The Church does not superstitiously observe days, merely as days, but as memorials of important facts. Christmas might be kept as well upon one day of the year as another; but there should be a stated day for commemorating the birth of our Saviour, b...
It goes way, way back when we were under Sweden's rule. We always think they are better than us. We played against them so often for so many years. Every country has one opponent they want to beat and for us, it's Sweden.
Watching 'Doctor Who' in the United States meant I was always behind the times - PBS didn't get new episodes until two years after they ran, and I was aware of the show's cancellation before the characters themselves knew, at least in my corner of th...
Guernsey itself was overcrowded, but its cliffs were utterly empty. I spent a wonderful year with a friend, climbing them. It was sheer magic: you went from this pretty, busy village of an island to the sea cliffs and heard nothing but the gulls and ...
You look back in time to when there was slavery and you think 'how did people even remotely believe that this was a good idea?'. It's incomprehensible for us to think of what the mindset was 100 or 200 years ago. I hope to make the present as incompr...
IBM isn't investing billions of dollars every year into research and development - and winning more patents than our top 10 competitors combined for more than a decade - as an academic exercise. But research is now being driven much more by what peop...
I don't read my books, I write them. Once I've finished the many years it usually takes me to write them, I can't bear to read them, because I've spent too long with them already. I'm not advertising them very well, am I?
I took a break after 'Confessions.' I was real picky. And then I suddenly realized I hadn't worked in a year. And I was sort of, like, not really happy. I think people are happier when they have structure, you know? You realize that as you get older....
I was 12 years old, so auditioning for a TV show was something I didn't even think really happened. The next thing you know, I ended up booking the gig and I did four seasons on 'Emily of New Moon.' I got to learn on the job and kept going from there...
I've seen few things more depressing than the end-of-season Giants-Padres series in 2001 in which Barry Bonds hit his 68th homer of the year while a .227-hitting, rapidly fossilizing Rickey Henderson staggered like a delirious marathoner toward 3,000...
Carly Simon abandoned the stage for seven years after collapsing from nerves before a concert in Pittsburgh in 1981. When she resumed performing, she would sometimes ask members of her band to spank her before she went onstage, to distract her from h...
The Moon is a ball of left-over debris from a cosmic collision that took place more than four billion years ago. A Mars-sized asteroid - one of the countless planetesimals that were frantically churning our solar system into existence - hit the infan...
Despite tantalizing suggestions of fossilized microbes in meteorites, puzzling and possibly biogenic methane gas in the martian atmosphere, and a long-standing controversy over the Viking lander experiments of nearly 40 years ago, there's still no Ex...
The strongest signals leaking off our planet are radar transmissions, not television or radio. The most powerful radars, such as the one mounted on the Arecibo telescope (used to study the ionosphere and map asteroids) could be detected with a simila...
Each year, thousands of UFOs are sighted and reported, which is an impressive tally of unidentified aerial phenomena. Surveys show that roughly one-third of the populace believes that at least some of this sky show is due to extraterrestrial spacecra...
When the first book out my sister-in-law read it and we were chatting at 5 o'clock in the afternoon and she said, "Oh my God, chapter six, sex and a murder," and her five year old wandered into the kitchen and said, "Sixty hamburgers?
To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old. What do we have from the past? Art and thought. That’s what lasts. That’s what continues to feed people and give them an ide...
If China wants to build a new six-lane expressway, it can bulldoze its way past any number of villages in its path; in India, if you want to widen a two-lane road, you could be tied up in court for a dozen years over compensation entitlements.
I'm very proud to be the first winner of the Indian Grand Prix, but then on the other hand we recently lost two of our mates. I didn't know Dan Wheldon, but he was big in motorsport, and then this year I got to know Marco Simoncelli, so our thoughts ...
Over the years, I've had a lot of different jobs - newspaper boy, dish washer, naval flight officer, Amtrak board member, Governor and chairman of the National Governors Association - just to name a few. But my most cherished job - and frankly my mos...
I was in Australia in about 1996 when I played some acoustic guitar for some guys at a studio down there. They were pretty happy with it, and mentioned doing an album, so about a year later I met some people who were interested in recording.
