"Stalin's strategy at the end of World War II was to acquire a small "buffer zone between Russia and Germany, consisting of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Albania, and most of Germany. In an effort to garner public support in these nations, Stalin mounted a public-relations campaign around the upbeat theme "Maybe We Won't Have Your Whole Family Shot," and in 1945 Eastern Europe decided to join the Communist bloc by a vote of 28,932,084,164,504,029-0. Heartened by this mandate, Stalin immediately ordered construction work to begin on the Iron Curtain, which was given its name by Sir Winston Churchill, who, in a historic anecdote at a dinner party, said, "Madam, I may be drunk, but an iron curtain has descended upon BLEAAARRRGGGHHH."

“If Man A asks Man B for directions, Man B, realizing that Man A is a weak, direction-asking type of male who probably also reads owner's manuals, could decide to attack Man A's village and plunder his women. Man A is not about to run that type of risk.”

“Guess who got punished for this. Do you think it was the grown-ups, who let the Russians get ahead? Of course not. It was the same group that had to get the polio shots: us kids. All kinds of experts came crawling out of the academic woodwork to declare that Americans were science and math morons, frittering away our brainpower playing Davy Crockett while Russian children were learning about the cosine. And so I remember 1957 as the year when school became less fun. From that point on, we spent a lot less time making authentic medieval castles out of papier-mâché, and a lot more time learning about the ionosphere. I suppose this change also had to do with the fact that we were getting older, but at the time I viewed it as yet another reason to hate the Russians.”

“Once, when the bar was slow, he told her about things he'd found in his clients' pools. Alligators, for example; he'd encountered at least a dozen. Also the occasional snake. Hundreds of frogs. These were to be expected in South Florida, which as far as the native wildlife was concerned was still a swamp, no matter how many houses got built on it.”

“Other nations are not allowed to mess around with the internal affairs of nations in this hemisphere.”

“Winter's here, and you feel lousy: You're coughing and sneezing; your muscles ache; your nose is an active mucus volcano. These symptoms -- so familiar at this time of year -- can mean only one thing: Tiny fanged snails are eating your brain.”

“In the case of the Extravaganza of the Seas, the owner of record was a man named Bobby Kemp, who was usually described in the newspaper as a millionaire entrepreneur. Kemp liked the look of that, entrepreneur, although he personally could not pronounce it.”