Just as some things are too strange for fiction, others are too true for journalism.

In the wake of Animal House, the stock briefly and quite wrongly shot up. So I love that movie.

I had grown up as a feature writer, and basically my career had been in The National Lampoon and as a magazine editor, and I'd never been a reporter.

If a journalist shows a facility for praise he's liable to be offered a job in public relations or advertising and the next thing you know he's got a big office, a huge salary and is living in a fine home with a lovely wife and swell kids - another career blown to hell.

Imagine having journalists in your own home and not even covering the furniture with plastic sheets first.

It is a law of governance that democracies have to spend themselves dizzy. Citizens of democracies can, after all, tell their government to give them things.

Mankind has invested more than four million years of evolution in the attempt to avoid physical exertion. Now a group of backward-thinking atavists mounted on foot-powered pairs of Hula-Hoops would have us pumping our legs, gritting our teeth, and searing our lungs as though we were being chased across the Pleistocene savanna by saber-toothed tigers. Think of the hopes, the dreams, the effort, the brilliance, the pure force of will that, over the eons, has gone into the creation of the Cadillac Coupe de Ville. Bicycle riders would have us throw all this on the ash heap of history.