The number one single today in 1960:
The number one single today in 1970:
The number one album today in 1987 was U2’s “The Joshua Tree”:
No comments on Presty the DJ for April 25
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The number one British single today in 1959:
The number one single today in 1961:
The number one single today in 1965:
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In early March, I met up with Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of the Atlantic, at an event sponsored by the magazine at the South by Southwest conference in Austin. He had just hired me away from National Review, the venerable conservative magazine where I’d been a writer and editor for 10 years.
“You know, the campaign to have me fired will begin 11 seconds after you announce that you’ve hired me,” I told him. He scoffed. “It won’t be that bad,” he said. “The Atlantic isn’t the New York Times. It isn’t high church for liberals.”
My first piece appeared in the Atlantic on April 2. I was fired on April 5.
The purported reason for our “parting ways,” as Mr. Goldberg put it in his announcement, had nothing to do with what I’d written in my inaugural piece. The problem was a six-word, four-year-old tweet on abortion and capital punishment and a discussion of that tweet in a subsequent podcast. I had responded to a familiar pro-abortion argument: that pro-lifers should not be taken seriously in our claim that abortion is the willful taking of an innocent human life unless we are ready to punish women who get abortions with long prison sentences. It’s a silly argument, so I responded with these words: “I have hanging more in mind.”
Trollish and hostile? I’ll cop to that, though as the subsequent conversation online and on the podcast indicated—to say nothing of the few million words of my published writing available to the reading public—I am generally opposed to capital punishment. I was making a point about the sloppy rhetoric of the abortion debate, not a public-policy recommendation. Such provocations can sometimes clarify the terms of a debate, but in this case, I obscured the more meaningful questions about abortion and sparked the sort of hysteria I’d meant to point out and mock.
Let’s not equivocate: Abortion isn’t littering or securities fraud or driving 57 in a 55-mph zone. If it isn’t homicide, then it’s no more morally significant than getting a tooth pulled. If it isn’t homicide, then there’s no real argument for prohibiting it. If it is homicide, then we need to discuss more seriously what should be done to put an end to it. For all the chatter today about diversity of viewpoint and the need for open discourse, there aren’t very many people on the pro-choice side, in my experience, who are ready to talk candidly about the reality of abortion.
Which brings us back to that event at South by Southwest, where the Atlantic was sponsoring a panel about marginalized points of view and diversity in journalism. The panelists, all Atlantic writers and editors, argued that the cultural and economic decks are stacked against feminists and advocates of minority interests. They made this argument under the prestigious, high-profile auspices of South by Southwest and their own magazine, hosted by a feminist group called the Female Quotient, which enjoys the patronage of Google, PepsiCo, AT&T, NBCUniversal, Facebook, UBS, JPMorgan Chase and Deloitte. We should all be so marginalized. If you want to know who actually has the power in our society and who is actually marginalized, ask which ideas get you sponsorships from Google and Pepsi and which get you fired.
The event itself was revealing, not for the predictable banalities uttered on stage but for the offstage observations coming from the master of ceremonies: my new boss. Mr. Goldberg in private sometimes takes an amusingly ironic view of the pieties of P.C. culture. After giving the opening remarks, he joked about inflicting upon me the “wokiest” thing I’d ever suffered through and said that he himself was “insufficiently intersectional” for the event. He had a good laugh.
I couldn’t share so easily in his humor. Mr. Goldberg knows something about the power of the Twitter mob. A Jewish liberal with some hawkish foreign-policy views and a clear-eyed understanding of the problems associated with the poorly assimilated Muslim minority communities in Europe, he has been labeled everything from a perpetrator of crimes against humanity (he served in the Israeli military as a young man) to an “Islamophobe” to the intellectual author of George W. Bush’s ill-conceived war in Iraq.
But he underestimated the energy with which that mob would pursue someone like me. Mr. Goldberg sits atop one of the most celebrated magazines in our country’s history, and before that he was a star at the New York Times Magazine and the New Yorker. He can survive the occasional heresy.
