Welcome to Episode 70 of the Charles C.W. Cook podcast.

Thank you to everyone who listened to the last episode, whizbang, and sent nice messages to me and to Luther.

I met someone in Dallas at a breakfast who told me

that he had up until the point at which Luther

appeared on this show for a sustained period of time,

believed that Luther was a figment of my imagination,

that he didn't actually exist,

quite genuinely, that I had made him up.

And that's why I kept killing him off,

as one might a bad sentence or a pesky fly.

But no, Luther does, in fact, exist. He is flesh and blood, almost as tall as I am, perhaps the same height.

Also has a beard, which is actually another odd thing, is that if I were going to make someone up, I probably would make him look a bit like me.

But no, I didn't. He is real. Since the last episode, I have taken another road trip.

This time from Jacksonville to Buffalo to watch Monday Night Football, I'm not going to dwell

on the game itself. The Jaguers lost 47 to 10.

It was something of a disaster. They're now 0 and 4. They're the only 0.4 team in the NFL.

But the road trip itself was terrific. We went up through South Carolina and got some barbecue in Columbia.

Then, I can already hear you groaning at how incorrigible I have become. Then we went to

see the point again. I know, I know I just went there on the roller coaster

road trip but I went up with a friend of mine and he had not ridden a roller coaster for 20

years and he said he wanted to. And so we came up with various plans as to where we could stop

along the way. But the problem is if you stop and spend six or seven hours

...