January 30, 2009 | Sports

Some people are casual NFL football fans. That is, they flip by it en route to Weather Network barometric pressure readings and pause for a quick glance up the miniskirt of a particularly comely cheerleader.

We’d like to reach out to those people, not literally, as we don’t know where their hands have been, but in the spirit of inclusiveness ushered in by the new president, to give them a few choice insights that’ll make the 8 and a half hours of programming that much more palatable and necessitate fewer ‘bathroom’ or ‘smoke’ breaks.

First off, there is no ‘bowl’….The trophy consists of a football perched obliquely atop a stand. There is no chalice, goblet, or any other type of potentially liquid-containing vessel to speak of, which doesn’t seem appropriate somehow given the Niagara Falls-like volume of cheap swill that is consumed over the course of a Sunday, but we digress.

The two teams battling for bragging rights over this non-bowl are the Pittsburgh Steelers (black and yellow) and the Arizona Cardinals (red), the former one of those old-timey clubs inextricably linked to their town’s rugged, blue-collar industrial, rust belt, crime-ridden roots and the latter, a team based in the desert.

The Steelers date back to when the game was played with a large piece of stone procured from an open pit mine rather than a ball and their star players were named Biff, Scout, Rosco, Tex, Gopher and Lenny. They wear black, are hyper-aggressive, vicious and generally win more often than they lose. By contrast, on the other side of the ball, are the Cardinals, not the powerful guys who can elect a pope, but the ones who are likely to shit on your feeder and get a mauling from the family pet. They’ve been terrible ever since the desert was made fit for human habitation (a point which could be argued if you’ve ever actually set foot in Phoenix)

The big, lumbering, slow-witted looking guy who looks like he should be delivering parcels for UPS or fishing things out of your eavestrough is Ben Roethlisberger (Roth-liss-burger). He is the quarterback, a star player for the Steelers and will be the recipient of much blame should his team lose on Monday (much like you will be that same morning, as you’re trying to uncross your eyes and focus on your boss’ dressing down, mid-hangover)

On the other side of the ball, Kurt Warner shares a hairstyle with his wife, is prematurely grey, scowls a lot and looks considerably older than anyone else, including the referees.

Speaking of which, don’t be alarmed by the referees addressing the crowd directly rather than the PA announcers like in other sports. There are so many rules in football (some of which we’ll get into here) so if hand signals were actually used exclusively they’d be more difficult to decipher than than a clandestine Crips prison yard meet up.

Here is the basic rule of football. Your team tries to carry the ball into the other team’s area (end zone) while the other team tries to smack you around so badly your evening’s repast will be through a tube in the closest ER. The former is accomplished by throwing the ball to members of your team (don’t be alarmed by the numerous times Ben Roethlisberger throws it to people wearing jerseys other than his own) or having the particularly skilled ones run through the opponents like an obstacle course. That is to say, if said obstacles actually moved and with a sense of purpose—possessed by that kind of ‘roid rage not alleviated by a dose of preparation H—to put you on the other side of the daisies (which would grow in the off-season if it wasn’t for artificial turf)

If you cannot get the ball into the other team’s zone, but are close enough to their goalposts, a weasily guy with a uni-bar helmet who looks like he’d be stuffed into a high school locker (or for that matter, the professional football one that bears his number) comes onto the field. If he kicks the ball between the two posts, that’s a score, but only three points as compared with the more conventional, crossing the end zone threshold, which is 7 (well, oh nevermind). Unless blessed with some kind of prosthetic foot, which would traumatize a TV audience should it ever be dislodged, these kicks rarely exceed a distance of 50 yards.

In order to get to the other team’s end zone, you move in increments that sound like little pills that might be fished out of a house frau’s medicine cabinet: ‘downs’. When you have the ball, you have 4 chances, or ‘downs’, to advance the ball ten yards (and/or ideally, into the other team’s end) or you have go give it to your opponents for them to try. This is accomplished by a punter, a guy who is only slightly less wimpy than the other kicker and whose responsibilities are not nearly as important.

So, there you have it. Basically, each team tries to get the ball into the other team’s end, each with 4 chances to earn 10 yards. If they don’t manage this feat, well, the ball is punted to the other team and they try. Before each play, plans are hatched as to how best to amass these 10 yards (or ideally more than that) in a huddle, an agglomeration you might encounter at your average back alley cock fight.

