('William Avery ','February 8, 1894','September 11, 1956','Owen Sound, ON, Canada','WWI Canadian Pilot','<p>Dogfighting just isn\'t what it used to be.&nbsp; Sure, there\'s something to be said for doing barrel rolls, screaming through the atmosphere at Mach Five Million, flipping on the afterburners and taking it right into the danger zone, but at the end of the day, most modern fighter pilots are really just launching missiles at the green shit on the HUD.&nbsp; Back in the days of the Great War, when fighter planes were little more than flying metallic deathtraps with large-caliber machine guns&nbsp;strapped to them,&nbsp;dogfighting was an up close and personal affair.&nbsp; I mean, taking down an airplane from a range of only a couple hundred feet with nothing more than a few hundred bullets isn\'t exactly like stealing candy from crippled orphans or shooting hippies in the face with a blowtorch.&nbsp; You need to have the lightning-quick reactions of a schizophrenic cat that accidentally got into a stash of cocaine, the ability to accurately use the iron sights of a .303-caliber machine gun from a standing position while also deftly maneuvering a rickety, barely-airworthy flying contraption so that you evade enemy bullets and don&rsquo;t crash face-first into a mountain, and, quite honestly, you need more luck than a lottery-winning leprechaun with a rabbit\'s foot for a keychain and a horseshoe lodged in his rectum.&nbsp; Canadian fighter ace Billy Bishop possessed all of these talents as he blazed through the skies of Western Europe like a demonic, balls-out bat from the deepest recesses of Hades, turning the most capable and daring pilots of the German Empire into giant flaming balls of&nbsp;<a href=\"http://youtube.com/watch?v=R5HO44sFRFI&amp;feature=related\">burnt toast</a>&nbsp;and spicy death.</p>\r\n<p>Bishop was born in Ontario in 1894 and spent a brief stint at the Royal Military College before dropping out to join the Canadian Corps of the British Army at the onset of The Great War in Europe.&nbsp; He enlisted in the cavalry, dreaming about leading insane, thundering charges on enemy positions and hacking up cowering kraut infantrymen with a badass gleaming sabre, but unfortunately for Billy even the most incompetent military commander this side of George Custer knew that sending a balls-out cavalry charge against a half-dozen machine gun nests was stupider than sticking your tongue in an overloaded power outlet.&nbsp; As a result, most of the Allied mounted units spent their first months on the Western Front sleeping in ankle-deep mud and shoveling horse shit several hundred miles away from anything even remotely resembling actual combat.&nbsp; Billy decided that he was sick of sitting around when he could be blasting assholes out of the sky from the cockpit of a badass fighter plane, so even though he had never piloted an airplane in his entire life he requested to be transferred to the Royal Flying Corps.&nbsp; He was put through several months of intense training, received his aviation wings, and was promptly hurled balls-first into action in March of 1917.</p>\r\n<p>Flying an Allied&nbsp;<a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nieuport_17\">Nieuport 17</a>&nbsp;biplane in World War I was roughly about as dangerous as putting together a suit of armor made from raw meat and flying down a Slip \'n Slide coated with barbecue sauce into a swimming pool full of hammerhead sharks and starving piranhas.&nbsp; The average lifespan for a new pilot in the Arras sector of Northern France - the area Bishop was initially stationed - was 11 days, a stat that put most rookies somewhere between fruit flies and unrefrigerated chicken meat on the life expectancy scale.&nbsp; You don\'t need to be the illegitimate love-child of Stephen Hawking and Marie Curie to know that these are not good odds.&nbsp; As if this wasn\'t bad enough, I should mention that during this time his squadron was squaring off against the notorious Jasta 11 - Germany\'s most elite squadron, personally commanded by The Red Baron himself.&nbsp; Bishop didn\'t give a shit though, and on 25 March he recorded his first kill, shooting down a German Albatross D.III fighter plane that was being a total dick and screwing with him for no reason at all.&nbsp; By 8 April, only two weeks into his service to the Queen, Billy had already added five flaming German-speaking infernos to his Asskicking Log, scoring the magic number that officially bestowed Bishop with the prestigious title of Fighter Ace.&nbsp; He&nbsp;spent the rest of April careening through enemy space like a sociopathic cyborg bird-of-prey with a rocket launcher strapped to its back, blasting anything that moved and dogfighting with some of the most dangerous pilots in all of Germany.&nbsp; Incidentally, when I wrote that last sentence I accidentally typed \"dongfighting\" instead of \"dogfighting\", an unfortunate typo that&nbsp;pretty much affixes a completely different connotation than what I was intending to say.&nbsp; Anyways, during that month he shot down an additional 12 enemy aircraft, bringing his kill total up to 17.&nbsp; This is pretty damned impressive, especially considering that he was lucky just to have merely&nbsp;<em>survived</em>&nbsp;his encounter with Richtofen\'s boys - by the end of April, 20 of the 25 planes assigned to Bishop\'s squadron had been completely blown to shit.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/bishop2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>\"Normal formation is two at the front and three at the rear, except Billy was always at least 1/2 mile ahead.<br />How he got that far I do not know\"</span></p>\r\n<p><br /><br /></p>\r\n<p>Despite his incredible success, by all accounts Billy Bishop was actually a pretty mediocre pilot.&nbsp; He didn\'t have a great deal of skill in the air, but he did have the natural instincts of a combat aviator, he was a crack shot with the machine gun, and he was utterly fearless and balls-out all of the time.&nbsp; He always tore ass out in to combat at full speed, loved being in the thick of the action, and never thought twice about slamming into barf-inducing rolls and nose-dives to try and outmaneuver his enemies.&nbsp; He utilized surprise and altitude to his advantage, preferring to swoop down through the cloud cover like a pissed-off hawk getting ready to peck the eyes out of a small rodent and shoot asshole enemy pilots in the face when they were least expecting it.&nbsp; He always volunteered for the most dangerous missions available, and eventually was given free reign by his commanding officer to fly solo search-and-destroy missions deep into enemy airspace.&nbsp; His maverick missions soon earned him the nickname \"The Lone Wolf\", which is probably one of the top five most badass nicknames a human being can have.&nbsp; It\'s right up there with \"The Unstoppable Unholy Ball-Smashing Machine\" and \"<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/attila.html\">The Scourge of God</a>\".</p>\r\n<p>Bishop\'s most notable achievement came on 2 June 1917, while he was flying one of his balls-out Lone Wolf missions against a heavily-defended airfield deep behind enemy lines.&nbsp; Bishop saw several planes on the tarmac out there, so he swept down and strafed the field, gunning down a couple of mechanics and damaging a shitload of expensive equipment.&nbsp; Several enemy fighters scrambled to face Bishop.&nbsp; He was able to hit two Albatross D.IIIs immediately after they got off the ground, sending them plummeting back to Earth like a couple of sacks full of lead shit, and then he killed two more in straight-up air-to-air combat.&nbsp; Despite the fact that his plane was severely damaged by ground fire and another group of fighters was sent in to pursue him, he managed to get back home safely and glide his broken-down, beat-to-shit plane back onto the runway.&nbsp; For shooting down four Germans in the span of about five minutes, Bishop became the first Canadian pilot to win the Victoria Cross - the Empire\'s highest award for bravery in combat.</p>\r\n<p>Captain Bishop was recalled from the front for almost a year following this event, but eventually was placed in charge of \"The Flying Foxes\" squadron in June of 1918, where he personally led a unit of hand-picked, elite Canadian pilots against the Germans.&nbsp; Unfortunately, High Command finally decided that if The Lone Wolf were to be shot down it would be a massive kick in the ballsack to the entire British Empire, so on 19 June 1918 he received word that this morning\'s mission would be his final combat operation of the war.&nbsp; Instead of being relieved that he could stop having jackasses in airplanes shoot goddamned machine guns at him all day, Bishop got really ripshit pissed off that he wasn\'t going to have the opportunity to jam his cannons up any more German urethras.&nbsp; In his final mission, Bishop went solo into a group of three enemy fighters, firing his guns like Tony Montana at the end of&nbsp;<em>Scarface</em>, swearing profusely and giving everyone the finger.&nbsp; He killed one German pilot on his initial pass, and then pulled up hard through the cloud cover.&nbsp; The two remaining enemy fighters tried to chase after him, but they got crossed up in the clouds and smashed into each other like dumbasses.&nbsp; Bishop quickly dove back through the clouds towards another flight group that was moving towards his position and opened up with his guns once again.&nbsp; Two more Albatrosses were sent careening towards the ground.&nbsp; The surviving Germans decided, \"screw this shit, I\'m out of here\", and bugged out like those Soviet MiGs from that got their shit jacked up by Maverick and Iceman in&nbsp;<em>Top Gun</em>.&nbsp; Bishop had notched five kills in the span of fifteen minutes and survived to tell the tale.</p>\r\n<p>Billy Bishop had claimed 72 air victories in only six months of active combat duty, making him the British Empire\'s highest-scoring fighter ace during World War I.&nbsp; When he returned from the front was hailed as a hero in Canada and Britain, receiving dozens of medals from numerous Allied nations and scoring with his wife pretty much all the time.&nbsp; In the years following the war he served as a Canadian Air Marshal and flight instructor, training the next generation of Canadian fighter pilots - men who would go on to prove their worth by helping the Allies win the Battle of Britain and forever keep the Nazis out of England.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/bishop1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>\"You have no idea of how bloodthirsty I\'ve become and how much pleasure I get in killing Huns\"</span></p>\r\n<p><br /><br /></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Links:</span><br /><br /><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Bishop\" target=\"blank\">Wikipedia</a><br /><br /><a href=\"http://www.historynet.com/william-billy-bishop-world-war-i-canadian-ace-fighter-pilot.htm\" target=\"blank\">HistoryNet</a><br /><br /><a href=\"http://constable.ca/caah/bbishop.htm\" target=\"blank\">William Avery Bishop</a></p>','2008-06-21','6569147724','bishop.jpg','bishop - Copy.jpg','Billy Bishop','Bishop kicked German ass in the skies, notching kills left and right, fighting The Red Baron\'s squad, and living to tell the tale.','\"Better to die voluntarily crashing than to have the enemy send you down in flames.\"'),('Justinian II','668','December 11, 711','Constantinople, Byzantine Empire','Medieval Greek Politician','<p>Emperor Justinian II of Byzantium wasn\'t a brilliant military strategist, a capable ruler, a benevolent dictator, or even a fucking half-decent human being.&nbsp; He was a ruthless, merciless motherfucker who crushed all who opposed him, brutally eliminated his enemies, and let nothing stand in the way of his insane, over-the-top, possibly-misguided mission to stomp the lower intestines of anybody ballsy enough to think they could screw with him for any reason.&nbsp; His entire existence was dedicated to one incredibly badass mission:&nbsp; Live for Revenge.</p>\r\n<p>Justinian inherited the throne of the Eastern Roman Empire in 685 at the age of 16, and immediately started more shit than a primadonna NFL wide receiver in his contract year.&nbsp; During the early years of his reign he negotiated a peace treaty with the Umayyad Caliphate that resulted in the Caliph paying tribute to the mighty Emperor (this pretty much proved to everyone who had the hugest nuts in the land), and his army of crotch-stabbing warriors beat the crap out of some jackass rebels that were causing trouble in Armenia and the Balkan Peninsula.</p>\r\n<p>But even though his armies were doing an excellent job of turning wild hordes of rampaging savages into sirloin chuck ground beef and the ruler of the most powerful nation in the Islamic World was sending him a fat welfare check every month, Justinian II was still pretty much utterly despised by the tightwad dickhead senators of the Byzantine Empire.&nbsp; First off, they didn\'t really dig Justinian\'s economic strategy, which basically involved taxing the ever-loving pants off of the citizenry and then using that money to build incredibly huge buildings and massive statues of himself punching Minotaurs in the face or wrestling fire-breathing three-headed dragons.&nbsp; On top of that, the populace was also a little pissed that Justinian once tried to have the Pope arrested for disagreeing with him on religious matters.&nbsp; Now I don\'t care if you\'re Catholic or not - pretty much everyone can agree that signing an arrest warrant for the fucking Pope because he doesn\'t agree with your interpretation of Christianity takes some seriously colossal fucking brass testicles.&nbsp; Unfortunately, the citizens of ancient Constantinople didn\'t really have the same appreciation for flagrant displays of testicular fortitude that you and I do, and eventually the Senate convened an emergency session so that they could do that which Roman Senators do best - plot an underhanded coup d\'etat and depose the Emperor.&nbsp; In 693, some fucking jackasses busted into the Imperial throne room and tackled Justinian like an over-enthusiastic police officer taking down a crackhead on&nbsp;<em>Cops</em>.&nbsp; This group of usurpers, which was comprised mostly of escaped prisoners led by two former high-ranking Byzantine Generals and the goddamned Patriarch of Constantinople, roughed the Emperor up, punched him in the solarplexus a couple times, cut off part of his nose, slit his tongue down the middle, executed all of his closest advisors and exiled him to the shithole town of Cherson.</p>\r\n<p>Well, not only did it fucking suck that Justinian just got humiliated, mutilated, and had his face jacked up by a bunch of convicted felons, but since the Emperor was supposed to be flawless and perfect in every way, his new disfigurement meant that he was pretty much out of the running to ever regain his throne.&nbsp; But fuck that.&nbsp; Justinian wasn\'t going to let something like a botched amateur nosejob stand in the way of his&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/emperor.html\">Palpatinian</a>amibition.&nbsp; His first order of business was to get a custom-made gold plate to cover his fucked-up nose, so he pretty much always looked like a mix between Rip Hamilton and the Phantom of the Opera.&nbsp; I imagine that this made him look fucking awesome all of the time:</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/justinian2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p><br /><br /></p>\r\n<p>Years passed, but Darth Justinian never forgot what happened to him.&nbsp; He just became more and more pissed.&nbsp; Every day, he strapped on a red headband and trained for hours on a heavy bag in an old abandoned gym while awesome pump-up 80s hair band music played in the background and a grizzled old trainer yelled at him to push things to the limit.&nbsp; Eventually, the false Emperor in Constantinople decided that it was too dangerous to have a ruthless, vengeful bastard like Justinian hanging around being not dead, so he sent some motherfuckers to arrest him and bring him into town for a proper execution.&nbsp; Justinian figured out what was going on and was like, \"fuck that\", so he fled Cherson to go live with the Khazars, a badass tribe of Jewish-Turkic nomads known for being fucking hardcore all of the fucking time and for eating (Kosher) meat right off the fucking bone.&nbsp; In the short time he was there, Justinian\'s badassitude, nunchuck skills and bench-pressing ability impressed the Khazar tribal leader so much that he offered his own sister to Justinian in marriage.&nbsp; In 703, Justinian was married to the Khazar princess, a woman named Theodora, and was starting to adapt to life amongst the tough-ass warrior nomads.&nbsp; It should also be mentioned that they lived in the town of Phangoria, a place so hardcore and insane that the magazine&nbsp;<a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fangoria\">Fangoria</a>&nbsp;was potentially named after it.&nbsp; Well the false Emperor was still determined to turn Justinian into shark food, so he put a mafia hit out on him.&nbsp; Luckily for our anti-hero, Theodora found out what was going on and tipped her husband off.&nbsp; That night, two fucking goons busted into Justinian\'s bedroom to kill him, but Justinian got the drop on them and fucking choked them both to death&nbsp;<em>with his bare hands</em>.&nbsp; Once the two thugs were sufficiently asphyxiated, Justinian stole a fishing boat and set out to seek his vengeance.</p>\r\n<p>He soon arrived in the land of the Bulgars, an even more vicious race of lawless, badass warriors.&nbsp; Justinian made peace with the Bulgar Khan and promised him truckloads of money and hookers in exchange for his help.&nbsp; The Khan quickly assembled a well-trained, balls-out force of 15,000 bloodthirsty Bulgar cavalrymen ready to fucking kick serious asses.&nbsp; Together with his new allies, Justinian rode out for the gleaming spires of Constantinople.&nbsp; His force was too small to penetrate the massive walls of the heavily-fortified city, but like any good diabolical madman hell-bent on the destruction of his enemies, Justinian had a plan.&nbsp; He knew about an old abandoned aqueduct that ran into the heart of downtown Constantinople, so in the middle of the night he and his men snuck into town through a series of secret passages and immediately started fucking shit up Trojan Horse-style, hacking up motherfuckers, burning shit, and generally just causing more havoc than a punch bowl of Red Bull at a birthday party full of eight year-olds being held in a Faberg&eacute; Egg museum.&nbsp; The next morning, ten years after he had been deposed, Justinian once again took a seat on his blood-soaked throne.</p>\r\n<p>Now the people that had messed with Justinian were fucked.&nbsp; And by fucked, I mean seriously fucking fucked.&nbsp; His first order of business was to march the false Emperor through the streets of Constantinople while a mob of angry citizens hurled rocks and rotten food at him, and then Justinian personally executed him in the public square by stabbing his head off with his boner.&nbsp; Then he set out looking for the traitorous Generals that had used his face for a pincushion ten years ago.&nbsp; In the time since Justinian was deposed, the two jackass traitor usurpers had themselves been overthrown and exiled, but the Emperor had his men travel to the farthest reaches of the Earth, find those bastards and bring them back to Constantinople.&nbsp; Once he had them firmly in his kung fu grip, Justinian slashed their noses and tongues just like they had done to him, had them bound and trussed, and spent the next two weeks using these guys for footstools while he sat on his throne.&nbsp; When he got bored of resting his feet on the backs of his enemies, he had them publicly executed for treason.&nbsp; Justinian also found the Patriarch that was responsible for his ordeal, stripped him of his rank, and put out his eyes with a really sharp pencil.&nbsp; Then he burned the town of Cherson to the ground, because it fucking sucked being exiled there for like eight years.</p>\r\n<p>Well unfortunately Justinian spent so much time exacting cruel retribution on everyone who had ever fucked with him that he kind of lost track of what was going on in the Empire.&nbsp; Towns soon revolted against him, foreign invasions threatened the borders, and he was eventually captured and executed by motherfuckers.&nbsp; His severed head was placed on display outside the city of Ravenna, which is actually kind of awesome when you think about it.</p>\r\n<p>Justinian II was a bad motherfucker.&nbsp; He wasn&rsquo;t the kind of guy that poets wrote epic works of literary genius about, or that history books remember fondly, but he was a seriously hardcore motherfucker who put vengeance first and everything else second.&nbsp; In my opinion, you kind of have to respect a guy who would \"go the extra mile\" and let his entire Empire collapse around him just to ensure that no man escaped his bloody retribution.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/justinian3.gif\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Links:</span><br /><br /><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justinian_II\" target=\"blank\">Wikipedia</a></p>','2008-06-13','753394611088','justinian1.jpg','justinian1 - Copy.jpg','Justinian II','Emperor of the Byzantines who was a real dick about taxes and ruthless with his enemies, and even tried to arrest the Pope.',''),('Attila','5th Century AD','453 AD','Unknown','Ancient Hungarian General','<p>Long before dudes like&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/khan.html\">Genghis Khan</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/tamerlane.html\">Tamerlane</a>&nbsp;made it routine for a rampaging horde of steppe nomads to ride into Europe on an army of man-eating horses, crushing their enemies before them, hacking off more limbs than a malfunctioning piece of Industrial Revolution machinery and reducing over-populated metropolises to steaming piles of charred ash and carrion, there was Attila the Hun - the Original Gangsta of Central Asian barbarian warlords and one of the toughest motherfuckers to ever tie on a fur cloak, slap an old lady in the face and trample some unsuspecting dumbass villagers with his horse.&nbsp; A man so renowned for his bloodlust, ruthless determination, and merciless, unstoppable asskicking powers that his enemies in Western Europe simply referred to him with one incredibly badass nickname:&nbsp; The Scourge of God.</p>\r\n<p>Attila and his brother inherited the Hun Empire in 433 after their father died for some reason nobody gives a shit about.&nbsp; Not much is known about the Empire at the time of Attila\'s ascension to the throne, but it is believed to have stretched from the Russian steppe to the Danube River in Eastern Europe.&nbsp; Or something.&nbsp; Attila\'s first move as the kind, benevolent ruler of his people was to walk up to the Emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire, metaphorically bitch-slap him in the fucking face with his dick, and demand that the Byzantines pay the Huns a tribute of 600 pounds of gold every year as sort of a \"please God don\'t let the bad men hurt us\" tax.&nbsp; Well 600 pounds of gold is pretty much a fucking shitload of gold, and after a couple years of this the Byzantine Emperor suddenly got sick of Attila\'s bullshit and decided to grow a pair.&nbsp; Emperor Dumbass used his newly-discovered power of testosterone generation to tell Attila him to go hump himself with a rusty coat hanger.&nbsp; Attila responded by cracking his knuckles, mobilizing his army, and marching a screaming horde of pissed-off motherfuckers across the Danube River in 440 CE for the sole purpose of causing enough chaos and destruction to make the L.A. riots look like Family Day at Fantasy Land.</p>\r\n<p>The Huns pillaged villages and towns all across Eastern Europe in a mad rampage of destruction and relentless assbeatings.&nbsp; Many cities, including Belgrade, were obliterated;&nbsp; Their populations were either sold into slavery or stabbed in the balls and left for dead, the empty buildings were looted and then burned to the ground, and the ashes were urinated on by drunk homeless people.&nbsp; For two years, Attila\'s men ravaged the countryside like an army of pissed-off repressed middle-class soccer moms assaulting a 90%-off clearance rack at Macy\'s.&nbsp; Once they\'d killed everyone they could find and stolen anything that wasn\'t bolted to the floor by six-inch nails, steel rivets and two tons of sold concrete, they turned their attention East towards the Byzantine capital of Constantinople.&nbsp; The city was surrounded, the Eastern Roman Army was shattered, and the Byzantines were pretty much royally fucked.&nbsp; The Huns didn\'t really have the technology or the manpower to capture the heavily fortified city, so instead Atilla went up and down the countryside searching for any Byzantine Army units that hadn\'t already been annihilated by his badass wildmen.&nbsp; Eventually, the Emperor in Constantinople surrendered, paid The Scourge of God 6,000 pounds of gold in small, unmarked, non-consecutive bills and agreed to triple the Don\'t Kick My Ass Tax.&nbsp; For Attila, this was all he needed to hear.&nbsp; He wasn\'t interested in owning huge expanses of territory, governing citizens, passing laws or doing any of that other City Hall bureaucracy bullshit paperwork - as long as his enemies were willing to pay him a shitload of gold not to kick their fucking asses, he was more than happy with the knowledge that he had made them all his bitches.</p>\r\n<p>Attila returned home, and within a few years his brother died of mysterious causes.&nbsp; I\'ll give you two guesses who may have been behind it.&nbsp; This \"unfortunate incident\" put power and rule over the Empire firmly in the ever-clenched, face-smashing iron fist of Attila.&nbsp; He chilled out in Hungary for a while, drinking Hennessey on top of gigantic piles of gold coins and half-naked European babes until the year 447, when once again the Byzantine Empire thought it would be really fucking hilarious to stop paying tribute to the Huns.&nbsp; Attila didn\'t even think about it - he just got his men together and stomped nuts across the Eastern Roman Empire, sacking cities throughout the Balkan provinces and shoving his foot up the ass of anybody not currently on his payroll.&nbsp; After another two years of getting their faces pummeled in and having their population wiped out quicker than an onset of the&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/blackdeath.html\">Bubonic Plague</a>, the Byzantines once again surrendered and agreed to pay&nbsp;<em>even more</em>&nbsp;tribute.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/attila1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>The secret to the Huns asskicking skills lie in the fact that they were completely balls-out all of the time.&nbsp; The entire army was mounted on horseback, allowing them to travel and maneuver at speeds far greater than their enemies could hope to achieve.&nbsp; On top of that, they used composite bows - powerful, long-range weapons that were pretty much the Cruise Missiles of Antiquity - and they could fire those bastards with deadly accuracy while charging at a full gallop.&nbsp; Their strategy was first to fly in, launch a couple of volleys of arrows, then fade away before the other guys even knew what the fuck was going on.&nbsp; While the enemy was still in disarray, the Huns would circle around, fire another volley, and then charge full-speed while yelling blood-curdling insane battle cries that made most of their opponent piss themselves with pure liquid terror.&nbsp; In hand-to-hand combat, their style was just to go balls-out all the motherfucking time - savagely hacking and wildly shooting anything that moved.&nbsp; They exercised little regard for their own personal safety, created vast amounts of chaos in the enemy ranks, and then used the disorder to their advantage.&nbsp; They also used nets and lassos to bind their enemies before hacking them up with swords or stabbing them in the eye with their spears, which is pretty sweet.</p>\r\n<p>Anyways, in 450 a chick named Honoria (who was actually the sister of Western Roman Emperor Valentinian III) sent a brave little R2 utility droid to our boy Attila with a special message - \"Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi, you\'re my only hope.\"&nbsp; Basically, Valentinian had forced Honoria into an arranged marriage against her will with some jackass motherfucker she couldn\'t stand, and she needed the Scourge of God to swoop in and rescue her from the clutches of some perverted douchebag asshole.&nbsp; This cry for help was like the Bat Signal for Attila, except instead of rappelling in on a zip line and punching bank robbers in the face while giant word bubbles exclaimed things like, \"BIFF!\", Attila started putting his sword through peoples\' heads and shooting Europeans in the face with giant flaming arrows.&nbsp; He rode his army in to Western Europe, claimed Honoria as his wife, and then demanded half of the Western Roman Empire as a dowry.&nbsp; When Valentinian said something along the lines of, \"there\'s no way in fucking Hell I\'m going to give you half of my Empire\", Attila basically said, \"bitch, I wasn\'t asking for your fucking permission.\"&nbsp; Now that\'s badass.</p>\r\n<p>In 451, the Hun hordes blitzed through German and Austria, crushing all opposition, pillaging countless villages and crossing the Rhine into Gaul, where Attila sacked every town he came across and whipped the ass of any Visigoth warriors standing in his way.&nbsp; The skies above France were clouded with the black smoke of dozens of smoldering villages as the entire countryside pretty much became one giant raging inferno of suck.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/attila3.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>HUN HUN HUNNNNNN!</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Even though the Visigoths and the Romans hated each other worse than the Red Sox and the Yankees, they eventually realized that they needed to join forces or they were all going to get personally sacked by a swift boot to the groin from Attila the Asskicker and his legion of bloodthirsty psychos.&nbsp; A gigantic combined army comprised of the best warriors the Visigoths and Romans had to offer was assembled to chase Attila across Gaul.&nbsp; They eventually caught up to him while he was in the middle of razing the city of Orleans, and the surprise attack forced the Hun invaders to withdraw.&nbsp; Atilla met the European army in a full-scale holy shit battle outside the town of Chalons to determine the fate of the West, but in a brutal battle resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of warriors on both sides, including the Visigoth King, Attila\'s army was narrowly defeated by the Allies.&nbsp; It would be the warlord\'s only documented defeat on the field of battle in his twenty-year career as a professional face-smashing conqueror.</p>\r\n<p>Attila withdrew from Gaul, crossing back over the Rhine and making everybody think he was headed back to Hungary to chill out in his sweet crib and drink wine all night.&nbsp; Then, right at the last second he sent a text message to the Western Roman Emperor saying, \"PSYCH LOL YA RITE LOSERS I\'M ONLY HUNGARY FOR SOME MORE ASS-KICKING!!!!111ONEONEONE\"&nbsp; Instead of heading home, he veered over into Italy and launched a surprise attack aimed at destroying Rome herself.&nbsp; The Huns looted Aquileia, Padua, and Milan before pressing on towards Ravenna and Rome, ball-knocking the Italian cities while Rome\'s armies were off celebrating their triumphant victory back in Gaul and getting backrubs and massages from loose Visigothic women.&nbsp; The only thing that kept Attila from conquering all of Italy was a delegation led by Pope Leo the Great, who came out at the head of a massive Roman Embassy that basically pleaded and begged Attila for mercy.&nbsp; The Hunnic King finally was like, \"fine, fuck it whatever, assholes.&nbsp; I don\'t have time for this.&nbsp; I\'m fucking out of here\", and headed back home.&nbsp; He died in 453, shortly after returning to his palace.&nbsp; He had just gotten married to some other random chick, and drank so much at the after-party that he choked to death on his own blood like some kind of awesome 1970s rock star.&nbsp; He was buried in a massive sarcophagus along with all of his worldy treasures, and then the tomb-builders were executed so that the secret location of his grave would never be discovered.&nbsp; To this day, it remains&nbsp;<a href=\"http://itsasecrettoeverybody.com/\">a secret to everybody</a>.</p>\r\n<p>Attila the Hun is generally remembered in the West as a terrible, bloodthirsty killing machine and one of the most badassed, toughest motherfuckers to ever live.&nbsp; He wasn\'t to dicked around with, he punched the most powerful Empires in the face in the world so hard that they got serious concussions and forgot how to tie their own shoelaces, and he didn\'t half-ass it when it came to eradicating anything that stood in his way through sheer violence and a couple of blowtorches.&nbsp; In the East, he is known as a wise and powerful ruler who commanded the respect of his subjects for twenty years, launched many successful military campaigns, and whipped a group of disorganized nomads into the world\'s most ferocious army.&nbsp; He is also commended by contemporary sources for his humility and self-discipline - one of the men on the Roman Embassy that went to plead for their miserable lives noted that while Attila\'s guests were offered lavish, exotic foods served on solid-gold serving plates, Attila himself just ate a huge slab of meat off of a wooden plate, drank from a wood goblet, and carried a beat-up, nondescript sword on his belt.&nbsp; As a true badass, Attila the Hun didn\'t need to flex nuts to prove how fucking awesome he was - the world already knew.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/attila2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Links:</span><br /><br /><a href=\"http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9011178/Attila\" target=\"blank\">Britannica Online</a><br /><br /><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attila\" target=\"blank\">Wikipedia</a></p>','2008-06-06','130536914375','attila.jpg','attila - Copy.jpg','Attila the Hun','His nickname says it all: The Scourge of God.','\"When evening began to draw in, torches were lighted, and two barbarians came forward in front of Attila and sang songs which they had composed, singing of his victories and his great deeds in war.\"'),('Sir Edmund Percival Hillary','July 20, 1919','January 11, 2008','Auckland, New Zealand','20th-century NewZealand Adventurer','<p>They said it was physically impossible.&nbsp; Unconquerable.&nbsp; A fucking suicide mission only attempted by dumbasses, arrogant fools and the criminally insane.&nbsp; He proved them wrong.</p>\r\n<p>The man who would come to be known simply as \"Sir Ed\" was born in Auckland, New Zealand in 1919.&nbsp; The tall, gangly Kiwi studied Mathematics in college and took a job working as a part-time beekeeper on his father\'s bee farm, where he basically spent all of his time pissing off bees and wearing sweet hats.&nbsp; Apparently, the summer is the off-season for beekeeping (who knew?), so during these months young Edmund would travel out to the sprawling mountains of his homeland\'s South Island to seek adventure in any form he could find it - hiking, skiing, having awesome barbecue cookouts and climbing around in the New Zealand Alps.&nbsp; Even though he was kind of lanky and goofy-looking, Hillary quickly learned that he had a knack for mountaineering.&nbsp; He was always the fastest man up the mountain, and his strength, endurance, and ability to function normally in high altitudes meant that he was always the guy standing on the summit first, hurling boulders down at his friends like Donkey Kong trying to make shit difficult for Mario.</p>\r\n<p>Unfortunately, Ed\'s long relaxing summer days spent clinging to the side of a mountain for dear life trying desperately not to plummet several hundred meters to his death were cut short by a little international tiff known as the Goddamned Second World War.&nbsp; Hillary was conscripted into the New Zealand Air Force, where he served as a navigator on one of those huge-ass awesome airplanes that can take off and land in the middle of the fucking ocean.&nbsp; During a particularly nasty adventure tearing ass over the Pacific, strafing the Japanese like a less-furry version of Baloo from&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0098924/\">Tale Spin</a>, Hillary\'s plane caught fire, leaving him a little more medium-rare than most people would like to be.&nbsp; He received his medical discharge and was sent home, where he was once again free to pursue his hobby of making the most formidable mountains in Oceana his bitch.&nbsp; Over time he decided to take on bigger and better obstacles, traveling to the Swiss Alps and later the Himalayas.&nbsp; In 1951 he served as part of the British reconnaissance expedition to Mount Everest, and in 1952 he went up the Himalayan peak of Cho Oyu.&nbsp; After these warm-up runs, it would be in 1953 when the 33 year-old Edmund Hillary would make a name for himself as one of the bravest and most badass explorers of the 20th Century.&nbsp; This was the year he would attempt to summit the \"unclimbable\" mountain - Everest.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/hillary6.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Nowadays, I guess climbing Mount Everest is impressive and all, but it doesn\'t really seem like&nbsp;<em>that</em>&nbsp;big of a deal.&nbsp; In the past few decades thousands of people have made it up to the summit, and it almost seems as though pretty much any jackass in half-decent physical shape with three months of vacation time and an endless supply of money with which to spend on frivolous shit can buy themselves a panoramic view of the Himalayas from the Roof of the World.&nbsp; Shit, there\'s even a fucking&nbsp;<a href=\"http://dsc.discovery.com/convergence/everestbeyond/everestbeyond.html\">reality TV show</a>&nbsp;about it... how badass could it possibly be?</p>\r\n<p>Well in March of 1953, it was the last frontier in the known world.&nbsp; No human being had ever set foot on the mountain\'s peak, and many of the world\'s best scientists and mountaineers believed it to be impossible.&nbsp; In the years since the discovery of the highest mountain on Earth, there had been thirteen documented expeditions - large, well-funded teams consisting of the best climbers on the planet making a push towards the one part of the world that man had yet to stand upon.&nbsp; Every attempt met with epic failure.&nbsp; Sixteen men perished on the mountain, frozen into blocks of ice buried deep in the snow like a bunch of prehistoric neanderthals, never to be heard from again.&nbsp; At best, attempting this mission was an excruciating exercise in futility.&nbsp; At worst, it was suicide.&nbsp; But Sir Edmund Hillary had giant cast-iron balls, and he didn\'t fucking give a shit.&nbsp; He was going to fucking seek out adventure, attempt the greatest feat of physical strength and stamina that this planet has to offer, and god help anybody dumb enough to get in his way.</p>\r\n<p>So twelve British climbers, along with a couple hundred support crew, marched 190 miles from Katmandu to Everest Base Camp.&nbsp; This alone was probably pretty nuts, considering that I probably haven\'t walked 190 miles in my entire life combined, let along through the rocky, treacherous Himalayan countryside.&nbsp; On the ascent up Everest, it was Hillary\'s job to forge a route through the previously-uncharted Khumbu Icefalls.&nbsp; Just so you have some kind of frame of reference, this is the fucking Khumbu Icefalls:</p>\r\n<table cellpadding=\"20\" align=\"center\">\r\n<tbody>\r\n<tr><th><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/hillary12.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></th><th><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/hillary10.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></th><th><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/hillary9.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></th></tr>\r\n</tbody>\r\n</table>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Holy shit, I damn near get fucking vertigo standing on a ladder to hang Christmas lights - and that\'s even with someone holding the other end of the damned thing.&nbsp; This guy not only went through this shit, but he was the fucking&nbsp;<em>first person</em>&nbsp;to do it.&nbsp; It\'s one thing to see another dude successfully do something crazy without dying, and another thing entirely to blaze a fucking trail like this.&nbsp; In fact, most of the shit on this expedition was uncharted and undocumented, meaning that Hillary and his crew had to pioneer their own routes, fix their own ropes, and basically risk falling hundreds of feet to a painful death on top of poisonous spikes every single step of their lives over the span of about three months.&nbsp; Thanks to their determination, endurance and luck the climbers finally reached the South Col of Everest at 25,900 feet on 26 May 1953.&nbsp; From there, they prepared for their final assault on the summit.</p>\r\n<p>Just camping out on the South Col is no picnic, let alone working your way up a sheer wall of solid ice with nothing but a rope, a giant nutsack and an ice ax.&nbsp; At altitudes of around 26,000 feet you are in what is known in mountaineering as the \"Death Zone\" - which sounds like the name of a bad Sci-Fi Channel TV series about a futuristic prison complex run by cyborgs but is actually the height at which human beings are unable to sustain basic life functions.&nbsp; The air pressure and atmospheric oxygen in the Death Zone is about one-third of what it is at sea level, meaning that the act of sitting still is almost enough to make you run out of breath (especially if you\'re fat and out of shape).&nbsp; Every movement becomes a struggle.&nbsp; You are constantly at risk of altitude sickness and fatal afflictions such as pulmonary or cerebral edema.&nbsp; Your digestive system shuts off since your body can no longer afford to expend the calories necessary to process food (that\'s bad).&nbsp; Your brain begins to be foggy, and you constantly feel like you\'ve just gone on an all-night opium-and-booze bender and haven\'t slept for three days.&nbsp; This is a bad situation to be in, especially when you are surrounded at all times by things that can kill you in incredibly painful ways - avalanches, crevasses, black ice, strong winds, and freezing sub-zero temperatures so cold that frostbite can start knocking your fingers off within seconds.&nbsp; In these conditions, carrying 30-pound rucksacks on their back, Edmund Hillary and his Sherpa climbing partner Tenzing Norgay set out on the morning of 29 May 1953 to assault the summit of the baddest motherfucking mountain on Earth.</p>\r\n<p>For five hours they fought up the mountain.&nbsp; Near what they believed to be the top, Tenzing and Edmund came up to a forty-foot tall wall of sheer rock that seemed almost impassible.&nbsp; Hillary forged a path up this obstacle that had no man had set foot on before - a treacherous path of rock and ice known today as the \"Hillary Step\":</p>\r\n<table cellpadding=\"20\" align=\"center\">\r\n<tbody>\r\n<tr><th><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/hillary11.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></th><th><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/hillary13.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></th></tr>\r\n</tbody>\r\n</table>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>When he started up the Step, Hillary couldn\'t even see the top of it.&nbsp; He just had to fucking make shit up as he went along, fighting the freezing cold, the insanely high-altitude, and the ripping fifty mile per hour winds that constantly threatened to blow him off the mountain and send him careening to his death like Wile E. Coyote.&nbsp; His experience served him well.&nbsp; At 11:30AM on 29 May 1953, Sir Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay officially conquered Mount Everest, kicking the toughest mountain on Earth in its figurative, non-existent ballsack.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/hillary5.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span style=\"color: #0000ff;\"><strong>Shizurpa 10-zing:</strong></span>&nbsp; omfg d00d i pwn3d u cuz i r r0xx0rzz</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>The way down was no easier than the ascent.&nbsp; The gusting wind had blown fresh snow over the mountain, covering up their tracks and leaving them at risk of becoming hopelessly lost.&nbsp; After four grueling hours the men returned to the South Col.&nbsp; When one of Hillary\'s climbing partners came up to him asking how the assault went, Hillary simply said, \"Well, George, we knocked the bastard off.\"&nbsp; Word reached England of Hillary\'s success on the same day as the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, and shortly after he was knighted.&nbsp; But Sir Ed was just getting warmed up.</p>\r\n<p>In 1958 Hillary led the New Zealand component of the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition, a British mission to explore the South Pole for some wacky scientific purposes nobody really gives a shit about.&nbsp; After helping set up New Zealand\'s Scott Base on Antarctica, Hillary and his buddies hopped on some crazy-ass tractors and hauled ass full-speed towards the pole, becoming the first men since 1912 to stand on the South Pole.&nbsp; He was later criticized for putting adventure ahead of the expedition\'s scientific goals, which is awesome.&nbsp; Real badasses don\'t let shit like science stand in the way of doing over-the-top shit.</p>\r\n<p>Hillary climbed ten more Himalayan peaks during his career, including a kickass expedition to Makalu in 1960 where he was determined to find evidence of the Abominable Snowman.&nbsp; My guess is that he intended to stake his claim as the first human to ever punch a fucking Yeti in the face so hard that it coughed up blood, but unfortunately his mission didn\'t meet a whole lot of success.&nbsp; In 1977 he rode a jet ski from the mouth of the Ganges River to the source just for the fuck of it.&nbsp; In 1985 he and fellow badass Neil Armstrong traveled to the North Pole, thus making Hillary the first man to stand and both poles and the summit of Everest, which rocks.</p>\r\n<p>Sir Ed was also pretty badass in that he did great things for the community.&nbsp; In 1960 he started the Himalayan Trust, a community service program dedicated to giving back to his Sherpa homies.&nbsp; Over his lifetime, the Trust brought 26 schools, two hospitals, two airfields and twelve medical clinics to impoverished Himalayan villages.&nbsp; The organization also worked to repair ancient monasteries, build bridges, plant trees, and hook up running water.&nbsp; Even better, Hillary wasn\'t the sort of motherfucker who was just going to write a fat check and forget about it either - he flew out during the summers, grabbed a shovel, and built some of that shit himself.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Sir Edmund Hillary\'s adventures earned him numerous awards and medals for bravery, including the highest honors of New Zealand and Great Britain.&nbsp; In 1992 his face was put on New Zealand\'s $5 bill, which is pretty fucking awesome considering that he was still alive to see it.&nbsp; On 11 January 2008 Hillary died of heart failure at the age of 88.&nbsp; He was humble and modest, but never hesitated to push himself to the max, seek out insane awesome adventures, and make the impossible his bitch.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/hillary4.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<table style=\"width: 500px;\" align=\"center\">\r\n<tbody>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td><span>\"For New Zealanders, Sir Ed was everything a good bastard ought to be - modest and humorous, brave and compassionate, and just grouchy enough to remind us he never sought, nor particularly enjoyed, adulation.\"</span></td>\r\n</tr>\r\n</tbody>\r\n</table>\r\n<p><br /><br /></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Links:</span><br /><br /><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Edmund_Hillary\" target=\"blank\">Wikipedia</a><br /><br /><a href=\"http://www.stuff.co.nz/4352164a26512.html\" target=\"blank\">A Man Kiwis Love to Love</a><br /><br /><a href=\"http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1702543,00.html\" target=\"blank\">TIME Magazine:&nbsp; The Top of the World</a></p>','2008-05-30','899114318635','hillary1.jpg','hillary1 - Copy.jpg','Sir Edmund Hillary','Climbed Mount Everest AND came back down.','\"The feeling of fear, as long as you can take advantage of it and not be rendered useless by it, \r\ncan make you extend yourself beyond what you would regard as your capacity.