Even at 70-something years old “Judo” Gene LeBell is still the toughest man alive, but he can’t use YouTube worth a damn.

LeBell is a two-time national judo champ and held the National Wrestling Alliance world heavyweight championship for an astonishing 12-seconds. As a martial arts master, he taught no less than Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris how to break arms. As a Hollywood stuntman he roughed up poor ol’ James Garner in more than a few episodes of “The Rockford Files” and threw Steve Martin into the pool in “The Jerk.” And yes, “Judo” Gene also reportedly choked out a certain stony faced actor with a pony tail fetish whose first and last names both begin with the letter S. When I was helping Gene write his autobiography, titled “The Godfather of Grappling,” he’d never tell me the tale of choking out a Tinsel Town tough guy who may or may not be Steven Segal. Don’t get me wrong. Gene is a sadistic bastard. He doesn’t have a problem with bruising peoples’ bodies but bruising a man’s ego is another matter entirely.

I first started working on Gene’s book in 2002. It’s eight years later and I’m on the phone with Gene, trying to coach him in the use of YouTube. World Wrestling Entertainment’s vegan grappling phenom Daniel Bryan has started calling his finishing hold “The LeBell Lock” after “Judo” Gene. The move first got noticed on the WWE’s big pay-per-view Summer Slam a couple of weeks ago. The hold didn’t have an official name then. A couple of days later on his blog, Bryan wrote: “It’s actually an omoplata with a crossface, but I’ve mostly just called it the LeBell Lock.”

I didn’t expect to hear much more of the matter after that blog. Dubbing it the LeBell Lock was a nice gesture on Bryan’s part, but surely the WWE’s brain trust would come up with a flashier name for it. As George W. Bush would say, I misunderestimated the WWE. On this week’s installment of “Monday Night RAW,” announcer Michael Cole actually called it the LeBell lock on the air when Bryan applied the face-crushing maneuver to The Miz during a post-match melee.

I didn’t watch “RAW” on Monday and was just now getting to it through the magic of my DVR. I called Gene to tell him the news. He was unaware of this. While we were on the phone, I sent him a link to a possibly illicit YouTube video of Bryan slapping that hold on The Miz. Michael Cole utters the name “LeBell lock” at the 6:20 mark of the video.

“I don’t have to watch all six minutes and 20 seconds of this thing do I?” Gene said cantankerously. The earlier bout between John Cena and The Miz held little interest for him. He couldn’t wait to see the wrestling hold that bore his name like a kid on Christmas Eve.

“No Gene,” I said, “You see the little circle underneath the screen there. Just move that until the text above it says 6:15 and let it play from there.”

Afer a couple of fits and starts, Gene moved the circle to the right place and let it play. I could hear Michael Cole and Jerry Lawler’s blow-by-blow commentary over the phone.

“It’s a neck crank where you’re key locking the guy’s arm so he can’t roll,” Gene explained.

As Bryan sunk in the hold, referees rushed into the ring to pull the two wrestlers apart. Gene laughed. “"They’ve got four zebras in there,” he said, referring to the refs’ black and white striped shirts.

Then Gene heard Cole call the move by its new name. Gene quickly figured out how to move that little circle back to the right point so he could hear it again. “Wow, they put that over real good,” he remarked.

“Judo” Gene LeBell, the toughest man alive and a self-proclaimed sadistic bastard takes time away from causing pain to feed his beloved squirrels.

When I was working on Gene’s book, he always tried to demonstrate the most painful, bone-breaking finger locks on me. “Gene, I need my fingers to type your manuscript,” I pleaded. Gene could see that I had a point, so he decided to show me knee locks instead. When I started to walk around with what he referred to as a “Transylvania Twitch,” I asked him to show me some other type of holds for a while. Gene chose to have his students put me through a series of neck cranks not much different than the one that Bryan used on The Miz. Things were a little bit easier for me when Gene took time away from causing pain to toss nuts to a family of squirrels that made their home on the roof of his townhouse. Gene often held out his hand with some shelled walnuts in it. I’d watch as the squirrels scampered down the stucco walls and ate right out of his deadly hands.