Playing the halftime show is Bruce Springsteen. He’s known ironically as ‘The Boss’ as most of his songs have to do with how shitty it is to punch a clock (perhaps not the right sentiment to be expressed in the depth of a recession). Singing backup and playing guitar is a Soprano’s henchmen from the eponymous show, who covers his receding hairline with a piece of fabric that looks like it would be lifted off the table at Madame La Rue, Psychic Reader [for our list of 2008 psychic predictions that went hilarious awry, click here]

So, there you have it. We Shark Guys look forward to a spirited contest, are hoping for an underdog upset, but at the end of the day don’t particularly care one way or the other.

January 29, 2009 | Sports

In pro wrestling there are a few ways to temporarily prolong your career. You can bed a member of the McMahon family, (preferably one involved in wrestling), adopt a tranquilizer regimen usually reserved for dancing circus bears or change up your identity with regularity like a wanted felon, or the less wanted, Madonna.

A great way to do this is by hailing from the menacing-sounding “parts unknown”.

An integral part of adopting this US Customs and Immigration-defying strategy is donning a mask, which adds considerably to the air of mystery not present if someone were to say, “hey, isn’t that Bob from Akron?’

In Luche Libre wrestling, they’ve known about this for a while, not because it’s some foil to work illegally in the United States, but because in Mexico, the mask is a key character component, passed down through generations and held in the highest esteem.  (also, it makes it easier to escape with your fight purse in some of the crummier barrios)

In Mexican wrestling, the mask is honorable and totemic, so much so that grapplers are occasionally even buried in them (with a closed casket just in case some heel attempts a funereal unmasking).

In these parts, masks are also associated with burial–if your Larry the Village Grocer, “paper or plastic” routine is in jeopardy of being buried in the bottom half of the fight card, you can change up your identity and see if the crowd pops for The Gimp Assassin instead.

Masks are a great part of your gimmick arsenal, especially when they’re used to introduce a new character, like Kane or put a twist on an old one.  When The American Dream Dusty Rhodes became The Midnight Rider after losing a match and being ‘banned from the state of Florida for 60 days’ [Snarky Editor's note: Like that's a bad thing?], a mask put the big man back in contention and suspicious heel manager J.J. Dillon noted, “In a very strange coincidence, a few days after that match took place, emerges a ‘new’ wrestling superstar, conspicuously 265 lbs and over 6 feet tall.”

Many wrestlers, for their very survival, concealed their identities so they could fight in different territories.

We’re not talking about those guys.

The masked grapplers featured on this list are wrestling writers’ brainchildren, brains that might’ve been deprived of oxygen for a prolonged period. Some of these scribes should be masked themselves, perhaps a bag worn over their heads, (after they’re repeatedly face-planted in the turnbuckle), for devising these less than spectacular creations.

So here are, scheduled for one fall and for all the marbles, our Top 20 Worst Masked Wrestling Gimmicks of All Time!

20. The Repo Man. A repossession agent is some guy in a pickup truck with a clipboard, who tows your cherished possessions off the driveway if you’ve run afoul of the bank. How he turned into some kind of er, “Loan Ranger” with a rope, is beyond us. You can’t just grab a mask, and slap it on any old profession, especially if it’s one typically not associated with wearing a mask. Perhaps this is how repo men operated in the 1880s. Regardless, this gimmick was repoed pretty darn quick.

19. The Conquistadors. Recipe for a lousy gimmick: Give yourselves a moniker inspired by 15th century Spanish explorers, fail to reference this or the New World in any way whatsoever and then inexplicably drape yourself in gold tights and matching masks. The idea here, which is as much of a stretch as spandex after a leapfrog, is that they were treasure seekers. However, rather than crested kettle hats and capes, or anything else that would’ve resembled a Ponce de Leon or Cortes (guys who originally brought dysentery and horses to the Americas) these Conquistadors, who were Puerto Rican and pawned off as Mexicans, became relegated to ethnic jobber feuds with the likes of the Young Stallions.

18. The Patriot. Given the unhealthy doses of xenophobia and nationalism always rampant in pro wrestling the last thing you needed was some condemned flea market knock off of Captain America, especially when The Real American, American Dream, and the cross-border tension easing Can Am Connection already beat you to the fake punch, as far as saluting the flag is concerned. Much like the other Patriot Act, this wore thin pretty quick. What would’ve been fun: a wigged, Patriot founding fathers gimmick. “I’m gonna take you out and beat you senseless. We hold these truths to be self-evident”

17. The Executioner. Again, zero effort on the part of the WWF at the time to enhance his executioner persona with say, a dark black hood (effectively put to use by the other Executioner, menacing boxing hall of famer Bernard Hopkins) or an axe. Instead, what was obvious to everyone watching Wrestlemania I, was that it was none other than “Playboy” Buddy Rose in a really tight-fitting mask (red for some unfathomable reason), whose identity top brass wanted to conceal as an immediate loss to Tito Santana would’ve sidetracked his career. If you look closely at the attached photo, you can see the look in Buddy Rose’s eyes as he realizes the only thing he’s executing is his career.

