Time magazine funnyman and true American original Joel Stein has revealed at last Which Mistake Taught Him the Most. Spoiler: his answer is about Joel Stein's sex life.

You know those people in your office who are always ducking out for cigarettes in groups? They're just shooting the shit, right? Talking about inconsequential things? Wrong. They're actually advancing their careers, while you sit inside working like a chump.

Nice work, Joel Stein. You really threw the missus under the bus this time, as you explain the trend of new-age-y anti-vaccination parents hitting home.

David Simon told television viewers to go screw themselves; Jane Fonda established a rallying point for her fellow travelers and Choire Sicha and David Carr watched a bust go down. The Twitterati celebrated troublemakers.

Two Seymours are celebrating today: Stephanie Seymour is turning 41; Philip Seymour Hoffman is turning 42. Woody Harrelson is 48. Daniel Radcliffe is 20. Don Imus turns 69. Michelle Williams of Destiny's Child is turning 29. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy turns 73. Local news anchor Kaity Tong is 60. Actress Stephanie March is turning 35. The New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg is 66. Estate jeweler Fred Leighton turns 77. LA Times columnist Joel Stein is turning 38. Slash from Guns N' Roses is 44. Marlon Wayans is 37. Interior designer David Kleinberg is 55. Country music star Alison Krauss turns 38. And Ms. Monica Lewinsky celebrates her 36th birthday today.

Just watch—next week Joel Stein is going to write a column thanking Chelsea Art Museum, Crunch, Dotspotter, Eve Online, AMC's Mad Men, Mighty Leaf Tea, Nextbook, Peter Cooper Village, Secret Diary of a Call Girl, SOAPNet, Sobieski, Starwood Hotels, Stoli Blueberry, and TNT's Saving Grace. We got here first, Joel! Oh hey, would you like to advertise on Gawker while you're stealing our material? Click here!

Oh hey, beloved humorist Joel Stein wrote a fantastic column for the Los Angeles Times newspaper called "How to Make Fun of Barack Obama." Wait, sorry, that's the wrong link. That link goes to a post we wrote on Wednesday. We meant to link to Joel Stein's hilarious and original column, "How to make fun of Obama." Do you need reassurance that all is right with the world? Here it is: his advice directly contradicts ours, repeatedly. Did you know that Barack Obama is really gay?

Oh yea. [LAT]

Self-referential LA Times humor person Joel Stein finally says "fuck everything" today, and writes a column about Julia Allison [LAT]. Yes. He calls her "a genius," but perhaps this was just a bit of flattery to draw some good quotes out of her. Here she is explaining the thinking behind her fake role as "editor at large" for Star, in an interview she gives via cell phone while shopping for clothes: "The people who do corporate strategy are understanding the power of three or four minutes on a cable network or a morning show. It's the best publicity you can get. Oh, that is the cutest dress I've ever seen. Oh my! Oh my God! I can't handle it. Anyway, with the advent of 24-hour news networks, you have an incredible amount of air time to fill." Shopping and building her brand at the same time! In case you're still stuck in the old, outdated journalism world, Julia breaks down how she is really just as smart as—or smarter than—any other REPORTER or whatever:

Girls Gone Wild pioneer Joe Francis profiled by enemy-of-Gawker and columnist Joel Stein? Sign us up! For coach ticket to a nation with no magazines or newspapers or late night cable advertisements! Francis, you may recall, was in jail for a couple months for tax evasion and being a scummy sonuvabitch. He and Stein apparently go way back! We learn so much about Francis, like how he is "a different class" than the other people in jail, and how his ADD often leads people to "mistake him for a coke addict" (heaven forfend!), and also he is just like Rosa Parks. This is page two of the five-page story, btw, and we refuse to go any further. [GQ via Radar]

On Friday, the Los Angeles Times fussbudget columnist Joel Stein announced that he's "horribly jealous" of conservative pain-in-the-ass Ann Coulter—"After all these years of Coultering, people still get riled up over her obvious attempts to make us mad," writes Joel, obviously pissed off that his own attempts to piss people off haven't delivered to him an iconic reputation such as the one Coulter has, for better or worse. He tests his theory that anything she might say would tick people off like so: "I developed the Ann Coulter Mad Libs™." Now, because someone already did it a month ago, bloggers are calling for his head over the column. We don't know enough to judge—but anything that might prevent Joel from writing is fine in our book!

