Step-show! A new word to save you time
Plus: Edinburgh Fringe! Tapper! Entourage!
Est. Read Time: 5 minutes. Read Time brought to you once again by the Ashburton Energy + Hair Logistics Group, in association with the Bradley Hills Bureau of Corrections + Housing.
New to the SternJourn? You’re getting this email because you subscribed or asked me to add you! It’s a place where Julian (me) talks about comedy, writing, productivity, and whatever the hell else he wants. Check out the best of 2022, 2021, or 2020!
SHOWS!
Pizza Party @ The Crow. July 22nd (tonight!). Free and easy parking in Santa Monica. This’ll be a fun show! Lots of funny folks including headliner Moses Storm!
2LIAN STERN KEEPS 2RYING. EDINBURGH FRINGE FEST. That’s right! I’m returning to Fringe and bringing back “Julian Stern Keeps Trying,” but giving it the 2Fast2Furious naming convention, which allows me to change as much or as little of it as I want! If you’re at Fringe, come hang. I’ll be at Carbon August 3-13 and Burrito N Shake August 14-18.
Well Dressed. The Roosevelt. August 30th. More details to come, but I’ll be on this fancy schmancy show back in LA at the end of the month!
Helloooo Sternal Journalists,
Big day for the horny chain text, as it is from one of those that I found out about the big political news of the day literally seven minutes after said news broke. I assume someone had it pre-filed like big news organization have for celebrity obituaries1.
But I’m not here to talk about any of that. Can you imagine if the Sternal Journal rocked out a nuanced and deeply reported take about all that? We simply don’t have the resources at the moment.
So instead, I’ve yet again invented a word. Past words that I’ve invented include dangus carangus, esqueechamay, and yipshaw. They are mostly useless to anyone except me, and none of them have caught on except for esqueechamay among a small circle of people who are mostly being nice.
But this one! This one is practical for I believe a strong majority of the population.
The word is:
step-show. noun. A show that you do not personally watch, but someone you are in close proximity to does, and therefore you know quite a bit about it and probably are somewhat invested.
Imagine. You are at a work function. You are making small talk with someone and ask their plans for the weekend. They say they are planning to catch up Love Island, the reality dating show which crams thirty-seven episodes into one month and therefore should qualify you for some sort of Masters Degree in media theory.
They ask if you watch it.
You don’t know what to say exactly. You don’t watch it. But your partner does, and therefore, you’ve seen or heard it in the background. And you’ve walked through the living room with laundry and lingered for a bit to say “Wait, I thought the tall one was friends with the little twerking one.” And you’ve been told, nono the twerking one is actually gone now, but they went to a place called Casa (which is markedly different and very the same as the Villa, which is where they live2), where the tall one met a new twerking one and he essentially replaced her, so everyone is mad but also horny.
So while you don’t watch it, you have seen bits and you have some things to say and maybe even some questions you’d like to ask a person who does not live in your own Casa (or I guess Villa in this case), so you wind up spurting out something like:
“Well, I don’t watch it, but my [partner/roommate/sister/friend/twerking one] watches it so I’ve like seen bits and pieces when I’m walking through the living room and I hear about it and and…”
AND we’ve wasted so much time in that conversation! We all have shows like this. Shows that are not ours, but are important to people we know or love and therefore by proxy are important to us.
So instead of blubbering the same explanation, “step-show” is the answer. I would consider “show-in-law” but it’s one more syllable.
ANYWAY
Recommendations!
The Death of Slim Shady. Album. People aren’t loving it necessarily (Pitchfork gave it a 4.8), but I felt like it was a return to form and a fun listen and the most palatable “famous person with all the resources in the world complaining or worrying about being canceled” (which I find normally pretty unpalatable) project I’ve heard in a while.
The Interview: Joel Embiid. Podcast Episode. I am not a big sports person, but I loved listening to this interview.
Bad Good TV. Type of media. This week, I watched the pilot episodes of both How To Make It In America and Entourage, the two shows that make up the “Mark Wahlberg produced” holy trinity along with Ballers. There was something extremely nostalgic about both of them, as they occupied the “smart phones technically exist but they aren’t everywhere” final moments of global eye contact. But also I was reminded that they kinda suck. I thought How To Make It had a better pilot than Entourage, but they were both whatever. And Entourage was a hit! It existed before we considered TV to have a capacity for high-brow and I think that was good? Maybe more on this in the future and maybe I’ll fully change my mind.
Tapper. Arcade Game. I went to Button Mash, the LA barcade, this weekend, and I was reminded of how much I love this Budweiser-sponsored arcade game. To be good at it, you have to enter a blissful, zen flow-state and I think, to be good at zen flow-states, you have to play Tapper. A friend of mine who many of us think pooped on our bathroom floor eleven years ago at a party has three of the top ten scores, and I think that says a lot about what kind of person gets to achieve the highest echelons of zen.
Anyway, that’s all! Much love! Have a zen week and take good care of your step-shows!
Julian!
Apologies for the recycled joke if you’re one of the people I said this to over text today.
Unless they’re in Casa