Greco-Golden Wrestling
“Who was that Greek guy who used to feud with ‘Classy’ Freddie Blassie?”
“‘The Golden Greek’ John Tolos.”
“Right. Not to be confused with ‘The Golden Greek’ Jim Londos.”
“I think all Greek wrestlers are just called ‘The Golden Greek.’”
“Except ‘The Golden Greek’ Spiros Arion, later known as the Iron Greek.”
“Not to be confused with the Iron Sheik.”
“Not to be confused with the Golden Sheik.”
“Not to be confused with Sheik Adnan Al-Kaissie.”
“Not to be confused with Greek Adnan Al-Kaissie.”
“… You just made that guy up.”
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39
Well, another year has gone by, and I’ve outlived yet another crop of idiots. Yessiree, I’m thirty-nine friggin’ years old today, so read it and weep, all you losers and quitters from history who died at thirty-eight. Oh, you are so stupid. You have to be good to get to this age, and face it, you are no good.
What’s that? I got lucky? No, Roberto Clemente, you are lucky. You’re lucky your plane crashed while delivering supplies to earthquake victims in Nicaragua. Why? Because dying a martyr makes everyone remember only your talent and not that you were actually a real jerk while you were alive. You are the John Lennon of baseball, Roberto Clemente.
And I have good news for you too, Eddie Guerrero. Yesterday was Wrestlemania, and you faced a lot of competition, but you retained your title as World Cruiserweight Champion Deadest Wrestler. Congratulations on your hard-fought victory over life!
Speaking of great champions, let’s not talk about Sonny Liston. Let’s talk about Muhammad Ali, who I hope is standing over Sonny Liston’s grave right now, still yelling, “Get up and fight, sucker!” Because, as bad shape as Ali is in right now, Sonny boy, he could still take you any day. Because you took a dive and stayed down for like a 1.5-billion-count.
“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore?” Give me a break. There’s no coming back from the dead for you, Emma Lazarus.
Remember that Bon Jovi song “Bad Medicine,” Sam Kinison? Of course you do; you were in the video. Well, you know what else is like bad medicine besides your love, Sam Kinison? Getting in a head-on collision while driving your car, because they both kill you. Oh! Oh! Ohhhhhhhhhh!
Rhapsody in Blue? How about a rhapsody in screw you, George Gershwin?
Marie Prevost, you were a winner who became the doggie’s dinner. Which makes you a loser, unlike me, because—to borrow a phrase from your day—I’m the cat’s pyjamas!
Well, Harry Chapin, your prediction came true: The cat’s in the cradle with a silver spoon and some other garbage like that, and now you are just like your dad. Because your dad’s dead too. Although he outlived you by like, a lot. He only died four years ago, at 89. So you spent 30 years in heaven wondering, “When you comin’ home dad? I don’t know when, but we’ll get together then.” Well, good news: You’re both dead, like father, like son.
Now you, Dimebag Darrell—you’re my favorite death metal guitarist. What’s that? You’re really more of a groove metal guitarist? No, you’re definitely more of a death metal guitarist now. Trust me.
And here’s a tip for you, Israel Kamakawiwo’ole: Next time around, try playing a regular guitar instead of a ukelele if you want to play down the fact that you weigh like eight hundred pounds. Or maybe strap on a cello. Wow, I just can’t believe I outlived a fat Hawaiian guy who weighed like eight hundred pounds! Boy, who saw that coming? As a matter of fact, like eight hundred more people died in the time it took me to type your name. Try being smaller and having a smaller name next time, dummy.
Speaking of which, hey JFK Jr. and FloJo: RIP—and eff you.
Oh, Mary Wollstonecraft. I loved your Frankenstein. What? No, you wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Men and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman? Hey, did you ever get around to wrapping up the trilogy with A Vindication of the Rights of Ghosts? What’s the hold-up? Oh, yeah, that’s right. Well, c’mon. I’ll get out the ouija board and you can dictate. C’mon, lazybones.
Guillaume Apollinaire, meet Federico García Lorca. You have a lot in common. You both died at exactly the same age—13,953 days old. One of you died in the Spanish Flu Pandemic, the other in the Spanish Civil War. And nobody has any idea who either of you are. Good work keeping your names out there.
Remember how your wife said, “Let them eat cake,” Louis XVI of France? Well, I’m eating birthday cake today. What are you eating? Eat shit, Loser XVI of France.
Daniel Pearl, you are so—okay, no. Forget it. Sorry.
Corey Haim? More like Corey Lame. Oh yes. Now this is more like it. Oh, this one is especially sweet. I had to put up with girls slobbering all over you when I was 14. Now you’re gone, and all those 14-year-old girls are mine, all mine.
