Dr Hackenslash

Was a two-page spread in the Sun a weekend or so back. Apparently he wants wrestlers who are and look natural. Farcical really

The presenter who is "friendly" with Cat Deeley?

Impress your fellow fans by recording a ditty about how the football season is coming back

Yeah, I doubt the Howletts claims - but a few hacks who were around when Lucan vanished were sent thee to camp and wait for Lucan to arrive. He never did. But even they are still 50/50 to whether he is alive or dead. I like to think he became Lib Dem MP John Thurso (first hereditary peer to win a seat in the Commons after the Lords were shaken up). Whaddaya thunk?

So detective Sidney Ball is undoubtedly a genius with the above deduction. Smacks more of a television cash in than a genuine find. S'cuse me for being cynical but old soldiers losing it on a large scale aren't exactly thin on the ground and many a man Lucan's age could talk posh. I'd love it to be him, mind. Would be one heck of a story if he came back. Shame he was fed to John Aspinall's lions, really...

I'm going to have to watch the Railway Children again :lol Wasn't she 21 playing someone younger?

It was a friendly and as soon as MON is exposed for what he really is, the better...

Maryport - don't you think Rowan Alexander, supposed "ex" Gretna boss, should go on the DL after his antics today Turning up and claiming to be boss. Genius.

I've been trying to track down information about Giant Gonzalez/El Gigante since I first saw that entry over a year ago, but given where he is and how he's living, I wouldn't be shocked if he has already gone!

NOBODY is immortal, which is - kind of - the point of this site. Granted, he might live to see his 100th birthday cards. But, he's gonna die! Turritopsis nutricula is a hydrozoan (jellyfish) with a life cycle in which it reverts back to the polyp stage after becoming sexually mature. It is the first case in which a metazoan (animal) is capable of reverting completely to a sexually immature, colonial stage after having reached sexual maturity as a solitary stage. It does this through the cell development process of transdifferentiation. This cycle then repeats, rendering it effectively immortal. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turritopsis_nutricula

Too fussy, too fussy...

Didn't vote for him, but I had a Michael Foot premonition last night...

Or their wife's body. Or their son's body. Given the Benoit stuff, anything could happen within the industry so don't count Rowdy Roddy P out of it yet!

Just a snippet from a Wiki talk page...

A couple of edits have been made a reverted on Wiki that she is dead. Probably normal vandalism, but worth a note.

For Melly's rhythm and spark we should thank, Right from his youth to his end as a crank, He was unconventional, there is no doubt, With trousers down, fist clenched and a trout, But was it a fisherman's tale or just a cheap wank. Okay, Godot wins.

You've just done something that Allingham never did...gone over the top

Isn't that some sort of oxymoron? Only when the pubs are open...!

Given that I'm a working journalist and am always worried about being identified, I better be careful here... But those who have seen Chyna's sex-tape with X-Pac will notice the acne on her backside. And Miss Elizabeth died young, while she was in a relationship with Lex Luger.

Yeah, looks like it was a hoax - suppose that eventually one of the vandal edits had to be right, what with the infinite monkeys situation...!

Fancy a sweepstake - how many more current or former profesional wrestlers will Melly outlive If he drags on too long, I'm dressing up as trout and getting in his bed...

Given her rapid promotion, she must be the one who has the only surviving copy of the supposedly-urban-mythical incriminating Gordon Brown university pictures. Oh, and his real name is James Brown, but hey

