The French are not rude. They just happen to hate you. But that is no reason to bypass this beautiful country, whose master chefs have a well-deserved worldwide reputation for trying to trick people into eating snails. Nobody is sure how this got started. Probably a couple of French master chefs were standing around one day, and they found a snail, and one of them said: 'I bet that if we called this something like `escargot,' tourists would eat it.' Then they had hearty laugh, because 'escargot' is the French word for 'fat crawling bag of phlegm.'

What may seem depressing or even tragic to one person may seem like an absolute scream to another person, especially if he has had between four and seven beers.

Babies are equipped at birth with a number of instinctive reflexes and behavior patterns that cause them to spend their first several years trying to kill themselves. If your home contains a sharp, toxic object, your baby will locate it; if your home contains no such object, your baby will try to obtain one via mail order.

There's an old saying among scientific guys: "You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs, ideally by dropping a cement truck on them from a crane."

Why do we shave? It doesn't seem like a natural activity. There are no examples of shaving in nature. The only creature that comes close is the male South Pacific Groping Beetle, which sometimes, just before mating, will slap on a little Aqua Velva. But we think this resulted from atomic testing.

Nobody is excused from the excellence trend. Babies are not excused. Starting right after they get out of the womb, modern babies are exposed to instructional flashcards designed to make them the best babies they can possibly be, so they can get into today's competitive preschools. Your eighties baby sees so many flashcards that he never gets an unobstructed view of his parents' faces. As an adult, he'll carry around a little wallet card that says "7x9=63," because it will remind him of mother.

The more boring a newspaper is, the more it is respected. The most respected newspaper in the United States is The New York Times, which has thousands of reporters constantly producing enormous front-page stories about bauxite...The [New York] Post would write about bauxite only if famous celebrites were arrested for snorting it in an exclusive Manhattan nightclub.