(Disclaimer: Today’s blitz post is a very macabre downer. If you want the usual type of light hearted fun we have around here, check out this or this.)

If you read my first post on wrestling for this fine website, you may recall me mentioning that my favorite wrestler for the past 11 years has been Chris Benoit. Pretty much from the first match I saw him wrestle, actually.

If you’ve been living under a rock this past week, Benoit allegedly strangled his wife Nancy with an electrical cord on Friday, smothered or killed his son Daniel with a chokehold on Saturday before hanging himself with the pulley from one of his weight machines late Sunday or early Monday.

Chris Benoit was one of my heroes. I admired the adversity he overcame to get where he was. I appreciated the fact that I had never heard a negative word about him in (out of character) interviews with other wrestlers. Usually, every wrestler has a ton of other wrestlers who hate them for one reason or another. I thought that he was a stand up example of a wrestler, a family man, a professional (by any definition) and that he was even a good Canadian. Ever since I started with journalism, I’ve had a thought in the back of my head: “someday, I’ll find an excuse to interview Chris Benoit.”

I usually don’t edit my writing in this format. I’m more into a stream of consciousness style of writing. This is my third time writing this article. The first one ended with “Thanks for the memories and the inspiration.” The second one ended with “Goddamn you for what you did and for letting me down so badly.”

I’ve spent the majority of the past week trying to, for lack of a better term, get inside Benoit’s head, and understand what happened. Really, it’s all I know how to do right now. I’m a journalist, and I guess that’s engrained in me. I want to try and understand what happened. Naturally, it’s hard to act as a journalist without all (or even most of) the relevant facts, but I’ve been trying. It’s all I can do.

A little background on Benoit the wrestler-

Benoit was the anti-Hulk Hogan. Hogan is a man with incredible charisma, but limited wrestling and athletic ability. Benoit did not capture the imagination of the casual wrestling fan with boistrous interviews, but he was in the eyes of many, myself included, the best technical wrestler of all time. Simplified, what that means is that Benoit’s movements and his storytelling in the match were second to none. He was crisp; he performed normal moves with a velocity that made it seem like everything he did could be a finishing move. Also as opposed to Hogan, he took an incredible amount of punishment in the ring. Many of his moves (a flying headbutt, german suplexes, dives to the outside, top rope superplexes) would cause him as much damage as his opponent.

To us internet wrestling folk, that was the kicker. Not only did he perform his moves excellently, but every night in the ring he gave you his all. He was also a cardio freak. Benoit was noted for doing 500 hindu squats before every match. To give you an idea of the insanity of that, here are excerpts from a blog by another WWE wrestler, Shaun Davari-

“Chris Benoit and Rob Conway warm up before the matches by doing free standing Hindu squats. They usually do about 500 a piece. It took them some time to build up to that many. The average person can do about 20 before cramping up. Someone in decent shape can do about 75-100. I wanted to give it a try…The next day I couldn’t even walk! I was so sore and tense in my legs that I couldn’t bend my knees past 45 degrees, and as the day went on my range of motion got less and less. Two days later was RAW and I couldn’t even bend my legs at all!…I hobbled back to the locker room and took a piss and to my amazement it was red. The next day I was in even more pain and sick as hell. I puked about 5 times…Came back to the locker room and my pee was blackish-brown. Like Dr. Pepper. Gave a sample to the doctor and he ran some tests on it and got back to me the next day turns out the red then eventually black was the actual muscle fiber in my legs! They had been broken down so much they traveled into my blood stream got to my kidneys.”

Point is, Benoit was a cardio machine. This was evident in the pace he kept in the ring.

One of the things that impressed me about Benoit was that his was a story of overcoming adversity. In the wrestling business, the most successful competitors (Hulk Hogan, Andre the Giant, Triple H, Undertaker and Steve Austin, for example) were larger than life. The shortest of the aforementioned group is 6′4″. At 5′10″, Benoit was a normal sized man in a world of giants. Reportedly, many promoters and wrestlers had told Benoit he was too little to make it to the top. But he was determined to prove, through his work in the ring, that he was as good or better than the aforementioned wrestlers. In many peoples eyes, he did just that.

But that’s really where the seeds for this tragedy were laid, in my eyes. Because he didn’t have the height to be readily accepted as a top ranked wrestler, Benoit focused on packing his body with the largest muscles his frame could hold.

