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They say that admitting your problem is the first step on the road to recovery. So here I go: I am in the throes of a powerful obession with professional wrestling.
There, I said it. but maybe it's not that bad... I have mentioned this before, noting that the Memphis-based Mid-South/CWA and Lexington-based ICW promotions were tremendous sources of entertainment to me in my pre-teen years. Since then, my interest has been mostly sporadic — until now, that is. After leaving Lexington, I watched WWF now and again and I know I spent at least one summer during college renting and watching all the Wrestlemania and WWF videos that were available up to that point. After college, my interest became even more fleeting and I would usually limit myself to watching some old-school videos about once a year for a couple weeks at a time. But this time, it's different. For about four months now, I've been enjoying a steady diet of pro wrestling every night after work and on the weekends. It started back when I snagged a set of 5 ICW DVDs from an online auction. Then I ended up watching a new installment of Smackdown! one Friday night and I became totally hooked. Since then, I have been watching Smackdown!, RAW, and ECW with some regularity and I have been catching up on the recent WWE pay-per-view events by picking up old DVDs of the shows at local secondhand stores. I even went out in a level 2 snow emergency to pick up a couple of DVDs a few weeks ago. I'm even planning on catching this year's big show, Wrestlemania 23. It's really that bad, folks.
I don't want to give anyone the impression that I'm really proud of all this. There's plenty to be embarrassed about. WWE isn't really your simple, light-hearted fake violence any more. It used to be that the arenas in Kentucky and Memphis would fill up with pre-teens who paid $1 or $2 admission to see hours of big match-ups; just fight, after fight, after fight. But these days, it's a completely different industry. All the salacious, over-the-top story lines along with the marketing, hype, sex and gore in today's WWE shows are really something of an annoyance to me. But the great thing about watching them on DVR/DVD is that I can just skip to the good matches and cut out all the crap in between. A good match between a face and a heel that includes some acrobatics, some bad acting and some cartoon violence is all I'm really after at the end of the day.
At this point, I feel compelled to share a little about my favorites from all these years of watching pro wrestling. It will be a little easier if I make two categories here: "Old School" refers to everything before the "WWE 'Attitude'" era (which I missed completely, by the way — No matter; "Stone Cold" Steve Austin, Goldberg and Mick Foley were never really interesting to me). "New Stuff" is basically a group that includes stuff from 2003 to now, as material from this era seems to be the easiest to find in secondhand stores right now.
Old School Jerry "The King" Lawler: Lawler was the man when I was a kid. As a face, he ruled the CWA territory for years, engaging in some of the most memorable feuds of the day with folks like Jimmy Hart, Bill Dundee, Randy Savage, and Nick Bockwinkel. His old matches with Bockwinkel are still a lot of fun to watch. Lawler was a lot more exciting as a face than he was as a heel. I got to see Lawler wrestle at Rupp Arena in Lexington in the early 1980's. I still have the program, but I don't recall much about the event.
Mr. Perfect
Curt Hennig aka "Mr. Perfect": Mr. Perfect had one of my favorite "finishing moves" of all time: The "Perfect-plex" (fisherman suplex). I got to see him wrestle the King of the Ring in 1993 and everyone around me was laughing at me because I kept yelling "Perfect-plex" him NOW!î Mr. Perfect's feud with Ric Flair (one of the best wrestling "bad guys" ever) and Razor Ramon led to one of my favorite tag-team matches at all time in the 1992 Survivor Series. Perfect was paired with "Macho Man" Randy Savage and although the match ended in a disqualification, it was still great to see Perfect escape Ric Flair's "figure four leglock" by nailing him with a chair. I just caught an old match between Hennig and Nick Bockwinkel for the AWA Title. The match was featured on the "Superstars of Yesteryear" DVD and it was the highlight of an otherwise crappy compilation.
"Macho Man" Randy Savage: Savage was a huge personality it Lexington before he ever uttered "Oooh YEAH" on a WWF show. I've already said this a few times, but his big steel cage match with Ratamyus really made a huge impression on me. I still remember how it felt to see him miss that huge elbow drop off the top of the steel cage. That was, of course, back when I thought it was all real! His WWF years were pretty good, but if you've never seen Savage's early years, it's worth checking out. One DVD compilation features a one-time pairing with Jerry Lawler in which the pair go up against King Kong Bundy and Rick Rude. It's a classic!
