sense of humor is a measurement of the extent to which we realize that we are trapped in a world almost totally devoid of reason. Laughter is how we express the anxiety we feel at this knowledge.

Hobbies of any kind are boring except to people who have the same hobby. This is also true of religion, although you will not find me saying so in print.

You're not allowed to park a truck in your driveway. You're not allowed to work on your house on Sunday. The people who enforce these laws are nuts. After I wrote a column on this, I got I don't know how many letters from Coral Gables homeowners, story after story after story, wonderfully horrible stories. And the venom they felt for their own government!

Magnetism, as you recall from physics class, is a powerful force that causes certain items to be attracted to refrigerators.

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.