Sigh, another day, another one gone. Andrew "Test" Martin was a fairly popular wrestler in the mid-90's, involved in some major storylines, including a marriage to Stephanie McMahon. It's also probable that he was legitimately connected with the edible Kelly Kelly. She spoke very tearily about his death. There's not much for us to add to the story, as this seems to be happening an awful lot right now. And frankly… Continue reading

Cheers are matched with jeers this afternoon as pre-human sacrifice has made its merry way back into American scientific research. Prez Obama has gone and lifted the ban on stem-cell use, and if everything goes awry, as it only really does in dystopian science fiction schlock, we could be sitting back, munching on perfectly-legal and biologically engineered human body parts, just like my hero Spider Jerusalem, within, what, the next… Continue reading

Poor kid... John is remembered best for his inglorious career as a minor leaguer, which included one very degrading incident wherein he was traded by the  Laredo Broncos for... 10 baseball bats. Now they were maple bats, mind you and those things aren't cheap. There's an old country expression where I comes from, "If you done log a maple tree to produce a series of baseball bats, which shatter easily and must be replaced often, you reduce Canada's seasonal ability to produce maple syrup, and its overall economic output." Heard that one on Hee-Haw. But anyway, three weeks after being traded, he disappeared from his new team, the Calgary Vipers, and went underground. Six months later, he turned up in Georgia, and was dead. Can we blame the death on being traded for baseball bats? In a word, yes.… Continue reading

Well, I bet you thought this was going to be a long diatribe about how newspapers are dying, and when they started dying, and why they're dying even faster now than when I began this sentence several words ago. (That's what, oh I don't know, a newspaper journalist would do!) Anyway, I prefer the Sugar Mob Handy-Dandy Reference Guide version, which explains the death of the mainstream press thusly: 68% of… Continue reading

I remember more than one occasion during my childhood of listening to WBEN 930 from Buffalo and hearing the dulcet folksiness of Paul Harvey, spinning some yarn or connecting the strange-but-true dots. Of course, his tales were usually apocryphal, but were at least plausible, things that could have happened if the world were a little more round and the phonebook was a little thinner. I remember being slightly awed at not… Continue reading

When I saw that Mr. Swensen departed us, I assumed to myself "that's probably the last of the munchkins" and so forth. Now young little people will have nobody left to look up to and who will speak to the hordes of fans at Wizard of Oz Con 2009? So sad. That one Munchkinhung himself during the movie and then it goes downhill from there, right? But you know what, according to Wikipedia, there are eleven munchkins still alive. Incredible!… Continue reading

Well, Mr. Quarry's career of course requires no introduction. I'm sure you all remember the landmark Count Yorga, Vampire. It was shut out of the 43rd Academy Awards by five vastly inferior films, which I will not condescend to mention here. Normally, sequels ted to be watered down affairs, and the main actors don't reprise their roles, but neither Robert Quarry nor the "Yorga Trilogy" could stoop much lower, so they were reunited the next year for Return of Count Yorga. The third Yorga film was never made, and so, the American Dream was lost.… Continue reading

Socks, you may recall, was the Clinton family's very first White House pet, before being replaced by Buddy the Chocolate Labrador and later still, Vernon Jordan. Buddy was a far more populist, telegenic and, let's be honest, Bill-like pet, while Socks always seemed rigid and testy (he took after Hillary- or she after him.) Well, Socks had the last laugh, dying at the fine old age of 20 shy a month, while Buddy was run over by a car when he was 5; was he part of the Kennedy family or something?… Continue reading

You may remember that NASCAR recently experimented with a foray into bobsledding. And with the response as staggering as it was, the future king of motorsports is ready to be crowned: Stock Car Racing in a busted up old rusty Dodge Neon!… Continue reading

The Pequistes are continuing to make Quebec freer and safer, not by actually winning elections or anything, but by bitching about irrelevent crap. Their latest victory? Squashing an annual reenactment of the battle of the Plains of Abraham, part of the event's 250th anniversary. The National Battlefield Commission had to cancel the reenactment because a deluge of threats from self-styled "resistance movements" like the RRQ.… Continue reading

