Steven Seagal has done a number of hasty, ill-advised commercials that were not a good match for his brand, which is something along the lines of āInternet Tough Guy Without the Internet.ā But his appearance as a playable character in World of Warships, one of those exploitative freemium wargames, fit him worse than his poorly-tailored, mildly offensive jackets. The official commercial announcement opens on the mountain temple where Steven Seagal dwells:
Like heās not living in a sprawling ranch-style McMansion in whatever Russiaās Florida is. Haha, who am I kidding? Itās Primorsky. We all know it. Letās just finally say it! Primorsky, you are the leopard print jetski of Krais.
Imagine the disappointment youād feel after trekking to the roof of the world and entering this sacred mountaintop temple… only to find the āmonkā is a shitty proto-weeb who looks like somebody Magic Markered hair on a thumb.
You already know how the rest of this āfunnyā ad goes: The default white guy from every character creation screen enters into a training montage with Steven Seagal, the white guy you get after hammering random. Seagal spouts uninspired āAsian soundingā advice like āstrength is not enough, use your mind,ā and the director cut out the part where everyone giggles except Steven Seagal. Seagal has one extremely brief martial arts scene in the entire two minute commercial, and that bit has seen more doctoring thanā¦ probably Steven Seagal. Buddy, you do not look good. You look like somebody put Steven Seagal in the microwave and forgot to poke holes.
Wait, here comes the comic turn! Youāll never see it coming!
After all this time, Inadequate White Dude #32 explains that heās not here for wisdom, he just wanted to use the wifi! To play World of Warships! You know — World of Tanks for people without the personal mobility to click that fast!
Side note: Every time Steven Seagal looks at a computer, you can see the most hardcore Asian-fetish pornography reflected in his little glasses. Doesnāt matter what heās actually looking at — the reflection shows you what he sees.
The ad unwisely closes on Seagalās bloated head floating over a white-flecked, vaguely oceanic background. It looks like he died masturbating in a sensory-deprivation tank and the spa forgot to check before the holiday weekend.
Of course the cowards didnāt put him in the game looking like that. Instead he got this extremely generous portrait, back from that golden era when he looked like a figurative asshole instead of a literal one, and you could still pay him not to dress like the waiters at an early ā90s P.F. Changās.
But oh man, World Of Warships were so excited for this promo! Or at least they tried to be! It was so sweet of them to go all out here, like they hadnāt just settled for Seagal after realizing that Bob Denver was dead, the surviving Village People wouldnāt work for scale, and the boat from Miami Vice had too much dignity.
āFire Down Below! The Glimmer Man is coming to World of Warships! We did not have Maximum Conviction in this choice, but were worn down by Attrition. We know heās not A Good Man, and The Asian Connection is unfortunate, but itās too late now. Weāre in the Belly of the Beast. Uhā¦ fucking The Onion Movie. Thatās one.ā
World of Warships gave him captaincy of the USS Missouri, the ship from Under Siege.
Which was a very appropriate choiceā¦ in that the ship is also a relic that used to be famous for fighting but now just sits around posturing because it hasnāt moved under its own power since the ā90s.
Seagalās character even came with special āSeagal Skillsā:
Could you click to make his boat slowly list to one side while all surrounding boats pretended to take damage? What was his ult? Betraying his own ship and suddenly appearing on the enemy destroyer? Could he combo that into shilling for the korporatsiya that made their cut-price artillery?
God, World of Warships really wanted to make this into a something. They even had Seagal pay a visit to their headquarters, where he stood around looking like a big penis caught in a little fingertrap:
Why does nothing fit him? Do they not make frog-closure jackets for Weebles? He looks like somebodyās squeezing a tube of shithead toothpaste.
They cut to clips from an aggressively apathetic interview wherein he begrudgingly admits that it āsounds like a good game.ā They vigorously assure him that he is āa very powerful ship.ā To be fair, only after he first says āit sounds like Iām the best ship. Iām the best ship, right?ā
There are way too many closeups (one) on his gross long thumbnail that he tells people is for āpickingā and hopes they assume āguitarā instead of ācoagulated coke blockages.ā
Because heās Steven Seagal and he must belittle everything he cannot fairly beat, from opponents to video games to women, he canāt even pretend to play this game he is being paid to like without lapsing into critique of its realism. He very plainly memorized up to two naval gibberishes and wanted to use them as many times as he could in a sort of conversational Aikido. Hereās how that plays out.
Hereās Steven Seagal with a group of people who donāt understand or like him almost as hard as he doesnāt understand or like them.
I promise that if heās not groping that woman, itās only because his right brachial artery is jammed with Steakāumms and he has limited mobility.
PC Gamer covered this hilariously obvious disaster of a promotion by saying it was a āless divisiveā move than prior events.
Hmm, letās see what the very next major story involving Steven Seagal has to say about that:
And so he was quickly pulled from a game that even Sonic would be embarrassed to cameo in. Though the developers very obviously didnāt want to say whyā¦
Everyone understood that it was really because nobody wants this slow-motion rapist blood-pudding to captain their imaginary fight-boat. Nobody, that is, except for the entire fanbase of this shitty freemium game:
Huh. So the kind of person that lives in the intersectionality between āfree online multiplayer war game enthusiastā and āavid forum userā and āSteven Seagal fanā also dabbles in āknee jerk rape defender.ā I am so shocked by this revelation that my tiny sunglasses have popped straight off of my bloated head and landed in my tea, embarrassing everyone that wonāt make eye contact with me at this traditional Japanese ceremony that I was not invited to. It has absolutely ruined the Burmese silk slacks that I had personally tailored to the dimensions of āmuch extra belly, four timesā and ānot so much crotch, not so much.ā
There’s a popular book series called THE PENETRATOR, who is sort of like if the Scottsdale police tried to make their own James Bond out of plumber DNA. The books are so short and readable that two PENETRATOR novels are often collected in one paperback the publisher calls a DOUBLE PENETRATOR.
That’s the only important thing you need to know about THE PENETRATOR, and the rest of this article is just examples of how insane the PENETRATOR novels became once they got into the high 100s.
Men! Manly Men! Now that I have your attention, ladies and Macho Men interested in Meaty Manliness, Iād like to put forth my thesis statement: Men were at their Manliest before the widespread use of electricity zapped the testosterone atoms of an entire nation. In this column, I aim to do two things: Explore just what made old-timey Men so Manly, and spread my ill-informed anti-electricity propaganda. Iāve already started on step two – invisible lightning bolts from the walls are electrifying your genitals as we speak! — so hereās step one:
The manliest things about old-timey Manmen were their magazines. None of that āTargeted Interestā or āIndependent Journalismā crap. Pre-1960 magazines were about two things: Punching and fucking and sometimes that was actually just one thing. But Iāll tell you what Iām not going to do: Read these terrible articles. Theyāre just shoddy fanfiction about actual murders from a freer time, back when Libel was a kind of off-brand hooch and a fact-checker was just a guy you had to beat in a fistfight if he called you a fibber.
Instead, I posit that we can best examine the whiskey-pissinā, beef-horkinā, revolver-suicide-retirement-plan manly manly men of the 1930s by having them take off their girdles and dance around a bit. But failing that, I guess we could just look at some of the ads in their old detective magazines.
Advertisements in True Crime publications put a lot of emphasis on wildly unqualified amateur law enforcement, which to be fair, is very in-wheelhouse for Complete Detective Magazine.