\"'),('George Smith Patton, Jr.','November 11, 1885','December 21, 1945','San Gabriel, CA, USA','WWII American General','<p>Since I\'ve started this website, I\'ve received hundreds of requests where people tell me who they think deserves a spot in the Hall of Badassitude and why.&nbsp; It should stand as a testament to this man\'s reputation as being an unstoppable face-smashing motherfucker that over the past four years I have, far and away, received more requests for him than anyone else.&nbsp; The name Patton is synonymous with a punch in the face and a karate chop to the testicles, and with Memorial Day right around the corner it\'s time to give this American hero his due.</p>\r\n<p>As a young man growing up in San Gabriel, California, George Smith Patton Jr. cultivated a love for all things awesome and asskicking-related.&nbsp; He studied the greatest works of&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/odysseus.html\">Classical</a>&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/hector.html\">badassery</a>, read any military history book he could get his hands on, and spent long evenings listening to his father\'s buddies swap tales about shooting peoples\' faces off in the American Civil War.&nbsp; Basically, Georgie pretty much knew he wanted to be the second coming of&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/hannibal.html\">Hannibal</a>&nbsp;before he even knew how to write a capital letter \"Z\" in cursive.</p>\r\n<p>Patton spent one year at the Virginia Military Institute before transferring to West Point, where he graduated and was commissioned a Second Lieutenant in the United States Cavalry.&nbsp; At the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm, Patton represented the U.S. in an event known as the Modern Pentathalon.&nbsp; This event basically was a combination of all the major Badass Food Groups:&nbsp; Fencing, shooting, horseback riding, swimming, and running.&nbsp; Shit, if they threw in a \"scoring with hot chicks\" component, it would be the ultimate test of all the skills required to be completely fucking awesome.&nbsp; Plus, adding a sixth event would make it a \"sextathalon\" which is fitting because HUH HUH HUH HUH.</p>\r\n<p>Anyways, Patton performed well in every single event and ended up finishing fifth in the final standings.&nbsp; However there is some controversy regarding this final score, because during the handgun accuracy portion of the competition Patton was ruled by the official scorers as having completely missed the target on his final shot.&nbsp; Patton argued that the bullet didn\'t miss the target, but instead passed through the bullet hole from the shot before - the modern-day equivalent of Robin Hood splitting the arrow at the archery competition, but instead of being hailed as the greatest and most accurate shooter in history, Patton was completely hosed out of a chance at winning the Gold Medal in Badassitude.&nbsp; Patton also receives further badass points in my book because while the Olympic standard for the shooting competition was a .22 caliber round, Patton rejected that pussy ass shit and used his .38 instead, because what good is handgun accuracy if your bullets are too puny to inflict a half-decent kill shot?</p>\r\n<p>After the Olympics Patton continued his study of cavalry tactics, horsemanship, and fencing, and eventually was certified as a Master of the Sword.&nbsp; Now, I\'m not really sure what that is, but I picture it having something to do with raising your saber over your head, shouting, \"BY THE POWER OF GRAYSKULL!\", and transforming your cat into a bloodthirsty tiger, all of which is pretty fucking balls-out.&nbsp; He was such a badass swordfighter that the Army asked him to help design the Model 1913 Cavalry Saber, a design known today as the \"Patton Saber.\"</p>\r\n<p>But even though he knew he was totally rad, George was still dying to test out his skills on the battlefield.&nbsp; He finally got the opportunity to do so while serving under the famous General \"Black Jack\" Pershing.&nbsp; Patton went into Mexico as part of the Punitive Expedition to try and hunt down<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/villa.html\">Pancho Villa</a>, and while the expedition itself was pretty much a complete bungling clusterfuck of a mission, Patton did manage to track down and kill two high-ranking bodyguards in Villa\'s army, capping them in the head with his custom-made badass matching pair of ivory-handled, nickel-plated Colt .45 Peacemaker revolvers, probably during an epic John Woo-esque shootout in an old abandoned Spanish Mission complete with white doves and guys getting their heads blown off in super-slow motion while sad violin music plays in the background.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/patton3.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<table style=\"width: 500px;\" align=\"center\">\r\n<tbody>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td><span>\"I don\'t want to get any messages saying, \'I am holding my position.\'&nbsp; We are not holding a goddamned thing.&nbsp; Let the Germans do that.&nbsp; We are advancing constantly and we are not interested in holding onto anything, except the enemy\'s balls.&nbsp; We are going to twist his balls and kick the living shit out of him all of the time.&nbsp; Our basic plan of operation is to advance and to keep on advancing regardless of whether we have to go over, under, or through the enemy.&nbsp; We are going to go through him like crap through a goose; like shit through a tin horn!\"</span></td>\r\n</tr>\r\n</tbody>\r\n</table>\r\n<p><br /><br /></p>\r\n<p>Pershing was duly impressed with Patton\'s pistol skills and his no-bullshit attitude, so he took Patton with him to France to fight in World War I as the commander of the newly-commissioned United States Tank Corps.&nbsp; Patton quickly rose through the ranks, earning a battlefield promotion to Colonel, winning a Distinguished Service Cross, and getting shot in the thigh by a machine gun during the Battle of Saint Mihiel.&nbsp; After the war, he would often times get drunk, drop his pants, and tell everyone he was the, \"half-assed General,\" which is kind of awesome.</p>\r\n<p>Between the World Wars, Patton became an advocate for armored warfare, and went to work designing, organizing, and training the next generation of American tankers.&nbsp; By the time the Germans needed their butts kicked once again in 1942, Patton was already a Major General in command of the U.S. 2nd Armored Division.</p>\r\n<p>It wasn\'t long before \"Old Blood and Guts\" would get his chance to prove his over-the-top Generaling skillz.&nbsp; Early in the North Africa Campaign, the U.S. II Corps was under the command of some dude named Lloyd Fredenhall.&nbsp; For the first couple months of Operation Torch, Fredenhall was getting his ass kicked up and down the northern coast of Africa by the notorious German General&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/rommel.html\">Erwin Fucking Rommell</a>.&nbsp; Rommel was pretty much in the business of making the Allies his bitch all over the place, and eventually General Dwight D. Eisenhower got sick of hearing about how the Allies were getting kicked in the sack every day so he yanked command away from Fredenhall and gave it to Patton.&nbsp; Together with the British 8th Army under General Bernard Montgomery, the Allies were able to push the Nazis out of Africa once and for all.&nbsp; After Africa, Patton invaded Sicily in 1943, where the rapid assault of his men helped the Americans capture the strategic stronghold of Palermo.&nbsp; After that, it was back to France to gear up for D-Day:&nbsp; The Big Ass Allied Invasion of Normandy.</p>\r\n<p>By this time, Patton\'s epic, profanity-riddled, blood-and-guts speeches and his no-fucking-around attitude had already earned him quite a colorful reputation among his soldiers and the American public, but it was Patton\'s success at the helm of the U.S. 3rd Army in Europe that would cement his legend as one of the 20th Century\'s most badass military commanders.</p>\r\n<p>During the Normandy Campaign, Patton burned rubber through the French countryside like a wild ass-kicking maniac, covering nearly sixty miles in the span of about two weeks, encircling and outflanking numerous German defenders and liberating most of northern France from Nazi control.&nbsp; He knew that his armor wasn\'t going to be able to slug it out with the German Tigers and&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/panther.html\">Panthers</a>, so he preferred to use the Allied forces\' superior mobility and speed to its fullest extent.&nbsp; He outmaneuvered the enemy, surrounded them, and then pretty much disregarded all classical and traditional military tactics in favor of full-on balls-out attacks.&nbsp; The only thing that was able to slow down the 3rd Army in Normandy was when they ran out of gas, and even that was a temporary problem.</p>\r\n<p>Patton\'s full-throttle, \"kick them in the crotch repeatedly until they die from it and then continue kicking them a couple more times just for good measure\" leadership strategy was a good representation of the man himself.&nbsp; He was headstrong, cocky, stubborn and ambitious, and he didn\'t tolerate anything less than the best from his men.&nbsp; He did his best to drill a sense of discipline and toughness among his soldiers through strict rules of conduct and rousing speeches, and he once got in deep shit for slapping a man right in the face because he was being a pussy and bitching about being shell-shocked.&nbsp; For the most part, he was largely unpopular with his soldiers, but even so, his confidence rubbed off on them and deep down they all trusted him to get the job done and get them home alive.&nbsp; He didn\'t let them down.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/patton.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<table style=\"width: 500px;\" align=\"center\">\r\n<tbody>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td><span>\"Some goddamn fool once said that flanks have got to be secure.&nbsp; Since then son-of-a-bitches all over the globe have been guarding their flanks.&nbsp; I don\'t agree with that.&nbsp; My flanks are something for the enemy to worry about, not me.&nbsp; Before he finds out where my flanks are, I\'ll be cutting the bastard\'s throat.\"</span></td>\r\n</tr>\r\n</tbody>\r\n</table>\r\n<p><br /><br /></p>\r\n<p>While he pounded the Huns up and down the hedgerows of Normandy, Patton is perhaps best known for his actions in the Ardennes Forest during the \"Battle of the Bulge\" in 1944.&nbsp; Hitler\'s elite SS Panzer units made a last-ditch mad dash towards Antwerp in an effort to break through the Allied lines, and a large portion of the U.S. 101st Airborne Division was besieged in the town of Bastogne.&nbsp; Patton\'s 3rd Army disengaged the enemy they were fighting and blitzed north at top speed several hundred miles in the middle of a goddamned snowstorm to break the German lines and end the offensive.&nbsp; Afterwards, they marched east, liberated the Buchenwald Concentration Camp, and captured more Germans than any other unit in the war.&nbsp; When Hitler finally capped himself in the head and the rest of Germany was like, \"fuck it you guys win just stop hitting us already\", Patton wanted to just keep marching east and fight the Soviet Union while, \"the bayonets were still sharpened,\" but luckily for the Russkies he never had the chance to stick it to those Commie bastards - he died on 21 December 1945 as a result of injuries sustained in a car accident a few days earlier.</p>\r\n<p>George S. Patton is one of the most hardass motherfuckers the United States has to offer and one of the most widely-recognized badasses to ever live.&nbsp; No legitimate discussion of badassitude is complete without him.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/patton2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<table style=\"width: 500px;\" align=\"center\">\r\n<tbody>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td><span>\"There is one great thing that you men will all be able to say after this war is over and you are home once again.&nbsp; You may be thankful that twenty years from now when you are sitting by the fireplace with your grandson on your knee and he asks you what you did in the great World War II, you won\'t have to cough, shift him to the other knee and say, \'Well, your Granddaddy shoveled shit in Louisiana.\'&nbsp; No, Sir, you can look him straight in the eye and say, \"Son, your Granddaddy rode with the Great Third Army and a Son-of-a-Goddamned-Bitch named Georgie Patton! \"</span></td>\r\n</tr>\r\n</tbody>\r\n</table>\r\n<p><br /><br /></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Links:</span><br /><br /><a href=\"http://www.pattonhq.com/speech.html\">The Patton Speech</a><br /><br /><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_S._Patton\">Wikipedia</a><br /><br /><a href=\"http://www.generalpatton.com/biography.html\">GeneralPatton.com Biography</a></p>','2008-05-23','372410320516','patton1.jpg','patton1 - Copy.jpg','George S. Patton','US general in World War II, and whose actions define what it is to have balls. ','\"We\'re not going to just shoot the sons-of-bitches, we\'re going to rip out their living goddamned guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks.  We\'re going to murder those lousy Hun cocksuckers by the bushel-fucking-basket.  War is a bloody, killing business.  You\'ve got to spill their blood, or they will spill yours.\"'),('Unknown','Unknown','September 25, 1066','Norway','Medieval Viking Warrior','<p>25 September 1066.&nbsp; The Saxons really had the Vikings by the balls now.</p>\r\n<p>It had all started earlier that year, when King Edward the Confessor kicked the bucket without first having the good sense to nail some babe and leave England with a living heir.&nbsp; Anglo-Saxon bigwig Harold Godwinson was already in the neighborhood of the throne room so he went ahead and grabbed the crown for himself, but this kind of pissed off the Norwegian King, a massive badass Viking known as Harald Hardrada.&nbsp; There was also a third dude who staked a claim on the recently-vacated throne, some French bastard named William, but he was currently dicking around in Normandy doing God-knows-what and doesn&rsquo;t really figure into this tale at all.</p>\r\n<p>Pissing off a Viking chieftain can generally only lead to one thing - hurt feelings and a copious amount of bloodshed.&nbsp; Within weeks of Harold Godwinson anointing himself King, a swarming horde of badass Viking warriors sailed into England on a river of blood and immediately began fucking up everything they came across like a rampaging plague of biblical locusts eating the first-born of Egypt during the Great Flood.&nbsp; The armies of Mercia and Northumbria marched forth in a feeble attempt to stem the tide, but both forces were quickly crushed in a frenzy of ball-crunching warhammers and whirling blood-stained longaxes.&nbsp; The town of Scarborough was sacked, pillaged, knocked over, burned to the ground and eaten by wolves, and it seemed as though there was little that the new King could do to slow down this marauding army of insane Viking madmen.</p>\r\n<p>But all of a sudden the entire Saxon army had hopped on their sweet four-wheel-drive ATVs and covered 180 miles in four days, catching the Viking army camping at Stamford Bridge with their fucking loin cloths down.&nbsp; The Norse leaders had not expected the Saxons to mobilize nearly as quickly as they did, and when the horizon suddenly became alive with the fluttering banners and gleaming steel of five thousand enemy soldiers, the Northmen knew they were beyond totally fucked.&nbsp; Most of their armor and weapons, along with one-third of their army, was still waiting back at the ships - nearly a day\'s march away and about as much use to these disorganized troops as a last season\'s J. Crew catalog.</p>\r\n<p>The charging Saxon army crashed into the small Viking camp on the West side of the River Derwent, cutting the unprepared Norsemen to shreds like a convicted felon shoving his buddy sack-first into a woodchipper on a cold Minnesota evening.&nbsp; Those who weren\'t immediately reduced to steaming piles of severed limbs and melted flesh attempted to flee across Stamford Bridge and join up with the rest of their allies on the East bank in order to regroup, gear up, pop a fresh clip into their Glocks and mount some sort of significant resistance.&nbsp; With all of the Viking warriors on the West bank either slaughtered or running for their lives, the Saxon forces prepared to charge over the river, jam their spears into the eyes of anyone wearing animal fur and complete the destruction of these Norse invaders once and for all. However, even with the Northman Army reeling and in complete disarray, victory would not come so easily for the Saxon Army.</p>\r\n<p>Standing astride the bridge was one man.&nbsp; A giant Norse berserker silently surveyed the Saxon army, firmly clutching a massive double-bladed Greataxe in his weathered, calloused hands.&nbsp; A lone Viking hero granted permission by his King to die honorably in combat, tasked with defending the narrow bridge and buying time for his brethren to reorganize.&nbsp; His face was concealed by an imposing horned helm - metal plates reinforcing a mask constructed from the bleached bone remains of a fearsome animal skull, his wild eyes peering through the darkness like searing orbs of white-hot flame.&nbsp; A living demon, sent forth from the darkest recesses of Hell itself to exact brutal vengeance on any mortal brave or foolish enough to cross him, defying anyone with more balls than sense to test his wrath.</p>\r\n<p>The full might of the Anglo-Saxon army charged the bridge, determined to extricate this colossal beast from his post through the sheer weight of their numbers, but the narrow walkway above the raging waters of the River Derwent was only wide enough for four men to stand abreast, and its guardian was unwavering in his resolve.&nbsp; The first rank of fighting men crashed full-speed into the Norseman like a school bus full of insolent teenagers being hurled face-first into a wall of unflinching spikes.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/stamfordbridge2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>The war chants of ancient heroes sung in the fearless Viking\'s ears, as though an invisible primitive iPod were blasting the song \"Freya\" by The Sword at maximum volume as he wrought terrible havoc upon the apprehensive and overmatched Saxon footmen.&nbsp; His savage strikes felled even the bravest warriors in a single blow, cutting down mighty champions with the same effortless ease as Martha Stewart carving up slices of a warm pumpkin pie, while any attacks that penetrated his agile defenses failed to significantly wound him or even penetrate his battle-hardened hide.&nbsp; Swords shattered on impact with his chain mail, terrible blows rained upon his chest and arms failed to elicit even the slightest wince of pain, and this ferocious barbarian cut a swath of destruction in his wake, wading through these experienced, professional warriors like a Japanese movie monster plowing through a swimming pool full of strawberry Jell-O.&nbsp; Dismembered appendages and decapitated corpses littered the battlefield, the river itself ran red with the blood of fallen men, and the bridge soon appeared as though a schlocky Halloween prop store had just exploded upon it.&nbsp; His features were alive with the blood-lusted determination of a true Viking berserker, his clenched teeth were bared like the fangs of a rabid wolf, his Advanced Battle Rage boosting his STR and CON scores to inhuman levels... one man fearlessly battling five thousand, holding the bridge until death.</p>\r\n<p>For almost an hour this resolute 20th Level Fighter single-handedly tore through the English like a chainsaw-wielding space marine with the God Mode cheat activated, shaking off even the most horrific wounds as if they were gunshot wounds from a laser tag weapon and slaughtering more soldiers than a bad Sci-Fi Channel Original movie.&nbsp; After watching this man unleash mayhem so brutal that it would make even the most hardcore MMA enthusiasts nauseous, one clever Saxon warrior wised up and decided not to try and test this barbarian\'s might.&nbsp; He floated a barrel in the river, hopped in, drifted underneath the bridge, and jammed his spear up through the planks, striking the Viking in his only weak point - the ball sack.</p>\r\n<p>The Swift-Footed Achilles had his infamous heel, Smaug the Magnificent had a weak point covering his heart, and the Giant Enemy Crab could be exposed for massive damage - but for this invincible Viking warrior, a spear wound in the junk was the one thing that could slow him down.&nbsp; As he fell to his knees, lamenting his unfortunate situation, the Saxons poured over the bridge and into the now-organized Norse camp.&nbsp; The berserker was dealt one final death blow and began his spiritual journey across the Rainbow Bridge to Valhalla, where he would spend the afterlife chilling out drinking forties of malt liquor with Odin and waiting around for his opportunity to carve his enemies to pieces once again at Ragnarok.&nbsp; With their champion finally slain, the Viking lines eventually collapsed as the vengeful Saxons fell on them like a face-melting Hydrochloric acid rain made out of pointy spears and broadswords.&nbsp; During the battle, King Harald Hardrada of Norway was shot in the damn throat with an arrow, and the influence of the Vikings over the British crown was forever broken.</p>\r\n<p>History never recorded the name of the insane, balls-out warrior who fought so ferociously on this day, but the songs of Viking skalds and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles do remember his deeds.&nbsp; When he finally succumbed to his numerous wounds and crashed to the earth, over forty Saxon soldiers lay dead at his feet, and dozens of wounded men were left helplessly crawling through the thick grass on the river bank, crippled by the savage onslaught of this crazy axe-swinging motherfucker.&nbsp; The full might of the English army had been completely halted by the strength of one man - the nameless Viking at Stamford Bridge.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/stamfordbridge3.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Links:</span><br /><br /><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Stamford_Bridge\" target=\"blank\">Wikipedia</a><br /><br /><a href=\"http://members.tripod.com/~GeoffBoxell/stamford.htm\" target=\"blank\">The Battle of Stamford Bridge</a><br /><br /><a href=\"http://www.britainexpress.com/History/battles/stamford-bridge.htm\" target=\"blank\">Britain Express</a></p>','2008-05-16','990588922560','stamfordbridge.jpg','stamfordbridge - Copy.jpg','Viking at Stamford Bridge','One of the most badass nameless berserkers to ever wield an axe.','\"But there was one of the Norwegians who withstood the English folk,\r\nso that they could not pass over the bridge, nor complete the victory.\"'),('Osceola','1804','January 1838','Tallassee, AL, USA','19th-century Amerindian Warrior','<p>If there\'s one thing that Colonial America was awesome at, it was fucking over the Indians.&nbsp; Using everything from broken treaties and shady business deals to crazy obscure airborne diseases and ball-shooting machine guns, we did everything we possibly could to exploit, subjugate, and/or completely relocate the native peoples of North America.&nbsp; While for the most part this was a pretty successful (if unsavory) operation - tomahawks and spears generally aren\'t much of a match for artillery batteries and portable nuclear missile launchers - some Native American tribes seriously didn\'t feel like putting up with our stupid bullshit.&nbsp; They took up arms, fought like a divorced couple on the Jerry Springer Show, and did whatever they could in defense of their homelands and their lifestyles.&nbsp; Of all the native tribes that started shit with the U.S. Army, none put up a more lengthy or ferocious resistance than the Seminole Tribe of Florida, particularly while under the guidance of a badass war chief known as Osceola.</p>\r\n<p>Osceola was born in 1804 in the small village of Tallassee, Alabama.&nbsp; When he was still a young man his tribe migrated to a reservation in central Florida, mostly to avoid conflict with the Europeans, Americans, and rival Creek Indian tribes, all of whom were continually fucking with them for no reason at all.&nbsp; Osceola and his peeps chilled out in area code 407 for a while, peacefully living off the land, rocking the&nbsp;<a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_drink\">black drink</a>&nbsp;and wrestling giant man-eating alligators just to prove how big their balls were, but unfortunately back in these days it was pretty much impossible for American Indians to avoid having white people try and fuck with them.&nbsp; Seriously, white people were like the paparazzi of the 19th Century - no matter where you went you couldn\'t fucking escape them. Not long after Osceola arrived at the reservation, a bunch dumbass white people started building homes on the outskirts of Indian Territory, and for some reason they got all pissed off that there were Indians near their homes.&nbsp; You\'d think that it\'s common sense that if you don\'t like Indians, you shouldn\'t move next door to them, but whatever.&nbsp; Anyways, the colonists ended up getting cheesed off because their black slaves kept escaping the plantations and running over to the reservation, and the Seminoles (who were pretty chill with everyone) weren\'t really interested in sending a bunch of innocent men and women back to a life of brutal servitude.&nbsp; The Seminoles would allow the runaways to join their tribe, any slave catchers sent into Indian Territory found themselves being used as live-fire target practice for badass Seminole bow-hunting snipers.&nbsp; There were also reports that some of the more daring Indian braves kept sneaking into Disney after dark and stealing free rides on Space Mountain, but this was never confirmed.</p>\r\n<p>Unfortunately for the \'Noles, President/Indian Hater&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/jackson.html\">Andrew Jackson</a>&nbsp;had the colonists\' back.&nbsp; As part of the bullshit Indian Removal Act, he put together the Treaty of Payne\'s Landing in 1832 - a document that basically told all the Seminoles living in central Florida that they needed to sign over their land, pack up their shit and move out to Oklahoma, a desolate place where, as I understand it, the wind comes sweeping down the plains like&nbsp;<em>all the fucking time</em>.&nbsp; Nobody wants to live in Oklahoma, and the Seminoles certainly weren\'t down with this bullshit attempt by the government to usurp their ancestral lands.&nbsp; When the U.S. Director of Indian Affairs brought this crap to the chief of Osceola\'s tribe, Osceola thought it was such a horseshit treaty that he whipped out his knife on the spot and jammed it right through the paper, lodging it firmly into the table below.&nbsp; Then he probably pimp-slapped the G-Man so hard that his moustache fell off and said something hilarious like, \"Cut that jibba jabba, fool!\"</p>\r\n<p>Once it became obvious that any attempt to relocate the Seminoles would be met with firm backhands to the face, swift kicks to the ballsack and bad references to 1980s sitcoms, the U.S. Army began preparing to get what they wanted by using the time-tested method of declaring full-on war.&nbsp; They brought in three full assloads of soldiers and weapons, and before long a number of increasingly bloody skirmishes were breaking out between the white settlers and the Seminoles.&nbsp; Osceola quickly realized what was going down, and knew he needed to get his warriors ready to chuck some fucking tomahawks into some stupid-looking American faces.&nbsp; Though he wasn\'t a tribal chief, he was charismatic as hell, and he went from tribe to tribe recruiting and organizing warriors with his natural leadership and unwavering devotion to the cause.&nbsp; Before long, he had organized a force of somewhere between 1,000 and 1,400 warriors ready to hack and slash their way to autonomy.&nbsp; Osceola was so dedicated to the cause that he didn\'t have time to fuck around with chumps who didn\'t support him, either.&nbsp; One time, he talked to some pussy-ass chieftain who said he was going to agree to terms with the Americans, load up the cargo van with apple pies and hamburgers and head out for the land where the wind comes right behind the rain.&nbsp; Osceola viewed this as the ultimate act of betrayal and cowardice, so he dueled the chief on the spot, killed him in single combat with a flying 360-degree atomic backbreaker, and recruited the tribe\'s warriors into his growing army.</p>\r\n<p>It wasn\'t long before the Seminoles began fighting back like a self-reliant housewife in a bad Lifetime Original Movie.&nbsp; Though he had no supplies, little in the way of weapons, and no reinforcements to speak of, Osceola took his war parties against the full might of the U.S. Army like a squadron of X-Wings assaulting the Death Star in the space above Yavin IV.&nbsp; He launched hit-and-run attacks against technologically and numerically superior American patrols, flying in out of nowhere, ambushing the shit out of the enemy, killing anyone foolish enough to not immediately run screaming into the woods, and then looting the supply trains.&nbsp; Using these tactics, Osceola was able to secure a large stockpile of weapons and medical supplies, which he then used to launch raids on American villages and towns.&nbsp; The contant Seminole attacks had many panicked white settlers taking the first train back to Whiteyville, and the tribes bolstered their numbers by destroying a bunch of huge plantations and recruiting the freed slaves into their ranks.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/osceola1.png\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>OMG ZERG RUSH</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>One of the greatest victories of this stage of the war came on 23 December 1835, when a group of 170 Seminole warriors ambushed two companies of U.S. Army regular infantry while they were on the march through some dense woods.&nbsp; Osceola\'s men attacked seemingly out of nowhere, catching the soldiers off-guard and opening up with several volleys of arrows and musket fire, followed by intense hand-to-hand combat where the braves went to town with their tomahawks like a rampaging horde of psychotic half-blind lumberjacks.&nbsp; When the smoke cleared the Seminoles had suffered three casualties, and killed 106 of the 108-man American detachment.&nbsp; The same day, a raiding party personally led by Osceola killed the Director of Indian Affairs along with his entire personal bodyguard.&nbsp; A month after that, Seminoles ambushed an Army detachment as they attempted to ford a small river, taking out 75 soldiers while they were stuck in waist-deep water.</p>\r\n<p>Osceola\'s early attacks were incredibly successful largely because the American Army was more out of its element than Sid Vicious in a Boca Raton retirement community.&nbsp; The swampy marshes of the Everglades were home to the Seminoles, but the terrain was not at all conducive to the U.S. strategy of engaging in large, set-piece battles.&nbsp; Malaria took a heavy toll on American soldiers slogging through the swamp, any attempts at large-scale military maneuvers were slowed down to a crawl, and the Seminoles could easily strike quickly and fade back into the Everglades without having to worry about any kind of U.S. pursuit.&nbsp; One time, a U.S. General actually attempted to send a 5,000-man regiment out to ambush a Seminole village deep in the swamp in an effort to completely crush the resistance movement.&nbsp; It took the Noles about two seconds to figure out what was going on, and by the time the blundering Americans stumbled their way into the village it was more deserted than a John Tesh concert.</p>\r\n<p>Throughout 1836 the Seminoles pressed their attack and tried to avoid getting involved in any kind of large-scale engagment.&nbsp; A combination of sieges, disease, and gunshot wounds to the face took its toll on the Americans, and several critical U.S. forts were captured during this time.&nbsp; However, attrition was also beginning to wear on Osceola\'s warriors.&nbsp; While the Americans seemingly had an infinite amount of manpower, the Seminoles could not replace warriors that were killed or wounded in action, and before long their ranks were thinner than an Anorexic European model or Bruce Willis\' hairline.&nbsp; Osceola was fighting a losing battle against impossible odds but he adamantly refused surrender in any form, vowing to battle the American encroachment on his territory until his last breath (and then probably even after he died - coming back and haunting the shit out of the U.S. generals from beyond the grave or something).</p>\r\n<p>Unfortunately, it wasn\'t long before Osceola got screwed over worse than Bret Hart at&nbsp;<a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_Screwjob\">Survivor Series 1997</a>.&nbsp; Osceola was contacted by some total bastard named General Thomas Jessup to meet for truce negotiations one day, and when Osceola met Jessup under a white flag he was ambushed, captured, imprisoned, and thrown in a South Carolina brig.&nbsp; Since he was a well-respected commander with a reputation for being a tactical military genius, he was actually housed in the officer\'s quarters of the brig and given free reign of the facility.&nbsp; Even so, Osceola was not the sort of badass who could tolerate living in captivity when he could be out kicking asses.&nbsp; He died of Malaria on 20 January 1838, less than three months after his bullshit capture.&nbsp; He was buried with full military honors by the U.S. government.</p>\r\n<p>Osceola valiantly defended his homeland and fiercely resisted the forced removal of his people for over three years.&nbsp; He never backed down, never compromised, and didn\'t flinch in the face of a battle he seemingly had no chance of winning.&nbsp; His shady, underhanded capture only served to piss the Seminoles off even more, and they would continue fighting the U.S. Army for many years after Osceola\'s death.&nbsp; Ultimately, the resistance was so hardcore and costly for the United States that the government eventually said, \"fuck it\", and left the Seminoles alone.&nbsp; To this day, the Seminole tribe of Florida remains unconquered.&nbsp; Not only that, but they also fucking own the Hard Rock Cafe, rule a multi-billion dollar gambling and entertainment empire, and pretty much own half of South Florida... not bad for a group that once found itself locked in a desperate life-or-death struggle for their own survival and the continuance of their way of life.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/osceola3.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<table style=\"width: 400px;\" align=\"center\">\r\n<tbody>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td><span><span>\"The government is in the wrong, and this is the chief cause of the persevering opposition of the Indians, who have nobly defended their country against our attempt to enforce a fraudulent treaty.&nbsp; The natives used every means to avoid a war, but were forced into it by the tyranny of our government.\"&nbsp;<br /><br /></span></span><center>- Maj. Ethan Allen Hitchcock, US Army</center></td>\r\n</tr>\r\n</tbody>\r\n</table>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Links:</span><br /><br /><a href=\"http://www.indigenouspeople.net/osceola.htm\" target=\"blank\">Indigenous People</a><br /><br /><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Seminole_War\" target=\"blank\">Wikipedia</a></p>','2008-05-09','655267128666','osceola.jpg','osceola - Copy.jpg','Osceola','American Indian who challenged the United States in the age old disagreement between American Indians and white people of the principles of land ownership.','\"I will make the white man red with blood, blacken him in the sun and rain, and the buzzards will feast upon his flesh.\"'),('Frederick Albert Mitchell-Hedges','October 22, 1882','June 1959','Buckinghamshire, England','20th-century British Adventurer','<p>Frederick Albert \"Mike\" Mitchell-Hedges has been described by many people as being a real-life&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/indianajones.html\">Indiana Jones</a>, only instead of hitting Nazis in the face with a bullwhip and popping wheelies with Sean Connery, Mitchell-Hedges puffed on a sweet pipe and spoke in a heavy British accent.&nbsp; After reading about this dude&rsquo;s insane adventures traveling the globe, discovering lost cities and ancient artifacts and arm-wrestling giant man-eating gorillas in the uncharted jungles of Central America, it&rsquo;s hard to dispute that claim.</p>\r\n<p>Born in 1882 in Buckinghamshire, Mitchell-Hedges was a pretty much an unruly bastard right from the beginning.&nbsp; His stodgy uptight father wanted him to get into the boring-ass family stockbrokering business, but Hedges was the kind of guy who would rather be hurling primitive wooden spears at ten foot tall scorpions, fistfighting an angry tribe of head-shrinking witch doctors and using a flimsy vine to swing over alligator-infested ponds like some kind of clinically insane Pitfall Harry &ndash; not sitting at a desk all day trying to figure out whether to buy fifty shares of fucking coffee, gold or milkshakes.&nbsp; He hated school, frequently caused trouble, and spent all of his free time reading whatever awesome adventure novels he could get his hands on.&nbsp; Eventually, old Dad had enough of Hedges&rsquo; bullshit.&nbsp; After one particularly rowdy night when Mike and his buddies got arrested for starting a bar fight by throwing a handful of ice cubes down the low-cut shirt of an incredibly large-breasted woman, the 18 year-old Mitchell-Hedges was shipped off to Canada.</p>\r\n<p>Mitchell-Hedges moved to New York and worked for a while as at a soul-sucking corporate stockbrokering job, probably because that was the only marketable trade he really had at this time.&nbsp; One day he found out that his jackass co-workers were setting him up have his stock completely destroyed through some wacky bullshit business-jargon-related means that I can&rsquo;t even possibly begin to understand, and he wasn&rsquo;t going to fucking sit around and let some bullshit suit-wearing bastards get the better of him.&nbsp; Instead of going to his bosses with the plot or doing something to save his own ass, Mitchell-Hedges did what any badass motherfucker with a chip on his shoulder would do &ndash; he rigged the situation so that the entire fucking company went down in flames with him.</p>\r\n<p>After the New York disaster, Mitchell-Hedges bounced around various odd jobs in places ranging from Texas to New Orleans before landing in Mexico, where he was promptly captured by&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/villa.html\">Pancho Villa</a>&nbsp;and his marauding hordes of frito banditos.&nbsp; Villa grabbed Mitchell-Hedges and threatened to execute him on the spot, but MH immediately busted out a perfectly-executed&nbsp;<em>a capella</em>&nbsp;rendition of &ldquo;God Save the King&rdquo; to prove that he was in fact British and not American.&nbsp; Villa was so pumped up about how fucking nuts this guy was that he decided to take Mitchell-Hedges into his gang.&nbsp; During his adventures riding around with Mexican outlaws, robbing train cars and raiding towns, Hedges received two gunshot wounds in his leg.&nbsp; In 1914 Pancho Villa allowed Mitchell-Hedges to return to London so that he would enlist in the Army and serve his country in World War I.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/hedges.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Unfortunately, the British Army declared Hedges unfit for service thanks to the two bullets lodged in his thigh, so he returned to New York.&nbsp; Not long after arriving in the city, Hedges&rsquo; good friend died, so he adopted her daughter to come live with him.&nbsp; Oh, and he was roommates with an undercover Leon Trotsky.&nbsp; MI6 contacted Hedges to spy on Trotsky, but he declined, saying that as long as Trotsky was on time with his half of the rent and paid for all of his crazy-ass long-distance phone calls he wasn&rsquo;t going to sell out his own roommate.</p>\r\n<p>Things got even more nuts for Mitchell-Hedges when he returned home to London and had a chance encounter at Waterloo Train Station with a total babe named Lady Richmond Brown.&nbsp; Brown and Hedges had been friends long ago, and when they met again Brown told our hero that she had been diagnosed with a terminal illness and only had a year or so to live (it would turn out later that the doc who issued this prognosis was actually a raging idiot and had no idea what the shit he was talking about).&nbsp; Since the end was oh-so near, Lady Brown said that if Mitchell-Hedges took her on some crazy insane adventures she would fund his exploits herself.&nbsp; Hedges hastily organized an expedition, and if it&rsquo;s any indication as to the kinds of balls-out shit he accomplished from this point on in his life, I should mention that his memoirs are titled&nbsp;<em>Danger, My Ally</em>.</p>\r\n<p>F.A. Mitchell-Hedges spent the next several years having crazy adventures discovering uncharted civilizations and uncovering buried treasure across Central America and the Caribbean.&nbsp; He explored ancient ruins and tombs, found sacred artifacts from long-forgotten empires, fought giant beasts, and traveled among the indigenous populations located deep in the forests of Belize and Honduras.&nbsp; He frequently reported his tales of derring-do to the paper back in London, and the rare pieces he unearthed were immediately shipped off to the British Museum, where they are still on display to this day.&nbsp; He told fascinating tales of adventure, which often times involved him saving Lady Brown, his adopted daughter, or his beautiful young secretary Jane Harvey from imminent peril like he was fucking&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/bannon.html\">Race Bannon</a>&nbsp;hitting a T-Rex in the face with a wooden torch or using a blowgun with poison darts to drop a tribal cannibal war-party.&nbsp; He was involved in hand-to-hand combat with jaguars, giant scorpions, poisonous snakes, and bloodthirsty bears, and one time he even claimed to have taken out a vicious oversized carnivorous iguana with a hunting knife.&nbsp; He discovered the Mayan Ruins at Lubaantun, documented the &ldquo;bizarre&rdquo; rituals of a tribe of cannibals, and recovered priceless pieces of great archaeological significance.</p>\r\n<p>He was also a master fisherman,.&nbsp; During his days the Caribbean he would sail out in a crappy wooden canoe and use a rod-and-reel to haul in massive stingrays, marlins and swordfish.&nbsp; In his well-illustrated book,&nbsp;<em>Battles with Giant Fish</em>, Mitchell-Hedges claims to have reeled in a 31-foot sawfish and says that he once caught a 700 pound man-eating killer shark off the coast of Jamaica.&nbsp; While living on the island of Roatan, he accidentally dug up three chests of buried pirate treasure, filled to the top with gold doubloons.</p>\r\n<p>Now fabulously wealthy and incredibly well-known for his amazing exploits, Mitchell-Hedges bounced around the world, living in places such as Hollywood, London, New York, and Paris.&nbsp; In the 1930s he had a Sunday night radio show in New York where he would tell amazing stories about his adventures in Central America.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/hedges2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>\"Live lived without adventure is no life at all.\"</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Mitchell-Hedges two most significant finds were the Virgin of Kazan and the Crystal Skull of Doom.&nbsp; The Virgin of Kazan is a 16th century icon of the Orthodox Church that the Russian people claimed helped them defeat Napoleon in 1812 by coming to life, growing to become 200 feet tall and them stomping the Grande Armee to death with its massive foot like it was a Really Holy Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.&nbsp; Hedges discovered this piece on the West Coast of Africa at the age of 65, and claims that he acquired it in a whisky drinking match against ex-Nazi Luftwaffe commander Herman Goering.&nbsp; Goering got pissed that he lost, so Hedges decked him.&nbsp; The Crystal Skull of Doom is a large human skull carved out of a single piece of solid crystal, complete with a moveable, hinged jaw, and is believed to be one of the most stunning crystal skulls in existence (a factoid that indicates that there is apparently more than one giant crystal skull in existence).&nbsp; Hedges found this artifact on a dig in the Mayan ruins of Belize, and constantly referred to it as a conduit of black magic and the embodiment of all evil.&nbsp; The thing is so creepy and weird that it was used as the logo for the famous show&nbsp;<em>Arthur C. Clarke&rsquo;s Mysterious World</em>&nbsp;back in &ldquo;the day&rdquo;.</p>\r\n<p>Of course, at this point I should mention that there are quite a few people out there who believe that pretty much everything F.A. Mitchell-Hedges ever said or wrote was either hyperbole, shameless self-promotion, or out-and-out bullshit.&nbsp; For example, the ruins of Lubaantun were actually previously discovered in a well-documented 1903 British expedition, and there&rsquo;s evidence to suggest that Hedges actually purchased the Skull of Doom at a Sotheby&rsquo;s auction in the 1940s.&nbsp; Still, the way I see it, Frederick Albert Mitchell-Hedges is either the most interesting man to have ever lived, or he&rsquo;s one of the greatest fictional adventure heroes of his generation.&nbsp; The fact that fifty years after his death we still don&rsquo;t know which version is the truth only makes his tale that much more badassed.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/hedges3.png\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br />The creepy skull.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Links:</span><br /><br /><a href=\"http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=562487&amp;in_page_id=1770\" target=\"blank\">The REAL Indiana Jones</a><br /><br /><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F.A._Mitchell-Hedges\" target=\"blank\">Wikipedia</a><br /><br /><a href=\"http://www.mitchell-hedges.com/2008/02/09/the-story-of-fa-mitchell-hedges/\" target=\"blank\">F.A. Mitchell-Hedges</a></p>','2008-05-02','36970514906','hedges1.jpg','hedges1 - Copy.jpg','F.A. Mitchell-Hedges','Spent his days being a living version of Indiana Jones, exploring dangerous territory and stealing treasure.','\"I craved excitement, and here there were no fierce animals, no hostile savages, not even a few poisonous snakes.  I longed to test my nerve.\"'),('Alexander Selkirk','1676','December 13, 1721','Scotland','18th-century Scottish Adventurer','<p>Alexander Selkirk was the seventh son of a humble, small-town Scottish shoemaker.&nbsp; Despite his father&rsquo;s wishes for Alexander to learn the art of leatherworking and take up the ultra-boring family trade, the restless, quick-tempered, and impetuous young whippersnapper had bigger and better things on his mind - like slashing angry Frenchmen with a cutlass and swimming in cargo holds full of captured Peruvian silver.&nbsp; He wasn&rsquo;t about to spend the rest of his life hunched over a table re-attaching stiletto heels on black leather thigh-high hooker boots, so at the age of eighteen he set out sail on the treacherous South Seas as a swarthy privateer, battling the Spanish, tying crazy fucking nautical rope knots, raking in fistfuls of gold, and singing those saucy sea shanties about drinking rum and ogling bar wenches with huge boobs.&nbsp; His wild adventures would serve as the inspiration for one of the most famous and widely-read novels in the history of English Literature, which is a claim that not many badasses out there can make.</p>\r\n<p>Early in his career as a government-sanctioned bloodthirsty pirate plundering Spanish treasures on behalf of the British crown, Selkirk proved himself to be an excellent navigator and shiphand.&nbsp; By the time he was twenty-three he was appointed Sailing Master (chief navigator) of the 16-gun galley&nbsp;<em>Cinque Ports</em>, which meant that pretty much every one of the 63 crew members on the deck was his bitch.&nbsp; The ship was commissioned as part of an ambitious expedition under the command of some dude named William Dampier, and set sail for adventure in September of 1703.&nbsp; The expedition&rsquo;s goal was to fire its cannons indiscriminately at anything with a sail, face-punch anyone who didn&rsquo;t speak the Queen&rsquo;s English as their primary language, and grab more money than a gold-digging ho in a bitter divorce settlement.</p>\r\n<p>Unfortunately, by all accounts, the good Captain Dampier was a complete raging moron.