Ladies and gentleman of Florida, this is the real Jeff Ament...take a very good look because there's an imposter running around...if someone comes up to you and says he's Jeff Ament and says he wants to take your pot or wants to take you to a strip club, it's probably not him.

I don't know how people do it these days - paparazzi and that kind of thing. That's something I can't even imagine.

I'm angry that George Bush got to be in the White House, and I'm angry that [Al] Gore wasn't able to be a better candidate after eight years of a great economy and being an incumbent.

The nice thing about money is that you can do good things with it. I still feel like if something needs to be done or we need to raise money for someone on death row, we can find ways to do it.

The interesting thing is that it seems like George W. Bush would have been happy being the president of anything. He could have been president of Major League Baseball. Less people killed. It wouldn't have affected the world on a planetary level. Sure, there would have been little things. There would have been scandals and kind of numbskull things here and there .

When I had a child, everyone was telling me that I was going to see the world through her eyes, and everything was going to get this nice gloss to it. I kept waiting for that to happen, and thought there was a real problem with me that it wasn't.

Competition is healthy, if you can turn it off and on. When someone gets too cocky in victory, that can ruin the positive aspect.