New Stuff Chris Jericho: I guess he's not wrestling right now, but I just recently caught his ladder match against Christian on the 2004 Unforgiven DVD. It was amazing!
Edge: I guess I am still not sure if he was a face or a heel in his feud. with Kane. I think he's a heel right now, but he's still fun to watch. Looking forward to that "Money in the Bank" ladder match at Wrestlemania!
Mr. Kennedy: What a great bad guy! If I was to categorize wrestlers by philosophy, I'd rate him as something of a nihilist.
Shawn Michaels: Hey! Shouldn't Shawn be listed under "Old School?' I mean, is he still around these days? Yep. And still pretty exciting, too.
A long time ago, a friend of mine explained that pro wrestling — like all great stories — was about two things: suffering and redemption. Kind of an interesting take on it, eh? Don't worry, folks...Sooner or later, my fascination with pro wrestling is bound to subside again for a little while. Until then, I'll just enjoy the ride. At least I'm not into NASCAR, y'know?
The full text of Lyubov Kosmodemyanskaya's book The Story of Zoya and Shura is now posted online. The book is a biography of two Heroes of the Soviet Union, Zoya Kosmodemayenskaya and her brother Alexander Kosmodemyansky (“Shura”), as written by their mother. This non-copyrighted book was originally published in 1953 by Foreign Languages Press (Moscow). All 286 pages of text and photos are now available through our website.
It's taken me quite a while — probably a bit too long — to transcribe the whole book and given the length of time involved, I wish that I could say that the transcription is flawless. I have spent quite a bit of time cleaning up typos and OCR in the text, but I am sure there are some minor errors here and there that will come to my attention as time goes on.
It was no easy time: the enemy was closing in on Moscow.
One day Zoya and I were walking along the street, and on the wall of a house we noticed a big placard from which the determined face of a soldier looked at us severely. The keen piercing eyes were looking straight at us, the words printed underneath rang in our ears as if they had been spoken aloud in an urgent voice, "What have you done for the front?"
Zoya turned away.
"I can't pass that placard calmly," she said bitterly.
"But you are still young, and you have been to the labour front—that's also work for the country, for the Army."
"Not enough," answered Zoya doggedly.
For some minutes we walked along in silence, and suddenly Zoya said in quite a different voice, cheerfully and with an air of finality, "I am lucky. Everything I want comes true."
"What are you thinking about?" I wanted to ask, and did not. But my heart was heavy with foreboding.
On April 20 I found a letter in the letter box. Shura's field post office number was on the envelope, but the address was not in his handwriting. I stood holding the letter for a long time, afraid to unseal it. Then I tore open the envelope and read the first lines. The room went dark before my eyes. I drew a deep breath, started reading again, and again could not read on. Then I gritted my teeth as hard as I could and read to the end.
"April 14, 1945
"Dear Lyubov Timofeyevna,
"It is hard for me to write to you. But I beg you to summon all your courage and strength. Your son, Senior Lieutenant of the Guards Alexander Anatolyevich Kosmodemyansky, died the death of a hero in battle with the German invaders. He gave up his young life for the freedom and independence of our Motherland.
"I will say only one thing. Your son is a hero, and you may be proud of him. He defended his Country honourably, and has proved himself worthy of his sister.
[...]
"In the fighting for Königsberg on April 6, Alexander Kosmodemyansky's self-propelled gun mount was the first to force a canal thirty metres wide and open fire at the enemy, destroying an artillery battery, blowing up an ammunition dump and killing nearly sixty Hitlerite soldiers and officers.
"On April 8 he was the first to break into the fort of Konigin Luisen, where 350 prisoners were captured together with nine tanks in good condition, 200 lorries and a petrol dump. In the course of the fighting Alexander Kosmodernyansky was promoted from commander of a self-propelled gun mount to battery commander. In spite of his youth he commanded the battery successfully and carried out all battle tasks in exemplary fashion.
"He was killed yesterday in the fighting for the locality of Vierbrudenkrug, west of Königsberg, which was already in our hands. Your son was one of the first to break into Vierbrudenkrug, wiping out nearly forty Hitlerites and crushing four antitank guns. An exploding enemy shell cut short the life of our dear comrade, Alexander Anatolyevich Kosmodemyansky.