I’m an unassimilated conservative from Lubbock, Texas. Much of my career for the past 20-odd years has consisted of writing pieces that tell people things they don’t want to hear. My angry critics on the left think I’m a right-wing monster; my angry critics on the right don’t like the fact that I’ve reported extensively from Trump country and haven’t thought very highly of what I’ve seen. If I’d been hired for a new job at some conservative outlet, you can be sure there would have been talk about how I pray each night for the death of the white working class.
But this time, the tsunami came from the left, as I’d predicted.
On March 22, the Atlantic announced that it had hired me and three others as contributors to its new section “for ideas, opinions and commentary.” In no time, the abortion-rights group Naral was organizing protests against me, demanding that I not be permitted to publish in the Atlantic. Activists claimed, dishonestly, that I wanted to see every fourth woman in the country lynched (it is estimated that 1 in 4 American women will have an abortion by the age of 45). Opinion pieces denouncing me appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Republic, Slate, the Huffington Post, Mother Jones, the Guardian and other publications.
The remarkable fact about all this commentary on my supposedly horrifying views on abortion is that not a single writer from any of those famous publications took the time to ask me about the controversy. (The sole exception was a reporter from Vox.) Did I think I was being portrayed accurately? Why did I make that outrageous statement? Did I really want to set up gallows, despite my long-stated reservations about capital punishment? Those are questions that might have occurred to people in the business of asking questions. (In preparing this account, I have confirmed my recollection of what Mr. Goldberg said with Mr. Goldberg himself.)
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The Washington Post reports:
The Democratic National Committee filed a multimillion-dollar lawsuit Friday against the Russian government, the Trump campaign and the WikiLeaks organization alleging a far-reaching conspiracy to disrupt the 2016 campaign and tilt the election to Donald Trump.
The complaint, filed in federal district court in Manhattan, alleges that top Trump campaign officials conspired with the Russian government and its military spy agency to hurt Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and help Trump by hacking the computer networks of the Democratic Party and disseminating stolen material found there.
“During the 2016 presidential campaign, Russia launched an all-out assault on our democracy, and it found a willing and active partner in Donald Trump’s campaign,” DNC Chairman Tom Perez said in a statement.
“This constituted an act of unprecedented treachery: the campaign of a nominee for President of the United States in league with a hostile foreign power to bolster its own chance to win the presidency,” he said.
The case asserts that the Russian hacking campaign — combined with Trump associates’ contacts with Russia and the campaign’s public cheerleading of the hacks — amounted to an illegal conspiracy to interfere in the election that caused serious damage to the Democratic Party.
Senate investigators and prosecutors for special counsel Robert S. Mueller III are still investigating whether Trump associates coordinated with the Russian efforts. Last month, House Intelligence Committee Republicans said they found no evidence that President Trump and his affiliates colluded with Russian officials to sway the election or that the Kremlin sought to help him — a conclusion rejected by the panel’s Democrats.
The president has repeatedly rejected any collusion or improper activity by his campaign. This week, he referred again in a tweet to the “phony Russia investigation where, by the way, there was NO COLLUSION (except by the Dems).”
Suing a foreign country may present legal challenges for the Democrats, in part because other nations have immunity from most U.S. lawsuits. The DNC’s complaint argues Russia is not entitled to the protection because the hack constituted a trespass on the party’s private property.
The lawsuit argues that Russia is not entitled to sovereign immunity in this case because “the DNC claims arise out of Russia’s trespass on to the DNC’s private servers . . . in order to steal trade secrets and commit economic espionage.”
The lawsuit echoes a similar legal tactic that the Democratic Party used during the Watergate scandal. In 1972, the DNC filed suit against then-President Richard Nixon’s reelection committee seeking $1 million in damages for the break-in at Democratic headquarters in the Watergate building.
The suit was denounced at the time by Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell, who called it a case of “sheer demagoguery” by the DNC. But the civil action brought by the DNC’s then-chairman, Lawrence F. O’Brien, was ultimately successful, yielding a $750,000 settlement from the Nixon campaign that was reached on the day in 1974 that Nixon left office.
The suit filed Friday seeks millions of dollars in compensation to offset damage it claims the party suffered from the hacks. The DNC argues that the cyberattack undermined its ability to communicate with voters, collect donations and operate effectively as its employees faced personal harassment and, in some cases, death threats.
