Airline food is not intended for human consumption. It's intended as a form of in-flight entertainment, wherein the object is to guess what it is, starting with broad categories such as "mineral" and "linoleum."

One of the issues that we professional newspaper columnists are required by union regulations to voice grave concern about is the federal budget deficit, which we refer to as the "mounting" deficit, because every extra word helps when you have to produce a certain number of gravely concerned newsprint inches.

Florida's number three industry, behind tourism and skin cancer, is voter fraud.

During bomb drills, we students were told to crouch under our desks. Apparently the desks used in classrooms in the fifties were made of an exceptionally missile-resistant variety of wood. During the Cold War years I often wondered why it never occurred to our defense planners to protect the entire nation from nuclear attack by simply covering it, from sea to shining sea, with a huge Strategic Classroom Desk.

Stuffwise we are not a lean operation. We're the kind of people who, if we were deciding what absolute minimum essential items we'd need to carry in our backpacks for the final, treacherous ascent to the summit of Mount Everest, would take along aquarium filters, just in case.

Never have a dog. Let's not beat around the bush here: dogs are morons.

I'm always writing new books so I don't dwell on the ones I've already done. I think that's a habit from being a newspaper guy because you're always writing columns and you can't reflect on the ones you've already done.