(left: In the early 90’s. right: last year. Notice the increased definition and “cutness”)

It becomes clear that Benoit used steroids to accomplish this. And it seems he used them consistently for the better part of his 20 year career. While I’ll avoid discussing the morality of using steroids, the side effects have been discussed at length in the media over the past week (albeit with an incredible degree of sensationalism). Regardless, some of the side effects that have been mentioned are forms of insanity and rage.

Next point, concussions. Referring back to my earlier mentions of how much punishment Benoit took in the ring, I think it stands to reason that Benoit had a list of concussions that would put Pagz to shame. I wonder about the german suplexes.

Every time that move is performed, not only does the back of your head smack off the mat, but there’s also the ass of a 250 pound wrestler landing on your face. I can see this leading to a lot of concussions, particularly since Benoit performed them in sequence, sometimes up to 10 in a row.

Former wrestler Chris Nowinski had his career ended due to a severe concussion. Now the Harvard graduate has written a book, and does speaking engagements, about the dangers of concussions in sports. He was quoted in a New York Times article this week:

“He was one of the only guys who would take a chair shot to the back of the head,” Mr. Nowinski said, “which is stupid.”

Mr. Nowinski has written a book called “Head Games: Football’s Concussion Crisis” (Drummond Publishing Group, 2006), about chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a condition that can cause memory loss, depression and “bizarre, paranoid behavior.”

Mr. Nowinski said that he had been trying to persuade the coroner examining Mr. Benoit to allow a brain exam to look for the telltale neurofibrillary tangles in the brain’s cortex, but that he had thus far been rebuffed.”

Pagz, take care of yourself.

We’ve now got a picture of a man with potential for psychosis stemming from both concussions and steroid use. Add to this, his son suffered from a condition called “Fragile X” syndrome, a sort of combination of mental retardation, austism and dwarfism. It’s a hereditary condition, so Benoit may have harboured guilt over it, or perhaps bitterness towards his wife over it. I theorize that all this had taken its toll on Benoit by 2003 and he began to unravel. That year, his wife filed for divorce, citing threats of violence. She later withdrew the divorce.

(As an aside, I’d like to point out this isn’t all an attempt to justify Benoit’s terrible actions, or to say that he wasn’t responsable for his actions. Judging that is a job for a far higher authority than I. We all make our own judgments and decisions, and we have to live with them. This is all just an effort to understand how someone could bring themselves to do something so awful, particularly when no one claims to have seen any signs of this before.)

Benoit was already in a bad way, and only getting worse everytime he was in the ring. With his synapses getting more fried out every night, he was ill prepared for the death of his best friend, Eddie Guerrero, in 2005. I see this as being the point where psychologically, he snapped. Shortly after this, some wrestlers have reportedly said, Benoit began to get paranoid and erratic. He thought someone was following him, and possibly trying to hurt his family.

(above:Benoit and Guerrero at the height of their careers in 2004.)

My theory of the last weekend of his life: (this is macabre as hell, but it’s how I cope. I’ll use the spoiler formatting for the benefit of those who don’t want to read such a theory)

Friday- During an argument with his wife over care of their son, something drives Benoit over the edge, and he kills his wife. It’s not an act of roid rage, or uncontrollable anger, but rather the twisted logic of someone who’s mental processes have been perverted. I’d like to think that Daniel did not know his mother was dead, but that’s just wishful thinking on my part.
Saturday- Benoit spends the day with his son, perhaps playing or just talking, all the while debating in his damaged head over the type of life his son will have. He may have thought that the boy would be better off in whatever afterlife there is than with a dead mother and a father either dead or in jail. At the end of the day, Chris and Daniel laid down in the child’s bed, and his son fell asleep in his arms. He gently slipped the crook of his arm around the boy’s throat, cutting off his air.
Sunday- I can’t even wager a guess at what went through his mind on this last day, sitting in his house with the bodies of his family. I’d guess at some point he went to his weight room, maybe the only place he felt comfortable, and killed himself.

That’s how I think it happened. Obviously, I’ve never met the man. I haven’t examined the crime scene, or read any toxicology reports, but that’s my feeling on it right now.

Before all this, I felt admiration for the man. As the story progressed, I felt anger towards him. Now, after considering all these possibilities, I just pity him. I feel bad that he was in a mental state where he could rationalize killing his family. I feel bad that noone was able to see what was wrong and reach out to him. I feel bad for Nancy and Daniel, the victims. Most of all, I feel sadness for Benoit’s two surviving children, the surviving victims.

