Beyonce celebrated her 30th birthday on her yacht in Italy, with family and a few close friends. Her close friend Gwyneth (??) was seen giving Beyonce an envelope.  Look how happy she is after she opens it!

I need to know what was in that envelope.*

Suggestions?

*My friend Maxine said “I would like to think it was a specially penned poem.” If you agree with Maxine, please approximate the poem.

ASK A MAN #101: ABOUT HANDSHAKES

“When they met one another, there was an uneasy moment as each watched the other’s right hand. If it went to his sword or gun, there was a battle, but if it went to his hat it was a salute of friendship or respect.”

-The Boy Scout Handbook

Doubt and uncertainty will get you killed. An indecisive driver is more likely to cause a collision than that jerkhole who just deliberately cut you off (if you’re reading this while driving, your GPS told me to tell you to unfasten your seatbelt, accelerate, and make an immediate hard left turn exactly… now). If the month-old milk in your fridge smells like it might have gone bad, don’t drink it until you’ve tricked someone else into drinking it. If you’re not sure that the firearm you wear to bed is loaded and the safety is off then the Chinese have already invaded your home, devoured your pets, and you and your family have become slave labor in one of those sweatshops where the little letters that appear on computer screens are assembled one pixel at a time. In a social situation, the handshake provides a shorthand determination of who’s who and how steady or shaky their character is.

But the question at hand is how do guys know which handshake to use and, when it’s your standard fist bump pas de bourrée, whose fist is on top? It turns out that the top fist is determined by an extremely complex equation developed by the heretical 14^th century Portuguese mathematician Aperto de Mão. Fortunately the equation with all its arcane symbols can be summed up as “who hast initiated ye fist bump is on top, unless ye initiator is a dwarfe or ye totally precocious baby.”

As for how we determine exactly which handshake to use, the magic of the Y chromosome has endowed men with a specialized gland that emits and detects identifying pheromones.

This gland coupled with our ability to recognize types of headgear allows us to know in advance of physical contact whether the other fellow is a Lakers fan, a Freemason, a gang banger, or French, and we adjust our handshake/aim accordingly. Scoffers: this is science, dammit, and cannot be disproven by any method known to Man.

So the next time you see a couple of bro’s or homeys engaging in complicated modes of manual hierarchical determination, remember that you are witnessing just one beautiful thread in the grand tapestry of snips, puppy dog tails, farts, and dick jokes that makes being a dude so totally totally awesome. Question answered.

© 2011 Anthony Robert Russo

One of the exciting new features you can look forward to here will be the convenience of A Man to answer your questions regarding male behavior. The feature will be called Ask a Man, and written by my friend Romeo, who is not only male but has served in our armed forces, drives a truck and currently brandishes a forbidding mohawk.

Romeo has always shown a willingness, however reluctant, to answer all my questions and now he will answer yours, too.

Here are the ones that bother me most, or let’s just say they mystify me the most:

When two men greet each other with a handshake, how do they know which kind of handshake to use? If it’s the fist on top of fist, how do they know whose fist goes on top? How do they know whether it’s going to be just an ordinary handshake or a special Bro Shake? What is the signal?

My second question is, why are men so fucking touchy? They can’t take any direct criticism, obviously, but anything that might remotely be construed as some kind of criticism makes them get testy. While they love to open sentences with “You ought to try…” or “Why do you always…” it is strictly verboten to address a man like that unless you want him to snap at you or sulk for an hour. Why are they so thin-skinned??

While I await Romeo’s lucid explanation of these mysteries, feel free to submit your own question for him in the comments. I am looking at this coming Friday as the launch date for Ask a Man.

I signed up at Twitter, initially, to follow Mrs. Palin and Amanda Palmer.  I couldn’t handle the former but the latter rewarded me with a free concert last night.

Then, I started tweeting just to annoy people. When that didn’t go anywhere, I forgot about Twitter. Then I came back and tried again.

Now, I have 124 followers but sadly for them I have nothing to say. Nontheless, I go there a couple of times a day and torture myself by scrolling through pointless nonsense tweeted by people I don’t know and mostly wouldn’t want to know.

Why are we tweeting, everyone? Whatever the motives that are driving Twitter, it can’t be good for civilization.

Here are my limited observations so far:

1. People want you to know what they ate.
2. People need to communicate every idle scrap of thought that pops into their heads.
3. People like to LOL at one another.
4. People think they derive status from their Tweeting associations.
5. People use Twitter instead of personal email, in order to have an audience.
6. The more people you follow, the more time-consuming it is to find anything interesting.
7. Kanye West is a big deal.
8. It’s important to follow another rapper and then retweet their illiterate musings.

BUT! On a positive note, Twitter has taught me this:

9. It’s fun to read people’s tweets as they watch “X Factor” especially if you’ve never seen it.
10. Rumi Neely is actually smart, witty and gracious. I like her! I stand corrected.

Twitter is adding to the clutter I’m stuffing my brain with on a daily basis and I know it’s time to be more selective. I’ve unsubscribed to a million mailing lists with ten million more to go.  I’m finding that I know too much about Lanvin for Target and too little about world affairs.  It’s going to be tough to unlearn my bad Internet habits. We’ll see how far I get.

Okay. Now explain Twitter.

I just saw “Valentino: The Last Emperor” for the first time, and of course it is delightful. The love story, the pugs, the hair, the dresses, the excess! My favorite moment was Valentino’s emotional proclamation:

“An evening dress that reveals a woman’s ankles when she is walking is the most disgusting thing I have ever seen.”

But when Andre Leon Talley appeared, I wondered anew, What is the point of him?

Watching him in the September movie, I felt he provided comic relief but beyond that, I don’t get it. Is he some kind of mascot for Anna Wintour?

His writing is nothing special, his personal style is grotesque, he fucked up Jennifer Hudson that year at the Oscars, why is he so celebrated? Is it his enthusiasm?His height?

This is a real question.  All day long, I bombard my husband with questions even stupider, and he often responds by saying, “Why? Weren’t you at the meeting where we all learned this?”

So, whoever was at the meeting, please explain.

What an arresting image! I love it.

Can any of you smart ones offer an exegesis?

And she still has to pee!

I haven’t seen her in a while and I was getting worried.

Welcome back, Goony Bird!

A friend  sent me a link to a woman who has a blog and documents what she wears every day. My friend ’s question was: “Why?!?”

God. I have no idea. Has everyone gone nuts? Who gives a shit what you wear every day, no matter who you are? I don’t even care what I wear every day, let alone some boring mom-woman.

I guess this mom-woman is the antidote to the Sartorialist.  The whole spectacle of what people wear has reached a tipping point, in my opinion.  Let’s start seeing everyone’s dental work or something.

I saw this picture of the March issue of British Vogue over here, where everyone is hot for Alex Chung’s clogs.

I don’t want clogs, but I’m sort of worried about “The Last Taboo” down there on the bottom right-hand corner. Evidently, we need to start talking about it.

Any guesses??