The suit also seeks an acknowledgment from the defendants that they conspired to infiltrate the Democrats’ computers, steal information and disseminate it to influence the election.
To support its case, the lawsuit offers a detailed narrative of the DNC hacks, as well as episodes in which key Trump aides are alleged to have been told Russia held damaging information about Clinton.
Russia engaged in a “brazen attack on U.S. soil” the party alleges, a campaign that began with the cyberhack of its computer networks in 2015 and 2016. Trump campaign officials received repeated outreach from Russia, the suit says.
“Rather than report these repeated messages and communications that Russia intended to interfere in the U.S. election, the Trump campaign and its agents gleefully welcomed Russia’s help,” the party argues
Ultimately, Trump’s associates entered into an agreement with Russian agents “to promote Donald Trump’s candidacy through illegal means,” the suit concludes.
The suit does not name Trump as a defendant. Instead, it targets various Trump aides who met with people believed to be affiliated with Russia during the campaign, including the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., his son-in-law Jared Kushner, his campaign chairman Paul Manafort and Manafort’s deputy, Rick Gates.
Manafort and Gates were charged with money-laundering, fraud and tax evasion in a case brought by special prosecutors last year. In February, Gates pleaded guilty to conspiracy and lying to the FBI and is cooperating with investigators. Manafort has pleaded not guilty.
The DNC lawsuit also names as a defendant the Russian military intelligence service, the GRU, which has been accused by the U.S. government of orchestrating the hacks, as well as WikiLeaks, which published the DNC’s stolen emails, and the group’s founder Julian Assange.
The White House, the Russian Embassy, WikiLeaks and Assange had no immediate comment on Friday. A Manafort spokesman declined comment.
The lawsuit was also filed against Roger Stone, the longtime Trump confidante who claimed during the campaign that he was in contact with Assange.
The Trump advisers and associates have denied assisting Russia in its hacking campaign. Stone has denied any communication with Assange or advance knowledge of the document dumps by WikiLeaks, saying his comments about Assange were jokes or exaggerations.
The DNC lawsuit argues that the Russian government and the GRU violated a series of laws by orchestrating the secret intrusion into the Democrats’ computer systems, including statutes to protect trade secrets, prohibit wire tapping and prevent trespassing.
The party said the Trump defendants committed conspiracy through their interaction with Russian agents and their public encouragement of the hacking, with the campaign itself acting as a racketeering enterprise promoting illegal activity.
The complaint was filed on behalf of the party by the law firm of Cohen Milstein.
The suit contains previously undisclosed details, including that the specific date when it is believed theRussians breached the DNC computer system: July 27, 2015, according to forensic evidence cited in the filing.
The analysis shows the system was breached again on April 18, 2016. The first signs that hackers were siphoning documents and information from DNC systems on April 22. The suit notes that four days later, Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos was informed by Josef Mifsud, a London-based professor, that the Russians were in possession of thousands of emails that could be damaging to Clinton.
The list of defendants in the suit includes Papadopoulos and Mifsud, as well as Aras and Emin Agalarov, the wealthy Russian father and son who hosted the Miss Universe Pageant in Moscow in 2013. Trump, who owned the pageant, attended the event.
The Agalarovs also played a role in arranging a meeting for a Russian lawyer at Trump Tower in New York in 2016, at which Donald Trump Jr. had expected to be given damaging information about Clinton.
Scott Balber, an attorney for the Agalarovs, said the allegations about his clients were “frivolous” and “a publicity stunt.”
“They had absolutely nothing to do with any alleged hacking of any Democratic computer system or any interference in the US election.”
The suit alleges that Trump’s personal and professional ties to Russia helped foster the conspiracy.
The DNC’s lawyers wrote that “long standing personal professional and financial ties to Russia and numerous individuals linked to the Russian government provided fertile ground for a conspiracy between the defendants to interfere in the 2016 elections.”
The lawsuit describes how the then-Soviet Union paid for Trump to travel Moscow in the 1980s.
