Finish Him…Up,Down,Back,Back,A…Fatality!

By Matt

From: http://knucklesunited.com/

This has got to be one of the best fatalities I have ever seen aside from Liu Kang turning into a dragon and eating the upper half of your body. For some reason I don’t think this is what they had in mind when they asked for a chair. Video after the jump.

11 Old School WWF Wrestlers With the Worst Side Jobs

From: http://www.11points.com/

Over the weekend, I found myself browsing deep in the annals of Hulu, and there, I came upon a channel called WWE Classics. It's got a few hundred clips of old matches... many of which are from the late '80s and early '90s, when pro wrestling was my bona fide obsession.

Back then, the WWE was the WWF. (I know the World Wildlife Fund somehow strong armed them into changing the initials... but that still ranks up there as one of the stupidest name changes in history. Right next to Football Bowl Subdivision, Chad Ochocinco, and Two Guys and a Girl with no pizza place.)

Over the same weekend, in a completely unrelated event, I also found my way onto the Bureau of Labor Statistics website, looking at salary data for hundreds of jobs. That's what I do on my weekends. Watch old wrestling clips and look at data. It's a modern miracle I have a girlfriend.

I decided to combine those two web stumblings into one list and do an homage to the WWF of my formative years. In that era, WWF overlord Vince McMahon had a penchant for giving wrestlers gimmicks where they had other side jobs outside of wrestling. He's outgrown that now... it took about two decades too long, but he finally realized that fans aren't more likely to cheer, boo, or buy tickets to see someone just because he's billed as a wrestlin' plumber.

Here are the 11 old school WWF wrestlers who have the lowest-paying side jobs, based on the most recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

1. Koko B. Ware - nonfarm animal caretaker ($21,500/year) - Koko wrestled in the era before black guys finally broke through the WWF's upper card glass ceiling. (Even now, when they do, it's a tenuous situation at best. Wrestling is right up there with scone baking as a mostly honkified business.)
   
   Koko's gimmick was The Birdman... he would bring his parrot, Frankie, to the ring with him. I chose him as the representative for the nonfarm animal caretaker because Jake "The Snake" Roberts was eventually less defined by his snake wrangling and more by his psychological warfare (and debilitating alcohol and drug addiction). Plus, if Jake was a real caretaker, he would've found a way to stop the Earthquake from repeatedly crushing his snake Damien with butt splashes.
   
   
   
   
   
   
2. Hillbilly Jim, Henry O. Godwinn and Phinneas I. Godwinn - farmworkers, farm and ranch animals ($22,920) - Hillbilly Jim was popular in the mid '80s. He was brought back in the mid '90s to try to make the fans like two obese wrestlers whose names acronymed down to HOG and PIG. Clever acronyms were never Vince McMahon's strong suit. (Besides HOG, PIG and the aforementioned WWE, he also had the XFL -- where the X stood for NOTHING, not Xtreme.)
   
   
   
   
   
   
3. Paul Bearer - funeral attendant ($23,270) - The Undertaker actually makes a much better living from his side job, more than $58,000. Paul Bearer's lower-level position isn't quite as lucrative. Although he does hold in his hands an all-powerful urn, so that might let him charge rates a little bit above the mean.
   
   
   
   
   
   
4. Brutus "The Barber" Beefcake - barber ($26,610) - I always understood that, because he was a barber, he had the tattered clothes. I could even kinda justify the brightly-colored fishnet gloves. But I could never quite figure out the purpose behind the bowtie. Maybe, since this side job is so low paying, he had to take an additional side job as a Chippendale? Or a bowtie model? Token for the Nation of Islam?
   
   
   
   
   
   
5. "The Model" Rick Martel - models ($30,160) - The average model pulls in $30,000 -- but I assume that's for, like, posing with a bottle of Castrol at an auto industry trade show. Once Rick Martel debuted his fragrance Arrogance he had to be making BANK. Just like other famous fragrance makers like Coco Chanel or Christian Dior or Frederick Coolwater.
   
   
   
   
   
   
6. Duke "The Dumpster" Droese - refuse and recyclable material collectors ($32,790) - I would say this was one of Vince McMahon's worst gimmick ideas ever -- I mean, how successful can a wrestling garbageman ever be? -- but the gimmick was actually Droese's idea. What I can blame on McMahon: Having the ring announcer say that Droese hailed from "Mount Trashmore, Florida."
   
   Unless that's an homage to Mount Splashmore from "The Simpsons" (which I am almost positive it's not), the concept of Mount Trashmore makes Parts Unknown seem grounded in reality.
   
   [Edited 3/23 at 10:15 AM: Turns out there actually is a landfill in Florida that's referred to as Mount Trashmore. Kind of invalidates that rant. Oh well.]
   
   
   
   
   
   
7. The Bodydonnas: Skip and Sunny - fitness trainers and aerobics instructors ($34,310) - Many wrestlers have found heel success by coming out and insulting the general fitness level of the crowd. Ravishing Rick Rude was so good at it that we looked forward to it; as a boy, I remember going nuts when I was at the Richfield Coliseum and he called us all "fat, out-of-shape, Cleveland couch potatoes."
   
