About a year and a half ago I wrote an article about all the crazy Indian music videos we were watching as a result of having a new über-cable TV package and an abundance of spare time.  Well the insanity associated with three hundred and twenty-nine channels of Comcastic car chases and infomercials certainly isn't restricted to half-hour compilations of the hottest hip-shaking babes the Indian subcontinent has to offer.  No, there are many other exciting and groin-grabbingly interesting things going on in the world of cable television, and as always I am eager to share my experiences with you, the captive audience.

As you probably have guessed from the numerous unfunny sports-related articles posted on this site, I am a big fan of athletic competition.  But aside from just religiously watching Red Sox baseball with Hot Andrea every single night, I've also been known to enjoy some of the less "commercial" sports as well; shit like the Olympic Games, international strongman competitions, Australian rules football, women's aquatic submerged synchronized basket-weaving and hardcore underground Russian slapfighting.  But even for a rabid sports fan, some things are best left undiscovered.  Here are five sporting events that Andrea and I have accidentally run into while surfing the waves of boredom at two in the morning looking for any sort of television programming that didn't involve either Chef Tony or Billy "Mr. Scream" Mays.  As always, I'm keen to share my pain with you.  Brace yourself, because this is going to get ugly.  You've been warned.  I've also enlisted Andrea's help in this endeavor, and since she suffered through this along with me she's more than happy to spread the misery around.

Professional Armwrestling

The Worldwide Professional Armwrestling Circuit takes the ancient, time-honored tradition where you challenge your drunk friends to a one-on-one showdown to determine who has the strongest biceps of them all, puts it in a blender, gets it hooked on PCP and then vomits it out on your television screen in a blaze of testosterone and male pattern baldness.  Truly there is nothing you can read or say that would prepare you for the visual tour-de-force that is watching a pair of sweat-drenched three hundred pound Swedish men holding hands and grunting while a skinny bitch in a referee's outfit dances around a small table doing his best "Mean Gene" Okerlund impression.  It is simply something that must be seen to be believed.

From what I can tell, the pro armwrestling scene is roughly similar to that of back-alley cockfighting.  The event that I saw appeared to take place in what was either an extremely spartan VFW hall, an abandoned warehouse, or some guy's garage.  The walls were gray and there was nothing on them, and the "audience" simply consisted of a half-dozen mildly-interested spectators, the armwrestling contestants and their girlfriends.  It seriously looked like something out of a bad 80's cop/action show.  I half-expected Don Johnson and Magnum P.I. to bust in there with their pistols drawn and tell the evil drug-dealing crime boss running the show that "the gig is up".

As far as the actual competition went, I have to be honest when I say that there really isn't a whole lot of entertainment value in watching fucking armwrestling.  There's a big "professional armwrestling" table in the middle of the room/alley/garage, the contestants put their elbows on the elbow pads, lock their fingers, and try to push the other guy's arm down so it touches the table.  But it's never that easy.  Apparently, there are lots of ways to "cheat" at armwrestling, so it's the ref's job to make sure that these giant dudes are armwrestling "fairly", whatever that means.  So the dudes lock hands, and then the ref has to inspect their grips from like ten different angles.  He walks all the way around the table, looks the these clasped hands for like forty-five seconds, and then decides whether or not he's going to allow the grips.  It's as exciting as jamming a pair of scissors repeatedly into your crotch.

Luckily, there is a "last resort" of sorts that the ref can call upon when neither of the wrestlers (is that the right term for them?) can't fucking suck it up and grab hands like real men:  The Straps.  After two or three "re-grippings", the ref can give the double thumbs-up, and his assistant brings out The Straps.  The Straps appear to be a detached shoulder strap from a digital camera carrying case, and it's tied around the hands so the guys are locked into a "fair" grip.  With all the bureaucracy crap out of the way, then they can get down to the serious business of armwrestling.  After about two minutes of set-up, the entire match usually takes the better part of about ten seconds before one guy goes down like a DC-10 in a hailstorm and the other dude pounds his chest like his fucking Bill Goldberg.  It's truly captivating stuff.  Like watching a train wreck.

Andrea:

This was the most ridiculous thing I have ever watched in my life.  The.  Most.  These dudes comes out, completely ripped, wearing fucking muscle tees or Hunk Hogan-style wife beaters and think they're bad as shit.  They vamp for the crowd, flex a lot and all you can do is LAUGH at them for taking ARM WRESTLING seriously.  It's ARM WRESTLING, for fuck's sake.  How can you possibly think it's a sport?  How do you even fucking turn pro???  PROFESSIONAL arm wrestling?  Is this some kind of joke?  I thought it was the way dumbfuck drunk guys settle arguments in a bar.  The best part is how they try to psych each other out, once they finally get to the table.  They like stare each other down so intensely, as though laser beams are going to shoot out of their eyes.  And then they flinch a lot, and change their grips to keep the other guy on his toes.  Finally, when the referee (!) has had enough of this bullshit, he calls for THE STRAPS!  And makes them lash their arms together for a fair grip.  It's retarded.

Straps!

The Lumberjack Games

The Lumberjack Games are apparently a staple in the areas of the United States that have lumberjacks, which are presumably Oregon and nowhere else.  The outdoor games of fun (or whatever the official title is for this mess) are pretty awesome, and completely insane.  First off, the Lumberjack games aren't specifically limited to games involving lumberjacks;  They're like a mish-mash of all the crazy events that don't fit into either the Olympics or the X-Games.  Certainly there are all manner of sports involving logs;  log rolling, log tossing, cutting logs with a hacksaw, karate-chopping logs, climbing on logs, putting a log in a river and running across it as fast as you can... all the major events are represented.  Then there are the dog events like frisbee catching and shit.  Logs and dogs.  And keg throws.  If that sounds awesome, it is.