But apparently being a cop back in the day is like being president today: All you need is raw enthusiasm, absolutely no regard for the sanctity of human life, and to have read part of one book (in the copās case, THE BLUE BOOK OF CRIME; in the presidentās case, THE MAKING OF BLOODSPORT: CHEAP DRUGS, CHEAPER SEX, AND THE VITAL ROLE OF DOING LATERAL SPLITS IN THE FOR-REAL KUMITE WHICH DEFINITELY EXISTS).
Donāt worry, once you read the table of contents for THE BLUE BOOK OF CRIME, you are done investing in your law enforcement education. You can then hunt criminals straight from the pages of the detective magazines you already own:
God damn, Conly āAll Neckā Ayers got fucking roasted in his own wanted poster. Itās true that it looks like his chin is mad at his throat, itās true that his nose is also his Adamās Apple, and itās completely, inarguably true that heās a human Patrick Star, but that eyebrow dig was just uncalled for.
If you just plain donāt have enough rope to hang Conly āThe Trunkā Ayers, maybe Johnny Bugg is more your speed:
John Harvey āSock Footā Bugg is the least threatening anything in the history of everything. That name is not pulled from my Doug fanfiction, but itās definitely going in there now. And heās a kidnapper! What does he kidnap, Smurfs? Imagine being abducted by Harvey āThe Sock Foot Cowboyā Bugg – your search party would be snickering right up until they found your severed toes artfully arranged into a flesh bouquet, aka The Sock Foot Corsage.
But point taken: a little tin mail-in badge is all the qualification you need to hunt these Dick Tracy first drafts.
Weirdly enough, detective magazines seem to endorse petty crime as much as they do slipshod vigilantism:
True Crime mags are full of more minor scams than your momās Facebook page. You wonāt find this many low-effort cons anywhere else but an Airport Hilton, and itās very odd that one publication is trying to move product to both predator and prey. Were these publications like the Reddit of their day: the only game in town where you could both complain about social justice and find exciting new hate groups to join?
But hey, it wasnāt all mail-order cops and classified-ad criminals — old-timey detectives knew how to have fun!
Finally! A tie that you can jerk off to! No longer do you have to carry two ties, one for work, and one for self-pleasure. Yes, one tie that does it all, from business deals on Wall Street to frustrated masturbation in the back of an Edsel! Plus the back is absorbent, for clean-up!
Not content to merely hustle rubes with magic trick, there were also a ton of ads for actual magic.
I didnāt even know you could sell ānew types of prayer,ā but thatās exactly the type of sloppy desperation Iād expect from āPAXCO,ā the shitty progenitor Hydrox to PoxCoās far superior Oreo.
Hey, do you dream of success, conquering your enemies, and mastering the power of prophecy? Have you triedā¦ smellinā stuff?
I guess dopes have been falling for aromatherapy scams since the first idiot with too many coconuts evolved a nose, but I just never pictured the Greatest Generationās manliest detectives buying into it. Some whiskey-fueled private dick stumbling into his office, all gutshot and ulcerous, pausing his grim narration to light a Raspberry Nag Champa because itās Tuesday and he needs the āGOOD LOVE AND MONEY WISHESā karma.
But I suppose that image does jive with the many, many wanted ads for poetry…
I understand that music had just been invented in 1928 by Billy Music and His Sound-Time Mouthblowers, and people were all very excited about it. But there is a lot of desperation in these many, many ads clamoring for shitty poetry about MOTHER and SACRED. This has to be some kind of scam, but for it to be this widespread, wouldnāt there have to be some takers? That implies thereās a significant demographic of singing gumshoes who read Complete Detective as much for the hot scoop on new ways to make your own blackjack, as they do for inspiration in penning āThe Ballad of Sock Foot.ā
Hey, hereās an eleven-inch solid slab of crazy:
Letās zoom in on that WANTED: A BABY! ad. Iām sure thatās a dark remnant of the time when child-trafficking laws only dictated how fast you could drive with somebody elseās kid in the trunk.
But no, itās actually a somewhat touching ad about infertility? Thisā¦ this is not what I expected from you, Kaiser-punching cocksmen of the past.
Letās pick another from the wall of textual lunacy:
Thereās something very sassy about building a body specifically for men to envy, but I love that FUN IN BODY BUILDING is just an add-on to SECRETS OF STRONG MAN FEATS. Implying that you donāt really need to have a beautiful body in order to rip a tractor in half with your teeth, but if you make your pecs dance while you do it then Karmov the Krusher will positively seethe with jealousy.
Huh. Itās like Iām sensing a theme here.
Perhaps one that could explain why thereās so many ads in these pages about failed marriages…
Aw, thatās almost sweet. Love is indeed āa cherished privilege,ā you chain-smoking, huge-livered, dead-at-50 old-timey copywriter. I am totally on board with this book about…
Holy shit!
Thatās the darkest turn Iāve seen since I wrote that joke about child-trafficking. H-how do you solve your marriage problems with fucking eugenics?! Do you breed perfect wives out of generations of your own – no, no I canāt even theorize about this book without typing sentences that will haunt my fingertips.
Letās refocus:
There are a surprising amount of ads targeted at female readers, and most of them are about trying to entice or entrap the mannish fans of True Crime mags who, alack and alas, seem more interested in envying each otherās glutes than breeding out the perfect woman.
I say āa surprising amountā of female readers not because Iām assuming women arenāt interested in detective work and savage homoeroticism — a demographic breakdown of Sherlock fans tells me thatās not true — itās just weird theyād be into this specific magazine. Because if thereās one thing Complete Detective fans hate, itās themselves and their failing, inadequate bodies. But if there are two things they hate, itās their own uncooperative penises and all women.
ZOOM. ENHANCE.
āYouāre gonna LOVE how much youāll HATE women! Finally, Tommy āThe Dā Horton does what weāve all been waiting for him to do, which is just fucking take the worst gender to the mat. Weāre not even gonna advertise a potential use for this information — just watch this dude fucking drag the unfairer sex for 123 double-spaced pages!ā
āAt last, a man whoās willing to straight-up fight a female! Any female! Any female under 5 feet with no formal fight training! And recently clipped fingernails! No farmworkers! NO ORIENTALS. A single unslapped woman is a challenge that 1932 has let hang for too long! Never again feel EMBARRASSED that the undonged might be happier than you, when you KNOW FOR A FACT that Tommy The Hort once heard a girl fart in an elevator! THAT BITCH. Learn aboutā¦ā
If thereās one thing Thomas D. Horton is sure of, itās that women donāt play by the rules. Heās not sure what those rules are, but apparently there are formal playguides for literally every abstract activity, and not a single woman obeys any of them. They bargain unfairly in love forā¦ love points? I donāt know what theyāre haggling for in a relationship, but Iām damn sure they cheat at āoffice.ā They even display bad sportsmanship when you call them animals — theyāre just the worst, and if youād hang back to light some Lucky Revenge incense while The Hortsman uses the Master Misogynistās Prayer to nail down this Eugenics For Spite chart, we wonāt even need these dames no more! Weāll be free! Free to focus on each otherās bodies, only reluctantly impregnating our carefully-bred Brood Cow when we need to make some more Complete Detectives!
In the 1900hotdog library, there are countless books made up of total bullshit, sometimes because the author was a lying grifter and other times because they were a stupid failure. This book, My Life’s Fight: the life story of Mark Bailey, has one of each. It’s the fully fictional life of a fighter who can’t fight as told to a writer who can’t edit, fact check, or spell. By any metric, it’s the worst, most pointless book ever written.
