We are just too swamped to do our TUF recap this week! Luckily Rafael Kayanan has a very thorough examination of the surprising Lauzon/Cole fight. As far as we’re concerned, the most notable thing about this episode was Lobstah, fight instigator getting kicked out while in the middle of making lobstah chowdah!!! That was tragic.

“Protect yourself at all times” is an old boxing adage which fighter Cole Miller found to be a very relevant one in this week’s segment of TUF when he faced the excellent, but sometimes wild ground and pound style of Joe Lauzon.

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After last week’s double header, and Rob Emerson’s second loss, I began to wonder if BJ is not a very good coach. Emerson was keenly aware of his own emotional weakness, something which BJ seems to have done nothing to address except for yelling from the corner advice like “Explode, Emerson!” Well, if he knew how to maybe he would! An experienced fighter like Rob should have beaten Corey, but BJ didn’t help him much. I discussed this in email with Rafael Kayanan, our technical expert for this season, and he responded with this:
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[Thanks Charles Foster Kane!]

UPDATE: WE’ve added Rafael Kayanan’s commentary at the end of the post.

Tonight’s episode is no drama—all FIGHT! Maybe this will slow this season’s ratings decline. Finally we get to meet this season’s killer nerd, Joe Lauzon, a quiet internet computer-fiddling type, but Dana warns that “This kid will rip your ****in’ head off.” He’s up against Brian, who has a lot of fights on his record but hasn’t emerged as much of a personality.
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[It’s come to our attention that some Beat readers don’t like our Ultimate Fighter coverage this year. We will seriously consider moving it somewhere else in the near future but we’re kind of enjoying doing it, so please just skip it if you don’t like it.]

Yes yes this is way late so we’ll be brief, scroll down for Rafael Kayanan’s commentary:

This episode opens with wrestling coach Tony DeSouza, whose wild beard and hair and intense grappling skills make him look like some kind of savage mountain man you wouldn’t want to tussle with, getting on Noah for laughing and not taking training seriously. Training junkies get their fix with a montage of crazy ass holds and Noah finally admitting that he got beat by a better man. By now BJ is just kind of fed up with his Bad News Bears team — which was his own fault for picking people based on not liking Jens Pulver, remember?

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We’re proud to introduce a new feature to our ULTIMATE FIGHTER recaps: expert commentary from Rafael Kayanan. Rafael is a cartoonist of long standing, (check out his work on Conan #39 written by Kurt Busiek, now in stores and his art blog here.) but he is also a technical expert and fight coordinator for movies, with extensive knowledge of fighting techniques, both hand to hand and with edged weapons. He also watches TUF and we’re honored to have him offering his commentary as his schedule allows.

So…on to the fighting!
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There was apparently a display of sculpture made from Scrapple at the Reading Terminal Market in Philadelphia yesterday, but try as we might we couldn’t find any online pictures of the momentous event. In case you’ve forgotten, scrapple is a vaguely-sausage-like substance made from simmering cornmeal, flour and spices with ground leftover pork trimmings. The trimmings include heart, liver and tongue and others bits and bobs of offal. We would very much like to see photos of sculpture made from pork tongue and cornmeal, so please, pass them our way.

Speaking of livers, we didn’t get a chance to do out TUF recap this week, but we did watch episode 3, in which Gabe got a colonic from a woman who was scarily enthusiastic about getting a “mudslide” and other members of the house paraded around in thongs with their butts hanging out wearing masks or something. They’ve gone completely William Golding in only a few DAYS! Awesome possum. Oh yes, Nate Diaz, Nick’s feisty little brother, beat Rob Emerson in a fight that an over-excited Dana thought was the second coming. Maybe we’ll have some screen caps with the next recap. We’re also attempting to recruit someone who actually knows something about fighting to augment our colonic-favoring covering.

Everyone has been linking to FIST-A-CUFFS. Run by San Hiti, it’s a game wherein artists draw imaginary team-ups and readers vote on who would win. Artists like Hiti, Paul Pope, Joe Quinones, Matthew Bernier, Kieron Dwyer and many more are contributing and a whole new round has just begun. Bookmark!

A rescued horse! Singing in Armenian! Close encounters in the sauna! And…the promise of a high colonic. This may just be the best season of TUF yet.
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To be honest, we’re a little worried about this comics thing going south, so we feel it’s time to finally diversify The Beat and start covering one or two non-comics subjects. We looked around and wondered “What is the hottest thing going?” and the answer was clear: MMA FIGHTING! We’re with Wizard on this: the boys love to see the real grappling and striking, and a whole new class of heroes is emerging.

We’ve been watching THE ULTIMATE FIGHTER since it debuted after Raw many moons ago. The first season was highlighted by the excellent coaching of Chuck Liddell, Randy Couture’s team’s failure to win many fights, and a lot of dumb challenges, as well as the great Chris Leben-Bobby Southworth-Josh Koscheck soap opera. Season 2 had Matt “I’m a Dick” Hughes berating his team right to the top, and unlikely hero Rashad Evans. Season Three was perhaps the best, with “The Passion of Ken Shamrock” taking center stage as his team helplessly watched the hopelessly out of touch pioneer bring a nutritionist to the fray instead of a jiu jitsu coach — a weakness that master psychologist and future Jenna Jameson escort Tito Ortiz would exploit every time.

Season Four was pretty boring — it was all vets who were the kind of level-headed professionals that UFC commish Dana White likes, but many had little gas left in the tank, and a season of no drama and boring fights was the result.

This year, the lightweights have been introduced, and from the looks of the opening episode’s editing, everyone, from coaches Bj Penn and Jens Pulver on down is pretty much a weirdo.

