It's one of the worst-kept secrets of family life that all parents have a preferred son or daughter and the rules for acknowledging it are the same everywhere: The favored kids recognize their status and keep quiet about it - the better to preserve the good thing they've got going and to keep their siblings off their back.

It has always amazed me how tax cuts don't work until they take effect. Mr. Obama's experience with deferred tax rate increases will be the reverse. The economy will collapse in 2011.

Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred.

I stupidly ignored education completely. I found it dull and I preferred to cause chaos and have fun. I regret this massively now.

In the government schools which are referred to as public schools Indian policy has been instituted there and its a policy where they do not encourage in fact discourage critical thinking and the creation of ideas and public education.

Much can be inferred about a man from his mistress: in her one beholds his weaknesses and his dreams.

We used to be referred to as bakers and then we became known as cake decorators and now we are known as cake designers. I teach at the French Culinary Institute in New York and cake design is a legitimate profession.

Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.

As much as I transferred my mother to Elizabeth Shore of The Black Dahlia as much as her dad mutated into an obsession with crime in general well I have thought about other things throughout the years.

Dad and mom would have preferred that I be a doctor a lawyer a scientist or a great humanitarian.

My daughter Lila loves the smell of gasoline - she always says 'Mummy keep the door open ' when I'm filling up the car. I've heard it is one of the most preferred scents in the world - maybe that's something to study for my next fragrance!

There does not seem to be that collegiality I referred to there seems to be much more of a them versus us attitude rather than we all have a role to play in this process so let's get on with it.