Rambo lives out his earthly pleasures with Miao Yin in the greatest deleted scene ever.

During the weeks running up to today’s release of “The Expendables,” Lionsgate has flooded the market with Blu-ray editions of its brawny stars’ past glories. The centerpiece of this well-oiled onslaught is “Rambo: the Complete Collector’s Set”, which includes all the enhanced interrogations, decapitations and exploding helicopters of all four Rambo films. But even though Rambo kills 83 people in the fourth movie alone, this so-called complete set would be rendered an example of false advertising if it did not contain “The Greatest Deleted Scene Ever.”

From the moment that a big bundle of Stallone arrived on my front stoop, I had to immediately pop in disc one of the “Rambo” set to make sure that the scene was there. I waded through several trailers and busy-body intros, but I found it almost hidden in a reel of other, far-lesser deleted scenes. Simply titled “Saigon Bar Flashback” on a disc that I scored at Target for seven bucks a few years ago, this deleted scene lays waste to all other cinematic outtakes like a shirtless John Rambo squeezing limitless rounds out of an M-60 machine gun sans tripod.

The sequence begins with Rambo roasting a pig and then cutting off a hunk of meat with that famous knife of his. I know it’s hard to believe that it gets better than this, but stick with me here. As Rambo chomps down on a charred piece of pork, a Lucky Lager logo flickers on the screen with the sound of an electrical crackle, followed by a heavy pentatonic riff that sounds like Cream’s “Sunshine of Your Love” played backwards. A split second later, the magical Lucky Lager logo transports us to a Saigon whorehouse where hussies are rocking out by the jukebox and drunk G.I.s give us a big thumbs up in between gulps of some god awful Asian brew that’s likely cut with formaldehyde.

As the camera pans over the drunken revelry, it’s apparent that we are actually seeing things through Stallone-O-Vision. For a few seconds, you are Congressional Medal of Honor recipient Rambo. Your gaze fixes on the hottest woman in the bar. It’s Miao Yin from “Big Trouble in Little China” (Suzee Pai) with her eyes of creamy jade. But your moment of being one with the Rambo is short-lived. The camera cuts to Rambo with a Fu-Manchu mustache slow dancing with Miao Yin in front of a neon Schlitz sign. Neon beer signs are gateways to other, better worlds here so we are then transported to Yin’s bamboo boudoir. A harmonized guitar solo joins the pounding drums and monster riffage. Soon Yin’s nipples are revealed, providing closure to anyone who watched “Big Trouble in Little China” countless times on cable in the late 1980s. Rambo’s nipples are also revealed. Rambo is shirtless–his most deadly state of undress. But instead of drenching half of the Asian continent in stage blood, this time Rambo opts to make love, not war.

Before we can hear Sly the Guy’s grunts of ecstasy, we find ourselves back in the present or at least the early 1980s. Rambo’s Fu-Manchu is gone, replaced by some Don Johnson-esque stubble. As Rambo is moved to tears by the thought of the glorious facial hair that was once his, we, the mere viewer, have no other choice but to go back and watch the scene four or five more times.

Also featured in the Rambo Blu-ray set are strange documentaries that combine your standard making-of feature with historical background on the real global conflicts that supplied these movies with their bloody source material. Disc four comes with a look at Burma’s closed dictatorship to go along with the most recent Rambo film. Disc three contains something called “Afghanistan: Land in Crisis” where John Powers of the “LA Weekly” points out that “Rambo III” may be the only film about Islamic Jihad shot in Israel. NYU professor Ella Shohat adds that it was “quite hilarious” to hear Hebrew-accented actors playing the Mujahideen. Also worth a look and listen is the Stallone commentary track that accompanies “First Blood” where Sly tells us about breaking his lower rib, his desire to kill a wild boar with his bare hands and drinking Campari with bitter, unemployed loggers.

The real Stan Lee (left) points an accusing finger at his dynamic doppelganger, Fake Stan Lee (right).

In this meta age of ours where Drunk Hulks and Feminist Hulks shun the use of pronouns on their snarky Twitter feeds, it’s only fitting that the Green-skinned Goliath’s creator should also have his imitators. However, Fake Stan Lee isn’t just relegated to 140 characters or less; he’s a living breathing person.

It was Friday just before 2pm. I was in a large conference room on the upper level of the San Diego Convention Center at Comic Con, waiting for the Stan Lee panel to start. I’d lucked out and got a seat only four rows back without having to wait in line for half the day. Seats are hard to come by at Comic Con. Even a Thursday evening panel titled “Geek Girls Exist” had a line winding around the halls for it, and a guy got stabbed in the eye over a chair in the “Resident Evil: Afterlife” panel on Saturday. With a “Spartacus: Blood and Sand” panel (a show I actually watch) beginning right after Stan Lee’s talk, I was camped out in Room 6BCF for the duration of the afternoon, bladder permitting.

But Stan “The Man” Lee meant a lot more to me than some Brutus Beekfcakes in skirts who eviscerate each other on pay cable. With the amount of Marvel Comics that I consumed since the age of five, it felt like Lee’s imagination had fueled my own. I might not be a writer today without Stan Lee. Every issue “The Incredible Hulk", “The Amazing Spider-Man", and “The Fantastic Four” that I devoured in the 1970s had the words “Stan Lee Presents” on the top of the first page. Stan’s shameless self-promotion let me know that being a writer, editor or publisher was a possibility.

At Comic Con this weekend, Stan was hyping Marvel cartoons geared at kids and his more recent creation, Striperella, for a more adult audience. “She strips at night and fights crime later at night,” we were told moments before Stan’s arrival for his panel.

