Captain Cannibal has no time for love

One my many pet peeves is when people misuse the world cannibal.  I’m no dictionary man but I’m pretty sure that a cannibal is an animal that eats its own species.  The co-called Cannibal Cop should indeed so be called since he wanted to eat human ladies.  The fictional Hannibal “the Cannibal’ Lector ate people.  Appropriate nickname.

Eating meat does not make you a cannibal.  Even if I ate a monkey that wouldn’t make me a cannibal.  But the real offenders are when animals eat people and are called cannibals.  Wrong.  A man eating tiger is not a cannibal.  A tiger eating tiger is.  Animals aren’t people no matter how much we put sunglasses on them.  Animals get to eat people if they want, that’s okay. 

Where I’m willing to be a little flexible is when animals eat similar animals.  Some snakes eat mostly other snakes, and the British person who’s narrating the nature documentary will say that they’re cannibals.  Technically I would say that wrong.  If a Red Striped Murder Snake eats a Puffy Bellied Laughing Snake that’s a different species – not cannibalism.  Red Striped Murder Snakes would only be cannibals if they eat other Red Stripe Murder Snakes. 

But I’ll overlook that if you want.

I had a dream last night that I was back enrolled at the hallowed halls of Iowa State University.  They were showing a movie in one of the classrooms and I went to see it.  That’s how you know it’s a dream because I never would have done anything like that when I was there for real.  If I wasn’t in class or at work I was in my trailer writing about wrestling or watching wrestling or playing wrestling video games.  I would never go somewhere where I might meet someone and have to talk to them.  Shudder.  Except a wrestling show.

In the dream a pretty girl came up to me and said “here’s your commemorative matchbook” and I said I didn’t want it.  She said I could throw it away if I didn’t want it but she had to give it to me or she’d be in trouble.  Weird, but whatever, I take it. 

Movie ends.  When I get up to leave a campus security guy is there and he tells me that I can’t leave until I pay for the matchbook.  I say I don’t even want the stupid thing.  He says that the matchbook is 80 dollars and I also have to pay a fine of 50 dollars for trying to steal it.  I say no way.

He says he’s going to call sergeant such and such at the Ames PD and I’ll be charged with such and such crime and he launches into a whole speech designed to make me feel trapped and powerless.  He’s clearly done this many times.

I say that I don’t have 130 dollars.  He says that I can get an advance on my tuition reimbursement to pay for the matchbook and the fine.  He radios someone at the financial aid office and while that’s in the works he spends that time insulting and mocking me while matchbook girl and her cronies watch and laugh. 

Word comes back 45 minutes of mockery later that the money has been transferred.  But the campus security guard says that there’s bad news – the deal where he would let me go if I paid expired one second ago.  So now I have to pay another 50 dollar fine.  Then he starts slapping me very lightly on the face and asking why I loved that matchbook so much that I had to steal it.

I grabbed him and slammed his head into the ground until he was dead.  Everyone was screaming and running and I sat down and waited for the cops to show up.

I’m no law man but I’ve been told that insanity defenses never work and in most places they don’t even let you try.  Since I kept slamming his head into the ground so many times probably manslaughter would be off the table.  So murder 2? 

When I woke up I was trying to think of a way out of that but I think dream-me was screwed.  Without an insanity plea what defense could there be?  The media has influenced me to believe that rich people can get away with murder but I’m not sure it’s true.  What can a high priced lawyer do that a cheap one can’t?  Didn’t one of the Kennedys beat a woman to death with a golf club and get away with it?  Is that because he was rich or because he had a Name?  Did it even happen, am I remembering that right? 

I was told once that if you’re not sure if something is real one tip is that simultaneous auditory and visual hallucinations are EXTREMELY rare.  Some people hear voices and some people see stuff that isn’t there but hardly anyone hallucinates in more than one sense at a time.  Because brain stuff.

I’ve also been told that because of brain stuff you can’t read in a dream.  I don’t remember ever reading in a dream.  There’s usually never even signs or anything that would have writing on them.  Books sometimes, but there’s never actual text on them.

So if something crazy is happening and you can see and hear it pick up a book and see if you can read it.  Keep one with you and tell people “this is my sanity check” and they’ll think you’re cool.

One time my friends took me to a college campus to watch a screening of Bladerunner.  It was a big thing because Bladerunner has 77 different versions and this was “the good one”.  I had never seen any version of Bladerunner before.  The first act was okay, seem like a neat premise.  Then it was boring and mildly stupid. 

After the movie my friends talked for 9000 hours about how that version sucked because another version had 7 seconds of footage that CHANGED EVERYTHING.  There’s was an insane amount of discussion about one of the robots holding a bird – those 7 seconds were all about the bird and without that the movie was garbage.  That bird was very important.

Hearing them talk about it made me hate Bladerunner.  But I still went to see Bladerunner 2 when it came out so the joke is on my I guess.  It was okay. 

I didn’t realize it at the time but that was my first introduction to the thing sci-fi people and wrestling people have in common – they seem to consume the genre in order to complain about it. 

I started watching wrestling in 1985.  I know this because it was a few weeks before Wrestlemania which was held on March 31, 1985.  When I was a kid obviously I didn’t know what was going on in the world of wrestling people but when I was older and started getting wrestling magazines and newsletters one thing became abundantly clear – wrestling fans hate wrestling.

WWF/E has been the big company my entire wrestling career so it’s gotten most of the hate but any company that bubbles up to try and compete with them gets their fair share also.  For 30 years all wrestling people say is how much wrestling sucks, how Vince McMahon is out of touch and is ruining everything, and how the entire industry will be gone in 6 months. 

Sidenote Vince McMahon does seem like a crazy old man but he just recently made 2 billion dollars off Fox and NBC so he must know what he’s doing.

Despite these claims wrestling rolls on.  It’s akin to every time a new Superhero Transformer Star Wars Trek GI Joe movie comes out and all the fans scream FAIL RUINED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! But the movie makes 98 trillion dollars.  So what does this mean?  That you make money by ignoring the fans and catering to “normal” people.

One of the 6,879,312 complaints about the WWE is that they ignore their fanbase to court casual viewers.  Which seems like the smart move if you want to make gobs and gobs of money. 

I now plagiarize from Kayfabe news a good example of how wrestling people operate –

“Though he is, by all outward appearances, an avid wrestling fan with an encyclopedic knowledge of the sport, 28-year-old Brandon Barker has attained the status of “super-smark” by hating every wrestler, promotion, and television show in the industry.

Barker now insists he only watches wrestling promotions that doesn’t actually exist.”

I think the reason that everyone who likes wrestling hates it is because they know that it could be the way they want it.  When they Lakers win the NBA championship you may not like it but there’s nothing you can do about it.  They won.  But when your favorite wrestler isn’t given two promo segments, a backstage segment, and wrestler a 30 minute match in the main event against your second favorite wrestler, and then has sex with your favorite lady wrestler live on camera it’s because Vince McMahon didn’t do it.  Just to spite you.

Some day when AI machines can make whatever content you want wrestling fans will finally be able to fantasy book everything. 

And they’ll still complain.