February 1, 2016 - New Old Beginnings

Hi. This right here is my website. It used to be a blog, but then, I unblogged it and went back to the old fashioned Web 1.0 style, because I am an old man now, and the old ways are best. The internet was cooler when there was less of it. When they finally figured out how to make money with websites, the next step was to make everything user-friendly enough that people who were previously too stupid to use computers could finally participate, and then you had the aggregator blog bullshit show up, and it's all ruined now, all of it. Everyone can start a blog or a social media account and shout into the void what they want the void to hear, but more often than not, they have nothing to say, so it's another sketchy political belief expressed via Minion meme, or the fifteen thousandth retelling of the "Hope, Jobs, and Cash" joke. A couple years from now, when Donald Trump is president and 48% of the continental United States is on fire, just remember that the modern internet did that, by telling the dude down at the Snak Shak to vote against HUSSEIN Obama trying to claim the mystical power of the Jade Helm for Socialist Islam. And if something good does get posted somewhere? It either gets scrolled off the page by a barrage of Star Wars mashup memes and "here's what Twitter says about X" articles too fast for you to know about it while you're out there living, or the site shuts down, due to not having enough Star Wars mashup memes and "here's what Twitter says about X" articles to generate clicks and pay the hosting bill.

And all the advantages of the modern internet have proven to be things that don't apply to me at all. Thanks to my giant, manly hands, I'm never going to post anything more substantial than a tweet (which is not substantial at all) with my phone, and outside of people I already knew in like 2001, most of the people who want to socially connect with me are just advertising robots and modernized human advertising robots who just want the ol' follow back (which sounds like a lurid sexual act, but is literally just folloing them back, you guys)  to boost their own meaningless numbers. I'm too lax on my housekeeping to be a YouTuber, and I'm too intelligent and good to be a Vine star, and either way, I'm not a cute tween boy with bad hair saying vaguely inspirational things, so no one would care if I was either. I have a wife and a job and a shitload of cats, so I'll never be able to capture people's minds and ad clicks via constant, nonstop posting, the way all the Buzzfeed/Vox/Gawker/Uproxx etc. aggregator sites have done, and I'll never be able to write for one of those, because MAYBE I DON'T WANT YOU TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENS NEXT. So I'm going back to the Old Ways, which again, are best. The grandiose way of putting this is that I'm trying to become the change I want to see on the World Wide Web, but the more honest version is that if I'm going to be an old man yelling at clouds, I'd rather do it on my own terms.



As for the old Wordpress-fired version fo the site, it's still there, (As is the final Blogger version of Web Surf Nicaragua, for the record, if you're cool enough to find it) and it's not going anywhere; just nothing else is going on it.  Future updates are just going up on this page right here, with more long-form stuff getting it's own page.  Then, at the end of the month, I'm  just going to copy anything here and paste it into a monthly dump page, for your future browsing enjoyment. Which kinda turns this into some half-assed 'zine format, now that I think about it, but the term "Monthly Dump" is funny to me, so that's probably the terminology I'll go with. Gonna try and do more stuff than I have been doing, and hopefully the wonderment of a brand new-feeing site will inspire me to maybe finish some of the things rotting in a Wordpress draft, or possibly even the drafts folder in my brain. Probably going to be a lot more "too long for Twitter, too short for a blog" stuff too, like maybe some random "_______ of the day" things. Who knows. Basically, we're going back to what things were like on the old WSN site until 2003 or so, except with fancy CSS in the underlying magical code, instead of frames and tables. I learned some CSS for you people. When I try to go True Black Metal with my internets, I can't even do it right. Shoulda just found an old pirated copy of Microsoft Frontpage and put crazy tiled backgrounds and embedded WAV files on every page. But what can you do.


Gentle reminder that my original site had a Flash intro as late as like 2002 and a non-animated splash page up to 2007.

Also, I'm not sure if this is going to look right or even be viewable at all on all our fancified cellular phones. GOOD. Y'all should be paying attention to where you're driving, anyway. This website is properly viewed on a computer, sitting down, with GWAR playing in the background at a volume that is reasonable to your pets and inoffensive to your neighbors. Even when listening to space barbarian monster metal, you should still be kind to your neighbors, because they might have to wake up early. Listen to GWAR daily, but for the most part, be kind.