As I was waiting for Stan to show up, Fake Stan Lee entered the room. He was wearing a sweater vest over a blue dress shirt, had Stan’s same receding hairline with an imitation mustache to match. But Fake Stan’s act went beyond the limits of mere cosplay. He’s a Stan Lee reenactor who never breaks character, not much different than the guys who play the part of Benjamin Franklin at certain historical sites in Philadelphia. Every word that Fake Stan utters is spoken with that same enthusiastic, New York accented patter as the real thing.

There was an empty seat next to me so I waved Fake Stan over. He was glad to take the seat and even agreed to answer a few questions.

“What’s it like being Stan Lee,” I asked.

He replied with loving but pointed mockery of the former publisher of Marvel Comics.

“Well, it’s very interesting being Stan Lee because, as you know, I created 95% of the most popular comic books in the world,” he said, “therefore everybody here should be paying tithe to me. So everyone, please get out your wallets and hand forth some money, either five or ten dollars. I think it’s the smallest thing that you can do for all the enjoyment that I’ve brought you over the years.”

I asked Fake Stan if the universe would explode if shook the real Stan’s hand.

“Prob-a-bly,” he answered spacing out each syllable.

When I asked if he escaped from the Negative Zone with the “Fantastic Four” villain called Blastarr the Living Bomburst, he claimed not to know who Blastarr was.

“But you created him!” I exclaimed.

A crowd gathered around to watch my interview with Fake Stan, asking him silly questions and getting silly answers. One woman was taping the interview with a really nice video camera. I’d really like to see that footage. People sitting around us laughed when I asked Fake Stan if he was ever tempted to earn some extra scratch by impersonating Hal Linden in the role of Barney Miller.

“I see what you’re doing and I like the reference,” he said, “You’re a good man and you’re very smart.”

Sometime during this tete-a-tete, a well-stacked model showed up in a Striperella costume. Somebody had a poster of Stan Lee kissing Striperella and now the crowd wanted Fake Stan to kiss Fake Stiperella. Fake Stan got out of his seat and affected an old man’s gait as he strolled up to Striperella. With the crowd urging them on, the two embraced with maybe a reluctant peck on the cheek resulting as the proceedings started to resemble the last throes of a depressing bachelor party.

The attempt at Dionysian revelry ended before it could ever take off and the Fake Stan returned to his seat right before the real Stan Lee emerged onto the stage.

At 87, Lee still possessed the same level of energy (boundless) that he’d displayed in any TV appearances that I could recall from the 1970s. A chair was set up on the stage for him, but he stood at the podium and gestured frantically through out much of his talk. Lee began with a tale of alter egos worthy of one of his costumed crime fighters.

“I used to have a real name, not something silly like Stan Lee.” Lee said from the stage. “It used Stanley Martin Lieber, a real name!”

Looking at Fake Stan Lee fidgeting in his seat, this was too much to process as I came to the realization that there wasn’t a “real” Stan Lee. Stan Lee was the world-renowned hero, with Stanley Martin Lieber relegated to being the nerdy, Peter Parker like secret identity.

Lee had his reasons, however. He used an alias when he first broke into the comics business in the early 1940s because “people had no respect for comics in those days.”

“They didn’t consider them an art form,” Lee explained. “They thought they were things that were read by dumb rubes or moronic children.”

“Today it’s different,” Lee continued. “Today, somebody says, ‘Hey isn’t that Stan Lee over there?’”

Lee paused for a minute before adding, “Excuse me President Obama, I’ll be back in a minute.” At that moment, the hall erupted with laughter.

Eventually Stanley Martin Lieber had his name legally changed to Stan Lee.

“It got so complicated that finally my wife decided, let’s just change it to Lee so now we’re Joan Lee and Stan Lee,” he explained. “I still like Stanley Martin Leiber but when I sign autographs, this makes it easier.”

But even after the transformation into Stan Lee, circumstances in his pulpy corner still forced him to conceal his identity like Tony Stark putting on his suit of armor to become Iron Man.

“I was probably the top romance writer in the world,” he said. “We had books called ‘My Romance’, Her Romance, ‘Their Romance’, ‘Romantic Romances and on like that. I wrote them all.”

The problem for Lee was that the books were written in a first person, confessional style.

“I’m used to signing my name to everything I write,” he said, “but it couldn’t say, ‘I Remember When I was 16 and I Fell In Love with the First Boy I Met’ by Stan Lee. I didn’t want to leave my name and I didn’t want to use someone else’s name. I wouldn’t get the credit. I came up with probably the best idea I ever had. On every one of the stories, I had the name of the story that I would write, ‘As told to Stan Lee.’”

As Lee launched into a tale of how the Comics Code Authority ordered him to decrease the size of a puff of smoke coming out of a six-shooter in an issue of ‘Kid Colt Outlaw’ because the puff of smoke was “too violent,” I asked the Fake Stan Lee if everything was true.

“It’s all absolutely true,” Fake Stan said looking awed by his living source material.

Last year at Comic Con, Fake Stan played the dozens with dudes dressed up as Deadpool and Spider-Man. Throughout the panel, I kept expecting Fake Stan to attempt the same with the man who was once Stanley Martin Lieber, but he never did. Soon after I asked Fake Stan my last question, he got up and left before the the legal Stan Lee had finished recalling his numerous name changes. Maybe things had gotten too meta for even Fake Stan Lee.

Margie Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church protests the San Diego Comic Con.

If Fred Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church had his way, God would be sending Biblical plagues down upon the San Diego Convention Center right about now and turning hundreds of nerds dressed in Batman costumes into pillars of salt.

It’s the first full day of the San Diego Comic Con. I was in front of the Convention Center, trying to cross the street against an unending tide of convention goers carrying oversized bags stuffed with assorted plastic figurines and video games. As I made it to the crosswalk, I saw a man in a checkered shirt on the side of the road holding up a dayglo lime green sign that read, “GOD HATES KITTENS” with a picture of a cat pasted to it. I chuckled and snapped a couple of pictures of him. I’m taking a lot of pics at Comic Con this year. Next to the man with the sign expressing the Lord’s hatred of baby felines was a person dressed like Bender the robot from “Futurama” holding up a sign that read, “KILL ALL HUMANS!” I took some more pictures of the beginnings of a picket line bathed in satire.