"War and death are inseparable, but it is so much more difficult to be reconciled with death on the eve our Victory.
"Be courageous. With sincere respect and sympathy, "Lieutenant-Colonel of the Guards Legeza. "
I love to come here, to walk along the dear familiar corridors of my children's school, which now bears Zoya's name. I look into the classrooms. I go up onto the third floor and approach the doors where there is an inscription: "Heroes of the Soviet Union Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya and Shura Kosmodemyansky studied in this classroom."
I enter this room, where the portraits of my children look down at me from the walls. There is the second desk in the middle row—Zoya used to sit there. Now another girl sits at this desk, and she has Zoya's clear eyes. And there that desk at the back of the next row—that was Shura's place. The girl who sits there now looks up at me. She is wearing a brown frock with a white collar and black apron, and she has such a grave thoughtful face.
[...]
Here is a young woman with a kind, pleasant face coming down the corridor to meet me. She is Katya Andreyeva. She has done what she intended to do; she has become a schoolmistress teaching at her old school, the school where she studied together with Zoya and Shura.
My children's classmates are now engineers, doctors, teachers. They continue the work for the sake of which their comrades gave up their lives.
I walk along the familiar corridor. The door of the library is open. Shelf alter shelf along the walls is full of books, a great number of books.
"Before the war we had twenty thousand volumes. Now we have forty thousand," says Katya to me.
I go outside. The school is surrounded with green trees. There they are, the trees the children planted. And I seem to hear Zoya's voice:
For better or for worse, we have now posted a total of 200 articles on our greeklish.org blog since we started back on April 18, 2005. Although we use a couple of counter/statistics log packages to track visitor activity, I'm still not terribly clear on how many hits we get per month. Our Domain Direct stats show usually show around several thousand hits to greeklish.org pages per month including visits to the main page, as well as visits other greeklish.org features. Our biggest overall draw to greeklish.org are the pages devoted to Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, including the Zoya's Story page and the text of The Story of Zoya and Shura by Lyubov Timofeyevna Kosmodemyanskaya. A Google search for the term "Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya" currently yields around 536 results and our Zoya's Story page is currently the 3rd overall, behind the English Wikipedia article and an article from Northstar Compass. Our gallery of photos from the Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya Museum is the search 4th result. When Googling the term "Zoya" by itself, 948, 000 results are yielded and Zoya's story is the 9th result overall. Zoya's Story has been linked to from a variety of English and non-English sites, including Wikipedia articles in English, Swedish and Esperanto .
Flash
#123
It seems as though we are not alone in the woes we experienced with our Mollie fish last year (remember all that?) as I have noticed a lot of Google search hits in our stats that feature search phrases like "creamsicle mollie sitting at bottom of tank," et cetera. And speaking of the whole fish flap, many of you will undoubtedly be happy to know that our 3 goldfish that we purchased back in July 2006 are still going strong in a comfy 30-gallon tank.
We get a lot of Google hits from searches related to comic books. I never really intended to write regularly on comic books, but I think that I have ended up writing more on that particular topic than any other. A lot of folks find us looking for information on spiders, too. A fair amount of visitors find our site as a result of Google searches on some of the more relatively obscure topics we have discussed in our blog, including Imelda Verrept (currently 6th search result out of 141), Ratamyus (currently 3rd search result out of 159), and Cosmos-954 (currently 29th search result out of 16, 500). Our web traffic comes mostly from the United States and Greece, but we have also been fortunate to entertain visitors from China, Pakistan, India, Iran and Russia. We're also happy to entertain visitors who find our site through links featured at other great sites like coldbacon.com and Louis Proyect's The Unrepentant Marxist.
We hope that the material we've posted thus far is both entertaining and informative. We're having a great time at our end and we enjoy sharing our thoughts and interests with our regular readers as well as our virtual friends, web-surfing acquaintances and like-minded folks all over the world.
