Star Wars makes you stupid. Star Trek makes you smart. Yes, both fandoms pursue cosplay, compulsive crap collection, and other life-wasters. But whereas Star Wars is a masturbatory end-in-itself, some Trekkers have at least pivoted their passion into meatspace, er, enterprises. Just trivial junk ...
If I"d known, as a teenager, that Lake Superior State University existed, maybe I"d have bothered getting a degree after all. For one thing, these guys usher in spring by burning a giant snowman. (It was "a Snow Ayatollah Khomeini during the Iran hostage crisis"). When the ...
On the topic of "noteworthy accomplishments," here's an ironic one: With How the Scots Invented the Modern World, author Arthur Herman somehow wrote a book that is tedious in direct reverse proportion to its subject"that is (as the subtitle teasingly promises), The True Story of How ...
"I lost my whole family in Auschwitz. Seriously: I waited in the gift shop for hours…" "Joan Rivers Taki's particularly hydrophobic commenters will greet with disbelief the news that, as it turns out, I"m only 2 percent Jewish. I"ll reveal the other 98 percent in my ...
I never want to belong to any club that would have anyone else as a member. Groucho's original complaint is incontestably clever, but when it comes to going almost anywhere, from the movies to Mass, other people are the problem, surely? (On the latter front, in the interest of accuracy, the ...
Congratulations, Taki's! You made the big time! And by "big time" I mean, er, a bunch of telephone poles in one Toronto neighborhood. Right after Trump's election, this poster was discovered duct-taped around East York: HEY WHITE PERSON! Are you tired of political correctness? Wondering ...
So this is my fourth Hitler. When I was a kid, I treasured my Book of Lists, and still remember big chunks of it. (But don"t know my own cell phone number a year after I got the damn thing...) This paperback treasury of trivia included the results of a poll asking U.S. respondents to name ...
I hate the Earth. Yeah, I hate all the other planets, too, but what I mean is: Nowadays, conservatives are supposed to pretend to care about stuff like equality and gay "marriage" and the poor and the environment. I don"t. I feel like I did when I joined AA: A group that I"d ...
Four years after her death, Helen Gurley Brown"author of the 1962 phenomenon Sex and the Single Girl and longtime Cosmopolitan editor in chief"is having a moment. Not one but two bulging biographies are now out (to accompany the one released just before she died). HGB obsessive Lena Dunham ...
It's a head-shaker of a showdown: two unlikely contenders not everyone is particularly excited about. Even some of the voters who got them to this point (beginning what seems like an eternity ago) are shaking their heads at the state of the race. Nope, I can"t believe it either: After 40-plus ...
