Category: Martial Arts

The Bully Busters

Happy International STAND UP to Bullying Day!

I do feel compelled to point out that whenever Hack writes a book where a bully is a central character, he insists that his friend Tim Storms be depicted as the bully in question because Storms actually has a physique like that and Hack won’t admit it but he’s obsessively jealous about it even though he hasn’t set foot in a gym since he confronted bodybuilding trailblazer Vic Tanny while Tanny was doing squat-thrusts in 1965. Hack was convinced that Tanny was having an affair with his then-wife and challenged him to a fistfight even though it turned out that Tanny had, in fact, never heard of Hack or his wife. Even so, Tanny obliged Hack by tying his larynx in a square knot.

To the point, Tim Storms is actually a really sweet dude who would never bully anyone but when I pointed out to Hack that constantly depicting him as a bully was a form of bullying itself, he told me to shut up unless I wanted him to give me a nipple twister.

The Bastard Son of Lee Marvin

Happy heavenly birthday to the great Lee Marvin!

The city of Pasadena, CA used to host an insane response to the staid and conservative Rose Parade with a free-for-all called the D0o Dah Parade which was populated by crazy groups each trying to outdo each other in outlandishness. One of the most outlandish was called The Bastard Sons of Lee Marvin, which was a group of precision marchers supposedly made up of the illegitimate offspring of Oscar winning actor Lee Marvin following a hearse carrying the corpse of their beloved father.

There is still a parade by that name in Pasadena but ever since corporate America got its hooks it in, it devolved into a shadow of its glorious past. Hack once attended the event in its heyday and awoke later that afternoon in a dumpster clutching the manuscript to this novel in his trembling hand.

The Fiendish Pit of Dr. Fug Manpoo

Hack has long been a fan of English author Sax Rohmer’s supervillain Dr. Fu Manchu, a stalwart role of horror actors like Boris Karloff and Christopher Lee (Karloff’s 1932 film The Mask of Fu Manchu is particularly fun, with a pre-Thin Man Myrna Loy as the doctor’s evil daughter Fah Lo See). The character’s popularity has fallen out of favor in recent years (last being seen as a leading role in Peter Sellers’ film farewell The Fiendish Plot of Fu Manchu in 1979, although Nicolas Cage revived it for a section of the 2007 cult classic Grindhouse) due to its racist attitudes and “yellowface” casting.

That didn’t stop Hack from adapting Fu Manchu into a Korean pug supervillain named Dr. Pug Manpoo who craps into a massive pit in his castle and tortures his enemies by suspending them over it with the threat of dropping them in. Variety reports that Nicolas Cage is in talks to play the role in a film version.