There are many ironies about this story. The one that strikes me now is that for years, I said, “if there was any justice in the world, Chris Benoit would be the most well known wrestler in the world.” And now he is, at least for the past week.

Another of my heroes has snuffed himself out. The first one was Hunter S. Thompson. Maybe I just pick shitty heroes. Maybe in some dark way, I’m drawn to them. Perhaps, subconsiously, I can sense the tragedy, and I can’t help but stick around for the drama. I don’t know.

All I know for sure is that a young boy and his mother are dead by the actions of a man almost universally described as a “loving, caring father.” It’s hard to reconcile the two images of the man.

This will probably be the last time I write about wrestling for a while.

Take care of yourselves and your loved ones.

Further reading that I found-

“Hell is a Place called Home” by Inside Clyde of Lethal Wrestling

411 Mania’s John Meehan’s thoughts on the subject

A few weeks ago I wrote an article along the lines of how Canadiana is represented in the Canadian media. Not surprisingly, the CBC was referenced. Without getting too far into it, I said I liked the CBC. I do. But now I’m going to muse over it a little more, and to be fair, I can’t let it off that easily.

The man in red is Wayne Rostad. He is maybe 12 feet tall, totes a guitar, sings like your uncle, has had that moustache since Christ was a corporeal (though recently he has shaved it leading me to not recognize a photo of him), and for two decades hosted the CBC series On the Road Again. This is a show I watched regularly in my childhood, not because I was particularly interested in cross-country travelogues and interviews with farmers in places like Carrot River, Saskatchewan, but because my father watched it. That, Land and Sea, Lorne Greene’s New Wilderness, and many others. We pretty much figured we knew Wayne on a first name basis if he ever decided to drop by, and heck yeah it was exciting when he visited somewhere in Nova Scotia. So forgive me if I carry a soft spot for a 20 year old show and its mustachioed troubadour host, but it’s there. Which now brings us to the beginning of 2007, when the CBC quietly pulled the plug on Wayne Rostad. Of course, On the Road Again was old. Yes, the ratings were lagging. But it didn’t lack for source material. It had a loyal audience. There were a lot of people upset to see it go. But cancellations happen to a lot of good shows. Who wasn’t sad to see Arrested Development cut after three seasons?

What makes a difference is that it didn’t skip people’s attention that the cancellation of this show was indicative of CBC’s recent attempts to slide into the race for higher audience ratings, to target a youth audience, to go populist, maybe even to be (God help me) hip.

Not that change is a bad thing, and maybe some people have their hearts in the right place, but the attempts thus far to court the kiddies on part of the CBC have been nothing short of embarrassing. I think the American Idol- like The One is the go-to example of just what we’re dealing with here. Hosted by George Stroumboulopoulos, a man I watched lobby for Tommy Douglas on The Greatest Canadian with impressive candour, it is an extreme departure from what those of us who had watched Stroumboulopoulos move from the ultra lame MuchMusic to the respectable CBC had wanted to see. This show, The One, was so obtrusive, it bumped The National’s timeslot back. Manhandling Peter Mansbridge! That’s not allowed even for good shows! And as part of the young crowd the CBC is trying to attract, I’m insulted.

You see, I have a brain. And nearly all of the friends I have who are also fans of the CBC like it because we consider information to be entertaining. We listen to Information Morning (in the Maritimes anyway) and have opinions on Rex Murphy’s diatribes (and also his scary eyebrows). And we’re still there, watching programming like China Rising (which is really great) but wincing every time ads for Fashion File Host Hunt play during the commercial breaks. Unfortunately, however, the going idea is that informative programming plays to an elitist audience of people three times my age, making me and my friends not exist, and not being fair to the upcoming generation of viewers who are now being fed this ‘new’ CBC.

The vision of Executive Vice President Richard Stursberg’s “2.0 environment” makes sense in theory but because nobody there appears to know how to do “2.0” right, it seems to be taking everything fans of the CBC cherish and, if not getting rid of them, mulches them into some kind of easily digestible paste, which is as gross to observe as it sounds. If I want to watch shitty, popular shows that pander to an audience with sub-zero attention span and remarkable disinterest in everything except flashy colours and celebrities, I’ll turn on Fox – or even A&E, which also fell down a slippery slope somewhere in between Biography and Dog the Bounty Hunter. And everyone, including me, likes that type of show now and then even if they say they don’t. But this is the national network. It’s a backbone, where at its best (if you’ll allow some doe-eyed wishful thinking) it should be the visible integrity of the country. Please, don’t let it degenerate any further. I’ll even watch Rita MacNeil Christmas specials again, if you want.