I was very lucky to get the chance to attend a Kiss Expo in Louisville, Kentucky way back in late 2001. It was really a great time as we got to see Eric Singer and Bruce Kulick talk for a while and there was even a performance by a Kiss Tribute Band (I think it was Mr. Speed). All of this stuff took place in the multipurpose area of a Holiday Inn, which was surprisingly a good accommodation for the event. The room was chock-full of vendors selling all kinds of licensed and unlicensed Kiss memorabilia. I carted away a few great finds that night, including a complete copy of "Kiss: The Originals" on LP and a CD copy of Quiet Riot's 1977 Starwood show. But my best find of the night was a CD copy of the full Eric Carr Memorial Tribute show from 1992 . I had seen this show offered as a collection of tapes on eBay a while back, but the final price on the set was really ridiculous at the time. I think most people were paying for the sentimentality associated with the show, but the amazing artwork on the package was a definite plus. The cover art was an homage to the Kiss solo albums, featuring a makeup-era portrait of Eric as "The Fox". I was sorry I had missed out on snagging this when I was bidding on the eBay auction and I even asked the seller for a scan of the artwork after the auction had ended, but he politely declined, explaining that he didn't want copies of the picture to be spread around too much. Kind of funny, eh? A bootlegger doesn't want other folks pirating his stuff! Anyway, when I saw a CD copy of the Eric Carr Memorial Tribute show for sale at the Kiss Expo, I was pretty excited. The packaging was obviously not professional per se, but the front cover was – sure enough – an exact copy of the solo album homage, complete with lettering and logos to match the other Kiss solo albums. For CD that was not a professional job, it was still an impressive package, including the inkjet labels on the CDs.
But all things considered, I have to say that I was really not prepared for just how awesome the Memorial Tribute show was. The show was actually originally aired on the New York Station WCWP/88.1 FM in 1992 as a tribute to Eric Carr on the first anniversary of his passing. The main part of the show is a rebroadcast of a radio show from December 23, 1989 in which Eric Carr stopped WCWP for an unannounced visit to promote the Kiss album "Hot in the Shade." But throughout the Memorial Tribute show broadcast, DJ Tony Mal provides narration featuring anecdotes and trivia regarding the life and times of the legendary Kiss drummer. Much of Mal's background information was gathered through interviews with Eric's family as well as articles and fanzines. Remember, 1992 back before the rise of the Internet, so they had to do research the old-fashioned way back then. The fact that the show turned out so well is really indicative of Mal's hard work and dedication. Throughout the special, Mal also plays a virtual compendium of Eric's Kiss-era work, including some material he wrote and/or performed for other talents, from Wendy O. Williams to Bryan Adams. Also included are some ultra-rare tracks of Eric's first band "The Cellarmen" that were recorded when Eric was only 15 years old. Because the special was produced in 1992, material from Eric's posthumous release "Rockology" as well as some other unreleased tracks that have come to light more recently are not included as they were not in circulation at the time.
I pull the tribute CDs out two or three times a year and I listen to the whole show start to finish. I just listened to the show yesterday for the first time in a while – in fact, I also listened to it again today! Sure, the program gets a little silly and cheesy at times but at the end of it all, it stands up as a fantastic celebration of one for rock's best and most underrated drummers. I've always thought it would be kind of cool to get the chance to tell Tony Mal what a great job he did in compiling this show, but there's not a lot of info about him on the 'net, so this article will have to do the job. Thanks Tony!
I was very lucky to get the chance to attend a Kiss Expo in Louisville, Kentucky way back in late 2001. It was really a great time as we got to see 
But all things considered, I have to say that I was really not prepared for just how awesome the Memorial Tribute show was. The show was actually originally aired on the New York Station WCWP/88.1 FM in 1992 as a tribute to Eric Carr on the first anniversary of his passing. The main part of the show is a rebroadcast of a radio show from December 23, 1989 in which Eric Carr stopped WCWP for an unannounced visit to promote the Kiss album "Hot in the Shade." But throughout the Memorial Tribute show broadcast, DJ Tony Mal provides narration featuring anecdotes and trivia regarding the life and times of the legendary Kiss drummer. Much of Mal's background information was gathered through interviews with Eric's family as well as articles and fanzines. Remember, 1992 back before the rise of the Internet, so they had to do research the old-fashioned way back then. The fact that the show turned out so well is really indicative of Mal's hard work and dedication. Throughout the special, Mal also plays a virtual compendium of Eric's Kiss-era work, including some material he wrote and/or performed for other talents, from Wendy O. Williams to Bryan Adams. Also included are some ultra-rare tracks of Eric's first band "The Cellarmen" that were recorded when Eric was only 15 years old. Because the special was produced in 1992, material from Eric's posthumous release "