It also details the history of Manafort and Gates, who worked for Russian-friendly factions in the Ukraine before joining the Trump campaign. Prosecutors have said they were in contact in 2016 with Konstantin Kilimnik, a former linguist in the Russian army who the FBI has alleged had ties to Russian intelligence.
The interesting historical side note is that Democrats Jimmy Carter and Ted “Do Oldsmobiles Float?” Kennedy each tried to get the late U.S.S.R. to intervene in consecutive presidential elections on their behalf.
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The number one British single today in 1964 was written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, but not performed by any of the Beatles:
The number one British single today in 1969:
The number one single today in 1977:
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Ronald Bailey reviews Inheritors of the Earth: How Nature Is Thriving in an Age of Extinction:
Humanity isn’t destroying the natural world. We’re changing it. And in many ways, our changes are creating richer and more vibrant ecosystems.
That’s the persuasive and liberating argument advanced by the York University conservation biologist Chris D. Thomas in his riveting new book, Inheritors of the Earth: How Nature Is Thriving in an Age of Extinction. “It is time for the ecological, conservation and environmental movement—of which I am a life-long member—to throw off the shackles of a pessimism-laden, loss-only view of the world,” he writes. Instead, he thinks a thriving world of exotic ecosystems and biological renewal is at hand. By the time readers have finished this carefully researched treatise, they should agree.
Thomas’ thesis isn’t exactly the conventional wisdom. In her Pulitzer-winning 2015 book The Sixth Extinction (Henry Holt and Co.), journalist Elizabeth Kolbert argues that current species losses are comparable to the five prior mass extinctions that have occurred in the past 540 million years. In each case, around 75 percent of then-living species were killed off. Kolbert and the biologists she cites suggest not just that a sixth such event is underway but that human activities are the chief cause of the disaster.
Last year, the Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich made a similar argument in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, concluding that all trends are “painting a dismal picture of the future of life, including human life.” Inheritors of the Earth brilliantly demonstrates that there are good scientific reasons to doubt these dire prophecies.
Thomas forthrightly acknowledges that the “‘extinction crisis’ is real” and “we are in the process of losing many species that existed before humans arrived on the scene.” Researchers estimate that 178 of the world’s largest mammal species disappeared before 1500. Since then, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature reports that 2 percent of mammals, 1.6 percent of birds, and 2 percent of amphibians have gone extinct. “This loss is devastating,” Thomas writes, “but, luckily, it isn’t the whole story.”
He observes that by 2000, human beings accounted for about 30 percent of the biomass of all land mammals, with our domestic livestock making up 67 percent of the rest. Due to human activities, the total amount of mammal flesh is “over seven times greater than it was before humans came along.” And this does not take into account the billions of domestic poultry we raise. The upshot is that “the natural state of the world—to be full of large herbivorous animals and carnivores that eat them—continues to the present day.”
Meanwhile, as people grow wealthier and agriculture more productive, fewer folks have to hunt for food or cut down forests for farms, so more space opens up for the return of wild nature. As a result, European bison have grown from a single wild population to 33; beaver populations have increased by 14,000 percent since mid-century; deer and wild boar in Europe have quadrupled since 1960.
Predators are increasing, too. For example, European gray wolf and lynx populations have risen by more than 300 percent since the ’60s.
Similarly, the white-tailed deer population in the United States went from 300,000 in the 1930s to over 30 million today; bison have gone from just over 1,000 in 1890 to more than half a million today. Black bears were locally extinct in many parts of the contiguous United States in 1900; more than 300,000 are now estimated to roam the lower 48 states. Killed off in the eastern U.S. by the 1930s, mountain lions now number more than 30,000 and are spreading eastward. “Once we stop killing them, large animals come back, rejoining the 90-plus percent of smaller ones that never disappeared in the first place,” observes Thomas.
Humanity is also creating a new Pangaea by moving thousands of species around the globe and thereby increasing local biodiversity almost everywhere. We are, in Thomas’ words, “acting as dispersal agents for other plants and animals.”
