Drug Abuse

I've just had the most relaxing of bank holiday weekends. However I'm black and blue because of it.

On Saturday, during some improv with ComedySportz in Manchester's Comedy Store, I jumped from the stage and misjudged the placement of my feet. In turn, my shin scraped along the edge of a step. "Oooh that smarts" I thought. Though it wasn't until I went to bed that night that I realised that my shin had actually swollen and that my leg was lumpy. A fine purple, black and blue specimen of a bruise followed and I was off to continue my weekend of relaxing, tidying the house and playing with the cat.

Until yesterday that was, when during a fit of child-like insanity I was running through the house and managed to ignore the fact that door frames are hard. More pain to me and you'd think that would be my lot for one weekend. However it was not to be when I was walking in through the back door and managed to twat my kneecap against the frame (again! The frame!) with enough force to make pictures fall off the wall. The pain was intense. I felt my body going into shock as the colour left my face and I was taken over by an overwhelmingly intense feeling of nausea.

In bed last night, trying to get to sleep, ignoring the pain, it made me think of when I separated my shoulder at the end of 2005. I had recently been dumped by my girlfriend of two years, was alienated from my friends and had a lonely Christmas to look forward to. Lonely that is, apart from the company of lots of very strong prescription painkillers.

Which is a rather nice segue into pro wrestling. Prescription drug abuse has been a problem in professional wrestling since the existence of prescription drugs. Wrestlers on the road taking bumps night after night, miles away from their families must be at very low points in the morale stakes. The security of my depression within the walls of a middle class household seems positively desirable compared to the situation countless wrestlers have, do and will, find themselves in.

This is possibly explaining how easy it is to become entrapped by "personal demons" (as the industry seems to put it), rather than excusing it or even justifying it. I'm put off taking over the counter painkillers even when I have a headache because of my past with painkillers in general. So why do countless wrestlers continue to abuse drugs of all descriptions despite the endless list of deaths from drugs in the industry? In particular, people like DH Smith, who will have seen his own father die young because of years of drug abuse.

Any thoughts as to why drug abuse is so abundant? Put your thoughts as a comment if you're lovely.

Demographics

I'm going out on a limb here and guessing that the main readership of this blog is the same as TNA's main demographic of viewers.

I wish it was because I was innovative (6 sided ring? OH MY!) or that I had catchphrases (it's not about weight limits... EURGHH). But it's not. I get hits to this blog the same way TNA gets viewers.

It's been no secret that the main draw of TNA in recent times has been its' women's division. And it's no secret that most people visiting this blog are looking for Candice Michelle's skanky feet. TNA's best rated demographic is men over 50. I would guess that my demographic's the same. So if you do by some miracle happen to be reading this blog and not scanning it for pictures, get your hands out of your pants and go outside.

In other news, Test coherently shared his thoughts on the return of The Ultimate Warrior in a recent MySpace blog post...

I'm not going to br sing this as a wrestling formum nyore but I will say this,,,thrE Ultimate Warirr is coming bacj, I;m 33 and barely remember who he as and thry expect the average san of to dat to remember wg..ho he is. I rememer Warior as the guy who ran to the ring he was so bown up he couln;t do anyhing in the ring,I remembr when Warrior opened up warrior university and at the ime I actually thought it was way to ake it nto pro westling yhat was until I met my idol zzzzzzzzzzzzzzbret hart and I'll never forget as long a I live brets exact words"warrior coulnn't even put youin a headlock, let alone teachyou how to put u in one. Brets gret guy who always hs a funny stry to tell. Now this story Bret told me about the Warrrior I have ahd no chuckle just disgust and wouldn't mind putting an old washedup ma i his place. as the story goes to Bret the hild who was brouht in the back because his dream was to see th Ultimate Warriop buy of course Warrior had no time for him not vrn a pvture ur an autraph and thr kids dream ws to met this piese uf shit and he went out in the crowd without a care in the worl, excuse my language but you are a 1st class piece of shit. and you think you are goinh to draw peole yu couldn't draw flys when Hogan graciouly hande you yh brlt. Younever loved wrestlinh like all of uds you wre there for thr payday and that's wy Hogan had to come baxk and yuwere wearing a singlet wit muscles painted om lke we couldnt tell u werent on the juice, there ar thoseho need juice and those that don't. You neded an iv hooked up to you. Im my mind you wanted toplay the sould00000000000000000000000000000000 you loved likemfootballand so on. You must have realized prtty quick you suckd but you could have gotten beter 000000000000000000000000000it bestwhen he tld me how was Igoimgto learn anything at wrrioys"

Erm... The only thing worth picking out of that is Test saying that there are those who need steroids, and those who don't. Considering he was fired from WWE, and then even TNA for taking steroids (seriously, how much did he have to take to get fired from TNA?!), I'm not quite sure what point he's trying to make other than he's drunk and unemployed.

