(originally posted at crw.livejournal.com, friends-only)
There's no easy way to go about this, so I'm just going to swallow my pride and come out and say it: as a child, I enjoyed watching professional wrestling.
We're talking maybe ages 6 through 10 or 12.
My parents didn't really believe in cable television, so Saturday mornings from 11 until noon, my options were cheesy teen sitcoms or professional wrestling on some UHF station brought to me by... what was it, Titan Sports Entertainment? [1]
So tonight, while reading up on the literary history of San Francisco, I came across a Gold Rush-era writer named
Bret Harte. Being curious, I went to wikipedia to look him up. Being careless, I hit return one character too early and was confronted with
Bret Hart. Oh no! Oh yes...
With a sort of morbid curiosity about my own childhood, I explored, and I must say that there's an awful lot of professional wrestling information on Wikipedia. Randomly paging up and down Bret Hart's page, I came across an interesting link called the
Montreal Screwjob - which is the
fascinating tale of a contractual snafu spilling over into the league's rich storyline, with a surprise ending for all those involved.
That's all, really. If you have the stomach for it, marvel at the professional wrestling information on wikipedia. Make yourself feel better by donning your anthropologist's hat ahead of time.
[1] - it's funny to think that a multi-million dollar enterprise like the WWE once had to pay for their airtime. The TV show being a loss-leader/marketing ploy for all their toys and shirts and fake championship belts. I never owned one of those... no... [2]
[2] - the above was my first-ever footnote (as far as I know), so I needed a footnote on the footnote to explain and mark the occasion. I'm not sure if btrott would be proud that I'm carrying on his meme or scared of my meta-footnote-fu.