THE APOCALYPTIC VERSES OF MOTÖRHEAD

From the Book of Sacrifice, Verse 1, Chapter 1



"If only you believe, then only you will die"

February 4, 2016 - Rassleman Spotlight: L.A. Park



aka Adolfo Tapia, aka La Parka, aka Principe Island, aka L.A. Par-K (La Autentica Parka), aka some other stuff

In the late 90s, World Championship Wrestling made a bunch of deals with a bunch of different wrestling promotions and brought in a whole bunch of dudes to flood the undercard on Monday Nitro and presumably to give wrestling fans a break from watching 40+ year-old ex-WWF guys. They brought in luchadores from AAA, Japanese dudes from NJPW, and grabbed a handful of other guys from places like ECW, and looking back today, it was a pretty mind-boggling thing. The first hour of the show would be absolutely stacked with incredible dudes doing incredible things in incredible matches. The problem though, was that I was a16 year old kid who had grown up on the WWF, and this was all nonsense to me. Wrestling to me was giant muscle-men stomping around really slowly and talking really loudly about how FOREIGNERS ARE BAD, and doing so IN ENGLISH, because this was FUKKIN AMERICA and if you DON'T LIKE IT, well then, we strongly recommend that you GET OUT. I was not a cultured wrestling fan, (is that even a thing?) in fact I was pretty much a dumbass. It never ocured to me that the Villanos were Mexican royalty or that I should freaking out that I got to watch Ultimo Dragon do his thing sometimes multiple times per week. It never occured to me that Eddie Guerrero would pretty much be my favorite wrestler someday, or that 20 years later, I'd be absolutely freaking out at the possibility of seeing Jushin Liger have one match on a WWE B-show.  I was tuning in to WCW to see what the Macho Man and Brutus Beefcake and THE HULKSTER were up to, and this flippy-doo bullshit these little tiny dudes who never talked were doing just took time away from that. But then, there was La Parka.


what

All of a sudden, this dude looking like a washed-out Grim Reaper Skeletor comes out, doing air guitar on a steel folding chair and doing crazy shit and just being like fifteen kinds of charismatic I had never seen before, and my lapsed-Hulkamaniac Grinch heart grew ten sizes that day. I accepted the love of La Parka into my heart, and all the confusing crap the pint-sized Vanilla Midgets were doing started to make a lot more sense, and La Parka under his many copyright-infringement-avoiding names has been my dude ever since. La Parka was a gateway drug to a bigger world outside of normal U.S. rasslin', which was probably a detriment to overall quality of life in the bigger sense, but greatly enhanced my evolution as the sort of dork who does things like type about wrestlers on the internet. And that's how I got where I am now, with both a modernized Darth Maul style L.A. Park mask and a WCW style La Parka mask in my closet along with a weird little bootleg toy octagonal wrestling ring toy with his picture on it, and the fact that it's La Parka II (who is still awesome, but he's no La Parka I, you know?) on the AAA Heroes Del Ring Xbox game slightly impairing my enjoyment of it. The dude was the logo of earlier versions of this site, he served as the basis of my user name on the Death Valley Driver message board, and I occasionally take pictures of myself wearing the mask while holding cats and post them on Twitter.

🎃🎃🎃👻💀👹 SPOOKY WEEKEND😱😈😲🎃🎃🎃 pic.twitter.com/hp8pgKpmTq

— Eggs Erroneous (@turriblevlence) October 31, 2014

L.A. Park Owns, you guys. And here are a few selections for y'all:


La Parka vs. Juventud Guerrera - It's the Chairman of WCW as I first learned of him, you guys.


L.A. Park vs. La Parka - Parkas of the past and present battle for rights to the name. Somehow, the result didn't stick, and that's why I'm still calling him L.A. Park.


La Parka vs. El Hijo Del Santo - An all time classic against a dude who's almost as legendary as his dad, which is saying something. Trigger warning for those pure of spirit who don't like seeing dudes bleed shocking amounts in the name of sporting performance art, and super double bonus trigger warning for people who have ever almost had their face torn off by the son of a saint. It's a three-part video, so just go to YouTube if the second part doesn't auto-load.

