Big Night In Wrestling

I'm still sick, sitting at home unable to do much more than cough a lot and stare at YouTube. Normally, I wouldn't bother to share that with the blogging world, but I did think this little moment was amusing: I just realized that the biggest night of the year in wrestling is happening tonight, and I had completely forgotten about it. Instead, I've been getting major enjoyment out of watching the 1997 edition of All Japan Pro Wrestling's traditional Real World Tag League tourney. I've gotten more excited while watching this event than I have from watching anything WWE has put out in the eleven years since. I don't even speak the language, and I'm still popping hard for the near falls in these matches. The whole show is booked to perfection, making great use of both the amazing talent (Kobashi, Misawa, Williams, Kawada, Hayabusa, Shinzaki) and the not-so-amazing talent (Wolf Hawkfield? Kamala???) and the performances in the ring really draw you in and make you care about who's about to get pinned. No sledgehammers, no overblown egos, no cartoony blustering...just amazing wrestling action.

I haven't looked at the results yet, and am only halfway through the show, but I'm rooting for Hayabusa and Jinsei, although I'm sure they won't get the win. So I'll cross my fingers for Misawa and Akiyama. I love Kobashi to death, but just find it hard to root for a team that has Johnny Ace on it. Interesting that Bradshaw is in both this event and Wrestlemania.

I'll dig around tomorrow and see how they treat Flair's final show on Wrestlemania, but as far as being entertained, I'm sticking with the Japanese product, thank you.

I Almost Died

So I've been sick for over a month now, just picking up the various bugs as they go around--wouldn't want to miss anything! I'm not a big fan of going to the doctor, 'cause it always seems like you pays yer money, they thump you a little bit, and then announce that "it'll pass". Well, on Tuesday, the cough that has been a constant throughout all these bugs had gotten to the point where it was making my kidneys hurt, so I figured it might be time to go see a medico. So off I go, and the doc sez my lungs sound clear, maybe I just have a touch of bronchitis. I leave the office with a prescription for a Z-Pack (antibiotics) and some Hycodan, a codeine cough syrup.

At home, I finish up dinner and then slurp down some of the Hycodan, hoping that at the very least it'll knock me out and let me have a good night's sleep for the first time in days. Au contraire, monsieur! Where codeine usually has a nice intoxicating and tranquilizing effect on most people, apparently I'm in that oh-so-special one percent that has quite a different influence. Long story short, it made me jittery, unable to sleep, and caused some lovely delusions. The regular readers of this blog are fortunate I didn't call them at two in the morning to warn them of the impending invasion of UFOs made of chocolate chip cookie dough. I ended up being hallucinatory and panicky for about 30 hours, and was too tense to sleep for another ten hours or so. All night, I would start to pass out from utter exhaustion, and then would suddenly snap awake seconds later...experiencing this over and over again threatened to drive me absolutely insane, and for a while there, I couldn't imagine ever escaping the grip of this demon. It was like descriptions I've read of heroin addiction, except I never got to feel the cool part of the heroin.

Anyway, the Hycodan finally passed through my system, but I'm still exhausted even after sleeping for ten hours. My supervisor at work was kind enough to call and check up on me and give me advice that didn't occur to my fever-addled brain, like eating crackers to absorb the codeine syrup. She also told me to go ahead and take the rest of the week off to rest and recuperate. At the moment, I'm just tired and sniffling and coughing a lot. I'll take "generally yucky" over "hallucinating and thinking you're about to die" any day.

Back To Basics

Went to the theater last night to see the premiere of a new show, "Al Pacino's Pictionary". Fabulous concept, featuring a couple at home inviting their cousin Al Pacino and an unsuspecting audience volunteer to their home to play Pictionary. Greg Brainos was hilarious as always as the overbearing Al Pacino, and the whole setup was just natural comedy. The gimmick of the husband and wife always getting the right answer in the first stroke of the pen was hilarious as well. And any time you get to see Zach Ward in a pencil-thin moustache: golden.

Afterwards, Brainos, Remi, and Eitan and I got some delish tacos from the taco truck and chatted on our own before heading off to join the rest of the DSI posse at Speakeasy. Probably should've just taken up Remi on his suggestion to hang out with him. The gang was playing foosball, and switching off teams and whatnot. It was fun to watch them, but then some bar guy we didn't know ended up on a team with Zach, and Remi and I got drafted to be the opposition. I'm not much on competitive games (I can't even handle faux-competitive warmup games) and this bar guy was crazy competitive. I was on goal, and you could see how pissed off and testosterone-soaked this guy was every time he whacked one past me over and over and over again with little ability on my part to defend. The whole affair brought me right back to elementary school when James Bigby laughed and nailed me with a kickball during PE after I made a pitiful kick that trundled up to his feet. Anyway, that was clearly the end of the night for me. Probably should've said goodbye to people, but then there would've been that lovely social awkwardness where you have to explain why you're leaving and people encourage you to stay and all that. Never good with that social stuff. And there was too much cigarette smoke.

