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Joel Stein |
Recent Columns:
You may not have noticed that this is the lamest Tour de France ever, probably because you already find guys racing bicycles to be the lamest thing ever. But because of my desire to be even snottier and more boring than I am, I've been following cycling since 1994 and have learned to appreciate the subtleties of team strategy, drafting, counterattacks and a 20-cyclist crash down a mountainside.
I believe comedic change is possible. Since the New Yorker dropped a bum joke on its cover this week, comedians have appeared on every news outlet to whine about how hard it is to make fun of Barack Obama. Really? They have an arsenal of jokes to use against a 71-year-old ex-POW cancer survivor and Obama is too touchy a subject?
I love $4 gas. It makes me appreciate freedom. I watch as the dollars spin and think, "You, Triceratops, did not get squished by an asteroid in vain. You got squished for a $60 drive to Vegas."
I'm not a good driver. This is partly because I lived without a car in Manhattan for 11 years, but mainly because I consider driving a background activity. Sure, occasionally I have to steer or accelerate, but mostly I'm just conveniently moving forward while I text, eat, check out women, write down ideas, listen to NPR and return calls, sometimes all at the same time. Every so often, when I'm particularly fidgety, I'm sad there's no such thing as man makeup.
I'm up $178.60 on this election. Sure, $100 of that is because I bet my mom that Barack Obama would beat Hillary Clinton, and $50 was because I bet her that John Edwards would drop out before Super Tuesday. And although some would say it's wrong for a son to take advantage of his mom's gambling problem, I think I was showing tough love by taunting her deeply held feminist hopes and dreams in a way that Atlantic City never could.
Like most Americans, I hear about foreclosures and other tragedies of the housing bubble and think: Why didn't I make money off this? I felt the same sense of devastating loss in 2000, when tech stocks crashed and I didn't benefit. Also, unlike my sister, I choked on exploiting that period of generosity right after our parents' divorce.
When wine drinkers tell me they taste notes of cherries, tobacco and rose petals, usually all I can detect is a whole lot of jackass. The language of sommeliers, winemakers, sellers and writers has devolved into nothing besides a long list of obscure smells that tells me nothing. I get a lot of cherry and cassis from Manischewitz too, but it would help a lot more if you told me it was cough-syrup-goopy sugar-water.
Many people will enjoy "Camp Camp," a book of photos and essays about summer camp, as a hilarious, touching study of awkward adolescence. Those people are idiots. "Camp Camp" should be studied as the greatest guide ever to how Jews get jobs in Hollywood.
Dear old people,
Afew years ago, I began working toward my retirement goal of being an intolerable old man. I'm way ahead of schedule on knowing enough about wine to bore anyone, but classical music has proved much more difficult, largely because no matter how much you listen, it does not get you drunk.