New Zealand’s 2,000 native plant species have been joined by 2,000 from elsewhere, doubling the plant biodiversity of its islands. Meanwhile, only three of New Zealand’s native plants have gone extinct. In California, 1,000 new species of vascular plants have joined the state’s 6,000 native species, while fewer than 30 species have gone extinct. Overall, Thomas estimates that “roughly one in a thousand species that arrives [at a new location] causes a real issue for the native animals and plants.”
Indeed, moving species around has turned some that were on the brink of extinction into ecological winners. Take the Monterey Pine: Endangered in its California coastal homeland, it is now thriving in New Zealand, Chile, Australia, Argentina, Kenya, and South Africa. Accumulating evidence shows that many introduced species of plants and animals are improving ecosystems by increasing local biomass and speeding up the recycling of nutrients and energy.
As plants and animals populate new regions, they start down different evolutionary paths that are already transforming some of them into new species. Spanish star thistles transplanted to California and allowed time to evolve are much less fertile when crossbred with their European ancestors—a sign that the two sets of thistles have significantly diverged. Australian crickets in Hawaii have evolved so that they no longer chirp and thus have a greater chance of staying hidden from the flies that want to lay their eggs on them. European hawthorn flies have adapted to lay their eggs on apples in North America. “We are living through a period of rapid formation of new populations, races, and species,” Thomas writes.
Many ecologists view this worldwide mixing and matching with revulsion. Neophobe biologists James Russell and Tim Blackburn, for instance, recently denounced researchers who do not automatically condemn introduced biota as “invasive species denialists,” likening them to people who challenge the scientific consensus on “the risks of tobacco smoking or immunisation, the causes of AIDS or climate change, [and] evidence for evolution.”
Such researchers behave, Thomas writes, “as if there is an ‘ought to be’ state of the world, with each species having its own ‘correct’ location.” But species and ecosystems have been evolving for eons. “Nature just happens, and the distributions of species change—no slice of time has any more or less merit than any other.” …
Since ecological change is inevitable, Thomas urges us to throw aside static notions of restoring local ecosystems to some imagined prehuman Edenic state. Instead, we should embrace our central role in molding the natural world and become more proactive in managing species and landscapes. “Our aim should be to maintain robust ecosystems (however different from those that exist now or existed in the past) and species, rather than defend an unstable equilibrium,” argues Thomas. “We can let change happen.”
Why not “rewild” parts of North America that once contained mammoths, camels, and saber-tooth tigers with ecologically similar species from other parts of the world? Let’s loose elephants, lions, cheetahs, camels, and llamas to roam unpopulated regions of the West. In place of the now-extinct woolly rhinoceros and European hippopotamus, why not settle the Sumatran hairy rhinoceros and African hippopotamus in the Camargue wetlands of southern France? Or transplant giant flightless birds—ostriches, rheas, cassowaries—to New Zealand, where they can fill the ecological niches of the giant moas eaten to extinction by the Maoris’ Polynesian ancestors?
“We can think about engineering new ecosystems and biological communities into existence, inspired but not constrained by the past,” argues Thomas. Employing such strategies also means that “we can protect plants and animals in places where it is feasible to do so, rather than where they came from.”
Thomas accepts that we are now living in the Anthropocene, a new geological age in which human activity has become the dominant influence on the earth’s environment. While our impacts on nature are sometimes regrettable, the trajectory of this exciting era may well bring many more gains than losses for both humanity and the resilient natural world around us.
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Today in 1964, the president of Britain’s National Federation of Hairdressers offered free haircuts to members of the next number one act in the British charts, adding, “The Rolling Stones are the worst; one of them looks as if he’s got a feather duster on his head.”
One assumes he was referring to Keith Richards, who is still working (and, to some surprise, still alive) 53 years later.
The number one British single today in 1965:
The number one British album today in 1972 was Deep Purple’s “Machine Head”:
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The number one British single today in 1958:
The number one single today in 1962:
The number one album today in 1973 was Alice Cooper’s “Billion Dollar Babies”:
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In the seven-year history of this blog (and three years of its predecessor blog) one of the subjects I believe I’ve never written about was professional wrestling.
