I've thought about it not a lot but I thought my relationship with Congress - the Democrats and Republicans - would help me get some things done. Not everything but at least they'd be willing to try.

First and foremost I am a commercial writer and I hope to entertain people. But having said that I'm in love with the relationship between humans and dogs and the more I learned about what our military working dogs are doing I wanted to at least share with people what an important role these animals have in all our lives.

First President Reagan was not enthusiastic. But I built up a relationship with him in other areas and then persuaded him that this was important to us and to me and that we had to at least be in the process of looking at this seriously.

I can sort of do what I want. Maybe I have to work harder to prove myself in some new relationship because they've heard some wacky stories about me. But at least I can get the meeting.

The African American's relationship to Africa has long been ambivalent at least since the early nineteenth century when 3 000 black men crowded into Bishop Richard Allen's African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia to protest noisily a plan to recolonize free blacks in Africa.

The person who needs the other person the least in a relationship is the stronger member.

The one who loves the least controls the relationship.

Truth makes many appeals not the least of which is its power to shock.

In the next 10 years I expect at least five billion people worldwide to own smartphones giving every individual with such a phone instant access to the full power of the Internet every moment of every day.

The nature of catastrophe is after all reasonably unvarying in the way it ruins destroys wounds and devastates. But if something can be learned from the event - not least something as profound as the theory of plate tectonics - then it somehow puts the ruination into a much more positive light.