5-4-Fri: Horrifying Things

Tomorrow is Halloween, so this week you get a list of five woefully ghoulish, terrible, horrifying things:

1. Blue Jeans Shorts. There is never, repeat after me, never any excuse for wearing blue jeans shorts. Hemming them only adds several centuries in purgatory. One exception: short cutoffs on hot girls in the 1980s; if this does not apply to you gender-wise or temporally then don't even think about it.

2. Tramp Stamp. As Chris Rock noted, any girl working the pole is a living symbol of parental failure. Don't extend the discussion to include shaming your parents with a lower back billboard. What one might refer to as the buttal philtrum should be bare--not covered with a butterfly that will just metamorphose into a bat as you age.

3. Barbed Wire Tattoo. For guys with no sense of shame, there is the barbed wire tattoo around the biceps. Dudes, see supra. Don't do it. You don't look like a super hero. You don't look like a football player. You don't look cool. You look like a dork. You look like someone who doesn't realize that your tattoo will be an ironic Abu Ghraib-like fence around your arm waddle when you're 70. Also, ladies, if Pam can't pull this one off, neither can you.

4. Mullet. This hairstyle has been much ridiculed elsewhere, so I'll leave it at simply shivering with repulsion and warning you off it; but beware its modern iterations. WHAT are the producers of the otherwise charming "Castle" thinking by giving the easy-on-the-eyes Stana Katic a girl mullet this season?!

5. The White Hemp Choker with Sea Shell Accents. Ever meet some tool who has been to a surfing lesson once on Spring Break and now obsessively wears brown leather flip flops and board shorts topped by a white rope surf choker? Me, too. Sporting these brotastic necklaces is a fashion nightmare for the turtle-shell-ribbed belly-baring boy toys of Abercrombie & Fitch catalogs and it ain't gonna work any better for you. Please--and I am begging America here--please stop it.

PS - I am not a close follower of Billy Ray Cyrus' career, but I think it is possible that he has been a combo-platter offender on all fronts here. And he's busy plowing new ground. I stumbled across the Disney juggernaut "Hannah Montana" on cable television the other day and daymn if Billy didn't show up playing Miley's fake-life dad and sporting blond highlights, a soul patch, a spin art Bonnaroo tee, some kind of dominatrix-like leather watch band the width of a WWE trophy belt. Maybe I'll go as him for Halloween this year. Spooky! (Sorry, Bill, but you put it out there.) Oh, and "Misirlou" by Dick Dale and the Del Tones is scary good; now playing on iTunes.