The government's view is that the best time to announce bad news, news that it doesn't want the public to dwell on is late on a Friday, when it will wind up in the Saturday papers, which if you were readers, then the week day editions. A holiday weekend is even better.
Way before we got a record deal, we were playing clubs seven nights a week, three one-hour sets a night. Then we got the record deal, and we took off on the road and stayed out.
Growing up, me and my brother, we were kind of exact opposites. We were completely yin and yang. He was more rough and tumble, and I just wanted to play with my girlfriends.
There was one public school for boys, and one for girls, but Jewish children were admitted in limited numbers - only ten to a hundred; and even the lucky ones had their troubles.
I grew up with another pretty darn good writer: Glenn Frey of the Eagles. We were very good friends, and we kind of studied it together.
Food trends have been around as long as people have had the ability to choose between different things to eat, but the modern, interconnected media has made food trends a viral phenomenon. Once upon a time, it was just a few newspapers and a few select gourmet magazines that were writing about food. Today, it's every single publication.
My parents were great at making sure I got out of bed when I needed to play football on a Sunday morning and that I was ready after school to go to training on a Tuesday and Thursday. But it was never forced upon me or rammed down my throat. If it had been, I could have ended up hating sport.
Novels by British writers are among my favorites because our family has enjoyed travel in England and because they are written with an economy of words as if they were written with a pen instead of a computer. Penelope Fitzgerald is a favorite.
My war buddies, some were Americans, but some were Afghans. These were the guys that I fought alongside. We bled alongside each other; we mourned together. When I came home, these weren't people I could keep up with on Facebook.
Most go to prison not on account of their irreducible uniqueness as people but because they are part of a marginalized sector of the population who never had a chance, who were slated for it early on.
The Constitution of the United States has absolutely nothing to say about a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. Were the federal courts to recognize such a right, it would be completely without constitutional basis.
During the second half of the twentieth century, I had the privilege of living through years of intensive erudition, and I realized that Canadians, located in the northernmost region of this hemisphere, were always respectful towards our country.
To go from working with a group of people in a sketch-comedy show on a small network, where it was all about just creating funny stuff, to being on a network show, and the pressures of that, and getting to know the new people who were involved in it. There was a learning curve for me. But it was an education.
Cleveland was the only visit I made. I had a good feeling they were going to draft me, but I was still shocked when they jumped up to the second round.
In 2001, my father finally succumbed to the bone cancer that had tortured him for seven years. His last weeks were a terrible, black icing on the cake, the agony, the slow twisting, thinning and snapping of his skeleton. Everything fell apart.
There is no real agreement among scholars as to whether Homer and Hesiod were contemporaries or whether Homer came a hundred or so years later or earlier. How could there be, given that both poets recited and sang in an oral culture.
Me and my brothers started a musical group early on, and we were playing in places where we really weren't supposed to be.
When we were doing 'Sports Night' and 'West Wing' at the same time, I thought I was the luckiest guy in the world because my two interests were politics and sports.
My mom was a model. She met my dad when he was building the Ritz-Carlton in Colorado and she was modeling there. Although we were very blessed, my parents never wanted us to believe we didn't have to work. They didn't want us to think that our situation would get us through life.
When I was travelling in Rajasthan people were waving hands, and it felt like I was visiting my own constituency.
Burlesque girls were alchemists. They were steel-tough performers who were willing to use kitchens as dressing rooms, haul their costume bags through the snow, and go into debt over fake diamonds, all for the five minutes onstage when they were goddesses.
I say the Islanders were the best team I ever covered because they had more so many stars who delivered with Canadian-Swedish-suburban modesty. And they won four straight Stanley Cups from 1980 through 1983.
I thought I was going to be a horror story writer. My influences were horror writers, like Rich Matheson, Ray Bradbury and Bram Stoker.
My stepfather met my mother when I was seven years old, and he was a guitar player. So he caught me messing with his guitar, his electric guitar, and he tried to show me some chords, but my hands were too small.
In the '80s, when I was watching Bond films in the cinemas, Roger Moore was the man. I'll always have a soft spot for him. His Bond films were light-hearted and silly as well as action-packed. For me, this spoke volumes. It meant that, someday, maybe someone like me with a whacky sense of humour could be James Bond.
Marx and Lenin were ahead of their time. Marx wrote before offshoring of jobs and the financialization of the economy. Lenin presided over a communist revolution that jumped the gun by taking place in a country in which feudal elements still predominated over capitalism.
My mother never watched me train in Romania. She wasn't allowed, it just wasn't done back then. My training was paid for by the government. My parents were not at the Olympics with me, either. I never expected them to be.
Because Jews were kicked out of every country in Europe at one time or another, and plenty of other places as well, there isn't an ability to identify with a national heritage - you'll never hear a Jew say 'I'm German' or 'I'm Polish,' without saying something about being Jewish as well, and for good reason.
The Russians were responsible for the Chekov character. They put in 'Pravda' that, 'Ah, the ugly Americans are at it again. They do a space show, and they forget to include the people who were in space first.' And I said, 'My God, they're right.'
When learning was monopolized by the monks in the Middle Ages, people specialized only in warfare and statecraft. And even these were not altogether free from the scholastic influence.
My mother and father were visionaries in Pittsburgh, part of that collective of people who were creative and active together, and I am a product of that community and those relationships.
I believe we have become paralyzed, paralyzed by our desire to be loved. Now our founding fathers had the wisdom to know that social acceptance and popularity were fleeing, and that this country's principles needed to be rooted in strengths greater than the passions and the emotions of the times.
When I think about the stuff I've turned down or the stuff I wasn't interested in, I don't have any regrets. Yes, there were some movies that went on to be really popular. But now, how do they really fit into things?
It actually took me a year to learn how to play running back - to understand what they were doing defensively and then what our guys were doing every single play.
My parents were overprotective because you could get kidnapped and bombs were exploding in the streets.
When President Obama visited Japan, we were able to confirm that our alliance is playing a leading role in ensuring a peaceful and prosperous Asia-Pacific.