Well, to answer both this and BHB's question, it's hard to compare to Premiership football. In football, it would only take one case, as you suggest, I'm sure. But in the shadowy world of professional wrestling, the regulations are lapse due to what I'd said about it being in a non-clearly defined area between sports, acting and stunts. In the Premiership, the clubs are the employers of the players while the league take control of drugs testing, etc, whereas in the WWE (and that pretty much is wrestling now) they are the employer and the controller of the whole thing. They have to test and, while I wouldn't dare say it happens (for the sake of my bank balance for one, if they had a top-performer doing six shows a week and attracting far more fans than anyone else who was caught with something in their system, would they suspend them? If Chelsea had a player who was scoring three a game and the tests found that player with something in them, the club wouldn't want to see their player suspended, but because the club don't conduct the tests they have no say in it (inciidentally, I seem to recall Chelsea actually getting into quite serious trouble for conducting their own, in-house tests a whle back). And really this isn't about steroids, in my opinion, because if every wrestler who was "on the gas" snapped like Benoit did, then there would be almost no wrestlers. Not that I care about the media going on about the steroid issue because it needs to be looked at properly and if misguided witch-hunts and finger pointing is what it takes, then so be it. If that saves one life at some point, then it's all for the best. It's not just steroids, it's the whole lifestyle. The recreational drugs, the women, the drinking, the ridiculous amount of time on the road, the jet-lag, etc, etc.. And, at the end of the day, just look a page or so back at how many young wrestlers have died. It's the same (roughly, I think) as a few Premiership footballers dying per season. Something would be done if that happened. The WWE are in for a rough ride, steroids or not, because of their trial. Vince McMahon himself was put on trial and accused of all sorts by the Federal Government in the 1990s (92/93-ish) but was eventually acquited. It's interested to look at around that time. WWF, as it was then, went from the Hulk Hogan-sized wrestlers to the Bret Hart and Shawn Michael's sized, smaller wrestlers. But that swung around again. Other investigations will also stem from this, they'll find pharmacists numbers at Benoit's place and then names of wrestlers and it could spiral out of control. This isn't about steroids, but if it takes all this media malarky to get the wrestling scene looked at throughly, rather than ignored because it isn't "respectable" and treated like a backstreet carnival act, then good. Though it is also important to remember that, ignoring the job Benoit did, what happened was shocking.

I'd agree with most of that, but to use the old saying, I wouldn't use the word "fake"... Pre-determined, sure; scripted, sure. As are films and television shows. Actors, playing characters, working to script. Are they "fake"? Are the Royal Shakespeare company fake because the actors who play Romeo and Juliet don't actually die on stage? It's no coincidence that the one remaning wrestling federation with any real global force is the WWE, formerly WWF, that in the 1980s stopped trying to convince viewers that people were going to get hurt every night. It carried on in the US South for years - heck, I even read a joke that if "Cowboy" Bill Watts had have been if the recent Vince McMahon carbombing angle. he would have actually died to protect kayfabe! But no, it's what Vince McMahon himself coined in the 1980s - Sports Entertainment. Heck, WWE is even called Sports Entertainment. It's not really different from having "Football Entertainment" for example, where all matches would be won 20-19 with the winner coming from 100 yards in the last second. Sure, it wouldn't be a real sport, but everyone would know that - it would only be fake if nobody knew the outcome was predetermined. And would anyone fancy putting on a show all around the world, being on the road 300 days a year? No. So is it surprising that many take a "helping hand" to help them deal with the schedule. All it takes is one slip and someone is paralysed - and it does happen. So are they athletes? No. Are they actors? No. Are they stuntmen? No. So what are they? Well, professional wrestlers. It's impossible to shoehorn them into any other category. And if they are being classified as professional wrestlers, people who put on shows set to scripts for the purpose of entertaining, how can they be faking anyone? *** Oh, and Brinsworth House - good to see you! I'll get back to your question later!

I've been reading a lot on this, perhaps far too much(!), and some things are starting to fall together. It turns out his seven-year-old son Daniel had a condition known as Fragile X, which can cause mental retardation and also explains his diminutive stature. Perhaps the reason it seems Benoit was injecting his kid with growth hormone. Anyway, Benoit's wife had neck problems and apparently was having trouble looking after the kid on her own while he was on the road 300-odd days a year wrestling. She apparently asked him to cut down slightly so he could help. They had a volatile relationship - she filed for divorce and a restraining order a few years ago but subsequently withdrew both. Apparently, she recently discussed it again and wanted to take the kid with her. At this point, it is thought Benoit decided to kill her. He could have just "snapped" as such, as he tied her hands and legs together. Though he may have snapped at this point because it's thought after he killed her, he smashed her head repeatedly against the floor. At this point he seems to have realised what he had done, or at least over the next few hours. At this point he realises he's going down, and doesn't want his son to be raised by anyone else. So he goes into his son's room and applies a choke hold, possibly a variation of his crippler crossface finisher, and kills him. Possibly just before or after this point is when he put the Bibles next to the bodies. Then, after some deliberation (and perhaps a bottle of wine, he was of French-Canadian descent after all, and an empty bottle was apparently found) he made sure his "guard dogs" were locked away safely and sent texts so that people would find the bodies sooner than later. Then he killed himself by tying a pulley to his weights, and dropping 240 pounds around his neck.