If people were like rain, I was like drizzle and she was a hurricane.

You have so much to offer, she was often told, as if she had a tray of cigarettes and candy perpetually strapped to her waist.

The words were clumsy in my mouth, like typing with hammers.

Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes

We got half the doggone MIT college of engineering here, and nobody who can fix a doggone /television/?" Dr. Joseph Abernathy glared accusingly at the clusters of young people scattered around his living room.

That's /electrical/ engineering, Pop," his son told him loftily. "We're all mechanical engineers. Ask a mechanical engineer to fix your color TV, that's like asking an Ob-Gyn to look at the sore on your di-ow!"

Oh, sorry," said his father, peering blandly over gold-rimmed glasses. "That your foot, Lenny?

He once told me that an August evening was "as hot as three toads in a Cuisinart," a comparison that left me blinking two days later.