This nation is so friendly that the leading cause of injury is getting passionately embraced by strangers.

Disney Resort and World and Compound, a place where your dreams really do come true, if you dream about having people wearing enormous cartoon-animal heads come around to your restaurant table and act whimsical and refuse to go away until you laugh with delight.

In more than 20 years of opening beers with guys, I have NEVER seen the Swedish Bikini Team show up. Almost always, the teams that show up in beer drinking situations consist of guys who have been playing league softball and smell like bus seats.

Bad grammar is the leading cause of slow, painful death in North America.

The problem was that Panama technically belonged to Colombia, which refused to sign a treaty leasing it to the United States. So Roosevelt sent a gunboat filled with marines down to Panama, just on the off chance that a revolution might suddenly break out, and darned if one didn't, two days later. Not only that, but the leaders of the new nation of Panama-talk about lucky breaks!-were absolutely thrilled to have the United States build a canal there. 'Really, it's our pleasure,' they told the marines, adding, 'Don't shoot.'

A perfect parent is a person with excellent child-rearing theories and no actual children.

A short distance away is the Tidal Basin, ringed by cherry trees that every year produce flowers, an event to which Washingtonians react as though it were the Second Coming of Christ.