Here's a piece of clearly newsworthy news from this last Sunday's New York City Times Sunday Arts & Leisure section:

Famous man looks his age.

Slow the presses! Is it really news because someone looks as old as they really are? What does this say about cultural expectations these days? Women have felt the squeeze of looking younger, probably forever. But wasn't there supposed to be a double standard, when it came to men? Men only had to be wealthy or powerful when they got older. Now we have to be fresh-faced, too?

In this case, the shocking revelation was about Billy Joel. There's a big, giant photo portrait of Joel showing a guy with a grayish goatee and wrinkles, a face well-earned over 59 years but not that different from the vast majority of other guys butting up against 60.

The sub-headline: "Billy Joel, the Unambiguously Aging Pop Star." As opposed to, what? The Osmonds, who are ambiguously aging? Or Michael Jackson, who erased his face into the definition of ambiguity?

Here are a few quotes, in case you don't want to wade through the otherwise complimentary epic: Joel, it says, "limped up the steps and gimped over to the piano, looking every bit the road-battered stagehand..." Then he "hobbled offstage." A sentence later, he's "this same balding, gray-haired man," who's "not so young." Joel "knows that save for those large, please-don't-hurt-me eyes, he looks nothing like the bushy-haired young man" on the cover of his "The Stranger" album. "Nothing like the baby-faced entertainer..." There we have it. We get the picture. Billy Joel has changed over the last 30 years. How shocked are you? (If I seem a little sensitive, it's because I'm around Joel's age, and I've put on weight, lost hair and gotten grey over the years, too. Maybe I'd change that if I could, but I can't, and neither can most other people except with medical help.)

Other than diseases or other specific ravaging, a lot of people can get by looking reasonably the same - not Dorian Gray, but not Keith Richards, either - between their late 20s and sometimes as late as their early 50s. But it catches up to you at some point if you're human.

Joel, according to the article, can take some comfort in the fact that "he can afford to be so self-deprecating" about his looks because he's the sixth top-selling artist of all times and "has the financial wherewithal to surprise his wife" with a $16 million house in the Hamptons. Thank god he has something to fall back on when the terror of aging hits him full in the mirror. There's that money and power thing. But what about the rest of us?

The story contrasts Joel with Bruce Springsteen, who "has stalled the aging process through blessed genes or some Faustian bargain." Yeah, big deal. My friend Peter Coyote still looks like a Ralph Lauren ad well into his 60s. I know another guy, a grandfather to one of my kid's classmates, who appears magically as a well-toned cross between an early Tab Hunter and Shaggy in Scooby Doo. Tom Petty and Jackson Brown both look from photos like they haven't changed in a quarter century. But people who know both of them say that under those manes the faces have weathered. Big curls don't necessarily hide wrinkles (Sammy Hagar, Robert Plant), so they sure won't for you.

Crosby and Stills, James Taylor, they took some mileage. Graham Nash not as much, but again, he's got that Edwardian hairdo that can help mask a megamile of time (Richard Branson, too), like women's bangs. Even perpetually baby-faced Paul McCartney, other than the now famously died hair, could pass for 66, which he is.

But the youthful wonders are the exception, right?

Women now officially have company in the "looks good for her age" social grief contests, according to the arbiter of newsworthiness among us older folks.

Who are your favorite examples of unambiguously old/blessed genes opposites? Who do you think has aged well, and who seems to be trying to cheat time, by surgical or other means?