  As a lot of you will know, I often spend my time watching buff, sweaty men rolling around, trying to get on top of each other. And I also like wrestling (*rimshot*, or maybe *rimjob*>. Anyway, I have bought a new book written by a guy who runs an internet site dedicated to certain aspects of wrestling. He has put all the content into producing - urlLink Wrestlecrap - The Book. Randy Baer (also known by his former wrestling manager alias, R.D. Reynolds) has run the wrestlecrap.com website for many years now, which catalogued basically everything that made people embarrassed to watch wrestling - stuff like fueds based on a fat wrestler sitting on a man's pet snake, matches where the winner is the first one to get a turkey from the top of a pole and dumb characters, like a wrestling tax man.
As the site became increasingly popular, the site had to come down due to the bandwidth caused by the visitors. For this reason, it became an obvious idea to put it all in a book. The book is structed into chapters covering different historical periods in the last 25 years or so of wrestling, starting from the birth of WWF's "Rock and Wrestling" age and finishing with WWE's flirtation with necrophilia (Heh. I might do my own little piece on this one for you lot, because the whole thinking behind it is incredibly stupid), with chapters on the fall of WCW and the movie career of Hulk Hogan. Although probably written with wrestling fans in mind, the book explains early on a lot of the 'behind the curtain' stuff so that a reader with little understanding of the "sport" can follow the discussions.
One of the main reasons for this that R.D., except in the cases of Hulk Hogan, The Ultimate Warrior and Ed Leslie, doesn't rest blame on the shoulders of the wrestlers themselves for the crap, but on the bookers and management members who believed that this stuff was the way to make money. On particular chapter focusses on Vince Russo, a booker in the last year or so of WCW, who seemed to believe that a wrestling show could win over fans by featuring hardly any wrestling.
The book is written in a style that is warm, accessible and funny. The only issue is, I would say, that the book cannot retain the interactive feel of the original website. It's great to get a description of Battle Kat, but the website had pictures and animations of the guy in action, which made you realise the absolute folly of sticking a cat mask on a 6ft 225 pound bloke and sending him out on TV. The story of the Cactus Jack amnesia angle is told well, but without the sound clips of the lines Mick Foley had to say to try and get the angle across, it does lose some of the humour.
Still, this is a top book, and if you want information on how to run a wrestling company into the ground or the thinking process that ends up with plumbers and dentists on TV, this is the book for you. urlLink Wrestlecrap is still updated every week, and maybe, if the book and the future work of RD Reynolds are successful, we will see the site back to it's full glory. 