THE APOCALYPTIC VERSES OF MOTÖRHEAD

Bastards, 4:3



  "I am the blade, I break the oath that you made
  I am the mace, I am the blow in the face
  I am the ax, to cut down heroes like rats
  I am the sword, I do the work of the Lord"


February 13, 2016 - Documentary Watchin': Kurt & Courtney



Just watched this for the first time a few days ago, but this movie right here first came to my attention not too long after it came out, when one of the dudes I knew who was probably more ahead-of-the-curve than the average 17-year-old from rural Mississippi told me and everybody else who was nearby that we just had to see it. Such recommendations tended to be kinda hit-or-miss, as these same people who hipped you to Clerks back in '95 or so (there was once a time when Kevin Smith was good, I'm serious, look it up) would also be the ones trying to make you watch Donnie Darko or tell you that A Clockwork Orange would change your life forever (it won't) and would eventually evangelize The Boondock Saints for years, then pretend it never happened once Hot Topic found out about that one. So look, I'm gonna just do the actual quality-assessment type part of the review right up front: Kurt & Courtney is an awful pile of shit, an eternal monument to human ineptitude and failure, it is bad, and everyone involved should feel bad. But it is also amazing, and you all should watch it someday, just not for the reasons that dude Don told me to watch it for, some eighteen years ago. (For the record, it's up on various streaming services like Hulu Plus, but you can watch it free and legal right here.)  I think the dude that made this, Nick Broomfield,  went in with all the best of intentions about exploring Kurt Cobain's life and various controversies surrounding his death, but it eventually dissolves into a The Room or Plan 9 From Outer Space situation, where it exists solely as an object of humorous ridicule. And that's kind of messed up, because it's a doc about a dude committing suicide, and you really do feel sorry for the director having to put up with the clown show of failure that's collapsing around him; but fuckin' A, it is what it is.


shoulda just posted this image as the full review

The plot is as follows: Broomfield starts to make a documentary for BBC about Cobain's life, his suicide, and the way people keep seem to be implying that one way or another, Courtney Love was behind it.  From there, he gets ankle-deep in various conspiracy theories, and a neverending stream of laywers, junkies, and opportunists drag him into hell, until you're wanting to invent time travel, so you can run up to the dude and yell "PULL OUT, IT'S NOT WORTH IT, ABORT, ABORT, ABORT," before the first interview with Courtney Love's dad. It almost seems like he's going to get something worth sharing with the world for a while, interviewing people like the family Kurt stayed with after his parents kicked him out, the ex girlfriend he wrote "About a Girl" about, a few other friends and acquaintances, and his almost upsettingly nice and well-adjusted aunt. Then, after the first time you hear the voiceover telling you that they were going to play a Nirvana song here, but Courtney Love's laywers stopped it, (which feels like it happens at least a thousand times), a phone call from BBC people telling him that the film has run out of money, a bizarre chat with Courtney's pre-Kurt boyfriend, and they talk to the private investigator she hired when he disappeared right before he aced himself, with another voiceover pointing out that they did the interview in a cheaper hotel room than their first choice, this thing flies off the rails into a flaming, carnage-filled wreck of zany wackiness.


Hank Love, ladies and gentlemen.

There's the interview with the ex-boyfriend that Courtney Love had tried to groom for superstardom for her to leech off of, who gets increasingly bitter until he impotently cuts some weird sort of wrestling promo on Courtney about how she'll get hers, and maybe he'll get out his guitar and write the  song that will metaphorically chokeslam her straight to hell. There's the interview with Kurt's "best friend" Dylan, who was living with a dealer who "had an Uzi," and the content of the interview is mostly okay, he he is so clearly fuuuuuu-huuuucked up that you can't tell whether he's about to fall asleep or offer the interview a beejer for some smack money, and then he goes into another insane wrestling promo about how if Kurt had actually been murdered, he himself would have already murdered whoever did it. It's like a dark, twisted, 90s heroin-chic version of the mentally impaired guy in the public restroom urinal with his pants around his knees who has to strike up a conversation about how if he met Osama Bin Laden, he would punch him right in the eye. (this actually happened to me once, and only now have I had some way to relate it to y'all, so I guess this flick succeeded somewhere)  The worst of all the people that show up is Courtney Love's dad, whose last name escapes me, so I'm gonna just call him Hank Love. Like this dude starts off as a wacky character like all the others, but by the second time you see him, it's clear that he's pretty much an absolute fucking monster, whose initial reaction to his son-in-law croaking himself was to write a book about how his own daughter probably might have definitely allegedly had him murdered, and who you find out later had sicced a pack of pitbulls on her to make her leave his home as a teenager. Google tells me that Hank Love is still alive, and that's a real shame, you guys.



