I would like for someone – anyone, really – in Hollywood to stand up and tell the truth. Just come right out with it. “Y’all,” I’d like to hear them say. “We have slap dab run out of ideas in Hollywood.” Well, they probably wouldn’t say it with a Southern accent, but you get the point.

I’ve made no secret of the fact that I don’t like spiders, but even I think a California man went too far when he used a blow torch to kill a black widow spider in his parents’ house.

I loved Halloween when I was a kid. It was a fun chance to dress up as a character you loved, but more importantly, it was a chance to get hyped up on sugar in a way your mother wouldn’t let you any other day of the year.

It was a surreal sight, those first images I saw of the neighborhood in Blakely, down in the heart of Southwest Georgia where I grew up. It looked like a bomb had gone off. It didn’t look real. But it was.

“Good morning, Milly. Did you see the story in the New York Times about dogs this morning?”

Of all the technological advances I’ve seen in my life, I’d have to say the evolution of the telephone is the one that fascinates me the most.

We’re coming up on the 13th anniversary of this column, which means I’ve written some 675 weekly columns, give or take a few weeks when I didn’t feel like it.

I feel like I spend half my life trying to remember passwords. It’s almost impossible to keep them all straight.