Everything on a boat has a different name than it would have if it weren't on a boat. Either this is ancient seafaring tradition or it's how people who mess around with boats try to impress the rest of us who actually finished college.

What use is it to endure the Dutch Rubs and Indian Rope Burns that are politics if you can't obtain mastery over people and give them noogies back?

Children from the age of five to ten should watch more television. Television depicts adults as rotten SOB's given to fistfights, gunplay, and other mayhem. Kids who believe this about grownups aren't likely to argue about bedtime.

Iraq's invasion of Kuwait is a case of bad men doing wrong things for wicked reasons. This is the full-sized or standard purebred evil and is easily recognized even by moral neophytes. Other malignities-drugs in America, famine in Africa and everything in the Middle East-are more complex. When combating those evils people sometimes have trouble deciding whom to shoot.

Never fight an inanimate object.

The dominant type of humor in the '60s was essentially defensive and self-deprecating, using humor as a shield.

It had never occurred to us that the Kremlin's new anti-booze campaign would apply to journalists. Now, that's a human-rights violation.