Once again, I’m alive and you’re dead. Way to go, idiots!
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Monologue #10
I don’t know who you are. I don’t know what you want. If you are looking for ransom, I can tell you I don’t have money. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills; skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. You know, like nunchuk skills, bowhunting skills, computer hacking skills…. Girls only want boyfriends who have great skills.
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The 10 Most Dead People of 2012
The world didn’t end in 2012, it turned out, but more than a few things on it did. For instance, there’s the Tom Cruise/Katie Holmes sham marriage. A brief but well-loved televised comedic star turn by a coat-wearing monkey (meaning, of course, the short-lived NBC sitcom Animal Practice, though there was also quite a hubbub about some business in a Toronto IKEA store). And the lack of conscience on the part of Two and Half Men star Angus T. Jones over his career (to be followed in 2013 by the end of his career itself). And as always, lives ended. But whose did so with the greatest finality? These.
10. Neil Armstrong
In 2012, we saluted and bade farewell to some of the great pioneers of space exploration. Foremost among them, of course, is I Dream of Jeannie star Larry Hagman, the first actor ever to portray an astronaut in a televised situation comedy. But arguably, others are almost equally deserving of recognition. For example, there’s the first American woman in space, Sally Ride, a woman who not only endured the indignity of going through life with a name ripped from the lyrics of the execrable bar-band standard “Mustang Sally” but also resisted the urge to, say, drive cross-country wearing a diaper to kill a romantic rival. And then there’s Neil Armstrong. Today, so-called space heroes like Chris Hadfield make their cowardly escape in commie rockets to gloat over the Earth’s destruction in the coming Mayan apocalypse from space. And don’t they look stupid now? Armstrong, on the other hand, hurtled through space in basically a garbage can, did some tricky piloting to land it with only a few drops of fuel to spare, stepped out and dropped a bon mot, planted his nation’s flag on another planet, listened patiently to Nixon prattling on for a while over the radio, then got back in, jury-rigged a repair with a pen cap, rocketed right back into the Pacific Ocean, got quarantined for 18 days in case of space germs, and then basically quarantined himself on his farm for the rest of his life just to avoid having to discuss how awesome he was. But can we discuss why it is, exactly, that a common dopehead like Timothy Leary gets the honour of having his ashes shot majestically into space, and Armstrong’s just get dumped in the Atlantic?
9. Michael Clarke Duncan
Now that he’s gone and staying gone, if you look in that briefcase from Pulp Fiction these days, you won’t find Michael Clarke Duncan’s glowing soul in there. (Only kidding: You can never actually see what’s in the case. It’s a MacGuffin, which is a type of crime dog.) Frequently confused with actor Ving Rhames (whom you may recall from that one prison movie) because they were only about a year apart in age, Duncan has received the kiss of death and will be forevermore out of sight. For all the power he wields, even his former costar and old buddy Tom must ruefully admit that bringing Duncan back is “Mission Impossible”. We now pronounce him not Chuck, not Larry, but dead.
8. Mike Wallace
Veteran of the Pacific theatre in WWII, radio and television announcer, newsmagazine anchor, commercial pitchman, game show host, occasional actor, and husband to several wives: all these words barely begin to cover Ed McMahon. Or Mike Wallace, for that matter. After getting serious as a newsman, Wallace became notorious for his combative style. He ambushed subjects in lobbies, parking lots and their own doorways. He grilled Maria Callas about her habit of walking out of interviews in her own apartment, where she couldn’t walk out. He made Streisand cry. “With an angelic smile, he can ask a question that would get anyone else smashed in the face,” observed colleague Harry Reasoner. Tell that to the Chicago police, who went right ahead and smashed him in the face at the 1968 Democratic convention. And you know what? He deserved it, because without Mike Wallace, there would be no Geraldo Rivera.
7. Whitney Houston
AND IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIinevitably, Whitney Houston’s years of drug abuse caught up with her. Was it ex-husband Bobby Brown’s fault for getting her hooked on the crack she once derided as wack? Arguably. Was it crassly self-serving for Bobby to perform his Ghostbusters II soundtrack hit “On Our Own” at Houston’s funeral? Probably. Would we all have liked Osama bin Laden maybe just a little bit better if the smitten terrorist mastermind had ever followed though on his plot to murder Bobby and take Whitney as his bride? Certainly. Alas, bin Laden is gone and Brown is still here. It’s not right, but it’s okay, when you consider this: As of late, Bobby isn’t even close to being the most loathsome R&B singer surnamed Brown in a toxic relationship with a talented yet troubled pop diva. Stay off drugs, Rihanna.
