Many of the things the slow food people honor were innovations within historical times. Somebody had to be the first European to eat a tomato.

My career at Microsoft really was getting in the way of my cooking.

Now, to find dinosaurs, you hike around in horrible conditions looking for a dinosaur. It sounds really dumb, but that's what it is. It's horrible conditions, because wherever you have nice weather, plants grow, and you don't get any erosion, and you don't see any dinosaurs.

If you have a block of ballistics gelatin and a high-speed camera, pretty soon somebody gets a gun!

The magic words 'on the Internet,' if inserted into nearly any sentence, seem to protect it from normal critical scrutiny.

We're more familiar with what economists call an English auction - prices start low and rise as people bid. However, there is also the Dutch auction, where prices start high and go lower until somebody bites. Movies are sold to the audience via a very slow Dutch auction, where each phase between price drops can last weeks or months.

People who grow up in a region doubtless have a better cultural awareness of their own cuisine, but it's also true that a lot of locals go to McDonald's, Applebee's and the like.