&nbsp; The 1703 expedition was highlighted by constant bickering and incessant bitching between officers and crewmen about stupid shit, while illness, fever, and scurvy wiped out several of the privateers before they had even had a chance to load their muskets.&nbsp; Captain Dampier himself was prone to uncontrollable bouts of anger, paranoia, and complete fucking incompetence, and on more than one occasion his over-cautious nature allowed poorly-defended enemy vessels laden with gold, rum, babes, LSD, and other plunder to escape near-certain capture at the hands of Dampier&rsquo;s marauding drunken hordes.&nbsp; The two ships in Dampier&rsquo;s fleet got the shit kicked out of them by cannon fire and bad weather, and this sad group of no-plunder-finding buccaneers more closely resembled the&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.baseball-reference.com/teams/PIT/2001.shtml\">2001 Pittsburgh Pirates</a>&nbsp;than anything that could ever be considered a &ldquo;scourge of the seas&rdquo; (or something equally as cool/menacing sounding).</p>\r\n<p>The Captain of the&nbsp;<em>Cinque Ports</em>&nbsp;wasn&rsquo;t much better than Dampier. Thomas Stradling was also a total cockburger, and he and Selkirk were constantly arguing about all kinds of stupid shit.&nbsp; Things finally boiled over when the ship put ashore on the island of Juan Fernandez, a tiny desolate rock roughly 400 miles off the coast of Chile.&nbsp; Selkirk told Stradling that the crew needed to take a couple days to repair the&nbsp;<em>Cinque Ports</em>and make her more sea-worthy so she wouldn&rsquo;t fucking sink into the ocean and result in the deaths of the entire crew, but Captain Stradling told him to go eat a bowl of dick.&nbsp; Selkirk then took all of his personal shit, got off the boat, stood on the beach, and refused to come back aboard until Stradling saw things his way.&nbsp; Stradling basically said, &ldquo;fine, fuck you then,&rdquo; and had the crew lift anchor.&nbsp; As Selkirk watched the&nbsp;<em>Cinque Ports</em>sail off towards the horizon, only one thought passed through his brain:&nbsp; &ldquo;Oh holy fucking shit, what the hell did I just do?&rdquo;&nbsp; He immediately began running out into the surf, screaming for the crew to stop take him with them, but Captain Numbnuts just leaned over the side of the deck railing, gave Alexander the middle finger and yelled, &ldquo;cram it up your cram-hole, mutineer!&rdquo;</p>\r\n<p>One month later the&nbsp;<em>Cinque Ports</em>&nbsp;sunk.&nbsp; The seven survivors, including Captain McJackass, were captured by the Spanish, tortured, and thrown into South American forced labor camps.</p>\r\n<p>Unfortunately, Alexander Selkirk&rsquo;s situation wasn&rsquo;t a whole lot better.&nbsp; He was completely alone, stranded on a deserted island, equipped only with a knife, a hatchet, a musket with one pound of powder, a chest of linens, two books on navigation, a Bible, a tin pot, some tobacco, a flask of rum and a flip-can (whatever the hell that is).&nbsp; He sat on the beach, desperately hoping that his doomed friends would return for him, but deep down he knew that he was on his own, left to battle the elements mano-e-mano with only a handful of random&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/macgyver.html\">MacGyver</a>-style supplies to keep him alive.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/selkirk1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>The first few months of exile were hard for Alexander Selkirk.&nbsp; As a career sailor, he was used to living in close quarters with a lot of other dudes, drinking rum, shooting cannons and playing hilarious practical jokes on his buddies, but now he was completely alone.&nbsp; He went through a deep Goth music-like depression and suffered from intense loneliness, despair, and the sort of utter fucking boredom that is associated with being stranded on a fucking desert island twenty-four hours a day with nothing to do but bang coconuts together and masturbate.&nbsp; He kept mainly to the coast of the island at first, ate shellfish that he found on the shore and spent all day either sleeping or scanning the horizon for sails, but after a couple months of moping around like a depressed teenager suffering through a particularly painful grounding at the hands of his oppressive parents Selkirk decided to suck it up and do what he had to do to survive.&nbsp; He moved his shit inland, built two thatched-roof huts out of pimento trees and grass, made fire by rubbing sticks together, and used his musket to hunt the mountain goats that were native to the island.&nbsp; He would cook the goats with his tin pot on a home-made wooden spit, season the meat with the spices and vegetables he scavenged on the island, and used their hides to make clothing and bedding for himself, stitching the furs together with a rusty nail he salvaged from debris he found on the shore.&nbsp; He read the Bible out loud every single day, not only to bolster his morale, but also in an effort to maintain his grasp on the English language.</p>\r\n<p>A major problem for Selkirk early in his life on the island was that hordes of giant fucking rats would break into his hut at night and attack him while he slept.&nbsp; Like any good diabolical madman, he then found and domesticated some of the feral cats that made their home on the island, and his army of felines served as his minions, providing both protection and companionship.&nbsp; He also domesticated some of the goats on the island, and used them to provide him with a source of milk and cheese.&nbsp; He also claims to have taught the cats and goats to dance, and says that he used to sing and dance with them, which is probably an indication that solitary life on the island kind of made him flip his lid a little bit.&nbsp; I mean, in my experience at least, I have found that cats&nbsp;<em>hate</em>&nbsp;dancing.</p>\r\n<p>For four years and four months Alexander Selkirk lived on Juan Fernandez Island.&nbsp; Life in the wilderness made him strong and completely nuts, kind of like a mix between&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/grylls.html\">Bear Grylls</a>, Tarzan and Gary Busey.&nbsp; When he used up the last of his gunpowder and shot, Selkirk learned to catch goats simply by running them down on foot and taking their shit out like Ray Lewis.&nbsp; He knew every inch of that island like the back of his hand, built up his body and his strength until he could run super fucking fast and leap great distances like&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/conan.html\">Conan the Barbarian</a>.&nbsp; His feet became so tough and calloused that he no longer needed to wear shoes, and his resourcefulness in terms of scavenging materials from the environment and adapting them to his needs was second only to the Professor from&nbsp;<em>Gilligan&rsquo;s Island</em>.&nbsp; His only concern in life was dying alone and having his corpse eaten by his cat army, which incidentally was something he actually spent a lot of time worrying about.</p>\r\n<p>Of course, life on a treacherous desert island isn&rsquo;t all about drinking milk and playing full-contact rugby with a herd of wild goats.&nbsp; One time, Selkirk tripped and beefed it off of a cliff while chasing a goat, hit his head on a rock and knocked himself unconscious for twenty-four hours.&nbsp; Also, during the course of his four-year exile, two different Spanish ships made port at the island.&nbsp; While this may seem like it was a good opportunity for the exile to get off that rock, Selkirk knew that as a British privateer he would be immediately captured and either executed on the spot or sent to work hard labor in the Peruvian gold mines.&nbsp; Sitting back on the beach sipping Mai Tais certainly seemed preferable to a lifetime of slavery in a poorly-lit cavern, so Selkrik managed to evade enemy patrols on both occasions (though once it got a little balls-out when a group of Spaniards opened fire on him with their rifles and chased him through the woods or a while).</p>\r\n<p>Finally, on 31 January 1708, an English expedition landed on the island, piloted by none other than William Dampier &ndash; Selkirk&rsquo;s old commander.&nbsp; Dampier brought Selkirk aboard, and Alexander immediately went to work proving to his new crewmen that he was the most hardcore motherfucker to ever live.&nbsp; His years in the wilderness had made him stronger and faster than any man in the British Empire, and there are reports that when landing parties would go in search of food Selkirk would routinely outrun the expedition&rsquo;s trained hunting dogs and take down wild animals with his bare hands like some kind of insane nature-hating Middle Linebacker.&nbsp; Since all Selkirk had to read on the island was the Bible and two books on Navigation, he was an amazing pilot and route-finder, and the expedition that brought him aboard actually ended up circumnavigating the globe - sacking and plundering Spanish and French ships and settlements along the way, of course.&nbsp; During the journey, Selkirk was promoted to second-in-command and fought bravely in a number of engagements, so when the expedition put into port in England in 1712 laden with gold and silver from the Spanish Main, Selkirk&rsquo;s share ensured that he would be a wealthy man for quite some time.</p>\r\n<p>Alexander Selkirk survived four and a half years on a deserted tropical island with nothing more than his wits, determination, and balls-out animal-tackling ability standing between him and a horrible, painful death.&nbsp; His amazing story was the foundation for Daniel Defoe&rsquo;s classic novel<em>Robinson Crusoe</em>, and his legend stands as a testament to how badass human beings can be when you put us on an island and make us fucking fistfight nature all damned day just to stay alive.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/selkirk.gif\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Links:</span><br /><br /><a href=\"http://books.google.com/books?id=DSARmYz3DkYC&amp;printsec=titlepage\" target=\"blank\">The Life and Adventures of Alexander Selkirk</a><br /><br /><a href=\"http://travellinghistorian.com/crusoe.html\" target=\"blank\">The Traveling Historian</a><br /><br /><a href=\"http://www.cindyvallar.com/selkirk.html\" target=\"blank\">The Real Robinson Crusoe</a></p>','2008-04-25','88432816232','selkirk2.jpg','selkirk2 - Copy.jpg','Alexander Selkirk','Stranded on an island for four years and not acting like a little bitch made this guy so awesome Daniel Defoe wrote Robinson Crusoe after him.','All the good things of this world are no farther good to us than they are for our use; and that, whatever we may heap up to give others, we enjoy just as much as we can use, and no more.\r\n\r\n- Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe');
INSERT INTO `weekly` VALUES ('Lewis Burwell ','June 26, 1898','October 11, 1971','West Point, VA, USA','20th-century American Marine','<p>Lewis Puller, nicknamed &ldquo;Chesty&rdquo; because of his perfect posture and the fact that his torso somewhat resembled a full-size beer keg full of lead bricks, raw muscle and horse steroids, was a hard-as-shit motherfucker who is almost universally-recognized as the most badass dude to ever wear the uniform of the United States Marine Corps.&nbsp; Not bad, considering that being revered as the pinnacle of toughness by the USMC is kind of like being King of the Vikings or the toughest Klingon to ever set foot on the planet Kronos.&nbsp; In his thirty-seven years of service to the Corps, Puller would rise through the ranks from Private to General, kick more asses than Juan Valdez on an insane bender, and become the most decorated Marine in American history.</p>\r\n<p>Born in the small town of West Point, Virginia, Puller grew up hunting, fishing, armwrestling black bears and reading about military history.&nbsp; He enrolled in the prestigious Virginia Military Academy in 1917, but dropped out after a year to enlist in the Marines, mostly because he didn&rsquo;t want to fuck around reading books about kicking sack when he could be out there booting it himself.&nbsp; He was commissioned as a Lieutenant in the Marine Corps Reserves, but was placed on the inactive list ten days after his enlistment (WWI was winding down, and the government was scaling the military back).&nbsp; Since nothing was going to stand between Chesty Puller and his mad desire to shoot motherfuckers in the eye, Puller re-enlisted in the Corps, this time going in as a lowly Private.&nbsp; After thirteen weeks of running eighty miles a day, climbing sheer cliff faces with his bare hands, and crawling under barbed wire while pissed-off Drill Instructors whacked him over the head with rusty medieval polearms and belted forth a constant stream of compound profanities vile enough to make the baby Jesus cry, Puller was shipped out to kick asses in Haiti.</p>\r\n<p>Puller\'s mission was to maintain order in Haiti by killing endless hordes of Caco Rebels bent on the violent overthrow of the U.S.-sponsored Haitian government.&nbsp; Over the course of five years, Chesty fought in over forty engagements against these rebels, where he gained valuable experience in small-unit tactics, jungle warfare, and ripping his enemies&rsquo; hearts out through their ribcages with his bare hands.&nbsp; His toughness and badassitude earned him rapid promotions, and by the time he was shipped out to Nicaragua in 1930 he was already a commissioned Lieutenant.&nbsp; Er... again.</p>\r\n<p>Lieutenant Puller first established himself as a Marine&rsquo;s Marine (i.e. a total badass) while punching rebels in the kidneys in the dense Nicaraguan jungles.&nbsp; In one of his first missions of the campaign, Puller led his platoon up against a much larger force of heavily-armed rebel scum, charging the fortified enemy positions without even flinching.&nbsp; Over the course of one week, Puller&rsquo;s men routed the enemy in five separate engagements, completely annihilating the rebel positions while sustaining minimal casualties.&nbsp; For his bravery in combat, Puller won the Navy Cross &ndash; the Marine Corps&rsquo; second-highest award for bravery (just below the Medal of Honor, and some say he got jobbed out of the MoH because he refused to play any bullshit political games).&nbsp; Another time he was leading his unit through a treacherous mountain pass when all of a sudden these rebel jackasses ambushed him from all sides with machine guns, mortars and crazy dirtbikes with guns mounted on the sides.&nbsp; Four of Puller\'s men went down under the initial attack, but he got his boys to cover, directed their fire, and then led a flanking maneuver that resulted in the complete destruction of the ambushing forces.&nbsp; Then, on the march home, he was ambushed twice more &ndash; both times resulted in the epic asskickings of everyone who fucked with him.&nbsp; For getting his platoon home safely with minimal loss of life, Puller received a second Navy Cross.&nbsp; By the time that he left Nicaragua, Chesty was known as &ldquo;The Tiger of the Mountains&rdquo;, a nickname he earned presumably by clawing the eyes out of a traitorous rebel, and was so despised by his enemies that the leaders of the rebel guerrillas had put a 5,000 peso reward on his head.&nbsp; You know you\'re doing a good job of whomping faces when your enemy is willing to hire bounty hunters and mercenaries to take your shit down like Han Solo.</p>\r\n<p>Puller bounced around for a while after Nicaragua, serving at several different posts both on land and at sea, including a stint as the commander of the elite &ldquo;Horse Marines&rdquo; unit in Peiping, China in 1933, where he rode around on horseback all day and practiced the age-old tactic where riot cops leap off their horses and take motherfuckers down.&nbsp; He continued to impress his superiors with his tenacity and his take-no-bullshit attitude, and when motherfuckers needed their faces smashed in World War II, it was Lieutenant-Colonel Chesty Puller who was once again holding the giant fucking sledgehammer.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/puller2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>\"All right, they\'re on our left, they\'re on our right,<br />they\'re in front of us, they\'re behind us.<br />They can\'t get away this time.\"</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>As the commander of the 1st Battalion, 7th Marines, Puller&rsquo;s men were tasked with making an amphibious assault near the Matanikau River on the sunny Pacific resort island of Guadalcanal and staking out a critical strategic Margarita stand.&nbsp; Two companies of the 1/7 hit the beaches, and almost immediately ran into a force of Japanese regular infantry much larger and more well-prepared than anything the Marines were expecting to face there.&nbsp; The invasion force was cut-off and surrounded by an enemy counter attack, and Puller quickly realized that he had to get his boys out of there before they were cut to pieces.&nbsp; Another group of Marines tried to break through the Japanese flank and reach the stranded men, but the enemy resistance was too strong and they were too well-fortified to be displaced.&nbsp; The commander of the operation told Puller that it was hopeless, and that those Marines were lost.&nbsp; Well Chesty Fucking Puller never resigned defeat for any reason.&nbsp; He slammed his fist down on the table and immediately stormed out of camp toward the beach, where he flagged down a U.S. Destroyer that happened to be sailing off the coast.&nbsp; Despite having absolutely no authority to do so, Puller boarded the vessel and immediately began organizing a second amphibious assault aimed at breaking through the Japanese lines.&nbsp; From the deck of the ship he directed the Destroyer to fire everything they had at the enemy fortifications.&nbsp; The shelling, coupled with the second landing, punched through the enemy blockade and cleared a path for the stranded Marines to escape.&nbsp; One week after this defeat, Puller and his men would return to the mouth of the Matanikau River and obliterate all Japanese opposition in the sector, probably with their bare hands.</p>\r\n<p>During that same campaign, Puller would once again prove his brass-ballsitude by going above and beyond the call of duty in the name of kicking every ass he could find.&nbsp; On the night of 24 October 1942, 700 men of the 1/7 were positioned in a thin, mile-long line, defending an American airfield that was critical for the success of the Guadalcanal operation.&nbsp; They suddenly came under an intense onslaught from the seasoned men of the Japanese 17th Army, who came charging full-speed at the U.S. positions.&nbsp; For over three hours in the middle of the night, Chesty Puller ran up and down the U.S. lines directing his men and giving orders to his company commanders.&nbsp; When the smoke cleared the next morning, the hard-fighting men of the 1st Marines had killed 1,400 of the enemy and captured seventeen trucks loaded with weapons and PlayStations while sustaining fewer than 70 casualties.&nbsp; Before he would leave Guadalcanal, Puller would be shot twice by snipers and hit once with shrapnel from an exploding mortar round, but none of that bullshit would slow him down because he had well over 200 hit points thanks to his 18 Constitution score and the fact that he was a Level 15 Marine Commander.&nbsp; Shit, fucking Admiral Yamamoto himself could have swooped in on a giant fucking red dragon that breathed fire right in Puller\'s fucking face and Chesty would have just casually dusted himself off, broken the dragon\'s neck, and hurled the Admiral into an active volcano.</p>\r\n<p>Puller continued to fight in the Pacific Campaign, once again earning distinction at the Battle of New Britain Island.&nbsp; This time, three separate Marine battalions had been hit hard by enemy fire and lost their commanding officers, so Puller himself ran up and down the American lines, re-organizing the men under heavy machine gun and mortar fire, and eventually leading an assault that would break the enemy lines &ndash; an action that would earn him his third Navy Cross.&nbsp; Later in 1944, Puller led the 1st Marine Regiment in the Battle of Peleliu, an engagement that was one of the bloodiest battles in the history of the Corps.</p>\r\n<p>After WWII, Puller returned stateside for a while.&nbsp; He taught strategy and tactics at various military institutions until one day he heard that some godless Commie bastards were fucking with Democracy over in Korea.&nbsp; Puller cracked his knuckles, loaded up his Colt 1911, and landed at the head of the 1st Marines at Inchon in September of 1950.&nbsp; At the Battle of Choisin Reservoir, Puller and his men found themselves holed up in the town of Koto-ri, completely surrounded by ten full Divisions of Chinese Infantry hell-bent on killing every American they could find and then re-animating the dead bodies to fight as their undead army of the night.&nbsp; Heavily outnumbered, and fighting in ball-freezing sub-zero temperatures, Puller&rsquo;s troops broke the enemy lines, smashed through seven enemy divisions, and then stayed behind as a rear guard, bearing the brunt of the Chinese onslaught so that the rest of the Marines could complete their retreat (Puller refused to refer to it as a retreat, however, he preferred to call it, \"attacking in a different direction\").&nbsp; The 1st Marines withstood fierce attacks by hordes of Communist soldiers but held their position, inflicted tremendous numbers of casualties on the enemy and managed to provide enough time for the Allies to evacuate all of their wounded men and salvageable equipment.&nbsp; Sheer bravery in the face of intense fire and a seemingly winless situation earned Chesty Puller his fifth Navy Cross &ndash; an unprecedented accomplishment that has never been equaled.</p>\r\n<p>As it should be for any good badass military commander, Chesty Puller was admired by his men and feared by his enemies.&nbsp; He always led from the front, fighting in the trenches with the men, and never flinched under even the most serious fire.&nbsp; One time a grenade landed next to him, and when the rest of the guys around him dove for cover he glanced at it and nonchalantly said, &ldquo;Oh, that.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s a dud.&rdquo;&nbsp; He inspired loyalty and courage in his Marines, treated his men well, insisted on the best equipment and discipline for his troops, and had a no fear, win-at-all-costs attitude that won him fourteen medals for combat bravery in addition to countless unit citations and campaign ribbons.&nbsp; He is the most highly-decorated Marine in history, and a legendary figure amongst his brethren.&nbsp; To this day, Marines at Parris Island end their day by saying, \"Good night Chesty Puller, wherever you are!\"</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/puller1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>\"Where the Hell do you put the bayonet?\"<br /><br /></span></p>\r\n<center><span>- Chesty Puller, on first seeing a flamethrower</span></center>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Links:</span><br /><br /><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chesty_Puller\" target=\"blank\">Wikipedia</a><br /><br /><a href=\"http://www.semperfidelisnoah.com/TheFewTheProud.htm\" target=\"blank\">The Top U.S. Marine</a><br /><br /><a href=\"http://www.geocities.com/heartland/6350/chesty2.htm\" target=\"blank\">Everyone Needs a Hero</a></p>','2008-04-18','95430217532','puller.jpg','puller - Copy.jpg','Chesty Puller','Rose through the ranks of the Marines from Private to three star General, busting all kinds of balls along the way.','\"We\'ve been looking for the enemy for some time now.\r\nWe\'ve finally found him.  We\'re surrounded.\r\nThat simplifies our problem of getting to these people and killing them.\"'),('David Webb','N/A','N/A','United States','Fictional American Spy','<p>From the moment that Jason Bourne&rsquo;s half-dead, unconscious body was scooped out of the river by a bunch of crusty old European fishermen with nothing better to do than catch dead bodies in their tuna nets, he instantly became American public enemy number one.&nbsp; The ex-CIA special operative suffered from some kind of bizarre, permanent severe long-term amnesia, presumably stemming from a crazy offshoot of post-traumatic stress disorder (though it should be noted that in the original Robert Ludlum book, Bourne sustained a gunshot wound that glanced off of his skull, making the whole amnesia thing a little easier to swallow), and had no fucking clue who the crap he was.&nbsp; The man didn&rsquo;t even know his own name, but holy shit his badassitude had been so deeply ingrained into his core being that from the second that three bullets were pulled from his cold, lifeless corpse he was ready to start busting motherfuckers&rsquo; heads open.&nbsp; Over the next couple of years, he would prove himself to be an insane badass espionage expert capable of single-handedly taking on everything from the United States government to Swiss park rangers, and making pretty much everyone in the world his bitch in the process.</p>\r\n<p>Despite having no memory of his history as a top-secret black ops hardcore assassin motherfucker, Bourne&rsquo;s training and badassitude has been so thoroughly hardwired into his brain that he was instantly competent in all manner of escape, evasion, hand-to-hand combat, and weapons skills right from the beginning of his adventure.&nbsp; On the run from the invisible black hand of the Central Intelligence Agency, Bourne spends quite a bit of time evading security cameras, leaping off of roofs, beating the shit out of elite agency operatives, and pulling insane handbrake turns while flying down the busy streets of crowded European cities in a bunch of cars that are about one step removed from a broken-down 1988 Yugo.&nbsp; Other than a massive wad of cash and about two dozen forged passports from a bunch of countries nobody has even heard of before, Bourne has no resources to speak of, and instead uses his wits, intelligence, instinct and asskicking prowess to evade capture, avoid detection, and exact revenge on some CIA directors who so royally screwed him over and are now trying to cover up their mistake by hiring dudes to put bullets into Bourne&rsquo;s face.&nbsp; His ultimate goal is to retrace his steps and learn the secret behind his existence, but you can pretty much assume that the process isn&rsquo;t quite that easy when you&rsquo;ve got America&rsquo;s most well-trained, well-funded secret agents trying to kill you every time you even think about taking a leak.</p>\r\n<p>Eventually Bourne manages to escape capture, get the CIA off his back, and lay low in India for a while with his girlfriend, but a guy like Jason Bourne can never truly leave his old life behind.&nbsp; One day some jackass Russian motherfucker shows up and shoots Bourne&rsquo;s girlfriend in the head with a high-powered sniper rifle (Marie actually survives in the books and the two more-or-less live happily ever after, but the plots of the movie series and the books are so wildly different that it&rsquo;s pretty much impossible to reconcile them both in one article), so Bourne comes out of hiding and starts living for some motherfucking revenge.&nbsp; He takes the fight to the front doors of CIA itself, battles a corrupt Russian oil baron, and eventually exacts his vengeance in an insane car chase that culminates in Bourne using a stolen taxi cab to pile-drive his girlfriend&rsquo;s murderer head-first into a tunnel support.&nbsp; Oh, and he also exposes an illegal plot by corrupt Agency directors to assassinate US citizens, kills half a dozen professional assassins, spits vodka in a cop&rsquo;s face, learns the secret of his identity, fakes his own death, pops a wheelie on a dirtbike and independently outwits the police departments of Zurich, Madrid, Paris, Naples, Berlin, Moscow, London and New York City in the process.&nbsp; All in a day&rsquo;s work for the world&rsquo;s greatest super spy this side of James Bond.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/bourne1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>One thing that is totally fucking badass about Jason Bourne is his insane hand-to-hand combat kung fu ninja face-punching skills.&nbsp; His fighting style is completely professional and direct &ndash; you don&rsquo;t see any flying spin kicks or crazy backflips or wacky wire-fu Iron Monkey shit with Bourne, just quick, efficient strikes with no wasted motion, geared to disarm and subdue the enemy.&nbsp; He can be facing three trained police officers with their pistols trained on his face, and with only five moves he&rsquo;ll steal their weapons, knock them unconscious and take control of the situation before his opponents even have a chance to finish screaming their pain-fueled profanities.&nbsp; He\'s also really good at punching guys in the balls.&nbsp; Of course, no badass secret agent worth his handgun would let himself be slowed down by a bunch of average cops, and Bourne&rsquo;s hand-to-hand truly skills shine when he goes up against some of the ultra-insane CIA assassins the Agency sends out to take his shit down.&nbsp; He can hold his own against the best of the best, and he has an awesome talent for using the environment to his advantage, constantly beating the fuck out of his enemies with whatever ordinary household items he manages to wrap his fingers around.&nbsp; He&rsquo;s used everything from books and extension cables to washcloths and candlesticks as lethal instruments of extreme bodily harm, pummeling and choking the shit out of some of the most dangerous and deadly men on the planet.&nbsp; He took one knife-wielding assassin out by stabbing him repeatedly in the face and arms with a shitty ten-for-a-dollar ballpoint stick pen (something I dream of doing every single day that I&rsquo;m working at my shitty desk job), and busted another guy up armed only with a fucking rolled-up magazine like he was some kind of disobedient puppy.&nbsp; When the Agency sent a hardcore badass sniper out to take him down, Bourne hunted the dude down like&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/hayha.html\">Simo Hayha</a>&nbsp;in a long black coat, outsmarting him and finally shooting him in the chest a couple times with a double-barreled<em>Doom</em>-style hunting shotgun.&nbsp; He&rsquo;s also a master of interrogation who can get any information he wants from people simply by threatening them or beating the crap out of them Jack Bauer-style.</p>\r\n<p>It&rsquo;s more than just ultimate asskickings that make&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T23oNcCFriE\">Yay-son Bourne Identity</a>&nbsp;such a balls-out super spy, however.&nbsp; His whole attitude and composure oozes badassery &ndash; he&rsquo;s a consummate professional who stays completely cool under pressure and who is always one step ahead of his target.&nbsp; There&rsquo;s no dramatics, no flashiness, no wasted motions.&nbsp; He doesn&rsquo;t slip up, he doesn&rsquo;t make mistakes, and oh yeah, every woman he meets falls in love with him because he&rsquo;s also goddamned Matt Damon and I read somewhere that Matt Damon has that effect on women.&nbsp; He can track down people who wish to stay hidden, elude capture by the best police agencies in the world and take out anyone who stands in his way without blinking, but even through all the professionalism and ruthless efficiency associated with his position as a black ops assassin, the Bourne character manages to retain his humanity somehow.&nbsp; He&rsquo;s not a machine like the Terminator or some shit, he&rsquo;s a man who is tortured by his past, and his flaws give him some distinctly human characteristics, which is also refreshing to see in an uber-badass.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/bourne3.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<table style=\"width: 500px;\" align=\"center\">\r\n<tbody>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td><span>&ldquo;I can tell you the license plate numbers of all six cars outside.&nbsp; I can tell you that our waitress is left-handed and the guy sitting up at the counter weighs two hundred fifteen pounds and knows how to handle himself.&nbsp; I know the best place to look for a gun is the cab of the gray truck outside, and at this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.&nbsp; Now why would I know that?&nbsp; How can I know that and not know who I am?&rdquo;</span></td>\r\n</tr>\r\n</tbody>\r\n</table>\r\n<p><br /><br /></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Links:</span><br /><br /><a href=\"http://nomorequo.blogspot.com/2007/08/top-5-jason-bourne-improvised-weapons.html\" target=\"blank\">Bourne\'s Top Five Improvised Weapons</a><br /><br /><a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAE68t6N_E0\" target=\"blank\">Fight Scenes from The Bourne Identity</a><br /><br /><a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7WTkhzZ_Kk\" target=\"blank\">Bourne vs. Desh</a></p>','2008-04-11','15278658521','bourne.jpg','bourne - Copy.jpg','Jason Bourne','So good at his job that even amnesia couldn\'t take him down.','I swear to God, if I even feel somebody behind me, there is no measure to how fast and how hard I will bring this fight to your doorstep.'),('Alexander Viktorovich Solonik','October 16, 1960','January 31, 1997','Kurgan, USSR','20th-century Russian Outlaw','<p>Alexander Solonik wanted to become a police officer and clean up the mean streets of Moscow like a Cold War-era Soviet re-make of&nbsp;<em>Dirty Harry</em>, making mob bosses his bitch and asking various punks whether or not they felt lucky just before inserting a large-caliber bullet wound directly into their foreheads.&nbsp; Instead, he would become one of the most notorious hitmen in history and incidentally still achieve all of those same career aspirations.&nbsp; He was the ultimate assassin, a man who, to this day, is known throughout Russia by only one moniker &ndash; Superkiller.</p>\r\n<p>Little is known of Alexander Solonik&rsquo;s early years.&nbsp; Standing only five feet, six inches tall, he is believed to have served as a member of an elite Soviet special forces intelligence unit during the Cold War.&nbsp; Stationed in East Berlin and trained extensively in espionage, infiltration, small-arms operation, Sambo martial arts, and various counter-intelligence techniques, some say that he was part of an ultra-secret military group designed to assassinate NATO diplomats and other high-ranking Allied military officers like some kind of crazy mix between Jack Bauer and&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/drago.html\">Ivan Drago</a>.&nbsp; Other sources say he was just a security guard or a non-ranking member of some paramilitary militia, but this makes for a far less interesting story.</p>\r\n<p>After bullshit Perestroika crippled the power of the Soviet Union, Solonik&rsquo;s unit was disbanded and he returned home, where he enlisted in a prestigious Police Academy.&nbsp; Apparently, while at the academy Solonik was pulling all kinds of wacky, borderline-psychotic pranks on the chief like he was Steve Gutenberg or Officer Moses Hightower, because just a few months into his tenure he was unceremoniously discharged for reasons which were never declassified.&nbsp; Upset at having his dream crushed, Solonik found work as a grave digger.&nbsp; After a few months of spending ten hours a day digging fucking graves outdoors in the fucking freezing recesses of rural Russia, shit only got worse for Alexander when one of his psycho ex-girlfriends accused him of sexually assaulting her.&nbsp; He was rushed through trial, convicted on some highly circumstantial evidence (the woman allegedly even recanted her story at one point), and was sentenced to eight months in prison.&nbsp; Upon hearing his sentence, Solonik only asked for one thing &ndash; five minutes to say goodbye to his wife.</p>\r\n<p>The police brought Solonik to the station to say his farewells, and soon as he had a moment alone with his wife he busted through a plate-glass window on the second story of the fucking police station, hit the ground in a perfect commando roll, and escaped into a nearby forest.&nbsp; Despite the fact that he was completely fucking surrounded by cops and Spetsnaz and shit, Solonik managed to make it all the way to goddamned Siberia before he was finally apprehended.&nbsp; Russian authorities captured him in a cosmetic surgery office while he was having all tattoos and distinguishing markings removed from his body.</p>\r\n<p>This time, instead of just eight months in a minimum-security resort, they sentenced him to several years in a federal pound-me-in-the-ass Siberian gulag, where he could look forward to sub-zero temperatures three hundred days out of the year and long, cold afternoons whacking rocks with a fucking pickaxe while security guards shoved AK-47s in his face.&nbsp; His second day in the detention facility, word got out that Solonik had gone to the police academy, and he was jumped in the yard by twelve fucking big-ass convicted murders armed with goddamned shovels.&nbsp; He was unexpectedly smashed in the back of the head by a shovel like the star of a bad amateur YouTube prank, but somehow managed to take down one of the motherfuckers with a judo shoulder throw, steal his shovel, and then use it to single-handedly beat the ever-loving fuck out of all twelve inmates.&nbsp; Nobody messed with him again.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/solonik1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br />A Gulag.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>From that point on, Solonik became a man with a mission.&nbsp; He worked out relentlessly &ndash; lifting weights, cardio conditioning... even using those stupid giant plastic gym exercise balls for something other than just kicking them into his friends&rsquo; faces when they weren&rsquo;t looking.&nbsp; When he&rsquo;d had enough of the prison&rsquo;s bullshit, one day he just pulled the grate off of a ventilation shaft, climbed through the air ducts, bypassed several guard patrols like Solid Snake without all the cardboard boxes and wacky exclamation points, and crawled his way out of the gulag.</p>\r\n<p>On the run in Moscow, Solonik fell in with a Russian organized crime outfit where his skills and HK-47 style assassination protocols would be utilized to their utmost potential.&nbsp; Despite being a hardcore,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/winnfield.html\">Jules Winnfield</a>-style badass assassin (badassin?) Solonik was more like Max Payne than Agent 47 in that his targets were almost exclusively high-ranking members of rival Russian mafia gangs &ndash; all bad dudes, reaping what they were sowing, and Solonik was their Grim Reaper.&nbsp; Now I know that most Russian mobsters will tell you that, &ldquo;there&rsquo;s no such thing as the Russian Mafia,&rdquo; but during the mid-90&rsquo;s there was a war raging through the seedy underbelly of the Moscow streets, and Solonik was the kind of man who dealt with shit like a badass motherfucker, taking out numerous underworld bosses by any means available to him.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Once time, there was a powerful crime lord traveling in a black armored car with heavily-tinted bulletproof glass windows, surrounded by a dozen well-trained elite mafia bodyguards.&nbsp; As the car rolled to a stop outside of a super-secret safehouse and the mobster stepped out onto the street in stylistic slow-motion while some crazy euro-trash techno music played in the background, Solonik capped this dude in the head from a concealed sniper&rsquo;s nest on the roof of a building over three hundred yards away.&nbsp; Then he dropped six of the boss&rsquo; bodyguards before vanishing into the night like a homicidal Batman.&nbsp; Another time, this slimy criminal mastermind was snorting a bunch of coke off of some strippers in the back room of his high-end posh Moscow nightclub, surrounded by an escort of ex-Spestnaz gunmen, when all of a sudden the door was violently kicked in.&nbsp; Solonik activated bullet-time and dove head first into the room, firing two pistols and taking out all of the gangsters before they could even unholster their weapons.&nbsp; Then he probably had sex with the strippers for like ten hours straight.&nbsp; There was another time that he tried to blackmail one of the most powerful mob bosses in all of Russia, and of course the guy told Solonik to get bent.&nbsp; One month later, the boss and all of his closest associates were found dead in various parts of the city, killed by everything ranging from knife wounds to shotgun shells to the face.</p>\r\n<p>During his time as a professional contract killer, Solonik quickly became the most feared man in Russia.&nbsp; No criminal was safe from him.&nbsp; He earned the nickname, &ldquo;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/alexander.html\">Alexander the Great</a>&rdquo;, not only because this is an incredibly clever play on his first name, but also because he was famous for going into gunfights &ldquo;Macedonian Style&rdquo; &ndash; the Russian term for dual-wielding pistols.&nbsp; I personally prefer to call it &ldquo;John Woo Style&rdquo;, and it is awesome.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/solonik2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Eventually, the law caught up with Alexander Solonik, and he was arrested by several officers on the streets of Moscow one morning.&nbsp; He agreed to go along with them peacefully, but right as they were preparing to enter the police station he whipped out the Scorpion submachine gun he had hiding under his jacket and opened fire.&nbsp; The cops chased him through the streets of Moscow, including through a crowded marketplace, all the while trading fire with the most dangerous man in the world.&nbsp; Solonik killed seven officers before he was shot in the kidney while trying to hop a chain-link fence.&nbsp; Cops at the scene would later remark that they couldn&rsquo;t believe the accuracy of Solonik&rsquo;s shots, even as he was running at full-speed and firing over his shoulder.&nbsp; Once cop claimed that he was hiding behind a concrete post and two of Solonik&rsquo;s bullets hit in the exact same place, kind of like a modern-day Robin Hood, only instead of robbing the rich and helping the poor he was shooting a bunch of cops in the head.</p>\r\n<p>Solonik spent eight months in Detention Center 1, the most air-tight prison in Russia, recuperating from his wounds and studying various foreign languages.&nbsp; When his injuries were completely healed, he once again made an unbelievable escape.&nbsp; He allegedly had a man on the inside this time, and the two of them used grappling hooks and ropes to exit the building in the middle of the night and make their way to a waiting BMW.&nbsp; To this day Solonik remains the only person to ever escape from this facility.&nbsp; The guy was like the fucking Harry Houdini of supermax penitentiaries.</p>\r\n<p>Things were too hot in Russia, so Solonik&rsquo;s next destination was Greece.&nbsp; In only a few short months, he set up his own criminal enterprise outside Athens that had ties to operations in locations ranging from St. Petersburg to Rome.&nbsp; He had his face altered by reconstructive plastic surgery, recruited a crew of over fifty gangsters to work for him, made millions of dollars, and had all the houses, cars, and women he wanted (including a tryst with Miss Russia herself).</p>\r\n<p>Finally, on 1 February 1997, police found a dead body in one of Solonik&rsquo;s villas.&nbsp; The man had been strangled to death with an extension cord, and was carrying a duffel bag full of AK-47s, wigs, forged documents, and ammunition.&nbsp; Fingerprints identified him as Alexander Solonik.</p>\r\n<p>Of course, there are many people out there who believe that this was just the final act in the incredible criminal career of Alexander Solonik, and that the body discovered by Greek authorities was not actually the remains of Russia&rsquo;s &ldquo;number one superkiller&rdquo;.&nbsp; There are many claims that he had his agents feed a set of false prints to Interpol, and this discovery was merely evidence of Solonik&rsquo;s retirement, not his untimely demise.&nbsp; The truth, like much of Alexander Solonik&rsquo;s career as a professional badass, will probably never be known.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/solonik3.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Links:</span><br /><br /><a href=\"http://english.pravda.ru/main/2003/01/24/42510.html\" target=\"blank\">Life and Death of Russian Killer Number One</a><br /><br /><a href=\"http://gangstersinc.tripod.com/AleksandrSolonik.html\" target=\"blank\">Gangsters Incorporated</a></p>','2009-04-04','662642221813','solonik.jpg','solonik - Copy.jpg','Alexander Solonik','The Russian outlaw who had epic shooting skills and escaped some of the most remote prisons in the world.',''),('Adnan bin Saidi','1915','February 14, 1942','Kajang, Selangor, Malaysia','WWII Malaysian Soldier','<p>In the early 1940s, Emperor Hirohito of Japan was in the business of stomping ballsacks, sending wave after wave of his own men at anyone he deemed worthy of his Imperial disdain, and generally just making all of Asia his bitch.&nbsp; The ultra-modern Imperial Japanese Army was pretty much epically beating the shit out of everything from China to Hawaii, and there wasn&rsquo;t a whole lot that anybody could really do about it other than die painfully from the massive cranial trauma that results from receiving a sword wound to the brain.&nbsp; As Imperial forces steamrolled through the Pacific like a freight train plowing through a giant container of Cool Whip, the Japanese set their stabby-stab sights on the Malaysian island of Singapore in February 1942.</p>\r\n<p>Now Singapore wasn\'t exactly a military powerhouse that was going to bust out some super-secret prototype stealth Gundam with jetpack feet and lasers for arms or open a secret bunker that served as a training facility for an army of Sam Fisher commando ninja vikings with night-vision goggles, automatic weapons and portable nuclear missile launchers, but the island did serve as a base for over 80,000 soldiers of the British Commonwealth.&nbsp; Singapore was like Yavin IV &ndash; it held great strategic significance to the Allied forces battling against Imperial occupation, and if the Emperor wanted to deal his enemies a crippling blow, he needed to terraform the landscape Death Star-style.&nbsp; To this end, the Japanese launched a two-pronged amphibious invasion of the island with the sole purpose of kicking everyone&rsquo;s fucking asses and writing the appropriate names down in a college-ruled spiral notebook with a rising sun and the phrase &ldquo;Asses that have been kicked by us&rdquo; drawn across the cover in decorative kanji.</p>\r\n<p>On the morning of 13 February 1942, dozens of military transports crashed into the Northeastern portion of the island of Singapore like a fleet of suicidal beaching whales, and a force of 13,000 Japanese soldiers began their determined march towards the city.&nbsp; Standing between this horde of crack regular infantry were a mere 1,400 Malay, Australian and Indian soldiers, many of whom had seen about as much live-fire combat as the Swiss Navy.&nbsp; Among these bold defenders was a 27 year-old local Malay officer named Adnan bin Saidi.&nbsp; Lieutenant Adnan\'s small, 42-man platoon was part of the force assigned to defend an area known as Opium Hill &ndash; a critical high ground overlooking some key British supply and munitions depots, and presumably a sweet place to plant some poppy seeds as well.&nbsp; Adnan&rsquo;s soldiers were young, ill-equipped and inexperienced, and were now facing off against a main invasion force of battle-hardened veteran Japanese Infantry from the elite Imperial &ldquo;Chrysanthemum&rdquo; Division.&nbsp; I know you&rsquo;re probably doubting the badassitude of a military unit named after a fucking brightly-colored perennial flower than can be used to make tea, but the Chrysanthemum is also the official symbol of the Japanese Emperor, so you can pretty much assume that he doesn&rsquo;t just let any group of inept jackasses get away with calling themselves the &ldquo;Chrysanthemum Division&rdquo;.&nbsp; The Malaysians had very little ammunition, few heavy weapons, they were impossibly outnumbered, and they had absolutely no hope of receiving any type of reinforcements or resupply.&nbsp; Lieutenant Adnan did the best he could &ndash; he ordered his men to sandbag their positions, dig in, and get ready for the fight of their lives.</p>\r\n<p>It wasn&rsquo;t long before the Japanese made contact, beginning their attack by shelling Opium Hill with more mortars and artillery than one of those illegal fireworks stands just across the South Carolina border.&nbsp; Once the defenders&rsquo; positions had been sufficiently blown the fuck up, the Imperial Infantry began their assault up the ridge.&nbsp; Armed with little more than their crappy service rifles, the Malay troops valiantly tried to fight off the Japanese onslaught, but it&rsquo;s kind of difficult to fight back when the enemy has more soldiers than you have bullets.