At this point in time, Gene LeBell has seen it all and done it all. He’s crashed cars, been set on fire, jumped off of buildings and has even wrestled a bear (no he really did this). As an ass-kicking renaissance man, he’s worked with every martial artist, pro wrestler and movie star that you can think of. But when he heard that the WWE had named a move after him, he was actually touched.

“You tell this Bryan guy to come by the dojo,” he said. Of course I don’t know Bryan but I could send him the link to this blog through Twitter and hope that he sees it. That’s how our world works these days.

“You know champ,” Gene said as we were wrapping up our phone call and YouTube lesson, “that really made my day.”

Me with “Judo” Gene LeBell in 2003.

You can buy “Judo” Gene’s autobiography, “The Godfather of Grappling, at www.genelebell.com. By allowing me to co-write his autobiography, Gene taught me more about my craft than any MFA program, plus there were those knee locks.

Crom! Mitra! What sorcery is this! Governor Schwarzenegger is now following me on Twitter. When I first go the email from Twitter informing me of this, I thought it was likely just one of the numerous fake Schwarzeneggers populating the Twiterverse. But upon checking my Twitter followers (all 94 of them), I soon found that it was the Governator’s verified account. It has the little blue checkmark next to it and everything.

My current governor is followed by 1,747,181 people and is following 111,204. At 9:15 this morning, Arnold was “Hanging at Melody Ranch with my son and his friends.”

“It’s a great Western town,” he adds.

Even though I have been tweeting about “The Expendables” a bit over the last couple of days, it’s still hard to figure out why Gov. Schwarzenegger or the handlers of his microblogging decided to follow me. Michael Chiklis tweeted to thank my interview with him at WonderCon ran in Salon, but nothing I posted ever moved him to follow me. Here are my last four tweets:

Both Eat Pray Love & The Expendables show Americans seeking enlightenment in exotic locales. Stallone blows shit up to find tranquility. (Around 2pm today)

Expendables is No. 1: http://shar.es/0XHIk USA! USA! (around noon today)

If The Expendables somehow makes $200 million, can Lucas please make “Grumpy Old Star Wars” w/ old Han, Chewie & Luke? (17 hours ago)
Also, over the last couple of days, I’ve also tweeted my recent Salon.com article on the Saigon whorehouse outtake from the first Rambo movie.

Governor Scwarzenegger and I are both following Wil Wheaton, Jerry Brown, Paul Krugman and ArnoCorps, the ballsy punk metal band of goddamned heroes that mocks Arnold at every turn. If you’ve read any of my recent blogs about Schwarzenegger, you can tell we don’t see eye to eye, but at least the guy doesn’t shy away from differing opinions. It’s hard to picture Meg Whitman following Paul Krugman, let alone a rock band that’s sole purpose would be to bag on her through thrash metal anthems.

Okay, speaking of ArnoCorps, I need to go to their lead singer’s compound to watch WWE Summer Slam. As the Terminator would say, “Hasta la vista, baby.”

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.

On Saturday morning at the “World’s Largest Star Trek Convention” in Las Vegas, 543 Trekkers put on their finest Klingon, Vulcan and United Federation of Planets apparel and crammed themselves into a ballroom at the Hilton for ten minutes in order to enter the records books for the most “Star Trek” people in one place. Even to an original series Trek nut like myself, this seems like a kind of contrived record. I mean, what about the most “Star Wars” fans in one place at one time? The most “Babylon Five” fans? Or how about all of those people in crazy, shimmering duds at the last San Francisco Love Parade? I hope those people just walk around dressed like that without an excuse. Back in those long ago days when I was a kid, the “Guinness Book of World Records” was a magical tome where you had to consume a whole crapload of live goldfish or never, ever cut your damned finger nails to gain entry onto its hallowed, pulpy pages. Being so obese that you had to be carted around on a flatbed truck when you were alive and buried in a piano case when you finally kicked the bucket, also helped.

