Gordon Hopkins

“So what's the deal with airline food?” This was the question asked by pretty much every lame stand-up comic during the not-nearly-brief-enough stand-up comedy boom of the 80s. 

The answer may surprise you.

As readers of this column know, I like to travel. Alas, thanks to Plague 2.0, I haven't been able to take any trips this year (sad-face emoji). I love Southeast Asia and one of my favorite places in the world is Thailand. 

My car is kind of like Columbo's raincoat, and not just because they are both really rumpled.

I don't recall if it was in an episode of the venerable TV detective series, starring the late, great Peter Falk, or perhaps it was in one of the excellent “Columbo” novels written by the equally late, equally great William Harrington, but I remember a scene where Columbo describes his raincoat as his “office.” That is, because the nature of his job meant he was out and about all the time, so his raincoat was where he kept his pencils and all his notes and stuff like that.

“My first decision as a child, at the age of eleven, was to become a magician. My second decision, at the age of twelve, was to become a short story writer, as the result of meeting another magician, Mr. Electrico, pointed at me, on a night when he sat in his electric chair, and touched me with his sword of fire. All this blue electricity coming down through his arm and hand, out the sword, touching me on the nose and he said, 'Live forever.' And it was that week I decided to live forever by becoming a writer.”