The legendary yet factual Curtis Wilkie has been the right man in the right place at an uncanny number of extraordinary times.

I just think lots of words have physicality. How about the word 'wobble?' You think that's arbitrary? When you say the word 'wince,' you wince. How about that?

That's American English for you: more roots than a mangrove swamp.

Many a person has been saved from summer alcoholism, not to mention hypertoxicity, by Dostoyevsky.

When I was a little kid, of course, I was brown all summer. That's because I was free as a bird- nothing to do but catch bugs all day.

When I weed, I like to get off into my own head. For one thing, my wife plants and I have trouble telling which plants are weeds and which are my favorite plants. So I tend to hop around and grab the weeds that I know are weeds. So I don't weed all that linearly. I tend to weed haphazardly.

Being president of too many well-meaning organizations put my father into an early grave. The lesson in this was not lost on me.