Aside from growing up dumb, racist, and filled with drugs, Mark Bailey has never done anything. But Donna Kshir transcribed every story he told about drug deals gone wrong, prison fights, and so, so many underground world championship street combat battles. They all have the same details of Mark getting his jaw and hands broken, winning because he never gives up, then listening to doctors say he’ll never wake up from his coma. Oh, and sometimes he signs autographs for his fans before the coma. And another thing…
This book was written in 2008.
This obviously fake bullshit was published ten years after every home had access to all information in the world, and Donna Kshir sat here with the scarless, chubby survivor of three hundred street fights and twice that many comas and never thought to Google any of the 27 world titles he won. To call her a bad writer is inadequate. She’s a bad 3rd grader. She’s a chimpanzee declared too stupid to use for shampoo testing. This trusting, mitten-handed cow doesn’t know the difference between “their” and “there” and at least 40% of the book is made up of previous paragraphs clumsily rewritten with different spelling errors. If you asked her to write instructions for soup she would say, “My naybor sayd soup is invented by wizerds to de feet breakfast. Wizords com bined all their majic to kill eggs with Soup.“
I don’t want to cherry pick her worst mistakes, so to give you the fairest possible example, here’s the very first page of the book:
You probably assume Donna is simply lazy as fuck, poorly educated, and untalented in a way beyond criticism. You can’t review this as a work of writing– it’s like mocking a ransom letter for missing a comma. If a janitor wrote this, you’d fire them for being the dumbest goddamn janitor in Pennsylvania. The middle school this woman dropped out of should burn itself down in shame. But, get this, according to the Dedication, this piece of shit book fulfilled her lifelong dream. And then, as she does all fucking book, she mentions the same thing on the next page in the Acknowledgements. Do you know what this means!? I think she was trying. This 72 page pamphlet of clumsily transcribed lies as told by the dumbest goddamn liar in Pennsylvania, which neither she nor anyone proofread, was her dream.
Let’s talk a little about Mark Bailey’s entirely fabricated life story. It started like most stories do…
In his early 20s, Mark was already an International underground fight champion. He was so deadly, and everyone knew it, but people would always spit on him and then he had no choice but to choke them out with lethal choke holds no one had ever seen before. The fact that anyone, even poor Donna left behind by our education system, couldn’t see this guy was full of shit is depressing. Donna must have so, so much MLM merchandise in her reverse-mortgaged home while she raises money for her ghost investigation equipment.
Every character who passes through Mark’s life is a movie cliche. He was trained in sombo, which isn’t how you spell that, by an evil Russian named Vlad, a name which means, “I should have looked up a second Russian name before I made this character up.” When Mark finally defeated Vlad, Vlad said he was ready to go back to street fighting, the thing it was already impossible for Mark to lose at. I think Mark was still around 22 at this point, and so he sort of retired from made up fighting to get into made up drug dealing. This landed him in made up legal trouble.
His lawyer, “Mr. Smith,” told him he was going to have to go to prison for 25 years unless he snitched, but Mark Bailey doesn’t snitch. It wasn’t exactly clear on why his testimony would help them, and honestly Mark’s entire legal saga was a narrative mess. He seems to have seen maybe one TV episode about the process, but definitely not a second. Here’s how he dealt with the threat of prison:
You don’t have to be a genius to know how Mark described his first day in prison. Take a minute and try to guess what he said, and what Donna Kshir recounted breathlessly and with a bag of hammers’ understanding of punctuation.
You’re right. Within three paragraphs Mark earned the respect of the big black man who runs the place by beating him up and turning down his job offer to be him.
To be legally allowed back into grade school, her teachers had to list Donna as “class hamster” on her paperwork. I have a feeling “Kshir” isn’t her real last name; it’s just the closest she could come to spelling “Kangaroo Brain Transplant Subject H-14”
Back to Mark’s story: due to a paperwork mixup he got thrown into a prison for cancer and AIDS patients. This weird digression seemed more interesting to him than normal prison which he instantly conquered, so another paperwork mixup sent him to a prison for the criminally insane where several things he saw in movies happened. In particular, Mark talks a lot about all the rape. Every few pages it comes up and Donna is not equipped for it. She seems to not know whether the word is a verb or some kind of adnoun, and whenever Mark invents another unspeakable sex crime her sentence structure falls apart worse than usual. It’s… I don’t know, “weird” isn’t the word. I mean, sure it’s weird, but it’s more like the worst aspects of their stupidity and dishonesty are painting a masterpiece of failure. There’s nothing quite as troubling or shitty as what these two piles of garbage came together to make for zero money and the benefit of no one.
By the time Mark got out of prison he was no longer a racist and gave his life to God. So he went back to street fighting where he maimed many fictional men in Jesus’ name, Amen.
Once he fought his way back to being a world champion of the streets, again, he became a teacher. He opened a school where he taught his lethal, unorthodox martial arts techniques to children. His students entered tournaments and “sat back and laughed, walking away with the medals and swords.” And since children were winning swords in no-holds-barred grappling tournaments, I guess we can add “martial arts tournaments” to the list of things Mark Bailey doesn’t know anything about and Donna Kshir can’t Google.
Every page of this tiny, never-before-read book is a fucking disaster. Mark’s fake life is a rough draft of a screenplay called Untitled Wayans Brothers ’70s Action Movie Spoof, and Donna Kshir is lucky if she can spoon chocolate pudding into her dog’s mouth without either of them losing an eye. Once the saga of Mark Bailey gets to this child Karate section, he and Donna slop together a swamp of words I fucking dare you to make sense of:
Longtime, tastemaking Me fans might recognize Sensei Mark Bailey from a Cracked article I wrote 10 years ago called “7 Fighters Who Lied Their Way to Legendary.” In it, I condensed thousands of pages of Internet drama and police reports about Mark and six men like him into 4000 words. It was no small feat, but they took the whole thing down after one of the subjects’ lawyers threatened to sue. I wasn’t told which one, but the liar who took the number one spot, Frank Dux on whom Bloodsport was based, was also known for filing ludicrous lawsuits. I couldn’t believe the nerdy comedy website caved in so easily. To what? A superspy ninja’s famously unreasonable lawyer!? Psh.
I have good news, though! Here at 1900hotdog.com, the closest thing we have to a legal team is a People’s Court board game that smells like 40-year-old beer, so now that I’m thinking about it, I’ll just reprint the whole thing here.
So now all I need to do is find an old draft, copy edit it, reformat it, find a ten-year-old backup drive of notes and graphics, Photoshop those, then reflect on the outrageous words I remember being funny in the 2000s but look like hate crimes today. After that, it’s just several hours of followup research to find out what all these shitty men have gotten up to in the last decade, and that, aspiring comedy writers, is how you make two days of work out of a half day off!
Please re-enjoy this…
My cousin knows a guy who killed someone by touching him by using an illegal Karate move known only to fifth graders. Knowing I would one day face him I learned how to kill on the streets from Tibetan jungle sherpas. During my martial journeys I studied with these men– these legends.
John Decyk is a professional fighter who was stabbed in the knee ligament at the age of 16. Doctors said he would never walk again, but fighting legend Royce Gracie helped prove them wrong. He went on to train John to become one of the top MMA stars in the world, winning 57 fights, multiple titles and finding time to also be a Marine, firefighter, and bail recovery agent. Soon after he posted his amazing life story on Wikipedia, John “The Jam Man” Decyk also became gay, studied with the X-Men, and won at least three cheese-eating championships.
As you had to have guessed, John Decyk’s fighting career took place entirely on the World Wide Web. He didn’t know that we knew, though. He wrote long blogs about his rivalry with boxer Floyd Mayweather, who seemed to know everything about this “The Jam Man” guy and all his make-believe championships. My gut says he’s not telling the truth, but there is an outside chance John Decyk was some kind of magic fighter that only Floyd Mayweather could see.