&nbsp; Eventually the tide of Imperial troops broke through the Malaysian ranks and the two forces fell into brutal hand-to-hand combat, whacking at each other with rifle butts, brass knuckles and ten-speed bicycle chains.&nbsp; Just as the men of Company C of the 1st Malaysian Regiment were getting ready to commend their spirits to Allah, Adnan bin Saidi ordered his men to fix bayonets and charge the enemy head-on.&nbsp; Company C jammed their bayonets on the ends of their rifles, formed up into a wall of pointy death, and rushed forward at the Japanese, impaling anybody they came across like a Greek Phalanx bum-rushing a hot dog stand.&nbsp; The tactic worked &ndash; the Japanese lines were broken and the survivors were driven back down Opium Hill to regroup.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/adnan1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>But the Japanese people didn&rsquo;t build a continent-spanning Empire by backing down and quitting every time somebody jammed a knife into their eyes, so the forces at the base of Opium Hill put together a plan to defeat the Malay soldiers and break through Allied lines.&nbsp; One Company of Japanese soldiers put on the uniforms of Allied Punjabi soldiers and marched up the hill towards Lieutenant Adnan&rsquo;s position, ostensibly to reinforce the Malay defenses.&nbsp; But Saidi wasn&rsquo;t falling for it.&nbsp; He astutely noticed that the supposedly-Allied soldiers were marching in a four-abreast formation, while actual Indian and Punjabi Regiments marched in columns of three.&nbsp; Adnan quietly alerted his troops, and as soon as the Japanese came into range, the Malaysians tore them a new bunghole, annihilating pretty much the entire Company in a fusillade of death.</p>\r\n<p>Now the Japanese commanders were&nbsp;<em>really</em>&nbsp;pissed.&nbsp; They eventually just decided to say, &ldquo;look, fuck strategy &ndash; we have several thousand motherfuckers here and they&rsquo;ve got like forty dudes, two machine guns, and a couple mortars up on that hill.&nbsp; Let&rsquo;s just swarm them until they are all dead.&rdquo;&nbsp; A mere two hours after the fake Punjabis got their asses handed to them, Imperial Stormtroopers and AT-STs launched a full-scale balls-out human wave &ldquo;Bonzai&rdquo; attack, rushing up the mountain like an endless sea of wealthy nerds charging after the last Nintendo Wii in the tri-state area.</p>\r\n<p>The Malaysian soldiers defending Opium Hill had sustained over 48 hours of near-constant battle without giving an inch to the Japanese invaders, but this time they were in an impossible situation.&nbsp; Outnumbered a hundred to one, low on ammunition, and completely out of food and medical supplies, they held out bravely against the charging Japanese warriors, but in the end it was too much.&nbsp; During the battle, Lieutenant Adnan continued shouting for his men to fight to the death &ndash; to resist at all costs.&nbsp; He personally manned a machine gun until his arm was broken by gunfire and shrapnel, at which point he began firing his pistol into the enemy ranks.&nbsp; When he ran out of bullets, he (along with the rest of his men) fought on with bayonets, knives, and even fists.&nbsp; Adnan refused medical attention or evacuation, vowing to stand with his men until the bitter end.&nbsp; The Japanese attack annihilated the entire unit.</p>\r\n<p>As the smoke was clearing on the battleground, the Japanese soldiers came across the severely wounded body of Lieutenant Adnan and immediately recognized him as the &ldquo;short berserker who had personally killed dozens of Japanese&rdquo;.&nbsp; They beat him up, hung him feet-first from a tree and bayoneted him to death like a medieval pi&ntilde;ata at a fucked-up Spanish Inquisition birthday party.&nbsp; Adnan bin Saidi had kicked so much ass in the battle and pissed off the Japanese so hard that after they occupied Singapore, Japan\'s secret police attempted to hunt down and execute Saidi&rsquo;s entire family.&nbsp; Now that\'s hardcore - when you\'re so fucking badass and you whip your enemies\' balls so hard that your death isn\'t even enough to satisfy their thirst for vengeance.&nbsp; Luckily, the Japanese gendarmes never found Adnan\'s relatives, and in the end the Lieutenant got the last \"fuck you\" - his relatives survived, and Japan was eventually ousted from Singapore by Allied forces in 1945.</p>\r\n<p>The Battle of Opium Hill is Malaysia&rsquo;s&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/travis.html\">Alamo</a>, and for his brave actions in February 1942, Adnan bin Saidi is remembered today as the national hero of both Singapore and Malaysia.&nbsp; He took a small group of inexperienced troops and stood up against one of the most powerful militaries in the world, showed no fear despite being thrust into a battle he had no chance of winning, and made his enemies pay dearly for every inch of land they took.&nbsp; His bravery and courage drew the attention of Allied nations across the globe, and inspired a fighting spirit and pride in the Malay people that stands to this day.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/adnan2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<table style=\"width: 500px;\" align=\"center\">\r\n<tbody>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td><span>\"He was heavily outnumbered by the Japanese&hellip; they bombed him but he fought on fiercely and inflicted heavy losses on them.&nbsp; Adnan would have never surrendered under any circumstances.&nbsp; He was absolutely dedicated.&nbsp; In fact, just before fighting, he adopted a motto for his platoon, &lsquo;Biar putih tulang, jangan putih mata&rsquo; - death before dishonor.\"</span></td>\r\n</tr>\r\n</tbody>\r\n</table>\r\n<p><br /><br /></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Links:</span><br /><br /><a href=\"http://web.singnet.com.sg/~nainz/malayregiment.html\" target=\"blank\">The Malay Regiment</a><br /><br /><a href=\"http://www.avalanchepress.com/RealTiger.php\" target=\"blank\">The Real Tiger of Malaya</a></p>','2008-03-28','437334923010','adnan.jpg','adnan - Copy.jpg','Adnan bin Saidi','Staved the Japanese military off for two days with not much more than bayonets, brute force, and balls. ','“By their stubborn defence of the Pasir Panjang Ridge at the height of the Battle of Singapore, they set an example of steadfastness and endurance which will become a great tradition in the Regiment and an inspiration for the future generations.”\r\n\r\n- British General A.E. Percival'),('Alvin Cullum York','December 13, 1887','September 2, 1964','Pall Mall, TN, USA','WWI American Soldier','<p>Originally a conscientious objector, Cpl. Alvin York, was drafted to serve with the 82nd Infantry Division in France in 1918. His actions on October 8th would forge a legend that would make him the most famous war hero of the war and spawn a movie in his honor.</p>\r\n<p>York&rsquo;s unit was working its way through the Decauville Railway when a nearby ridgeline opened-up with fire from more than 30 machine guns. York&rsquo;s platoon was ordered to flank the Germans and before long they came upon a small German trench just behind the ridgeline. The platoon quickly overtook the trench but was discovered by the remaining Germans. Suddenly, all 30 of the machine guns they had were pointed straight at York and his 16 men.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">Within seconds, nine of York&rsquo;s men were killed in the fight. The remaining men took cover in a trench, except for York &ndash; who found himself alone, staring down an entire machine gun company.<br /><br />He drew his rifle.<br /><br /></p>\r\n<p><img style=\"display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;\" src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/york1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>Instantly, York opened fire on the Germans while being the sole target of every machine gun, rifle and pistol they had. Later York would comment, &ldquo;I jes [<em>sic</em>] couldn\'t miss a German\'s head or body at that distance.&nbsp; And I didn\'t.&nbsp; Besides, it weren\'t no time to miss no how.&rdquo;</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">At one point, a squad of German infantrymen popped out of a nearby trench and charged.&nbsp; York had just fired the last round of his clip and didn\'t have time to reload, so he pulled his Colt M1911 .45-caliber service pistol and opened fire. He killed the charging Germans in order from farthest to nearest so they wouldn&rsquo;t know their fellow soldiers were down.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><br /><span>&ldquo;I teched off the sixth man first; then the fifth; then the fourth; then the third; and so on.&nbsp; <br />That\'s the way we shoot wild turkeys at home. &nbsp; <br />You see we don\'t want the front ones to know that we\'re getting the back ones, <br />and then they keep on coming until we get them all.&nbsp; <br />I knowed, too, that if the front ones wavered, or if I stopped them the rear ones <br />would drop down and pump a volley into me and get me.&rdquo;</span>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">After taking down the last one, the machine gun fired stopped. A German Major rose from the trenches, hands in the air and pleaded, &ldquo;If you don&rsquo;t shoot anymore, I will make them give up.&rdquo;&nbsp; York, being a pacifist at heart, had no desire to continue killing Germans, so he accepted the surrender and escorted the German commander back to where the rest of the American squad was holed up.&nbsp; When the Major saw the US situation, he incredulously asked, \"how many men&nbsp;<em>have</em>&nbsp;you got?!\"&nbsp; York said, \"I got a-plenty.\"&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>When all was said and done, Alvin York had single-handedly killed 28 enemy soldiers and captured 128 enlisted men, 4 officers and 32 machine guns without suffering so much as a scratch on his body.&nbsp; With this regimental-sized enemy machine gun Company out of the way, the American 77th Division was able to capture the railroad that evening,.&nbsp; York was lauded as a hero by the Allied forces - he received the Congressional Medal of Honor, the Croix de Guerre, the Legion of Honor, and the Croce di Guerra.&nbsp; As all of the POWs were being marched back to the American HQ, a Brigadier General walked up and said something to the effect of, \"I hear that you captured the whole German Army!\"&nbsp; York responded, \"No sir, just 132 of them.\"</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/york2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Links:</span><br /><br /><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvin_York\" target=\"blank\">Wikipedia</a><br /><br /><a href=\"http://acacia.pair.com/Acacia.Vignettes/The.Diary.of.Alvin.York.html#October%208th%201918\" target=\"blank\">The Diary of Alvin York</a><br /><br /><a href=\"http://www.historynet.com/wars_conflicts/world_war_1/3717286.html\" target=\"blank\">History Net</a></p>','2008-03-21','97378124098','york.gif','york - Copy.gif','Alvin York','Single-handedly killed 28 German soldiers and captured 132 more in a single day, no big deal.',''),('Taira no Masakado','c. 903 AD','c. 940 AD','Hitachi Province, Japan','Medieval Japanese Samurai','<p>When badass skull-cleaving samurai warrior Taira no Masakado was decapitated after his failed attempt to overthrow the Emperor of Japan in 940 AD, his severed head was hung outside the gates of the Imperial Palace to serve as a warning to others not to ever ever fuck with the Emperor.&nbsp; Every night, after dark, the decapitated head of this creepy samurai would allegedly come to life, curse everyone out with incredibly harsh and damning language, gnash its teeth like an animal, and mean-mug the entire town.&nbsp; For three months this animatronic hate-skull hung outside the palace, and instead of decaying or decomposing the way severed heads are supposed to the already-intense face supposedly just continually kept looking more and more pissed off every single morning.&nbsp; Finally, one night, the head of the man known as &ldquo;The First Samurai&rdquo; ripped itself off the post, hovered in the air for a moment, and then randomly flew off to the east.&nbsp; The head landed near the previously-unknown town of Edo, where some fishermen buried it and built a shrine on the spot they found it.&nbsp; Today the site is considered so sacred/haunted/whatever that this shrine still stands untouched on a chunk of land in downtown Tokyo&rsquo;s financial district where the property value massively exceeds that of pretty much any other piece of real estate in the world.</p>\r\n<p>Welcome to Badass of the Week&rsquo;s MONTH OF SPOOOOOOOKY HALLOWEEN SHIT.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"../images/213317630693/masakado1.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Ok, it&rsquo;s not really going to be a month of spooooooky Halloween shit because I&rsquo;d rather kill myself than try and present ghost stories as legitimate history every week, but I do think I&rsquo;m just going to write about some really really bad motherfuckers for the rest of this month, and, hey, if there&rsquo;s some SPOOOOOOOKY HALLOWEEN SHIT that goes along with it then fuckin&rsquo; a, right?</p>\r\n<p>Taira no Masakado, the First Samurai, was a hardcore bastard so totally ruthless, brutal, and unstoppable that you could almost legit believe that his rage would continue manifesting itself physically even after the death of his body.&nbsp; A powerful landowner during the Heian Era of Japanese History, Masakado was famous for launching the first true rebellion against the Emperor since the establishment of the Kyoto Government 100 years earlier.&nbsp; By the time he was done, the entire countryside of Japan was burning, and the groundwork had been forged for all of the powerful daimyo and samurai that would follow.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"../images/213317630693/masakado2.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Masakado was born probably around 903 AD, at the height of the Heian Era, when shit in the Japanese countryside was pretty fucked up.&nbsp; The Emperor in Kyoto didn&rsquo;t really do much, leaving power in the hands of landowners and provincial governors, most of whom had private armies so they could more efficiently rip off and beat up the people they were supposed to be protecting.&nbsp; Bandits, starvation, and corruption were rampant, and everything had a seriously Wild West vibe to it.</p>\r\n<p>Taira no Masakado was one of 12 grandsons of a very powerful leader of the Taira Clan, a family of ultra-wealthy landowners, but Masakado was pretty far down in the pecking order for getting to do cool shit.&nbsp; He tried to become the police chief of Kyoto but was rejected, so he begrudgingly went back to the family farm for a boring life in the country.&nbsp; He tried to spice things up by marrying one of his many second cousins, but her dad, Masakado&rsquo;s Uncle Kunika, told Masakado to fuck off.&nbsp; Which I guess is understandable if it was because he was against cousin-humping, but in reality it was because Masakado didn&rsquo;t have enough money or glory and Uncle Kunita didn&rsquo;t think Masakado was borrowing his sandals let alone boning his daughter.</p>\r\n<p>What was less cool was when Uncle Kunika hired an unruly mob of pissed-off heavily-armed horsemen to pull their fucking samurai swords and ambush Masakado while he was riding through the countryside with a couple friends.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"../images/213317630693/masakado3.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Out of seemingly nowhere, Uncle Kunika&rsquo;s goons launched arrows at Masakado and his buddies, but luckily the wind was blowing really hard that day and the arrows blew off course and slammed harmlessly into the ground around the samurai.&nbsp; Masakado took one look at this mob of assholes racing forward to kill him, drew his katana (well, it was probably a tachi but who cares), and ran screaming straight-on into the onrushing horde with his blade screaming for blood.&nbsp; Swinging, chopping, slicing, and swearing like a fucking sailor, Masakado and his friends murdered their would-be assassins to shreds, executed any wounded survivors mercilessly, and then rode to the home of the goon squad&rsquo;s leader and burned it to the ground.</p>\r\n<p>Remember how this guy&rsquo;s head still talked shit to people after his death?&nbsp; Yeah&hellip; this was not a guy you wanted to piss off.&nbsp; And now&hellip; now he was angry.</p>\r\n<p>Fuming with rage at his betrayal, Masakado next rode to Uncle Kunika&rsquo;s house, killed him in the face with a fucking sword, burned the farm to the ground, and then went on the run as an outlaw bandit leader.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"../images/213317630693/masakado4.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>This sets off a huge clan war that makes the Hatfields and McCoys look like the pillowfight intro in a girl-on-girl porno.&nbsp; Uncle Kunika&rsquo;s son Sadamori showed up with a bunch of his buddies and attack, but Masakado and his motherfuckers wreck him, burn his home, torch his lands and his crops, and lay waste to the villages in his territory, killing and plundering with impunity.&nbsp; Sadamori complains to the Emperor, who demands that Masakado appear in Kyoto to answer for his crimes, and Masakado doesn&rsquo;t even bother to respond to the emperor&rsquo;s letter&hellip; which is a big deal in Feudal Japan.</p>\r\n<p>Well, in 936 something strange happens.&nbsp; The Emperor dies.&nbsp; He&rsquo;s replaced by his son, and the first thing the son does is pardon all Japanese landowners for their crimes.&nbsp; So Masakado isn&rsquo;t an outlaw anymore, he&rsquo;s just a guy.</p>\r\n<p>Content, Masakado goes home and gets some sleep.&nbsp; He awakes in the middle of the night to Sadamori&rsquo;s guys surrounding his house trying to kill him.</p>\r\n<p>Masakado kills like a dozen guys fighting his way out of there and picks right up where he left off.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"../images/213317630693/masakado5.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Unable to find peace, Masakado becomes a hardcore warrior roaming the lands like a samurai biker gang with a hardcore vendetta against everything ever.&nbsp; Men hear of his reputation and flock to follow him, swelling his ranks with bandits, warriors, and disgruntled minor nobles.&nbsp; They help the vice-governor of Musashi province overthrow the governor and seize power.&nbsp; He burns the capital of Hitachi Province and arrests the governor after that asshole stole two years&rsquo; worth of grain from his own citizens.&nbsp; He gets official seals printed with his face on them and uniforms for his troops.&nbsp; Before long, he&rsquo;s the dominant power in eight provinces in eastern Japan and people are telling him he should just go overthrow the Emperor and be done with it.</p>\r\n<p>Around this time, weird stuff starts to happen in Japan.&nbsp; Earthquakes.&nbsp; Rainbows.&nbsp; Lunar eclipses.&nbsp; Random flocks of butterflies flying together through the capital.</p>\r\n<p>So of course in 940 AD the Emperor shits a brick and the calls for the death of Taira no Masakado at all costs.&nbsp; He hires Masakado&rsquo;s cousin-nemesis, Sadamori, to hunt down the traitor and bring his head back to Kyoto on a pike.&nbsp; Sadamori is all too happy to oblige.</p>\r\n<p>Unfortunately for Sadamori, not only does he get his fucking face wrecked in his first battle with Taira no Masakado, but Masakado also manages to capture Sadamori&rsquo;s wife and most of his gold in the battle.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"../images/213317630693/masakado6.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Sadamori eventually regroups, puts together a vastly overwhelming force that outnumbers Masakado by a wide margin, and defeats his hated rival.&nbsp; Masakado is killed fighting a last stand, swinging wildly with his sword and hacking down people despite numerous wounds all over his body.&nbsp; His head is put on a pike and paraded through the streets of Kyoto, then hung outside the palace, where it comes to life at night and scares the piss out of the people who live in the city.</p>\r\n<p>It&rsquo;s worth nothing, just for spooky Halloween shit, that Masakado&rsquo;s daughter (known as &ldquo;Takiyashi the Witch&rdquo;) continued to live in the ruined palace even after Sadamori&rsquo;s men looted and burned it.&nbsp; There&rsquo;s some weird-ass awesome art associated with her.</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">&nbsp;<img src=\"../images/213317630693/masakado8.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>The Shinto shrine known as &ldquo;The Hill of Masakado&rsquo;s Head&rdquo; lies in some of the world&rsquo;s highest-priced real estate, in the middle of the Tokyo Financial District near the palace Tokugawa built for the Emperor in the 17<sup>th</sup> century.&nbsp; The shrine is built on the burial spot of Masakado&rsquo;s head, and he is said to haunt people and cause earthquakes and plagues when people mess with him or don&rsquo;t respect his head.</p>\r\n<p>But the story gets even weirder.&nbsp; In 1923 the Emperor decided he was sick of Masakado&rsquo;s bullshit, revoked the long-dead samurai&rsquo;s status as a Shinto god of fury, bulldozed his shrine, and built the Imperial Finance Ministry on top of it.&nbsp; Within two years, fourteen people who worked at the Ministry were dead, from reasons ranging from &ldquo;workplace accident&rdquo; to suicide.&nbsp; Nearly a dozen others were injured.&nbsp; In 1940, exactly 1,000 years after Masakado&rsquo;s death, a bolt of lightning struck the Ministry, set it on fire, and the entire place burned to the ground.</p>\r\n<p>They rebuilt the shrine.&nbsp; It still stands to this day.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"../images/213317630693/masakado9.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>','2014-10-10','213317630693','masakado.jpg','masakado-small.jpg','Taira no Masakado','The First Samurai\'s fury was so implacable that he continued to rage even after he was decapitated.','“Riding on chargers like dragons, leading clouds of followers, raising their whips, pressing down their stirrups, advanced as if to cross ten thousand leagues of mountain, each man’s heart afire, his spirits high, ready to conquer one hundred thousand foes.”  \r\n- Masakado-ki\r\n'),('Lapu-Lapu','1491','1542','Mactan Island, Philippines','16th-century Filipino Chief','<p>When you&rsquo;re talking about badass, super hardcore martial arts practiced by people who have absolutely no fear of severe bodily harm, multiple broken bones or getting knocked in the face with a powerful instrument of blunted death you could do a lot worse than fucking Filipino Stick Fighting.&nbsp; If you&rsquo;ve&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MvarVr0ouU\">never watched</a>&nbsp;Eskrima or Kali practitioners go at it before, you are really missing out on some ultimate epic asskickings.&nbsp; Basically, the sports involves two balls-out motherfuckers standing across from each other on a dojo floor, wailing on each other with unforgiving bamboo sticks until someone either dies or suffers so many hairline bone fractures that they can no longer physically stand up anymore.&nbsp; The last dude standing is declared the winner.&amp;nsbp; Or something like that.</p>\r\n<p>Here in the West, the Filipino martial arts aren&rsquo;t considered as &ldquo;sexy&rdquo; as some of the Chinese and Japanese fighting styles, and many people don&rsquo;t realize that the Philippines has a rich history of bashing motherfuckers in the goddamned face with a matching set of hand-carved wooden bludgeons.&nbsp; Even the almighty&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/brucelee.html\">Bruce Lee</a>&nbsp;himself trained under some of Eskrima&rsquo;s Grand Masters, and incorporated aspects of their fighting style into Jeet Kune Do.&nbsp; You know&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Advv1YjEJ9w\">that scene</a>&nbsp;in&nbsp;<em>Enter the Dragon</em>&nbsp;when Bruce is in that cave and he&rsquo;s using those two sticks to beat the holy living fuckballs out like eight hundred dudes?&nbsp; That&rsquo;s fucking Eskrima, bitches - a time-honored tradition of bashing in skulls and dishing out asskickings that traces its roots all the way back to the 16th century and a native Visayan chieftain named Lapu-Lapu, a tribal leader who became the first Filipino to defend his homeland against foreign invasion.</p>\r\n<p>There isn&rsquo;t a written record of what Lapu-Lapu was up to prior to the year 1521, but by all accounts his life revolved around two things &ndash; kicking asses and taking names.&nbsp; According to legend, Lapu-Lapu&rsquo;s father was a big-time Level 15 Chieftain on Mactan Island who was pretty much an unstoppable killing machine, thanks in no small part to an awesome magical&nbsp;<em>Amulet of Strength +5</em>&nbsp;that did double-damage against Goblins, Orcs, and Drow.&nbsp; Well one day a pirate from the nearby island of Cebu asked the Chief if he could borrow the amulet, because some motherfuckers from the Underdark had kidnapped the pirate&rsquo;s girlfriend and he needed to launch a serious raid to get her back.&nbsp; The Chief, who was apparently oblivious to the fact that you can&rsquo;t fucking trust anything that a goddamned pirate says, coughed up the amulet and (not surprisingly) never heard from the pirate again.&nbsp; From that time on the Mactan tribe and the Cebu tribe spent most of their free time ballknocking the crap out of each other with bamboo rods and hurling insults at one another like a pair of mudslinging politicians rampaging along the campaign trail.&nbsp; Lapu-Lapu rose to power amidst this heated rivalry, and like any good badass warlord he decided he was going to ratchet the Violence-o-Meter up to the next level.&nbsp; He instituted a strict training regimen for his tribesmen, taught his warriors the art of Eskrima and Kali, and had his troops fight insane one-on-one<em>Soulcalibur</em>-style sparring duels with wooden sticks to help increase their fighting ability, pump up their strength and conditioning, and improve their ability to be bludgeoned about the head and neck in a furious manner without dying or having a seizure or some shit.</p>\r\n<p>It was in the Year of Our Lord Fifteen Hundred and Twenty-One that Lapu-Lapu and his warriors would face their greatest test.&nbsp; On 14 April a European explorer named Ferdinand Magellan landed his fleet on the shores of Cebu Island with the intention of wreaking havoc like the Tazmanian Devil at a Sotheby&rsquo;s auction.&nbsp; The Spanish and Portuguese sailors were well-received by the Cebu tribe, and in a short period of time Magellan was able to convert many of the natives over to Catholicism, convincing them that since the greatest Catholic ruler on Earth was the King of Spain, all native Filipinos should just bend over and submit to the will of the Spanish Crown.&nbsp; The Cebu Chieftain was pronounced a &ldquo;servant of God and Spain&rdquo;, and anyone who didn&rsquo;t want to accept all of the Roman Church in all of its Popey Goodness was declared a heathen infidel deserving only painful death and suffering.&nbsp; The Cebu Chieftain, seeing an opportunity to take this ultra-modern army of hardcore Spanish soldiers and utilize them for his own nefarious purposes, immediately said something along the lines of, &ldquo;well&hellip; speaking of heathen infidels, there&rsquo;s this dude on Mactan Island named Lapu-Lapu, and he&rsquo;s actually a Muslim&hellip;&rdquo;</p>\r\n<p>Magellan, eager to cement the Philippines&rsquo; subservience and loyalty to the Spanish King, did what every good Conquistador did to the indigenous populations of the islands and civilizations they visited &ndash; he mobilized his armies and prepared to burn some villages, plunder everything that wasn&rsquo;t nailed down, slaughter anyone he could get his hands on, and either convert the survivors to Christianity or sell them into slavery.&nbsp; On 27 April 1521, Magellan and his crew landed on Mactan Island, eager to show the savage barbarian natives what it was like to be fucked in the ass by a civilized European Superpower.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/lapu-lapu2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Being a devout Muslim, Lapu-Lapu wasn&rsquo;t in the mood to hear about any Jeebuses, and he certainly wasn&rsquo;t going to sit back and let a bunch of smallpox-carrying non-M41 Pulse Rifle-toting Colonial Marines stamp his balls into dust and carry of the women of his sizeable harem, so he mobilized a large force of the most badassed warriors he could find and prepared to give the Conquistadors a wooden-plank asskicking that would make them wish they were back in Catholic school getting their knuckles bloodied by angry nuns.&nbsp; His men got their best bamboo spears, fighting sticks, stones, arrows, and swords and prepared to turn back the invaders.</p>\r\n<p>The only surviving account of the Battle of Mactan comes from one of the dudes who was in the Spanish raiding party (and this guy had a total stiffy for Magellan so his account is probably pretty biased in favor of his countrymen), but it&rsquo;s better than nothing.&nbsp; According to the tale, Magellan had originally planned to make a landing and use his ships&rsquo; cannons to serve as artillery backup in the battle, but when the fleet got close to the island they learned that there was a large reef that was preventing the Spanish ships from getting close enough to the shore for any kind of coastal bombardment.&nbsp; Magellan didn&rsquo;t bother to find a new point of attack, and instead took somewhere between 50-60 men and marched through thigh-deep waters towards the shore, where he met up with a large force of several hundred pissed off Filipino martial artists.&nbsp; The Conquistadors didn&rsquo;t give a shit though, and immediately opened fire on the natives with their muskets and crossbows and started yelling insults about their enemies&rsquo; virility.</p>\r\n<p>Often times, much is made of the bravery of a small group of soldiers battling against a much larger force of savages, and how noble these men are for standing up against impossible odds, but consider this battle from the perspective of the Filipino warriors and Lapu-Lapu.&nbsp; First off, you&rsquo;re standing on the beach, facing white-skinned men that don&rsquo;t look like any people you&rsquo;ve ever seen before.&nbsp; You&rsquo;ve a fucking bamboo stick and a flimsy wooden shield, while the enemy is wearing heavy steel breastplates and helmets that are strong enough to deflect any arrows or rocks that you or any of your companions launch at them.&nbsp; Oh, and they also have fucking firearms and crossbows that are much more advanced and powerful than anything you&rsquo;d ever thought possible.&nbsp; Your orders are to charge across a beach and fight these guys in hand-to-hand combat, which had to be the fucking 16th Century equivalent of fistfighting a company of goddamned ray-gun toting space aliens or some shit, but these guys didn&rsquo;t even give a crap.</p>\r\n<p>At first, Magellan&rsquo;s men used their muskets and crossbows to keep Lapu-Lapu&rsquo;s warriors at bay, but when he saw that the natives weren&rsquo;t breaking ranks and running screaming into the jungle like a bunch of pussies just because the Spanish set off some black powder, Magellan decided he needed to step up his display of technological superiority and consummate dickheaditude.&nbsp; He had a couple of his men set fire to a nearby village, burning it to the ground with torches and flamethrowers.&nbsp; As you can imagine, this really only succeeded in making the Filipinos even more totally ripshit pissed off, and Lapu-Lapu ordered a full-scale balls-to-the-wall charge on the Conquistadors&rsquo; position.&nbsp; As the horde of screaming warriors was closing in on the Spanish invaders, Lapu-Lapu ordered his archers to launch one final volley of arrows at the Europeans &ndash; only this time he instructed his men to aim not for the heavily armored torsos and heads of their enemy, but at their unarmored legs.&nbsp; Several Spanish soldiers were hit in the thighs and calves, and the crippled men were quickly pummeled to death by Lapu-Lapu&rsquo;s rampaging stick fighters.&nbsp; Lapu-Lapu himself is credited with delivering the kill shot on Ferdinand Magellan, as the chieftain cut the Explorer down with a single blow of his giant-ass two-handed scimitar.&nbsp; The Spanish invasion force was completely over-run by the tribal warriors, who beat the fucking crap out of anyone they could find, and the surviving troops ran off as quickly as their sails would carry them.&nbsp; A few days later the Spanish fleet asked Lapu-Lapu to return the remains of their fallen commander, but none could be found.&nbsp; The conquering invader had been beaten into a bloody smear that was carried away by the tides.</p>\r\n<p>Lapu-Lapu is the national hero of the Philippines, and he stands today as one of the few tribal leaders who stood up to the European explorers and Conquistadors and emerged victorious.&nbsp; He trained his men in badass martial arts, he didn&rsquo;t back down from a technologically superior force, and he didn&rsquo;t take crap from anyone.&nbsp; Today, there&rsquo;s a city named in his honor, countless statues of him exist across Mactan Island, and the Polynesian Resort at Disney has a drink named after him &ndash; it&rsquo;s one shot of dark rum, one shot of Bacardi 151, and one shot of sour mix with ice, orange juice and pineapple juice &ndash; guaranteed to kick your ass, just like the man it&rsquo;s named after.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/lapu-lapu4.gif\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span style=\"color: blue;\"><strong>Magellan:</strong></span>&nbsp;&nbsp;<span>OH SHIT WTF</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Links:</span><br /><br /><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Mactan\" target=\"blank\">Battle of Mactan</a><br /><br /><a href=\"http://living.cebunetwork.com/battle-of-mactan-shrine/2006/05/08/\" target=\"blank\">Mactan History and Myth</a><br /><br /><a href=\"http://www.historyhouse.com/in_history/magellan/\" target=\"blank\">Magellan\'s Demise</a></p>','2008-03-14','230567525445','lapu-lapu.jpg','lapu-lapu - Copy.jpg','Chief Lapu-Lapu','Bitch-slapped Magellan for trying to edge in on his turf, and asserted Filipinos as motherfuckers not to be trifled with.',''),('Angus MacGyver','March 23, 1951','N/A','Mission City, MN, USA','Fictional American Lawman','<p>Angus MacGyver is an award-winning chemist and physicist who basically is the action-hero equivalent of Mister Wizard,&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/indianajones.html\">Indiana Jones</a>, Billy Nye the Science Guy, James Bond, and both Mythbusters all wrapped up in a leather jacket and a glorious head of feathered blonde hair.&nbsp; Early in his career as a counter-terrorist asskicker, MacGyver served with the U.S. Military Bomb Disposal Team in Vietnam and Afghanistan before joining the Department of External Services (DXS), where he worked as a top-level secret agent, spending his work days turning coffee mugs into high-explosive hand grenades and neutralizing weapons-grade biotoxins with orange juice and freshly-squeezed goat milk.&nbsp; After several years with DXS, he later became part of a humanitarian organization known as The Phoenix Foundation, where Mac continued being awesome and whipping the balls off of injustice and evil across the globe.&nbsp; Nowadays I hear that he&rsquo;s part of a secret arm of the United States Air Force that battles crazy telepathic Egyptian Aliens and warps around the universe in &ldquo;Star Gates&rdquo; or something along those lines, but I can&rsquo;t really speak competently about any of that stuff.</p>\r\n<p>What makes MacGyver different than most badass action/adventure heroes out there is that he isn&rsquo;t the sort of guy kicks down a door, sprays automatic weapons fire all over the fucking place, snaps some dude&rsquo;s neck with his bare hands and then breaks a massive cinderblock over his head for no reason at all.&nbsp; MacGyver never uses guns, he always seeks out non-violent means of subduing and humiliating his enemies, and he prefers to go out on missions armed with little more than his wristwatch, a Swiss Army knife, a roll of duct tape, and his razor-sharp wits.&nbsp; He isn&rsquo;t a big, physical, beat the shit out of everyone meathead douchewad who feels like he needs to flex his nuts every ten seconds just to overcome some deep-seeded sense of personal inadequacy, and instead prefers to use his scientific knowledge, intelligence and cunning to get his way out of any number of dangerous situations.&nbsp; Of course, it&rsquo;s not like he can&rsquo;t bust asses when he needs to &ndash; MacGyver has a tenth-degree black belt in the art of kicking guns out of peoples&rsquo; hands, punching international terrorists in the face, and creating any number of devices designed to stun, wound, or otherwise incapacitate anybody who poses a threat to Western Civilization.&nbsp; He&rsquo;s taken down all kinds of assassins, criminals and thieves, he speaks a number of different languages, he knows morse code, and he can make fire just by concentrating really hard while staring at some twigs.&nbsp; In his spare time he climbs mountains and plays ice hockey (which just so happen to be two of the most badass hobbies this side of competitive hot dog eating and biathlon), and if the late, great Gary Gycax hadn&rsquo;t already departed from this mortal realm and transcended into the Elemental Plane of Awesome he probably would have said that on top of MacGyver&rsquo;s 18 Intelligence he also has a +40 to Demolitions, a +40 to Repair, and a +60 to Jury-Rigging Random Shit.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/macgyver1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Obviously the most badass aspect of MacGyver is his amazing ability to repeatedly get himself and his buddies out of imminent life-threatening danger using only his intelligence and a handful of basic everyday household items.&nbsp; Over the years, Mac has built dozens of bombs and explosives, created vacuum tubes, magnets, catapults, bazookas, pesticides, tranquilizers and complex sonar devices using little more than his belt, a stick of gum, some kite string, a ballpoint pen, two Advil, a nine-volt battery and a handful of wet dirt.&nbsp; Once he disarmed a nuclear warhead using a paperclip.&nbsp; Another time he used a cactus to power a shortwave radio.&nbsp; He&rsquo;s created countless over-the-top diversions, numerous traps, oil slicks, smoke screens and various types of tear gases, pepper sprays and poisons all while saving the environment, rescuing underprivileged orphans, fighting murderous robots and blowing up everything from secret drug stashes to Soviet Red Army war machines.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s all in a day&rsquo;s work for MacGyver to take a matchstick , a lead pipe, some water, a latex glove, two feet of rope, a small jar of vinegar, a fork and an old shoelace and then use those items to break free from his restraints, ride a zipline across a canyon gorge, repair a broken-down vehicle, drive his friends to safety and blow up the bad guys&rsquo; secret hideout right before they fire an ultra-powerful satellite laser that will destroy the White House and burn down a Humane Society pet shelter.&nbsp; When Mac gets captured and shackled to the wall of a dank, lightless underground dungeon the question is never &ldquo;is he going to be able to get out of this?&rdquo; &ndash; it&rsquo;s, &ldquo;how is he going to use a coat hanger, some rusty thumbtacks, a Swiss Army knife, some duct tape and a magnifying glass to break free, kick this goon&rsquo;s ass and disable the time bomb before his girlfriend gets blown up?&rdquo;</p>\r\n<p>No prison or restraints can hold him, any inordinately complex deathtrap you can think of is quickly rendered more useless than a third nipple, and he cannot be stopped by any kind of security system whatsoever.&nbsp; He easily bypasses everything from fingerprint scanners, electronic keypads and laser tripwires to crappy bicycle combination locks, spiked pit traps and rabid killer Russian attack dogs.&nbsp; Over the years, his name has become so synonymous with insane ultra-creative ingenuity, badass jury-rigged improvisational weapons and homemade explosives that it can actually used as a verb (i.e. to MacGyver something is to take a handful of boring shit and make it do something really fucking awesome), and in many East Asian countries the Swiss Army Knife is actually known to most people as the &ldquo;MacGyver knife&rdquo;, which rocks.</p>\r\n<p>Despite everything I&rsquo;ve said here however, in the end perhaps Mac&rsquo;s ultimate badassery can be summed up with one semi-rhetorical question &ndash; if you were captured by terrorists, strapped to a time bomb in the basement of an old Soviet gulag and had thirty minutes to break free, deactivate the bomb, rescue your girl and stop the terrorist leader before he steals the Russian nuclear launch codes and starts World War III, who would you rather have at your side than MacGyver?</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/macgyver2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Links:</span><br /><br /><a href=\"http://www.macgyveronline.org/\" target=\"blank\">MacGyver Online</a><br /><br /><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_problems_solved_by_MacGyver\" target=\"blank\">Wikipedia:&nbsp; List of Problems Solved by MacGyver</a></p>','2008-03-07','13349326628','macgyver.jpg','macgyver - Copy.jpg','MacGyver','The spy who can make bitchin escape tools out of virtually nothing (and a little duct tape).',''),('Benjamin Oliver Davis, Jr.','December 18, 1912','July 4, 2002','Washington, DC, USA','WWII American Pilot','<p>From the moment that 14 year-old Benjamin O. Davis, Jr. went on an insane barnstorming flight with a crazy-ass stunt pilot who executed more barrel rolls than Donkey Kong, he knew he wanted to be a pilot.&nbsp; Davis&rsquo; father was the first African-American General in the United States Army, and he was determined to follow in his dad&rsquo;s footsteps, enrolling in the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1932 with dreams of becoming a commissioned officer in the United States Air Corps (which at the time was part of the Army because the Air Force didn&rsquo;t exist yet LOLOLOLOL) .</p>\r\n<p>Unfortunately, being a black man attending the U.S. Military Academy in 1932 sucked more balls than the kids at Willy Wonka&rsquo;s Everlasting Gobstopper factory.&nbsp; For four years, Davis received the &ldquo;silent treatment&rdquo; from his jackass classmates, who refused to speak with him, eat with him, or let him join in any reindeer games, all in an effort to be total dicks, ostracize him and force him out of the academy.&nbsp; In an environment that would have drained the life out of most people quicker than a malnourished vampire, Davis somehow managed to persevere for four long years, and in 1936 he became only the fourth black man to ever graduate from the nation&rsquo;s top Military Academy.&nbsp; Because the Air Corps only accepted white people for some dumbass reason, Davis was assigned to the US 24th Infantry, an all-black &ldquo;Buffalo Soldiers&rdquo; unit.&nbsp; Even though he was a commissioned Lieutenant and an officer of the United States Army, he was barred from the officers club on the base because of his skin color, which was total fucking bullshit.&nbsp; When he proved himself to be a competent leader and commander, US High Command transferred him to the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, where he taught military tactics and Asskicking 101 to a group of young recruits, each of whom would grow to become heroes in their own right.</p>\r\n<p>As you will see, it would take more than blatant racism and an oppressive system dedicated to breaking his will to keep Ben Davis down.&nbsp; He continued to thrive in Tuskegee, commanding the respect of his students and fellow soldiers, and eventually caught a big break in 1942 when President Franklin D. FDR Roosevelt announced that an all-black fighter squadron was being put together to go battle the Nazis overseas.&nbsp; Davis signed up immediately and was one of only five officers to complete the initial training course at Tuskegee.&nbsp; He then became the first black officer to solo in a US Air Corps plane, and was eventually appointed commander of the new all-black US 99th Pursuit Squadron &ndash; a unit that would come to be known as the Tuskegee Airmen.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/davis1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Davis trained his men, recruited new pilots, and in 1943 the 99th Squadron was sent out to North Africa to help the Allies battle&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/rommel.html\">Rommel</a>&nbsp;and his buddies in the Afrika Korps.&nbsp; Tuskegee Airman P-40s also served during the invasions of Sicily and mainland Italy, winning a Distinguished Unit Citation for raids on strongholds at Monte Cassino, blowing the shit out of the enemy strongpoints while&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/voytek.html\">Voytek</a>&nbsp;and his friends did their work on the ground.&nbsp; The 99th also got a chance to flex its balls by shooting down twelve Nazi fighter planes in two days in the skies above Anzio, achieving air victories at a ten-to-one ratio over the course of seventy-two hours.</p>\r\n<p>Davis was then promoted to command the 332nd Fighter Group, another all-black Tuskegee Airmen unit tasked with providing fighter escort for Allied bombers as they made carpet bombing runs throughout Europe.&nbsp; The 332nd had an impressive service record during the war, and the &ldquo;Redtails&rdquo; (so called because they painted the fins of their fighters red) were constantly being requested as fighter escort by Allied bomber crews, few of which even knew that the Redtails were an all-black unit.&nbsp; Davis himself flew 60 combat missions personally, winning the Silver Star and Distinguished Flying Cross for his actions blowing the shit out of anything in the sky that didn\'t have a giant white star painted on its fuselage.&nbsp; Once he led a group of eight P-47s against a squadron of 18 German Bf-109s and emerged victorious, probably by spinning his plane around in circles like the end of&nbsp;<em>The Last Starfighter</em>&nbsp;and blasting the shit out of everything with a&nbsp;<em>Gradius</em>-style super-missile burst.&nbsp; His men won a Distinguished Unit Citation for another mission he led, when P-51s from the 332nd went on a 1,600 mile bombing run against the Daimler-Benz tank factory deep in the heart of the Vaterland, annihilating hundreds of&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/panther.html\">Panzers</a>&nbsp;before they could even get out of the assembly line and giving Hitler the finger in the process.&nbsp; During the run, the P-51s of the 332nd Fighter Group went up against a squadron of super-advanced German Me-262 jet fighters, and despite being incredibly outgunned, Davis&rsquo; men managed to shoot down three enemy jets, six other fighters, two F-14 Tomcats and half a dozen TIE Interceptors without losing a single Allied bomber.&nbsp; For a frame of reference, before that battle only two Me-262s had ever been shot down by the Allies.</p>\r\n<p>The Tuskegee Airmen led by Captain Davis flew 5,000 missions during World War II, shooting down 111 Nazi pilots and destroying 273 enemy planes on the ground while only losing 66 of their own planes.&nbsp; The 445 combat pilots under Davis&rsquo; command earned 150 Distinguished Flying Crosses, 14 Bronze Stars, 744 Air Medals, and at one point flew 200 consecutive missions without losing a single bomber.&nbsp; Service records don&rsquo;t get a whole lot better than that.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/davis2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br />An Allied P-47 like the ones Davis flew.<br /><br /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>When Benjamin Davis returned home, however, he was once again confronted with a battle that couldn&rsquo;t be combated with a never-ending stream of machinegun bullets and several hundred tons of high-yield explosives.&nbsp; Despite being a fucking true American war hero, Davis and his wife were still barred from going out to dinner at restaurants in his hometown simply because of bullshit segregation, which, as I just mentioned, is total bullshit.&nbsp; He wasn&rsquo;t going to just sit there and put up with that garbage though, and after the war he worked closely with the newly-created United States Air Force to help implement racial integration into their ranks.&nbsp; Thanks in a large part to Colonel Davis\' actions, the USAF was the first branch of the military to fully integrate.