No Gays for a Day

Joel Stein, the laziest, but occasionally most inspired newspaper columnist in America, hits it out of the park today. In response to the passage of Prop. 8, he is proposing a "No Gays for a Day" day, sort of like the the day without a Mexican thing a couple of years ago. It's an incredibly simple idea: everyone gay will take the day off of work, to highlight how many gay people there are in this country, and what life would be like without them.

I love it. I think it's a great idea. It's very funny, which any protest movement could use. It's going to be on December 5th, which is my mother's birthday. Mom will be supportive.

The opportunities for camp are just wonderful. What's Ellen going to do? I can see her spending several days leading up to this talking about it, and then running a rerun on the day of, and then spending a day or two afterwards talking about it. Maybe she could go on Oprah's show.

A brilliant opportunity for gay people to take themselves seriously and not seriously at the same time. Take a vacation to protest! Laughing and crying at the same time.

Many, many people will not get the joke. But for those of us who do, it could be a great tonic. Make that a vodka and tonic.

So much for that stereotype

Joel Stein, the only columnist in America who manages to be both an elitist snob and an apathetic slacker, recently explored the outer fringes of the electoral process. In this era of expanding the franchise, Los Angeles County set up last-minute voter registration booths at several Wendy's around town. Assuming that only the irredeemably lazy would take advantage of fast food and voter registration, Stein expected to find people who had not bothered to register and were only now making up for their procrastination. Not quite.

The first person I saw, to my shock, was someone I knew -- publicist Julia Cohen. I immediately started to make fun of her for registering at the last minute, but she told me she had registered a long time ago but feared that her forms were lost because she didn't get a voter information guide in the mail. She'd spent 25 minutes on the phone and then tried to confirm her registration on a website, but the city's computer server was overwhelmed. She even stopped by the Barack Obama campaign office for advice. Cohen wasn't a slacker. She was an anal-retentive geek.

It turned out that almost everyone I talked to at Wendy's was an incredibly responsible citizen.

. . .
My attempts to pick on procrastinators quickly turned into political conversations I was not nearly informed enough to handle. No, Doug Amaturo (had to update his address), I still don't know why the L.A. Times is against Proposition 2.

I love it when stereotypes clash with reality, and reality wins. I particularly like it when the stereotype in question is the lack of intelligence of the average American voter.

I went to high school in a suburb of Detroit. There was one class that was required by the State of Michigan for graduation: everyone had to take a class in American government. Maybe that actually worked.

Joel Stein doesn't quite get stoned

I love Joel Stein, the most laid-back columnist writing for a large newspaper in America. The one columnist who writes as little as possible about the election. His column today gives new meaning to the term "alternatively focused." Exploring the boundaries between the law and mind-altering substances, he spends some time trying to find out how easy it would be to score some medical marijuana. Someone points him in the direction of a medical office a few steps away from a pot dispensary. This works for him. The man who would write every column from the beach if he could appreciates the relaxed, but focused, approach to life in this crowd: "Stoners are very clearheaded when it comes to avoiding extra effort."

Not surprisingly, he has very little trouble, either at the doctor's office or the pot dispensary. To confirm that his is not an unusual experience, he called a guy named Doug Benson, who was High Times magazine's 2006 "Stoner of the Year." I'm fairly sure I don't want to know what the qualifications are for winning that award. Benson buys all his pot from a pot dispensary. He doesn't even mind paying sales tax. Yes, that's right, the 2006 "Stoner of the Year" pays sales tax on his pot. He also prefers dispensaries because, apparently, they're more professional. They leave him alone, whereas "dealers like to hang out." So the Stoner of the Year is very focused on maximizing the productive use of his time. The man is a pro.

But there's a serious point at the end:

I always wondered what would happen if marijuana were legalized for anyone over 18. It seems it already has been, and nothing happened.

He doesn't mention the War on Drugs, but he doesn't have to. I don't smoke pot, and I don't approve it. But neither am I a big fan of throwing massive numbers of people in jail. I haven't followed the debate over medical marijuana or legalization very closely, but I'm sure there are those who think that medical pot is a sham, a legal way to circumvent drug laws. This column will provide them with ammunition. But it's also not even remotely surprising. Open up just about any alternative weekly in Los Angeles, and probably California, and you will see ads for medical marijuana.

But he's also pointing out something that is almost as obvious. Pot is easily available, and society has not collapsed. What he doesn't mention is that there are some people for whom medical marijuana is actually a medical necessity. Sometimes the best columns on politics are the ones that don't say anything about politicians.

Eating out or staying in - which is more expensive?

Do you like to eat out at restaurants? Of course you do. We all do. Do you worry about it being too expensive? Probably, unless you got lucky with some stock options at some point in your life. Do you think eating out is more expensive than eating at home? Probably, unless you grill yourself some filet mignon every night. But are you really sure of this? Joel Stein, the columnist who covers everything you never thot you would see on the Op-Ed page (he once reported on the making of a porn movie, and, when the director offered him a part, almost took it), performed an experiment, comparing eating out for a week with eating at home. It was not a particularly scientific experiment, because Joel Stein, as he will be the first to tell you, is not a particularly disciplined person. But he found out that what most people think should be blindingly obvious is, in fact, true. Despite the best efforts of his wife to skew the results (she wanted it to look like eating out is cheaper), it turns out that eating at restaurants is, in fact, more expensive than eating at home. Whew! Vital social science research performed just in time for the good of a country in the middle of a recession.