But there was an energy in the air at 9am yesterday morning that melted both my cynicism and my hangover. The soundtrack to “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” was piped in through the room’s sound system, making everything seem so dramatic. “We have 200 people in the room,” one of the convention’s organizers announced as a steady stream captains and creatures spawned by the mind of Gene Roddenberry entered the room and took their seats. The previous record of 507 costumed Trek characters was set in Germany. I actually got chills when the number got to 400 while Jerry Goldsmith’s Klingon theme was playing. When the number 450 was announced, the crowd erupted into cheers. The announcer then said that there was a greater variety of alien lifeforms trying to break the record in Vegas that day, and that the Germans mostly stuck to Starfleet uniforms. When the count stalled at 490, people were sent out into the rest of the convention to pull people in. The moment of suspense was a short one however, and the count started to go up again. When they announced that the 505th fan had crossed the threshold, the announcer said, “The record is going down! We got it!”

The enthusiasm was contagious.

“510, 511, 512… 518, 519.”

The cheers were louder than before. The enthusiasm of the Trekkers was contagious and I really felt that I had witnessed history under those fluorescent lights.

The con, which at times seemed like little more than an autograph mill, got to me again only a few hours later. Shatner and Nimoy were on stage and Patrick Stewart made a surprise appearance. The crowd went nuts and I dashed over with the other press photographers to snap some shots. For everybody in that room, this was a huge moment. Those chills were back as I looked up at the three “Star Trek” icons through my camera lens. I actually had to choke back a tear there as the claps and cheers of hundreds of Trekkers filled the room.

Sir Patrick Stewart invades Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner’s bickering.

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.

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.

On Thursday May 13, pro wrestling bad guy Chris Jericho played a packed nightclub in Glasgow, Scotland with his power metal band Fozzy in support of their new album “Chasing the Grail.” The following day he fronted a show in Nottingham, England and then did two shows in London the day after that. On Sunday he rested (or likely traveled), but was in Toronto on Monday getting clotheslined out of the ring during the weekly broadcast of the WWE’s flagship program “Monday Night RAW". Only five days later he was at it again, playing a rocker dive in Chesterfield, Michigan followed by a pay-per-view tag team match in Detroit the next afternoon. Just like any other rocker, Jericho can’t quit his day job to pursue his dreams of rock n’ roll glory, but in Jericho’s case, that day job involves body slams, spandex and pyro.

As if Jericho doesn’t have enough on his plate, he’s found himself in the middle of a literary blogosphere controversy, albeit indirectly. In a recent Huffington Post blog titled “Why Men Don’t Read: How Publishing is Alienating Half the Population,” book editor-turned-thriller-writer Jason Pinter details the difficulties in getting his mostly female former higher ups at Grand Central Publishing to take a chance on Jericho’s memoirs despite the wrestler’s obvious media profile. In the end, the fate of Jericho’s book hinged on the opinion of the fifteen-year-old nephew of one of the company’s senior editors. Luckily for all involved, the kid was a Jericho fan. The resulting book, “A Lion’s Tale: Around the World in Spandex", cracked the New York Times bestseller list and has spawned a sequel titled “Undisputed: How to Become the World Champion in 1,372 Easy Steps", which is scheduled to hit the shelves in February 2011. Not surprisingly, Jericho has composed much of the new volume while on airplanes.

As Pinter’s assertions of an estrogen-dominated publishing industry sparked off a firestorm of controversy in web outlets both large and small (with Salon’s own Lara Miller weighing in), I had to get Jericho’s take on this whole thing. After a Memorial Day promotional appearance at an FYE in Austin, Texas, Jericho granted me the following interview. Of course we discussed Pinter and the upcoming book, but we also found the time to talk about heavy metal, the psychology of getting wrestling fans to hate you, and Jericho’s hand in coining Tony Stark’s favorite put-down from “Iron Man 2″. In fact there was so much to go over, we didn’t even mention Jericho’s appearance in the summer comedy movie “MacGruber” or his upcoming gig as the host of the ABC reality show “Downfall", which wasn’t announced at the time of our conversation. Jericho did have time for both Monty Python and Woody Allen references, however.