I then saw a line of cops behind Bender the robot, and beyond them were the God Hates Fags people. Fred Phelps and his congregation from the Westboro Baptist Church took some time away from protesting the funerals of fallen soldiers to spend a little time waving their hateful placards in the general direction of Comic Con and its annual mega-gathering of movie stars, geeks, nerds, Klingons, stormtroopers and multitudes of gals dressed in Princess Leia slave girl outfits.

I walked past the line of San Diego police officers. “I’m press,” I said, “I want to get some pictures of these people.”

The police let me through but instructed me not to go any further than a concrete barrier that separated the lawn the Westboro Baptists were standing on and the street. The police also told me not to go into the street.

Once I got to the end of the concrete barrier, I snapped a couple of pictures of a woman who turned out to be Margie Phelps, the daughter of Fred Phelps. Her bottom half was wrapped in the American flag and she was holding up four signs at once, two in each hand. This gave her the illusion of more limbs, making her look like a strange pagan goddess of intolerance and hate. One sign said, “Fags doom nations” and another one read, “America is Doomed.” All of their signs have the benefit of really good four color printing. They take pride in these signs.

I asked her if she’d grant an interview and she agreed. Still mindful of the police presence, I inched as closely to her as I could, and held out my digital recorder and started asking questions. The transcript of this conversation is below for those that want to read it, but talking to Ms. Phelps was a little like arguing with a brick. I called her a fame whore, so there’s some satisfaction of that but I do wish that I thought of saying that her cup is filled with the filth of many nations. That would have been a Biblical zinger there, but that wouldn’t have brought a pillar of fire down from the heavens to destroy the Westboro Baptist Church.

As I was conducting my interview with Phelps, more Comic Con attendees had gathered to form a counter protest that started to outnumber the original protest. One guy in a Starfleet uniform held up a cardboard sign that said “God hates Jedi” on one side and “God Needs a Starship” on the other. Other counter protesters held up signs that said, “Support fiction, read the Bible,” and “Odin is God Read ‘The Mighty Thor’ #5″ The comic con goers also rallied themselves for a rousing chorus of Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” making the whole thing seem a very serious, or “a very special” episode of “Glee.”

But the best counter-protester was a man dressed like Jesus Christ who was carrying a sign that said, “God Loves Every Body.” Sure, he separated the words every and body, but that’s still a lot closer to what the Bible says about the Almighty’s preferences than anything written on the Phelps family’s signs.

Jesus here has the right idea.

Here is the interview with Margie Phelps. For those of you who got through my interview with Andrew Breitbart, this should be a walk in the park if only because it’s much shorter…

BOB CALHOUN: So why are you out here at Comic Con today?

MARGIE PHELPS: well we’re out here to say that if were to invest one fraction of the resources that you spend and invest in worshiping Batman, and the Ghostbusters and Buffy the Vampire Slayer and so fourth in reading the Bible and obeying God, this nation would not be (garbled).

BC: You seem to be pretty knowledgeable you threw out Buffy there.

MP: We read the news. It’s not hard to track what’s going on in this country. This kind of convention would draw a lot more people than, for instance, a convention about obeying God.

BC: What about the Promise Keepers though? The Promise Keepers fill arenas several times bigger than this.

MP: Promise Keepers. Promise Keepers, dot com, potato, po-tah-toe – all worshiping false Gods.

BC: So the Promise Keepers are worshiping false gods as well…

MP: Of course they are. They are worshiping themselves, first and foremost. It’s just another false religion.

BC: So who are the real Gods then?

MP: You mean who are the real servants? There’s only one God and you know it and all mankind knows it. It’s in your DNA. The Promise Keepers claim to worship the only true and living God, but instead they worship their works and self righteousness and that’s every bit as wrong as these foolish people worshiping Batman and all.

BC: Okay, Batman I understand, but why picket the soldiers’ funerals.

MP: Because the soldiers are dying for the sins of this nation and the whole world is looking over at those events. They are big, splashy, patriotic pep rallies. We’ve picketed over 500 of them. They’re great, big, giant public events. Why not picket them?

BC: It’s really tacky. These people are grieving. These families lost somebody.

MP: They’re not grieving. They’re angry with God and they’re mugging for the cameras, and they’re mugging for the cameras and they’re bringing all their business outside… Let me finish. They’re bringing all their business outside on Front Street and Main Street for everyone to talk about.

BC: At a cemetery? That’s Main Street?

MP: Number one, we don’t picket cemeteries. We picket on public sidewalks, 30 minutes before the funeral, and we leave when it starts. Have you ever been there picketing? I have. I see what goes on.

BC: But aren’t you people just mugging for the cameras? You’re here at Comic Con. You’re at Ronnie James Dio’s funeral. Aren’t you just being fame whores just like the whores of Babylon you purport are in there (pointing to the San Diego Convention Center)?

MP: We’re using any public forum available to get these words before the eyes and ears of doomed America. (Raising her voice) We are not claiming…

BC: I think you’re just fame whores like the people in there (Note: Sylvester Stallone was in there somewhere).

MP: And I don’t care. Now going back to what sprung you off onto that side trail, we don’t claim that we’re privately mourning for our dead son. They do.

BC: How are you supposed to know that though? How are you supposed to know whether they are mourning privately or not? What made you God? Does God speak to you?

MP: By their public actions. I don’t care or know or care what they do in private. We don’t speak to them in their private quarters. We speak to them when they come out on the public sidewalk. And that’s what all of America is doing, bowing down to those dead bodies saying, “God Bless America” like a bunch of fools.