Ah hell, I watch those anyway.

IMDb Link: A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors
Year: 1987
Directed by: Chuck Russell
Writing credits: Wes Craven

Weasel Rating: {>>–} (So-So)

Please note that this review is laden with spoilers.

Freddy Injury Count: Freddy, as a giant rubber-neck or snake-like being, is stabbed in the eye, stabbed in the armpit, zapped with elf-powered-magic, kicked in the neck, clubbed twice, and impaled. But wait, there’s more. He then proceeded to have his ears nearly burst by a woman’s scream, he is stabbed with his own glove, then dies in a dazzle of special effects. Apparantly his own glove is the worst injury he incurred.

Body count: 5, with 1 implied death. Freddy can’t seem to achieve Jason’s level. If one were to add up all three of his first movies, he would come close. There were, however, dozens and dozens of supposedly dead bodies hanging from the rafters in one of the dream sequences. It is implied that these are Freddy’s kills.

Plot Outline: Freddy is back! And no, not some kid-posessed with Freddy… But Freddy himself! This is the first movie where he is actually called “Freddy” instead of “Fred.” It’s about time!

In this movie, Freddy is back to tormenting kids in their dreams. All the kids on Elm Street are sent to a “dream hospital” for therapy - but they seem to be sharing group hallucinations. Freddy slowly starts killing them off one by one!

It turns out that each kid has a magical superpower in their dreams. These on their own are funny enough to qualify the watching of the movie. Things like turning into a magician and zapping people, becomming an 80’s punk ass-kicker, or even being supra-strong.

The star and sole survivor of the first movie, Nancy, is back too - being the kid’s helping hand in their dreams.

The ghost of Freddy’s mom (as is revealed at the end of the movie) revealed Freddy’s origins to the audience as well. In the same dream-institution, in the abandoned wing, they had a certain cell block devoted to the world’s worst criminally insane. No maximum security prison, just a communal room behind a locked door. One night, a young nurse was accidentally locked in the cell, and she was found nearly dead the next morning, being raped by over 100 criminals. She was pregnant… and Freddy turned out to be “the bastard son of 100 maniacs.”

My Opinion: Other than this whole movie and the kids powers reminding me of the Care Bears, this movie wasn’t half bad. It was only one quarter bad. I recommend this over all other movies in the first 4 of the series.

Interesting Notes:

• This is the first movie where Freddy got some “cheezy” lines, making his kills more humorous - and Robert Englund was given chances to improv in almost every kill scene.
• This movie sports a claymation Freddy! Go claymation, go!
• The origional VHS version of this movie sports a pre-show music video! In all of it’s hardcore 80’s video glory! Some scenes of the movie are very comically spliced in. I loved it.
• This movie was Banned twice in Sweden (running time 93 and 92 min). Finally passed at 90 min in 1988.

Fun Quotes!

• “Welcome to Prime Time, Bitch!” - Freddy’s first Improv line, spoken just before shoving a girl’s head into a television. The original line was (sadly) “You’re on TV now, girl!”
• “Let’s go kick the motherfuckers ass all over dreamland!” - This is just too funny.
• “I said, ‘Where’s the fucking bourbon?’” - Looks like Freddy’s turning into a heavy drinker. I hope he doesn’t get more messed up than he already is.

Lead roles:

Heather Langenkamp - Nancy Thompson
Craig Wasson - Dr. Neil Gordan
Patricia Arquette - Kristen Parker
Robert Englund - Freddy Krueger
Ken Sagoes - Roland Kincaid
Rodney Eastman - Joey Crusel
Jennifer Rubin (I) - Taryn White
Bradley Gregg - Phillip Anderson
Ira Heiden - Will Stanton
Laurence Fishburne - Max
Penelope Sudrow - Jennifer Caulfield
John Saxon - Donald Thompson
Priscilla Pointer - Dr. Elizabeth Simms
Clayton Landey - Lorenzo
Brooke Bundy - Elaine Parker

Tagline: Sleep. Those little slices of death. How I loathe them. - Edgar Allen Poe

Part two of the two part series, Paper Fasteners, all hail the Stapler! See also last week’s article on Paper Clips.

