1 I interviewed Calvin Trillin a couple of years ago.

2 The person who led me through that was Trillin.

3 But Mr Trillin is incapable of resisting the temptation of comedy. The jokes kept on welling up and Mr Trillin made a parallel reputation as a writer of funny stuff.

4 Trillin wrote several articles about Goldberg, who happened to be a college friend.

5 Mr Trillin describes himself as a "Deadline Poet" because of the rhyming verses he contributes regularly to the Nation.

6 The thought is rather appalling, but Mr Trillin makes it work for him: "You can say what you want to about my Uncle Benny, but he never made his living as a money lender."

7 The jokes kept on welling up and Mr Trillin made a parallel reputation as a writer of funny stuff.

8 CALVIN TRILLIN made his reputation over four decades as the author of "US Journal" in the New Yorker,(www.Sentencedict.com) reporting extensively about serious and often tragic subjects such as race relations and crime.

9 Mr Trillin makes fun of the arrival in the Port of Galveston, Texas, in 1908, from somewhere "near Kiev", of his father and his Uncle Benny.

10 Although Mr Trillin graduated from Yale University (his father encouraged him to go east having read Owen Johnson's 1911 tale, "Stover at Yale"), he was brought up in Kansas City, Missouri.

11 Still, the thought of handing over hundreds of billions of dollars to China who sits on a couple trillin dollar surplus is going to cause problems in the negotiations at Copenhagen.

12 I want to thank Burkhard Bilger, Lauren Collins, and Calvin Trillin for speaking with us.