(NOTE: I’m sure we could have gone on like this all day, but I asked Phelps for her name and ended the interview after that one because the counter-protest was really heating up.)

The last time that Lionsgate unleashed a werewolf movie on Redbox patrons, we got the hairless wolf men of the Alan Smithee directed “Neowolf.” “If you can’t afford a bale of yak hair,” I quipped at the time, “you’ve got no business making a werewolf picture.” It seems that Lionsgate got the message, because they’ve come roaring back (all puns in this particular column are intentional) with “Wolf Moon,” and this time the lycanthropes have the appropriate amount of hair. The werewolves still look like what you’d get if you tried to make a wookiee costume from black hefty bags and a whole mess of clip on tresses, but at least these howlers don’t need an appointment with Sy Sperling and the Hair Club for Men.

“Wolf Moon” starts off with a brutal murder shot in black and white followed by a couple of truckers getting torn up by a wolf man. Some bare b-cups make their way into the picture at the 21-minute mark but then the bulk of the first hour is taken up by enough music videos to start a new digital cable channel that nobody watches. Like most people, I watch a werewolf movie for some mutilations, time lapse transformations and even a little inner torment, but I don’t watch them for scene after scene of a drifter auto mechanic (Chris Devecchio) frolicking in local swimming holes with a teen hoochie (Ginny Weirwick) to the strains of a wannabe Steve Perry solo project. As I watched “Wolf Moon", I couldn’t help but picture a guitarist rushing into band practice saying, “Hey we got a song in ‘Wolf Moon’! We’re finally gonna’ MAKE IT!” Poor fools. “Wolf Moon” marks your group’s zenith, not its ascent. Now get back to the barroom and stop taking up space in cheap horror movies.

“Wolf Moon” features Maria Conchita Alonso ("Running Man") as the lady sheriff of a small Nevada town, Billy Drago (you’ve seen him in many straight-to-DVD and SyFy movies) as a werewolf hunter who spends a lot of time looking at microfiche, and Sid Haig ("The Devil’s Rejects") as a cranky rancher who’s way too into Viagra. Why you’d make a werewolf movie with Haig and not have him play a werewolf, I don’t know. Max Ryan, who appears in “Sex and the City 2″, makes a bid to be in two of the worst movies of 2010 with his turn as the werewolf patriarch who strings together more clichés than I ever thought possible. “Blood is thicker than water/There’s a storm blowin and it’s coming down heavy/ You’d better realize what side of the fence you’re on,” he says almost one tired line after the other in a move more savage than any he commits under the light of a full moon.

Your average straight-to-DVD movie clocks in at 80-90 minutes, but “Wolf Moon” is a punishing two hours and four minutes. It feels even longer at times. I know that Roger Ebert or someone will probably tut-tut me for this, but I was driven to watching long stretches of this movie on that 2x fast-forward setting where you can still hear sped up dialogue and slowed it down to normal speed for the occasional slaughtering of hookers and hot werebeast-on-werebeast action. This is how I recommend viewing “Wolf Moon” and think that Lionsgate should include a special feature suggesting this on any future pressings of the disc. This movie rates a T for torturous on the ol’ SHITE meter, making it one cut above “Neowolf", which only eked out an E for endlessly dull.

In other straight-to-DVD news that has totally slipped past me for six months now, Global Asylum, the makers of such “mockbusters” as “Snakes on a Train” and “The Da Vinci Treasure” as well as “Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus", has beaten Pixar to the punch with their December 2009 release of “Princess of Mars", an adaptation of Tarzan creator Edgar Rice Burroughs’ 1912 space adventure novel that kicked off his John Carter series. Pixar has their live action “John Carter of Mars” movie scheduled as their big release for 2012, but “Princess of Mars” has fallen into public domain so Global Asylum can adapt some source material instead of slapping together their usual shameless ripoff. Why they released it so far in advance of Pixar’s effort instead of cranking out something called “Toy Tale” is anybody’s guess. Still, an actual literary adaptation gives Global Asylum an unsettling air of legitimacy.

Any legitimacy is quickly shattered upon viewing the disc, however. In Burroughs’ novel, John Carter is a confederate Civil War veteran who is magically transported to Mars after being bushwhacked by Indians. Once on the red planet, he romances the titular princess and grapples with Tars Tarkas, a four-armed badass with huge fangs. Writer/director Mark Atkins (cinematographer of “Transmorphers: Fall of Man") updated the tale and has Carter (Antonio Sabato, Jr.) shaking down opium growers in Afghanistan before getting whisked away to some planet called Mars that isn’t the real Mars. (Please don’t make me explain.) Beginning our tale during the War on Terror is understandable, but Sabato’s tramp stamp is a piece of modernizing I could have done without. To compensate for Sabato’s unfortunately placed tattoo, the film boasts lots of Traci Lords in a metal bikini, but then it plunges back into negative territory with a chintzy two-armed Tars Tarkas (Matt Lasky). I’m not a Pixar zombie by any stretch, but at least I know they’ll deliver a Tars Tarkus with the right amount of limbs.

It’s also safe to say that Pixar will give us a more creative vision of Barsoom (as the Martians call it) than that patch of Vasquez Rocks where Captain Kirk once fought the reptilian Gorn in an old “Star Trek” episode and the waste filtration plant where this “Princess of Mars” ends up. In the movie, they say that the plant is used for making breathable air on Mars but I bet there’s a lot of poo moving through those old pipes. There was also 42 inches of visible poo on my flatscreen TV when I was watching this thing. I wanted to give this an I for interesting for the curiosity factor, but the good ol T is more appropriate.