I really wish that little kid in elementary school had toughened up or something.

Visiting The Record Shop

So my buddy Jackson sends me an email today labelled "A Challenge". Well, I always likes me a challenge, especially a graphic challenge, as this turned out to be.

He sent me to a blog called The Yellow Stereo, in which this guy PJ came up with a very cool idea: basically, you take a randomly generated band name, a randomly generated album title, and a randomly generated picture, and then use your graphic editor of choice (and your fine artistic skills!) to mock up an album cover! What fun!

PJ suggests you get your band name by taking the title of whatever comes up when you visit the Wikipedia random article page. Now I'll tell ya right now, I cheated a little bit on this first step, as I would generate a new page if I got the name of a famous person or of an actual band (I was really pissed when I got "The Great Kat" and then found out she was an actual musician. Is that a cool name or what?) For your album title, go to the random quotes page and scroll down to the last quote; the last four words of the last quote are your album title. (I soon discovered that I needed to refresh the page each time to get new quotes as I made multiple albums.) Then go to Flickr's Interesting Photos page and grab the third photo; that'll be the image of your album cover. (I'll go ahead and admit now that I actually was grabbing the fourth photo, as when I went to Flickr, the third photo had a watermark that was pretty sucky.)

Now make your album covers! Here's what I came up with...it seems to want to produce industrial minimalist bands or German techno-type stuff, but I did end up with a good metal band as well. First off, we have Overconvergent Modular Form, and their hit album "Like It Better Dead"

(click to see bigger)

Gotta love the OMF and their sweet trance beats. Next we have Segmental Blood Pressure with "As Simple As That"

They look like maybe they're one of those electronic cello bands that play modern interpretations of hard pop songs. Or maybe just Christmas tunes. On to Diasello and the haunting "Sweet Serenity of Books"

I like the name Diasello. I was quite fortunate to end up with a nice simple picture for that one, and had fun making the creepy, ethereal logo for the group in the sky. I'm thinking these folks are like latter day Clannad. Quite a polar opposite to our last group, the note-shredding guitar-wailing explosions of CYCLOTYPHLOPS and "My War On Terror!"

Rock on! And yes, "My War On Terror!" WAS the last four words on that quote, and yes, the exclamation point was part of the original text. Sweet.

In real life, overconvergent modular form refers to some type of mathematical space, segmental blood pressure is the bp of individual limbs, Diasello is a village in Greece, and cyclowhatever is some sort of blind snake.

So anyway, I challenge all my graphically-inclined friends to try this out on your own blogs and comment here with a link to your offerings. It is a CHALLENGE, I'm telling you!

Things I Didn't Know

"Things I Didn't Know", or "Wikisurfing U.S.A."

So today at lunch I got bored and commenced to surfing through Wikipedia, looking up one thing and clicking on an internal link to leap to another article, eventually Googling a term to find a picture, and from there leaping onto other interesting finds. I thought some of y'all out there might enjoy following along today.

I started by dropping into my chair and exclaiming "uff da". Now, I had no idea what that phrase means; I just remember reading it in the title of a book long ago. So I look 'er up on Wikipedia and discover it's a Norwegian phrase used in the Midwest to mean "I am overwhelmed." Interesting.

At the end of that entry, they suggested a link to "oy vey". Why not? Everybody loves Yiddish. From that entry, I learned there was a Jewish James Bond parody called "Oy Oy Seven" (I'll have to track that down sometime) and that there's a sign that reads "Oy Vey" on your way out of Brooklyn.

"Oy vey" was a favourite phrase (apparently) for the Japanese character on the 1960s show McHale's Navy, so off we go! I had no idea the comedic show was based on a dramatic movie, so that was interesting. A brief trip to Joe Flynn's page added to my knowledge of character actors.

On McHale's Navy, they piloted a PT boat, and would sometimes refer to the commander of another PT Boat, PT109--that boat was, in real life, commanded by none other than John F. Kennedy. So off we go to the PT109 page! I had never heard the exciting tale of JFK's naval exploits, so that was pretty cool. Stranded on an island behind enemy lines in the Pacific, he carved a message on a coconut and sent it back to the Navy via islanders on an outrigger canoe.

The article said that Kennedy preserved the coconut shell and it was now in the Kennedy Library in Boston. Well I HAD to see that! And thanks to the internet, my lazy ass can see it from the slothful perch of my office chair.

Oddly enough, that picture was on this page, which is part of an insanely detailed website devoted to Jeopardy, with complete listings of all the questions and answers for each show, along with incidental remarks from smarmy Alex Trebek and the contestants, and even a "Game Dynamics" graph that charts how each contestant progressed through the game. While you're at this site, check out the guy's amazing glossary of Jeopardy-geek terms. Back to the coconut page though, the great find there was the category "Food A LaFontaine" which featured voiceover king Don LaFontaine reading dramatic descriptions of foods--and the page has links to mp3s of the actual readings! Yay!