And then, oh my god, the paparazzi guys. Broomfield gets hooked up with these two "stalkerazzi" guys named Al and Jack somehow, who are too ridiculous to be real, like someone Kramer and Newman would hook George Costanza up with to help perpetrate a hare-brained scheme. One of them shows up in sunglasses, a wig, and a mask, and somehow, the guy with the normal haircut and the turtleneck is the ridiculous looking one. They lay out their nefarious scheme to ambush Courtney and ask her if she killed Kurt, (which of course, if she had, she would answer honestly, you guys, seriously) and good god, y'all to further inform the filmmakers of the conspiracy that had occurred, they send the poor BBC guy off to see fucking El Duce. This dude, if you are unaware, was the frontman and general head honcho of The Mentors, a band of executioner-masked dudes who pioneered a genre they referred to as "rape rock," and is probably best knon to normals from their appearance alongside GWAR on a shock rock themed episode of The Jerry Springer Show. But while GWAR wear masks in the name of showmanship, the Mentors wore them in the name of not being arrested and/or hunted down and killed by angry parents. He gets led by a man described as "Divine Brown's pimp" to a Fred Sanford-ass secret location, where El Duce describes how Courtney offered him $50,000 to "blow his fuckin' head off," in an almost disarmingly friendly and casual manner, until there's an awkward silence, followed by Duce kind of going "YAAAAHHHH" into the camera and walking off. (And for the record, the severely pro-rape dude who openly regrets not taking cash to commit murders still somehow comes off as sympathetic in comparison to Hank Love) When we go back to our paprazzi friends and their Trailer Park Boys scheming, the most amazing sequence takes place, where they walk through the planned ambush interview, and Turtleneck Boy goes "Sony Handicam, we know it'll do the job," followed - I shit you not - by footage of the actual plan coming to fruition as the camera's battery runs smooth the hell out of juice before they can even get to Courtney Love.


Even this dude's Heidi Fleiss poster is like "lol, whatevs"

The rest of the film consists of Broomfield going "man, this murder conspiracy is bullshit, y'all," but in a British accent, followed by him trying to salvage the film by going into real-life stuff about Courtney Love (with help from Kurt Cobain at times) being highly litigious, threatening, and even physically violent with members of the press, and there probably could have been a real documentary to be made about all of that, but so much time had been wasted on conspiracy trainwreck footage, that this is only maybe the last twenty minutes or so. Overall, this thing is an entertaining disaster, and in my wildest dreams, someone will scrape together enough interviews and footage to do an Overnight-style look into the making of this thing, or better yet, a ridiculous R-ratedly fictionalized comedy about it, possibly starring Norm Macdonald and/or the Trailer Park Boys. Also, the parts with shady private investigator types reminded me way too much of the old creep neighbor I bought my 1997 Nissan Sentra (R.I.P., sorry I almost never changed your oil) from, and made me really glad my roommate's non-rent-paying tendencies got us evicted before I could get introduced to whoever central Oklahoma's version of El Duce was. Y'all remind me to tell you about the last quarter of 2004 someday, that shit was nuts. Anyway, Kurt & Courtney sucks ass, and I love it forever.


YAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH

THE APOCALYPTIC VERSES OF MOTÖRHEAD

Aftershock, 1:3



Running through the ruins
All directions wrong
Listen to the world scream out
On and on and on

