Detroits industrial ruins are picturesque, like crumbling Rome in an 18th-century etching.

Good manners are a combination of intelligence, education, taste and style mixed together so that you don't need any of those things.

The real slums are another matter. The bad parts of Tondo are as bad as any place I've seen, ancient, filthy houses swarmed with the poor and stinking of sewage and trash. But there are worse parts - squatter areas where people live under cardboard, in shipping crates, behind tacked-up newspapers. Dad would march you straight to the basement with a hairbrush in his hand if he caught you keeping your hamster cage like this.

No one has ever had a fantasy about being tied to a bed and sexually ravished by someone dressed as a liberal

Sloths move at the speed of congressional debate but with greater deliberation and less noise.

Not being a liberal, I have very little grasp of things that I know nothing about.

The weirder you're going to behave, the more normal you should look. It works in reverse, too. When I see a kid with three or four rings in his nose, I know there is absolutely nothing extraordinary about that person.