So back to Wikipedia we go to look up Don LaFontaine's info, as I realize I've never actually read his biography. That page gives us the information that LaFontaine has actually appeared multiple times on Jeopardy, so a quick jump back to the J-Site gives us links to more mp3s from those appearances! You've got to check out the nursery rhyme previews...they're fabulous.

A search for Don on YouTube gives us stuff I had seen before but which is still great to revisit, like his Geico spot, a short magazine piece, and the now-classic "Five Guys In A Limo". There's also stuff I hadn't seen, like this Today Show piece, an amusing appearance on the Frank Caliendo show, and a parody of Don done by Pablo Francisco. And all that reminds me of the fabulous trailer for Jerry Seinfeld's Comedian which features another voiceover giant, Hal Douglas.

And now back to work.

The Art Of The Physical

So I was thinking today...and I came to the conclusion that one of the reasons I like pro wrestling so much is that I enjoy over-the-top physical presentation. I can enjoy subtlety as well, such as the clever punnery of I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue or the wordplay of the "Four Candles" sketch by The Two Ronnies, but generally speaking I seem to be entranced by the spectacular. I've been thinking a bit about that sort of thing lately, as it relates to my enjoyment (or lack thereof) of live musical performances. I've never been much of one for concerts--I always tend to find my attention drifting and critiquing the sound mix or examining the decor of the building. Even when I was a schoolkid attending the North Carolina Symphony, I found myself wondering how the giant chandelier was held up by such a thin chain rather than paying any attention to the performance going on in front of me.

Most bands I've seen just don't give enough for me on stage. Perhaps I'm shallow (probably), but I just can't enjoy myself unless there's a big physical presentation accompanying the vocal performance. I need style, showmanship, and charisma. That's why I enjoy people like Cab Calloway or Kiss, and the best concert I ever attended was James Brown--they all knew how to put on a SHOW. Performers like James Brown or Ric Flair don't just go out there and do whatever the label on the marquee advertises (soul music, pro wrestling) they make their performance big and bold and something you can't take your eyes off of.

Anyway, what inspired this post was discovering some performances of the Nicholas Brothers I hadn't seen before. If you don't know the Nicholas Brothers, they were brothers (amazing, eh?) who were the most astounding dancers of all time. Their physical acrobat skills would've earned them a place in the history books, but the addition of their amazing showmanship and absolute style makes them into entertainment legends. This is the most famous performance of the brothers, dancing to Cab Calloway's orchestra in the movie Stormy Weather. The climactic scene of them doing the splits over each other's heads is just stunning--and then they just get back up again! Here's a later performance in colour that has some jaw-dropping moments. This is the performance I hadn't seen, a song and dance routine that shows they had the moves way back when, and great singing voices to boot. Now that's a show.

More Wild Wrestling From Japan

So I got several positive responses to my last post about President Ramu, the little girl from the Japanese wrestling promotion 666 who beats all her opponents with her demon-possessed supernatural power. While discussing Ramu with Vanessa down at Chapel Hill Comics, I brought up another one of my favourite characters from one of Japan's wackier wrestling promotions, namely a fellow who goes by the name of Danshoku Dino. He wrestles for a promotion called DDT, the Dramatic Dream Team, which has more nutty gimmicks than any other wrestling group on the planet.

Dino is my fave though. He is flamboyantly gay, and seems quite obsessed with grabbing his opponents' nuts. He is the master of the testicular claw, and his finishing move is the Danshoku Driver, which involves stuffing his opponent's head in his oh-so-brief tights and then delivering a piledriver. Those of you who are familiar with Japanese wrestling may remember stories of how Bruiser Brody, the 6'8" 285 pound monster, would make his entrance by roaming through the crowd swinging his trademark chain and making everybody run for their life. Well, Dino makes his entrance by roaming through the crowd trying to kiss whatever men he can get his hands on, making them run for their life. Hilarious. And don't get me started on how funny a good Danshoku wristlock can be.

You can check out a match with Dino taking on Akira Tozawa here (part two is here.) He does basically the same bits when he visits the Dragon Gate promotion for a six-man tag match, but it's a fun match to watch when you realize that his opponents are Anthony W. Mori and BxB Hulk, who are basically a couple of boy-band-type pretty boys who are typically marketed towards young women, but that Dino just salivates over (they're joined by Super Shisa, the masked guy). To add to the amusement, Dino's own teammate is Magnum Tokyo, who is a sort of exotic dancer character famous for moves like "The Viagra Driver". They're joined by Naoki Tanisaki. Check out that match here: Part the one, Part the two.

Hilarity.