10. Your New Year’s kiss left smudge marks on your mirror

9. Your wife’s resolution was to give up you

8. You recently invested all your money with some Italian guy named Ponzi

7. You’re Michele Bachmann

6. You accidentally watched that new TV show about two dudes in dresses

5. You just woke up from your 2010 New Year’s Eve party

4. You started the new year with ten fingers and toes – now, not so many

3. You can still hear that firecracker someone set off near your head on New Year’s Eve

2. Last year your company went paperless; this year they’re going peopleless

1. You’re still writing “2011” on all your death threats
 

Bob Sullivan’s Top Ten Everything appears every Monday.

So it’s that time of year again.  The leaves on some of the smaller plants are beginning to change colors, the nights are getting longer, and the summer heat is finally dissipating.  Football is on TV and on the mind of every old man down at the local coffee shop in the morning talking about his grandson.  My pumpkin patch has already produced ripe fruit.  Fall is certainly right around the corner.

It’s time to start thinking about what you’re going to wear for Halloween.

Here are a couple of “common sense” ground rules for the selection of a perfect Halloween costume, as gleaned from my many years working as a bartender and bouncer:

1.  There are ALWAYS too many sluts and hookers. 

I swear, Halloween is the day when half the women out there let their freak off its leash.  You’ll head to a Halloween party, and when you walk through the door, every where you look are women in scandalously skimpy costumes.  Nurses, cops, devils and angels, and not a single one of them catching less than an R-rating.  Skinny, average, minivan, it doesn’t matter what the girl looks like, she’s gonna be showin’ some clevege!

It’s so retarded!  An overwhelming amount, a distressing amount, of hookers doth not a party make.  No matter what Charlie Sheen says.

Random girl at the party:  Hey!  Any body wanna guess what I am?

Me:  A slut?

RG: <Gasp!>  Yes!  How did you know?

Me:  [facepalm] One. You are here.  Two.  Because I’m certain the Highway Patrol has regulations limiting an officer’s ability to show off that much butt floss to oncoming traffic during a routine stop.  It’s supposed to be a “string bikini”, not a “powerline cable bikini”.  Dear god, leave me alone.

Ladies, some of us enjoy meeting people who have the capacity for basic thought, someone with originality.  That thoughtless, default slut suit you fill out so nicely at 25 isn’t going to look nearly so sexy when you’re 60.  If you want to show off a little skin, try a freakin’ toga, something!, damn, you’re killin’ me with this nonsense.

Pick something else.  Sure, the girl with DDs exploding out of the top of her impossibly strained bodice will win the Best Costume award, but you’ll wake up tomorrow with your dignity and be able to sign into Facebook with pride.

Rule #2:  There is ALWAYS that one guy who has dressed up as a woman to the point where you begin to ask questions. 

As always, you don’t want to be that guy.  It’s always a good call to avoid crossdressing for Halloween.  None of your friends will harass you for going without a costume if you tell them the alternative was you dressed up as Helga, the Overly Endowed Viking Bar Wench (Try our new model!  NOW with Back Hair!).

Rule #3: Most of us do not need to DIY a costume.

If you could design and pattern attractive outfits, you’d have a rapper with your name in his name.  Since there is no McGowan Mane selling discs, it’s better to rent or buy a pre-made costume.  Leave that to the professionals.

And if you don’t have a lady friend willing to help you out, fellas, avoid make up at all costs.  You really don’t know what you’re doing.

It’s not really that expensive to get a costume off the Internet, less than you’re going to spend on drinks, probably.  Unless you’re going as The Great Trash Heap, it’s worth it to cough up the loot and get a good looking costume.  You’ll feel better about yourself, others will be more willing to talk to you, it’s a winner who’s time has come.

With all of that said, I’m thinking about being the world’s biggest Smurf.  Gargamel’s worst nightmare, a 6’3″, 300 lb Smurf.  Punt that cat halfway across the forest.  What are y’all thinking about?

Recently a friend of mine decided to sell the antique Indian headdress she kept in a Perspex box in her house. I was baffled by this decision as it was a thing of great beauty and she did not need the cash. But she had made up her mind: she was moving house and the headdress had to go.

I asked how she had acquired it in the first place:

“My grandparents picked it up at a train station in the 1930s,” she said. “They used to travel around the South West and the Indians would come to the platforms to sell things. So they bought the headdress. They probably didn’t pay much for it, either.”

It was, apparently, a Navajo war bonnet, a headdress of great symbolic power. War bonnets could only be worn by individuals who had performed brave deeds in battle, and they also conferred protection upon the wearer. Since this example contained at least thirty feathers, its original owner must have been an exceedingly brave man. And yet at some point his descendants had been reduced to such destitution that they had surrendered this sacred object for a couple of bucks. Such was the esteem in which Indian culture was held in those halcyon days of yore.

Anyway, since I know a little about antiques, and a lot about obscure and unusual things, my friend asked for help in placing a value on the bonnet. “I saw one on eBay going for $1800,” she said, but otherwise she had no idea.

