Favorite Thing Today

Property owners along a commercial strip plotted to create a voting district without voters, only to discover belatedly that the boundaries they drew actually included one lone voter -- and she's not in favor of their political goal.

Tourist agencies ... encourage the nude runs there because of the business they bring in. And, yes, you often get a T-shirt.

When Joe Fortenberry, a farm boy from Happy, Texas, threw one down at the West Side YMCA in New York City on March 9, 1936, he may not have been the first man to dunk a basketball, but he was the first to do it in an aesthetically stirring way, and in front of the right people.

These keepsake passwords, as I came to call them, are like tchotchkes of our inner lives. They derive from anything: Scripture, horoscopes, nicknames, lyrics, book passages. Like a tattoo on a private part of the body, they tend to be intimate, compact and expressive.