6. Tony Scott
They say director Tony Scott left behind no note when he jumped off that bridge, but he did. Its contents? Well, as one of his Top Gun characters might have said, “I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill myself.” (Okay, here it is: It read, simply, “I feel the need … the need for suicide!“) What else did he leave behind? Tony Soprano, for one thing; it was the Scott-directed True Romance that gave James Gandolfini his breakthrough role as a murderous yet contemplative mobster. There’s Man on Fire, an acclaimed biopic of Vietnamese Mahayana Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc. And let’s not forget one of the hottest lesbian scenes ever committed to celluloid by Hollywood (Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon in The Hunger) as well as one of the hottest gay scenes (the volleyball game in Top Gun).
5. Daniel Inouye
Who’s the most badass war hero to have been welcomed into the halls of Valhalla this year? Old-school conqueror of Iraq “Stormin’” Norman Schwarzkopf, who crawled through a Vietnamese minefield to wrestle one of his own wounded soldiers into submission so a medic could work on him? Actor Charles Durning, whose reply to being stabbed eight times with a bayonet was to beat the German who did it to death with a rock? With due respect, the baddest ass belonged to Senator Daniel Inouye, who, after shrugging off a bullet to the guts, used his left hand to pry a live grenade out of that of his blown-off throwing arm and then use it to finish off the last of three consecutive machine gun nests. There isn’t a man who wouldn’t have liked to shake the hand of this Medal of Honor recipient, most of all Inouye himself.
4. Jack Klugman
It was a lethal year for 1970s sitcom actors. Jeffersons star Sherman Hemsley moved on up to a deluxe apartment in the sky. (Amen.) Ron “Horshack” Palillo and Robert “Epstein” Hegyes went like Sweathogs to the slaughter. But ultimately, the greatest laughs stemmed from Jack Klugman’s portrayal of slobby sportswriter Oscar Madison in The Odd Couple (because without him, we might not have had slobby sportswriter Bob Uecker on Mr. Belvedere, and without that, we would not have the infamous story about Belvedere costar Christopher Hewitt having to be hospitalized after sitting on his own testicles). Klugman was equally famed as the star of Quincy, M.E., and were there any crusading coroner of his ilk left to perform an autopsy on him, it would surely bear out suspicions that it was that sick, sinister punk rock music that killed him. One likes to imagine crusty Quincy teaming up with Ben Matlock, the country lawyer played by the great Andy Griffith, who also passed this year, to solve old-fogey crimes in heaven. And that Matlock turns out to be a totally fussy neat freak, and they bicker all the time.
3. Ernest Borginine
As befit his husky frame, Ernest Borginine lived large over his 95 years. He beat Frank Sinatra to death in From Here to Eternity in 1953, and then beat Frank Sinatra again for the Best Actor Oscar for Marty in 1955. He married actress/singer Ethel Merman and divorced his third of five wives only 38 days later, right after their honeymoon during which jealousy over the wild adulation he received from fans drove her crazy (the chapter of her autobiography titled “My Marriage to Ernest Borginine” consisted of a single blank page). He was a Navy man onscreen and in real life, and he also copiloted an advanced, top-secret supersonic helicopter stolen from the military on missions of national security for a little while, no big deal. And to what did he attribute his longevity in televised interviews? Frequent masturbation. He admitted later that he said this mostly to freak out the squares on Fox & Friends, and that his vegetarianism and sheer, deliberate slothfulness were bigger factors in his good health, but still: God bless you, Mr. Borginine. You are a role model.
2. Jerry Nelson
As if the constant, unflattering comparisons of Muppet veteran Jerry Nelson’s signature character Count Von Count to reviled NHL commissioner Gary Bettman weren’t arduous enough, not to mention the sorrow of losing Robert Bork, the colleague behind the Swedish Chef, what finally proved too much to bear was almost certainly the stress of tallying the constantly increasing number of accusers coming out of the woodwork with revelations about their sexual abuse at the hands of Nelson’s colleague, Elmo puppeteer Kevin Clash (“One statutory rape! Ah ha ha! Two statutory rapes! Ah ha ha!” etc.). Nelson will live on in a sense, partly because fellow Muppet performer Matt Vogel will assume the role of the Count, but mainly, of course, because the Count is, after all, a vampire, an immortal creature of the night that cannot be slain by normal means.