   The Bodydonnas tried that but, without having even one-two-thousandth the charisma of Rick Rude, any reaction was nothing more than a Pavlovian trigger based on hearing the name of the city. Skip was definitely more suited for his low-paying side job than for wrestling... at least the theatrical elements of wrestling.
   
   Sunny, at least, ushered in the WWF's era of fake-breasted blonds... an era that, from what I can tell, has exploded today to the point where it's actually impossible to keep track of all the fake-breasted blond women the WWE has on the payroll.
   
   
   
   
   
   
8. Coach - coaches and scouts ($35,580) - This guy was Mr. Perfect's manager for a while in the early '90s. He would blow his whistle for almost the entire match. It's not as annoying as it sounds -- it was actually far, far, far more annoying.
   
   
   
   
   
   
9. Tugboat - sailors ($35,880) - It was never clear if this guy was on a tugboat or if, because of his size, we were to believe that he might actually BE a tugboat. I'm going with option A because of the cringe-inducing lil' sailor's hat he's got on.
   
   
   
   
   
   
10. Doink the Clown - entertainers and performers, misc ($35,820) - During my wrestling phase, I often found myself in the position of defending pro wrestling to the traditional dissenters. Things like "evil clowns who wrestle" made my position exponentially more difficult to defend.
    
    
    
    
    
    
11. Big Boss Man - corrections officers and jailers ($41,340) - With that fairly reasonable side salary he shouldn't be on this list. And he wouldn't be if the Bureau of Labor Statistics tracked the annual salary of vikings... if Jim "The Anvil" Neidhart was actually an iron worker... or if I'd decided to count Val Venis under the occupation "pipelayer."
    
    
    
    

Classic WWE Moments: Macho Man Randy Savage Interviews

This week in WWE classic moments, TPS profiles the one and only Macho Man Randy Savage. Known for his flashy outfits, his beautiful manager Elizabeth, and his patented elbow drop from the top ropes, Savage’s Macho Man persona quickly became one of the wwe’s top draws of the late 80’s and early 90’s.

Savage was one of, if not the most, charismatic wrestlers of his time. He was a two time WWE champion, a onetime intercontinental champion, and a four time WCW champion. Even with all these accomplishment in the ring, fans may have truly loved the Macho Man for his out of ring charisma.

Here is a montage of classic Macho Man Randy Savage interviews showcasing what the Macho Madness was all about.

Smuggler Caught With Heads of 353 African Gray Parrots

Written by Dave Harcourt

A new trade in parrot heads and tail feathers is adding to the pressure on the world’s wild population of African Grey Parrots, which is confined to the tropical forest area of West and Central Africa.

This is highlighted by a recent post by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) from Cameroon, which reports on a suspect arrested by game rangers who was found to be carrying 353 parrot heads and 2000 tail feathers. The suspect stated that he had collected the material for a witch doctor who was treating his mentally ill brother.

The African Grey Parrot (Psittacus erithacus) is a medium-sized parrot, endemic to the rainforests of West and Central Africa. The birds are highly valued for their beauty and ability to mimic humans - they cost a minimum of US$ 500 each.

Between 1994 & 2003 more than 450 000 parrots were captured and exported under controls that required a permit from a national authority to certify that the export was not detrimental to the species in the wild. However, this trade along with illegal capturing, exceeding of quotas and other demands resulted in considerable stress on the African Grey populations. As a result and following investigation, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) recommended zero export quotas for several range states and decided to develop regional management plans for the species. In particular it recommended a two-year ban on the export of African Grey Parrots from Cameroon. It is interesting that the United States and the EU have banned the import of wild caught parrots since 1992 and 2007 respectively.

This introduction of regulated trade does not effect the illegal export of African Grey Parrots, which is apparently quite well established although very inefficient. For example, it is believed that about 15,000 birds are taken out of the Lobeke region of Cameroon every year but that almost half of these die in transit due to poor handling.

The constraints on the movement of live parrots has probably contributed to this even more threatening trade in heads and feathers, which are more easily stored and transported. The market for these products in not yet understood. Balla Ottou, a leader in Cameroon’s wildlife management, thinks the heads are probably mainly exported to India and China and the tails to Nigeria. This needs to be clarified so that the authorities can develop counter strategies

Unfortunately this kind of trade is likely to flourish as the financial difficulties of the world bite deeper and the unemployed poor in Africa become more and more desperate.

Interestingly a search of ebay, shows that there is a substantial trade in the red feathers of the African Grey. The feathers appear to be used for craft and fly fishing. On 24/01/2009 there were 16 auctions for feathers with one seller parrotinthegarden having 125 feathers on auction, supposedly molted by his African Grey Pandora! These feathers sell for from 50c to just over a dollar each. Another person sells African Grey Tail feathers as “Pluma De Loro Africano” for religious purposes at US$ 7 each!

Photo credit: Michael Gwyther-Jones on Flickr under a Creative Commons License.