So what is it? A stapler is a device that was designed to fasten multiple pieces of paper together. The basic construction is usually of plastic and metal, and includes a base for a top arm to swing down upon. The base has a curved piece of metal to allow the arms of a staple to bend around to “lock” pieces of paper together. When pressure is applied to the top arm, it swings down, and the mechanical workings inside push a single staple through an aperture and into your target (such as your thumb).

But who am I kidding, who doesn’t know what a stapler is? Let’s hear something interesting.

A History: It is believed that in the 1200s, people attempted to fasten papers together with a short ribbon. Each piece of paper had a cut in the upper left hand corner; A process was used to seal and connect the papers with wax and ribbons. Although this method was used for almost 600 hundred years, it is unknown who developed this early fastening method.

During the 1700s, a stapler machine or fastener was made for the exclusive use of King Louis XV of France. Each staple was handmade and inscribed with the royal court’s insignia. For some reason, this device was never introduced to the masses.

In 1841, Samuel Slocum patented his invention of sticking pins on paper - early inspiration for the stapler. The first true stapler was the McGill Single Stroke Staple Press, which could load a single staple and drive the staple through two pieces of paper. Patents were issued for this invention in 1866 and 1879.

Novelty Mfg Co. received patents for their stapler in 1866, with others following in the 1880s and 1890s. Although their fastener loaded one staple at a time, it was recommended for binding books, papers, and pamphlets, as well as for putting down carpets and upholstering furniture.

Charles H. Gould also gets credit for inventing the stapler. In 1868 he invented the wire stitcher for use in binding magazines. Gould’s wire stitcher used uncut wire, which then cut and inserted the wire in the folds of the magazine as well as folding the wire ends over. Gould’s invention is considered the predecessor of the modern stapler.

By the beginning of the 20th Century, different stapling machines were being manufactured in larger quantities. In 1905 an American manufacturer, B. Jahn Mfg. Co., developed what would turn out to be the most popular stapler of its time. His stapler could hold Twenty-five tin-coated metal staples, and were placed in a modern-like tray within the stapler. It wasn’t easy to use, though; every time a staple was needed, the operator hit the stapler with a mallet. It is unclear whether it also reduced workplace stress.

The actual word “stapler” came into its own in 1909. Before that time, these products were called fasteners or a “Hotchkiss” after the American company that created the majority of them.

It wasn’t until 1914 that the stapler gained a presence in American offices. This is evidenced in the 1913 edition of Webster’s Dictionary:

Sta”pler (n)

• A dealer in staple goods.
• One employed to assort wool according to its staple.

Companies thought that only one stapler was all that was needed for an office of 500 people! It became a common gathering ground like the modern-day photocopier. Still, the first office-grade staplers were not easy for office workers to use because they had loose or paper-wrapped staples with a complicated reloading procedure.

Fortunately in 1923, the Boston Wire Stitcher Co. introduced an easier model. In time, manufacturers also developed another innovation - - staples that were glued in a strip for easy handling.

In the late 1930s, Swingline created a product in which the stapler would open up on top, and one could drop in a strip of staples. Twenty years later, electric staplers were introduced. Although electric staplers filled the need for faster productivity and accuracy, the basic principle of these earlier staplers remained the same.

Contributed Notes: “… Old-fashioned law offices in the UK (and a few in the US) are still fastening Wills together with ribbon-and-wax, on the grounds of general coolness, and also, it’s harder to tamper with.” - SEF

“… In Japan, a stapler is sometimes called a ‘hochikisu’… that is, like Hotchkiss.” - exceptinsects

My writing is actually going to pay off for a change!

I was recently offered a position at one of my favorite gaming sites, Fun-Motion. It’s a website that focuses on free and cheap, indie-developed Physics-based games.

It’s where I found some of my recent favorite games, such as SteamBrigade, Armadillo Run, and of course… Toribash.

I’m currently scheduled to do two reviews per month (though I don’t beleive that’s set in stone) and I’m actually getting cash-dollars for it!

Finally my dollar-signs-in-eyes avatar is topical!

Though gumbo is basically a whatever-I-have-left-in-the-house-goes-in-the-pot recipe, I accidently stumbled upon what will probably be my standard recipe from now on.

The recipe is fairly healthy - full of veggies and made with very little oil. The “sausages” I use are actually turkey sausages. No rice or potatoes or anything in it either, so those doing low-carb can be happy as well. And yet, this soup is full of flavour!

So…WOULD YOU EAT THIS??

Be careful not to completely lose sight of the big picture.

It’s a beautiful, warm summer’s day. I’m going to bike to the lake.