Basically, the Lumberjack Games kick ass.  All the games involving running around or hacking shit up with a hatchet or a saw of some sort, and you really can't go wrong with either of those.  Despite the running and the chopping though, I'd have to say that the main highlight for me was the "Dog Long Jump".  This is a dog-based event which was certainly conceived by some asshole kids who were really bored on a hot summer day, but truly this sport has been refined and made awesomer and awesomer every year.  Here's how it works:  You get a dog.  You find a toy the dog likes.  You get the dog SUPER PUMPED about the toy.  Then you chuck the toy off a pier into a river.  The dog will run and then do a flying leap off the pier.  Judges then measure how far the dog jumped.  It pretty much rules.

Andrea:

I vaguely remember staying up and watching this with 'Mazin' B.  I have to admit, this kind of stuff actually impresses me.  Not the sheer brute strength of these dudes hacking through a 3-mile wide tree stump, or even the cat-like agility of running across a frikkin log floating in the water... what impresses me most is that someone out there invented these so-called sports and poor lonely children from Canada and the Midwest actually TRAIN in these sports!!  Can you imagine Little Jimmy coming home one day and saying, "Mom!  I found a sport I really want to play!  I want to be the best log-roller who ever lived!"  Are you kidding me with this?  Do you really never want to get laid again, Jimmy?  Because turning yourself into a champion log-roller is not the way to impress chicks.  Picture him in college now, log-rolling the world over (or wherever they have these contests).  Maybe he's got a girlfriend.  How excited will she be to talk about her beau?  "Jimmy?  Oh.  Um, he's a championlogroller.  ANYWAY.  He's a really nice guy and we're going to Canada this summer..." Don't allow yourself to become that.  Friends don't let friends roll logs.

The Jack Russell Terrier Power Hour

Holy shit, this was probably one of the most ridiculous things I've ever seen in my life.  It's a lot like the dog stuff the Outdoor Games did, but instead of having dogs catch frisbees in their teeth or run head-first into a wall for no reason they instead round up a truckload of Jack Russell Terriers and make them run obstacle courses or race each other or do all manner of insane humiliating shit.  And the announcers fucking play it up like it's Game 7 of the World Series or something.  Hello?  It's not the 4th quarter of the Super Bowl;  it's a fucking two year-old terrier that looks like a puppy banging his head into a foam barrier, jumping over a metal bar, stopping to scratch his ear, then getting stuck in safety netting and having another dog crash into him.  It's like watching a furry Marx Brothers movie.  I seriously cannot stress enough how ridiculousness this shit is.  I mean, just look at the pictures:

Andrea:

The thing that stands out the most to me about actually having wasted two hours of my life watching this crap was Amazing Ben's incessant giggling throughout the entire event.  He just kept shouting, "They look like PUPPIES!!" over and over.  Then he threatened to train our cat Bozo to run kitty obstacle courses, but I think unless we used an entire ham as a lure, Boze wouldn't bother getting off his lazy butt.  Anyway.  The dogs were really cute, but the owners were moderately freakish.  The amount of TIME these people spending training their dogs to do this retarded stuff is just unimaginable.  Don't these assholes work??  Can't they come up with a better use of their time?  Volunteer at a soup kitchen or something, if you're really starved for something to do.  Douchebags.

Just for good measure, here's a picture of a basket full of Jack Russell Terrier puppies.

If you don't like this picture, you have no soul.

Sumo Wrestling

Oh man, we watched Sumo wrestling the other day and it was everything I could have hoped for.  Just two big fat dudes bumping guts and slapping each other like pissy transvestites at a Brooks Brothers midnight madness sale.  Totally awesome.

Here's what rules about sumo.  First off, the entire point of being a sumo wrestler is to see how fucking fat you can get.  That's gotta be the sweetest part of the whole job;  you can just sit on your ass eating all day and nobody gives you a hard time because it's all part of your job.  Secondly, You can pretty much do whatever you want to the other dude as long as you get him out of the ring before he knocks you out.  It's like watching the human equivalent of Godzilla vs. Mecha-Godzilla.  The only thing that pissed me off was that a lot of the sumo guys were from like Eastern Europe or the U.S. or something.  What the fuck?  Sumo is supposed to be big fat Japanese guys.  When whiteys are involved it just looks wrong, like Tom Cruise hacking up dudes in the Last Samurai.  Luckily a Japanese dude won it, proving once again that a European Sumo Wrestler is about as natural as a gerbil driving a car.

You know that commercial with the fat sweaty sumo wrestlers bouncing off each other and then the voiceover says, "You're not as clean as you think"?  Ugh.  And I mean that.  Obviously, men like watching gigantic slovenly looking dudes in thongs attack each other, but I don't really get the appeal.  I NEVER, in my weirdest fantasies, wanted to see a 500-pound guy in a thong.  PERIOD.  It's FREAKY and GROSS.  I think I kept trying to go to sleep while Ben was watching this, but he kept waking me up to make me watch the newest fat guy.  And what was really weird was the announcer guy.  They apparently arbitrarily decided who was wrestling for the West and who was wrestling for the East, and it seemingly had absolutely nothing to do with where they were from.  So like the guy from Bulgaria was "FROM THE EAST, SLOVENLY GLUTTONOVICH" or whatever.  And then some dude from Japan would be announced "FROM THE WEST!" and I will admit right now that I did.  Not.  Get.  It.  It just made me want to take a shower.  And lose 50 pounds immediately.

NCAA Wrestling