For the Black Sabbath album “Heaven and Hell” (1980), Ronnie James Dio penned a fast-paced metal anthem titled “Die Young.” As guitarist Tony Iommi’s monster riffage builds to the tune’s climax, Dio hammers home the song’s refrain by repeating its title (7x according to Lyrics007.com). Dio went on to live another 30 years after writing this song, and was 67 years old when he died from stomach cancer last Sunday.

Despite the exploding drummers of Spinal Tap, it’s amazing how many heavy metal musicians are making it to their golden years. The original four-man lineup of Black Sabbath, pretty much the first heavy metal band, is still with us. And remember, this line-up includes Ozzy Osbourne, a man known for biting the heads off of bats and other potential carriers of rabies as well as for his comparatively mundane battles with substance abuse and depression. Ozzy turns 62 later this year. Although Sabbath fans across the Internet are shocked that the Ozzman outlived Dio (just search Twitter for Ozzy and Dio even now), Ozzy still has slightly over five years to truly outlive his Sabbath replacement. He only has three and half years until he can collect full social security benefits however.

Eighteen people have been in Black Sabbath since the band’s self-titled debut album four decades ago. Only two of them have died: Dio and Ray Gillen. Gillen (not to be confused with the 64 year old Ian Gillan who sang with Sabbath in 1982) replaced vocalist Glenn Hughes (age 57) during the Sabs’ 1986 tour but never released any albums with the band. Gillen, a singer best known for his work with the band Badlands, was 41 when he died in 1993 – too young to die, but still middle aged by any definition. Of the 16 surviving members of Sabbath, only drummer Mike Bordin (best known for Faith No More) is under 50, and he’s just two years shy of the half-century mark. Like Gillen, Bordin filled in on a tour but never released any material with the band.

After Bon Scott’s untimely passing in 1980, no other member of AC/DC has died and the complete lineup of their most popular album, “Back in Black” (1980) is still touring. Cliff Burton of Metallica, Randy Rhodes, Nicholas ‘Razzle’ Dingley of Hanoi Rocks, Steve Clark of Def Lepard, Dimebag Darrell of Pantera, Paul Baloff of Exodus, and Eric Carr of KISS have all passed on, but I had to really strain to come up with this list. When Kevin DuBrow of Quiet Riot died of a cocaine overdose, he was already 52 years old and proto-metaler Dickie Peterson of Blue Cheer was 63 when he died last year. Both DuBrow and Peterson qualified for AARP membership.

On the other hand, the complete rosters of Iron Maiden, The Scorpions, Judas Priest, Guns N’ Roses (Axl and all), Motley Crue, and Deep Purple (another founding metal band) are all still walking this Earth, plotting farewell or reunion tours or suing their former managers. Hell, Lemmy AND Ace Frehley are still alive and both men aren’t exactly models of clean living. I’m not going to hazard to do the math but it looks doubtful that metal musicians are any more likely to die from violence or accidental causes than any other population group or profession.

Ronnie James Dio flashing the devil horns, the heavy metal hand symbol that he popularized.

There were a few moments of false hope this morning that reports of Ronnie James Dio’s death were just a vicious Internet rumor. A UPI article hit the web around 9:30am PST telling us that the golden voiced metal singer was battling stomach cancer at Houston’s M.D. Anderson Hospital, but hadn’t succumbed just yet. The source of the good news was Dio’s wife, Wendy. I went to the Hotel Utah on Bryant Street in San Francisco for brunch and drink or two. Brandi, my longtime friend and bartender, was spinning “The Sign of the Southern Cross” from Sabbath’s “Mob Rules” album. She hadn’t heard that the official word that Dio was still with us, at least according to official reports. Brandi often wears an upside down cross. She was happy for the optimistic update.

However, it was only a couple of hours before the Associated Press and the LA Times made news of Dio’s passing official. The quashing of all hope was delivered via smartphone to me on a barstool. “Brandi, Dio really is dead now,” I said while settling up my tab. “His wife issued a statement.” Dio had actually been gone since 7:45am. He was 67 years old.

“Aw fuck it,” Brandi said, “I’m playing ‘We Rock’ right now.’”

The opening guitar riff to the opening track off the “Last in Line” album thundered through the bar’s aging sound system. “You watch their faces/You’ll see the traces/Of the things they want to be/But only we can see,” Dio’s recorded voice sang. Lyrics that always bore a certain kind of mock profundity to me became more genuine with the finality of the situation.

By the time the song reached its third verse, it was hard not to choke back a tear for the poet of my ninth grade imagination: “We pray to someone/But when it’s said and done/It’s really all the same/With just a different name.”

But then there were those choruses to remind us of the ethos that Dio had devoted his life to: ” But sail on, sing a song, carry on/’Cause We Rock, We Rock, We Rock, We Rock.”

Yes, because of Ronnie James Dio, the man who fronted Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow, fronted Sabbath after Ozzy, and then went solo for the platinum selling “Holy Diver” and “Last in Line” albums, we did in fact rock. Maybe not as often, or as hard, or as purely as Ronnie James himself did, but for a few moments at Konocti Harbor in Mendocino County, or a cramped nightclub on Fourth Street in San Francisco, or driving down the 101 blasting Sabbath’s “Heaven and Hell” on the cassette deck, or cutting class in the Menlo Atherton High School parking lot, we rocked. And we owe all of this rocking to Ronnie James Dio.

#6 on the Amazon Kindle Wrestling 100.

My punk-wrestling memoir, Beer, Blood and Cornmeal: Seven Years of Incredibly Strange Wrestling (ECW Press, 2008) was finally released for Amazon’s Kindle this week. This pleases my good friend Len E. B. who only buys books on the Kindle now since he spent around 300 bucks on the thing. Likely due to Len’s purchase (thanks Len!), for a brief, shining moment yesterday BBAC was #6 on Amazon’s listing of Kindle bestsellers in the Wrestling category. My book was behind a download of The Marine Corps Close Combat Manual, which goes for the low, low price of $2.99 a pop and is authored by no less-storied an organization than the USMC. However, BBAC was ahead of Rey Mysterio: Behind the Mask, which came in at #8, and two different digital versions of Hulk Hogan’s 2002 biography Hollywood Hulk Hogan. Surprisingly, The Hulkster’s 2009 follow-up, My Life Outside the Ring, wasn’t in Amazon’s Kindle top-20.