16. Aldo Montoya. Aldo Montoya, “The Portuguese Man O’ War”. Opting for a superhero look rather than the marine invertebrate was a good choice, as a human jellyfish doesn’t play well in any arena. However,  this superhero looked like a sketch scribbled in the sub basement of a rec center for wayward youth. Bears passing resemblance to a forgettable incontinent-sounding comic book creation from the 40s, The Whizzer, dressed up in that always intimidating color: yellow. Forever known to fans of the squared circle as “the guy with a yellow jockstrap on his face”.

15. The Battle Kat. Easily the least intimidating masked wrestler of all time that isn’t the one following this entry, this kitty was doomed from the start, as his feline mannerisms/persona were immediately undermined by Gorilla Monsoon’s unhelpful “It’s gotta be hard for him to step into the ring and do anything with that kind of mask on, you’ve got no peripheral vision and it’s tough to breathe”. Even more difficult had this extremely lame gimmick gone on for any longer would have been fending off lawsuits from Mattel, owners of the He-Man franchise from which the Battle Kat idea was blatantly stolen.

14. Shark Boy / Shark Girl. Shark Boy (thankfully, no relation) would draw his hand to his forehead like a pontifical blessing and then mimic a shark’s dorsal fin, because, well, he hailed from “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,” and at various times “from the deep blue sea”.

To demonstrate how much wrestling has evolved since the introduction of masks, his female counterpart Shark Girl, it would seem, sprouted limbs and crawled ashore, as she hails from an island. (For other terrible TNA masked wrestlers, please check out the offensive and tacky partner of Sharkie Curry Man).

13. Golga. Speaking of sharks, the talented John Tenta (R.I.P.) best known as Earthquake, was ‘The Shark’ in WCW (“I’m not a fish, I’m a man!”) and just when you thought things couldn’t possibly sink any lower, the accomplished sumo wrestler was weighed down by an even more astonishingly brain-dead gimmick, Golga, part of the decorous Parade of Human Oddities. The character was obsessed with Cartman from Southpark, a cheap product tie-in during the show’s heyday.

12. The Giant Machine. Many speculate that during his heyday Andre The Giant was one of the most recognizable athletes on the planet. Nobody else had as much difficulty getting in and out of imported rental cars. Just before Andre turned on Hulk Hogan, the WWF decided it would be a good move to put one of their all-time biggest draws in a mask and bill him as Giant Machine, a masked wrestler from “The Orient.”  If you’re nearly 7 feet tall and 500 lbs, a masked masquerade is less effective than throwing a tarp over you and being passed off as a Ringling Brothers elephant. To their credit, wrestling brass and if memory serves, Bobby Heenan, pointed out to the audience in protest, ‘that guy’s really Andre the Giant!’

11. The Killer Bees. An above average, athletic tag team known for their feuds with the Hart Foundation, they make our B-List by being a babyface team that adopted a dirty tactic used by heels—not a good one, like a chair or a foreign object—but ‘Masked Confusion’, whereby the referee would be confused about who was the legal man in the ring, due to their concealed masked identities (At least the facial identities. Completely different physiques and hair length were a different story, but wrestling referees are notorious for being not the brighest of lights on the Christmas tree.)

CLICK HERE FOR PART TWO OF THE WORST MASKED WRESTLER GIMMICKS OF ALL TIME!!!

January 26, 2009 | lists

With Part One of our list of exploding animals, we’re sure we’ve earned a lifetime ban at PETA conventions. The chances of us ever getting asked to attend one of those nudie photo shoots where some hot actress is wearing only a couple of leaves of lettuce and a smile are slim. But since we’re the kind of guys who will forsake the frivolities in the interest of giving our readers more bang for their buck, we will continue and compound the offence given in the first installment by presenting you with another four animals gone boom. Put on an apron, don the protective eyewear and hold your noses as we present the Top 4 Exploding Animals!

4) Exploding Snail: (available via subscription only) Dave Barry made a lot of hay with this one in his column. A Syracuse woman was sitting down to dinner at a fancy eatery for her 36th and ordered the escargot, that French delicacy that you eat and puts your bill over 100 bucks. She was getting ready to eat her second escargot when it exploded in her face, blinding her for 90 minutes and resulting in burns around her right eye.  The restaurant owner who actually benefited from the notoriety gained by his combustible crustaceans reckoned that steam built up inside the snail due to its internal moisture and that propelled out of the serving dish and into the birthday girl’s eye.