The Hulkster apparently told his son Nick recently to "man up". Or as Macho Man may have put it, to "Be a Man". OOOHHHH YEAHHHHH.

Speaking of which, Jay Lethal proposed to SoCal Val recently. Not content with stealing gimmicks, TNA seem happy enough to steal entire angles. Not even low profile ones. MASSIVE angles that people won't ever forget. Vince Russo amazes me in the way that Piers Morgan does - both are completely unemployable, yet employed. Bizarre.

To finish, I'd like to tell you that I wore my Hotrod t-shirt to work one day this week. My boss was having a meeting with a bank manager. During which, as head of accounts, I was asked to bring some files and spreadsheets through. After I left, the bank manager apparently asked "Was THAT your accountant? Don't they usually wear suits?".

Ithangyew.

Stop the press: Regal suspended!

GAH.

I sit here astounded. William Regal's been suspended for 60 days because of his second violation of WWE's wellness policy. (Link here)

I'm absolutely shocked. Since when did part-timers need to be jacked up?

Is Regal, whose name has been thrown about in rumours of a full time return to the ring, finding it tough to get back into shape?

Lance Storm puts it absolutely superbly in one of his recent blogs where he tells of how hard he trained just for his one match with Bryan Danielson.

"Being inactive for as long as I had I knew I was going to have to really push myself in order to be able to hang with the work rate standards of ROH."

Jeff Hardy's latest suspension was certainly "RVD-esque" in terms of stupid timing. I might have to say that Regal's suspension today is "Hardy-esque" in its' timing. What an absolute moron.

In other news, Brooke Hogan's apparently losing her sanity and is cracking up.

She's been officially mental according to Hollywood reports since her brother was thrown in the slammer. But the roots lie in the affair that The Hulkster had with one of her close friends, Christiane Plant. Apparently Brooke's really hurt by the affair because of how close she was with her father.

I wasn't really convinced through watching Hogan Knows Best, but the following picture reassured me of their deep bond.



The fact that I used the word "deep" there is disturbing. Even more so when you try to figure out what's in The Orange One's right hand, let alone what he intends to use it for.

Be a Man

OOHHH YEAHHHHHH!

I'm not sure what was going through his head when he said "yes" to it, but Macho Man Randy Savage released a rap album in 2003 called Be a Man.

Savage gets krunk non-stop for 14 tracks of sheer Macho magic.

"Oooh Yeahhhh!"'s a-plenty, I'm not quite sure what this album's for. A debut rap album is always a difficult thing to do. But when the rapper's 51 years old and making their first album, there's significantly less credibility to it than an album from someone who you suspect has the usual story of being raised in the ghetto by pimps with family values and has been to prison 8 times because of drug dealing and drive-bys and all those other non-cliche things rap-folk do.

You would've thought that Savage would've gone down the Kenny Rogers route with a musical career. He would still suck at being Kenny Rogers, but you'd expect that. Him pretending to be Nelly is just weird. Or should that be 'Wurrrd'?

If I had less of a life, I'd count the "Ooh Yeahhh"s for you. But I have neither the patience or ability to count that high. It's as if the man only had one catchphrase or something... oh...

The really baffling thing about it is who came up with the idea? If Savage came up with the idea, then he's obviously an idiot. If somebody else thought "Savage would make a great rapper", then they're also an idiot.

The highlight of the album is the title track - 'Be a Man'. Savage basically calls Hogan out and trash talks The Orange One. Savage mocks Hogan's acting career whilst glorifying his own minor role in Spider-Man.

I love the picture at the other end of that link. He's all beard and steroids. That was in 2002. Who saw that picture and thought "rap sensation"?

IDIOTS. THAT'S WHO.

One Weirdo Nation pt. II

I couldn't have predicted it myself. But my sudden increase in posting on this here blog has increased traffic.

However, the way people are finding this blog is bizarre. Most people are looking for pictures of Candice Michelle's skanky foot fetish alter ego Mackenzie Montgomery or Christiane Plant - aka The Hulkster's new tag team partner.

