Actually, there is no way of making vomiting courteous. You have to do the next best thing, which is to vomit in such a way that the story you tell about it later will be amusing.

I wonder if it changes the nature of a society for beauty to be so common. Maybe in Vietnam "She has a wonderful personality" really means something. But I couldnt figure out a polite way to ask.

Freedom is not empowerment. Empowerment is what the Serbs have in Bosnia. Anybody can grab a gun and be empowered. It's not entitlement. An entitlement is what people on welfare get, and how free are they? It's not an endlessly expanding list of rights - the "right" to education, the "right" to food and housing. That's not freedom, that's dependency. Those aren't rights, those are the rations of slavery - hay and a barn for human cattle.

If I bring anything to the table, it's the fact that not everybody realizes they're funny. So I just point a finger.

Never strike anyone so old, small or weak that verbal abuse would have sufficed.

The only really good vegetable is Tabasco sauce. Put Tabasco sauce in everything. Tabasco sauce is to bachelor cooking what forgiveness is to sin. The next best vegetable is the jalapeno pepper. It has the virtue of turning salads into practical jokes.

The Chinese had gunpowder, but it didn't occur to them to put it in a gun. They possessed the compass but didn't go anywhere. They invented paper, printing, and a written form of their language, but hardly anyone in China was taught to read.