&nbsp; He was the first black man to attend the Air War College in Montgomery, and became the first black General of the Air Force.&nbsp; He served in the Pentagon until serious shit started going down in Korea, when he was once again sent out to kick asses.</p>\r\n<p>General Davis was placed in command of the USAF&rsquo;s 51st Fighter-Interceptor Wing during the Korean War, where he became one of the first black officers in US Military History to ever hold command over white enlisted men.&nbsp; He did it pretty fucking well, too - during the defense of South Korea the F-86s of the 51st flew 45,000 sorties, shooting down 312 Chinese MiGs while only losing 32 pilots.&nbsp; Never content to sit back and not be blasting the shit out of motherfuckers when a perfectly good opportunity to do so presented itself, Benjamin Davis personally led many missions, and his leadership and tactical abilities contributed greatly to the 51st boating a ten-to-one kill ratio over enemy fighters during the war.</p>\r\n<p>After Korea, Davis was the commander of the US 13th Air Force in the Philippines, and then served as Deputy Commander-in-Chief of US Strike Command before retiring in 1970 as a three-star Lieutenant General.&nbsp; During his adventures he was awarded the Legion of Merit, the Air Medal, the Silver Star, the Distinguished Flying Cross, the Air Force Commendation Medal, and the Philippine Legion of Honor.&nbsp; His actions, and those of the brave Tuskegee Airmen, proved to the uptight dickwads in charge that black men could kick ass just as much as white men and led to the eventual racial integration of the American Armed Forces.&nbsp; He overcame segregation, bigotry, epic dumbassitude, crazy flying Germans and Chinese MiGs, and proved himself as a true American Hero.&nbsp; Despite all of his battle honors and awards however, perhaps the most telling statistic is this &ndash; at the time the United States Air Force was formed, there was only one black officer in its ranks.&nbsp; Today, there are over four thousand.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/davis3.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<table style=\"width: 50%;\" align=\"center\">\r\n<tbody>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td><span><span>\"The courage, tenacity, and intelligence with which he conquered a problem incomparably more difficult than plebe year won for him the sincere admiration of his classmates, and his single-minded determination to continue in his chosen career cannot fail to inspire respect wherever fortune may lead him.\"&nbsp;<br /><br /></span></span><center>- Davis\' graduation entry in the West Point yearbook</center></td>\r\n</tr>\r\n</tbody>\r\n</table>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Links:</span><br /><br /><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_O._Davis%2C_Jr.\" target=\"blank\">Wikipedia</a><br /><br /><a href=\"http://www.aviation-history.com/airmen/davis.htm\" target=\"blank\">Benjamin Davis, American</a><br /><br /><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_Airmen\" target=\"blank\">The Tuskegee Airmen</a></p>','2008-02-29','19958127560','davis.jpg','davis - Copy.jpg','Benjamin O. Davis, Jr.','Flipped a large middle finger to segregation and became the first African-American general of the United States Air Force.',''),('John Barclay Armstrong','January 1, 1850','May 1, 1913','MicMinnville, TN, USA','19th-century American Lawman','<p>When you&rsquo;re talking about badass police organizations that take hardened career criminals and make them look like Larry, Moe, and Curly being beaten over the head with gigantic sledgehammers and band saws, you could do a Hell of a lot worse than the Texas Rangers.&nbsp; The Rangers were the S.W.A.T. Team before the invention of the H&amp;K MP5A4, the SAS before&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/grylls.html\">Bear Grylls</a>&nbsp;, and the Justice League of America without all that crazy-colored spandex and latent homoerotic undertones.&nbsp; Back in the late 19th century, the Rangers roamed the lawless prairies of the Old West looking for wandering outlaw bandit gangs that needed their asses kicked, never resting or relenting until they found the most deadly criminals in America and either dragged them away in handcuffs or filled their balls full of piping-hot forty-five caliber ammunition.&nbsp; The Texas Rangers were tough-ass motherfuckers who were absolutely not to be messed with for any reason ever, and among the most famous and decorated of the Rangers was a dude named John Barclay Armstrong.</p>\r\n<p>Armstrong was born in Tennessee in 1850, and moved to Texas in 1871 for the explicit purposes of cracking jerks in the face with a tire iron.&nbsp; He served a short time as a local lawman before joining up with a new unit called the &ldquo;Special Force&rdquo; under the command of Captain Leander H. McNelly.&nbsp; The Special Force was the original gangsta of Special Forces units like GSG and Seal Team Five, something you can tell by the fact that the word &ldquo;force&rdquo; is singular (nowadays Special Forces detachments are a fucking dime a dozen).&nbsp; They were the badass paramilitary arm of the Texas Rangers, responsible for seeking out bandits with bandandas covering their faces, gunslingers who shoot people in the chest when they think they\'re being cheated at poker, yeller-bellied cattle rustlers, and other Old West stereotype motherfuckers and beating the holy living bejeezus out of them with their fists, rifle butts, and really large tree branches.&nbsp; And they were good at their job.&nbsp; A small, elite, well-trained outfit, kind of like Rainbow Six with Colt .45s and awesome moustaches, they were definitely not to be messed around with &ndash; McNelly himself only brought on men who were born out-of-state because he was worried that some native Texans might show a moment of hesitation when it came to shooting their fellow countrymen in the face.</p>\r\n<p>One of the Special Force&rsquo;s first objectives was to ensure order on a particularly lawless part of Texas known as the Nueces Strip.&nbsp; The Rangers protected witnesses in important homicide trials, resolved decades-old family blood feuds (probably by killing or arresting everyone associated with either family), recovered cattle stolen from Texas ranches, and battled Mexican guerillas who launched raids across the border against American townships.&nbsp; The hardcore Special Force put down several high-profile gangs like a rancid meatball and even arrested the notorious outlaw King Fisher and his group of ruffians, besting them in a badass bare-knuckled boxing fistfight in the middle of the night that probably went down like an old 1960&rsquo;s Batman episode complete with giant &ldquo;BIFF!&rdquo; word bubbles.</p>\r\n<p>Now when I say these guys are hardcore as all fucking hell and do whatever it takes to get the job done, what I&rsquo;m saying is that &ldquo;police brutality&rdquo; wasn&rsquo;t a part of the Wild West vernacular.&nbsp; These guys did not fuck around, and if it took some, er, \"creative thinking\" to get their man, the Rangers weren&rsquo;t opposed to bending the rules a little bit.&nbsp; Once they found the gang they were searching for, there was generally a lot less &ldquo;reading them their Miranda rights&rdquo; and a lot more &ldquo;firing indiscriminately at anyone who wasn&rsquo;t wearing a Sherriff&rsquo;s badge&rdquo;.&nbsp; John Barclay Armstrong was right at home in this rough-and-tumble group, and before long he was promoted to the rank of Sergeant, serving as McNelly&rsquo;s second-in-command.&nbsp; He nickname among friend and foe alike was &ldquo;McNelly&rsquo;s Bulldog&rdquo;, probably because if anybody fucked with him he&rsquo;d flip out and bite them in the jugular.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/armstrong1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br />Texas Rangers.<br />You don\'t want these guys hunting you down.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>One time, the Special Force ran into a group of cattle rustlers under the command of ex-Mexican Army General Juan Cortina.&nbsp; Cortina and his men were all former soldiers who were still really super pissed off about that whole Mexican-American War thing, so they had been launching raids into Texas border towns, robbing banks, stealing cattle, and punching shopkeepers&rsquo; wives right in the face for no reason at all.&nbsp; The Rangers caught up with Cortina&rsquo;s men near Palo Alto, where a platoon of his hand-picked elite troopers were driving a herd of stolen cattle like a Cattle-ac Escalade (oh my god I&rsquo;m so fucking hilarious).&nbsp; The rustlers saw McNelly&rsquo;s men on the horizon and laid an ambush in a boggy salt marsh, but in the ensuing gunfight the Rangers killed sixteen outlaws while only losing one of their own.&nbsp; Another time, the Special Force was pursuing a group of 250 stolen cattle that were smuggled across the border into Mexico.&nbsp; Despite having absolutely no jurisdiction to do so, McNelly and Armstrong put sixteen Rangers in rowboats, crossed the Rio Grande in the middle of the night, beat the shit out of the cow thieves, and ended up bringing back 400 cattle that had been taken from Texas ranches.&nbsp; Where the hell those other 150 cows came from is anybody\'s guess.</p>\r\n<p>After McNelly&rsquo;s retirement in 1876, John B. Armstrong was promoted to Lieutenant, and the Special Force was absorbed into the Texas Rangers Frontier Battalion.&nbsp; Armstrong was involved in several gunfights while trying to restore order to the lawless areas of Eagle Pass and Laredo, and at one point he tracked down and killed convicted murderer John Mayfield, probably by pulling his arm off during an arm-wrestling match and then beating Mayfield to death with his own fist.&nbsp; The biggest case of his career however came in 1877, when he was given the task of taking down one of the deadliest gunfighters in the Old West &ndash; John Wesley Hardin.</p>\r\n<p>In terms of sheer body count, John Wesley Hardin was one of the most insane gunmen in American History.&nbsp; During his career as a gambler, gunfighter, and outlaw, Hardin notched 44 confirmed kills, taking down everything from card sharps and thieves to Sherriffs and Marshals, and anybody in-between.&nbsp; Basically, this wasn&rsquo;t a guy you wanted to look at cross-eyed, because he&rsquo;d end up putting a bullet in your brain.&nbsp; In 1877 however, Hardin crossed the line when he shot a couple of Texas Rangers to death.&nbsp; Now Rangers really hate it when you kill their buddies, so they took the mission personally and were determined to succeed where hundreds of posses and lawmen had failed.&nbsp; John Barclay Armstrong volunteered for the job as soon as it was posted, even though at the time he was recovering from a gunshot wound to the leg and had to walk with a cane.&nbsp; Since he had such an outstanding record as an asskicker, his superiors assigned him to the job.</p>\r\n<p>Armstrong first went to Alabama, where Hardin was last seen robbing railroad cars.&nbsp; He set up shop there for a while, gathering clues, and eventually was able to intercept a letter that indicated Hardin would be traveling from Alabama to Florida under an assumed name.&nbsp; John Barclay Armstrong caught up to the dangerous outlaw on a train in Pensacola on 23 July.&nbsp; He walked into Hardin&rsquo;s train car and came face-to-face with Hardin and three other members of his gang.&nbsp; Armstrong ordered their surrender, and upon recognizing what was taking place, Hardin exclaimed, &ldquo;Texas, by God!&rdquo;, which only makes me think of a local truck dealership commercial where a crazy dude in a cowboy costume sticks his face right into the camera and screams, \"MY GAWD, THAT\'S TOO CHEAP!!\"</p>\r\n<p>Hardin and his men all reached for their pistols.&nbsp; One of Hardin&rsquo;s men drew and fired a shot the put a hole through Armstrong&rsquo;s hat.&nbsp; Armstrong got really pissed off about getting a gunshot hole right through is favorite hat, so switched his cane over from his right hand to his left, quick-drew his pistol and fired a shot right into the man&rsquo;s chest, killing him instantly.&nbsp; He then leapt over and grabbed Hardin&rsquo;s pistol right as he drew it from its holster.&nbsp; Hardin kicked Armstrong off him, but Armstrong quickly rebounded and brained Hardin in the fucking head with the butt of his Colt .45 Peacemaker hard enough to knock him unconscious for two hours.&nbsp; The other two members of the gang dropped their weapons, probably because they were in complete shock that this one dude had just Kung Fu-ed the butt out of their fearless leader.</p>\r\n<p>Unfortunately, even though he had Hardin in custody, Armstrong didn&rsquo;t have the proper warrants ready so he was unable to transport the prisoner.&nbsp; Several of Hardin&rsquo;s associates telegrammed Armstrong threatening to bust Hardin out of jail by any means necessary, but Armstrong cooly responded by saying that if anyone tried to fuck with him he\'d just shoot Hardin right in the fucking face.&nbsp; That shut those dickheads up pretty quickly.&nbsp; Before long, the warrants arrived, and Hardin was extradited to Texas to stand trial for his crimes.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/armstrong2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><br /></p>\r\n<table>\r\n<tbody>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td><span><span>&ldquo;Arrested John Wesley Hardin, Pensacola Florida this P.M. He had four men with him.<br />Had some lively shooting.&nbsp; One of their number killed.&nbsp; All rest captured.<br />Hardin fought desperately.&nbsp; Closed in and took him by main strength.<br />We are waiting for a train to get away on.<br />This is Hardin&rsquo;s home and his friends are trying to rally men to release him.<br />Have some good citizens with, and will make it interesting.&rdquo;<br /><br /></span></span><center>- John B. Armstrong, telegram to Rangers HQ</center></td>\r\n</tr>\r\n</tbody>\r\n</table>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Armstrong was also part of the Texas Rangers detachment sent to capture the notorious bank and train robber Sam Bass, a colorful dude who used to sign his name, &ldquo;Signed by Sam Bass, Kiss My Ass&rdquo; (seriously).&nbsp; Local authorities had managed to learn that the Bass Gang was going to hit a bank in Round Rock, Texas on 18 July 1878, and when the job went down Armstrong and his Rangers were there like pre-teen girls at a Justin Timberlake concert.&nbsp; Bass&rsquo; men suddenly became retarded and opened fire on the officers, and the fierce battle that ensued resulted in the death and/or capture of Sam Bass and his entire gang.</p>\r\n<p>Armstrong resigned in 1881 and spent a brief stint as a U.S. Marshal before living out the rest of his days on a large ranch in rural Texas with his wife and seven kids (he apparently was rocking the Viagra or something).&nbsp; Interestingly enough, Armstrong&rsquo;s ranch is the same place where Dick Cheney shot a dude in the face a couple years ago.&nbsp; Apparently, Armstrong&rsquo;s enduring spirit and desire to indiscriminately blast people in the face and chest with firearms continues to prevail even into modern times.</p>\r\n<p>John Barclay Armstrong was a principal badass in an organization well-known for its badassery.&nbsp; He had a sweet &lsquo;stache, he captured hundreds of wanted men, and he set the tone for all the badass Texas Rangers that would come after him.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.amazingben.com/argonauts-chucknorris.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Links:</span><br /><br /><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Barclay_Armstrong\" target=\"blank\">Wikipedia</a><br /><br /><a href=\"http://www.texasranger.org/halloffame/Armstrong_John.htm\" target=\"blank\">Texas Ranger Hall of Fame</a><br /><br /><a href=\"http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/AA/far10.html\" target=\"blank\">The Handbook of Texas Online</a></p>','2008-02-22','835184829585','armstrong.jpg','armstrong - Copy.jpg','John Barclay Armstrong','The Texas Ranger that all old west outlaws feared.',''),('Agustina Raimunda María Saragossa Doménech','March 4, 1786','May 29, 1857','Tarragona, Spain','19th-century Spanish Soldier','<p>The beautiful Northern Spanish city of Saragossa had enjoyed over seven hundred years of peace, love and hippie tree-hugger prosperity stretching from the time of&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/elcid.html\">El Cid</a>&nbsp;up until the fateful year 1808, when her walls were threatened by the marauding armies of Napoleon Bonaparte&rsquo;s ever-expanding French Empire.&nbsp; Napoleon, perhaps suffering from the psychiatric complex that bears his name, had this crazy hard-on to conquer all of Europe (probably just to be a total dickhead to everyone), and one of his primary goals was to force all of Spain and Portugal under whichever one of his little thumbs wasn&rsquo;t currently shoved inside his coat pocket.&nbsp; Obviously, the Spanish weren&rsquo;t too psyched up about capitulating to the fucking French (and who can blame them), so the two nations became embroiled in an incredibly bloody and brutal campaign that would come to be known as the Peninsular War.</p>\r\n<p>But who gives a shit about all that crap.&nbsp; The point here is that in 1808 the peace-loving city of Saragossa was completely surrounded by arbitrarily-pissed-off Frenchmen with thin, curly-cue waxed handlebar moustaches all eager and willing to slaughter some Spaniards for no good reason at all.&nbsp; The town had been cut off from supplies and ammunition for weeks, and the defenders of the city were constantly being pounded by artillery and musket fire as Napoleon tried to break their will like an Entenmann&rsquo;s spokesperson at a Weight Watchers meeting.&nbsp; Finally, after sixty days of the siege, the French launched a full on balls-to-the-wall invasion of the city, charging the gates like King Arthur&rsquo;s men in&nbsp;<em>Monty Python and the Holy Grail</em>.&nbsp; At this point the town was only defended by a small, heavily outnumbered force of volunteer soldiers, and before long the massive horde of Perrier-swigging, wine-connoisseuring Frenchies broke through the city gates like a Frank Sinatra-singing alien chest-burster busting out of an unhappy patron at a crappy intergalactic greasy spoon diner.&nbsp; Napoleon&rsquo;s men fell on the artillery positions located just inside the gates like an army of Gerald Fords, and many of the front-line Spanish defenders either ran for their lives or got some up-close and personal hard-hitting interviews with the pointy end of a bayonet.&nbsp; Within minutes it appeared that the defensive lines had broken, and it was beginning to look more and more like the citizens of Saragossa were going to need to start developing a taste for frog&rsquo;s legs, rude waiters and trashy uber-trendy fashion magazines with unpronounceable names where anorexically-thin bitches wear see-through shirts and look bored out of their damn skulls all the time.</p>\r\n<p>However, all was not as fucked-up as it seemed.&nbsp; Amidst all the confusion, smoke, gunfire, and epically graphic strings of Spanish profanity stood a woman known as Agustina de Aragon.&nbsp; During the initial fighting she had been up on the battlements with the artillerymen, passing out apples, Powerbars and Gatorade to the men to help sustain their fighting spirit and replenish their electrolytes, and doing her part to help defend her city.&nbsp; However, when she saw all these dudes running away with their panties in a wad shrieking like grade-school girls just because a couple of fucking French dudes were waving knives in their faces, she did what any badass worthy of that moniker would have done &ndash; she got really ripshit pissed off and started bashing motherfuckers&rsquo; heads together like B.A. Barrackus.&nbsp; When one of the Spanish cannon crews dropped their gear and bravely ran screaming away from the rampaging French invaders, Agustina de Aragon charged full-speed towards the abandoned gun.&nbsp; With an entire Company of angry screaming soldiers only a few hundred feet away and rapidly closing in her position, she shoved a canister of black powder and grapeshot into the mussle and packed it down with the ramrod.&nbsp; Then, right as the French troops was preparing to lunge at her with their bayonets and skewer her like a meat kebab she cooly took a long drag from a cigarette, said something along the lines of, &ldquo;suck my dick, motherfuckers&rdquo;, and flicked the lit cigarette into the hatch, sending forth a massive shotgun-blast of metallic spiky death into the enemy from point-blank range.&nbsp; When the smoke cleared, the bloodthirsty, stab-happy French troops had been reduced to a large pile of dead-ass bitches.</p>\r\n<p>Having effectively proven that she had the biggest balls of anyone in the town (is &ldquo;ovarian fortitude&rdquo; the correct terminology here?), Agustina turned and looked over her shoulder at the Spanish soldiers behind her.&nbsp; The men were all like, &ldquo;damn, if this chick can kick so much ass all by herself, what the fuck are we doing?&rdquo;, and immediately rushed back to their positions and began pouring artillery and small-arms fire into the invaders.&nbsp; Agustina&rsquo;s inspiring actions pumped up the Spanish more than a live performance of Young MC&rsquo;s &ldquo;Bust a Move&rdquo;, and the Spanish soldiers were able to not only push the French back out of the city, but launch a counter-attack that would force Napoleon to lift the siege of Saragossa.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/agustina1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Unfortunately, this wasn&rsquo;t the last the Spanish would hear of Napoleon.&nbsp; The French returned a few months later, and after several weeks of hardcore house-to-house back-alley streetfighting the city&rsquo;s hopelessly-outnumbered defenders were forced to capitulate.&nbsp; Agustina was taken as a prisoner of war (she was working as part of an artillery crew during the battle, because after showing off her ability to vaporize organic meatbags the Spanish couldn&rsquo;t possibly have ignored her bravery or badassitude with a heavy weapon) and thrown in prison, but promptly led a daring&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/conan.html\">Conan the Barbarian</a>-style prison break &ndash; probably busting out by giving one of the French guards a flying side kick to the back of the head, stealing his rifle, beating ten people to death with it, swinging across a crowded ballroom on a chandelier, and then setting a world record in the two hundred meter Freestyle while swimming through an alligator-infested moat and having French special forces paratroopers fire fully-automatic handheld Gatling guns at her.&nbsp; Once free, Agustina joined up with the hardcore Spanish guerilla movement where she participated in daring raids against French supply depots and military bases, doing her part to try and liberate her people.</p>\r\n<p>After a few years of bitter fighting, the Spanish, along with their British and Portuguese Allies, began to break the Grande Armee&rsquo;s double-reverse choke-hold on Spain.&nbsp; Agustina&rsquo;s guerilleros were absorbed into the Free Spanish Regular Army serving under the command of a fellow badass, the Duke of Wellington, and during the campaign to liberate Spain she was eventually promoted to the rank of Captain and placed in command of a full artillery battery.&nbsp; At the Battle of Vitoria in 1813, Agustina de Aragon and her men fought bravely as Wellington&rsquo;s forces defeated the French Army and drove them from Spain once and for all.</p>\r\n<p>Agustina de Aragon, the &ldquo;Spanish&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/joanofarc.html\">Joan of Arc</a>&rdquo;, was a common-born woman who, through her bravery and ultra-badassitude, became a larger-than-life national hero and a legend among the people of Saragossa.&nbsp; She was a war hero, a freedom fighter, a badass guerilla, and a tough-ass bitch in every possible way.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/agustina2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Links:</span><br /><br /><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agustina_de_Aragon\" target=\"blank\">Wikipedia</a></p>','2008-02-15','401435930917','agustina.jpg','agustina - Copy.jpg','Agustina de Aragón','Known as \"The Spanish Joan of Arc\", this lady helped keep the French from occupying Saragossa during the Napoleonic Age.',''),('Thor Heyerdahl','October 6, 1914','April 18, 2002','Larvik, Norway','20th-century Norwegian Adventurer','<p>Badassitude isn&rsquo;t always about killing other human beings and using your enemies&rsquo; severed heads to play two-on-two pickup hoops with hot topless bikini babes.&nbsp; Sometimes it&rsquo;s about going on crazy adventures and using your intellect and your bravery to go the extra mile and prove to everyone in the world just how massive your nuts are.&nbsp; Norwegian archaeologist Thor Heyerdahl falls in to the second category &ndash; the man wasn&rsquo;t the sort of guy who could crush human skulls into giant piles of bone dust with his bare hands, but in his lifetime he explored uncharted territories, returned unscathed from several expeditions deemed &ldquo;suicidal&rdquo; by the scientific community, and had some of the most amazing adventures this side of<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/indianajones.html\">Indiana Jones</a>.&nbsp; Plus, he was named after the fucking Norse God of Thunder, and it&rsquo;s a little-known fact that it is against the law in Norway for you to be named Thor and not be totally fucking awesome.&nbsp; Seriously, if your name is Thor and you totally suck ass, then you are bound by law to change your name to something less ball-rockingly awesome.&nbsp; Like Alfred.</p>\r\n<p>As a young man, Thor was really into zoology and animals and shit.&nbsp; He used to wander around Norway and capture armfuls of indigenous fucking poisonous vipers&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/irwin.html\">Steve Irwin</a>-style, putting together a large private collection of venomous snakes which he could potentially have used to wipe out the entire populations of small rural villages.&nbsp; He didn&rsquo;t though, turning away from a live of evil genius-caliber crime to go to Oslo University and study Zoology, Geography, and Polynesian Culture.&nbsp; He was so fascinated with the culture and history of the Polynesian people that when he graduated college and married his first mega-hottie wife in 1937, they immediately set sail together for the remote South Pacific island of Fatu Hiva.</p>\r\n<p>Now, when most people honeymoon in French Polynesia, they spend their afternoons leisurely reclining under a palm tree on the beach outside their post five-star resorts, sipping Mai Tais and checking out hula-dancing fire-twirling babes in grass skirts and coconut bikinis.&nbsp; Not the Heyerdahls.&nbsp; They settled in a vast, green valley located near an ancient tribe of goddamned Polynesian cannibals, built a thatched-roof hut out of shit they foraged from the underbrush, and dedicated their free time to studying the local fauna and excavating the nearby ruins of a long-dead civilization.&nbsp; They ate from fruit trees, drank out of rivers, and got it on like ALL THE FUCKING TIME because let&rsquo;s be honest here it was their honeymoon.&nbsp; During his adventures learning from the indigenous peoples and wandering around never-before explored ancient ruins in Fatu Hiva, Thor began developing a theory that was completely radical at the time &ndash; he found evidence that led him to believe that the Polynesian Islands had been settled in an East-to-West fashion by ancient South American peoples, not West-to-East by Asian peoples as all Ethnographers of the time believed.&nbsp; This was a balls-out, over-the-top theory that would eventually drive Heyerdahl to do some insane, awesome shit.</p>\r\n<p>After a year and a half living off the land, discovering new shit, and returning to nature on Fatu Hiva, Thor returned to Norway because there was a little thing called fucking World War II going on.&nbsp; He joined the Free Norway military, and served in a Parachute Infantry regiment against the Nazis.&nbsp; No big deal, just helping to liberate the free world from the oppression of Fascist dictators.&nbsp; All in a day&rsquo;s work for a badass archaeologist.</p>\r\n<p>After the war, Thor finally got around to publishing his theory that Polynesia was settled by South American peoples who sailed West from Peru.&nbsp; While this might not seem like that big a deal, it was fucking huge shit to the anthropological community, who widely attempted to discredit Heyerdahl&rsquo;s theories, saying that such a migration was impossible and he was a total dumbshit asshole for even suggesting it.&nbsp; Well Thor wasn&rsquo;t the sort of badass who was going to sit around and let a bunch of numbnuts professors tell him that he was full of crap &ndash; he organized an expedition to Peru and decided to give those motherfuckers a proverbial scientific kick in the nards.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/heyerdahl1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br />101 days on this fucking thing.<br />In shark-infested waters.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>So Thor Heyerdahl went to Peru and build a goddamned raft out of flimsy-ass balsa wood in 1947.&nbsp; Most dipshit &ldquo;experts&rdquo; thought that the raft, named &ldquo;Kon-Tiki&rdquo; after an ancient Incan mariner god, would probably spontaneously combust, collapse, sink into the Pacific about two hundred yards from the shore, and the entire crew would be swallowed up by a great white whale.&nbsp; Heyerdahl used any research on ancient seafaring he could find to build a completely accurate vessel out of materials and technology available to the ancient Incan peoples, and pushed off for Polynesia as soon as possible.&nbsp; For months, Thor and his crew sailed on this barely-seaworthy vessel through shark-infested waters on a seemingly impossible mission, but after 101 days and 4,300 miles of water he successfully set foot on Polynesian soil.&nbsp; Then he published a scientific paper called, &ldquo;Eat Shit, Motherfuckers:&nbsp; The True Story of How Thor Heyerdahl Made You Assholes Look Like a Bunch of Fucking Morons&rdquo;, which stated that his adventure proved that it was in fact scientifically possible for the Incans to have settled in Polynesia.&nbsp; Now that&rsquo;s how a badass handles criticism when he knows he&rsquo;s right &ndash; he goes on a balls-out suicide mission just to shove it in his detractors&rsquo; stupid faces.</p>\r\n<p>After Kon-Tiki, Heyerdahl went on expeditions to study the moai on Easter Island, where he explored ruins, sought out ancient archaeological discoveries, battled the Ghosts of the Twelve Ancients with a legendary magical sword crafted from the bones of fallen angels, and punched a llama in the face for no reason at all.&nbsp; His work in the field of population migration and ethnography were groundbreaking, but his theories were still considered by many scientists to be more radical than jumping over the flaming wreckage of an oil tanker on a bitchin&rsquo; surfboard with skulls and ninjas airbrushed on it.&nbsp; However, after reading about all of his awesome adventures across the globe, many people began to appreciate his work and open their minds to the research he was performing.</p>\r\n<p>Thor&rsquo;s adventures in building crazy boats and going on bizarre-o suicide Mr. Toad Wild Rides wasn&rsquo;t over after Kon-Tiki however.&nbsp; No, his quest for awesome balls-out shit was only just beginning.&nbsp; At one point he came up with a theory that the ancient African peoples could have sailed to the New World before Christopher Columbus, another theory which was widely criticized by jackasses who didn&rsquo;t know the difference between a discovery of great archaeological significance and a twenty year-old toaster.&nbsp; So Heyerdahl built a huge boat out of these weak-ass papyrus reeds, and decided to sail it across the Atlantic Ocean.&nbsp; Most nautical experts at the time thought the reeds would get water-logged and the ship would collapse after about two weeks in open water, but of course Thor didn&rsquo;t even give a crap.&nbsp; He put together a multi-national crew and shoved off &hellip; FOR ADVENTURE!&nbsp; His rinky-dink ancient ship, &ldquo;Ra&rdquo;, left Morocco and covered 2,700 miles in 56 days, but was ultimately destroyed by a storm only one week away from its final destination.&nbsp; Of course, Thor never fucking half-assed anything in his entire life, so he built a SECOND ship only ten months later, and this time he covered 3,200 miles in 57 days, finally landing in Barbados and proving the plausibility that there were pre-Columbus voyages to the New World.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>In 1978 he once again built a boat out of reeds and set sail from Iraq to prove that people could have migrated by sea from Iraq to Pakistan.&nbsp; However, Thor and his crew were getting pissed off because every port they stopped at on the African coast was a fucking warzone with jerks shooting each other in the groins for no reason at all.&nbsp; So five months into their journey, Thor and his crew set fire to their ship out of protest for how fucked-up the world is. &nbsp; And because setting huge bonfires is awesome.&nbsp; Heyerdahl continued his research into his 80s, studying Norse Myth, green politics, archaeology and eco-conservation right up until his death at age 87.&nbsp; His life is probably best summed up by the e-mailer who suggested this particular article, when he wrote:</p>\r\n<p>&ldquo;Thor Heyerdahl guy was the MacGyver of impossible voyages. He could probably have crafted an oceanliner out of tree bark and his own manly sweat. He even burned perfectly good boats of his own making to protest the shit that didn\'t fly with him.&nbsp; He was a relentless adventurer and an example to everyone, everywhere.&nbsp; In an age of intolerance, he made friends across all boundaries, exhorted people to travel and learn new tongues, taught the value of our natural environment, and never stopped in his pursuit of knowledge.&nbsp; He was a free spirit who refused to be bound by convention and he made the world a better place.&rdquo;</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/heyerdahl3.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Links:</span><br /><br /><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_Heyerdahl\" target=\"blank\">Wikipedia</a><br /><br /><a href=\"http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4397210,00.html\" target=\"blank\">Guardian Article</a><br /><br /><a href=\"http://www.gonorway.no/norway/sidevisning.php?id=44\" target=\"blank\">Go Norway</a></p>','2008-02-08','9376919431','heyerdahl2.jpg','heyerdahl2 - Copy.jpg','Thor Heyerdahl','Built ships out of seriously outdated materials to give the archaeological community something to scratch their heads at, and just for funsies.',''),('Voytek','Unknown','December 1962','Iran','WWII Polish Soldier','<p>For centuries, Poland has been known specifically for two things &ndash; badass spicy sausages, and getting epically fucked over by every other European nation in every possible way.&nbsp; Polish people are constantly getting about as much respect as the Duke University football program, and the once-proud nation has been carved up more times than Joan Rivers&rsquo; face.&nbsp; The early days of World War II was no exception, when the unsuspecting, peaceful Poles all of a sudden found themselves getting sneak-attack double-teamed by the international military superpower dickheads Germany and the Soviet Union.&nbsp; Sure, the Communists and Fascists fucking hated each other, but apparently they were willing to join forces and work together to oppress the citizens of Poland, steal their land, and imprison anyone they damn well pleased.</p>\r\n<p>Of course we know about what the Germans did to the people of Poland, but it certainly wasn&rsquo;t any picnic being on the receiving end of the sickle and hammer either.&nbsp; Captured Polish POWs that weren&rsquo;t executed on the spot by the Russkies were shipped out to fucking hardcore Gulags in Siberia, where the spent twelve hours a day eating disgusting borscht and gruel, mining snow from ice caves with pickaxes like the Dwarves in Snow White and toiling away in temperatures that never got above negative fifty degrees in the summertime.&nbsp; However, once Germany double-crossed the Soviets and started beating the holy living shitburgers out of the Red Army, Josef Stalin all of a sudden had a change of heart and decided to let captured Polish POWs out of prison so they could help fight for the Allies.&nbsp; Since the Poles weren&rsquo;t too keen on fighting on behalf of the Russians who had oppressed and imprisoned them, they decided to serve under the British instead.&nbsp; A large number of these men were put on trains and sent to Iran, where they formed up into the Polish Second Army Corps.&nbsp; II Corps&rsquo; first mission was to travel to Palestine, link up with the British 8th Army and assist in the Allied invasion of Italy.</p>\r\n<p>On their trip through Iran, the men of the Polish 22nd Transport Artillery Supply Company came across a young Iranian boy wandering through the desert like Jim Morrison tripping balls, and carrying a large cloth sack.&nbsp; The men thought the boy looked tired and hungry, so they gave him some food and a Crunch bar or some shit.&nbsp; When the kid thanked them, the Poles asked what was in the bag.&nbsp; The boy opened it up and revealed a tiny, malnourished brown bear cub.&nbsp; Since the soldiers knew the little cub was in very poor health and needed attention quickly, they bought the bear from the kid for a few bucks (or whatever the hell they used for money in 1940&rsquo;s Iran &ndash; I can&rsquo;t be bothered to look it up), and fed it some condensed milk from a makeshift bottle.&nbsp; For the next several days, they nursed the bear back to health, giving it food, water, and a warm place to sleep.</p>\r\n<p>Over the long journey from Iran to Palestine, the bear, now named Voytek (it&rsquo;s spelled Wojtek in Polish but pronounced \"Voytek&rdquo; because Polish is a crazy fucking language) quickly became the unofficial mascot of the 22nd Company.&nbsp; The bear would sit around the campfire with the men, eating, drinking, and sleeping in tents with the rest of the soldiers.&nbsp; The bear loved smoking cigarettes, drank beer right out of the bottle like a regular infantryman, and got a kick out of wrestling and play-fighting with the other soldiers.&nbsp; Of course, he was the most badass asskicking wrester in the entire company, thanks in part to the fact that he grew to be six feet tall, weighed roughly five hundred pounds, and could knock small trees over with a single swing of his massive, clawed paw.&nbsp; He grew to be a part of the unit, improving the morale of men who had spent several years getting their asses kicked in slave labor camps, and was treated as though he were just another hard-drinkin&rsquo;, hard-smoking&rsquo;, hard-fightin&rsquo;, hair-growin&rsquo; soldier in the Company.&nbsp; When the unit marched out on a mission, Voytek would stand up on his hind legs and march alongside them.&nbsp; When the motorized convoy was on the move, Voytek sat in the passenger seat of one of the jeeps, hanging his head out the window and shocking the shit out of people walking down the street.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/voytek1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>In addition to kicking peoples&rsquo; asses and drinking beer, Voytek also enjoyed taking hot baths for some reason.&nbsp; Over the summer in Palestine, he learned how to work the showers, and you could pretty much always find him splashing around the bath house.&nbsp; Once, he entered the bath hut and came across a spy who had been planted to gather intelligence on the Allied camp.&nbsp; Voytek growled, slapped the dude upside his stupid head, and the man immediately crapped his pants and surrendered.&nbsp; The Soldier Bear was lauded as a hero for successfully capturing an enemy agent, who in turn was interrogated and gave up vital intelligence on enemy positions.</p>\r\n<p>When it was time to stop fucking around and get &ldquo;in the shit&rdquo; as they say, II Corps linked up with the hardcore British 8th Army and headed out to the middle of the Category 5 Crapstorm the was brewing in Italy.&nbsp; The problem, however, was that British High Command did not allow any pets or animals in their camp, so the Polish Army formally enlisted Voytek the Bear into their ranks.&nbsp; He was given the rank of Private, assigned a serial number, and from that point on was included in all official unit rosters.&nbsp; The Brits were like, &ldquo;whatever chaps&rdquo;, and didn&rsquo;t even bat an eye when Voytek marched ashore with the rest of the 22nd Company.</p>\r\n<p>The Poles&rsquo; Finest Hour of the war came in the incredibly bloody battle for Monte Cassino.&nbsp; By the time II Corps arrived, the Germans were deeply entrenched in the hilltop monastery, and three previous Allied assaults on the position had all proved more fruitless than a South Florida orange tree in the middle of a worldwide Nuclear Winter.&nbsp; The campaign was proving to be one of the bloodiest battles of the Western Front, and the Poles were brought in to make the final push to capture the fortress.&nbsp; During the fighting, Voytek the Hero Bear actually hand-carried boxes of ammunition, some weighing in at over 100 pounds, from supply trucks to artillery positions on the front lines.&nbsp; He worked tirelessly, day and night, bringing supplies to his friends who were bravely battling the Nazis.&nbsp; He never rested, never dropped a single artillery shell, and never showed any fear despite his position being under constant enemy fire and heavy shelling.&nbsp; His actions were so inspiring to his fellow soldiers that after the battle the official insignia of the 22nd Artillery was changed to a picture of Voytek carrying an armful of howitzer ammunition.&nbsp; In the same vein, you have to assume that it was pretty fucking demoralizing to the Germans to see that the Poles had a fucking GIANT GODDAMNED BROWN BEAR fighting on their side.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/voytek3.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Thanks in part to the heavy shelling by their artillery, the Polish forces broke through the Nazi defenses and captured Monte Cassino.&nbsp; Voytek and his comrades would go one to fight the Germans across the Italian peninsula, breaking through the enemy lines and forcing the Krauts out of Italia for good.&nbsp; After the war, some elements of the Polish Army, including Voytek, were reassigned to Scotland, since Poland was under USSR control, and many Polish soldiers did not like the prospect of living in a Soviet-run police state.&nbsp; Voytek lived out the rest of his days in the Edinburgh Zoo, where he passed away in 1963 at the age of 22.&nbsp; It was said that he always perked up when he heard the Polish language spoken by zoo guests, and during his life in there he was always being visited by his old friends from the Polish Army &ndash; some of whom would throw cigarettes down into his open arms, some of whom would even jump into the bear enclosure and wrestle with him for old time&rsquo;s sake.</p>\r\n<p>The idea of a fucking alcoholic Nazi-fighting bear is so awesome that you&rsquo;d think it was something out of a bizarre cartoon or a Sci-Fi Channel Original Movie.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s the sort of shit that, even with all of the historical evidence, seems too totally awesome to be true.&nbsp; The bear was a hero of World War II, and there are statues of him and plaques memorializing his brave service in Poland, Edinburgh, the Imperial War Museum in London, and the Canadian War Museum.&nbsp; Unbelieveable.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/voytek4.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Links:</span><br /><br /><a href=\"http://www.vbservices.co.uk/baczor/html/wojtek_by_antolak.html\" target=\"blank\">Voytek, the Iranian Soldier-Bear</a><br /><br /><a href=\"http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/worldnews.html?in_article_id=510452&amp;in_page_id=1811\" target=\"blank\">Daily Mail Article</a><br /><br /><a href=\"http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/south_of_scotland/7208505.stm\" target=\"blank\">Honour Sought for \'Soldier Bear\'</a></p>','2008-02-01','15422271533','voytek.jpg','voytek - Copy.jpg','Voytek the Soldier Bear','It\'s a bear that was a soldier. There is no other comparison to how cool that is.','\"He liked a cigarette, he liked a bottle of beer - he drank a bottle of beer like any man.\"'),('Naib Subedar Yogendra Singh Yadav','Unknown','N/A','Bulandshahr District, India','20th-century Indian Soldier','<p>Most Westerners don&rsquo;t think of the Republic of India as being home to hardcore, badass motherfucking commandos who climb up sheer cliff faces, brave automatic weapons fire, beat the crap out of AK47-toting insurgents in hand-to-hand combat, and do all manner of insane awesome&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/snakeeyes.html\">Snake Eyes</a>-style shit while wailing on air guitar and bench-pressing orphan children.&nbsp; Those people couldn&rsquo;t be more wrong if they incorrectly bubbled their names in on the SATs, because it turns out that India produces some balls-out motherfuckers who exert more insane kung fu badassery than an anthology of 1970s Shaw Brothers films being shown at the Shaolin Temple in the middle of an Ultimate Fighting tournament between ninjas and professional wrestlers.&nbsp; A prime example of this is a dude named Yogender Singh Yadav &ndash; a man who is more than likely one of the biggest badasses you&rsquo;ve never heard of.</p>\r\n<p>In case you&rsquo;ve had your head jammed inside a set of hand-crafted wood-paneled cabinetry for the past seven centuries or so, India and Pakistan fucking hate each other with the searing fire of a million ruptured anti-matter containment chambers.&nbsp; They&rsquo;re like the Kid Rock and Tommy Lee of the international community, always talking smack or getting in fights at paparazzi-attended awards ceremonies and barbecue cookouts, and in this metaphor the object of their affection - Pamela Anderson Hyphen Lee - is a region known as Kashmir.&nbsp; For those of you who get the extent of your international news by saying &ldquo;wassup&rdquo; the guy behind that counter at 7-11, Kashmir is more than just a fucking kickass Led Zeppelin song that rocks the balls off of children and adults alike and then sends the disembodied balls careening into a Black Hole of Awesome &ndash; it&rsquo;s a mountainous region situated between India and Pakistan that\'s filled with people who refer to themselves only as \"Kashmiri\", mainly because they don\'t fucking know which country they actually live in.&nbsp; The place is so hotly contested, that political maps of the area usually look more like Venn Diagrams than Pie Charts, and these two nations have been bashing each other&rsquo;s skulls in over the territory for centuries now.&nbsp; They&rsquo;ve even threatened goddamned thermonuclear war over this area, which kind of seems like overkill as far as I\'m concerned.</p>\r\n<p>Anyways, shit boiled over in 1999 when Kashmiri and Pakistani rebels infiltrated Indian military lines on the border and captured several abandoned fortresses and bunkers.&nbsp; All of a sudden, the Indian Army found itself completely surrounded and in an incredibly precarious position &ndash; they had to re-take those forts at all costs.&nbsp; Troops were mobilized, and the Kargil War was rocking like an Ecstasy-filled rave, complete with truncheon-wielding cops and barfing teenagers.&nbsp; Yogender Singh Yadav was part of a Commando platoon attached to the Indian 18th Grenadiers, an elite special forces unit that had been ordered to attack strategic Pakistani fortifications in a region known as Tiger Hill on the evening of 3 July 1999.&nbsp; The mission was to climb a sheer, snow-covered cliff face at 18,000 feet, set up a rope system so troops could ascend the mountain, and eliminate any resistance in the area.&nbsp; Now when I say &ldquo;Tiger Hill&rdquo;, the first thing that probably comes to mind is a gentle, rolling, grassy slope with a bunch of preteen kids chasing fireflies and hot Indian babes frolicking amongst sunflowers in wet saris, but this motherfucker is actually more along the lines of Annapurna being butt-humped by Everest:</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/yadav1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Ok, that&rsquo;s actually a picture of Kanchenjunga, the 3rd highest mountain in the world, but the shot was taken from the peak of Tiger Hill, so you can sort of get the idea &ndash; this motherfucker is situated on the type of terrain that human beings aren&rsquo;t supposed to be able to traverse.