The week started off well with me getting hits from Google from the phrase "Khali killing wrestler". But it slowly descended into an onslaught of searches for an old wrestler's mistress. Until this post, I've not had any pictures of her on this blog. The huge majority of those searches for her picture came through Yahoo and not Google. 'Yahoo' is not a verb for a reason.

Special mention goes to the weirdos who searched for "ashley massaro implicated in escort service busted by the fbi". Something tells me they want very specific results from their searches. Either that or they've not used a search engine before.

So to conclude, if you're reading this, you're either someone with a foot fetish who's out of luck, or a retard.

Happy hunting ya pervs!

One Weirdo Nation

It's official. The Ultimate Warrior is scheduled to return to the ring for a match for the first time in a decade next month. Details can be found here.

Warrior, known to his friends as "WARRIAH!" will fight in Barcelona on the 25th June for NWE. But who will his opponent be for the big return, the money-making-match, the biggest thing to happen to wrestling since that thing Chris Benoit did?

None other than The Cabinet's own Orlando Jordan. Yup, the biggest match of the year is going to be The Ultimate Warrior versus The Ultimate supporting-role.

The make-up-wearing, bigoted, right-wing Warrior keeps a blog called 'Warrior's Machete'. In which he spouts his own brand of stupidity and moral wrongness. On a post of his made last year (this one here), I have to stop reading before the end of the first paragraph:

It has to be a difficult choice: Sluts or a Saint? Use print space and TV time to cover the sick behavior of psycho, suicidal, pop-culture sluts or revere this country’s Founding Saint’s birthday? Nah, scratch that — it wasn’t a difficult choice. No need to lie to ourselves, here. This country’s Media has for a long time easily whored itself out to irreverence, indecency...

I'm not sure about you, but when somebody who's a household name all over the world for being a professional wrestler criticizes the media for it's bias towards irreverence and indecency, the phrase "Biting the hand that feeds" comes to mind.

Seeing Hulk Hogan in the ring these days causes me to shudder. It's not the same as it used to be. However The Hulkster has made sporadic appearances in the ring forever, albeit less frequently as time goes by. The thought of Warrior stepping back into the ring after a 10 year hiatus, during which he's definitely not been training is scary. He wasn't the safest of performers back in his prime. The people who compile the Botchmania videos on Youtube must be in puddles of their own making in anticipation of Warrior's return.

For the sake of getting more hits to this blog through Google, I'll mention that Torrie Wilson was released from her WWE contract this week. I'll mention that she's also been nude on at least one occasion. That ought to do it.

Whatcha gunna do when the legislative branch runs wild on you?

The Hulkster's son, Nick "Too young to be a Backstreet Boy" Bollea will make a special appearance tomorrow to a crowd of whatever the capacity of Pinellas County Court is.

Nick faces a maximum sentence of 5 years in prison because he's apparently been charged with 'Felony reckless driving involving serious bodily injury'. Bollea won't dispute the charge. Either that means his lawyer's got something sneaky up his sleeve or Hulk's budget for lawyers is already being used up on his own ongoing divorce case.

With Wesley Snipes having recently gone down big time for tax avoision, celebrity immunity from the klink is less believable.

The thought of Nick going to prison is crazy. What the inmates would do with someone so young and pretty doesn't bare thinking about. The fact that he's under 18 matters not one jot as the boy's being charged as an adult.

However, what of The Orange One's involvement? He was seen racing with Nick and buying beers on the day of the crash. In fact, one of the charges against Nick is that he was 'a person under the age of 21 operating a vehicle with a blood alcohol level of .02 or higher'. A law which is both specific and vague at the same time.

The fact that Hulk's not been implicated in this whole thing yet is crazy. It's not as if he will have had an alibi provided by his wife (or for that matter his daughter, who was the first to be told of The Hulkster's affair).

In news more related to wrestling, Bobby Lashley's no-compete clause has expired. As such, he's being advertised to appear in Booker T's PWA promotion later this month. Funnily enough, they advertise it on the site (www.bookertpwa.com) with the words "Our mystery guest is former world champion Bobby Lashley!". That's almost as subtle as The Shockmaster's debut. With PWA becoming more and more like TNA's version of FCW, the next logical conclusion would be Lashley beating the entire TNA roster in a single match. TNA don't need former WWE guys to raise their profile and their game. If they do bring in every released WWE wrestler, the best thing they can do is job them out to put their own guys over. Otherwise, they look desperate and as if they're second best.