As if they needed to, everyone did their part to bust the myth of John Decyk. Decyk fought back as hard as he could refuting every joke and fact check with another lie. It was all less than meaningless. He was like a starving man crawling away from food to get to his fake moustache. He must have removed the occupation “professional dick sucker” from Wikipedia 200 times a day alone. He could have easily become the world’s most respected professional dick sucker in less time.
Among the highlights, he posted a hilariously fake discharge certificate to explain why he wasn’t in the Marines and tried to prove he was a bail bondsman with a shirtless picture of himself carrying what looks like 2 pepper sprays, 3 cell phones, and 30 pounds of baby fat. This joke is going to be more cute than funny, but in The Jam Man’s case the proof really was mostly pudding.
To give you an idea of how difficult John Decyk was to outwit, one person offered him a $3500 purse if he showed up to fight. John Decyk asked “what kind of fag would want an expensive purse.” That’s how deep his knowledge of the sport was after “64 pro fights.”
How It Ended: Arrested
John’s fiance’s mother was involved in a court case against the world champion, and she Googled his name as research. This led her right into a forum devoted to fucking with him. She was only too excited to join in, and she soon teamed up with the Internet to turn him from laughing stock into crater. He was humiliated then arrested for a number of charges, one of which was fucking shooting a gun at his brother’s head.
2020 Update: In 2016 John did an interview where he was asked about this article and he claimed it was a lie that he was telling all these lies. I swear I’m not saying this just to protect our precious fun, but it’s possible the liar with a history of lying might be lying about the lies and he, in fact, fucking sucked and still sucks.
6. Craig Rehage
Long after it should have been possible to try something this stupid, a fight promoter in the midwest got a call from a welterweight fighter named Craig Rehage who claimed to be undefeated in 18 amateur bouts. Sensing bullshit, but still being quite lazy, the promoter booked him for a match at 170 pounds anyway. Craig called before the match and said he was at 178 pounds and simply couldn’t lose any more weight. When he showed up, he weighed 190 pounds. Also, he didn’t know how to fight. It’s like he showed up to an online date and she said, “You fat dumbshit. You lying, bee-sting-faced cautionary tale of drug abuse. What was your plan here? Claim to be Georges St-Pierre and hope things magically work out?” and he only heard the very last sentence.
A second promoter came forward with a near-exact story about Craig, and an Internet star was born. The MMA Underground Forum scrambled to find more information about him, and what they found was a gold mine of douchebaggery. Craig had invented stories about being the training partner or cousin of dozens of UFC fighters to try to get free t-shirts, had fake pro hockey and football careers, and had submitted himself as a sports celebrity to any page that would allow it. You know that satisfying feeling you get from seeing someone you hate fail? Imagine an entire community sharing in that together.
As their blissful mockery grew to critical mass, Craig himself joined the forum posing as a lawyer who didn’t personally know Craig but decided to take some time to verify all his outrageous claims. It was as convincing as a swarm of bees in a trenchcoat. Craig can barely spell his name and here he was attempting the same transparent deception from everyone’s first day on the Internet.
How It Ended: Arrested
Craig learned nothing from the time he spent fooling no one as the absent-minded lawyer that was NOT named Craig Rehage. So he tried the same trick in real life– he found himself in some trouble for stealing hockey equipment and decided to get back at one of the police officers by writing harassing letters to his own girlfriend as the police officer. It turns out it’s still a felony to falsify charges against a police officer even if it’s that police officer’s most easily solved case ever.
2020 Update: As far as I can tell, this guy just kept getting arrested for scams that never fooled anyone, but weren’t fun enough to be cataloged by an entire community of fight nerds.
5. Manny “The Hialeah Kid” Reyes, Jr.
Manny Reyes, Jr. competed in point Karate before he made the switch to MMA and became the UFC Lightweight Champion. This was shocking to the UFC and its fans since he had never had a single match in it or any organization. He was, however, one of the first to adapt Karate for Internet message boards like in this desperate plea to UFC referee “Big” John McCarthy:
“DO SOMETHING UFC….DO SOMETHING GAYFUCK MCCARTHY…….. I DARE YOU…….I DARE YOU……. PIECE OF SHIT…I HAVE NO RESPECT FOR YOU………YOUR MOTHER OR FATHER EITHER…..OUR MOTHER WAS A WHOAR AND YOUR FATHER WAS A FAG… LOL………..I’m laughing at you………Send me an Email Address…….Fag!”
By the time this master of persuasion was done karate chopping his keyboard, his Myspace page had so many belts he didn’t even know how to spell them all. Unfortunately, it takes exactly the same amount of time to claim you have a belt as it does for a search engine to prove you don’t. In this rocket age of technology, you can only be the world’s greatest fighter for 7 or 8 seconds at best. Which meant Manny wanted to look cool, but only to the stupidest people alive. Maybe it was a short-term plan to sleep with very dumb girls because he had a theory stupid people herpes could cure regular people herpes? It’s honestly hard to get into the mind of someone dumber than anyone any of us will ever meet.
Manny actually did go on to build a “real” MMA record including several fights in Lords FC. This is a strange promotion that only has two fights on each card: one with Manny winning against a made-up opponent, and another fight between two made-up opponents. Where we live, reality, he has two wins in King of the Cage, but no one has been able to stay awake through them to verify it. Manny seems clinically insane, and has claimed many times that these two wins over bad opponents with no experience and losing records made him… well, I’ll let him explain:
I am the #1 LW in MMA and I did Fight for KOTC….so I am the KOTC #1 CHAMPION……..
If Bob Hope were alive, he’d say that this fella knows less about belts than a pair of suspenders. Seriously, though: he’s clinically insane. When Manny Reyes, Jr. puts on pantyhose, he truly thinks he’s Miss Teen USA and gets pissed off he now has to change all his business cards.
Here’s a fun Manny story: He once had a heated disagreement with the actual UFC champ Jens Pulver. I’m not sure what started it, but Jens Pulver refused to back down from his position of not knowing who the fuck Manny Reyes, Jr. was.
How It Ended: Beaten to Undeath
Reyes continued to challenge many pro fighters and then call them cowards when they wouldn’t fly him out and pay him $10,000. He whined and bitched so much that you couldn’t tell if he was trying to land a fighting career or a Vagisil commercial. Eventually, lightweight contender Hermes Franca offered to fight him at AFC 10 for $1 with the rest of the purse going to Reyes, Jr.. If you were Manny, this would be right when your friends convinced you to apologize and save some dignity. Well, Manny’s only friend was a dwindling tube of dick cream and all it was saying was, “Think of all the me you could buy.”
When the two met in the ring, Hermes Franca didn’t set the world record for fastest knockout that night, but he only missed it by 30 seconds. Hermes pounded Manny Reyes out so quickly and easily that it looked like he was changing a disagreeable pillow case.
When they woke him up and explained what had happened to him, the now more mentally-challenged Reyes had the balls to say that it was a moral victory for him because Hermes used karate. This wasn’t accurate, but victims of head trauma often get their language centers scrambled. Manny was probably trying to ask his dick cream where it left the remote. Either way, you have to concede that the guy’s more determined to be a dipshit than the rest of the world is to fix him.
After the Hermes loss, he returned to inventing wins for himself over the Internet. No one was interested, so he got the idea to start a rumor that he had died! Here’s the problem: his ego couldn’t resist bragging about his popularity and imaginary world titles when he submitted the fake reports, so they read mostly like sarcasm. He scrambled to get anyone’s attention while he debunked the very rumor he started, but all he’d proven is that when the time comes, this goddamn idiot won’t even be able to die correctly.
