Forget the EpiPen, it's all in your head. Not mine though, I can't keep anything in there.

Joel Stein, L.A. Times opinion columnist, thinks that nut allergies are a "yuppie invention."

Really! Kids with food allergies are just victims of their parents' mass hysteria! Kids who don't live in "rich lefty communities" don't have these wussy conditions! (Never mind that families in poor communities might not have the money or the health care to discern such a thing... more entertaining to posit that only affluent liberals would come up with such a problem in the first place.)

I don't know what causes nut allergies, or why they appear to be on the rise in recent years. I'm just glad my kids don't have 'em. However my Peanut is allergic to shellfish. Does this mean I'm a "parent who needs to feel special?" If so, why didn't this need affect the Bean, who has no food allergies? Oh crap, there I go again, with the pesky reasoning. So sorry.

But wait, what about my friends whose kids have celiac disease? They must be real prima donnas. Hard to reconcile that with their laid-back personas and conservative politics. Reverse psychology, you say? Oh, those tricky attention seeking yuppie friends of mine!

So, yes. Stein's column today is jackassery. Before I read it, I was more familiar with his work for Time, where he comes off as -- guess what? -- an attention-seeking self-absorbed yuppie food snob. Go figure.

I miss Time, though. I used to pay for subscriptions with unused not-so-frequent-after-all flier miles. Just as the subscription ran out, Delta "actually, you haven't flown with us since the 20th century, so would you just get rid of these miles already?" Airlines would send another solicitation, and I'd renew. Sadly though, Delta's last magazine offerings did not include Time, or Newsweek, or U.S. News & World Report. To fill the weekly news niche, I opted for The Economist. It was that or Cigar Afficionado, and I think it's safe to say that for better or worse, we've all had enough of the Clintons to last us a lifetime.

So The Economist comes to the house these days, and like Time before it, piles up in a basket in the downstairs bathroom. However, it's not a good fit, because I don't want to live in the downstairs bathroom. Turns out The Economist has a lot of, you know, words, and stuff. You can tell how serious they are about all the words by the tiny margins. (As anyone knows who's ever tried to force five pages of prose into two, the first step is to narrow the margins.) Also, they place one impenetrable article right after another, with barely a blank line, let alone any celebrity gossip items, between.

I liked Time for its mix of news and fluff. Although I'm giving it the ol' college try, I fear The Economist is a bit too unrelentingly substantive for my gnat-like attention span and diminished capacity to retain anything I read (blame for both is assigned to my lovely offspring). Parents with children older than mine assure me that both these things can be recovered. In the meantime I have no time for The Economist.

After all, there are allergies to invent.