1. Dick Clark
And speaking of eternal, unaging creatures, we turn to America’s Oldest (and now Deadest) Teenager, Dick Clark. Many other great contributors to popular music fell off the charts this year, of course. Robin Gibb of the Bee Gees is no longer stayin’ alive. Disco queen Donna Summer declared enough was enough and had her last dance. The Beastie Boys’ MCA was DOA. Jazz pianist Dave Brubeck is now decomposing in an innovative 0/0 time signature. The Monkees’ Davy Jones succumbed to a heart attack, thereby escaping his lifelong fear of dying an ironic drowning death and thus going to his eponymous locker. And at last, we have seen the last of Etta James. But Clark (often thought of as “the white Don Cornelius”), while never so much as lifting a musical instrument, nevertheless introduced rock and roll, payola, and the concept of a youth culture itself to America. Hate teenagers? Well, Dick Clark basically invented them. And for decades, he seemingly was one, until December 2004, when he had a stroke, aged rapidly as though he’d drunk from the wrong Grail, and made everyone so uncomfortable once a year for the next eight years that they actually somehow yearned to see more of Ryan Seacrest. Tonight, look for his ashes, contained in the plummeting ball that marks the ringing in of the new year, to explode at the stroke of midnight into a choking cloud, engulfing the entirety of Times Square, for auld lang syne.
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X-mas X
On November 1, the day after Halloween, Shoppers Drug Mart stores here in Canada began playing Christmas music, which is the most egregious example of Christmas creep that I’ve yet seen. Many agreed; after a heartening backlash from customers, the company agreed to cease and desist the holiday cheer (at least temporarily). Is it still too early for Christmas music? You bet. It’s also too early to put up the tree, but sure enough, ours is up. If I had my druthers (and all I’ve asked for on my Christmas wish list is my druthers), I’d wait until Advent to officially start the Christmas season. I don’t even know what Advent is. My wife is the Catholic in the household, not me. But I know it has the great decency to wait until December to take place. I at least seem to have won the battle to wait until somewhere between American Thanksgiving and the Grey Cup to erect the tree, though it might still be in storage if I hadn’t needed to clean out the closet anyway.
And speaking of cleaning out the closet, here’s my tenth annual CD-length too-early Christmas mix, which contains quite a few songs I’ve been meaning to use, one I thought I had used, and one my wife swore up and down I’d used at least three years ago and went nearly insane trying to prove it. So in the spirit of starting the annual holiday insanity early, here it is:
- The Sonics – “Don’t Believe in Christmas”
- Cheap Trick – “Come On Christmas”
- OK Go – “Father Christmas”
- Fountains Of Wayne – “I Want An Alien For Christmas”
- Apples in Stereo – “(Baby It’s) So Cold”
- Teenage Fanclub – “December”
- The Housemartins – “I Smell Winter”
- Summer Camp – “All I Wonderful Christmas Is You”
- Hawksley Workman – “Common Cold”
- Tommy Roe – “It’s Now Winter’s Day”
- Brendan Benson – “Merry X-Mas Everybody”
- Asobi Seksu – “Merry Christmas (I Don’t Wanna Fight)”
- Raveonettes – “Christmas in Cleveland”
- Cocteau Twins – “Frosty the Snowman”
- Mazzy Star – “Flowers in December”
- My Morning Jacket (feat. The Head and the Heart) – “When the Bells Start Ringing”
- Whiskeytown – “Houses on the Hill”
- Scott Miller – “Christmas in Prison”
- Bradley Wik and the Charlatans – “Midwest Winters”
- Roman Candle - “It’s Christmas. Go On and Say Hello”
- Beneath Her Parachute – “December Cliche”
- Sufjan Stevens – “Sister Winter”
- Six by Seven – “I Believe in Father Christmas”
- Pearl Jam – “Don’t Believe in Christmas”
Get it here. And if you’re looking for about twelve more hours of the same (and why wouldn’t you be?), the previous compilations (detailed here, here, here, here, here, here, and here) were all knocked offline in this year’s great raid on Megaupload, so here’s a link to all ten compilations in one big Zip file. Enjoy.
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My left ear
“Hey, remember how I worried I was going deaf in my left ear?”
“Yes?”
“Well, I took a push pin…”
“Uh-oh…”
“And I jammed it in and dug it around…”
“A push pin?!” [cringe]
“And I cleared a bunch of earwax out of the hole in my left ear—”
“Oh God!”
“—phone. Cleared it right up. It was my earphones, not me.”
“Oh thank god. You scared the hell out of me.”
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Browntexting
Brownbuddy: My wife chastised me for texting while pooping. I told her that everyone does it … it’s called “browntexting”.
Me: Ha. Added to my vocabulary.
BB: The font colour should change automatically.
Me: You are a genius today.
***
BB: I’ve got a Pavlovian thing going on where I always think of you instead of Drew Barrymore when I crap.
Me: I like the idea that most normal people would think of Drew Barrymore under those circumstances.