&nbsp; The sort of place that forges legends like&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/weathers.html\">Beck Weathers</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/simpson.html\">Joe Simpson</a>, and the sort of place that takes regular people and turns them into giant frozen meatsicles lost forever under a pile of snow and rock.</p>\r\n<p>Now Yadav had been trained in mountain climbing and alpine warfare, so on this dark, freezing night he volunteered to run point and be the first man up the cliff face.&nbsp; His job was to affix a rope system into the ice so that the men climbing behind him could walk/climb up the wall like Batman and not have to carry around ice axes and kill themselves trying to use all that crazy mountaineering bullshit.&nbsp; Once the platoon reached the top of the cliff, they would then assault three separate fortified Pakistani bunkers, hopefully using the element of surprise to overwhelm the defenders.&nbsp; At roughly 11pm, in whipping winds and freezing cold, Yogender Singh Yadav whipped out his climbing gear and set out on an incredibly dangerous mission.&nbsp; After several minutes of tough climbing, Yadav was already halfway up the treacherous ice wall.&nbsp; His platoon commander and several of his comrades were close behind him, waiting for Yadav to fix the ropes so they could complete their dangerous mission, when all of a sudden the Commandos heard a distinct whistling sound coming from the mountainside only a few meters from their position &ndash; RPG fire.&nbsp; Seconds later, a rocket-propelled grenade smashed into the mountain, followed by the thumping sound of heavy machinegun fire ripping through the rock and ice.&nbsp; Yadav&rsquo;s platoon commander and several Indian soldiers were shot or fell and plummeted to their deaths below.&nbsp; His entire squad was eliminated in seconds.&nbsp; Yadav himself took three bullets &ndash; two in the shoulder and one in the fucking groin, which I bet hurt like a motherfucker.&nbsp; However, somehow this just made him even more pissed, and he started climbing like fucking&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/nagano.html\">Nagano</a>&nbsp;on Mount Midoriyama, racing up the last 60 feet of cliff face, willing his body to pull him up the ledge.&nbsp; Once he hoisted himself onto&nbsp;<em>terra firma</em>, he proceeded to charge the bunker, which was laying down a heavy barrage of rocket and large-caliber machinegun fire in his direction.&nbsp; Somehow, Yadav reached the enemy position, and chucked a grenade in, killing everyone inside and silencing the gunfire.&nbsp; At this point, a SECOND fucking pillbox opened up on the rest of the Indian soldiers now struggling to reach the top of the mountain.&nbsp; Yadav cracked his knuckles, jammed a new clip into his rifle, and sprinted towards the gun emplacement.&nbsp; He ran up, leaped into the Pakistani position, and came face-to-face with a four-man machinegun team.</p>\r\n<p>Yadav took one look at these fuckers and busted out some serious kung fu action, throwing his ice ax into one guy&rsquo;s head, stabbing another dude in the throat, and finishing off the last two in serious Bruce Lee-style hand-to-hand combat.&nbsp; He was like fucking Steven Segal jacking up motherfuckers who were unaware that this land belonged to the Eskimos.&nbsp; In the fighting, Yadav suffered severe injuries, including a broken arm that he probably got from punching a guy in the fucking face with enough force to crack a cinderblock.&nbsp; When the rest of the assault team finally reached him and prepared to evacuate his wounded ass to safety, Yadav simply whipped off his belt and used it to fashion a makeshift sling for his useless arm, grabbed his pistol in his off-hand, and probably said something along the lines of, &ldquo;there&rsquo;s still another bunker, you motherfuckers.&rdquo;&nbsp; The platoon was so pumped up by this display of bravery and hardcore badassitude that they charged the third Pakistani position, guns blazing.&nbsp; The enemy hardpoint fell within minutes.</p>\r\n<p>For his bravery on Tiger Hill, the Indian Army posthumously awarded the Param Vir Chakra (the highest award for bravery) to Yogender Singh Yadav.&nbsp; The problem is that Yadav actually lived through the battle.&nbsp; He received notification of his &ldquo;posthumous&rdquo; award from his hospital bed, as he was recovering from a broken arm, a broken leg, and somewhere between five and fifteen gunshot wounds to various parts of his body.&nbsp; Apparently, nobody that heard the story believed that he could have possibly survived, but nobody banked on the fact that he was the most hardcore motherfucker around.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/yadav2.bmp\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Links:</span><br /><br /><a href=\"http://indianarmy.nic.in/PVC/photo_7.htm\" target=\"blank\">Indian Army Site</a><br /><br /><a href=\"http://www.india-today.com/itoday/19990830/defence.html\" target=\"blank\">Legacies of Kargil</a></p>','2008-01-25','63610142386','yadav.jpg','yadav - Copy.jpg','Yogender Singh Yadav','Scaled a mountain to save his country in the amount of time it takes Chuck Norris to take a shit.',''),('John Henry','1840s','N/A','United States','Mythological American Adventurer','<p>John Henry was born into slavery in the deep South in the 1840&rsquo;s, but would become a true American hero, loved by not only the underprivileged black men and women who worked hard to build the United States into what it is today, but by anybody smart enough to respect ultimate insane badassitude in its highest form.</p>\r\n<p>Henry worked his balls off on a bullshit cotton plantation as a young man, busting his ass all day for no pay in miserable conditions, but he never even complained, he just made the best of a shitty situation.&nbsp; For starters, long days of hard work got him really jacked up, and before long he had biceps large enough to choke cattle and abs so firm they could stop small-arms fire from five feet away.&nbsp; He was tall, cut, and OH YEAH he was also the STRONGEST MAN EVER - like he rolled a natural 18/00 for Strength&nbsp;<em>legitimately</em>&nbsp;which is about as common as a hot babe attending DragonCon without receiving any sort of monetary compensation for doing so.&nbsp; He was tough, tireless, and more handsome than a genetic hybrid of Taye Diggs and Tyson Beckford (he probably scored with incredibly hot babes all the fucking time &ndash; some people suggest that references to him being a &ldquo;steel-driving man&rdquo; refer to more than just his profession), and if that&rsquo;s not enough for you he also played the banjo like a motherfucker and had a beautiful singing voice.&nbsp; Basically, this guy was like a 19th Century Jay-Z &ndash; he was the dude that&nbsp;<em>everybody</em>&nbsp;wanted to come to their hot parties.</p>\r\n<p>However, instead of kicking back, Big Pimping and sipping Cristal after the War Between the States paved the way for the emancipation of the slaves, J-Hizzle pursued a more backbreaking and potentially badass profession &ndash; he became a Steel Driver, and I&rsquo;m not talking about the big brother of the Sand Wedge.&nbsp; I&rsquo;m talking about pounding motherfucking giant steel railroad spikes into the ground with a giant hammer thirteen hours a day, six days a week, and building the transportation lifeline that would allow the United States to expand from the East Coast all the way out to the Pacific.&nbsp; Now back in the 1870&rsquo;s, this was a vital, yet brutal and inglorious profession.&nbsp; Conditions for the railway workers across the American frontier were abysmal &ndash; deaths from smoke inhalation and heat exhaustion were an everyday occurrence, the pay was low, and the living conditions weren&rsquo;t much better than those of the old Southern plantations.&nbsp; Yet for some freed slaves living in a harsh period of Reconstruction, this sort of hard manual labor was the only work available to them.</p>\r\n<p>Once again, John Henry never complained &ndash; he loved his job, showed up early every single day and kicked more asses than a kung fu master in a commercial butt-transplant facility.&nbsp; He pounded out more spikes than a fully-automatic nail gun, busting his nuts for the C&amp;O Railroad in West Virginia.&nbsp; Things were going smoothly for the first several years of employment, when all of a sudden the path of the railroad ran straight into the gigantic Big Bend Mountain.&nbsp; Since it was impractical to divert the train tracks around the massive rock formation, the railroad owners decided to tunnel straight through two miles of solid rock.&nbsp; This was an incredibly tough job, but &ldquo;Iron Man&rdquo; Henry was more than up to the task.&nbsp; The man was an unstoppable, one-man wrecking crew, beating the shit out of the mountain like Joe Frazier wailing on Samuel &ldquo;Screech&rdquo; Powers in an Ultimate Fighting cage match.&nbsp; With his trusty fourteen-pound hammer &ldquo;Lucy&rdquo; (a&nbsp;<em>Warhammer of Strength +3</em>, double damage to all Golems and Rock or Stone-Related Constructs), he demonstrated unmatched power, tunneling ten to twelve feet per day in the Pre-Steroid Mining Era - a time when most men were lucky to carve out twelve inches in twelve hours.&nbsp; When his friends and co-workers became sick, tired, or exhausted, Henry only picked up their slack, carrying the entire operation on his back, working all hours of the day and night, and stopping only to eat, slam out a fiery banjo solo, and bone his hot wife.&nbsp; At night, the guy fucking pounded his hammer into the rock so hard that his managers used to worry that the entire Big Bend Mountain was going to fucking cave in.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>While I didn&rsquo;t intend for that last sentence to come out as a double-entendre, I am happy that it did.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/henry1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>\"Bring me a nine-pound hammer, and I\'ll knock this mountain down.\"</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>So one day this slick-ass used car salesman type showed up at the mine camp with a shiny new steam-powered drilling engine that looked like a mix between a ten-ton cordless power drill, a propane grill, the Terminator, and one of those sewer-cleaning machines from&nbsp;<em>Labyrinth</em>, talking about how his stupid machine can drill faster than ten men combined and costs about half of what it takes to pay an honest working man&rsquo;s daily wages.&nbsp; Of course, the jackass cheapskate railroad fat cat robber baron executives thought this was the hottest shit since &ldquo;Baby Got Back&rdquo; and were all ready to sign off on this new machinery, fire all their employees, and buy a giant Scrooge McDuck money chamber to practice their backstroke in when all of a sudden the construction foreman came up to the salesman, jammed a giant twelve-inch knife in the drafting table for no reason at all and said in a completely deadpan voice &ndash; &ldquo;that don&rsquo;t mean shit to me.&nbsp; I got a guy who can drill faster than twenty men.&nbsp; On amphetamines.&rdquo;&nbsp; The salesman didn&rsquo;t believe that anybody in the world could match the unimaginable power his wacky contraption, and challenged John Henry to a race to see who could drill faster &ndash; a mechanical monstrosity hell-bent on putting good men out of work permanently, or the strongest, hardest-working motherfucker in American history.</p>\r\n<p>Everyone in town came out to see the big race between man and machine.&nbsp; Knowing that the hopes and livelihoods of hundreds of his friends lie in the balance, John Henry gripped his trusty hammer, as the salesman revved the engine of his power tool like it was a crazy suped-up ricer from&nbsp;<em>The Fast and the Furious</em>, pushing his sunglasses up on his nose and adjusting his leather racing gloves.&nbsp; The July heat scorched the West Virginia countryside like a malfunctioning flamethrower operated by a sociopathic pyromaniac as the blonde bikini babe with giant fake breasts held up the checkered flag indicating when the racers could begin.&nbsp; She dropped the flag, and the battle for the American working man was on like a honky-tonk jukebox.&nbsp; Fueled entirely by a limitless supply of burning coal and the imprisoned souls of tiny underprivileged orphan children, the vile cyborg DrillMaster 9000 churned to life like a hideous metallic Frankenstein Monster, blowing John Henry off the line and ripping face-first into the solid rock wall like Wile E. Coyote.&nbsp; At first, the machine appeared to be winning as it clanked into the rock, burrowing a hole quicker than an army of gophers.&nbsp; The crowd gasped.&nbsp; Hundreds of men saw their jobs and their lives flash before their eyes like a bad sitcom montage.&nbsp; John Henry took one look at what was going on and got super King Kong Omega pissed off like the Incredible Hulk, flexing his massive guns so hard that his shirt exploded and caused a sonic boom loud enough to deafen small children.&nbsp; No fucking robot was going to show up a hard-working American badass, goddamnit.&nbsp; He not only continued smashing the rock wall with his warhammer, but he grabbed a SECOND fourteen-pound sledgehammer in his off-hand and started going to town with it.&nbsp; He dual-wielded the shit out of his massive spiked tools, pounding the fucking stone so hard that his entire body quickly became obscured in a giant cloud of dust.&nbsp; After over an hour with both man and monster kicking the fucking ass of this stupid mountain, the DrillMaster all of a sudden burst into flames like Britney Spears&rsquo; career, exploding into a giant cloud of smoke, ash, and vile black ichor.</p>\r\n<p>Victory didn&rsquo;t even slow Henry down, however, as he was in what athletes like to call &ldquo;The Zone&rdquo;.&nbsp; He kept drilling like a crazy bastard until all of a sudden he became so fucking incredibly XTREME that his heart exploded and he died on the spot, his hammer still clenched in his fist.&nbsp; When the smoke finally cleared, the spectators saw that the Fusion-Powered Nuclear Drill had cleared out nine feet of tunnel in just under two hours;&nbsp; John Henry had cleared fourteen.</p>\r\n<p>John Henry is a true American working-class hero, and his epic badass exploits served as the focus of folk songs across the nation.&nbsp; He was a role-model for underappreciated, overworked, underpaid manual laborers as they built railroads, roads, and buildings in our country&rsquo;s youth, who admired his strength and work ethic and respected the fact that he was able to give the middle finger to our giant robot overlords.&nbsp; His triumph proved that no stupid bullshit technology was a match for good old jacked-up human beings.&nbsp; As an added bonus, after his death, his wife and son learned that Henry had saved up ten thousand dollars in a bank account, which they used to buy a house and live happily ever after.&nbsp; Even in death, John Henry was fucking badass.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/henry.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>\"Show me the machine.&nbsp; I can beat it.\"</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Links:</span><br /><br /><a href=\"http://www.ibiblio.org/john_henry/\" target=\"blank\">John Henry - Steel Driving Man</a><br /><br /><a href=\"http://www.voanews.com/specialenglish/archive/2006-06/2006-06-05-voa1.cfm\" target=\"blank\">American Stories</a><br /><br /><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Henry_(folklore)\" target=\"blank\">Wikipedia</a></p>','2008-01-18','9465533899','henry2.bmp','henry2 - Copy.bmp','John Henry','The Steel-Driving man, and the American working-class hero.','\"A man ain’t nothing but a man.  He has just got to do his best.\"'),('Gojira','N/A','N/A','Japan','Fictional Japanese Monster','<p>It&rsquo;s hard to argue with the badassitude of a gigantic, hundred foot tall, irradiated lizard with giant spikes sticking out of his back who spends his nights and weekends shooting atomic fire out of his mouth, pummeling large industrial metropolises into cinderblock dust, and punching the shit out of anything larger than an elephant until it explodes into giant globules of monster goo.&nbsp; Godzilla (binominal name&nbsp;<em>Godzillasaurus Monstrum</em>) is just the sort of monster who fits that particular bill, and he&rsquo;s been doing it better than anyone for over half a century.</p>\r\n<p>Godzilla is the prime example of why you should never fuck with the power of scientific evolution &ndash; the legend goes that when the goddamned Americans dropped Fat Boy and Little Man on Japan back in &rsquo;45, the colossal nuclear fallout and intense radiation turned a regular every-day foul-tempered prehistoric flesh-eating lizard-dinosaur on a remote island somewhere in the Pacific into a gigantic airplane-crushing monster capable of head-butting skyscrapers into the next time zone and obliterating an entire city block by ripping a really loud nuclear-powered EMP fart.&nbsp; Now he shows up and terrorizes the countryside every so often(kind of like the Terrasque) in a crazy drunken rage, bashing everything he sees and flexing his nuts before returning to the murky depths of the ocean to hibernate underwater somehow.</p>\r\n<p>Godzilla is huge.&nbsp; And by huge, I mean really fucking huge.&nbsp; He&rsquo;s so big he makes the T. Rex from Jurassic Park look like something out of one of those fruity calendars with pictures of newborn kittens on them, and unlike a lot of epically giant things out there he has the good sense to use his massive size as a means with which to destroy anything that crosses his path, smashing buildings with his giant fucking tail, punching pagodas until they become giant flaming explosions, and using commuter trains as nunchucks with which to pummel the life of out other giant mutated monsters that get in the way of his mission to completely eradicate all human life on the planet.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/godzilla1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Another sweet thing is that Godzilla is completely unpredictable, and as such represents the Ultimate Duality of Awesome:&nbsp; When he leaves the warm beaches of Monster Island and emerges from the dark waters near the Japanese coastline you don&rsquo;t know if he&rsquo;s there to smash orphanages or save the universe from a rampaging giant space monster who shoots lasers out of his forehead and spits acid on hot Japanese babes.&nbsp; That&rsquo;s just how he rolls.&nbsp; One minute he&rsquo;s Earth&rsquo;s savior, the next minute he&rsquo;s grabbing handfuls of cheering humans and grinding them between his massive pointy teeth.</p>\r\n<p>The most daunting thing about Godzilla is that he&rsquo;s virtually indestructible, and his scaled hide is tougher to penetrate than a home-schooled Mormon chick.&nbsp; Tank shells, surface-to-air missiles, and armored-piercing ammunition only succeed in making him angry.&nbsp; You can crash jet fighters into his eyes and he won&rsquo;t even blink &ndash; he&rsquo;ll just clench his fists and start breakdancing in the middle of downtown Tokyo.&nbsp; Even shooting him in the fucking face with a nuclear warhead only makes him EVEN MORE POWERFUL, because he sucks up radiation like a Geiger counter in Chernobyl and it has roughly the same effect on him as if he drank the contents of a gasoline tanker filled with Red Bull, Viagra and pure Columbian cocaine.&nbsp; Shit, every once in a while he gets randomly struck by lightning for no reason, and the next thing you know he&rsquo;s fucking shooting bolts of electricity out of his hands like a malfunctioning stun gun or a 5th-Level Evoker.&nbsp; Even on the off-chance that some monster gets a lucky shot and knocks Godzilla out of action, or the humans come up with some crazy fucking Sleep Ray and send him into hibernation or some shit, Godzilla has a mutant healing factor that makes Wolverine look like a hemophiliac and he comes back to life more regularly than Jason Voorhees.&nbsp; You can&rsquo;t finish him off &ndash; the guy has been around for almost sixty years with no signs of slowing down &ndash; and he&rsquo;s never going to get bored of stomping asses across the Tokyo skyline.&nbsp; The dude&rsquo;s completely leveled that city like a hundred times, yet those crazy Japanese just keep re-building it only to somehow still act like they&rsquo;re really fucking surprised when Godzilla shows up and does it again.</p>\r\n<p>Of course, Godzilla&rsquo;s not just out to destroy the entire population of Japan &ndash; he also enjoys beating the fucking shit out of the vast array of bizarre mutated monsters who dare to step on his turf.&nbsp; It doesn&rsquo;t matter how crazy the thing is, how many heads it has, or how impractically gigantic it is, Godzilla just emits his trademark ear-piercing, window-shattering scream, beats his chest like a giant green Tarzan, and starts Greco-Roman wrestling the giant cockroach until it&rsquo;s arms break off and it gets it&rsquo;s limbless body hurled into an erupting volcano on the surface of the Moon.&nbsp; He&rsquo;s got mad<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/brucelee.html\">Bruce Lee</a>&nbsp;Kung Fu skills and a tail that delivers more force than the demonic love-child of an F5 tornado, a 10.5 Earthquake and a Category 5 Hurricane, and if that doesn&rsquo;t knock his enemy out of action he shoots a giant beam of blue atomic energy out of his mouth and burns the fucking shit out of anything he wants with more effectiveness than a Disintegration Ray.&nbsp; Nobody can fuck with him &ndash; he&rsquo;s taken Ghidrah, Mecha Ghidra, Jet Jaguar, Megalon, Rodan, Mothra, Gigan, Anguirus, Biollante, Space Godzilla and Mecha Godzilla, and a bunch of other beasts with crazy fucking names that may or may not feature the word &ldquo;Mecha&rdquo; and turned them into giant bloody smears across the Japanese countryside.&nbsp; He&rsquo;s the fucking King of the Monsters, bitches, and he&rsquo;s willing to prove it to any giant two-hundred foot tall carnivorous, fire-breathing, flying eating machine that thinks it can front on him.&nbsp; Sometimes when he gets bored he even joins up tag-team with other monsters in epic four-way giant monster fights, which is pretty fucking rad.</p>\r\n<p>Now, as I&rsquo;ve done previously with the illustrious&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/kirk.html\">Captain James T. Kirk</a>, allow me to attempt to summarize the mighty Godzilla in four awesome pictures:</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<table cellpadding=\"15\">\r\n<tbody>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/godzilla2.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></td>\r\n<td><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/godzilla3.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></td>\r\n</tr>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/godzilla4.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></td>\r\n<td><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/godzilla5.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></td>\r\n</tr>\r\n</tbody>\r\n</table>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>As if it&rsquo;s not badass enough that Godzilla is an insane fucking huge-ass lizard that levels cities, eats Humvees and judo throws giant floating moths into the sides of Mount Fiji, he&rsquo;s also accomplished what few actors in history ever have &ndash; he&rsquo;s got his own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/godzilla6.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Links:</span><br /><br /><a href=\"http://www.godzillatemple.com/\" target=\"blank\">Barry\'s Temple of Godzilla</a><br /><br /><a href=\"http://petcaretips.net/godzilla.html\" target=\"blank\">Godzilla at petcaretips.net</a><br /><br /><a href=\"http://www.godzillaondvd.com/\" target=\"blank\">Godzilla on DVD</a>&nbsp;(where I found most of these pictures)</p>','2008-01-11','21241544770','godzilla.jpg','godzilla - Copy.jpg','Godzilla','The product of nuclear detonations in Japan, this fuck of a monster uses Tokyo as his playground. Literallly.',''),('Sir William Wallace','N/A','August 23, 1305','Elderslie, Scotland','Medieval Scottish General','<p>William Wallace was a hardcore 13th century freedom fighter who kicked English asses anywhere he could find them and served as a central figure in the First Scottish War of Independence, where he busted motherfuckers&rsquo; heads open with a gigantic two-handed broadsword and took no bullshit from anyone, anywhere, at any time, for any reason.&nbsp; He was born the second son of a minor noble, and therefore received precisely jack fucking shit in terms of wealth, land, and power, but in his insane exploits across the lowlands of medieval Scotland would be the sort of shit that towering legends and somewhat-accurate Academy Award-winning historical epics are made of.</p>\r\n<p>Right off the bat let me say that William Wallace wasn&rsquo;t the sort of bastard that anyone in their right minds would ever want to fuck with.&nbsp; Picture the sort of dudes that compete in the Highland Games &ndash; those crazy, beer-chugging, log-chucking, beard-wearing motherfuckers who throw eight hundred pound kegs of whiskey two thousand feet through the air and headbutt small woodland creatures to death.&nbsp; Then picture a guy who could take those motherfuckers in a bare-knuckle boxing match nine out of ten times without even breaking a sweat and you&rsquo;re starting to get the idea of the sort of guy William Wallace was.&nbsp; Judging by the fact that he carried a six-foot-long claymore into battle with him and wielded it with more efficiency than a gas-powered chainsaw, many historians believe that Wallace was close to seven feet tall.&nbsp; Nobody could take this motherfucker in single combat without getting their skulls smashed like an over-ripe cantaloupe, yet despite being the most imposing figure on the battlefield this side of&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/quarrelsome.html\">Wolf the Quarrelsome</a>, many writers of the time mention that he was as dexterous and agile as a genetic hybrid of a panther and Jet Li, and could run faster than a Lamborghini loaded with jet fuel.&nbsp; His&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/conan.html\">Conan</a>-like ability to cover twenty yards with a single bound is the epitome of the Sniper&rsquo;s Motto &ndash; \"If you run, you&rsquo;ll only die tired\", and his crazy unabashed kilt-wearing is the utter definition of being fucking balls-out all the time. He probably fucking had to wear a kilt because no mortal pants could contain his massive brass nuts anyways.&nbsp; Here is his story.</p>\r\n<p>Back in 1297 Scotland was having some succession problems when the sole heir to the throne passed away unexpectedly, so King Edward I of England (known as \"Longshanks\", a nickname he came up with himself while bragging about the size of his dong) decided he&rsquo;d settle the dispute by just appointing himself King of Scotland and stabbing anyone who didn&rsquo;t approve of his decision.&nbsp; This didn&rsquo;t sit too well with the Scottish nobility however, so they took up arms against the English ruler.&nbsp; Edward Longshanks responded by invading Scotland, slaughtering the inhabitants of the town of Berwick, kicking the Scottish Army&rsquo;s ass at the Battle of Dunbar, arresting the King, and stealing the Stone of Destiny (a giant fucking rock that served as the symbol of Scottish royalty) from its home in the castle at Scone.&nbsp; Before returning to England with the Stone of Destiny and the now-deposed King, Edward made sure to place his men and officers in command of every important thing in all of Scotland, because he was a total fucking dickhead.</p>\r\n<p>Now around this time William Wallace was already known as a notorious outlaw who was wanted by the authorities for killing the Governor of Dundee, a jackass tyrant who got what he deserved when he tried to fuck with Clan Wallace.&nbsp; One day, not long after the English had completed their ass-raping of Scotland, Wallace was out drinking beer and fishing in the town of Lanark.&nbsp; On his way home, he ran into five drunk-ass bastard English soldiers who demanded that Wallace hand over his entire day&rsquo;s catch, probably because they&rsquo;d been smoking hash all day and had a serious case of the munchies.&nbsp; Wallace offered to give them half of his haul, but they told him that if he didn&rsquo;t fork over the goddamned trout then they would have him executed for treason.&nbsp; He responded by bashing one of the motherfuckers in the face with his fishing pole, stealing the dude&rsquo;s sword, using it to hack all five men to pieces, and then using those pieces as bait to catch even larger fish.&nbsp; He then ran back to town and hid at his girlfriend&rsquo;s place.&nbsp; When the Sherriff came by to arrest Wallace, his girlfriend said she had no fucking clue where he was. Since &ldquo;aiding and abetting&rdquo; was a much bigger deal back then than it is today, the Sherriff had Wallace&rsquo;s girlfriend executed on the spot.</p>\r\n<p>Mistake.</p>\r\n<p>Wallace went into an insane berserker rage, killed the Sherriff, dismembered his corpse, and slaughtered the entire English garrison at Lanark with his dick.&nbsp; From there he began his crusade against the English, recruiting a band of badass guerilla warriors as he traveled across the Scottish countryside, fighting for freedom from oppression and assholishness everywhere.&nbsp; At Loudoun Hill, Wallace&rsquo;s group of 50 dudes ambushed a 200-man English cavalry detachment, wiping them out to a man and killing General Fenwick, the man allegedly responsible for the death of Wallace&rsquo;s father.&nbsp; At Ardrossian Castle, Wallace&rsquo;s small group managed to capture a heavily-fortified, well-defended English stronghold by luring the garrison out from behind the safety of the castle walls, ambushing them, and caving their brains in with tire irons.&nbsp; News of Wallace&rsquo;s victories inspired the Scottish people and got everyone super pumped up to fight against English oppression and rise up in support of their freedom.&nbsp; Commoners, outlaws, and peasants flocked across the countryside to join his ranks, and before long William Wallace had a sizeable army of hardcore crazy motherfuckers ready to tear the English limb from limb.&nbsp; They besieged and captured several English strongholds across Scotland, including the historical seat of power at Scone Castle, and managed to force the enemy South of the Forth, out of the heart of their homeland.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/wallace1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Now Edward Longshanks obviously got really ripshit pissed that his serious hardcore generals couldn&rsquo;t quell this outlaw and his band of revolutionaries, so he had a bunch of his officers executed Darth Vader-style, ordering the survivors to launch a full-scale attack on Wallace&rsquo;s makeshift army of soccer hooligans.&nbsp; At the Battle of Stirling Bridge, a strong, well-equipped, well-trained, professional English Army drew up battle lines against William Wallace&rsquo;s forces.&nbsp; Outnumbered over five to one and hopelessly outgunned, Wallace had a plan.&nbsp; He waited for the English to cross the narrow bridge before falling upon them from all sides like a pack of rabid hell wolves attacking an unconscious man made completely out of beef sirloin.&nbsp; As the English attempted to bring their heavy cavalry across the river, Wallace had one of his men destroy the bridge, sending several hundred knights down into the river below and cutting off the English vanguard&rsquo;s only escape route.&nbsp; The English force was completely routed.&nbsp; As a tribute to his victory, Wallace had a scabbard made out of the dried skin of the slain English Commander, which is kind of morbid.</p>\r\n<p>With the English Army in disarray, fleeing like those stupid ghosts after Pac-Man eats a power pill, Wallace pressed the attack, ready to chomp down on them with his giant yellow jaws of fury while he still had the advantage.&nbsp; He launched a campaign across the border into Northumberland, raiding, pillaging, and burning English settlements wherever he could find them, living for revenge like he was the fucking&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/punisher.html\">Punisher</a>.&nbsp; He pushed as far south as Cockermouth, which means very little to me in terms of Geography, but I decided to mention it because Cockermouth is probably the greatest name for a city in the entire history of the world.&nbsp; After several months of kicking ass, capturing supplies, and beating up on the already-defeated English army, Wallace returned to Scotland with incredibly quantities of booty and fame, which in turn probably helped him get incredible quantities of booty from hot babes all over the place, some of whom may have let him cockermouth.&nbsp; For his actions in kicking English asses, he was knighted by Robert the Bruce and given the prestigious title, \"Guardian of Scotland and Leader of its Armies\".</p>\r\n<p>Unfortunately, the rock star party had to end sometime, and King Edward had finally had enough of Scotland&rsquo;s bullshit.&nbsp; He ended the war he was currently fighting in France and committed all of his forces to battling the rebellion.&nbsp; In 1298, an army of 30,000 Englishmen crossed the border to teach Wallace a lesson.&nbsp; The two forces met up at the Battle of Falkirk, where 6,000 Scotsmen made a desperate stand against the invaders despite the fact that the odds were worse than the male-female ratio at a&nbsp;<em>Magic:&nbsp; The Gathering</em>&nbsp;tournament.&nbsp; Unfortunately, Wallace was abandoned by his cavalry (which, unbeknownst to him, was comprised almost entirely Scottish nobles who had been bought off by the English crown), and his remaining infantry couldn&rsquo;t stand up the massive numbers of longbowmen and heavy cavalry fielded by the English.&nbsp; Wallace lost the battle, but during the fierce fighting he did manage to kill the master of the English Knights Templar in single combat, which is fucking rad.&nbsp; Even though they suffered a bitter defeat on the field however, the Scots still managed to inflict such significant casualties against the English that they could not continue their invasion.</p>\r\n<p>Following the defeat at Falkirk, Wallace resigned his title as Guardian, relinquishing it to fellow badass Robert the Bruce, and headed off to France to try and convince the King to help aid Scotland in her war for independence.&nbsp; During his trip Wallace had lots of crazy adventures, like when his ship went up against the notorious pirate Richard Longoville, also known as The Red Reaver.&nbsp; Wallace personally kicked Longoville&rsquo;s ass in hand-to-hand combat and threw him in prison, but then released him on the condition that he would only continue to attack English vessels and leave the Scots alone.&nbsp; Despite doing lots of cool shit like bench-pressing the Eiffel Tower and eating a baguette, Wallace&rsquo;s mission to France proved to be unsuccessful, and around 1300 Wallace returned home to Scotland.</p>\r\n<p>Unfortunately, at this point William Wallace was fighting a losing battle.&nbsp; Edward of England had paid off many Scottish noblemen, convincing them to pledge fealty to the English crown, and Wallace found himself alone in his struggle.&nbsp; He continued his hit-and-run fighting with a great degree of success, but ultimately he never again managed to put together a force capable of going toe-to-toe with the English.&nbsp; Scotland finally fell completely under English control in 1305.&nbsp; Only Wallace and his band of outlaw rebels remained.&nbsp; Eventually, Wallace was betrayed by his own men, who handed him over to Edward in exchange for some cash and a high five.&nbsp; Wallace was convicted of treason, and the English dragged him naked through the streets, cut off his balls, beheaded him, and dismembered his corpse.&nbsp; Now that&rsquo;s a shitty way to go.</p>\r\n<p>William Wallace&rsquo;s legacy would live on, however, and his death would inspire the Scots to once again take up arms for their freedom.&nbsp; The First Scottish War of Independence would continue, and would ultimately result in Robert the Bruce achieving victory at the Battle of Brannockburn in 1314, finally securing independence for the people of Scotland.</p>\r\n<p>Not only was William Wallace a badass in the sense that he could beat the fucking hell out of you without even batting an eye, but to this day he stands as an enduring national hero to the Scottish people.&nbsp; He fought for his country and for his freedom, not for riches, wealth, or power like some other douchebags out there.&nbsp; He was tough, he was a capable and intelligent commander, he was passionate about killing English people, and he inspired a nation to battle injustice and tyranny despite incredible odds.&nbsp; And thanks to him, they were successful.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/wallace2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Links:</span><br /><br /><a href=\"http://www.electricscotland.com/history/articles/william_wallace.htm\" target=\"blank\">Sir William Wallace</a><br /><br /><a href=\"http://www.wallace-manandmyth.org/\" target=\"blank\">Wallace:&nbsp; Man and Myth</a></p>','2008-01-04','66204315068','wallace.jpg','wallace - Copy.jpg','William Wallace','The pioneer of the quest for Scottish independence, Wallace whipped out his six foot claymore and equivalently sized dick to fight the English.','\"Tell your commander that we are not here to make peace, but to do battle to defend ourselves and liberate our kingdom.\"'),('Elliot Stabler','October 20, 1966','N/A','New York, NY, USA','Fictional American Lawman','<p>Detective Elliot Stabler of Manhattan&rsquo;s Special Victims Unit is the kind of guy you love to have on your side.&nbsp; The badass ex-Marine could just have easily been a hardcore insane sociopath as a police officer, but luckily he decided to harness his getting-pissed powers for good.&nbsp; Now his idea of a perfect afternoon revolves around tackling wife abusers, swearing at child pornographers, and smashing Bill Goldberg in the back of the head with a fire extinguisher.</p>\r\n<p>The thing about Elliot is that he spends all day dealing with the worst kind of bastard criminals &ndash; pedophiles, rapists, murders, child molesters &ndash; and he seems to take everything personally.&nbsp; He&rsquo;s super intense, and doesn&rsquo;t fuck around for a second when it comes to taking some jackass d-bag kidnapper, shooting him in the shoulder, face-planting him into the asphalt and shipping him off to Federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison.&nbsp; His anger management issues make him that much more dangerous, because you just never know when he&rsquo;s going to fucking flip out, bar the doors of the interrogation room and go all CIA on a suspect&rsquo;s ass to get a confession.&nbsp; And when it comes to the good cop, bad cop stuff, he&rsquo;s ALWAYS the bad cop.&nbsp; He fucking just leans up against the wall, only speaks to insult the suspects, and shows them nothing but the utter contempt that they deserve at all times.&nbsp; Usually those fuckers sing like birds to Detective Benson simply because they&rsquo;re terrified of being left alone in a room with this dude.&nbsp; And it&rsquo;s not just idle talk either - he just completely flips his lid like a ninja sometimes and beat the ever-loving shit out of these scumbag criminals, because nobody fucking comes between Elliot Stabler and his righteous quest to put dirtball molesters behind bars.&nbsp; He&rsquo;s good at it too &ndash; that one time that he was being sued for some &ldquo;excessive force&rdquo; bullshit, the assistant district attorney mentioned that he has something like a 97 percent closure rate on all of his cases.&nbsp; As a reference point, most people don&rsquo;t have a ninety-seven percent closure rate when it comes to tying their fucking shoes.&nbsp; Also, if I had to guess, the three percent failure rate probably all stems from confessions that Elliot beat out of suspects and which were thrown out in court.</p>\r\n<p>Now the ultimate duality of Elliot Stabler is that he&rsquo;s also great at dealing with the victims of these horrible crimes.&nbsp; You&rsquo;d think that he was all about shooting perverts in the balls and bodyslamming perps through coffee tables, and that he couldn&rsquo;t possibly be a warm and understanding individual, but when it&rsquo;s time to get the victim&rsquo;s side of the story Elliot shows compassion for their plight and always makes them feel comfortable enough to open up and give him some clues and shit.&nbsp; You see him deal with these people and you&rsquo;re all thinking to yourself, &ldquo;wow, Elliot is really just a nice guy,&rdquo; and then two minutes later he&rsquo;s clubbing a rapist over the head with a fireplace poker and throwing him off a fire escape into a dumpster.</p>\r\n<p>You can&rsquo;t stop this guy either.&nbsp; He&rsquo;s been shot, stabbed, poisoned, blown up, thrown through plate glass windows and punched in the face countless times, but his reaction is always the same &ndash; he shows no pain, dusts himself off, refuses medical treatment, and gets right back to fucking work.&nbsp; He&rsquo;ll be bleeding out of ten places on his body, sitting at his desk filling out paperwork while everyone looks at him like he&rsquo;s nuts.&nbsp; One time some jackass teenager stabbed him in the chest with a pen, and his first response was to get pissed and jack the kid right in the fucking mouth.&nbsp; The same can be said for his work ethic&hellip; once Elliot&rsquo;s on the case, he refuses to back down for any reason, even when his own Captain is like, &ldquo;goddamn it Elliot I&rsquo;m ordering you to back down!&rdquo;.&nbsp; If he has to &ldquo;bend the rules&rdquo; or &ldquo;violate your human rights&rdquo; a little bit to get some vital evidence to solve a rape or find a missing kid, he won&rsquo;t even hesitate to go that extra mile.&nbsp; When he&rsquo;s interrogating someone and they try to fuck with him, he smolders with rage and intimidates the hell out of them until they crack like a fucking egg.&nbsp; Stonewalling him only makes him even more pissed off.</p>\r\n<p>Now a good detective is only as good the men and women who are watching his back, and it doesn&rsquo;t get much better than SVU.&nbsp; He&rsquo;s got a&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/stabler-hargitay.jpg\">hot babe</a>, a&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/stabler-munch.jpg\">creepy conspiracy theorist</a>, and&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/stabler-icet1.jpg\">Ice</a>&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/stabler-icet2.jpg\">Mothafuckin&rsquo; T</a>.&nbsp; I mean holy shit, I think I&rsquo;d have a good chance of taking down Godzilla in an illegal Russian underground slap-fight if I knew Ice-T was backing my shit up.</p>\r\n<p>Speaking of his squad, Elliot fills another interesting role in that he provides help to the younger officer when they need it, and is always willing to help out with other detectives&rsquo; investigations when they run out of leads and shit.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s not too often that you see the &ldquo;loose cannon&rdquo; also function as the &ldquo;wise veteran&rdquo;, but Elliot Stabler apparently doesn&rsquo;t subscribe to your bullshit archetypes.&nbsp; He does whatever he wants, whenever he wants, to whomever he wants, at all times.&nbsp; He&rsquo;s a badass, tough cop who takes no bullshit, confronts the worst criminal elements our society has to offer, and pummels the living fuck out of them.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/stabler1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Links:</span><br /><br /><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliot_Stabler\" target=\"blank\">Wikipedia</a></p>','2007-12-21','36360716903','stabler_new.jpg','stabler_new - Copy.jpg','Elliot Stabler','The fictional cop that every real cop should look up to.','\"You know that year you\'re currently serving?  Add twenty-five, and choke on it.\"'),('Hattori Hanz&#333;','1542','December 23, 1596','Mikawa Province, Japan','16th-century Japanese Spy','<p>Hanzo Hattori was the leader of the Iga Ninja Clan in 16th Century Japan and is considered by many to be the most badass ninja to ever live.&nbsp; His exploits have become the thing of legend in his native land, and all who study the arts of Ninjitsu and Kicking Ass look to Hanzo as the shining example of what it means to be totally fucking awesome.</p>\r\n<p>Hanzo Hattori began his training by climbing a mountain at the age of eight and seeking instruction from the most hardcore ninja masters in all of Japan.&nbsp; He busted his nuts every single day for four years, practicing insane ninja skills like jumping, flying, and stabbing, finally being declared a full-on ninja at age twelve.&nbsp; By the time he was sixteen, he had already proven himself as the ultimate badass, serving in battles for the Oda Clan, where he earned the nicknames, &ldquo;Hanzo the Ghost&rdquo;, and &ldquo;Devil Hanzo&rdquo;, probably because he would sneak around undetected and then nail motherfuckers in the face with a flying side kick when they least expected it.&nbsp; Then he&rsquo;d drop a smoke bomb and vanish into the night, only to re-appear moments later, chopping off some jerk&rsquo;s head and doing backflips for no reason at all.</p>\r\n<p>Hanzo began to make a name for himself while in the service of a dude named Tokugawa Ieyasu, who was a General in the Oda Clan.&nbsp; Tokugawa would eventually go on to kick the asses of everyone in Feudal Japan, unify the country&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/qin.html\">Qin Shi Huangdi</a>-style and earn the esteemed title of Shogun, so Hanzo could tell everyone he knew Ieyasu &ldquo;back in the day&rdquo;, and everyone would know he was O.G.&nbsp; Hanzo fought valiantly at the Battle of Anagawa in 1570, where Tokugawa&rsquo;s men slogged through some brutal hand-to-hand combat in the middle of a river, and later at the Battle of Mikatagahara in 1572, where Devil Hanzo and his ninja motherfuckers kicked asses despite being outnumbered four to one by an army of hardcore samurai.&nbsp; After the first day of fighting Tokugawa\'s had been overwhelmed, and the enemy was preparing to make their final assault on the Oda Clan positions when Hanzo and his ninjas launched a balls-out night raid against the enemy\'s main camp, lopping off heads, hitting people in the face with nunchucks, hurling ninja stars all over thep lace, causing disorder and chaos, and forcing the withdrawl of the invading armies.</p>\r\n<p>Now you don&rsquo;t become the most legendary ninja in history by not being fucking awesome.&nbsp; Hanzo is reputed to have possessed otherworldly skills, and supposedly could teleport, turn invisible, and make shit explode just by swearing at it.&nbsp; He could reportedly hold his breath underwater for like two days straight, and his martial arts moves were so sweet that it made people barf all over their kimonos (in a good way).&nbsp; His Ninja Clan, the &ldquo;Men of Iga&rdquo;, were recruited to spy on the enemies of Tokugawa, as well as perform assassinations, reconnaissance, sabotage, demolitions, kidnappings, and other forms of espionage black ops shit, sort of like the Navy SEALS, only with more stabbing and climbing and fewer Southern accents.&nbsp; He had ninja operatives working undercover as ronin warriors in the castles of many of the Tokugawa&rsquo;s enemies, and his spies were more omnipresent than the fucking CIA and the KGB smashed together into one giant Voltron of Secrecy.&nbsp; Hanzo Hattori and his Iga Ninjas were so effective that many people credit much of Tokugawa&rsquo;s rise to power on his successful deployment of crazy ninja badasses throughout the country and his utilization of their superhuman skills.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/hanzo1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Hanzo the Ghost would pull off his most famous accomplishment in 1582, while he was out kicking asses with Tokugawa Ieyasu in the Osaka Prefecture.&nbsp; Hanzo had just gotten finished executing an unprecedented one hundred fifty-eight hit combo on some jackass rival ninja master, culminating with a&nbsp;<em>Shoruken</em>&nbsp;Dragon Punch that made his opponent\'s head explode into a geyser of blood, when all of a sudden word came down that the warlord Akechi Mitsuhide had just betrayed and assassinated his master, Oda Nobunaga.&nbsp; Since Nobunaga was the leader of Tokugawa&rsquo;s Clan, it meant that shit was about to get really fucking hairy for the future shogun in a hurry.&nbsp; They knew Akechi was going put up security checkpoints and send out roving bands of samurai looking to decapitate Tokugawa and bury his head in a drainage ditch somewhere, and now he appeared to be trapped, alone, and surrounded, with a few hundred miles separating him from his castle in Mikawa Prefecture.