The inclusion of my memoir, with its celebration of the ring exploits of Macho Sasquatcho, El Pollo Diablo (the Devil Chicken) and El Homo Loco, is likely to cause consternation among two types of grappling purists: college wrestling coaches and lucha libre aficionados.

Collegiate wrestling coaches (along with mixed martial arts fighters, Marine Corps Drill Instructors and judokas) are vexed that Amazon lumps theatrical pro wrestling, also known in certain parts of the country as rasslin’, with books on “real” sports such as amateur or competitive wrestling, mixed martial arts, judo, aikido and jiu-jitsu. This creates an odd-listing to be sure, where earnest self-defense manuals written by Ultimate Fighting legends like Randy Couture and Royce Gracie share a category with my book that features a guy who wrestles in a chicken costume while drunks hurl tortillas at him. As I write this, the current #6 on this list is the 3rd edition of Coaching Youth Wrestling, which sports a cover photo of two ten year olds trying to take each other down. Coaching Youth Wrestling is not only on the same list as my lurid account but also The WrestleCrap Book of Lists! (sic). I will agree with these Greco-Roman coaches: there is definitely something wrong with this.

Lucha libre aficionados will be angry at how my book could have come in ahead of the life story of a genuine luchadore for even one whole hour yesterday. I get emails from these guys from time to time, usually railing on how I haven’t “paid my dues” in the squared circle.

For any regular readers, I must apologize for what is nothing more than an overwrought press release here. I’ve abstained from such things for a while now, choosing instead to write what I term “quality blogs” or “essays.” But originally, I started blogging at the behest of my publisher to create a “platform.” These early blogs usually detailed publicity stunts like holding a book reading in front of Cody’s Books in Berkeley after it had closed for good or demonstrating choke holds on booksellers and librarians at the 2008 Book Expo America. Dan Sirota details this phenomenon in his latest OS essay, When Julia Became Julie, Content Lost Its Throne. It is difficult to imagine Robert E. Howard spending the time to prattle on about the release of The Bloody Crown of Conan on the Kindle. Or could you imagine Hunter S. Thompson doing this? Maybe we should crank call Harlan Ellison posing as a rep from Fictionwise Classic and ask him to blog the 69¢ download of Paingod and Other Delusions. I’m sure ol’ Harlan will love that.

Gene Barry (with co-star Ann Robinson) crashed a plane to get away from Martian war machines in “War of the Worlds” (1953), not “Invaders from Mars.”

Gene Barry, a towering figure of my UHF TV viewing in the 70s, passed away in a rest home in the Woodland Hills district of Los Angeles today. He was 90 years old. The Associated Press obituary of Barry didn’t even mention that he was in War of the Worlds (1953). That’s like forgetting that Sir Alec Guiness was in Star Wars!

Look, if you just admit that the greatest achievement of American culture was the output of science fiction movies in the 1950s, we’ll all get along a lot better. Sure Hendrix, Steinbeck and Miles Davis were all pretty amazing, but the greatest artistic explosion this country has ever seen started in 1951 with The Thing from Another World and The Day the Earth Stood Still and drew to a close in 1960 with The Time Machine. Some would argue that the 50s sci-fi movement actually ended in 1963 with The Slime People, but that film, where all of the action is obscured by the constant output of one heck of a fog machine, can best be described as an outlier. A case can also be made for 1962’s Day of the Triffids. Triffids definitely has the quality of such 50s staples as War of the Worlds and Forbidden Planet, but it’s British so we don’t care.

Yes, I know that Barry was nominated for a Tony for playing a gay night-club owner in La Cage aux Folles on Broadway in the 1980s, but that pales in comparison to playing a scientist trying to hold society together while Martians blast the living shit out of Los Angeles (and London and San Francisco and Moscow) with crazy looking heat rays that make a cool assed noise. The Associated Press did credit Barry with being in the other Martian invasion movie of 1953, Invaders from Mars. The only problem: Barry wasn’t in Invaders from Mars. Fact check people! Saying that Gene Barry was in Invaders from Mars is like putting Mark Hamill in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Gene Barry was also in the nuclear scare movie The Atomic City (1952) and he did some pretty crazy kung-fu with that cane of his in 108 episodes of Bat Masterson but I’ll always remember him as the suave but earnest Dr. Clayton Forrester in War of the Worlds, even if the Associated Press can’t seem to. At least Adam Bernstein in the Washington Post bothered to get it right and even imbedded this trailer from War of the Worlds in his Gene Barry piece:

Al Sharpton tries to educate the masses inside and outside the ring on this week’s “Monday Night RAW.”

Capping off a month of rising racial tensions spurred by Glenn Beck and shouting Southern congressmen, this week’s installment of The Ultimate Fighter offers us a bout pitting a muscular black street fighter from Miami against a flabby redneck brawler who goes by the handle of “Big Country.” If that wasn’t enough, earlier in the week, the WWE’s Monday Night RAW was hosted by the Reverend Al Sharpton. While a former president decries racism and the current one denies it, one wonders if the post-racial era has any chance of regaining its pre-healthcare debate momentum after the shellacking it’s taking at the fists of our basic-cable combat sports, both real and staged. Only one thing is certain: the symbolism will be thick enough to cut with a tomahawk chop to the chest.