Oh sorry, did somebody say "Reverse-over-the-top-rope-ladder-match-inside-a-cage-but-oh-no-that's-no-ordinary-cage-it-has-two-more-sides-than-normal match"? Looks like I spoke too soon.

Giant wrestler finds fame in India

Whilst browsing BBC's news website as I do every day, I stumbled across a story that was one of the most emailed of the day.

You can read it here.

I was flabbergasted to find that the BBC had posted such an article on its' website. More shocking perhaps was the fact that this public service organisation had actually published an article which was incredibly lazily written and seemingly a regurgitation of a press release.

Khali is referred to as a "Former labourer". Which is about as true and vague as saying that I'm a "former child". What it fails to mention is the fact that Khali is also a former police officer. One who is actually AWOL from his post. One who's still been getting paid his basic police officer salary while he's been earning six figure sums in the US as a wrestler.

The entire article stinks of Khali's publicist being the author. Scraping the barrel of association by claiming he enjoys top-billing along with Hulk Hogan (click here to see the only time they met) and The Rock. Funnily enough, I can't find a video of him and The Rock together because it's never happened.

Having spent a year in Japan, the article claims, Khali had been duped by his agents. I would be inclined to agree. Having watched this match, I think Khali was duped into believing he could wrestle. I've deconstructed this match in an earlier post, so no new jokes there. It is such an awful match that you really need to see it to believe it.

The article says that Khali went to the US from Japan where he was snapped up by WWE soon after. What isn't pointed out is the fact that Khali botched a basic move on a wrestler who then died. The Great Khali killed somebody because of his own in-ring incompetence. He wasn't even that green, having wrestled near-Main Event matches in Japan (though he hides his experience very well in his Japanese matches).

The article posted on the BBC's site angers me. It genuinely does. Not because of the massively kayfabe and story-line-sticking journalism, but because it's as though Khali's agent has actually hacked into the BBC's site and posted a press release there screaming to people that he's looking for acting work. There is absolutely no merit in that journalism whatsoever. In fact, I'd be willing to to say, based on that article, that this blog has more journalistic merit than the BBC.

The long and short of it is that I watch pirated DVDs of Pay-per-Views and spend all day reading rumour sites to get that kind of opinionated fiction, I don't want my licence fee contributing to that kind of self-promotion at all.

They used to be called 'valets'

There was a time when the most you'd see of a woman in professional wrestling was as the girlfriend or manager of a wrestler. A 'valet' if you will.

It should come as no great surprise, or indeed leap of logic, to find out that WWE's own Ashley Massaro is implicated in a recent bust of a high profile escort agency by the FBI. For the real smarks I'd put a joke here about Little Guido and co.

Rolling Stone magazine were responsible for making sure that discretion was actually not assured with this escort agency.

Usually the escorts are victims of ruthless pimps. So at the risk of making this blog look like a rip off of "The Smoking Gun", let's look at the pimp.



Her name is Michelle Braun, and to be a client of her agency, you need to pay a $5,000 deposit. $2,500 of that is paid when you apply for membership. That's before you even get to meet a pornstar/Playboy model/person-who-thinks-they-can-wrestle-but-are-better-off-losing-on-reality-shows.

I'd feel severely ripped off paying that kind of extortionate money for a woman and Ashley showed up at my hotel room. It's the equivalent of buying a pack of crisps, only to realise as soon as you open it that there are only four crisps in it.

Every time I see Ashley on my TV I throw whatever food I have within reach at the screen in the vain hope that it would somehow break through the glass, travel through space and time and transcend time zones and time delays and just land in her mouth so that she'd eat something. ANYTHING. The last time I saw bones as obvious as hers was while looking at pictures of compound fractures.

It's shocking that someone as hideous and bony as her is pushed as being the fittest thing since forever while the natural, ample curves of Beth Phoenix are portrayed as being those of a massive, powerful beastcow.

Ashley was quick to defend herself on her own blog.

Just got buzzed on some BS that is going around. Dont believe it for a second.
Getting in touch with my lawyer as we speak.