BOB CALHOUN: You’re the first person that I ever heard call someone an ass clown. How did you feel when you heard that in “Iron Man 2″?

CHRIS JERICHO: I was laughing because I thought I should get a royalty for that or something. I came up with that on the spot. We were in Bakersfield, California, just doing dueling insults with Kurt Angle. He was like, “you’re this,” and I’m that. And I’m like, “You’re just an ass… clown.” People kind of laughed at it so I said it on TV a week later, and then the next week after that there were signs in the crowd that said “ass clown.” That’s how you can always see if people like something. If you say something on TV and the next week there’s signs in the crowd with that phrase on it. Right off the bat, I knew that I had stumbled onto something.

BC: That’s the kind of audience feedback that you have in pro wrestling that you don’t get as a rock band or in any other kind theater or performance.

CJ: Because it’s a weekly serial almost like the 1940s, you see the instant gratification of what happened the week before. Playing a show with Fozzy, I’ll get the gratification that night, but it’s not like you’re going back to Glasgow the next week to see if people enjoyed a certain song or whatever. It’s the same thing when you’re acting. You don’t get any gratification for that for six months or eight months afterwards until you go to the theaters or see your work on TV. But with wrestling, because it’s live theater, because it’s televised around the world, because you show up every week to do it, you get the feedback right away.

BC: With your most recent heel incarnation where you’re lecturing the audience on how they need to grow up, were you surprised at the kind of reaction that you got in this post-modern era? The kind of ire and hatred that you got for doing that?

CJ: It’s not the line that you say, it’s how you deliver it, and nobody likes being talked down to. Nobody likes it either if you’re telling them something that’s the truth. If you were walking across the street and you were about to get hit by a bus and I saved you, but every single day I went, “Hey, remember when I saved you from getting hit by a bus. You should’ve looked both ways.” At first, you’d be like, “Well, yeah, you’re right.” After awhile you’d say, “Shut up. I understand. Enough already. I wish you’d let me get fucking hit by the bus.” And that’s kind of how it works with what I’m doing in the WWE with calling people hypocrites. It all stems from something that really happened, and people don’t like being told the same thing over and over and over again. It becomes quite sickening. That’s the reason the character has drawn such ire for such a long time, it’s that I’m a know-it-all who’s basically telling the truth with what’s going on in society, but people don’t like being told that.

BC: If Robert Downey Jr. calls anybody a gelatinous tapeworm in “Iron Man 3″ are you going to challenge him to cage match?

CJ: I’ll jump through the screen like Woody Allen’s “Purple Rose of Cairo” and attack him right then and there.

BC: You could get a good movie out of that.

CJ: You could.

BC: Tell me about Fozzy’s “Chasing the Grail” album. What is the grail, how fast is it moving and why are you chasing it?

CJ: The grail could be anything. I wrote a song called “Grail” and our guitar player Rich (Ward) came up with the idea of “Chasing the Grail” for the record title. You’re not exactly chasing an old cup that Jesus drank wine out of. The grail is something that could be a job, a girl that you’re looking to catch – whatever it may be. So it stands for anything that’s a goal in your life or a dream that you set out to capture. For me, it’s an African Side Flying Swallow and it moves about 36 miles per hour on land and I’m going to catch that son of a bitch one of these days.

BC: Now the lyrics on the record are a mix of The Bible, Stephen King and Viking disembowelment.

CJ: Well yeah, it’s a heavy metal record so those are the three food groups that you go to: Stephen King, Bible and Viking disembowelment. Any metal band worth their weight in rock will hit those subjects over and over again.