This should be good!

Comics fans, if you want to skip this, just go to the next item. We’ll normally be posting this on weekends, but couldn’t get around to watching our “Tivo” until now.
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Hey if anyone wants to join in a campaign to nominate Jason or Billy Hazelnuts, we’re all in!

It started when Glenn Hauman (him again!) wrote the following about last weekend’s I-Con:

Friday night, while I was escorting a number of actresses from the annual Destinies Mystery Guest show at I-Con, we were forced to go through a crowd of LARPers to exit the building.

The smell was, shall we say, pungent. And that’s being polite. I’ve smelled better rotten meat and curdled milk. The comments between us after we could breathe again were savage.

Now, the case of Black Plague we had earlier this year rendered our sense of smell inoperable which sounds great (we also lost our sense of taste, which was not great) — especially for our trip to NYCC. We thought this was the best-smelling big con we’d ever been to before we remembered that we couldn’t smell anything anyway. Because you know, at some point in our con-going years we’ve all wandered into the Waft of Death. The WoD is not exclusive to comicons — It also is scented at concerts, post offices, the VA. But it seems to happen very often at nerd-esque gatherings.

Well, along comes Mike Chary at Howling Curmudgeons to say stinky is peachy:

No, you idiot, attractive women are not laughing at them because of their hygiene. They are laughing at them because they are stupid, shallow actressses who don’t realize they are at a crowded con with limited ventilation, and are not used to being in such a place, and their guide, a stupid, shallow columnist, doesn’t realize that like all crowded venues with limited ventilation (rock concerts, sporting events, gyms, night clubs) such a circumstance will result in some body ordor issues regardless of the deodorants used. Especially on the second day of a con with people engaged in the physical activity of live action role-playing. Your complaint is like coming in with a group of actresses to half-time of a high school basketball game and complaining about the odor in the locker room.

Mike, I hate to tell you this, but those girls were laughing because the LARPers smelled. What’s this about “SECOND DAY”. That meant SECOND SHOWER OF THE CON! Esp. if you’re going to go LARPing around in body armor. Yes yes, we know inside armor it gets stinky and moldy — that’s why those hygiene-loving Spartans didn’t wear armor!* — that is why you shower often, and douse yourself with Polo before a joust. Come on now, that’s just common sense. So the moral of the story is: clean up your spoor!

As for the speculation over the odor in a high school girl’s locker room, it smells like heaven and everyone knows that.

[LARPing photo taken from the Maine Adventure Society website, on our family compound, and The Beat has LARPEd with some of those chaps and they smelled okay, even after a brisk campaign.]

*Actually they did but that wouldn’t have been as hot.

Another 300-mashup vid courtesy of DEFAMER.

[Thanks to GF for the link.]

We were totally checking out the gruesome photos of his staph infection on UFC star Forrest Griffin’s MySpace page when we found his own tribute to the Maid of Might.

Seriously, between showing off his pustulant staph infection and this, this dude has ISSUES, and we don’t mean DETECTIVE #494.

AAAAAAAND, one last 300 note: At last week’s Second Life 300 press conference, we managed to ask star Gerard Butler if he would ever get into the kind of shape he did for 300 again. The answer was not unexpected, but saddening all the same:

“I wasn’t in that kind of shape in the first place. I hate to say this, I’d love to say something inspiring, but I actually don’t think I could get into that kind of shape again. It was great for that moment, but I actually over did it and was in a lot of pain for a few months.”

Women all over the world may mourn this news, but at least we go on with the certain knowledge that for one shining moment, one man rose to the highest level his body could achieve, and even if this man truly gave his all, through the miracles of slo-mo, pause buttons and screen captures, the legend of dear, dear Gerard Butler and his 300 muscle groups will live on forever.

Speaking of Second Life, you can visit the 300 area at Silverscreen and look at books, see photos or kick peopleinto a pit while shouting “This is SPARTA!” Internet marketing man Neville Hobson talks about the event here and via comments, you can see how the custom avatars were made by Adam’n'Eve here.

Even if he did wallop a Mainer.

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Fans of the inimitable Shatner will enjoy this clip of him doing a voiceover recording and then putting a clueless producer in his place, as Robin Quivers and Howard Stern guffaw in glee. As Robin and Howard point out, Shatner is being a total dick, and yet he’s kind of within his rights as well.

[Link via Cartoon Brew]

UPDATE: Actually, we highly recommend reading the comments at Cartoon Brew linked above where various voiceover directors and other pros discuss whether Shatner was the one being very unprofessional.

A mysterious Batman sighting caused three Arizona school to be shut down:

To an Arizona middle school, Batman! Three schools in the north Phoenix suburb of Cave Creek were on lockdown for about 45 minutes Wednesday morning after a student at Desert Arroyo Middle School reported seeing a person dressed as Batman run across campus, jump a fence and disappear into the desert, Scottsdale police Sgt. Mark Clark said.

The student described the person as 6 feet 3 inches tall and possibly male.

“We’re assuming it was male, although they did have a mask on,” Clark said.

A police manhunt scoured the countryside to find the mysterious Dark Knight, but he eluded capture because, after all…he’s Batman.

Our gym now has “Cardio Theatre,” small plasma TVs on most of the cardio equipment so you can turn your brain off while you turn your heart on, and this morning we actually watched about half of an episode of LOONATICS while on the stairmaster, and at that moment a desire was born in our heart, a desire to work out and take steroids and get strong and buy guns and nitro and flamethrowers and maybe strychnine, and to hunt down everyone responsible for this show and MAKE THEM PAY, oh God, MAKE THEM PAY. THEY MUST PAY.