I spent a few hours online searching different auction websites for prices. But soon I noticed something curious. I couldn’t find any old headdresses- only replicas made by living artists. A shiny, new war bonnet made out of fluffy turkey feathers by a 35-year-old Navajo single mother went for $400-700. But what about an ancient one that may have actually been worn into battle against the nefarious White Man, or an enemy tribe? Surely that would be worth a lot more…

Since information was hard to come by, I sent an email to the man who runs the Austin auction house, complete with pictures attached: “What do you think this headdress would fetch at auction?” I asked.

“Is the artist’s name written on it?” he replied.

“It’s not a replica,” I answered. “My friend’s grandparents bought it a long time ago.”

“Is it made of eagle feathers?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Is that important?”

“Yes- selling eagle feathers is highly illegal,” he replied.

And then he sent me a link to an astonishing story about a man named Leighton Deming who had owned Geronimo’s headdress. It had been in his family for five decades. Then, after trying and failing for twenty-five years to donate it to museums he had decided to sell it for a million dollars. Eventually Mr. Deming found a buyer, but when the day came in October 1999 for money and feathers to change hands, it turned out that the buyer was the FBI, and that he was at the center of a sting operation. Suddenly surrounded by 10-12 agents wielding M-16s, Mr. Deming was informed that selling eagle feathers was a federal crime punishable by five years in jail and a $250,000 fine. Geronimo’s headdress, meanwhile, contained 48 golden eagle feathers.

Mr. Deming pointed out that since Geronimo had received the headdress as a gift in 1907, the bird had been dead for many years- definitely since before the sale of golden eagle feathers was declared illegal in 1962.

But that made no difference, the legal reasoning being that people who own a damaged headdress might be tempted to restore it by cheekily plucking fresh feathers from a living (and endangered) eagle’s behind. Although he thought this reasoning was absurd, Mr. Deming did not want to dedicate years of his life to a legal fight and plead guilty to a lesser charge of “unknowing bartering,” for which he received a six-month suspended sentence.

The next time I was in my friend’s house I compared the pictures of a golden eagle’s tail feathers in a book with those in the headdress. They looked the same to me. The sale was canceled.

Now when I started to tell you this story, I thought the moral was going to be about the unintended consequences of well intentioned but poorly written laws. Looking back, however, I can see several morals and there may be a few more in there that I’m not even aware of. I’ll leave it to you to extract the one you like most.

I would like to say this, however:  don’t go selling any antique Navajo war bonnets until you’re absolutely sure they don’t contain eagle feathers.

Originally published at the mega awesome RIA Novosti site

10. The rats have gnawed through your garden hose, making it impossible to hose down the hallway

9. Your living room’s leaf pile dates from three autumns ago

8. The producers of Hoarders thought your place was just a little too much

7. Your heating vents are clogged with Frito crumbs

6. Even Jehovah’s Witnesses won’t come inside

5. The Health Department has you on speed dial

4. When you go in the kitchen, your spouse uses Raid to provide cover fire

3. You have so many dust bunnies, the legs of your bed no longer touch the floor

2. You’ve misplaced two of your children

1. Your refrigerator has a wet hacking cough
 

Bob Sullivan’s Top Ten Everything appears every Monday.

10. The ‘corsage’ he pins to your dress his handmade from Bounty paper towels

9. He takes you to the prom in the basket of his Schwinn

8. Every time he starts dancing, concerned chaperones place a wrapped spoon in his mouth to prevent him from biting his tongue

7. He wants to be home by 9:00 so he can catch the rerun of Fringe

6. He claims he’s suffering from ‘Bieber Fever’

5. He’s wearing a cardboard Burger King crown

4. His tux was ‘borrowed’ from his dad’s funeral home business

3. When he asks you if you want to catch a bite somewhere, he displays his collection of coupons

2. He keeps calling you “Mommy”

1. You’re both wearing the same dress

Bob Sullivan’s Top Ten Everything appears every Monday.

10. He delivers his speech without moving his lips, thanks to his little ventriloquist’s dummy ‘Muammar’

9. Her first name is Snooki

8. His speech is laced with crude double entendres and Polish jokes

7. He can’t emphasize enough the many incredible advantages of buying a ShamWow!

6. His claim to fame: He played Epstein on Welcome Back, Kotter

5. She goes on and on about how Barack Obama’s birth certificate has to be a forgery

4. Before he goes on, he asks the principal if he wants a little ‘nose candy’

3. He claims to have deciphered the “secret language of kitty cats”

2. He begins his speech, “If life hands you lemons, you should squeeze the juice directly into the wounds of your enemies.”

1. He spends an entire hour blathering on about his tiger’s blood, Adonis DNA, and fire-breathing fists

Bob Sullivan’s Top Ten Everything appears every Monday.