3) Exploding Toad: In 2005, the world’s thirst for exploding amphibians was nicely sated by a story out of Germany and Denmark concerning toads that just seemed to be sitting around blowing up all over the place. Nature protection officials were watching toads swell up and go boom – their innards decorating up to one meter of the surrounding area. The lake where most of these incidents were taking place was dubbed “The Lake of Death,” but, as an astute Wikipedia writer took the trouble to point out, “No other animals in the area were exploding.” Over 1,000 toads had burst their guts over just a few days.

The actual reason for this is the kind of thing that used to horrify us on Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. Scientists found it was due to an influx of predatory crows into the region. For crows, few things are as tasty as toad liver and they are pretty skilled at getting it. A crow can swoop down, pluck out a toad liver and be off to shit on a park-goer’s head before he can say, “Why do I always forget to wear my hat?” The toad puffs up to protect itself – too late – and
due to the hole where the liver used to be their blood vessels and lungs rupture and this spreads to the intestines and, well, boom.

2) Burmese python explodes: We feel for the python in this one. Who among us hasn’t say, at a buffet or a wedding with decent eats, gone for the glory and tried to shove just one more piece of chocolate cake down an already well sated gullet? Or ordered another round when half of the last one lies spilled over the table. The ability to overindulge is the ability to enjoy life, with both hands.

So if you’re a giant Burmese python skulking around in the Florida everglades, a bit tired of the standard diet of rats and puppies, and you come across an alligator – all that sweet alligator meat right there on the hoof as it were – you might be tempted to forego a proper sizing up of your prey and just say get in my belly. That’s what this python did, and he bested the alligator, eating it, but not exactly able to digest his meal. The alligator so distended the python that it exploded, leaving behind cool photos and giving us one more entry on this list.

1)Exploding Whale: The golden rule when it comes to explosions is, of course, the bigger the better. If a film director shows a backwoods cabin being blown to smithereens, the audience will be impressed, but if he can get some convincing CGI guys on the job and have the Eiffel Tower shot to the moon like a rocket where it blows up on impact, then you have yourself a summer blockbuster. And when it comes to exploding animals, it does not get much better than this one, the granddaddy of all exploding animal threads and videos.

This happened in Oregon in 1970, but has lived on via a hilarious news report (see below) at the time which has become a viral favorite on the net. A whale had washed up on one Oregon beach, and it was decided that the Oregon Highway Division were responsible for disposing of it – because it had begun to stink worse than an accidental face-full from the fertilizer sprayer. As he says in the video, the gentleman in charge of the operation said that they had no experience dealing with dead whales and had no idea how to go about it. Bury the whale and predators will dig it up or the tide will wash in and things’ll go back to square one. They could chop him up, he said, “but nobody wants to do that.” So they decided on dynamite.

The detonation was not a success. A large part of the whale was still in tact after the explosion, while massive chunks of blubber from other quarters went hurtling at terrified bystanders who thought that the quarter-mile distance they had given between themselves and the whale would be enough. It wasn’t. Everybody was showered in bits of whale goo and one sizable chunk of blubber crashed on the hood of a man’s car, smashing it in. It looked like a hell of a fun day at the beach in Oregon.

Combustible Mention

The Non-Exploding Cow – Moooving Art from Berlin: As mentioned earlier, it is not possible – despite Dave Barry’s many attempts to convince otherwise – to blow up a cow by holding up a match to its ass and waiting for it to fart. There are also far better ways to spend a Saturday night even if you live in rural areas. If you do attempt this, you’re likely to have one angry cow on your hands and a farmer with a shotgun in search of an explanation as to why you’re lingering around the hindquarters of his livestock.

Had this stunt went off as expected, it could very well have knocked the exploding whale off the top of this list. German artist Wolfgang Flatz planned to drop a dead cow packed with pyrotechnics from a helicopter onto a demolished building. The cow was expected to land in an explosion of fireworks and beef bits not since the barbecue blew up during 4th of July Celebrations at the local Stop and Gobble. A teenager protesting the planned bovine blast at least offered an interesting reason for the protest, saying that the event could trigger “spiritual shock”, and if anything is going to convince you of a creator at work – insane though he may be – it would be the site of a cow plummeting to earth and setting off a display of fireworks and gore when it lands. That beats the founding stories of most religions. Nonetheless, the gawkers in the crowd were disappointed by the actual event. The cow was just dumped out of the helicopter and landed with a thud, no fireworks, and sadly no exploding cow.

CLICK HERE FOR PART ONE OF OUR TOP EXPLODING ANIMALS RUNDOWN!