2020 Update: Let me just Google hi– oh my god, this lunatic isn’t in jail? And he’s teaching Karate to gyms full of badly masked children during an airborne disease pandemic? Fuck.
4. Scott “Lionheart” Blevins
Tiny and insane Scott Blevins is an expert in something he thinks is called “Maui Thai” and claims to have been trained by “Renzin” and “Rocky” Gracie in Virginia. This is notable because there are so many r-named Gracies that teach jiu-jitsu it’s actually sort of an achievement to make up two and not accidentally pick a real one. Scott also claimed the UFC signed him to compete in their 135 pound division, which at the time, of course, did not exist.
With the size of a 4th grader and the fighting abilities of that 4th grader’s little sister, Blevins lost all his amateur fights before losing his first 13 professional fights, all of them in the first round, most of them in less than a minute. It’s possible that he’s worse at fighting than anyone will ever be at anything. Think about it scientifically: if there is a worse fighter on Earth, they would cease to be that moments into the testing process. It’s like trying to directly observe a quark– all you get for your troubles is a series of confusing paradoxes and an angry void that suddenly knows you’re gazing into it. What I’m saying is that Scott Blevins sucks so hard he defies our understandings of science.
How It Ended: Inside Out and Arrested
Before he could achieve his UFC dreams, Scott Blevins was arrested for several counts of sexual misconduct with a 14-year-old. He has all kinds of stories to explain how he didn’t do it including a corrupt cop and a frame job by a different sex offender, but the one thing the great teachers Renzin and Rocky Gracie never taught him was how to properly tell a lie. His defense was so childlike and filled with holes that Scott Blevins forgot where he was and tried to lure his own words into a van with ice cream.
2020 Update: A few years ago he was thrown back in jail after he stabbed his roommate for trying to stop him from stabbing his girlfriend’s tires. So Scott’s still kind of pursuing his dream of being a fighter, but we should add two more losses to his record. At this point, the police in Indiana must use him to train cadets. They’ll never find a person more certain to be committing a crime but also just so fucking bad at fighting.
3. Sensei Mark Bailey
Five time shootfighter-of-the-year and former Navy SEAL Mark Bailey has led a hard life. He was a 27-time title-holder in The World Fighting Championship, but had to deal drugs to supplement his income since that’s not a real thing. This criminal activity landed him in prison, stripped of all his titles. Luckily for his cellmate, his prison stay was also imaginary. Why is Mark Bailey so dangerous? Because Navy SEALs are trained to control their violence, and Mark Bailey should have told you this earlier: he’s not a Navy SEAL at all. One might think there’s some truth to the drug part of his story, though.
Mark created a website to document his domination of the world of martial arts. He was undefeated, with almost all his fights ending via death. There were no eulogies for his fallen opponents, but the webmaster did produce this grim explanation: “Mark Bailey never intends to kill… but in some cases his striking strength is too powerful for a human body to withstand.” Mark Bailey isn’t even considered a heterosexual since everything he fucks is technically a puddle within seconds.
How It Ended: Starting From $0.33 New or Used at Amazon.com
The problem with Mark Bailey is that all the imaginary fights he’s been in have given him very real brain damage. Noah’s Ark has fewer plot holes than this guy’s history. His made-up fight record reads like an idiot trying to spell UFC fighter names and he physically looks like someone made a pussy out of cookie dough and balanced it on chopsticks. His entire existence was debunked by the Internet in less time than it took him to accidentally kill “Hinso Grasie” and “Kent Sharmrock” in underground kickboxing matches.
Nevertheless, he published an autobiography called My Life’s Fight. I ordered a copy and the shipping-and-handling charge was $3.66 more than the cost of the book itself. Probably because touching it gives your hand Down’s Syndrome. Oddly enough, after thousands of fights, he finally had one in front of people in 2008 at the main event of Skip Hall’s Dixie Throwdown IV in Alabama. He fought a man named Dave LaFlamme, and I have some things to say about this “fight.”
Let me first describe the deadliest striker on the planet, Mark Bailey. Mark Bailey holds his head and hands perfectly still and tries to block jabs with a double slap like a child in a high chair who wants more chocolate. I have some combat sports experience, and if Mark didn’t have 87 wins by spinal paralysis on his fight record, I’d swear this guy had never even sparred before. As he circled, Mark’s face was holding a festival of vulnerability, and his rapidly slowing love handles seemed to be saying, “God, nobody told us there would be all this circling.” LaFlamme answered back with a few not-quite-punches before lowering his head into a choke. I’m not saying the fight was fake, but if it wasn’t, someone should tell these gay gentlemen that there’s a crowd of Alabamans that can see them slow dancing.
Not everyone sees Mark as an obvious, ridiculous fraud. Why here’s a letter from “K. Uchideh” a real person from Korea who wrote to Mark after he visited his or her school, home, or dojo:
“Thank you so much for the autographs that you took the time to sign, even though your hand was broken. Your style is unbelievable! I can see why you have won every cage championship match that you have entered. I am anxiously awaiting your next training video and want to see you fight again soon. Congratulations on winning the World Shootfighter of the Year title for the 5th straight year.”
K. Uchideh – Korea
2020 Update: Aside from making fun of his bullshit book for our hot dog comedy website and a single video of him endorsing some kind of holographic wristband you stick to yourself for energy, there’s no trace of Sensei Mark Bailey on the Internet. But kudos to 8eight Holographic Magic Bracelets for landing that endorsement from a sloppy hillbilly who is literally only known for lying about murder.
2. Rafiel Torre
Let me start with a totally true story. A man named Ralph Bartel was invited to a secret underground martial arts tournament in the woods… a competition so secret and exclusive that one might almost call it pointless if one were stupid enough to think it happened.
Despite its secret underground nature, one reporter got wind of the story. It happened when Ralph Bartel called the reporter and asked for a ride there. It’s possible that the tournament was only secret because no one had ever thought to tell a reporter about it until that moment.
For the trip, Ralph brought two bags: one full of camping equipment and one secret bag of mysterious contents. Ralph asked to be dropped off– he had to make the rest of the journey on foot, alone. The reporter knew enough about secret underground martial arts tournaments to fill in the blanks, and like your mother, every blank was filled with Ninja.
Ralph said to come back in three days. Well, three of our days. Time works differently when you pass through the Karate Portal.
The reporter arrived back at the rendezvous point three days later. Ralph, mighty Ralph, was waiting without a mark on him from his three days of secret battle. He was holding one bag of camping equipment and one bag-sized World Champion karate trophy. Ralph had done it! The reporter was surprised to find out that a forest full of dead martial artists has no odor. Did the coyotes already eat them? And if so, wouldn’t they now be ninjas? Knowing he was unravelling the edge of something big, he drove the secret champion home.
Maybe even more absurd than all of that is the fact that the reporter bought it. Ralph, now a world champion, went on to invent other stories about his Brazilian father who trained him in jiu-jitsu. In fact, he was so good at Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu that he decided his name should be Rafiel Torre, a name 710% more Jitsuey than Ralph. These and other lies got him an invitation to the first Abu Dhabi world submission grappling tournament. To say he got his ass handed to him is almost physiologically accurate. He was submitted and eliminated in under a minute.
