Quotes from Jonathan Miles

The greatest meal of my life involved a Triscuit.

A banal poem is never more than a banal poem. A banal or trite lyric, however, can be - with the right vocal cords - brilliantly and shatteringly conveyed.

Though little known in the U.S., the Dakar is a sports juggernaut in Europe, where France's state broadcasting company runs more than 25 hours of coverage, and the leading drivers and riders are accorded the same status we give to Super Bowl quarterbacks.

Paddleboarding is what happens when you want to kayak on a surfboard or surf a kayak: You stand atop a board paddling yourself around. It's a leisurely good time.

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.

The James Brown we saw tended to be the James Brown we chose to see: as the caped crusader of funk and soul, adored by millions, or as the face in a seemingly endless series of mug shots. The ways in which he appealed to and appalled different audiences made Brown a kind of national Rorschach test.

Few things grace a plate as dramatically as a whole plucked upland bird, however it's cooked.

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

Most of us seem to be buried under our own possessions, and it seems to be getting worse.

You pray for days when the crappie fishing is so relentlessly good that you're giggling like a kid and the only things you're lacking in life are another stringer and an extra hour on the water. But what do you do with that pile of freshly caught crappies spilling out of your cooler? Call your pals for a mega-fry.

Havana is one of the great cities of the world, sublimely tawdry yet stubbornly graceful, like tarnished chrome - a city, as a young Winston Churchill once wrote, where 'anything might happen.'

For whatever reason, I encounter Canadian whiskey at hunting camps way more often than I do in restaurants, bars, or homes. Could be the lower price. Could be the mellow character, which lends itself to long hours of fireside sipping. Or it could just be tradition.

If everything is disposable or recyclable, how does that make us feel about ourselves and each other?

Technically, fish can last up to half a year in a freezer, but their quality starts to slide after the first month.

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.

For most of the competitors, winning the Dakar has little to do with the standings on the final day and everything to do with making it to the final day.

It's often said that doves provide valuable practice for duck season, but this strikes me as upside down. With their tiny profiles, wicked speed, and fighter-plane acrobatics, doves are more difficult to take down.

You can't rent a car in Bermuda; about twenty miles long and two miles wide at its fattest, it deems itself too small for surplus traffic.

Driving a race car isn't too far a cry from driving any other sports car, but driving one through Africa in the middle of the night offers a wide scree of new sensations.

For centuries, pates have been one of the greatest vehicles for wild game. But making a pate, which is nothing more than a meatloaf, has tended to be a laborious task, with ingredient lists as long as a shotgun barrel.

Wild geese have so much less fat than their domestic brethren that, as far as the kitchen is concerned, the two birds should be considered different species altogether - so much so that they require opposite roasting methods.

The booming popularity of alligator hunting, sparked by reality shows like the History Channel's 'Swamp People,' is easy to understand: It's an exotic blast of adrenaline. But there's a culinary upside as well, with gator boasting a delicate light-pink meat that, to me, falls somewhere between veal and wild turkey.

Think schnitzel, and you usually think veal or pork: pounded into tenderness, battered, and fried to a golden magnificence.

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