BC: You’re a Christian and you’re way into metal. Do you ever feel that you get if from both sides? That you have Christians who don’t understand how you can be into heavy metal, and you have pagan or atheist metalheads who don’t understand your faith?

CJ: Back in the 1980s, you used get that when metal was first coming into prominence. You know the picketing. You’d go to an Iron Maiden concert and there’d be signs. I think now the whole world has calmed down a bit. If you really want to get technical about it, God created everything anyway so God created Iron Maiden believe it or not. Heavy metal’s a release, a great way to work out your aggressions. It was when I was 15 and it is now that I’m 39.

BC: Tell me about Jason Pinter. Were you aware of the hoops that he had to jump through to get “A Lion’s Tale” published?

CJ: No, I wasn’t aware of it at all and it was actually really interesting to hear that story. Especially now that the people at Grand Central (Publishing) signed Bret Hart’s book, they signed Mick Foley’s book, so these other books are signed because of “A Lion’s Tale". And hat’s off to Jason for seeing that. Am I a wrestler? Yes, but it’s so much more than that. I didn’t write “A Lion’s Tale” for wrestling fans. I wrote it for people who might not know anything about wrestlers, (as) more of a follow your dreams type of book than “then I gave him a body slam.” I think that it paid off in spades. I wasn’t aware of the lengths that Jason had to go through to get the book signed so when I read about it, I was kind of laughing because he hadn’t told me that story. Soon after he signed the book, he left the company to go and write on his own. So he started as my editor for about two weeks, but then I never saw him again until hearing this story on his blog.

BC: How would you compare the publishing industry to pro wrestling?

CJ: I don’t know. There’s not a lot of similarities I don’t think except that they’re both entertainment involved businesses. I think writing any kind of a book whether you’re a wrestler, a musician, or an actor; it’s such an art form. It’s such an arduous process. It takes such a long time. I’ve never been the guy that would pawn off my story to somebody else to write. I’ve written every world of both of my books including the one that I’m just going to ship right now. I work with a collaborator to give me some thoughts and advice as I write it myself. I think that that’s one of the reasons why “A Lion’s Tale” was so successful because I was very hands on with it – the same way I’ve been with my wrestling career from the moment I started.

BC: Now you’re writing the new book on planes, at least from reading your Twitter feed.

CJ: Yeah, that’s the way for me to do it: planes, trains and automobiles, man. You do so much traveling that it really makes the time go by faster, especially when you’re writing and you get really into it. Hours go by as if in minutes. It’s funny too because I’m a big fan of watching movies and DVDs and I haven’t watched anything in the last couple of months because all I’ve been doing is writing every single chance that I get. So now that I’m almost done, I have these huge piles of DVDs in my house that I have to start watching because I haven’t had any time to do it. All my spare time, even when I’m not on a plane is devoted to writing this book, rewriting it and editing it. There’s a lot of work to it. I’m up for it, but I couldn’t churn out a book a year like Stephen King. I don’t know how in the hell he does it, but I’m sure he probably wonders how I could wrestle 210 times a year.

BC: I take it the new book is about your experiences in WWE?

CJ: That and Fozzy. It’s as much of a rock and roll book as it is a wrestling book. It’s kind of half and half. Actually, my experiences in LA acting as well – it’s kind of an all encapsulating show business memoir.

BC: Your previous book, “A Lions Tale,” is about promotions that you had worked in in the past and a lot of them aren’t even in existence any more. Is there a different feeling going into writing a book about that includes your current employer and co-workers?

CJ: Not really. I don’t have any reasons to be angry about anything. I’ve had a big career and have done everything anyone can ever do. Obviously there are some stories where there are disagreements or conflict and that’s what makes the stories interesting. At the end of the day, everyone I write about I have the utmost respect for. You have watch what you say in certain points but I watched what I said in the first book too because I wasn’t coming up to settle any scores or be bitter. There’s a couple of villains in the first book and there’s a couple of villains in the second book. There’s some great stories about some of my clashes with Vince (McMahon), but that’s bound to happen when you’ve worked with somebody for almost ten years.

