When I was a lad, my family took a car trip to visit distant relatives. One stop was my mother's cousin in St. Louis. When my brother and I hunkered down to sleep on the pullout couch in the paneled basement, I spied a pair of very long legs on a magazine in plain view on an end table. That was my introduction to Playboy. I was in heaven, but I knew there'd come a time when I'd be heading straight to hell.

Did you catch Steve Croft's interview of recently retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens on "60 Minutes" Sunday night? Two observations: 1. I hope to be half as cogent at age 70 as Stevens is at 90; 2. The fact that a man who was a moderate Republican when he was appointed by President Gerald Ford turned out to be court's leading liberal is as indicative of the polarization that our country has undergone in 35 years as anything I can imagine.

No matter where I went this weekend, I could not avoid food. I'm not talking about eating it -- though that was an issue, too. It was impossible to avoid thinking about it. Were you as surprised as I was to learn that Del Monte Foods, which was by taken over by private equity firms led by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, has nothing to do with fresh fruit and produce (that's a company called Fresh Del Monte)? KKR, which is as savvy as they come when it comes to cash flow, is putting its $4 billion bet on canned and processed …