Al Sharpton is the latest celebrity to host Monday Night RAW since the WWE started this experiment with a June appearance by Donald Trump. While guests ranging from Seth Green to Jeremy Piven to Bob Barker have mostly used the show to hype new books or movies, Sharpton was there to promote his national education tour with Newt Gingrich and Education Secretary Arn Duncan (now that’s a tag team). This made for one of the strangest television hybrids in the process as the USA Network brawl-for-all strayed into the realm of community access programming, only with more body slams.

Sharpton was booed heavily by the audience in Albany, NY as he made his way into the ring to James Brown’s “Living in America” during the show’s opening segment. The surly crowd also booed the mention of the words “education” and “civil rights.” Wow, civil rights and education; what horrible concepts! Remember when wrestling fans used to boo Nazis and Soviets? Full time sourpuss and tag team belt holder Chris Jericho did everything in his power to turn the mob’s ire from Sharpton to him by saying that the people in the arena were “gelatinous tapeworms” who “don’t deserve to be educated.” Sharpton finally earned some cheers by “empowering the people” and making a match between the Caucasian heel team of Jericho and The Big Show and their better-liked rivals MVP (a Barry Bonds/Kobe Bryant takeoff) and the World’s Strongest Man, Mark Henry, both of whom are African American.

Pro wrestling, a phenomenon closely associated with unwashed hillbillies in the public imagination, may seem like an odd venue for Sharpton’s outreach efforts however the WWE in particular is responsible for one of the first post-racial stars with Dwayne Johnson AKA The Rock. Like Barack Obama, the Rock is mixed-race with ties to Hawaii. Early attempts by Vince McMahon’s brain trust at casting then Rocky Maivia as an Islander babyface fizzled quickly. Later, The Rock was the head of a cabal of grappling black militants called The Nation of Domination, but little mention was made of his ethnic heritage by the time he made it to the top-tier of the WWE’s roster. He didn’t have to dance in between clothes lines like his black father, Rocky “Soul Man” Johnson, nor did he wrestle barefoot and wear puka shells like his Hawaiian uncle Peter Maivia. Like Tiger Woods, that other pillar of post-racial America, The Rock was able to become the number one attraction in an athletic field that previously had a mostly white fan base.

Al Sharpton’s classroom of freaks.

After Jericho and The Big Show defeat MVP and Mark Henry (through nefarious means of course), the next time we see Sharpton he is on a soundstage made to look like a schoolroom. We know it’s a schoolroom because there’s an apple on the desk. Any good that the WWE may have done by creating one of America’s first post-racial stars is almost undone as Shaprton’s classroom is overrun by a cavalcade of ethnic stereotypes. There’s an angry Chicano, an Italian with a clueless dago shtick that was collecting dust when Chico Marx was still using it and a grunting dwarf in a leprechaun suit. Sharpton soon waves them away and proclaims that tonight “it’s all about “education.” Yes, I enjoyed this skit, and yes, I feel deeply guilty about this.

As with almost all of RAW’s celebrity guest hosts save for the incomparable Bob Barker, Sharpton participates in some of the worst television imaginable. Luckily, WWE champ John Cena is around to summon a steel cage to descend from the rafters as if by magic, thus restoring our bad TV equilibrium. Still, that large WWE audience was too tempting for Sharpton to pass up and the announcers did mention that you could find Sharpton’s National Action Network on Twitter and Facebook several times when they weren’t plugging this Sunday’s Hell in a Cell pay per view. Sharpton may be all about education, but Vince McMahon is still about the pay-per-view.

Kimbo Slice, the prophet!

If Don King were promoting Wednesday night’s Ultimate Fighter match between Kimbo Slice and Roy “Big Country” Nelson, it would have been billed as a battle between a black ghetto fighter and a white cracker. While the subtext of this match-up amidst the current political backdrop may be undeniable to certain intellectuals writing their blogs, race wasn’t even mentioned during the third installment of this season’s TUF. In fact, much more was made of Nelson’s big stomach than anything else. “He’s got the biggest belly I’ve ever seen,” Coach Quinton “Rampage” Jackson quipped before adding, “I wonder how he aims when he takes a pee.” UFC promoter Dana White, the man who sets the tone, also weighed in on Nelson’s weight by saying that the fighter “looks like he just left every buffet in Vegas.”

Instead of picking the sores of regional or ethnic divides, the producers of TUF let us get to know the fighters as likable guys with human foibles. In the beginning of the episode, Kimbo Slice talked about how he fought anyone and everyone because he felt they were “the enemy” until he had a revelation. “The true you is the enemy,” he said, “the inner me: enemy!” The more time the camera spends with Kimbo, the more you want to get to know him. “A bird that flies high eventually has to come down to get water,” he tells a fellow fighter, dispensing a kind of zen warrior wisdom that would sound cornball if it wasn’t delivered by such an imposing man. In my previous review of the season premiere of TUF, I wrote that this season’s older roster would have deeper back stories, and this episode is paying those dividends.

Nelson, bearded and scruffy, is kind of the John Kruk of mixed martial arts. As a former champion of the now defunct International Fight League, he is also the most experienced fighter on TUF this season. “He has tons of experience,” Coach Rashad Evans observes, “He won’t be intimidated by Kimbo.”

The weigh-in is brought to us by the “superior sludge protection of Castrol GTX.” Kimbo and his massive shoulders weigh an even 230 pounds and Nelson tips the scales at 264 pounds. “You don’t look like you weigh 264,” Kimbo tells Nelson but then Nelson takes off his shirt and reveals his spare tire. There will be two five minute rounds. If the fight ends in a tie, one more “sudden victory” round will be ordered.

The Battle of the Bulge: Slice and Nelson square off during the first round of their Ultimate Fighter bout.

