Kaupo Kikkas
It’s not every day you come across a 35-year-old head of government, which—let’s face it—is probably a good thing for everyone involved. The last thing we need is a bunch of Millennial prime ministers posting selfies to Facebook while driving, or constantly complaining about their student loan debt.
Still scrambling to come up with a Halloween costume that’s smart, sexy, and completely unrecognizable? Why not dress as a head of state! If nothing else, you’ll finally get to wear that suit you bought for job interviews.
But with over two hundred heads of state to choose from, how do you narrow it down to just one? Luckily for you, JD and I have nothing to do, so we’ve compiled this list of 12 Heads of State Who Would Make Great Halloween Costumes.
NOTE: We wrote this before things in Syria had descended to today’s utterly horrifying levels. There is unfortunately a lot of suffering in the world. But what these folks are enduring, and/or escaping, and/or enduring while they escape is shocking even in a world full of shockingly awful things.
We are not experts on international aid organizations, but below are a few we know are helping. We encourage you to consider supporting their efforts, as we do, and doing anything else you might be in a position to do. In the city we call home (St. Louis) we’re telling our elected officials that we support bringing refugees here, and again, if you’re in a position to do something similar we encourage you to consider it.
⋅ CARE
⋅ International Rescue Committee
⋅ Medicins Sans Frontiers
WARNING!!!
Do not read this straight through from beginning to end. These web pages contain many different adventures you may have as Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. From time to time as you read along, you will be asked to make a choice. Your choice may lead to success or disaster!
Uruguayan president José Mujica claims to have invented “shabby chic.” No one disputes this claim.
José Mujica has been dubbed “the world’s poorest president.” I’m no accountant, but I suspect that the problem is that he donates 90% of his salary to charity.
Xavier Granja Cedeño / Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, Comercio e Integración
Last month, King Juan Carlos I surprised the world* by announcing that he would abdicate in favor of his handsome and gigantically tall son, Felipe VI. (Though he did not actually mention his son’s handsomeness or giganticness in his announcement.)
US Capitol
On July 4, 1776, fifty-six brave patriots gathered together in the boring city of Philadelphia to sign a document that later came to be known as the Declaration of Independence.* Now, 238 years later, some equally brave patriots (me and J.D.) are commemorating the occasion by ranking those signers in order of hotness.
Like our Founding Fathers before us, we also have a long list of grievances against the British government, but we will save that for another day.
*Actually, they just approved the final wording on July 4. Historians believe there never was an official signing ceremony, and instead Thomas Jefferson just forged everyone’s signatures.
Fotograaf Nick van Ormondt
Recently I discovered that if you do a Google search for “Mark Rutte shirtless,” this web site is the first result.* I won’t tell you how I found this out, because it reveals far too much information about my personal life. But I will say that you don’t need to bother Googling “Mark Rutte in a tank top,” because it yields no satisfying results.
Not a day goes by that we don’t get a phone call from some world leader wanting to know what he or she can do to improve their ranking on our totally arbitrary list of the hottest world leaders.
Since we simply don’t have time to field all of these phone calls, I have prepared this helpful guide entitled “How to Improve Your Ranking on HottestHeadsofState.com.”
Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper listens patiently to our hold music.*
Håkan Dahlström / flickr.com
First, I want to take a moment to congratulate Helle Thorning-Schmidt on being so hot. Bravo to her—and to the wise people of Denmark who convinced her to abandon her successful career as a Land’s End catalog model and take up residence in Denmark’s prime ministerial mead hall.