</p>\r\n<p>Hanzo somersaulted into action like the motherfucking ball-busting ninja that he was, telling Tokugawa to stay back and let the Iga Clan handle shit.&nbsp; He snuck into the nearby Koga and Iga Prefectures, climbed the highest mountain he could find, and started wailing a bitchin&rsquo; guitar solo so loud, flaming, and technically challenging that it started setting off explosions and fireworks in the sky above him.&nbsp; When nearby ninjas saw how much ass Hanzo was kicking, they all met up with him and formed an insane entourage of 300 Master Ninjas all prepared to escort Tokugawa to safety or die trying.&nbsp; Using diplomacy, secrecy, advanced reconnaissance and the occasional jump-spinning 360-degree roundhouse kick, Hanzo and his ninja bodyguards were able to successfully escort Tokugawa to the safety of Mikawa.&nbsp; Tokugawa was so impressed by this display of bravery and badassitude that he kept two hundred of the ninjas on his payroll, officially forming the &ldquo;Men of Iga&rdquo;, under the command of Hanzo Hattori.&nbsp; They were assigned the critical duty of protecting the West Gate of Edo Castle &ndash; the gate most susceptible to a surprise attack by enemy forces.&nbsp; Tokugawa knew that if shit was going to go down, he wanted Hanzo Hattori and his Goddamned Ninja Army to be the ones on the front lines.&nbsp; The West entrance to Edo was renamed Hanzo-Mon, and to this day &ldquo;Hanzo&rsquo;s Gate&rdquo; still stands proudly, just daring motherfuckers to mess with it.</p>\r\n<p>Hanzo served bravely until 1590 when he died valiantly in battle at age fifty-five.&nbsp; He had been chasing down a rival ninja clan, kicking everyone&rsquo;s ass, when he ran into a trap and was burned to death by flaming oil, going out in a blaze of glory (nyuk nyuk) and probably looking awesome even in death.&nbsp; To this day Hanzo is such a legendary, popular figure in Japan that characters bearing his name appear in all sorts of games, television shows, and other shit, and it&rsquo;s a well-known fact that two-thirds of all Japanese Ninja Cartoons feature at least one character called Hanzo Hattori.&nbsp; Of course, there were like three different dudes from history known as Hanzo Hattori (I only covered the most well-known one here), but whatever.&nbsp; Most famously he was played by ultimate badass Sonny Chiba in the show &ldquo;Shadow Warriors&rdquo;, where Hanzo was depicted as the no-bullshit asskicker he was in real life, spending his free time slicing evil ninjas in half, kicking ronins in the teeth, and getting babes to take their shirts off.&nbsp; Chiba even reprised the role for the movie&nbsp;<em>Kill Bill</em>, when his badass skills and Hanzo Steel were needed to help&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/thebride.html\">The Bride</a>&nbsp;exact brutal revenge on her mortal enemy, and dismember an entire gang of wannabe Yakuza dumbasses in the process.</p>\r\n<p>Another thing to keep in mind when discussing the badassitude of Hanzo Hattori is that we probably don&rsquo;t know half of the awesome shit he did in his lifetime, because most if it was behind-closed-doors cloak-and-dagger type insanity.&nbsp; Like the sort of Black Ops shit that never gets declassified because it\'s too hardcore.&nbsp; I mean, for all we know he could have single-handedly wiped out an entire clan of ninjas like Ryu Hayabasa or Shinobi, but there just isn&rsquo;t any historical record of it because as far as Tokugawa was concerned it never happened.&nbsp; Mission Impossible type shit &ndash; &ldquo;if you are caught or captured we will disavow any knowledge of your actions.&rdquo;&nbsp; He&rsquo;s like&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/quarrelsome.html\">Wolf the Quarrelsome</a>&nbsp;- we don&rsquo;t know everything he was involved in, but what we do know about him is totally badassed.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/hanzo2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Links:</span><br /><br /><a href=\"http://www.piratesversusninjas.net/hattorihanzo.html\" target=\"blank\">Pirates Versus Ninjas</a><br /><br /><a href=\"http://www.skhquest.com/articles/HanzoHattori.php\" target=\"blank\">Stephen K. Hayes Bio</a><br /><br /><a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMqnO_36mEY&amp;feature=related\" target=\"blank\">Clip of Hanzo Kicking Ass in \"Shadow Warriors\"</a></p>','2007-12-14','49512237213','hanzo_new.jpg','hanzo_new - Copy.jpg','Hanzo Hattori','The father of all ninjas.',''),('Xie Jinyuan','April 26, 1905','April 24, 1941','Jiaoling County, Guangzhou, China','20th-century Chinese Soldier','<p>In October 1937, China was in some seriously deep shit.&nbsp; The Imperial Japanese Army had invaded Manchuria back in 1931, but in July of \'37 they declared war and immediately proceeded to fucking annihilate everything they came across, turning the poorly-trained and under-equipped Chinese National Army into target practice and conquering anything that happened to pass into their line-of-sight.&nbsp; It was in the midst of what was turning out to be one of the most epic ass-beatings in the history of warfare that the insane actions of a single group of heroes under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Xie Jinyuan found a way to inspire badassitude in their countrymen and give the Japanese invasion forces a giant swinging cock-slap right in their collective faces.</p>\r\n<p>As I mentioned like two sentences ago, the Chinese Army had spent roughly two months getting their faces rocked off by the unstoppable juggernaut that was the Japanese war machine as it tore through the countryside crushing asses like Grave Digger.&nbsp; It wasn&rsquo;t until 6 August that the Chinese commanders finally located their balls and decided to make a stand and defend the critical port city of Shanghai from the invaders.&nbsp; Through several weeks of hardcore bitter fighting that turned the majority of the city into a raging inferno of suck, the relentless Japanese assault busted through the Chinese lines like the Kool-Aid Man, capturing several crucial areas and putting the Chinese in an indefensible position in the city.&nbsp; Knowing that they were fucked worse than an over-the-hill porn star, Chinese high command ordered a complete withdrawal of all surviving civilian and military personnel still positioned in Shanghai.&nbsp; Only a small element of the badass Chinese 88th Infantry Division would be left behind to cover the retreat and slow down the Japanese Army so as many people could be evacuated as possible.</p>\r\n<p>Colonel Xie Jinyuan ordered his battalion to fall back to the large, well-equipped six-story concrete warehouse that had been serving as Division HQ during the Battle of Shanghai.&nbsp; The area was stocked with equipment and supplies and was backed up against the Suzhou River, and since the other side of the river was a British-controlled Neutral Zone, Xie knew that he would only have to worry about defending the Sihang Warehouse from attacks on three sides.&nbsp; As his men began to trickle in, he ordered all the walls and windows reinforced with sandbags, he strategically positioned his guns throughout the structure, and he scoured nearby buildings for whatever food, medical supplies and ammunition as his men could carry.&nbsp; He cleared out any nearby structures that the Japanese soldiers could have used for cover, setting up choke points and kill zones wherever he could.&nbsp; The fortifications that could not be demolished were rigged with explosives and hilarious whoopee cushions.</p>\r\n<p>On 27 October, the Japanese moved into the areas surrounding the warehouse and began their attempts to capture the stronghold.&nbsp; Hardcore balls-out fighting had already reduced Xie&rsquo;s 800-man battalion down to around 450 men, but only 414 soldiers had actually made their way to the warehouse by the time the shit hit the fan for serious.&nbsp; His outfit was a mixture of grizzled old veterans weary from three months of near-constant fighting, and green, inexperienced recruits who could barely tell the difference between the trigger and the safety selector on their rifles.&nbsp; He had no heavy weapons, no anti-tank or anti-air guns, and no reinforcements, and now he was locked in a shitty warehouse, completely fucking surrounded by the elite Japanese 3rd Division &ndash; twenty thousand men with artillery, mortars and more armored vehicles than one of those shitty Japanese Mecha animes where blue-haired chicks fly around outer space in rocket ships shaped like giant phalluses.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/xie2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br />Sihang Warehouse, seen here getting fucked up with bullets and explosions.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>The Japanese immediately went on a full-on charge, eager to take the last bastion of Chinese control in the city and reduce it to firewood, but as they tried to approach the building they ran into a wall of fucking machine gun bullets, many of which managed to infect the enemy with severe cases of death.&nbsp; At one point the Japanese managed to set fire to the warehouse&rsquo;s ammunition stores, but luckily Xie&rsquo;s men were able to get the blaze extinguished before the gunpowder caught fire and turned the warehouse into a goddamned space shuttle.&nbsp; During the night the Chinese rebuilt their fortifications, and Xie attempted to rally his troops&rsquo; morale in the face of a grim situation.&nbsp; On the awesome side, the British troops across the river took an interest in the shitstorm that was going down at the warehouse and snuck over during the night to give the Chinese troops some extra supplies and evacuate wounded men.</p>\r\n<p>The next day the Japanese continued pouring fire into the building, but after several massive assaults they were still unable to penetrate Xie&rsquo;s defenses.&nbsp; At this point the citizens of Shanghai were digging the fighting spirit of the 88thDivision and the banks of the British side of the river became crowded with spectators cheering on the defenders.&nbsp; They shouted encouragement to the men, sang pump-up music, smuggled materials and supplies into the fortress and even went so far as to write out Japanese troop movements on giant posters so Xie could see what the fuck was going on.&nbsp; I picture the scene kind of like looking like the crowd at WWE Raw or some shit.&nbsp; During the night, a large Chinese National Flag was brought to the defenders, and when dawn came up on the 29th it was flying proudly above the warehouse, serving as an inspiration to the denizens of the war-torn city and getting everyone who saw it super psyched up to kick some Japanese ass.</p>\r\n<p>Now this really pissed off the Imperial 3rd Division, and they spent the next three days and nights fucking incessantly pummeling the shit out of the warehouse with everything from mortars to artillery to giant goat-launching catapults.&nbsp; As Xie had predicted, the enemy commanders didn&rsquo;t dare attack the warehouse with air or naval bombardments out of fear of hitting the British concessions (and bringing the wrath of the Almighty Churchill on Japan), but pretty much anything else the Japanese could get their hands on was launched at the stronghold in a never-ending barrage of grenades, explosives, ninja stars and paper footballs.&nbsp; Endless waves of Imperial Stormtroopers, armored cars and tanks charged the defensive positions, and the Japanese were even able to break through into the warehouse and scale the structure&rsquo;s walls a couple of times, but brutal hand-to-hand fighting proved that the Chinese Kung Fu was superior and the 3rd Division was kept at bay.&nbsp; Xie himself was mentioned as getting in on the action and choking some dude to death with his bare hands in the time that he wasn&rsquo;t surveying the situation, encouraging his men, or firing his rifle at the onrushing hordes.&nbsp; At night, the Japanese would turn giant floodlights on to cover their troop movements and blind the Chinese defenders, and they even once tried to dig a tunnel underneath the building, but nothing was successful.&nbsp; Sihang Warehouse was locked up tighter than a Catholic School prom date.</p>\r\n<p>Finally, after four days of constant fighting, and with the evacuation of Shanghai nearly complete, Xie was ordered to fall back and retreat to the British concession on the morning of 1 November.&nbsp; Originally he refused, saying he would fight the Japanese to the last man, but his superiors managed to convince him that getting his entire command killed for no reason didn&rsquo;t really make a whole lot of sense so he began to make arrangements for the withdrawal.&nbsp; Twenty-seven of his men were too fucked up to evacuate, so Xie set them up with heavy machine guns and had them provide covering fire while the 376 survivors limped across the bridge to safety.&nbsp; For bullshit political reasons the Brits arrested the defenders and put them in a POW camp where they would stay imprisoned for three years, but Xie Jinyuan had become a national hero overnight, and during his entire tenure in the camp people from across China would flock to meet him.&nbsp; When the collaborationist Chinese government finally decided he was becoming too influential a figure, Xie was assassinated by traitors.&nbsp; His funeral was attended by over on hundred thousand mourners.</p>\r\n<p>Xie Jinyuan is fucking badass as shit for taking a handful of inexperienced soldiers and turning them into a fighting force capable of holding back the advance of tens of thousands of Japanese soldiers, covering the retreat of the bulk of the Chinese National Army, and greatly contributing to the safe evacuation of five hundred thousand civilians from Shanghai.&nbsp; Considering that the Imperial Army slaughtered over three hundred thousand civilians after they captured Nanjing in December 1937, Xie&rsquo;s actions probably saved many innocent lives as well.&nbsp; His valiant stand also served to bolster the fighting spirit of the resistance movement, proving to the Chinese people that the Japanese were not invincible, and it also proved to the British that the Chinese were willing to fight for their independence &ndash; a realization that would lead to a great deal of financial and military aid to the Chinese government.&nbsp; To this day, the story of the &ldquo;800 Heroes&rdquo; (Xie was feeding a campaign of misinformation and consistently reported the size of his force at 800 to make the Japanese believe that they were facing a much larger force) is a national legend among the people of China and Taiwan, and Xie Jinyuan is remembered by ally and enemy alike as being a total badass.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/xie3.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br />Colonel Xie looking pimp.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Links:</span><br /><br /><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sihang_Warehouse\" target=\"blank\">Defense of Sihang Warehouse</a><br /><br /><a href=\"http://www.cctv.com/lm/176/71/88857.html\" target=\"blank\">CCTV Article on Xie Jinyuan</a>&nbsp;(The English translation here is a pretty rough)</p>','2007-12-07','9806548369','xie1.jpg','xie1 - Copy.jpg','Xie Jinyuan','No nonsense officer during the Battle of Shanghai who didn\'t take shit from anyone. Especially the Japanese.','\"We will fight the enemy with our last bullet, and will punish him with our last drop of blood.  Defend to the death.\"'),('William Barret Travis','August 1, 1809','March 6, 1836','Saluda County, SC, USA','19th-century American Soldier','<p>William Barret Travis was born 8 August 1809 in South Carolina, but spend most of his youth living in motherfucking&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/spartans.html\">Sparta</a>.&nbsp; While I know Sparta, Alabama probably isn&rsquo;t exactly the second coming of&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=caaQ4VT9GY8&amp;feature=related\">Cake Town</a>, filled with spear-hurling, beard-wearing angry guys and their Six-Pack Abs of Destruction hanging out with coked-up topless babes, it still produced a hardcore badass in Travis, who served as a Lieutenant in the local chapter of the Alabama Militia while also somehow finding a way to work as a lawyer, teacher and newspaper editor in his spare time.&nbsp; I personally feel exhausted after a grueling eight hours of sitting at a desk browsing the Internet, but whatever.&nbsp; When he was nineteen, the young officer married a 16 year-old student of his (scandalous), but it turned out that the bitch apparently just wanted better grades in English Literature or some shit because a year later the couple went on the Maury Povitch show and a paternity test revealed that she was cheating on him and he in fact was NOT the father of her unborn daughter.&nbsp; Instead of breaking down and crying on Maury&rsquo;s shoulder like some of those wusses that appear on that bastion of daytime human tragedy, Travis immediately went out, found his wife&rsquo;s lover/boyfriend, killed him in a &ldquo;pistols at dawn&rdquo; motherfucking balls-out duel and immediately fled the country for the greener pastures of the then-Mexican state of Tejas.</p>\r\n<p>While living it up on the lam, Travis tried to continue his work as a lawyer and militiaman, but chilling in Texas in the 1830&rsquo;s was a total pain in the balls because some motherfucker named General Santa Anna had just been elected Presidente-Por-Vida of Mexico and was being a total wanker to everyone for no reason at all, grabbing up executive powers Oliver Cromwell-style.&nbsp; Well Travis wasn&rsquo;t the sort of guy who was going to sit around on his dick like some jackass while his individual freedoms were being oppressed so he went all Thomas Jefferson on their asses, joining the local movement for Texas Independence against those Mexican bastards who were oppressing his freedom to run from a murder charge in the U.S. and live his life in relative peace.&nbsp; The independence movement found a lot of traction with white and Tejano Texans alike, and before long they had a full-fledged backwoods-militia style organization set up to fight for their rights to party.</p>\r\n<p>For the most part, being a part of the Texas Revolution in the early days meant paying his monthly dues, going to meetings every Monday night down at the function room of the local Shoney&rsquo;s and trying to use his hardcore lawyer skillz to rewrite the increasingly-oppressive Mexican constitution, but in 1835 Travis had the first chance to flex his nuts when a Texan named Andrew Briscoe was arrested for being awesome and resisting some unfair tax laws.&nbsp; To protest this bullshit maneuver by Santa Anna&rsquo;s government, Travis raised a 25-man armed militia, commandeered a ship and led an amphibious assault on the prison where Briscoe was being held.&nbsp; In less than an hour Travis&rsquo; men were able to overwhelm the 45 Mexican soldiers garrisoning the fortress, force their surrender, steal their guns and release Briscoe and his cohorts from jail.&nbsp; This brazen display of badassery caught the eye of Texas Revolutionary leader Sam Houston, who immediately appointed Travis to be a cavalry commander of the newly-organized Army of Texas.&nbsp; It also caught the eye of President-General Santa Anna, who wasn&rsquo;t too fond of these jerk Texans fucking up all of his cronies, and shit in Texas started to get out of hand pretty quickly.&nbsp; Before you could say &ldquo;Tuesday Tex-Mex Steak and Nacho Special&rdquo;, the War of Texas Independence was on like a neckbone sandwich.&nbsp; Sam Houston&rsquo;s first orders to the 26 year-old Lieutenant Colonel on 3 February 1836 was to send his troops to reinforce a Mexican stronghold that had recently been captured by a masterful Texan surprise attack &ndash; the mission at San Antonio de B&eacute;xar, better known today as The Alamo.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/travis2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>When Travis arrived at the Alamo, he was greeted by a motley crew of hardcore freedom fighters &ndash; some two hundred Texan, American and Tejano soldiers from multiple backgrounds, ethnicities and nationalities, all unified by the desire to fight against bullshit oppression by any means necessary.&nbsp; Travis had to respect these men&rsquo;s fighting spirit, but it was going to take more than guts and giant brass testicles to make TEH ALAMOZ more heavily defended than one of the fortresses in Blood Gulch.&nbsp; He worked with the fort&rsquo;s commander, Colonel James Neill, to get shit in order, setting up palisades, sandbagging the walls and putting extra cannons, sniper rifles and plasma grenades in strategic locations around the complex, but when Neill had to go home because his pussy hurt and he wasn&rsquo;t feeling well it came down to Travis to complete the fortifications himself.&nbsp; He stocked up on food, trained his men in the art of warfare and (along with fellow Alamo defenders and ultimate badasses Jim Bowie and Davy Crockett) whipped the garrison into a respectable fighting force capable of holding it&rsquo;s own against pretty much whatever the Mexicans could throw against it.</p>\r\n<p>Well it wasn&rsquo;t long before Travis\' men had a chance to prove their worth.&nbsp; The Alamo was a key strategic and logistical fortress within Texas, and Santa Anna was pretty keen on having it under Mexican control and not run by a bunch of Texas rabble.&nbsp; The General perosnally marched out at the head of 6,000 Mexican Regular Infantry, armed with over 20 artillery pieces and encircled the mission in late February.&nbsp; The Mexicans cut off all communications and supplies between the fort and the outside world, besieging the defenders for thirteen days and pelting them with gunfire and Spanish insults.&nbsp; Several times Travis was able to send runners out through enemy lines to appeal to other Texans for help, though no relief would come to the beleagured defenders.&nbsp; The only reinforcements Travis and his men would see was a small group of 32 soldiers who managed to slip through the Mexican lines on March 2nd.</p>\r\n<p>Once word came down that the Alamo was on its own against the entire Mexican Army, everybody was pretty much sure that they were completely boned.&nbsp; They were outnumbered sixty to one, surrounded, hopelessly outgunned, and every day and night for thirteen days Santa Anna&rsquo;s men bombarded the fort with small-arms and cannon fire while blasting &ldquo;No Quarter&rdquo; by Led Zeppelin incessantly, indicating to the defenders that if they continued to resist the Mexicans they would receive no mercy.&nbsp; One day, with morale dwindling, Travis called all of his men out to the courtyard of the facility, unsheathed his sword, and drew a line in the sand.&nbsp; He said any man who wished to fight should cross the line &ndash; anyone who didn&rsquo;t cross was free to make a run for it during the night and save their own hides.&nbsp; Every single man stepped across the line, except for Jim Bowie, who was dying of Typhoid Fever and confined to a stretcher, but he had his men carry him over the line so it&rsquo;s pretty much the same shit.&nbsp; Despite the bleak situation and impending death, Travis somehow managed to keep his men ready for action and pumped up about shooting Mexicans and fighting for their freedom.&nbsp; He raised a flag over the mission that simply read, &ldquo;INDEPENDENCE&rdquo;.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/travis1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<center><span>\"Come on, boys, the Mexicans are upon us, and we\'ll give them Hell.\"</span></center>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Just before dawn on 6 March 1836, Santa Anna raised a blood-red flag, signaling the order to begin the assault and issue no quarter to the defenders.&nbsp; Mexican Infantry began Zerg-rushing the Alamo immediately.&nbsp; Travis saw what was going down, ran to the battlements, raised his sword over his head, fired his badass&nbsp;<em>Doom II</em>-style sawed-off shotgun into the oncoming hordes and rallied his men into battle.&nbsp; He was hit in the side with a gunshot early on in the fighting, but managed to prop himself up against a wall and continue firing on the enemy.&nbsp; Fierce fighting and exemplary bravery by the Texans repelled the first two Mexican assaults on the fortress, but on the third push by Santa Anna&rsquo;s men, they were able to get ladders up on the walls and Mexican Infantry began pouring into the compound.&nbsp; Brutal hand-to-hand fighting ensued, with men using fists, knives, rifle butts, whiskey bottles, bayonets, knee strikes to the groin and pretty much anything they could get their hands on to beat the ever-loving shit out of each other, but it was ultimately a lost cause for Travis and his men.&nbsp; According to an account by US Colonel Willam Gray, the Mexican General Mora entered the fort and saw William Travis sitting propped up against a wall and drew his sword to finish off the half-dead Alamo commander.&nbsp; Travis drew his sword, swung up from his seated position at the same time that Mora dealt his killing blow, and both men simultaneously ran each other through.&nbsp; In less than an hour of fighting, every single Alamo defender had been slain, but they had taken somewhere between 500 and 1,000 of the enemy with them.&nbsp; News of The Alamo&rsquo;s last stand reached Sam Houston by way of some of the women and slaves who were spared from the slaughter, and this display of heroism only served to make the Texans even more pissed off than they already were.&nbsp; The bravery of Travis, Crockett, Bowie, and the other defenders inspired men across Texas to join the Revolutionary Army, and only one month later Sam Houston was able to beat the fuck out of Santa Anna&rsquo;s troops at the Battle of San Jacinto and secure independence for the Republic of Texas.&nbsp; His battle cry, used to inspire troops to victory:&nbsp; Remember the Alamo.</p>\r\n<p>The defense of the Alamo is one of the most badass last stands in history, and Travis should get major props for being the man in charge of the operation, and for his badass actions leading up to and during the battle.&nbsp; Sure, in the 1960 film&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/wayne.html\">John Wayne</a>&nbsp;played Davy Crockett, and Jim Bowie was such a balls-out character with an awesome knife that it&rsquo;s hard not to like him, but William B. Travis was an underrated badass motherfucker who took a group of 180 irregulars and turned them into a tough-as-shit force that held its own against impossible odds and inspired a nation to fight for its liberty.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/travis3.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<table style=\"width: 50%;\" align=\"center\">\r\n<tbody>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td><span><span>\"Travis was seen to hesitate, but not about the death he would choose.&nbsp; He would take a few steps and stop, turning his proud face toward us to discharge his shots; he fought like a true soldier.&nbsp; Finally he died, but he died after having traded his life very dearly.&nbsp; None of his men died with greater heroism, and they all died.&nbsp; Travis behaved as a hero; one must do him justice, for with a handful of men without discipline, he resolved to face men used to war and much superior in numbers, without supplies, with scarce munitions, and against the will of his subordinates.\"<br /></span></span>\r\n<p align=\"center\">- Mexican Colonel Jose Enrique de la Pe&ntilde;a</p>\r\n</td>\r\n</tr>\r\n</tbody>\r\n</table>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Links:</span><br /><br /><a href=\"http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/online/articles/TT/ftr3.html\" target=\"blank\">Biography</a><br /><br /><a href=\"http://www.lone-star.net/mall/texasinfo/alamo-battle.htm\" target=\"blank\">The Battle of the Alamo</a><br /><br /><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Alamo\" target=\"blank\">Wikipedia</a></p>','2007-11-30','90908721673','travis_new.jpg','travis_new - Copy.jpg','William Travis','Fought alongside other badasses like Davy Crockett and James Bowie in the Battle of the Alamo. They were all disappointed to find out that there is no basement in the Alamo.','\"The enemy has demanded a surrender at discretion, otherwise, the garrison are to be put to the sword if the fort is taken.  I have answered the demand with a cannon shot, and our flag still waves proudly from the walls.  I shall never surrender or retreat... I am determined to sustain myself as long as possible and die like a soldier who never forgets what is due to his own honor and that of his country.  Victory or Death.\"\r\n- Lt. Col. William B. Travis\r\n'),('Makoto Nagano','March 30, 1972','N/A','Miyazaki Prefecture, Japan','21st-century Japanese Athlete','<p>If you\'ve never watched an episode of&nbsp;<em>Ninja Warrior</em>&nbsp;before, then let me be the first to tell you that you are seriously missing out on some of the most insane shit that Japanese game shows have to offer, which is a huge fucking deal because insane shit is pretty much Japan\'s specialty these days.&nbsp; If you\'ve never heard of the show I\'ll magnanimously forgive you, simply because it\'s pretty much the only thing on G4TV that\'s even remotely worth watching (except of course for the occasional&nbsp;<em>Arrested Development</em>&nbsp;rerun) and if you\'ve never turned that station on before I completely understand.&nbsp; Anyways, Ninja Warrior a Japanese game show where one hundred contestants from across the globe compete in the most suicidal obstacle course this side of the&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/aggrocrag.html\">Aggro Crag</a>, doing balls-out crap like crossing a set of monkey bars with their teeth, hanging suspended a hundred feet above a pit of giant spikes with nothing more than a tentative grasp on a frayed kite string and doing a bunch of other shit you wouldn\'t see this side of&nbsp;<em>God of War</em>&nbsp;or&nbsp;<em>Prince of Persia</em>, all while this crazy Chairman Kaga motherfucker screams at them, insults their virility and tells the jeering crowd that they have dishonored their families and must be the subject of scorn and ridicule.&nbsp; The demonic four-stage obstacle course from Hell is so evil, heinous and damn-near impossible that over the span of nineteen tournaments and several years on the air only two men have ever completed the entire thing.&nbsp; One of them was Makoto Nagano, a commercial fishing boat captain who as far as I can tell is built out of five and a half feet of solid superhero-caliber adamantium muscle and can perform daring feats of strength and agility that most people technically shouldn\'t even be allowed to dream about.</p>\r\n<p>One thing I dig about this guy is how every time they mention on the show that Nagano was a fishing boat captain the producers cut to some home grainy video of him climbing up to the crow\'s nest of his ship, doing a handstand and then hanging upside down on a rope or some shit just to prove how fucking hard his nuts are.&nbsp; He\'s one of those boat captains that probably spends his long days at sea just&nbsp;<em>wishing</em>&nbsp;that he could be attacked by pirates so that he could flip out and beat their asses with a series of Guile-style backflip front kicks before somersaulting over some sharks, rapelling down a flaming cargo net and punching a hole in the pirate ship with his bare hands.&nbsp; Seriously, the man has more upper body strength than a Mr. Universe contest, but still manages to be agile and quicker on his feet than the opening act of Riverdance.&nbsp; The dude is seriously one shuriken short of being a one-man unstoppable ninja army capable of scaling walls, leaping over moats filled with rabid alligators, climbing upside-down on ropes like Sam Fisher on the Cream and the Clear and then kicking anyone\'s ass without even thinking about it.&nbsp; I mean, this guy goes up against decatheletes, Olympic gold medalists and other hardcore motherfuckers in peak physical condition and his performance on the course makes these guys look like they were runners-up at a Cub Scout Field Day.</p>\r\n<p>Now Nagano also isn\'t just some one-shot flash in the pan motherfucker like Akiyama or some shit either.&nbsp; Not only did Nagano complete the entire obstacle course in the most brazen display of manliness and badassitude this side of a documentary about testosterone and body hair, but he\'s routinely battling through the first couple of stages without even breaking a sweat, reaching the third stage in pretty much every single tournament he\'s ever been in.&nbsp; He holds the speed record for the first and second stages, taking obstacle courses that would make Sylvester Stallone crap his pants and destroying them like they were a poorly-constructed LEGO spaceship put together by a blind third-grader, he can climb up a rope faster than Spider-Man on cocaine, and he\'s capable of not only supporting his entire body weight using only two fingers tentatively clutching a railing an inch and a half wide, but then he can climb thirty feet over a giant gorge on said railing without even blinking.&nbsp; The man is unstoppable.&nbsp; You could run over his legs with a bulldozer and he\'d still find a way to beat the first stage, probably by propelling himself thirty feet in the air using only his arm muscles and soaring the entire length of the course.</p>\r\n<p>I\'ve embedded a clip of Nagano defeating the Ninja Warrior course, purely for your enjoyment.&nbsp; Unfortunately the video quality is about as high-fidelity as a 1970\'s underground snuff film and I couldn\'t find the American version on YouTube, so in the meantime this crappy squint-your-eyes-to-see-anything 64k version will have to satiate your desire for badassitude.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><object width=\"425\" height=\"344\" data=\"http://www.youtube.com/v/oco3lPfokaU&amp;hl=en&amp;fs=1&amp;rel=0\" type=\"application/x-shockwave-flash\"><param name=\"src\" value=\"http://www.youtube.com/v/oco3lPfokaU&amp;hl=en&amp;fs=1&amp;rel=0\" /><param name=\"allowscriptaccess\" value=\"always\" /><param name=\"allowfullscreen\" value=\"true\" /></object></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Links:</span><br /><br /><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Makoto_Nagano\" target=\"blank\">Wikipedia</a></p>','2007-11-23','236134922530','nagano2_new.jpg','nagano2_new - Copy.jpg','Makoto Nagano','This guy is proof that ninjas still exist.',''),('Count Roland','Unknown','August 15, 778','N/A','Medieval French Soldier','<p>Count Roland was the unstoppable champion of the Frankish peoples, the first among the Twelve Peers of Charlemagne, and a legendary medieval hero best known for his insane last stand at the Battle of Roncevaux Pass in the 9th Century CE as depicted in the epic poem&nbsp;<em>The Song of Roland</em>.&nbsp; The nephew of the Emperor Charlemagne (a total fucking badass in his own right), Roland proved throughout his service to the Holy Roman Empire to be the biggest, baddest motherfucker amongst all of the Frankish Paladins, reknowned for his bravery, strength, honor, courage, fighting skill, ability to&nbsp;<em>Detect Evil</em>&nbsp;at will and ability to&nbsp;<em>Remove Fear</em>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<em>Cure Disease</em>&nbsp;once per day.&nbsp; At a Level 15 Paladin he also rode on his Epic Mount, the noble steed Veillantif, a badass warhorse that could exhale black smoke through his nose and trample small children without even blinking.</p>\r\n<p>Around the time of Roland\'s greatest exploits, Charlemagne and his knights had been campaigning in Spain against the Saracen King of Sargossa, some jerk named Marsile.&nbsp; After seven years of hard fighting, Marsile had finally been worn down and negotiated an end to the war.&nbsp; The deal was that if the Franks left Spain, Marsile and his Saracens would convert to Christianity and start hunting for Easter Eggs while singing \"O Tennenbaum\" as loud as possible.&nbsp; Apparently Charlemagne thought this was a sweet deal (he fucking loved Christmas carols) and started to march his army back home.&nbsp; As the Franks crossed the Pyrenees Mountains, they knew that the possibility of an ambush was plausible so Charlemagne placed his Twelve Peers (a brotherhood of twelve paladins known throughout Europe as the greatest warriors alive) in charge of the rearguard, giving them the highly important job of covering the army\'s rear flank.&nbsp; Well right as the rearguard was getting ready to pass through the narrow Roncevaux mountain pass, all of a sudden they were ambushed by a fucking shit-ton of screaming angry Saracen and Basque warriors.&nbsp; It turns out that one of Charlemagne\'s paladins, a dirtbag motherfucker named Ganelon, had sold out to the Saracen King and betrayed the Franks in exchange for giant piles of gold and naked bellydancers.</p>\r\n<p>So all of a sudden the 20,000 men of the Frankish rearguard found themselves staring at over 400,000 really pissed-off dudes ready to hack their fucking brains out with crazy-ass scimitars and ninja stars.&nbsp; Roland didn\'t even give a shit though.&nbsp; His friend Oliver, a fellow member of the Twelve Peers, told Roland that he needed to blow on his horn (a magical instrument called the Oliphant, which was allegedly carved from the horn of a unicorn) and signal for help from the main Frankish force.&nbsp; Roland refused - his badass code of honor forced him to stand and fight, not call for help like some sort of pussy ass damsel in distress.&nbsp; Sure he was outnumbered fifteen-to-one, but he was going to take as many of those motherfuckers with him as he possibly could and he wasn\'t going to send the main body of Charlemagne\'s army running face-first into an unwinnable situation.&nbsp; He gripped his massive Basque-stabbing spear and ordered his men to hold the mountain pass at all costs.</p>\r\n<p>The Saracens and Basques charged head-on into the Frankish knights and all fucking hell broke out pretty much immediately.&nbsp; Hopelessly outnumbered, Roland and his men fought bravely but suffered insurmountable casualties.&nbsp; During the fighting Roland used his spear to stab a Saracen champion off his horse, lift him up in the air, and then chuck his dead body three hundred yards into the ground where he broke his spine in fifteen places.&nbsp; When Roland kicked so much ass that his spear broke into pieces, he drew his legendary sword Durandal (an indestructible blade that once belonged to&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/hector.html\">Hector of Troy</a>&nbsp;and had since been augmented with several relics of Christian Saints) and started whipping fucking asses.&nbsp; He chopped one saracen knight so hard that he split the guy in half from head to groin, so he probably looked kind of like the T-1000 did after&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/connor.html\">Sarah Connor</a>&nbsp;shot him in the balls with a grenade launcher.&nbsp; That\'s a fucking powerful Critical Hit right there.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/roland1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<table style=\"width: 50%;\">\r\n<tbody>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td><span>His steed he spurs, gallops with great effort; he goes, that Count, to strike with all his force.&nbsp; The shield he breaks, the hauberk\'s seam unsews, slices the heart, and shatters up the bones, all of the spine he severs with that blow, and with his spear the soul from body throws.&nbsp; So well he\'s pinned, he shakes in the air that corpse, on his spear\'s hilt he\'s flung it from the horse: So in two halves Aeroth\'s neck he broke.&nbsp; Nor left him yet, they say, but rather spoke:</span>\r\n<p><span>\"Strike on, my lords, with burnished swords and keen; contest each inch your life and death between, that never by us France in shame be steeped. When Charles my lord shall come into this field, Such discipline of Saracens he\'ll see, for one of ours he\'ll find them dead fifteen; he will not fail, but bless us all in peace.\"</span></p>\r\n</td>\r\n</tr>\r\n</tbody>\r\n</table>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Against all odds the knights were able to beat back the initial saracen onslaught, forcing them to fall back and regroup.&nbsp; Roland glanced around and saw only 300 of his men remaining, facing a shitload of saracens&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/spartans.html\">Thermopylae</a>-style.&nbsp; Once again Oliver asked Roland to signal the main force, but he was just like, \"fuck that man, we got these chumps right where we want them.\"&nbsp; Sure he was overconfident, but how badass is it that this guy feels morally obligated to fight out a blaze-of-glory last stand despite being outnumbered a thousand to one?</p>\r\n<p>The second assault on Roncevaux Pass would be just as devastating as the first.&nbsp; In increasingly brutal fighting, several of the Twelve Peers fell in battle.&nbsp; Roland of course was the sort of badass who sought out the saracens that had killed his friends and avenged their deaths in the most bloody ways imaginable, but it still became increasingly obvious that the end was near.&nbsp; Roland finally relented and blew the Oliphant three times - not so much to signal for reinforcements or help, but rather to make sure that Charlemagne came back to give the knights a good Christian burial and to avenge their deaths.&nbsp; In true badass fashion, Roland\'s chief concern wasn\'t dying gloriously on the field of battle, but that was that there was a chance his death might go unavenged.&nbsp; Nice.&nbsp; Anyways, he blows his horn so fucking hard that blood shoots out of his nose and mouth (awesome) like an x-treme medieval death metal rock star.</p>\r\n<p>Seeing that the end was near for the Frankish warriors, the Sargossan King Marsile decided to personally ride into battle and get the kill-shot on Roland since he was only like a few hundred Experience Points short of leveling up.&nbsp; Now Marsile was a badass motherfucker himself, and he made short work of three of the elite Frankish Paladins, dropping them with Force Lighting and&nbsp;<em>Street Fighter</em>-style Hadouken fireballs.&nbsp; This only made Roland&nbsp;<em>more pissed</em>, so he ran up to Marsile and chopped his fucking hand off like Darth Vader.&nbsp; Marsile ran off clutching his hand like a little one-armed bitch so his son Prince Jurfleau immediately ran up to avenge his father.&nbsp; Roland glanced over his shoulder at the charging Prince, gave him a side kick right in his solar plexus and then decapitated him with one swing of Durandal.&nbsp; The sight of their rulers being fucking manhandled by this badass insane bloodlusted knight broke the morale of the saracen warriors, then they fell back once again to regroup.</p>\r\n<p>So the saracen and basque warriors once again ceded the field to Roland and his men, though there wasn\'t much fight left in the Frankish rearguard.&nbsp; Roland looked over the battlefield and saw the ground littered with blood, bodies from both sides, and all manner of severed appendages.&nbsp; Only he and the Archbishop Turpin were left standing, and both had been mortally wounded during the battle.&nbsp; Oliphant was broken - Roland had used it as a bludgeon to beat the fucking shit out of some dude who was messing with him - and since he knew he was about to die, he smashed Durandal repeatedly onto a rock in an effort to break it and prevent it from falling into enemy hands.&nbsp; As I mentioned before however, Durandal was fucking indestructible, so Roland eventually just had to hide it under his body.&nbsp; He commended his soul to&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/stmichael.html\">St. Michael</a>, propped himself up against a rock and died facing South towards his enemies.</p>\r\n<p>It wasn\'t long before Charlemagne returned to the field and surveyed the carnage.&nbsp; He immediately led his army to defeat the saracens, capture the Kingdom of Saragossa, execute Marsile and arrest that rat-bastard traitor Ganelon for high treason.&nbsp; Since Charlemagne\'s court handled shit in the most badass manner possible - through brutal gladiatorial combat known as Judicial Combat - Ganelon got his fucking ass kicked by Roland\'s good friend Thierry.&nbsp; Then he was drawn and quartered by wild fucking horses.&nbsp; That\'s what happens when you fuck with one of Charlemagne\'s homeboys.</p>\r\n<p>Roland was a fucking badass who almost single-handedly held Roncevaux Pass against a horde of tough-ass warriors, protecting the rear flank of his retreating army.&nbsp; He kicked ass, slaughtered his enemies, never backed down, was slain valiantly and had his death avenged.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/roland2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<table style=\"width: 50%;\">\r\n<tbody>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td><span>The Count Roland, he canters through the field, holds Durandal, he well can thrust and wield, right great damage he\'s done the Saracens. You\'d seen them, one on other, dead in heaps, through all that place their blood was flowing clear!&nbsp; In blood his arms were and his hauberk steeped, and bloodied over, shoulders and neck, his steed.</span></td>\r\n</tr>\r\n</tbody>\r\n</table>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Links:</span><br /><br /><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland\" target=\"blank\">Wikipedia</a><br /><br /><a href=\"http://www.timelessmyths.com/arthurian/roland.html\" target=\"blank\">Timeless Myths</a><br /><br /><a href=\"http://omacl.org/Roland/\" target=\"blank\">The Song of Roland</a></p>','2007-11-15','644241723697','roland_new.jpg','roland_new - Copy.jpg','Roland','One of the few people who make the French look awesome.','The Count Roland, when their approach he sees, is grown so bold and manifest and fierce.  So long as he\'s alive he will not yield.'),('Ulf Hreda','10th Century','11th Century','Ireland','Medieval Irish Warrior','<p>Wolf the Quarrelsome was an 11th century Irish warrior whow as known at the time as the biggest and most badass motherfucker on the known planet.&nbsp; Brother of the legendary Irish High King Brian Boru, Wolf\'s mother was killed by a viking raiding party while he was still young, allowing him to cultivate an unending hatred for everything viking-related.&nbsp; While Wolf honed his ability to crack peoples\' heads open with a gigantic fucking axe and then turn their skulls into decorative wine goblets, Brian made a name for himself by uniting all the Irish peoples under one banner and standing up to the combined forces of viking jackasses across the island.&nbsp; See, back in the day Ireland was divided out into a shitload of little crappy kingdoms, pointless city-states, and other such garbage so Brian put together a bitchin-ass army, kicked the bejeezus out of his rival warlords and unified the country&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/qin.html\">Qin Shih Huangdi</a>-style, breaking the political hold the viking nations had over some of the Irish counties in the process.&nbsp; Well apparently not everyone in Ireland realized how totally sweet it was to be ruled by High King Brian Boru, so these jerks from the province of Leister decided to be complete dicks and revolt.&nbsp; In order to help them kick Irish ass they called in their BFFs, a horde of motherfucking bloodthirsty Viking pillagers.&nbsp; Approximately twenty billion hardcore Vikings, Scotsmen, Irishmen and other assorted Celtic and Gaelic warriors met at the Battle of Clontarf in 1014 and immediately proceeded to start beating the fuck out of each other with swords, hammers, axes, fists, rocks, shields, cats, barbells, pitchforks, stun guns, shopping carts and whatever the hell else they managed to bring along with them.&nbsp; It was at this point in history that Wolf the Quarrelsome proved himself to be the most hardcore motherfucker in an arena filled with hardcore motherfuckers.</p>\r\n<p>Now in order to fully appreciate the importance of his actions, let\'s examine Wolf the Quarrelsome from an historical perspective.&nbsp; First off, his fucking name is Wolf.&nbsp; You don\'t get a name like Wolf by being a seventy-pound nerd that gives himself a hernia trying to pick up a box of file folders (unless of course it\'s like an uninspired RPG handle or something, but even then you would never have the fucking balls to ask your friends to start referring to you as \"Wolf\" in your day-to-day life).&nbsp; Wolf is a serious fucking name.&nbsp; In the Viking histories his first name is translated as \"Ulf\", and as we all know Ulf is the sort of name that\'s reserved for guys who eat entire chickens in one sitting, drink their weight in beer, grow beards at the rate of one inch per hour, wail death metal on X-plorer guitars, play professional ice hockey and who are so ripped that every time they flex their shirt explodes and fly off.