To get one thing clear first: No, pro wrestling is not a sport. The fact that Sports Illustrated covers pro wrestling, at least online, demonstrates the downhill spiral of SI. As Steve Allen, whose early career included pro wrestling announcing, said in an A&E special on pro wrestling, yes, pro wrestling is fake. And we wouldn’t have it any other way.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8GcFLyUzFI
Facebook’s If You Grew Up in Madison, Wisconsin, You Remember page mentions live pro wrestling at Breese Stevens Field, presented by promoter Jimmy Demetral and apparently hosted by John Schermerhorn, who both covered sports and hosted the “Dairyland Jubilee” show on WKOW-TV in Madison.
It turns out my hometown was also the hometown of one of the noted wrestiers of the 1960s, Sailor (or Seaman) Art Thomas:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-1VgzVpC7A
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iJXD-MPWiM
(Those from the ’80s might remember Lou Albano in the first Cyndi Lauper video, “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.”)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ccdF7VrLKU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQ6xcKWsqbg
I’m told WKOW carried pro wrestling, but I don’t remember watching it. The first pro wrestling I remember watching was on an Iowa TV station my grandparents got in Southwest Wisconsin. Whoever lost this particular match bled enough “blood” that it looked as though a case of ketchup had exploded. (Imagine cleaning that afterward.)
Once we got cable TV, we were able to watch, first, “All Star Wrestling” on WVTV-TV (channel 18) in Milwaukee. And our favorite wrestler was South Milwaukee’s own The Crusher:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VN02ZwqiPU
The Crusher started as a heel …
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evuiz7TH7Yg
… before he became a hero:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYaxc_Y2S2w
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQGKmNtjbUc
The Crusher and his tag team partner, The Bruiser (former Green Bay Packer William Afflis), were even in a movie:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypwTUW9sY7k
It turns out some of The (Da?) Crusher’s contemporaries are still on the scene, though Reggie Lisowski died in 2005:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTlYJUSMEM8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uX6BU8OGY50
WVTV was then taken off the cable system, replaced by WTCG-TV in Atlanta, which became WTBS, which became TBS. That replaced one hour of All Star Wrestling with two hours of Georgia/World Championship Wrestling.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVXLe1jatU4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xKT3V2K0Pc
You wonder why pro wrestling has been popular for decades? Check out this from around 1980 (and remember where the U.S. was vs. the Soviet Union in those days):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u42tFhDXYYQ
Meanwhile, MSG, which carried New York Rangers hockey games, also carried the World Wrestling Federation.
And that brings up what Kyle Smith writes about:
When he first started wrestling in America, the French combatant who had been calling himself “le Géant Ferré” in Montreal needed a new handle. A midwestern promoter explained that running ads for the Giant Fairy wouldn’t fly. Why not, he asked, wrestle under your own name instead?
So was born the legend of André the Giant.
Growing up in a small town in France, the young André Roussimoff told family members, “I don’t want to live on a farm my whole life. I want to do something different.” His life turned out to be as unusual as his body, which, due to an unchecked hormonal surge (his parents and siblings were of normal size), grew up past seven feet and out to nearly 500 pounds. Not an actor, not quite an athlete, he was what the wrestling entrepreneur Vince McMahon calls him in the new HBO documentary André the Giant: “an attraction.”
Roussimoff became the cynosure of McMahon’s pro-wrestling circuit in the 1970s and early 1980s. Other wrestlers on the payroll created their characters with masks or robes or trash talk or eccentric behavior. (George “the Animal” Steele, for instance, made a habit of dining on the padding in the corners of the wrestling ring.) But André’s character was his body. All he had to do was show up. Even routine interactions became strange in his presence. One dining companion interviewed in the documentary recalls that once when he tried to pick up the check at dinner, the Giant, not having it, instead picked him up like a doll and set him on top of an armoire. The speaker relating this anecdote is Arnold Schwarzenegger.
More than any movie star, André couldn’t escape the world’s eyes, couldn’t hide under sunglasses and a hat. He was an oddity too big to ignore, and even people who didn’t know about his career play-acting violence inside the wrestling ring approached him as you would a fantastic creature. Friends, too, dehumanized him. One writer in the documentary compares his hands to a lowland gorilla’s. Fellow wrestler Terry Bollea, better known as Hulk Hogan, said he moved like a Clydesdale horse. He once played Bigfoot on a 1976 episode of The Six Million Dollar Man.
