I believe many Harley guys spend more time revving their engines than actually driving anywhere; I sometimes wonder why they bother to have wheels on their motorcycles.

The planes are crowded and noisy and late, and everybody hates everybody. If armed terrorists had tried to hijack any of the flights I've been on lately, we passengers would have swiftly beaten them to death with those hard rolls you get with your in-flight meals.

John Dorschner, one of our staff writers here at Tropic magazine at The Miami Herald, who is a good friend of mine and an excellent journalist, but a raving liberal, wrote a story about a group that periodically pops up saying that they're going to start their own country or start their own planet or go back to their original planet, or whatever. They were going to "create a libertarian society" on a floating platform in the Caribbean somewhere. I know there's never going to be a country on a floating anything, but if they want to talk about it, that's great.

This is an especially good time for you vacationers who plan to fly, because the Reagan administration, as part of the same policy under which it recently sold Yellowstone National Park to Wayne Newton, has "deregulated" the airline industry. What this means for you, the consumer, is that the airlines are no longer required to follow any rules whatsoever. They can show snuff movies. They can charge for oxygen. They can hire pilots right out of Vending Machine Refill Person School.

I love the Olympics, because they enable people from all over the world to come together and--regardless of their political or cultural differences--accuse each other of cheating.

And so by the fifteenth century, on October 8, the Europeans were looking for a new place to try to get to, and they came up with a new concept: the West.

The problem with winter sports is that - follow me closely here - they generally take place in winter.