BC: In your experience with your first book, do men read?

CJ: Absolutely. Absolutely. This book was read by every demographic and every segment of society that I could imagine: men, women, hermaphrodites, everybody. Now that I’ve been doing in-store signings for Fozzy and “Chasing the Grail", I sign at least 20 or 30 books at every signing from people that have just bought it. It’s still selling, which to me is amazing.

I’ve been writing a book about conventions. This means (duh), I’ve been going to a lot of cons, tradeshows and many events that involved some degree of cosplay. I’ve been to a gun show, the International Cannabis & Hemp Expo, WrestleMania, a “Star Trek” con, a comic book con, and the 2010 California Republican Party Convention. This weekend, my convention quest brings me to Conspiracy Con X at the Santa Clara Marriott. Everyone I tell about the Conspiracy Con asks me the same set of question: How can this convention even happen? Wouldn’t the CIA or our evil reptilian overlords love the chance to wipe out such speakers as Power of Prophecy Ministry President Texe Marrs, Shaman and extra-terrestrial behaviorist William White Crow, Occult Irish History expert Michael Tsarion, AND public access TV horror host and conference emcee Mr. Lobo while they are all in ONE PLACE?

“We have never, ever been overtly harassed in some cloak-and-dagger, Men in Black scenario,” Brian William Hall, the Executive Producer of Conspiracy Con explains in a recent email interview. “We do know, however, that we are watched; that many from any given alphabet soup agency are there in attendance each year.” “

“For the price of a ticket,” Hall adds, “They can gather valuable intel from the information dispensed, and they can learn what we in the truth movement have garnered, as well.”

“It is literally a gift for both the public and the oh-so private sector within the intelligence community.”

Hall organized the first Conspiracy Con in 2001 as a way of helping to dispense information on such issues as, well, I’ll let Hall himself explain:

“UFOs and a potential non-terrestrial presence that has been here for eons; suppressed technologies that would free us from the need for polluting fossil fuels; suppressed medicine and real cures for such things as AIDS, Cancer and the Common Cold; the fact that AIDS and other emerging viruses are actually manufactured for the purposes of wiping out undesirable populations through so-called benevolent vaccination programs around the world; that 9-11 was an inside job (or, at least, that the official version is the biggest conspiracy “theory” of them all about what happened in 2001; that the OK City Bombing was an inside job; that US Presidents are not elected, but selected by the global elites to further their goals and not that of “we-the-people;” that we are being poisoned systematically with toxic fluoride in our water and oral care products, with excito-toxins like MSG and Aspartame in our food, with toxic elements in most vaccines, and last but not least toxic biologicals and chemicals being sprayed from the skies through a clandestine aerosol spraying program (aka Chemtrails) around the globe; that secret societies and powerful banking dynasties control everything we see and hear, which includes the manipulation of world monies, governments, politics, media, science, education and religion; that all banking and economic crises are scientifically orchestrated; that we are seeing a police state today and that our modern society is nothing short of an Orwellian wet dream… and the list goes on and on.”

While this all might be a lot to take all at once, Hall assures me that although the search for truth is “extraordinarily labyrinthine and is wrought with conspiracy and hidden agenda the likes of which would tower above the highest mountain on this planet,” that “the evidence, documentation, testimony and said patterns of history back (him) up time and time again.”

To cap off our email interview, Hall offered the following quandary: “The Matrix? It ain’t just a movie. Digest that one for a while.”

I’ll be digesting that this weekend at Conspiracy Con as well as the possible agendas of extra-terrestrials, the conspiracy against herbal healing and of course more secret societies than you can shake an all-seeing eye at. You can follow my Conspiracy Con observations on Twitter at http://twitter.com/bob_calhoun.