BB: Sure … you know the thing where you’re certain that all of her dumps happen simultaneously with yours? Kind of like quantum entanglement, but with pooping.
Me: It’s similar to déjà poo, the feeling you’ve excreted the exact same meal sometime before.
BB: YES! Anyway, because my idea of browntexting went over so well I always think of you as soon as I sit on the can.
Me: It’s nice to be thought of.
***
BB: Leftover hamburger buns + variety of sub deli meats + leftover lasagna sauce + cheese = delicious lunch + smooth, punctual poops.
BB: I sent that browntext to my wife first by mistake. Mixing browntexts and sexts is probably not a good idea unless you’re German.
Me: I know what you mean. I’ve sent your wife about a dozen sexts that were meant for you. It worked out, though.
***
BB: Last night my wife asked me who I was browntexting. The lingo is really catching on!
Me: Let’s get it into the Oxford dictionary as Word of the Year.
BB: Instead of saying she’s going to the bathroom, she now says she’s going to “text Peter Lynn”.
Me: I’m the man you see about a horse.
BB: Yeah, a BROWN horse.
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Once again, I ruined everything
I had a good day yesterday. I took the day off work and took my wife to see that new Meryl Streep/Tommy Lee Jones movie. Actually, now that I think of it, I had a bad day. I mean, it was all right if you like post-menopausal chick flicks. I was just about the only male there, and we were just about the only people under sixty. (Also, I’m pretty sure Streep was just channeling Phyllis from The Office, and I was so grossed out I almost put a stop order on that Meryl Streep Fleshlight I’m having custom made.)
So, even though someone got shot at that theatre a couple of years ago, aside from the blue-hairs in front of me tittering at the sight of Streep and Jones putting the “sex” back in “sexagenarian” it was a pretty sedate crowd. Except, some jerkass in the first row was lighting up the theatre with his cell phone, ruining everything.
My wife had some Nibs, so I asked her for some. Then I started chucking them at the back of this guy’s head to get him to smarten the hell up and turn his phone off.
Well, my wife was mortified that I was (a) wasting her candy, (b) throwing candy at a stranger, and (c) throwing candy at a stranger who was in a motorized wheelchair because of his serious physical disabilities.
I hadn’t noticed that last part, but I was kind of horrified when she pointed it out. For all we knew, he was pushing some custom app on his chair-mounted smartphone to pump some more oxygen into his system. I got a lecture about how he’d probably been bullied all his life and had probably come to the movies so he could forget about all his miseries for a couple of hours, and now I was doing it to him again. I mean, the poor guy just wanted to escape into a fantasy world where he could imagine what it might be like to have sexual intercourse or live to be middle aged, and once again, I ruined everything.
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Monologue #9
Good morning. In less than an hour, aircraft from here will join others from around the world. And you will be launching the largest aerial battle in the history of mankind. “Mankind.” That word should have new meaning for all of us today. We can’t be consumed by our petty differences anymore. We will be united in our common interests. Perhaps it’s fate that today is the Fourth of July, and you will once again be fighting for our freedom… Not from tyranny, oppression, or persecution… but from annihilation. We are fighting for our right to live. To exist. And should we win the day, the Fourth of July will no longer be known as an American holiday, but as the day the world declared in one voice: We will not go quietly into the night! We will not vanish without a fight! We will not like them in a box! We do not like them with a fox! We do not like them in a house! We do not like them with a mouse! We do not like them here or there! We do not like them anywhere! We do not like green eggs and ham! We do not like them, Sam-I-am!
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“What is it with you, huh?” asked Pappagallo. “What are you looking for? C’mon, Mel, everybody’s looking for something. You’re happy out there, are you? Eh? Wandering? One day blurring into another? You’re a scavenger, Mel. You’re a maggot. Did you know that? You’re living off the corpse of the old world. Tell me your story, Mel. C’mon. Tell me your story. What burned you out, huh? Kill one man too many? See too many people die? Earn money for a filthy little cocksucker who takes advantage of you?”
Mel turned to Pappagallo, glaring angrily.
“Oh, so that’s it?” said Pappagallo. Earn money for a filthy little cocksucker who takes advantage of you? Just like every motherfucker. That makes you something special, does it? Listen to me. Do you think you’re the only one that’s suffered? We’ve all been through it in here, but we haven’t given up. We’re still human beings with dignity. But you, you’re out there with the garbage. You’re nothing!”
“Fuckin’ hate! Fucking cunt cocksucker whore! Fuck!” screamed the Road Warrior as he ran to the driveway, jumped into his Ford Interceptor and drove away.
That was the last we ever saw of him. He lives now only in my memories.
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