Yet director Jason Hehir finds the humanity in this superficially bestial figure. It’s pleasing to think of such a powerful man as being a gallant one, and his admirers say he was. Within the fake brutality of pro wrestling, says Hogan, André maintained civility by using real brutality. “This is not a business of tough guys,” says Hogan. “If you’re in this business, it’s to entertain. For those guys who thought they were tough guys in this business, André would straighten ’em out real quick.” Example: André despised the wrestler known as “Macho Man” Randy Savage. A clip from the documentary shows a match in which the Macho Man found his face absorbing abuse from the Giant’s gargantuan bottom. “He’s sitting right on his head!” cries an announcer. Buttocks, face, buttocks, face. That’s showbiz, kids! Maybe the true fantasy element André stirred in us was not our wish that a man-Alp could be as tender as the one he portrayed in The Princess Bride, but the longing to humiliate our annoying coworkers as proficiently as he did. Cook fish in the office microwave and an André-style response seems condign.
André had his faults, of course. His drinking was as renowned as his performing: A writer who profiled him said that on any given night, he would put away several mixed drinks, four bottles of wine, and 20 to 25 beers. That’s nothing, says another intimate, who claims he once saw André consume 106 beers. Of equal note is the Roussimoffian flatulence, which is likened sonically to incoming bad weather and would carry on for 30 seconds at a go. Once it nearly crashed a plane, or so legend has it, the aircraft’s pilots being temporarily stunned by the chemical-weapons-grade emission. Flying was excruciating for the wrestler as well: He couldn’t fit into any plane’s bathroom. Someone would have to curtain him off and bring him a bucket in which to relieve himself.
The drinking looked different to a co-star of The Princess Bride, on the set of which an ailing André needed help to catch Robin Wright’s sylphlike Buttercup. Co-star Cary Elwes tells us André drank to relieve the pain. Pro wrestling takes a serious toll on the human body, especially for someone André’s size. He suffered severe back and joint distress linked to his disorder, called acromegaly, and by the time of his valedictory bout with Hogan in 1987, his chief wrestling move was the “standing perfectly still” gambit. Hogan had to come up and allow himself to be bear-hugged for a prolonged period to provide the thrills. Roussimoff was then 40, and had been warned he wouldn’t survive into a fifth decade. The prophecy was off, but only by six years.
HBO’s documentary is riddled with gaps — the portrait of McMahon’s wrestling circus, in particular, seems unduly forgiving — because it is determined to frame André’s life as a piece of entertainment. We learn, for instance, that André left behind a daughter, but nothing about her mother or any other woman with whom he had relationships. Instead, it’s the fellas who tell us what a hit he was with the ladies. “He wore a size 24 ring, what else can I tell you?” says one of the guys. The movie is much more interested in this sort of japery than it is in showing who André really was, but then again, he was a difficult person to know. “He was not the most articulate man in the world,” observes an announcer who knew him. His ballads were in his body slams.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_jTeuajas0
Andre’s acting career included Bigfoot:
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London’s Express reports, if that’s what you want to call it:
Scores of conspiracists led by self-titled Christian numerologist David Meade are certain the world will end as we know it on April 23.
The Nibiru theory, also known as the Planet X or Wormwood conspiracy, is a hoax doomsday claim which flares up online every few months.
Purveyors of the theory believe a rogue planetary system from beyond the fringes of our solar system is barrelling towards Earth.
The supposed arrival of Nibiru is meant to herald the imminent apocalypse and seal humanity’s doomed fate.
But the conspiracy theory has been circulated online hundreds of times before, and so far none of the predicted end of the world dates have come true. So why is April 23 a definite date?According to Mr Meade the apocalypse was meant to begin on October 15 last year, marking the start of a series of cataclysmic events. Fast forward several months and a planetary alignment on the night of April 23 will allegedly fulfil a prophecy from the Biblical book of Revelation 12:1-2.
The Bible passage in question reads: “A great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 