The bad news was that the yard contained a dog. A very, very large dog, wide and hairy, like a cross between a rottweiler and a Goodyear blimp.

The IRS spends God knows how much of your tax money on these toll-free information hotlines staffed by IRS employees, whose idea of a dynamite tax tip is that you should print neatly.

Once again, we come to the Holiday Season, a deeply religious time that each of us observes, in his own way, by going to the mall of his choice.

I am much more likely to care about someone trying to be funny and give them some credit for whatever he or she did that was remotely funny than I am to be mused by somebody declaring this isn't funny, that isn't funny, this sucks. If you want to write humor, you're going to have to get used to that.

SAT tests are designed by huge panels of experts in education and psychology who work for years to design tests in which not one single question measures any bit of knowledge that anyone might actually need in the real world. We should applaud kids for getting lower scores.

I'm a big believer in anesthesia. I think it should be used for every medical procedure, indlucing routine physicals.

Newspaper readership is declining like crazy. In fact, there's a good chance that nobody is reading my column.