All right - I'll tell you what you did for me: you went for happy, silly, beautiful walks with me.

But anyway, it's obvious through human experience that extended families and tribes are terribly important. We can do without an extended family as human beings about as easily as we can do without vitamins or essential minerals.

"Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before," Bokonon tells us. "He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way."

About belief or lack of belief in an afterlife: Some of you may know that I am neither Christian nor Jewish nor Buddist, nor a conventionally religious person of any sort. I am a humanist, which mean, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without any expectation of rewards or punishments after I'm dead.

I've written about Powers Hapgood. He was a Harvard graduate, son of a wealthy family who owned a cannery out there. After leaving Harvard, he went to work in coal mines and then was a CIO executive when I met him there, in Indianapolis.

Vietnam was a country where America was trying to make people stop being communists by dropping things on them from airplanes.

Human beings are about 1,000 times dumber and meaner than they think they are.