Finally, a paper for the Hamptons!

There were a couple of choices as to how I could spend my Friday night. They were:

A) Listen to Billy Idol’s “Dancing With Myself” on repeat for 4-6 hours and dance around my room until I collapsed face-first on the floor in exhaustion, or
B) Write a vitriol-saturated rant about a semi-local newspaper.

I chose B. In retrospect, I probably should have chosen to read a book or something. Judge for yourselves.

The paper in question is Dan’s Paper, which boasts having the “Largest Weekly Circulation in the Hamptons plus Special Manhattan Delivery (sic).” Immediately it’s evident that this is one of those bullshit “lifestyle” papers that rich people read to make their lives seem less meaningless while they piss away their money. As such, I was actually pleasantly surprised that there were no articles inside advocating the depopulation of Long Island west of the forks so as to create the world’s largest equestrian field. Rather, it was noted on the cover that this week’s issue included a very special section on romancing in the Hamptons for Valentine’s Day! The excitement at the reader’s fingertips is palpable!

The first word I would use to describe this paper is: unnecessary. As somebody who doesn’t live in the Hamptons and doesn’t ever plan to, I can safely say I didn’t give a shit about any of it, and here’s what got me about this paper in the first place – it was available at the Stony Brook Administration Building! In huge stacks! I know the higher-ups in the University are loaded, but…why? Do they just throw out the unread 50 copies of this crap every week?

The paper’s target audience tends to be the well to do, but a closer look at the articles leads one to believe they’re really intended for the well-to-do who also have the attention span of third graders. The closest thing resembling any kind of political commentary was (I shit you not) an article by a gentleman named Dan Rattiner (THE Dan in Dan’s Papers) about how he could spot various physical characteristics of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton on his hi-definition television. Riveting! Dan also wrote a commentary on the Giants Super Bowl run vaguely on the level of what somebody who had just watched SportsCenter on Monday morning could do if they were asked to write a 500 word essay about it and had no prior knowledge of any professional sports ever. Another article has Dan quipping “Do they still study geography in grammar school? Or have they just thrown up their hands and given up on all this?” Hard hitting educational commentary from a man who confessed that he was interested in how closely Obama shaved his neck.

Romancing the Hamptons included a whole bunch of boring articles on how chocolate is delicious and other such inanities. “I love chocolate because it is delicious, satisfying and it makes me feel good. I eat it every day.” This sounds like a sentence I wrote about my favorite things when I was six years old. For extra fun, make it a mad lib!

“I love _____ because it is ______, ______ and ______. I eat it every day!”

On the same page where a restaurant was advertising $50 bottles of wine (I’d rather get drunk for cheap, thanks) there was a heartwarming entrepreneurial story of a man who created a dating website just for Hamptonites. Someone special could just be a click away…provided you’re in their income bracket! Another article touted various foods as aphrodisiacs. Not much worse than what you’d find in Newsday’s Part 2, I guess, but fuck it anyway.

Hilariously, the page opposite the chocolate article was advertising a $16,000 necklace and asks “Will you be his valentine?” For $16,000, I’d better fucking hope so. If that fails, you can just try opening a suitcase full of hundred dollar bills for the girl, I guess. This is the part of this post where I get on my soapbox about how I fucking hate jewelry ads of all types and say that I honestly don’t understand the fascination people have with shiny rocks and bits of metal. Kay Jewelers can get bent too and for your information, I’m never buying a diamond. Ever. De Beers is pretty much one of the most evil companies on Earth. Rant over.

Actually, rant not over – $16,000 can pay for three semesters of education at Stony Brook. And this paper, advertising this overpriced arrangement of rocks, was available in the school’s Administration Building. I don’t doubt there are people on campus that have the means to spend $16,000 on useless aesthetic bullshit like a necklace (after all, there’s an idiot with a Hummer on campus) but seriously, I can’t get over the fact there were like 100 copies of this publication delivered to the University. Who the hell could seriously read this thing?

The feature article in the paper was about James Lipton. I don’t really have anything against James Lipton so I’ll leave him alone, although I remember the Will Ferrell Lipton impersonation more than Lipton himself. Whatever, I say.

The letters to the editor touched on the biggest threat to relations between rich people in America and rich people in Europe: tipping habits. Did you know service charges are often included in Europe and it’s not necessary to leave a tip at most restaurants? Who says this is a shitty excuse to cut down some trees?! Get me a plane ticket to Milan, because I will teach those Europeans that I am cultured and totally know my shit when it comes to tipping in places other than TGI Friday’s. We just need to teach those silly foreigners that you need to tip when you come here, and we’ll be set (assuming they don’t take all of our restaurant jobs first, and therefore don’t require tips from their fellow foreigner customers – a harrowing possibility).

Finally, let me add that I don’t know who the fuck Dan Rattiner is or why he’s the one that publishes this verbal atrocity for Long Island’s elite, but I don’t care to find out. “Dan’s Papers” is a stupid name for a publication but I guess “Rich Asshole Weekly” was taken. Anyway, if I had a paper to my name I think that it’d actually have something to do with me. It’d be cover-to-cover melt your face off ass-kicking. All of the articles would either be about me (in the third person, of course) or everything that I think is awesome, and I’d probably write all the articles in my free time in between my massage sessions on my private yacht. The circulation would be, like, one person, but if I had the money to start my own publication in the first place, you can bet your ass I’d print out a million copies of that shit and airdrop it on the Hamptons out of spite. Tell me, would you rather read this:

…or this:

I think I know your answer. Nobody can resist a free poster!