Chris Benoit

Carin told me I should write something about the Chris Benoit situation. She’s right and I was planning on it, but even though you’re reading what I’ve come up with, I really have no idea what to say. I don’t even know what to think at this point. I’m reading what comes out just like everybody else is, and just like them, the more I hear, the more shocked, the more saddened, the more confused I become. It never crosses your mind that somebody you look up to, somebody you see as special to you in some way, somebody you’ve almost never heard a bad word spoken about could have done what it’s looking more and more like he did. I know it’s a strange thing to say, but of all the people in and around the wrestling business, there’s almost nobody I have a harder time picturing murdering his family and killing himself than Chris Benoit. It just doesn’t seem possible, and there are moments when I think about it and I half expect that any minute now I’m going to wake up and everything will be the way it was before. Unfortunately I know that’s not going to happen, and that as today moves on and becomes tomorrow and as tomorrow turns into next week, more details will emerge, and somehow everything will get even harder to comprehend than it already is.

None of us will ever truly know what went on in that house or what was going on in the minds of the people in it, and sadly, the only ones who will ever fully understand what happened this weekend can’t tell us now. But I think it’s pretty safe to say that even if they could, sense could never be made of it. Sense can never be made of something like this, no matter how much we may wish it could. Right now and likely forever, the only things that I’ll ever know for sure are that 3 people are dead, and that even though you can’t take his accomplishments away from him, the name Chris Benoit will likely never mean the same thing as it did just a few short hours ago.

Strange Dreams are Made of Trixie.

You can tell I spend a lot of time thinking about Trixie. Why? She’s in my dreams! She’s in a lot of my dreams in very ordinary ways, but there were two that were especially weird.

I had one dream that it was one of those times that Steve and I were off to visit his family. But in the dream, I decided to leave Trixie behind! I didn’t leave her with someone, I just left her in the apartment. Everyone was fine with this, until I got there, realized that we would be gone for days, and began panicking when I finally figured out that noone would be there to feed her, let her out to relieve, all that good stuff. Then, it was too late to go get her, so we were just going to hope for the best. And the dream was over, I woke up with a start, terrified that I had actually done this. Alrighty then. What does that mean? Does part of me think I would actually abandon Trixie? Weird.

Then I had another dream that made even less sense than the other one, although I can sort of see fragments of reality in it. I dreamed that I took Trixie out to play on the flexi-lead, and the lawn was full of dogs! Dogs everywhere! They were playing, romping, having a good time. So I let Trixie loose, and we all watched the fun. Then I brought Trixie back in, and every so often, when I’d call Trixie to me in the house, I’d think I saw another dog! One time, the dog that jumped at me was yellow, and we all know Trixie is black! Somehow, I’d brought Trixie in, but another dog had followed us, and noone had stopped the dog from coming in with us. I was trying to get this mystery dog to sit, and it would not sit at all. Trixie was not a fan of our stray and kept growling at him. This was not a good scene.

I picked up the phone to call our downstairs neighbour. My thought was she knows everyone in the building, she’d know who this dog belonged to and help me get it home. But the phone wasn’t working! Every time I’d pickit up, it would either buzz at me strangely or I’d be hearing someone else’s conversation.

Finally, I wrestled this big dog without a leash past a growling Trixie and into the elevator. We went down to my neighbour’s door, but she wasn’t home! I got back into the elevator, and ran straight into my boss! I wondered what the hell he was doing in the elevator, but wondered if he could help me with this dog. He went to look at the tags to figure out where the dog was supposed to go, but just as he was about to read it, the elevator opened, he said he had to get off here, but to go to the lobby and he’d be right there to help me. But he never showed up! So there I was, in the lobby of the building, fighting with this uncontrollable dog that wasn’t mine. All I kept thinking in the dream was, “Man I’m glad Trixie’s good at her obedience.”

Man, my brain is screwed up when I sleep. I wonder what other weird dreams it will cook up with Trixie in them.

No What Allowed?

Wow. It’s not very often that, while browsing apartment listings, you stop dead in your tracks and laugh for five minutes at a listing…after staring at it in bewilderment for another 2 minutes.

I’m trying to help a friend find an apartment, so I’m surfing around the newspaper’s classifieds section. I found one listing that said “no crocodiles allowed!”

Crocodiles?

Yes, in fact, it said c r o c o d i l e s.

This is the listing.

No Crocodiles Allowed!
Item#:  911076      
Rate:  
$1,150  /  month
(Fixed Price)      
Address:  120 Mansion St    
City, Province  Kitchener, ON       
National        
Bedrooms:  1    
Bathrooms:  1    
Square Feet:   615       
Quantity Available:  1    
Condition:  Unknown      
Date Available:  09 Jun 2007    
Posting Date:  09 Jun 2007    
Posting Expires:  09 Jul 2007      
Posting Last Modified:  09 Jun 2007 11:23:55 PST    
 
Seller: 
greatspace

    Description

Air Conditioning: Yes    
Building Age: 1 years 
Floor Size: 615 Square Feet    
Stories: 6 
Parking: 1  
You’ll love this beautiful upscale, almost new 1 bedroom condo. Quiet residential area, new building. Stainless appliances. Electricity extra. No smoking.
Shared roof terrace. Lots of light in this unit. 

Everything else looks normal, except the part about the crocs, which leads me to say, huh? What…who…why?! In the middle of a city, there is a one-bedroom apartment listed, and they actually had to tell people that crocodiles were not welcome. No dogs? Got it. No pets? Totally understand. But are these landlords saying that they’re finding it a common occurrence that tenants are keeping crocodiles in their apartments?