I don't know about you but when I search Facebook for "Neal Pollack," I get two Neal Pollacks, neither of whom are the Neal Pollack that I want to find. (I'm looking for the Alternadad writer and blogger Neal Pollack who writes about his son so much!) But when I search from my friend's account, I get three Neal Pollacks, the last of whom is the Neal Pollack I want to find. How could we tell? Though we couldn't view his profile, we could view his friends. They include Timedouche columnist Joel Stein and his lovely wife, Cassandra Barry; Biblically-living author AJ Jacobs; Defamer editor Mark Lisanti; Gawker's once-upon-a-time editor Elizabeth Spiers; and Sloane Crosley, the indefatigable publicist. Come on, Neal! We want to poke you so hard!

At the Time 100 gala a few months ago, I approached Joel Stein ("humorist," LA Times and Time columnist), whose relationship with this website has been, shall we say, tense, and introduced myself. Almost immediately, he asked why Gawker hates him. He said he "really wanted to know." He also said that his wife gets really upset when she reads Gawker and sees all the mean things people say about her DH. As we parted, I offered to send Joel and his wife a Gawker commenter invite. In the grand tradition of people leaving this place with a fuck-you to the people who, despite being total hacks, have managed to wrangle themselves a lucrative, high-profile job in journalism, I've decided to post our correspondence. Joel Stein, congratulations. You're my Joe Dolce.

In a column called "Beating Joel Stein," (not, sadly, a how-to guide) the L.A. Times "humor" columnist introduces you to the finalist of his Comedy Special Olympics. Dude writes for Nerve and Babble and his piece is about circumcision. Sounds like a battle of equals to us. [LAT]

Time magazine hates eHarmony, evite, MySpace, and SecondLife. For an institution that thinks Joel Stein is a god, this is a surprisingly accurate list. [Time]

Bad news for those seeking knowledge of the fellatory arts from alleged humorist Joel Klein (a god to those in their twenties and thirties who like to give and get oral sex): Joel has pulled out of his scheduled stint as blowjob instructor at L.A.'s Babeland, apparently under pressure from his Los Angeles Times paymasters, who presumably understand that they look ridiculous enough already without one of their columnists providing examples of how to suck in other forums. It's a blow—ha ha, get it?—to anyone who had hoped to further their understanding of the male wang from its living embodiment. The class will continue on without Joel, but really, the whole thing just feels like a tease. Were we more mouthy we'd register our deep-throated disapproval of this early withdrawal; it just seems kind of toothless.

Out on the West Coast the week after next? We've got an event for you!

This week's Time magazine is full of all kinds of goodies! Apart from a front-of-the-book piece by Norman Pearlstine calling for a federal shield law to protect journalists (presumably so that Time doesn't have to bend over for prosecutors again) there are two essays by Joel Stein (who, you'll recall, is a god to people in their twenties and thirties). The first one—part of the issue's package on why we eat what we eat—describes Joel's 48-hour Master Cleanse fast. Joel gets hungry! And cold! And tosses off a couple of easy Jew jokes! It's Joel Stein like you've never seen him before, unless you've ever seen him even once.

This week's Time contains an except from Al Gore's new book about American democracy (apparently, it's in jeopardy), gays in Dallas (there are a bunch of them) and this fascinating charticle about the life and times of the fictional heroine from the Terminator movies. This is a smart, far-sighted strategy: The kids come for the fun pop culture stuff, but stay for the sobering analysis of the dangers facing the Republic. And let's not forget comedy god Joel Stein! It's working!

It's time for another excerpt from Don't Hassel the Hoff (St. Martin's Press, May 15), the autobiography of one of the world's most loved entertainers. In this installment, a career setback (News To Me, a sitcom co-starring the Hoff about the life of Joel Fucking Stein, was cancelled before it got out of the gate) sends David spiraling back into the arms of sweet, sweet alcohol, with results that seem eerily resonant given recent developments in the author's life.