Without strenuous preplanning, road food is almost always bad food, sad food, chain food, clown food.

So much magazine writing is playing to an empty room. You work like a plow horse, your words get printed on a half-million or more copies, and then it often just disappears into this national vacuum.

I'm either proud or embarrassed to say that I never took a journalism class in my life.

My childhood was basically divided between fishing and roaming the woods and hiding out in my bedroom. Maybe things would've turned out differently if I'd had a TV in there; who knows.

I was born in Cleveland, Ohio; raised primarily in Phoenix, Arizona; and, after running away from home in my teens to play music and bouncing around a bit, settled in Oxford, Mississippi, which I consider more my home than anywhere else in the world.

The mint julep may be sacred in the South, but so is college football, and that doesn't stop us from enjoying it.

Aside from the martini, the mint julep may be the most iconic cocktail in America.

More often than not, punches underwhelm - too fizzy, too fruity, too sherbet-y, and/or too baroque, the flavors all muddled into the boozy equivalent of the water left over from cleaning watercolor brushes.

Anyone with a fondness for intricately flavored, carefully measured cocktails and entertaining at home knows how poorly the two mix.

An early remedy for malaria called for tossing the sufferer, Br'er Rabbit-style, into a prickly bush; in his hasty retreat, went the thinking, he might leave the fever behind. Orally-administered cobwebs were also deemed effective.