February 19, 2016 - Rassleman Spotlight: Baron Corbin



Baron Corbin is cool, because he's pretty much the perfect wrestler for 2006. That sounds like a diss, because it's 2016 now, (Or whatever year it is where you are, because you might be reading from the future, and the website bill payment comes out automatically, so this should still be up in 2018. I hope I'm not dead from whenever you're reading this. Jesus.) but the WWE has been stuck in the late 90s since, well, the late 90s, so any forward progress is welcome.Eventually, they're gonna run out of 50 year-olds to pop a Wrestlemania network subscription drive, and the current crop of dudes have done too many jobs for 50 year olds to have any value when they're that old. So new guys are good. But anyway, aside from not having a shaved head and his tatoos being more modernized than tribal in nature, he's like the custom wrestler that all the idiots you knew made on their PS2 copies of Smackdown: Shut Your Mouth, usually right after they made Goldberg. He's like the super Hot Topic style Entry Level Juggalo you used to see a lot of, who would go out and buy a Hatchet Man beanie and desperately try to convince themselves that ICP was some sort of gothic rock instead of a rap group, but by the time they hit college age, they erased all aspects of their former selves and bought Coldplay Cds or whatever. They never had the Clown Love necessary to take the leap to become a full-fledged Ninja and and pick up a neck tattoo and a crippling addiction to crank, and for those folks, I'm pretty sure Madman Pondo still wrestles, out there somewhere in the streets.
But anyway, Baron Corbin is the dude who's enough of a 6'8" (allegedly) hoss to properly impress Vince McMahon, but he's also Team Jacob-y enough to potentially recapture some of the sad young girl/thirsty old mom marketshare the WWE lost by getting rid of both Hardy Boys. He's also getting better and better at being a giant piece of shit bad guy wrestler who makes you hate him on purpose, and despite the  WWE reality show fakery that seemed heavily involved with WWE Breaking Ground, they showed enough of him as a dude who's way up his own ass about being an ex-NFL practice squad guy and who also goes to those weird shops where they sell mummified cats to make me think that he might be an actual, real-life bad person, and it takes me back to a more innocent age, when I was a tiny baby child and I wanted Roddy Piper and Big John Studd to be literally killed in the ring for their crimes, which were most assuredly innumerable in quantity and unspeakable in magnitude. But like I don't wan't him killed, because I'm an adult now, but maybe if like Simon Gotch got too snug on a punch and caught him in the bridge of the nose and made his eyes water up, I'd be pretty down with that. And I'm gonna make a nerd confession here, if rumors of The Undertaker's Wrestlemania 32 opponent being an NXT guy are true, I hope it's this guy, because Unfathomably Old 2016 MMA Zombie Wizard Undertaker vs. Modernized Young Version of 2002 Biker Undertaker would be awesome, and that's the sort of thing that would make a dude's career, forever and ever. Also, his entrance music is god dang fire.

Selections for y'all, which are sorely lacking, because he's only been around for like a couple years, and the WWE locks down their Network-exclusive stuff:



Baron Corbin vs. C.J. Parker - Honestly, you shouldn't even bother clicking play on that video, because the idiots at the WWE edited out the only good part, and I'll just have to describe it for y'all. The match is nothing special anyway, because this is pre-Crisis Corbin, where he just came out and killed people in literally like twelve seconds, so the match basically doesn't count as one. Although I guess if I'm getting technical, pre-Crisis Corbin would be the early days when he was a short-haired neckbeard guy getting killed by that Batista-looking British dude, and "match ends so fast that the crowd counts the seconds" Corbin would be post-Crisis, and the modern worthwhile professional wrestler version of him would be like the New 52 version of Baron Corbin. Then there's that whole weird continuity hiccup where Baron Corbin Prime punched his way out of that pocket universe, and... I feel as though I have lost you.
Anyway, the part you don't see references a previous match where hippie dude CJ Parker brought out some manner of environmental protest sign, which Corbin broke, because he was still a good guy then, and the WWE is problematic. So for the rematch, CJ Parker brought out a new sign that said "you can break my sign, but you'll never break my spirit," and when Corbin comes to the ring, the crowd starts chanting "BREAK HIS SPIRIT, CLAP-CLAP CLAPCLAPCLAP" and it was the only time I genuinely enjoyed something that the stupid fucking crowd at Full Sail University has done. I still want to push all those nerds into the sea someday, though.



Baron Corbin's entrance music - Possibly the most "there's a dude coming to crush you and your home and all your pets and possesions" WWE entrance theme outside of Rusev's, both of which make me giddy for the eventuality that James A. Johnston gets put out to pasture and CFO$ takes over doing the rassletracks for everybody. Like what even is CFO$, anyway? Is it a person? A group? Some sort of robot music licensing service with low standards of who they'll work with? Magical mysteries.



Baron Corbin & Rhyno vs. Jason Jordan & Chad Gable - This video is also kind of useless, because it's just the final minute or so of a match that was on a WWE Network exclusive show, and like I said, the E puts the clamp down when people try to bootleg those on YouTube, so it's the only video of this match I could find. This is mostly known for being the match where the world at large discovered that Chad Gable has become pretty much the new Internet God Master of WHITE DUDEZ DOIN MOVEZ, but somewhere in the background of all that noise, this was the one where it suddenly became apparent that Baron Corbin might actually be okay at the wrestling. It's a shame that there's only a minute of this (or footage of pretty much anyone who's only been WWE NXT people) on free internets. You should get the WWE Network for real though. Unless you don't like wrestling, in which case, why did you read this all the way to the end? Go read a book or look at a sunset or something, Jesus.