Listening to the radio every day for an entire year was a prison sentence. It was the most depressing, annoying, debilitating project I have ever undertaken, and I have a master's degree in art history.

In death, you get upgraded into a saint no matter how much people hated you in life.

After Hiram Bingham built the first church on Oahu the student recalls, "When it was completed some of the natives said among themselves, 'That house of worship built by the haoles is a place in which they will pray us all to death. It is meant to kill us."

But when I am around strangers, I turn into a conversational Mount St. Helens. I'm dormant, dormant, quiet, quiet, old-guy loners build log cabins on the slopes of my silence and then, boom, it's 1980. Once I erupt, they'll be wiping my verbal ashes off their windshields as far away as North Dakota.

I'm a big fan of editing and keeping only the interesting bits in.

Like Lincoln, I would like to believe the ballot is stronger than the bullet. Then again, he said that before he got shot.

No one I know actually reads what I write, so thank heavens for you strangers.