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VON ERICHS HEADING TO ISRAEL, TAKESHITA HEADING TO ALL JAPAN AND MORE

Gery Roif sent word that Kevin, Marshall and Ross Von Erich will be heading to Israel for a local premiere of The Iron Claw, doing meet and greets.  The family will also be meeting with families of hostages being held by Hamas and showing their support to Israel.

Steven Fernandes sent the following:

It was announced during today's All Japan Pro Wrestling show that Konosuke Takeshita will be appearing on the 1/27 show. 

A new book slated for a January 23, 2024 release, Toxic: The Story of Nine Famous Women in the Tabloid 2000s by Satah Ditum appears to have a chapter on the late Chyna set for the book as the promotional material notes:

Welcome to celebrity culture in the early aughts: the reign of Perez Hilton, celebrity sex tapes, and dueling tabloids fed by paparazzi who were willing to do anything to get the shot. It was a time when the Internet was still the Wild West, and when slut-shaming, fat-shaming, and revenge porn were all considered perfectly legitimate. Celebrity was seen as a commodity to be consumed, and for the famous women of this era, they were never as popular—or as vulnerable—as when they were in crisis.

Toxic tells the stories of nine women who defined the hell of celebrity in the 2000s and explores how they were devoured by fame, how they attempted to control their own narratives, and how they succeeded or (more often) failed. These women come from all walks of fame—pop music, acting, reality TV, and WWE wrestling. Some of them you think you know already, and others will be less familiar, but Toxic reveals these women neither as pure victims nor as conniving strategists, but as complex individuals trying to navigate celebrity while under attack from a vicious and fast-changing media. Their portrayal has shaped the way that all women—famous or otherwise—are viewed today, and their experiences preempted the now-universal condition, especially thanks to social media, of living under the public gaze.

In this book, Ditum brings readers back to a time before second chances and redemption arcs, and traces the ripple effects that came in the wake of spending a decade vilifying our idols. We’ll see how these women’s stories intersect with the birth of YouTube, the rise of Internet pornography, and the emergence of Donald Trump as a political force. It’s time to come to terms with how those cultural events shaped the way we see ourselves, our bodies, our relationships, our aspirations, and our presence in the wider world. We are all products of the toxic decade.

 

A new book slated for release on 1/19n promises to explore the invention of professional wrestling and those involved in perfecting the genre into what it has evolved into today.  Ballyhoo!: The Roughhousers, Con Artists, and Wildmen Who Invented Professional Wrestling by John Langmead will be published this November by The University of Missouri.  Promotional material for the book notes:

Ballyhoo! The Roughhousers, Con Artists, and Wildmen Who Invented Professional Wrestling is a history of professional wrestling’s formative period in the U.S., from roughly 1874 to 1941, and the contested interplay of wrestlers and promoters who built the “sport” as we know it. During this period, the major conventions that would define wrestling to the present day were perfected and codified, as wrestling morphed from a rough sport practiced on farms and at town gatherings to melodramatic mass entertainment that reliably drew large crowds in cities across the nation.

The narrative uses the life and career of Jack Curley—a boxing promoter whose fortune took a turn for the better when he began promoting wrestling matches—as a compass as it charts the development of wrestling. By the late 1910s, Curley’s shows were selling out Madison Square Garden monthly. Ballyhoo chronicles his competition with the other promoters, as well as the lives of colorful athletes like “Strangler” Ed Lewis, Frank Gotch, the “Masked Marvel,” Jim Londos, “Gorgeous George” Wagner, “Farmer” Martin Burns, and “Dynamite” Gus Sonnenberg.

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