When people questioned him about how he lost so badly and wait, also didn’t actually have a Brazilian dad, he adjusted his story so that he was now a master of ju-jitsu, the Japanese style that isn’t very good. Oh, and he didn’t know where you guys got all that Brazilian dad stuff from. The nice thing about Rafiel’s lies were that they were fluid enough to flow around most scrutiny. Because of that, and an exhaustive series of apologies, he remained a part of the MMA community for a long time. He even won his first pro fight at King of the Cage 7: Wet and Wild. Note that when I say “won,” I mean that he most likely paid a guy named Ioka Tianuu to gently place his leg into a kneebar. There were infants locked in cars outside the Soboba Indian Casino that night that noticed there was something fishy about the fight.
How It Ended: Tragedy
During sessions of group sex, Rafiel and another man’s wife fell for each other. All it took was her thumb up his ass while he poked Hepatitis B into a fat stranger to tell them it was love. Working backwards from a Knot’s Landing script, Rafiel and the woman hatched a plan to kill her husband Bryan and take his life insurance. But since treachery is hard, they changed the plan to just asking UFC fighter and former marine Gerald Strebendt if he’d kill Bryan for $10,000.
Gerald said no.
Well, shit. Plan B: Rafiel waited until Gerald had probably forgotten about that and went ahead and killed Bryan himself. Ironically, with jiu jitsu. He covered up the crime by hiding the body in the back of Bryan’s truck in an Albertson’s parking lot and claiming self defense when what must be the world’s greatest detective found the body.
The community was very nearly shocked! They knew Rafiel killed a lot of world champion martial artists during his jungle tournament days, but cold-blooded murder? I guess we can all take a lesson from it– if someone has lied about everything in their life and they’re leaving an orgy with your wife and your life insurance policy, don’t be too quick to trust them.
2020 Update: Not a ton of updates on the murderer serving a life sentence. Maybe in 2030 there will be some fun “Rafiel” news!
1. Frank Dux
Frank Dux was a spy and a master of ninjutsu, which is just a Japanese word for somersaulting megaspy. He was the best. He trained under a shidoshi whose name was only coincidentally the name of a James Bond villain. He was in a covert branch of the military so secret that even our military didn’t know about him. He doesn’t exist so hard that birds shit right through him. But someone did know about him: a shadowy society of martial artists who run a tournament called The Kumite. They invited Frank to enter which was the stupidest thing they ever did, because the CIA or whoever never trained him how to not kill everyone’s dicks.
From 1975 to 1980, he was the undefeated Full Contact Kumite World Heavy Weight Champion. He had 56 consecutive knockouts in one tournament, a number too stupid to be fake. He set four world records in the same tournament including “Fastest Recorded Kick with Knockout: 72 mph.” I guess the Kumite Athletic Commission figured it was okay to keep radar guns pointed at the fighters at all times since Frank removed most of their gonads before the long term effects of radar exposure could manifest. In fact, he punched so many dicks through their sacred walls that city temple inspectors shut them down for code violations.
The best thing about Frank’s lies is that they’re too impossible to even give the benefit of the doubt. Fifty six wins in a single elimination tournament implies magnitudes of participants more than the population of the Earth. And the idea that each body part on each fighter is being clocked for speed by ancient Chinese radar guns is something a four-year-old would explain to be unlikely to a 3-year-old.
Also, suspiciously, the organization that held the Kumite seemed to share a home address with Frank Dux, and the trophy they gave him was the same trophy he suspiciously paid for himself. Think about that: The Kumite is so secret the only paper trail leads to Frank Dux, professional secret agent. That means the other fighters, while obviously not very good at fighting, are unbelievably good at being secret. Why, if Frank Dux hadn’t written a book about them and bought himself that trophy, I doubt I’d have even believed they existed.
How It Ended: Awesomely
In 1988, Frank’s extremely true story was made into the film Bloodsport which is still Jean-Claude Van Damme’s and possibly the world’s best movie. Dux worked on the film as the fighting coordinator where he taught Van Damme how to properly get punched in the face for several minutes and then win by spin kick. Jean-Claude would go on to use these fighting techniques exclusively for two decades.
Years later, Dux and Van Damme worked together on the story of The Quest. It was a film like Bloodsport only with Bloodsport elements. Dux took Van Damme to court because Dux apparently had a big gross revenue deal for his “Story By” credit. In the film industry, this type of arrangement is almost as common as an actual ninja spy holding a trophy for Best Ninja Spy. To see both of these things in the same place is like finding a human vagina on your unicorn: literally fucking incredible.
Frank Dux never managed to produce evidence of this amazing agreement since the documents were in a box that was destroyed by a fire. Fitting in perfectly with his life of the fantastic, this fire was a magical fire that destroyed document boxes and nothing else. It sounds ridiculous now, but imagine you were a judge presiding over a case between the cocaine-filled star of Double Impact and an actual, real-life superninja who controls fire. That judge said exactly what you would say: “Pay the man, Timecop.”
2020 Update: One thing you can never trust is information about Frank Dux, but I personally have some. Aside from him hassling Cracked to take this article down, I’ve dated one woman who told me how Frank Dux creepily hit on her at her ninjutsu dojo. I’ve also purchased one autographed headshot of Frank Dux from a San Francisco spy shop where the clerk had no less than five stories of Frank Dux being a total asshole. As far as I can tell, he had been waiting his entire life to complain about Frank Dux to the first person who asked about him.
And while I have never had the chance to tell Frank Dux how his weirdly compelling shittiness has touched my life, I have personally thanked two of the people who made Bloodsport for making Bloodsport. Paulo Tocha, the Muay Thai guy who had a gentleman’s rib-smashing contest in the middle of he and Jean-Claude’s fight, gave me some unorthodox round kick tips in a Hollywood jiu jitsu school, and Stan Bush pretended he didn’t hear me when I requested “Kumite, Kumite” at a San Diego Comic-Con show. So this asshole, liar ninja helped create some wonderful memories. Thanks, Frank!
Special thanks to Sherdog.com, Eddie Doty, Bullshido.org, the Underground Forum, Paulo Tocha, Stan Bush, and Frank Dux.
Malibu Comics was a short-lived imprint in the 1990s that acted as a sort of comic book Drain Trap — a stagnant place you could dump your worst ideas to keep them from rising up and poisoning the rest of the industry. If Marvel was the appealing picture of the Whopper on the Burger King menu, Malibu was the soggy slab of gray meatpoison you actually got. And Exiles was the caustic grease at the bottom of the bag that ruins your pants.
Thatās seriously the cover of their very first issue. Thatās the first impression they were comfortable with for the whole series. I promise I didnāt photoshop that mouth — thatās really something Malibu drew on purpose, looked at, somehow did not destroy out of reflexive shame, and then actually had the gall to put up for sale. Hereās the very first page:
Weāre not one full page into, again, the very first issue of a brand new series, and we have multiple redirect arrows. Redirect arrows are how normal comic book artists apologize for coming to work drunk. In Japanese comics, theyāre widely regarded as an acceptable suicide note. This is a worse first impression than going on a blind date in blackface and then explaining that itās not what it looks like — you just have āJungle Feverā and you jerked off to a mirror earlier.
In keeping with the theme so far, the very first character weāre introduced to, Amber Hunt, is immediately established as a vapid dipshit that we should all hate. Sure hope the whole book doesnāt hinge on this horribly sexist caricature doing or saying literally anything els–
Well, shit.
Amber Hunt is our protagonist.