Both fighters are cautious during the first minute of the match. Nelson frustrates Kimbo early on with his jab but Kimbo rushes in and starts throwing the bombs that have sent so many other hard men to the pavement. Nelson ties Slice up and both men’s flesh grinds on the Octagon’s chain link fencing as they vie for position. Nelson finally takes his man down. Kimbo’s head lands at a painful angle on the cage wall. Slice almost bridges out but Nelson maintains the mounted position and starts throwing short punches to the top of Kimbo’s dome. The round ends. “Big Country” has probably won it.

The second round begins. Nelson looks a little tired. Kimbo throws punches with the force of a jackhammer. Nelson looks dazed but takes Slice down again. Both men land hard on the mat. Kimbo, a heavy puncher with little experience in ground fighting is as effective in this position as a fighter jet is on a runway. Nelson lands more short punches to Kimbo’s bald dome. The ref orders Kimbo to fight back or else he’s calling the fight. Kimbo is tied up. He does nothing. The ref stops the bout in the second round. “Big Country” Nelson, the show’s most experience contestant has taken out its best known star.

“None of us could get that big belly the hell off of us,” the ever quotable “Rampage” Jackson muses, “It’s like having the moon sitting on you. How do you get the moon off of you?”

Roy “Big Country” Nelson’s win over Kimbo Slice wasn’t a win of white over black, but a victory for the fat over the fit.

Illustration by Greg Franklin

Who in the flaming fuck is Aaron Ekhart? Is he the guy with the really big dick on that HBO show Hung? No? Are you sure? He sure looks like that guy. Well if he ain’t that guy, how in the hell did he get billed over Jennifer Aniston in the latest romantic comedy? I mean Anniston’s the most famous woman in the whole god damned world. In every friggin’ supermarket aisle, there she is, staring at me plaintively. We hear who she’s broken up with. Who she’s back together with. Who she longs for. Now that’s a god damned star folks! But somehow this Aaron Ekhart guy who I’ve barely heard of, who may or may not even have a big dick, is billed above her in a chick flick for Christ’s sake – Anniston’s wheel house if ever there was one. If Joan Crawford were around today, she’d rip off Aaron Eckhart’s head and shit down his throat before he’d get top billing over her. Then ol’ Joan would beat Universal studio cheif Ron Meyer with a wire hanger and stuff raw beef down his throat until he sobbed like a little girl.

Hollywood women of today sure are slipping. Bette Davis went to the mat with no less a star than Errol Flynn to keep him from getting top billing in The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939). And Errol Flynn was a real god damned movie star too. Robin Hood. Captain Blood. He was a womanizing, boozing, mustachioed, jailbait seducing junkie par excellence but Bette was going to drive one of her spiked heels through that matinee idol face of his and then body slam Jack Warner on a concrete floor covered in thumbtacks before she’d let his name go above hers in those credits.

I first noticed that a gal couldn’t catch a break when Chris O’Donnell got billed above Drew Barrymore in Mad Love back in 1995. O’Donnell wasn’t even in his Batman flick yet (yes, I know Ekhart was in Dark Knight) but there he was billed above Drew Barrymore, who was far more famous than him in every way you could think of. She was in E.T. She had successfully fought juvenile alcoholism and had bounced back. She was on every talk show and on the cover of every magazine. She was a Barrymore for cryin’ out loud but she couldn’t get billed above a comparative nobody. I guess he’d been in Scent of a Woman but he sure wasn’t Al Pacino.

In the trailers for Vicky Christina Barcelona (2008), Javier Bardem gets billed above Scarlett Johansson AND Penelope Cruz. At least Bardem won an Oscar and all for No Country for Old Men 2007, but Bardem is just the latest Euro import. We get them every so often but Yves Montand didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting billed above Marilyn Monroe in Let’s Make Love (1960). And in a slightly less Euro-tinged note, Frank Sinatra still had to play second fiddle to an aging Rita Hayworth in Pal Joey (1957) and Pal Joey was pretty much a Sinatra vehicle!

I’m beginning to wonder if the only way for Megan Fox to get top billing was for Diablo Cody to write a movie for her where she slaughters all of the male characters like sheep. I don’t care how dumb Fox may be or how talentless she is. Like Anniston, You can’t get away from her. She generates copy. She’s one of the biggest stars going but she will forever be relegated to second billing in any film also featuring that towering thespian Shia LeBouf. Hell, even Garbo would be billed beneath Shia LeBouf if she were making movies today.

Last year, they made The Women with Meg Ryan, Eva Mendes and Annette Bening. In this day and age of the devalued screen queen, it seemed daring to make a movie with no men in it whatsoever (not even a gay male shopping mentor). The problem was that The Women is a remake of a 1939 film with none other than Joan Crawford. Joan didn’t get top billing though. That went to Norma Shearer. I don’t know much about Shearer but she must have been one tough bitch to wrest the top spot from Crawford’s claws. That was one of the few times that anyone got one up on Joan. Clark Gable was able to get his name above hers in Strange Cargo (1940) and Lon Chaney, Sr. was able to pull off that feat in The Unknown (1925) when the actress was only 22. But John Wayne, John Garfield, Henry Fonda, Dana Andrews, Sterling Hayden and Jack Palance all fell before her ruthless determination. That’s a whole lotta’ nuts there folks, and Joan Crawford cracked each and every one of them.

I was beginning to think that Nicole Kidman may be one of the few actresses around today who can get billed above a male co-star but then I checked out her listing in IMDB. Next year she’s going to be in a movie called The Rabbit Hole but she’s second billed to that newly crowned king of Hollywood, Aaron Ekhart. Nicole, if you’re reading this, before that publicity campaign ramps up you have to ask yourself: “What would Joan Crawford do?”

Bob Calhoun is secure in his manhood but still felt the deep-down need to lace this essay with lots of profanity anyway. He is the author of the punk-wrestling memoir Beer, Blood and Cornmeal: Seven Years of Incredibly Strange Wrestling (ECW Press, 2008), which is available from Amazon.com.