Christmas is a stocking stuffed with sugary goodness.

My sophomore year I spent exactly one day on the JV football team. It was the tryout day.

I have such respect for people who do non-fiction casting after settling on the grandparents we got for this. It is really hard to find people who are not fame-whores. We're lucky these people actually wanted to spend their time doing this. All of them would have much rather been cooking without the cameras, being with their families. That's why they're great characters.

If there's one thing that everyone can agree on, it's that, right or wrong, they hate the press.

Think of all that hard work our founding fathers put in - the revolutionizing, the three-fifths compromising, having to write the entire Constitution with a quill - and yet they neglected to include the right to vote.

While some of my closest friends were jocks, it seemed that they spoke a different language with each other. Joining in their conversation was fraught with risk.

As the great philosopher George Santayana would have said, 'those who cannot remember the past . . . should simply read Jan Van Meter's Tippecanoe and Tyler Too.' Van Meter's greatest hits collection of slogans is the catchiest ever retelling of American history. It's like the greatest minds of Madison Avenue sat down to write a history book. They don't make sound bites like they used to!