I’m so tempted to email these people and ask why they felt it necessary to tell prospective tenants that crocodiles were not allowed to live there. Perhaps a better question is, where are crocodiles allowed to live? I want to know, so I can avoid those buildings.

Speaking Of Running Gags

Here’s one from the You Named That Kid What? Files.

Pat and Sheena Wheaton said they decided to name their new baby “4real” shortly after having an ultrasound and being struck by the reality of his impending arrival.

“For most of us, when we try to figure out what our names mean, we have to look it up in a babies book and … there’s no direct link between the meaning and the name,” Pat Wheaton told TV One on Wednesday. “With this name, everyone knows what it means.”

But when the parents filed the name with New Zealand’s Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages, they were told names beginning with a number were against the rules.

The government office has opened negotiations with the parents about the name under a policy that says all unusual names must be given case-by-case consideration.

“The name has not at this stage been rejected,” Registrar-General Brian Clarke said in a statement Thursday. “We are currently in discussions with the parents … to clarify the situation.”

Clarke said the rules are designed to prevent names that are “likely to cause offense to a reasonable person.” Satan and Adolf Hitler were proposed names that have been declined, he said.

If no compromise has been reached by July 9, the baby will be registered as “real,” officials say.

The full article is
here,
4Real.

A New Trend To Follow

I don’t know if anybody else has picked up on this or not, but I’ve been noticing something odd about the news lately. Over the last few weeks, there has been an unusually high number of stories dealing with people whose names somehow relate to the situation that caused them to make headlines in the first place.

First there was Christopher Woods, the guy who is suing the Boost Plus energy drink people for damages over a case of endless, well, uh, wood.

A few days later there was the story of Iowa woman Suzanne Marie Butts, who is facing charges and possible prison time for stealing toilet paper from a local courthouse.

And just yesterday I came across the story of an imprisoned murderer who was caught with an entire cell phone charger stuffed up his ass. His name? Tony Pile.

I know that things like this happen from time to time, but 3 cases in as many weeks is pretty weird so I thought I’d better mention it before somebody else scooped my observation. It would suck to spend so much time *coughcough*researching*coughcough* such an important topic and have it all be worth nothing in the end. And don’t worry, I’ll be sure to report on more of these as I find them or as people point them out to me, because this is so totally a ready made VC running gag.

DVS Is Great, But This Is a Bit Much

Are you a blind person? Do you like pornography, but feel that today’s porn product is neglecting you by not paying attention to your accessibility needs? If so, then boy oh boy do I have a treat for you. Yes indeed, your life changes today. For today is the day that PornForTheBlind.org enters your world.

Thanks to this new free service, never again will you have to ask yourself or even worse a friend questions such as “just what is he doing to that woman exactly?” Or “did he really get it all on her face like he said he wanted to?” Porn for the Blind’s helpful narrators will solve those mysteries and so many more for you, and they’ll do it with just slightly more vocal inflection than Steven Wright.

But wait, there’s more!

If the ever so cheerful sounding men using the technical terms for sex acts aren’t enough for you, you will no doubt be thrilled to learn that none of them appear to have grasped the concept of holding a microphone away from their mouths while speaking into one. The inclusion of the original site’s URL’s and the exact lengths of the clips being described are also features that will surely set your loins to blazing.

So visit Porn for the Blind today.

Porn for the Blind: If this doesn’t turn you on, you’re probably normal.

Jehova’s stalkers

I got something in the mail yesterday that frightened me. It was a piece of mail from some Jehova’s Witnesses, or Jehova’s Witlesses as Steve called them. But I didn’t even have to open it to be frightened by it. You could tell it was not professionally put together. Someone was doing this from their home. Even scarier, it was addressed to us, as our names appear on the buzzer downstairs.

Think about that for a while. That means that someone had to stand down there, write down everybody’s apartment number and names as they appeared on the buzzers, and then go out and carefully hand-mail all the junk-mail they wanted to send us. Doesn’t that seem like a scary amount of effort? Why do they want to convert the people in this building so badly? And why not use that energy for something, ya know, productive?

Do Not Pass Go, Do Not Make Shitty Movie

When people ask me why I never go to the movies and why I don’t care when stuff comes out on DVD, I always have a million ways to answer their questions. And as of this very moment, I now have
one more.
Yes, “Monopoly: The Movie” could soon be coming to a theatre near you.

FILM director Ridley Scott is preparing the most unlikely movie of his career: a feature-length version of the venerable board game Monopoly.

The 69-year-old British film-maker, whose hits include Gladiator and Black Hawk Down, has been offered the pick of young actors to help turn the property game into a comedy thriller.

William Morris, the oldest theatrical agency in Hollywood, has promised Hasbro, which owns Parker Brothers, the manufacturer of Monopoly in the US, that the cream of its stable of 2000 actors will help create a blockbuster movie.

Scarlett Johansson and Kirsten Dunst are being considered for roles. Hasbro, which claims that Monopoly has been played by 750 million people since the 1930s, wants the film to feature “sexy young people” in an attempt to attract teenagers to board games.

Comedy thriller? Ok then.

I’ll admit I’m somewhat curious about this movie, mostly because I can’t figure out how they intend to shoehorn the hours upon hours of madcap excitement that is an actual game of Monopoly into 90 short minutes. I’m not sure if that’s the plan, but I hope that’s what they’ve got in mind. If they try to go all true to life on us with this one we’re going to end up with something slightly longer than watching Ben-Hur 3 times, and I don’t think anybody wants that.