So Malibu comics wants us to know three things right from the jump: Our heroine is stupid, our heroine is self-centered, and theyāre sorry for being repetitive when they could have just said āsheās a woman in a Malibu comic.ā
That grocery store toy aisle āIron Guyā up there is Supreme Soviet and those are his Cybernoids. āSupreme Soviet and the Cybernoidsā is a kickass name for a Russian Daft Punk cover band, but theyāre terrible names for comic book characters. They sound like Honorable Mentions pulled from a Dr. Who name-the-villain contest, but donāt worry — those arenāt your main villains.
Do worry, your main villains are stupider. Like Bloodbath:
Whoās a ripoff of every single Wolverine ripoff, and looks like Dr. Frankenstein tried to build Dave Bautista out of Rob Liefield parts. He looks like somebody tried to break the Character Creation screen. He has a fishhook tattooed on his face though heās in no way nautically themed, and he couldnāt decide between skullwings and Pippi Longstocking braids so he told his barber both and hung strong through the laughter. Heās trying to pull the old Reality Show āIām not here to make friendsā gambit, but itās definitely coming across as āI wore sweatpants to the prom because I knew nobody wanted to dance with me anyway.ā
Hey, meet the only character in this entire series that I like:
Her name is Hot Rox. Have you guessed her power? Itās elocution.
Our heroes are no better!
Everyone in the Exiles sucks so hard itās difficult to overstate. Iāll try: They suck so hard, if they were an album theyād be Imagine Dragons ironically covering NWA songs. They suck so hard, if they were a car theyād be a brown Nissan Juke. Itās not enough! Theyād be a Nissan Juke with one of those family stickers in the window, only every member would be a Calvin peeing on a smaller Calvin until the final Calvin, who has to pee on himself. They suck so hard, if they were a sex scandal theyād be Martin Shkreli caught masturbating in a Foot Locker. Fuck! Nothing is landing. Youāll just have to meet them.
This is Tinsel. Thatās seriously her comic book name, and this is seriously her comic book power.
Malibu ripped off Jubilee and Dazzler, two characters nobody wanted, and found a way to make the combination of them worse. Thatās like pairing hot pickles and warm oatmilk, only you put the warm oatmilk inside the pickle like a briny gusher so it can ejaculate into your mouth when you bite it. You were wrong from the start, and every step you took afterward made it exponentially worse.
The rest of your crew are:
Mustang!
Shitty Gambit got to design his own superhero persona and the toughest thing he could think of was to wear boxing safety headgear and name himself after a powerful horse.
Ghoul is the zombified corpse of that art teacher who constantly jokes about smoking weed. Itās strange how all of his most talented students are young women who look like they can keep a secret. Itās even stranger that his āafter hours intensive portfolio reviewā always takes place in his Volkswagen Jetta.
Catapult is our Michaelangelo character, three years after we as a culture accepted that not everything had to have Michaelangelo character. He has none of the charm or self-awareness of Michaelangelo and twice the quips, but the writer was not legally allowed to be around actual teenagers, knew no actual āhipā slang himself, and was also quite unwilling to look any up.
This is Deadeye:
Deadeye is, without question, the most useful member of Team Exile. Deadeyeās superpower is that he has a gun and can aim it.
Aaaand we saved the worst for last. That is Trax, who pulled his superhero name from an orthopedic hiking insole. Hereās Trax after taking a glancing blow from Super Soviet:
Later in the comic, itās revealed that Super Soviet actually had no superpowers of his own. That was Trax after taking one medium human punch.
Traxās only superpower seems to be smelling women from a greater distance than normally possible, or advisable:
To the surprise of nobody, heās a sex pest:
That reprimand almost seems progressive, doesnāt it? Donāt worry, this is a Malibu comic. Female brains just take extra time to understand good jokes, math, and complimentary groping. That woman has time to think about it later and realizes she was wrong:
But hey, speaking of good jokes — whereās that choice Malibu āyour friend that canāt quite do a Chandler impressionā humor?
The wall of his classroom just exploded, so that kid turned around to ask nobody if they thought the flames would be on the test, which you might almost recognize as a joke before your female brain took that extra time and realized you were horribly mistaken. Itās kind of like following a strange adult you think is your mom only to look up half a block away and realize itās a circus clown. That moment of dull, confused horror is the closest thing to a laugh a Malibu comic has ever gotten.
Now that weāve met the colorful cast, letās jump into the plot: Amber Hunt has latent superpowers, and is drawn reluctantly to the Exiles Team. Just in time, too, since a sinister corporation might be making their own superpowered army! The heroes go in to investigate, but find theyāve stumbled into an ambush.
Thatās a pretty generic setup, but maybe they go somewhere interesting with it?
Oh wait, thatās actually the ending.
The Exiles scout out Evil Headquarters and Ghoul has all the bad guys cornered… then decides to fucking 180 noscope some fuel tanks, killing everybody:
Meanwhile back at the Exile base, it also explodes, killing… everybody else?
This has been an accurate synopsis of the entire Exiles series.
The end.
What, did you expect something more?
The writers knew you would!
So they put in one last panel just verifying that you were an idiot for expecting that.
Exiles lasts four issues, does nothing interesting, and then they all die abruptly. Thatās the worst ending you could possi-
Oh wait, Iām sorry, I didnāt turn the page. Thatās not the end! Thereās an epilogueā¦ in the form of a written apology from the Exiles team.
In which they explain why they wrote a bunch of characters who exist solely to suck and then die. The answer is: Some people just suck and then die.
They wrap it up by further acknowledging that you, the reader, probably wonāt like this story, but thatās only because they donāt know what theyāre doing.
Although I gotta say, āDrunken Magicianā is a killer euphemism for āincompetent fuckwit.ā Iām going to change all of my business cards.
In 1979, the streets feared only one thing: author Sidney Filson. She wrote HOW TO PROTECT YOURSELF & SURVIVE: from one woman to another which made all other books look like frivolous indulgences. This is 151 pages of kill-danger’s-dick-with-car-keys Karate. When star scavengers are one day picking through the remains of human civilization, they will use this book as an archaeological marker to determine which woman died last.
After the title and a picture of someone punching a hand, there was nothing left to be explained, so Sidney used the back of the book for her 9″ x 12″ headshot. It’s unusual for an urban survival book, but from one woman to another, Sidney is looking pretty good. When you have Sidney’s smile, hair, and bone structure, you don’t waste your book sleeve with “further information.” Here’s some, though: this book rules and I can prove it. See, I’ve developed a system that can scientifically measure the three main features of the genre: Groin Destruction, Pre-Enactments, and Attitude. If you’re interested in further information…
The most efficient way to measure the greatness of a female self-defense book is with The 1-900-HOTDOG Tri-Matrix of Lady Karate Literature. As shown here:
Groin Destruction is the primordial ooze from which all Karate life developed. The fastest way to overcome any physical disadvantages you have against an attacking man is by smashing the flopping weak spot that led him into this mistake. Hand swings, foot bashes, fuckable tubes of mayonnaise left as distractions… a self-defense book needs to be creative, aggressive, and single-minded when it comes to the penis.
Pre-Enactments paint a picture of where you will be using your violent new powers. A low-scoring book in this category might have nothing more than a few bored men lunging at women in a parking lot. An exceptional book will feature costumes, absurd situations, and suspiciously real reactions to dick punches. It should imagine situations where you’re fighting your way out of a dentist groping or a clown emergence. A lady Karate book should remind you danger is everywhere and ridiculous and anyone who forgets it is doomed to be killed by a Chuck E. Cheese.