10. On your paper “What I Plan To Do After Graduation,” your teacher wrote “Guess again”

9. Your final paper in Music class was entitled “Why Justin Bieber Is the New Mozart”

8. The last time you picked up a book, it took you the better part of the afternoon to find all the Waldos

7. It’s bad enough you had an affair with a teacher, but the shop teacher?!

6. In Geography class, you identified the Ivory Coast as “two brands of soap”

5. In your high school yearbook, you were voted ‘Most Likely to Be Unable to Tell His Ass from a Hole in the Ground’

4. You were caught out on the football field, sticking a suppository into a hole in the ground

3. In Chemistry, the only elements you could name from the periodic table were Neon, Freon, Dione, and Leon

2. After years of instruction, you still talk into the wrong end of the telephone

1. The only history you learned all year long, you learned from Glenn Beck’s Classroom of the Air
 

Bob Sullivan’s Top Ten Everything appears every Monday.

10. A gift certificate to Scepters R Us

9. The latest CD from Prince

8. Gold bricks

7. An English-American dictionary

6. An athletic cup to protect the crown jewels

5. The illusion that their family still has some power

4. A nightie from Queen Victoria’s Secret

3. A sobriety test for the future Princess Kate’s personal driver

2. Something to read on the throne

1. Nothing (what could you possibly get them that they don’t already have?)
 

Bob Sullivan’s Top Ten Everything appears every Monday.

10. You don’t care who you get your shamrocks off with

9. You keep going up to strangers and saying, “Ire me; I’m kiss-ish!”

8. You think a tube of toothpaste is astronaut food

7. You keep wishing someone would drive the snakes out of your head

6. You wonder how you wound up with a lower stomach tattoo that says “Kiss My Lucky Charms!”

5. You’re now thinking Sarah Palin is Presidential material

4. You can actually see leprechauns

3. You make Charlie Sheen look like Justin Bieber

2. You wonder how you wound up with a bent shillelagh

1. You spend the entire night doing your Linda Blair impression
 

Bob Sullivan’s Top Ten Everything appears every Monday.

Sometimes our celebrity brethren need to feel the white hot sting of my bitch-slap o’ advice so badly, I have trouble even typing. This, friends, is one of those times. Our girl crush Scarlett Johansson, who, until very recently, was married to Ryan Reynolds, People Magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive, may be hooking up with – guys, y’all might have to sit down for this – Sean Penn. Ohhhh, it hurts.

What? What? I mean, really, Scarlett? It was bad enough when Natalie Portman had her ill-advised fling with him (Oddly, Penn’s fling with Jewel didn’t bother me. That just kinda made sense.), but this is truly heinous.  Scarlett, this is bad. There is nothing about this that is good. What, exactly, is so awful about it? To quote Carrie Fischer in When Harry Met Sally — which I try to do regularly — “It’s so awful, there’s no way to even explain what is so awful about it.” Be that as it may, I’m sure gonna try. Here goes:

1. Sean Penn is old.

Ok, 50 isn’t anywhere near old, but it’s a helluva lot older than 26. Scarlett, I understand the whole older man-younger woman thing and how that’s attractive to some girls. It works for Catherine Zeta-Jones. Believe me, if the dude from Mad Men (not Jon Hamm, the grey-haired one, and only if Jon Hamm isn’t available. Jon, call me.) knocked on my office door and said “Let’s go,”  the only thing my boss would see when he walked past my desk would be a puff of smoke. But Sean Penn is not the grey-haired guy from Mad Men. He’s not even the slightly-pudgy, bespectacled guy from Mad Men.

2. Sean Penn is crazy.

How crazy is he? He’s so crazy that Madonna dumped him. Madonna. He’s so crazy that he and Hugo Chavez are friends. As in, have-a-standing-date-to-drink-Arbor-Mist-and-watch-Glee friends. That man is crazy straight up, no chaser. A big ole bag of crazy. Crazy follows him around like Charlie Brown’s cloud. Everyone knows you don’t go to bed with crazy, Scarlett.

3. The bizarro circumstances surrounding how you met him.

To quote some anonymous source from Us Magazine (emphasis mine):  “‘Scarlett first reached out to Sean when she was planning to visit Haiti with Oxfam,’ says the source. ‘She knew Sean was living there in a tent and turned to him for advice.’” In a tent, Scarlett? In a tent??

4. Ok, let’s bring this bitch home.

Here comes the dear-God-what-are-you-thinking, tough love portion of our chat, Scarlett. Because you apparently need to be reminded of this, I would like to refresh your memory that you went from this:

To this:

Let’s go over this again, just in case you weren’t paying attention. You had this:

And now you have chosen this:

Scarlett, dear, you’re backsliding. Get rid of this guy, but immediately, and hook up with someone less creepy, like — I don’t know — Woody Allen. In this dark march toward whatever it is we are approaching… Don’t—don’t hang back with the brutes!

Let’s face it: Some celebrities could use good advice. Meg Boyle gives it to them every Tuesday (let’s just pretend it’s Tuesday).