If you answered, ''Spin the Bottle,'' then I frankly do not want to know any more about your childhood.

Granted, this system is insane, but we must not let sanity stand in the way of airport security.

I bet that if you actually read the entire vastness of the U.S. Tax Code, you'd find at least one sex scene . . .

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.

The thing I have learned, especially in the Internet age, probably the easiest thing in the world is to declare that something is not funny. I mean it's not actually humor to say something is not funny, but it is viewed by a lot of people - and by that I mean mainly snarky young Internet men - as a kind of humor in and of itself is putting down other people's efforts at humor. And I don't care that much anymore about that because I know how easy that is to do.

Spreadsheet: a kind of program that lets you sit at your desk and ask all kinds of neat "what if?" questions and generate thousands of numbers instead of actually working.

We decide to start with the best-known sight of all, the one that, more than any other, exemplifies what the Big Apple is all about: the Islip Garbage Barge.