Attitude! describes how well the book prepares you mentally for fucking someone up. If I can stop being cute for a second, martial arts books are like sex books– every delusional idiot thinks they should write one and only much more delusional idiots think they improve by reading them. Pictures of Karate will not help you fight, and you don’t need to throw a book club into the Octagon to discover Sensei Barb’s Palm Strikes for Seniors was inadequate training for real combat. But who cares? Human conflicts hardly ever look like combat. Anyway, a book with poor Attitude will try to convince you you have the secret double chop technique to escape any grapple. A good one will convince the reader not to take anyone’s shit and to let your bitch ass attacker know that no matter what happens he’s leaving with a bite full of missing dick.
Great! Now let’s see how How to Protect Yourself & Survive: from one woman to another rates on this groundbreaking and expertly designed self-defense book rating system!
Groin Destruction: 7/10
Sidney calls her self-defense courses “Wonder Woman School” because as she says on page 118, and I *gulp* quote, “Can you imagine Wonder Woman being raped?” I should have warned you earlier, Sidney is a woman of palm heels to the groin, not words. Her philosophy is to go fucking nuts on every dick that gets out of line and to train for this, she has one student awkwardly stand still while another squares up and slaps her in the crotch. It’s a technique that will make you say, “I understand the risk I’m taking engaging with you in this way and under these circumstances, but hi there, ladies.”
Sidney suggests different groin techniques based on the location or angle of your opponent. For instance, and I again *gulp* quote, “Do not attempt to grab the groin area of a man on top of you. This is what a rapist expects a woman to do in self-defense.” One of her few faults is how Sidney seems to view the world through the lens of point Karate where even men in the middle of horrifying assaults are following some kind of martial arts game plan you can outmaneuver with your guile. Her tips feel wise, but I worry some attackers aren’t going to stick to the script. It feels like telling someone not to use a plunger to try to defeat a janitor. It’s like saying “hot dog eating champion sexual assaulters will be expecting you to slow them down with a trail of delicious hot dogs– do the opposite!” Can you guess what the opposite of a trail of delicious hot dogs is? No, that’s not it! No. No. No! No. Yes! You’re right, it’s a suitcase full o– hold on, why are you so curious?
Under most other circumstances, Sidney loves a good groin attack. And it gives me great pleasure to say I’m summing up about four pages of her book here: Have a friend lay down so you can practice stomping on a dick. I love it so much, but I can’t imagine a worse way to train than putting a fragile thing you care about on the floor to hone your stomping technique. It’s getting you used to very specifically not shattering a pelvis. What did a zucchini cost in 1979? Four cents? I bet you could build an entire penised vegetable man for about two dollars and after you’re done killing it you’d have a healthy meal for your family. Oh, I sound crazy? This lady dedicated a chapter of her Karate book to telling untrained women how to stab each other in the vagina with high heels!
By the end of the book, the groin attacks take on an almost magical effectiveness. Like when this creep tries to give a flower to a six-year-old and she responds by just obliterating his nuts. And notice Kaylee isn’t using an elbow strike to set up an escape. That’s elbow one of a seventy elbow combo. Sidney makes maybe three mentions of fleeing in her entire survival book. This is a book for women who, sure, want to survive, but would much prefer to get pulled off a disfigured cock by a SWAT team.
Pre-Enactments: 8/10
Most of the photos in the book are Sidney and her students using other women as punching bags, but the male actors brought in to play shattered rapists earn their money.
You don’t normally get performances this big from the models in Karate books. These are theatrical ass kickings.
This guy is being hit by a slap from a 110 pound woman who isn’t rotating her hips and it is shutting his fucking brain off. When he wakes up the prison doctor is going to tell him, “Hey, pal, I’m not a doctor, but maybe you shouldn’t have been grabbing women if your bones are made out of styrofoam. What’s that? Where’s your dick? Oh, buddy, ha ha you don’t want to know what happened to that. The cop who mopped it up for evidence quit the goddamn force.”
This guy is the greatest Karate model I’ve ever seen. Look at the performance he brings to “ATTACK FROM THE REAR.” Sidney is writing this deadly serious handbook on genital revenge and he is turning it into a jazz routine. During his interview for this job he told her, “Oh, sweetie, my father was a Baptist preacher, so trust me: I can play straight.” Look at him slinking up on her in his tap shoes like he’s playing Insecurity in a high school play. It’s hard to overstate how little chance White Slacks Jeffrey has against Sidney Filson.
Every part of White Slacks Jeffrey’s body explodes in orgasmic terror when you touch it.
No one will ever have greater self-esteem than the women practicing elbow strikes on White Slacks Jeffrey. Everything that touches him shatters his entire skeleton and astonishes him. His balls blast out the back of him when you slap them. But, okay, what if you’re not being attacked in a white void by a jaunty man-about-town? What if you’re doing a little bit of swimsuit meditation in a grassfield? Well, I have 16 words for you: “Close your own eyes, and poke them a bit with your finger. Imagine a full thrust.”
Women should obviously be allowed to go wherever they want as nudely as they want, but this scenario seems ill-advised. It’s almost like something Sidney set up on purpose after telling a black market trader, “Don’t worry about where I’ll find two human eyeballs. Just hand me my swimsuit and be back in an hour with the money.”
Besides her love of vulnerable spots, Sidney is a huge advocate for car key nunchucks. About a third of her book is devoted to attacks you can do with a little chain attached to your keys. Sidney is certain they are the deadliest weapon devised by woman, and if she is dangling keys from her hand, she is a category 7 murder hurricane. When Sidney Folson opens her front door, she blows apart anyone and everything in her foyer.
“Practice screaming as you strike!” Sidney spent so much time training students and readers to remove faces with car keys I worry she lost perspective on how intimidating a long keychain is to people who haven’t read her book and devoted their life to key murder. For instance, if you’re walking your dog and a group of men cat-call at you, she suggests identifying the leader and showing him all fucking six inches of your keychain.
Attitude!: 10/10
If you read a single word from the pages I scanned, you had to have seen this score coming. Sidney Filson is always seven dead bodies deep in a fantasy about killing a van of perverts. Her dating profile is just a picture of you with both ends of her car key nunchucks in your eyes under the words “NO.”
Look at how Sidney responds to someone asking about pacifism:
Sidney is the best. You were thinking of not fighting back? No, you are going to tear that piece of shit’s eyes out. You are going to beat him until he is unconscious or begging to be unconscious. “It won’t be hit or miss.” She is clumsy with her words but they somehow all come together to paint a beautiful picture of dead predators. However, Sidney sometimes gets herself a bit too worked up imagining all these terrible things. Once that happens, she’ll start freely using “c” and “n” words while she simmers somewhere between murderous rage and uncontrollable murderous rage.
Sorry about, you know, all of this, but this is the world Sidney is preparing you for. A world where hypothetical schizophrenics can keep their face… for now. The line “Walk away and show no emotion,” actually shows a lot of restraint for Sidney. Normally her side of a confrontation begins like this:
So say you’re a woman any passing astronaut would describe as bralessly sitting on a bench, and a man gets too fresh. Sidney offers two options: palm strike to the face or car key nunchucks to the hand. But we will be here all day if I keep showing you situations where she advises palm strikes or key stabbings. Instead, I want to show you the darkest, most troubling moment of the book which I also think defines her entire martial arts philosophy:
Sidney trained under a man named Grand Master Peter Urban, and the most profound thing he ever said to her was how rape would not exist if everyone took Karate. I think I disagree, but only because teaching all rapists Karate seems less safe, not more. We’ll never know who’s right since it’s only Grand Master Peter’s theory for now. Either way, it demonstrates Sidney’s approach to the world– Karate solves everything and I’m done thinking about it. After reading her book I am positive she’s right and my car key nunchucks fucking dare you to disagree with us.