  Every so often, I have a brief nightmare about being in a airline crash. It never seems to last more than a few seconds: I'm sitting somewhere, then suddenly it's a plane, and everyone is screaming and wind or flame sears my face- sometimes both. I can't control anything, my body always feels frozen, especially from the waist down. And yet, my plane crash dreams never happen in the context of dreams about flying, they're always non-sequiturs, like a flash of the incorrect reel playing in a dark theatre before the projectionist fixes his mistake.  Albert Camus once said that a car crash would be the most absurd way to die. (He later died in a car crash of his own.) I imagine that airplane crashes take the cake now.… Continue reading

  Muzak Holdings LLP- I'll let you guess what their main product is- is filing for Chapter 11. According to the Associated Press, they now have less than $50,000 and about $350,000,000 in debts. We all know how easy it is for a vital industry titan like Lehman Brothers or General Motors to flush itself down the drain, but how does a company as innocuous as Muzak, indeed, they are probably the defenition of innocuous for most Americans, fail so spectacularly? I mean my god, who owed money to Muzak?… Continue reading

That's not a sex pun, so stop giggling. Marian Cozma was only 26, and a completely innocent man, as you might well expect of a handball player. Right now, the details are kind of sketchy, partly because nobody has covered this crisis that He was stabbed in the heart by either a group of Maffiosos (sic), according to Wikipedia, or by Gypsies, according to Gazeta Sporturilor.… Continue reading

An all-time great steel guitarist, just a notch or two behind man-god Sneaky Pete Kleinow. Before we go any farther, let's listen to a clip. Tom was a founding member of The Buckaroos, Buck Owen's backing band, and he played with them from 1963 to 1969. If you can't remember a time when country music didn't sound like that clip up there, or this one down here, it's because guys like Tom Brumley, killed any possibility of American music for white men sounding any different.… Continue reading

The NHL is now officially bailing out the Phoenix Coyotes as fast as they can move them buckets. Should anyone be surprised? Let me put it this way: this year, my 14-year old dog lost most of his eyesight in one day. It was a shock, and we were pretty sad, but were we surprised? No, because he already had diabetes.… Continue reading

And among these nations shalt thou have no repose, and there shall be no rest for the sole of thy foot; but the Lord shall give thee there a trembling heart, and failing of eyes, and languishing of soul. Deuteronomy 28:65 Heim was the SS doctor at Mathausen concentration camp, where he tortured and killed possibly hundreds of inmates. Although he wasn't personally responsible for as many murders as Alois Brunner or Sandor Kepiro, both still at large, Heim was marked by the Simon Weisenthal Center's hunters and other international agencies because of his exceptional cruelty. The following comes from his 1950 Austrian arrest warrant: It was 1941, and an 18-year-old Jew had been sent to the clinic with a foot inflammation. Heim asked him about himself and why he was so fit. The young man said he had been a soccer player and swimmer. Then, instead of treating the prisoner's foot, Heim anesthetized him, cut him open, castrated him, took apart one kidney and removed the second, The victim's head was removed and the flesh boiled off so that Heim could keep it on display.… Continue reading

Tomorrow, February Third, 2009, will mark fifty big years since rock and roll died (the first time.) A plane crash, on that day, killed Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and the Big Bopper, way out in Iowa, while they were on tour. Dion, who was also on the their tour, survived. I wonder why-yyyy? Anyway, although the artists were declared dead on the scene, rock and roll was rushed to a nearby hospital, where it managed to survive, despite spending five years in a coma, only to die a number of other times in following years. Here are some of those events, but first, the plane crash:… Continue reading

The Knesset (parliament) of Israel is usually formed by coalition governments, and sometimes this means that the most disparate parties become unlikely bedfellows. Of course, that has nothing to do with this particular ad, which has been running on T.V. here for the past week. This isn't some Cheech and Chong prank! It's sponsored by the recently-established, and mysteriously-populist coalition of the Israeli Marijuana Party and the Party for the interests… Continue reading

This is an excerpt from a letter I received today from a philosophy professor of mine: I cannot understand what the Israeli government intends and how diasporic Jews of good conscience can support it.  My best stab at understanding roughly has Ashkenazi Israel defending its right to European style colonial repression or murder of "less civilized" indigenous populations in order to defend its right to continue it's particular brand of European… Continue reading

If one forgettable European island nation, Iceland, is struggling and for sale and being led by a Green-Leftist lesbian, then surely the gods have a funny way of balancing things out. Yesterday, the tiny European "micro-state" (yes, that is its actual designation) of Malta sadly learned of the permanent retirement of two of its better-known arts figures: Pawlu Aquilina, a poet and writer, and Charles Clews, an actor known for… Continue reading