Bless. I don't know what she thinks she's going to sue for. I don't think it counts as libel or defamation if it's merely stating fact. She seems quite embarrassed by the whole thing. Which is odd. Because it means she's essentially saying "I take my clothes off for cash" but draws the line at sleeping with people for cash. But that's where she misunderstands the loophole. She must be an awful escort. Imagine if the cops busted her while she was "on the job". What's she going to do, fess up or use the age-old loophole of saying that the bloke she's with is paying for her time and not her sex? Judging from her reaction to being named by Rolling Stone, she'll probably do the former.

In the end it all boils down to the phrase that everybody should live their lives by: Don't do anything you wouldn't want your mother finding out about.

Two Months?!

Yes. It's almost been two months since I last posted anything. The reason for this has been that I've moved house and it's taken this long to get the internet connection up and running. Though to be honest, I'm glad it's up. Last year I had to go without the internet for my entire 6 month tenancy of a house when I decided to go with TalkTalk. SIX MONTHS. Can you believe it? I'd managed to develop social skills and everything within that time because of my sheer misfortune.

Anyway, a lot has happened in the world of wrestling since I last wrote. Well, I say a lot. A lot of comedy GOLD and one Wrestlemania.

So let's start with the big one. Wrestlemania. My goodness what immensity. From start to finish I loved it. I feel guilty that I didn't pay for it because it was so good. Money in the Bank was truly awesome. The spots were inspirational. Not that they made me want to go down B&Q and come back with a car full of ladders to play around with in the back garden though. The fact that everyone was on top of their games so much that the match we saw even happened was crazy. If everybody working in the World banks was at that point in their careers, we'd all be a bit better off. The spots were all insane but full of logic too. Things like Johnny Nitro (They're called 'Opal Fruits' too you know) stepping onto the ladder leaning onto the turnbuckle and just riding it to another ladder. Incredible but making sense too.

The fact that CM Punk won was the culmination of scores of mark-out moments for me throughout the entire match. An incredible match that made me forget about the reality of wrestling so many times. I loved it because it took me back to how I felt watching wrestling when I was 9 or 10.

The rest of the PPV was great aswell, but to be honest, I'd rather use the rest of this blog to talk about Michael Hayes and Santino Marella.

When the story that Michael Hayes had been suspended for 60 days after Wrestlemania broke, I was shocked. But not because of what you might think. When I first read about it, I read the following:

It has been confirmed that head SmackDown writer Michael Hayes has been suspended for 60 days.

Michael Hayes has been absent since Wrestlemania, from backstage WWE. Hayes is the head writer for Smackdown. Wrestlers say Hayes is serving a 60-day suspension concerning his behavior towards a wrestler during Wrestlemania weekend. However, WWE is calling it a "vacation".

The belief backstage is that Michael Hayes got sent home for supposedly choking Carlito with wrist tape. It was meant to be a rib on Carlito, but Carlito took it as a threat to his Wrestlemania spot and threatened to show up on TNA Impact! No one knows for sure who put Hayes up to it, but the wrist tape looked like it had part of an "X" in black marker on it.

Honestly. I don't know what purpose someone would have to make that kind of thing up. The only true thing about that story is that Michael Hayes got suspended. My guess is that Damien Demento wrote it and somebody believed him. Which is the equivalent of agreeing with your town's mentalist when he tells you the leprechauns are floating off to the sky and that they're taking your corn flakes with them. ABSOLUTELY STUPID IS WHAT THAT IS MATE.

But it transpires that a good ol' boy from Georgia was a bit of a racist. On tonight's news, you'll see how the sky is blue. Apparently Dok Hendricks uses racist language all the time and that it's something you get used to when you're with him. If this is true, then it's abhorrent. Truly sickening, not that that kind of attitude exists (because let's face it, we'll never be rid of these idiots), but that that kind of attitude exists openly within a public company.

Funnily enough, since Hayes' temporary departure, things have gotten incredible on WWE TV. Firstly this week, we saw William Regal exercising what I'd like to call his HITLER CLAW. He was an absolute facist and pulled the main event. What a legend. I love him for it.

That was followed on Tuesday night by Mike Adamle pissing off. HOORAY.

And then on Friday Mick Foley made his debut on Smackdown as a commentator. That's three different shows with three reasons to not miss them. It also means that I now have three different reasons to get Sky. Which sucks. What am I? Made of money?

This week's "and finally" story is about Santino Marella getting arrested for drunk driving.



One too many Peronis saw Santino fail TWO different field sobriety tests before being taken into a cell for the night. He was released on a $500 bail while elsewhere a sigh of relief was heard from Vince McMahon who may or may not have said "Thank God it wasn't steroids".