I strained to remember where I was or even what I was wearing, touching my green corduroy jeans and staring at the exposed-brick wall. As my paranoia deepened, I became convinced that I had died and no one was telling me.

Eric Schmidt looks innocent enough, with his watercolor blue eyes and his tiny office full of toys and his Google campus stocked with volleyball courts and unlocked bikes and wheat-grass shots and cereal dispensers and Haribo Gummi Bears and heated toilet seats and herb gardens and parking lots with cords hanging to plug in electric cars.

Women are affected by lunar tides only once a month; men have raging hormones every day.

The sounds of silence are a dim recollection now, like mystery, privacy and paying attention to one thing — or one person — at a time.

When I need to work up my nerve to write a tough column, I try to think of myself as Emma Peel in a black leather catsuit.

It takes a lot of adrenaline and fear to make me actually write.

Tweetin' ain't cheatin'.