This wouldn't be so bad, I told myself. But secretly, I knew that I was quite wrong. - Bill Bryson

America was entering the age not just of the automobile but of the retarded attention span.

What sets the carbon atom apart is that it is shamelessly promiscuous.

It’s a bit burned,” my mother would say apologetically at every meal, presenting you with a piece of meat that looked like something — a much-loved pet perhaps — salvaged from a tragic house fire. “But I think I scraped off most of the burned part,” she would add, overlooking that this included every bit of it that had once been flesh.

Happily, all this suited my father. His palate only responded to two tastes - burned and ice cream — so everything suited him so long as it was sufficiently dark and not too startlingly flavorful. Theirs truly was a marriage made in heaven, for no one could burn food like my mother or eat it like my dad.