&nbsp; Ulf isn\'t a name, it\'s the gutteral sound that your enemies make when you punch them in the stomach with enough force to make Rocky Balboa cough up blood.&nbsp; As if \"Ulf\" isn\'t a badass enough name, his epithet is \"The Quarrelsome\" and you can be pretty fucking sure that you don\'t get an epithet like \"the Quarrelsome\" by taking shit like an overworked veterinary fecal analysis technitian.&nbsp; Quarrelsome by definition means that you fuck up motherfuckers who fuck with you, so we can assume that this guy was so good at putting bitches in their place that his name became synonymous with beating the shit out of people for little to no reason.&nbsp; That\'s badass.</p>\r\n<p>In case you can\'t close your eyes and inherantly picture what a guy named \"Wolf the Quarrelsome\" would look like, we can learn a little more about Wolf by the description the Viking skalds give him in the epic&nbsp;<em>Njall\'s Saga</em>.&nbsp; They refer to him as \"the greatest champion and warrior\" of Brian Boru\'s army.&nbsp; Now Brian Boru\'s forces are comprised of hardcore motherfucking Scots, Irish, Celtic warriors, vikings, ninjas, pirates, zombies, red wizards, necromancers, samurais, United States Marines and Roman gladiators.&nbsp; For this guy to be singled out&nbsp;<em>by his enemies</em>&nbsp;as the biggest badass of this insane army, you have to imagine that he\'s even more hardcore than even the biggest, meanest, axe-swinging, Guiness-chugging, shillelagh-busting hooligan bastard rugby players you\'ve ever seen.&nbsp; The guy probably drank beer by the keg and then went out into the woods to chop down trees with his crotch so he could whittle the ends into points with his teeth and hurl them at enemy castles.</p>\r\n<p>Another thing that totally rocks about Wolf the Quarrelsome is that he only appears in history twice, and both times he\'s kicking ass.&nbsp; It\'s those folks that are shrouded in mystery who are often the most interesting, kind of like how&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/snakeeyes.html\">Snake Eyes</a>&nbsp;just shows up, kicks the shit out of everyone and goes home without speaking a word and everybody thinks he\'s the most awesome of all the G.I. Joes.&nbsp; Or how a lot of nerds used to think Boba Fett was totally fucking sweet until they learned his lame-ass backstory and he went from being \"mysterious badass bounty hunter\" to \"Jango\'s curly-haired kid\".&nbsp; That\'s how it is with Wolf.&nbsp; We never learn about his policy-making efforts.&nbsp; We don\'t know shit about his childhood, his girlfriend, his favorite color or what he liked to do in his spare time.&nbsp; When you read a history of his life, you only learn one thing - he kicked fucking asses.&nbsp; That\'s it.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/quarrelsome1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Wolf first shows up in history right at the beginning of the Battle of Clontarf.&nbsp; The main thrust of the Viking offensive was personally led by a hardcore&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/skallagrimsson.html\">Egil Skallagrimsson</a>&nbsp;motherfucker named Brodir of Man, a legendary hero reknowned for his strength and his badassitude.&nbsp; Brodir was one of those helmet-with-horns-on-it bastards with a giant fucking longaxe who started whipping Irish balls all over the place, driving Brian Boru\'s men back, when all of a sudden Wolf the Motherfucking Quarrelsome sought him out on the battlefield and engaged him in one-on-one combat.&nbsp; Brodir of Man took one shot at Wolf, Wolf sidestepped him and bashed him in the fucking face with his axe, knocking him to the ground.&nbsp; Brodir tried to scramble to his feet, but Wolf kicked him in the fucking chest, knocking him back down to the ground.&nbsp; Brodir got up a third time, brought up his shield and Wolf smacked him with a mighty axe blow that sent him tumbling down the side of a fucking hill.&nbsp; When Brodir got to his feet for the fourth time, the big bad viking warlord hero decided he\'d had enough of getting his ass kicked by an obviously superior warrior and went running away like a little bitch.&nbsp; As Brodir ran towards safety, Wolf the Quarrelsome allegedly yelled, \"JOGGING IS FOR GIRLS!!!\".&nbsp; With Brodir of Man no longer leading the Viking army, Wolf the Quarrelsome almost single-handedly cut a swath of destruction through the enemy ranks, severing limbs and adding a nice glossy crimson sheen to his axe blade as Brian Boru\'s Irish forces began to rout the Leister foes.&nbsp; By the end of the day 6,000 viking warriors had been slain and the political power the Viking Kings held over Ireland was forever broken.</p>\r\n<p>However, it wasn\'t all unicorns, rainbows, butterflies and giant piles of severed Viking heads for the Celtic warriors at Clontarf.&nbsp; You see, as Brodir of Man and his entourage of elite viking warriors were bravely running away from the serious asskicking Wolf the Quarrelsome had righteously laid upon them, by a sheer stroke of luck they came across the tent of Brian Boru.&nbsp; Now while Brian Boru was a pretty badass dude back in the day, at the time of the Battle of Clontarf he was like eighty years old or some shit.&nbsp; The vikings busted into his tent, caught him in the middle of his prayers, chopped his fucking head off, and ran off into the woods yelling about how awesome they were.&nbsp; About an hour later, Wolf the Quarrelsome returned to report victory and found the decapitated corpse of his older brother.&nbsp; This sent him into a fucking insane rage, and he swore vengeance on the man who had killed his brother and his King.&nbsp; He immediately put together a force of tough-as-shit celtic warriors and set out to fuck Brodir up, because as you can probably guess, medieval badasses with names like Wolf the Quarrelsome don\'t fuck around for one second when it comes to living for revenge.&nbsp; He and his men hunted the viking raiders down and engaged them in the most brutal hand-to-hand combat this side of the original&nbsp;<em>Mortal Kombat</em>.&nbsp; All of Brodir\'s men were slain, and Wolf took down Brodir himself with a badass judo shoulder throw followed by a punch to the throat.&nbsp; Then he cut open Brodir\'s stomach with a huge fucking axe, pulled out all of his entrails and tied them around a tree for some strange reason, causing Brodir to die a horrible and painful death.&nbsp; This is what happens when you mess with Wolf the Quarrelsome.&nbsp; You end up having your small intestines used as a sick-ass Halloween decoration.</p>\r\n<p>Perhaps I\'m over-glorifying a guy who really has very little place in history, but in my opinion Wolf the Quarrelsome is a totally underrated badass.&nbsp; He shows up, beats the shit out of a hardcore motherfucking viking army, bests their hero in single combat on two separate occasions, lives for revenge, and is tough enough to merit special mention from incredibly hardcore Icelandic warrior-poets as being the \"greatest warrior and champion\" on the field of battle.&nbsp; As far as I\'m concerned that\'s pretty badass.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/quarrelsome3.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<table style=\"width: 50%;\" align=\"center\">\r\n<tbody>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td><span>Wolf the Quarrelsome turned then to meet him, and thrust at him thrice so hard that Brodir fell before him at each thrust,and was well-nigh not getting on his feet again; but as soon as ever he found his feet, he fled away into the wood at once.</span></td>\r\n</tr>\r\n</tbody>\r\n</table>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Links:</span><br /><br /><a href=\"http://omacl.org/Njal/11part.html\" target=\"blank\">Njall\'s Saga, Part 11</a><br /><br /><a href=\"http://www.doyle.com.au/battleclontarf.htm\" target=\"blank\">The Battle of Clontarf</a></p>','2007-11-02','785714224616','quarrelsome_new.jpg','quarrelsome_new - Copy.jpg','Wolf the Quarrelsome','Slaughtered away the Vikings to free Ireland from any Viking dominion.','Wolf the Quarrelsome cut open Brodir\'s belly, and led him round and round the trunk of a tree, and so wound all his entrails out of him, and he did not die before they were all drawn out of him.  Brodir\'s warriors were slain to a man.'),('Joe S. Simpson','August 13, 1960','N/A','Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia','20th-century British Adventurer','<p>t\'s hard to debate the badassitude of any hobby that can potentially get you killed, and mountaineering is no exception.&nbsp; I mean, these climbers go out and push their bodies to the limit to the xtreme gonzo balls out, risking life and limb for no good reason except to prove how hardcore they are and to feel the rush of adrenaline that can only come from hanging off the side of a mountain 25,000 feet above the ground with nothing but your grip strength and a bungee cord between you and an incredibly painful death.&nbsp; Probably the most extreme/insane mountaineers are those who specialize in ice climbing, which is to mountaineering what sword-swallowing is to fencing.</p>\r\n<p>Ice climbing is pretty much where you try to scale a giant sheet of solid ice with nothing but a warm jacket, a fucking viking-style battle axe and some rope.&nbsp; I can safely say that I find some dumbass way injure myself trying to operate the ice machine in my fucking freezer at least once a week, so I can only assume that I would last about fifteen seconds as an amateur ice climber.&nbsp; The good news is that I don\'t think I have the arm strength to get myself more than about fifteen feet off the ground, so I\'d probably just end up breaking an arm or some shit as I plummeted back to Earth, but some of these nuts can just fucking race up a slippery ice-slicked cliff face like they were some combination of an elevator and the Abominable Snowman.&nbsp; One of those dudes is British climber Joe Simpson, a guy with one of the most hardcore survival stories this side of&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/weathers.html\">Beck Weathers</a>&nbsp;or<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/pennington.html\">Larcena Pennington</a>.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/simpson2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>In 1985 Joe and his buddy Simon Yates decided to travel to the Andes and climb to the top of Siula Grande using a path that had never successfully been completed, just to prove that they had balls the size of small automobiles.&nbsp; They chose to ascend the West face of the mountain, which was almost completely vertical and absolutely covered in nothing but a sheer layer of ice, loose dirt, flat rock, motorcycle grease, melted butter and used cooking oil.&nbsp; It was 6,350 meters to the summit, which means very little to me because I\'m about as familiar with the Metric System as I am with the proper technique for crocheting a sweatervest, but it\'s safe to say it was really fucking high up and nobody had ever completed the climb before.&nbsp; Well Yates and Simpson just grabbed their crotches in a threatening manner (experienced climbers do this to try and intimidate the mountain they are about to ascend), threw on their climbing gear and hacked their way up the side of the previously-unconquerable mountain face.</p>\r\n<p>They reached the summit after an arduous trek, and gave each other a jumping high-five at the peak to symbolize how fucking badass they were.&nbsp; Then they immediately started their journey 3,000 feet back to their base camp where they could chill out and drink some coffee.&nbsp; Unfortunately, before they got very far the ground gave out underneath Simpson and he busted ass like a bad skateboard bails video.&nbsp; When he smashed into the ground, his tibia bone splintered like a toothpick and shards cracked up into his kneecap, fucking it up royally.&nbsp; He could barely move his leg or stand, and they still had a long ways to go back to camp.&nbsp; So Simon Yates took two cords of 150-foot rope, lashed them together, tied one end around his waist and used the other end around Joe.&nbsp; For the next several hundred feet, Yates slowly lowered Joe down the mountain and together they made their way back to safety.</p>\r\n<p>But then just as you thought things couldn\'t get any worse for our intrepid heroes, a huge ass blizzard fucking swept in and started kicking up snow like a drunken ski patrol snowmobile party.&nbsp; In the whipping wind and unrelending snow, Yates unknowingly lowered Simpson off the side of a huge ass cliff, and before they realized what the shit was going on Joe Simpson found himself dangling 100 feet above the ground suspended only by a thin rope being held by his buddy.&nbsp; Yates finally discovered what had happened and tried to yell down to Joe, but the unrelenting winds made communication impossible.&nbsp; For over an hour, Simon Yates tried to hold onto the rope and pull his friend back up to safety, but after lowering Joe down the mountain for several hours he had no strength left.&nbsp; Soon he realized that if he continued to hold on to that rope, he would eventually be dragged off the side of the cliff and neither man would survive the journey.&nbsp; His feet began to slip in the snow.&nbsp; His muscles burned.&nbsp; Finally, he made the only decision he could - he cut the rope.&nbsp; Joe Simpson plummeted 100 feet down a narrow crevasse, crashing into an ice bridge below.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/simpson4.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Despite falling one hundred feet and landing flat on his back, Joe Simpson somehow managed to not die.&nbsp; He looked around at his surroundings and discovered he was alone, freezing, horribly injured and trapped in an increasingly deadly situation.&nbsp; At this point two things are running through his head - his unrelenting badass survival instinct and the song \"Brown Girl in the Ring\" by 1970s pop/disco supergroup Boney M.&nbsp; Joe closed his eyes and told himself, \"there\'s no fucking way I\'m going to day with this shitty disco song stuck in my head\".&nbsp; He pulled himself up onto his one good foot and started moving.</p>\r\n<p>He somehow found the strength to rappel down to the absolute bottom of the crevasse and crawl out from inside the glacier that for all intents and purposes should have been his tomb, and from there he spent the next three days crawling, limping and hopping five fucking miles back to base camp.&nbsp; He had no food, ate snow to keep hydrated, and never gave up.&nbsp; When he finally reached camp, he found his friend Simon Yates preparing to break down and head back to England.</p>\r\n<p>Joe Simpson is about as fucking hardcore as they come.&nbsp; The man summitted an unclimbable mountain face and managed to to survive a tremendous fall that would have killed most mortal humans.&nbsp; Then, as if that wasn\'t badass enough, he pressed on with a knee so fucked up that he technically shouldn\'t have even been able to stand up, endured a complete lack of food, and somehow find a way to traverse an incredibly hostile, cold, high-altitude environment and make his way back to camp.&nbsp; For that he is considered a legend amongst mountaineers, who all hope to aspire to that level of badassitude.&nbsp; Absolutely unbelieveable.&nbsp; It\'s the sort of shit you\'d see in a bad action movie and be like, \"yeah right bullshit that could never happen.\"</p>\r\n<p>You can read more of his story in&nbsp;<em>Touching the Void</em>, the book he wrote about the adventure.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/simpson1.gif\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Links:</span><br /><br /><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touching_the_Void\" target=\"blank\">Touching the Void</a><br /><br /><a href=\"http://www.noordinaryjoe.co.uk/\" target=\"blank\">No Ordinary Joe</a></p>','2007-10-26','678510625532','simpson_new.jpg','simpson_new - Copy.jpg','Joe Simpson','When climbing mountains wasn\'t enough, this motherfucker started climbing ice. ICE.',''),('Erwin Johannes Eugen Rommel','November 15, 1891','October 14, 1944','Heidenheim, Germany','WWII German General','<p>As soon as my article on&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/wittman.html\">Michael Wittman</a>&nbsp;opened the door to the possibility of Nazi badasses, I\'ve received somewhere around a kajillion e-mails requesting a page on the most formidable and brilliant commander in Hitler\'s Wehrmacht - Field Marshal Erwin Rommel.&nbsp; In his brief career as a General in the German Army \"The Desert Fox\" made a name for himself as a tactical genius and a buster of Allied balls across two fronts.</p>\r\n<p>Rommel first saw combat in World War I while he was serving in the elite German Alpine Corps, which was a unit of badass, highly-mobile mountain warfare experts trained in the art of high-altitude fighting across the northern border of Italy.&nbsp; The&nbsp;<em>Alpenkorps</em>&nbsp;soldiers were reknowned for being totally balls-out and Xtreme, and many of their military operations involved strapping on snowboards with battle axes and skulls painted on them, getting mad air coming out of a half-pipe and then hosing their enemies down with machine gun fire while doing bitchin\' to the max 360-degree spinning jumps and wailing on their guitars with enough heavy metal power to cause army-devastating avalanches.&nbsp; Captain Rommel won the Iron Cross First Class for his actions commanding the&nbsp;<em>Alpenkorps</em>&nbsp;during the Battle of Caporetto, when he did a fakie backside 720 off a ramp while throwing hand grenades with deadly accuracy and then lead his company in the encirclement and capture of over 9,000 Italian soldiers.&nbsp; The P.O.W.s were then forced to serve as&nbsp;<em>Alpenkorps</em>&nbsp;roadies for the rest of the war, lugging heavy amplifiers and drum sets across the Alps so that the Korps could continue rocking it to the max and generally just being radical.</p>\r\n<p>When Germany finally capitulated after World War I and signed the Treaty of Rape Germany in the Ass at Versailles, Rommel returned home and wrote what would become the definitive textbook on Germany infantry tactics.&nbsp; In the inter-war period he served as a military rifle instructor at a couple of different service academies and made some extra Deutchmarks serving in Hitler\'s personal bodyguard whenever the F&uuml;hrer decided to travel around the countryside.&nbsp; It wasn\'t until World War II broke out however that Rommel would have the chance to make a lasting name for himself as a capable military commander.</p>\r\n<p>When the Blitzkrieg decided to rock France\'s collective pants back into the Stone Age, Erwin Rommel found himself in command of the German 7th Panzer Division.&nbsp; He quickly proved himself to be the most balls-out commander in the Wehrmacht, as his tanks tore ass head-first across the hedgerows covering something like 100 miles a day, busting through the French lines and hitting them from behind with massive large-scale assaults designed at crippling the enemy\'s combat capabilities.&nbsp; In the span of just a few months, he had managed to capture over 10,000 enemy soldier and destroy over 450 tanks while only losing a grand total of 42 of his own Panzers.&nbsp; His unit was nicknamed \"The Ghost Division\" by the French because it was fast, powerful and threw the awesomest Halloween parties, and Rommel was awarded the Knight\'s Cross for his successes.</p>\r\n<p>But I know what you guys are thinking... getting a bunch of French and Italian soldiers to surrender is more like beating your girlfriend at armwrestling than it is like killing a lion with your bare hands.&nbsp; Well Rommel\'s victories in France earned him the rank of Field Marshal and a trip across the Mediterranean to command the 15th and 21st Panzer Divisions in North Africa - the vaunted&nbsp;<em>Afrikakorps</em>&nbsp;- and it was in the desert that he would prove his badassitude to Germany and the rest of the world.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/rommel1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>When Rommel arrived in Libya, he was ostensibly under the command of some jerkass Italian General and had strict orders to stay near the port of Tripoli and defend it against any potential attacks by the nearby British 8th Army, which was a fucking bullshit assignment.&nbsp; Well Rommel was like, \"fuck that dude I\'m fucking Erwin Rommel and I do whatever the fuck I want\" and immediately set out to kick some asses.&nbsp; He sensed that the Brits had a tenuous hold on the territory surrounding Tripoli and immediately whipped out his ball-shooting machine guns and started rocking faces with his Panzers, launching a massive campaign across North Africa.&nbsp; With a small, ill-supplied force of German armor and mechanized infantry, Rommel was able to capture an astonishing amount of territory in a very short period of time and before the Brits had finished their afternoon tea they were in the process of being humped while Rommel captured all of Libya and laid seige to the Allied fortress of Tobruk, leaving a trail of charred rubble in his wake.</p>\r\n<p>The Desert Fox was pretty much unbeatable in land warfare, but unfortunately for him the&nbsp;<em>Afrikakorps</em>&nbsp;didn\'t have a whole lot going for it besides it\'s hardcore tanks and a brilliant strategist at the helm.&nbsp; Due to Rommel\'s rapid advances and balls-out tactics, the Korps had trouble bringing in enough supplies and fuel from it\'s base in Tripoli, and he was facing a logistical nightmare as Allied naval and air superiority took out two-thirds of the beef jerky, Nintendo DS games, bullets and other random shit that he was supposed to have to re-supply his units.&nbsp; In addition to this, most of the German military might was focused on fucking up Josef Stalin\'s Communist buddies in the USSR, and German High Command didn\'t sent<em>Afrikakorps</em>&nbsp;much in the way of reinforcements.&nbsp; Rommel was always outnumbered at least two-to-one, but still managed to kick enough ass to win the day every single time.&nbsp; However right about this time, the fucking hardcore British 8th Army launched Operation Crusader - a massive effort to break the seige of Tobruk and eliminate the German presence in North Africa.</p>\r\n<p>But Rommel wasn\'t just going to sit back like some fucking chumpburger and do lame shit like dig trenches and erect fortifications - he was going to go nutsack-to-the-wall and charge a force of over 700 tanks with his group of about 260 tanks and some Italian motorized infantrymen riding around on Vespa scooters eating canolis.&nbsp; He swept through the blistering heat of the desert, encircled the Commonwealth forces with his small group and completely fucked them in the ass (metaphorically speaking of course).&nbsp; He disrupted Allied supply lines, outflanked the enemy, drove into Egypt and overwhelmed the defenders at Tobruk.&nbsp; At the Battle of El Alamein he was stopped after several days of stalemated fighting after his tanks ran out of gas, all his reinforcements got wiped out by British air power and his soldiers had all broken their rifles in half while fighting hand-to-hand combat against rhinoceroses.&nbsp; Unable to press the attack, he held his position and awaited support from Berlin.&nbsp; Then he got sick and started barfing his guts out like a drunk frat boy and had to go back to Germany to seek medical attention.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/rommel2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>While Rommel was in Germany, General Bernard Montgomery of the British 8th Army decided it would be the perfect time to counter-attack the Nazi forces since they were totally boned without their fearless leader.&nbsp; The Allies busted through the Afrikakorps lines at the Second Battle of El Alamein, forcing Rommel to come back to the front to start cracking skulls.&nbsp; When he showed up he saw that shit was out of hand and requested permission to withdraw to a more strategic position.&nbsp; His answer came directly from Hitler himself - victory or death.&nbsp; No retreat.&nbsp; So Rommel held his indefensible position and got his shit fucked up by a numerically superior force.&nbsp; Finally, he had enough of getting his ass kicked and fought a masterful withdrawl action 1,400 miles back to Tunisia, constantly keeping Montgomery at bay and preserving his now-dwindling army.&nbsp; Unfortunately he was completely outgunned, attacked on all sides by US and UK forces, he didn\'t get any reinforcements, he had no air power supporting him, and the German ULTRA encryption codes had been broken by the Allies.&nbsp; Basically he was completely and totally fucked, and even though he fought bravely he eventually had to abandon ship and retreat back to Germany.</p>\r\n<p>Once he was back in the Vaterland, he was assigned to help defend the Western front against the inevitable Allied invasion.&nbsp; Rommel advocated bringing the powerful German Panzer Divisions up to the coast so that they could rapidly counter-attack any possible Allied landings and prevent the Democracies from establishing a beachhead, but since this was a really brilliant idea of course Hitler fucking vetoed it.&nbsp; Eventually Rommel got sick of Hitler\'s bullshit and joined up in a plot to overthrow him because the dude was really fucking up Germany.&nbsp; Rommel wasn\'t really down with assassinating the Fuhrer, but he did want to imprison him in a military coup.&nbsp; However his buddies decided to try and blow Hitler\'s shit up with a bomb and when the Gestapo found out about Rommel\'s involvement in the plot they forced him to commit suicide by eating some cyanide.&nbsp; While this certainly sucked for Rommel, it did work to give him some extra street cred with the Allies.</p>\r\n<p>Rommel was reknowned for being a chivalrous and valorious commander, and a worthy adversary for the Allied forces in North Africa.&nbsp; I sort of see him as a modern-day&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/hector.html\">Hector of Troy</a>&nbsp;- he didn\'t really belive in all that Nazi bullshit, and he was respected and admired by friend and foe alike for his skill and bravery.&nbsp; He was noted for his humane and just treatment of captured enemy soldiers, and in his tenure as commander the<em>Afrikakorps</em>&nbsp;was never accused of committing any sort of war crimes.&nbsp; He ignored Nazi High Command\'s orders to execute all captured commandos and Jewish prisoners of war, he refused to conscript the local citizenry to perform slave labor without paying them for their work (a common tactic for German units), and he was a brilliant tactical mind hindered&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/hannibal.html\">Hannibal</a>-style by a complete and total lack of logistical support from his government.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/rommel3.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>\"In the absence of orders, find something and kill it.\"<br /><br />-Rommel</span></p>\r\n<p><br /><br /></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Links:</span><br /><br /><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwin_Rommel\" target=\"blank\">Wika-Wika-Pedia</a><br /><br /><a href=\"http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/Rommel.html\" target=\"blank\">Jewish Virtual Library Entry</a></p>','2007-10-19','306302826147','rommel_new.jpg','rommel_new - Copy.jpg','Erwin Rommel','The Desert Fox - Hitler\'s most dangerous (and gentlemanly) commander.','\"We have a very daring and skillful opponent against us,\r\nand may I say across the havoc of war, a great general.\"\r\n\r\n-Winston Churchill'),('Yi Sun-sin','April 28, 1545','December 16, 1598','Seoul, Korea','16th-century Korean Admiral','<p>Admiral Yi Soon Shin (sometimes written Yi Sun-sin because for some dumbass reason there are like fifteen bajillion ways to transliterate Asian languages into the Latin alphabet) is the national hero of both Koreas and one of the most brilliant and badass naval commanders in history.&nbsp; Born in Seoul in 1545, he grew up doing badass things like practicing his swordsmanship, studying military tactics, riding wild horses, eating steaks and building homemade bows-and-arrows using only a kitchen knife some fishing wire. His badassitude got him enrolled in a prestigious military academy, and upon graduation was assigned to defend the Northern Frontier against some fuckers known as Jurchens who were cocking everything up and being total d-bags to everyone.&nbsp; The Jurchens were constantly running into Koran lands and pillaging shit, so Yi earned valuable combat, leadership and tactical experience beating the shit out of the marauders and donating their severed heads so a local minor league baseball team could use them for batting practice.&nbsp; After several successful campaigns against the Jerk-Ins (this is the term he uses for them in his war journal) he eventually captured their war leader and made him do \"The Worm\" for like four hours straight until he died of exhaustion because he just wasn\'t funky enough to handle it.&nbsp; While this was a huge victory for Korea, Yi\'s commanding officer was pissed that Yi was stealing all the thunder so he made up a false rumor that Yi had deserted his army during the final victorious battle.&nbsp; Yi\'s reward for being a hero to the Korean people was that he was arrested, stripped of his rank and tortured within an inch of his life.&nbsp; When he was finally released from jail, he re-enlisted as a lowly Private.</p>\r\n<p>It\'s hard to keep a badass down though and within a few months of re-joining the army Yi found himself steadily rising back through the ranks again, thanks in large part to him being fucking awesome.&nbsp; In virtually no time he was appointed the commandant of an Ivy-league military academy, and a few months later was awarded the rank of Admiral and assigned command of a large naval district.&nbsp; He was charged with the buildup of the Korean Navy, which he took to with great diligence.&nbsp; Good thing too, because right about this time the Empire of Japan had recently been unified by a dude named Toyotomi Hideyoshi and he had his sights set on the conquest of Korea and the Ming Empire of China.&nbsp; In 1592 a fleet of 1,700 Japanese warships set sail to start jacking up the Koreans\' shit.</p>\r\n<p>Despite the notable handicap that Yi Soon Shin had never actually fought a single naval battle in his entire life and knew about as much about hoisting a mainsail as I do about crocheting a full-size replica of the USS Enterprise, all of a sudden he found himself in command of an untrained, outmanned, outgunned and outsupplied Korean Navy staring down a Japanese Armada of warships filled with badass samurais, footsoldiers and ninjas who can both fly and stab and even do both of those things at the SAME TIME.&nbsp; Admiral Yi didn\'t give a fuck though - he immediately set out to kick some asses.&nbsp; At the Battle of Okpo, Yi\'s first-ever experience with naval warfare, his fleet of 54 ships utterly annihilated a force of over 70 vessels.&nbsp; Not only did he kick their asses, but the only reported damage to the Korean side came when some dude got a splinter in his right index finger while bashing a Japanese sailor over the head repeatedly with a rowing oar.&nbsp; At the Battle of Sacheon, Yi came across a force of Japanese troops who had landed on the shore so they could pillage a Korean settlement so he got super pissed, swept in, sunk every Japanese warship in the harbor, broke the main mast off of his flagship with his bare hands and used it to pummel the Japanese commander to death.&nbsp; During the battle, Yi was shot in the shoulder by a stray bullet, but he didn\'t even flinch.&nbsp; He just sucked the bullet out of his wound and spit it with enough velocity to explode two Japanese battleships.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/admiralyi2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Throughout 1592 Admiral Yi Soon Shin won numerous other small-scale battle against the Japanese Navy, sinking hundreds of enemy vessels during the course of two campaigns while suffering only eleven wounded sailors, no KIAs and no ships lost.&nbsp; Now it should be noted that the Korean ships were superior to the Japanese ships in terms of firepower and hull strength, but still holy shit that\'s a fucking hell of a record.&nbsp; Yi was a brilliant naval strategist, carefully planning and coordinating all of his attacks and personally leading his navy into combat, issuing them directions on the fly.&nbsp; He received intelligence from local fishermen and villagers and planned his battles accordingly, striking enemy supply ships that were bringing food, supplies and munitions to the Japanese Army and severly hindering their war effort.&nbsp; In ship-to-ship combat on a tactical level, Yi relied on the firepower of his ships\' cannons and ordered his men to avoid hand-to-hand combat with the Japanese navy at all costs.&nbsp; You see, the Japanese had tons of badass samurai so their strategy was to board the Korean ships and start chopping motherfuckers up&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/mifune.html\">Mifune</a>-style and there wasn\'t a whole lot of shit that the Koreans could do about it except die painfully.&nbsp; Yi knew that his men didn\'t stand a chance against goddamned samurai so he did his best to set fire to the Japanese vessels before they even got close and burn those jerks to death before they could start impaling people on their magical katanas.&nbsp; His men were down with this strategy.</p>\r\n<p>He also built something called \"Turtle Ships\" which sound kind of stupid and fruity but were actually awesome.&nbsp; Turtle Ships were large, fast-moving warships with reinforced metal plating completely covering the top deck to protect the sailors from enemy arrows and gunfire.&nbsp; The plates also had big-ass steel spikes sticking out of them so if any ninjas tried to fly on board they\'d get impaled like when you knock Scorpion or Sub-Zero off the bridge level in Mortal Kombat.&nbsp; It carried about 30 guns, and the front of it was shaped like a badass dragon that shot a cannon out of it\'s mouth, had a smokescreen that came out of it\'s nose, and could be used as a battering ram to smash enemy ships into driftwood.&nbsp; Yi used the Turtle Ships to barrel through the enemy lines, blast everything they came across on either side and then ram the shit out of the enemy flagship, sinking it and drowning the Japanese commanders.&nbsp; Plus it looked fucking badass and intimidated the shit out of people:</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/admiralyi1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Later in 1592 Yi Soon Shin took a force of 56 vessels and went up against a fleet of 73 Japanese battleships near Hansan Island, a fortress that pretty much served as party central for the Japanese invasion forces.&nbsp; Yi staged a fake retreat to draw the Japanese out of their fortified harbor and then caught them in a trap that sank 59 enemy ships and essentially crippled what was left of the Japanese Navy.&nbsp; Yi followed up this asskicking by capturing the enemy naval fortress at Pusan, sinking several hundred Japanese ships as they sat in port, crushing the enemy morale, seizing control of all the major supply routes to Northern Korea and choking off all Japanese reinforcements to the battlefront.&nbsp; Toyotomi Hideyoshi ordered his Admirals not to face the Korean Navy again because they were getting their fucking asses reamed up and down the coast, and an armistice was signed between Korea and Japan.</p>\r\n<p>However, the peace didn\'t last long and before you know it the Japanese were ready to have more of their ships reduced to firewood by Admiral Yi.&nbsp; Unfortunately for the Koreans, in the time between the fighting the Japanese had managed to put a double agent into the Korean Court, and he convinced the King to order Admiral Yi to move his armada to a dangerous area known as the Chilchon Straits.&nbsp; When Yi received the order he immediately saw through the bullshit and refused it, reportedly giving the messenger the finger and then slapping him full in the face like a little bitch.&nbsp; So once again Yi Soon Shin was stripped of his rank, imprisioned and tortured within an inch of his life.&nbsp; Command was given to some jackass named Won Gyun, who was fucking incompetent.&nbsp; Won moved Admiral Yi\'s combined force of 169 battleships and 30,000 sailors to the Chilchon Straits, directly into the trap that was laid for him by the Japanese.&nbsp; In the span of only a few hours Japanese Commando Samurai Ninja Marines annihilated the entire armada and chopped Won Gyun up into shark chum.&nbsp; Only thirteen ships and two hundred men were able to escape the carnage by bravely running away at top speed as soon as the Japanese started fucking everything up.&nbsp; The King then decided to get his shit together and put Yi back in charge because at this point it was pretty motherfucking obvious that not just any idiot could lead the Korean Navy to victory against the Japanese war machine.&nbsp; When Yi retook command of his navy and saw the dire situation before him, he is reported to have said the following:</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span>\"I still have thirteen ships.&nbsp; As long as I am alive, the enemies will never gain the Western Sea.\"</span></p>\r\n<p>So in 1597 Admiral Yi and his thirteen ships found themselves on the run, hunted by the entire Japanese Navy.&nbsp; At the Battle of Myeongnyang, Yi Soon Shin came face-to-face with a fleet of three hundred Japanese warships, all bearing down on him and filled to the brim with angry, screaming katana-wielding samurai warriors.&nbsp; Yi wisely positioned his tiny force to block a narrow strait&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/spartans.html\">Thermopylae</a>-style in an effort to deny the Japanese the chance of completely enveloping him.&nbsp; The Japanese poured into the strait at top speed and ran head-on into a strong current that slowed them down considerably, leaving them exposed to fire from the Korean ships.&nbsp; During the course of the battle, Yi constantly repositioned his fleet in an effort to keep the Japanese marines at a distance and prevent them from boarding his ships.&nbsp; His cannons bombarded the enemy, and when the smoke cleared he had sunk 123 Japanese ships and killed over 12,000 enemy sailors, including the Admiral in command of the Japanese Navy.&nbsp; Yi\'s losses totaled three wounded and two killed.</p>\r\n<p>This insane victory broke the back of Japanese morale and marked a turning point in the war.&nbsp; At the Battle of Noryang, over 150 Korean and Chinese vessels finished the job on the Japanese Navy, defeating an armada of 500 enemy ships as they attempted to retreat back to Japan.&nbsp; While giving pursuit, Yi was shot in the chest and died. His last words were, \"The battle is at it\'s height.&nbsp; Do not announce my death.\"&nbsp; The remnants of the Japanese fleet would limp back to its homeland and her leaders would sue for peace - the war was over.</p>\r\n<p>Admiral Yi Soon Shin was a tactical genius and one of the most badass military commanders ever.&nbsp; He constantly went up against impossible odds and defeated the Japanese in thirty-three separate naval engagements, while always suffering minimal or negligible casualties to his own forces.&nbsp; He never lost a single battle in his entire career, his balls-outitude managed to severly cripple the Japanese war effort as he nearly single-handedly turned the tide of the war in Korea\'s favor.&nbsp; He was an excellent leader, he kept up his troops\' morale, he was kind, gracious and a hero to the people, and after his death he received countless awards and honors both from the Korean and Chinese governments.&nbsp; A true badass.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/admiralyi3.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Links:</span><br /><br /><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yi_sun_shin\" target=\"blank\">Wikipedia</a><br /><br /><a href=\"http://www.koreanhero.net/en/NationalHeroOfKorea.htm\" target=\"blank\">Admiral Yi Sun-sun - Korean Hero</a></p>','2007-10-12','767324127223','admiralyi_new.jpg','admiralyi_new - Copy.jpg','Yi Soon Shin','Kickass Korean admiral and major thorn in Japan\'s balls during the 16th century.',''),('Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar','1043 AD','July 10, 1099','Vivar, Castile, Spain','Medieval Spanish General','<p>Mister Se&ntilde;or Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar El Cid Campeador Esquire of Locksley DDS was born in present-day Spain to a family of lesser Castillian nobility in the early 11th century.&nbsp; During his wild, wacky and excellent adventures hacking up soldiers of all races, shapes, nationalities and ethnicities across the Iberian Peninsula he would grow to be a peerless warrior, a ball-grabbingly tough military commander, and one of the most legendary knights to ever live.</p>\r\n<p>Rodrigo\'s dad was a big dog under King Ferdinand the Great of Spain and the two often spent their days together watching bullfights, drinking Sangria and trying to push the Muslim Moors out of Iberia in a series of excruciatingly bloody wars known as the Reconquista.&nbsp; When Ferdinand eventually kicked the bucket, instead of having one of his sons or daughters claim the throne of Spain for themselves he decided it would be a really fucking brilliant idea to divide the country into several different kingdoms with each one ruled by one of his offspring.&nbsp; Obviously, his oldest son Sancho got the royal screw-job (no pun intended) in this deal, and so of course he immediately decided to reclaim all of Christian Spain for himself and rule the kingdom that he believed was rightfully his.&nbsp; His first acts as King were to appoint young Rodrigo as standard-bearer of his army and immediately declare war on all of his younger siblings.</p>\r\n<p>The first time El Cid shows up in history in any meaningful capacity is during the Battle of Graus in 1063, when Sancho\'s Castillian army (aided by their Moorish allies) were mixing it up with the Aragonese.&nbsp; This battle kind of went down like the first stage of&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WD0evrX4Sr0&amp;mode=related&amp;search=wizards%20warriors%20nintendo%20nes\" target=\"blank\">Wizards &amp; Warriors II:&nbsp; Ironsword</a>for the NES, and El Cid proved himself by jumping around like a madman in a full suit of armor kicking the asses of birds, anthropomorphic bouncing rocks and Aragonese footmen.&nbsp; He really got a chance to display his badassery when the bravest and strongest of the Aragonese knights came forward to try and gank Cid\'s flag away from him.&nbsp; El Cid simply smashed this jerk knight in the solarplexus with the back end of his flag pole, whipped out his sword and busted out a flying, jump-spinning 360-degree sword maneuver known as the \"Whirlwind Slash\", effectively slicing this supposedly-hardcore knight up like a band saw through a can of Thanksgiving Day cranberry sauce.&nbsp; From that day forth, Rodrigo was known by his countrymen as \"El Campeador\" meaning \"The Champion\".&nbsp; He was officially promoted to commander-in-chief of Sancho\'s army, and would go on to lead the Castillian troops to victory time and time again.</p>\r\n<p>The campaign to reunite Christian Spain mainly on the plain wasn\'t in vain.&nbsp; Cid went up against seemingly impossible odds at the battles of Llantada and Golpejera, but still managed to whip the asses of Sancho\'s dumbass brothers and conquer the kingdoms of Leon, Galicia, and Toro.&nbsp; He beseiged and captured Zamora in 1072 by completely surrounding the city walls and blasting Puya\'s song \"<a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z95wJCZjp8k\" target=\"blank\">Oasis</a>\" at maximum volume (cranked to the proverbial eleven) twenty-four hours a day for like two weeks straight.&nbsp; Unfortunately right as his men were seizing final victory from the hands of his hated enemies, King Sancho\'s cardiovascular system was seizing up as a result of multiple stab wounds to the back while he was being murdered by an assassin.</p>\r\n<p>After Sancho died, the next heir to the throne was his brother Alfonzo, a dude who already had his ass royally whupped up on by Mr. El Cid and who had spent the past few years living in exile.&nbsp; Alfonzo returned to accept his coronation as the new King of Spain, but El Cid wasn\'t the sort of dude who was going to sit around and watch injustice being committed.&nbsp; Rumors had been circulating that Alfonzo was behind the assassination of Sancho, and El Cid demanded to know the truth - he wasn\'t the sort of badass who was going to kneel before an corrupt ruler.&nbsp; At a time when all the other sniveling spineless nobles lacked the balls to stand up and say something, El Cid kicked down the door to Alfonzo\'s hotel room, grabbed him by the arm, dragged him to the Burgos Cathedral and made him publicly swear on the Bible in front of statues of the saints and the Virgin Mary that he had nothing to do with Sancho\'s murder.&nbsp; Alfonzo swore it, so El Cid decided to let him live and pledge his allegiance to him.&nbsp; That, my friends, is how badasses handle shit.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/elcid1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>While Cid certainly handled things in an honorable manner, you can pretty much guess that Alfonzo wasn\'t a huge fan of being called out in front of all of his subjects.&nbsp; He also wasn\'t super fond of El Cid having shoved his sword up his ass and forced him into exile either, so it shouldn\'t come as an earth-shattering surprise that Cid was demoted and replaced as commander-in-chief of the army.&nbsp; The guy who took over was some douchecasket named Count Ordonez.&nbsp; Well in 1079 El Cid was hanging out in Seville getting his hair cut and collecting taxes when all of a sudden he decided to beat the shit out of Ordonez and his ally, the Emir of Granada.&nbsp; Cid\'s men went up against the combined might of two armies and beat them both down like an MMA bout between a rugby hooligan and a third grader.&nbsp; Near the end of the battle El Cid met Count Ordonez in a short-lived duel.&nbsp; Ordonez attacked, El Cid blocked the attack with his sword, swung it around and disarmed the Count.&nbsp; Then he made two more slashes and the Count\'s pants fell down to reveal polka-dot boxer briefs.&nbsp; Defeated and humiliated, the Count then found himself the prisoner of El Cid Campeador.</p>\r\n<p>This was fucking it for El Cid in Christian Spain.&nbsp; Alfonzo blew a gasket and sent Cid off into exile.&nbsp; But of course it\'s going to take more than exile to keep a real badass down (for more info see:&nbsp; Bonaparte, Napoleon), so Cid decided to go around the country like a wandering D&amp;D-style adventurer, taking quests at the local Hero\'s Guild, following up on leads he received from shady innkeepers and rescuing damsels-in-distress from the clutches of two-headed ogres and fire-breathing Red Dragons.&nbsp; Eventually he signed on Blackwater-style as a mercenary working for the Moorish kingdom of Zaragoza, serving the Emir for ten years, winning many battles and defending Zaragoza from invaders while also carving out a small fiefdom for himself in his spare time.</p>\r\n<p>Throughout his career, El Cid Campeador was never bested on the battlefield.&nbsp; Riding on his white stallion Babieca (Spanish for \"stupid\", which is kind of like how I have a cat named \"Bozo\") and flourishing his sword La Tizona, Cid was an unequalled warrior and commander.&nbsp; He could not be defeated in single combat, he frequently used unorthodox tactics to achieve victory, and he used to get his troops super mega pumped-up for war by loudly reading to them about the heroic deeds of ancient&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/odysseus.html\">Greek</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/caesar.html\">Roman</a>&nbsp;badasses, which is awesome.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/elcid2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br />La Tizona, the sword of El Cid.<br /><br /><span>(Long Sword +4,&nbsp;<em>Protection from Evil</em>&nbsp;10\',&nbsp;<em>Bless</em>&nbsp;1x/Day,&nbsp;<em>Dispel Evil</em>&nbsp;1x/Day)</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>In 1086 Spain was invaded by a group of people called the Almoravids - Muslim warriors from present-day Morocco.&nbsp; Basically the Almoravids swept across Gibraltar and started KICKING THE ASS of everyone they came across.&nbsp; King Alfonzo went out to face them at the Battle of Sagrajas with a force of 60,000 men and limped home with only 100 knights remaining under his command.&nbsp; He knew there was only one motherfucker in Spain who could lead the Christians to victory against the Almoravids, and that was El Cid Campeador.&nbsp; He immediately sent a messenger to Zaragoza to beg Cid to come back to Spain.</p>\r\n<p>For obvious reasons Cid had no love of Alfonzo, but he decided this would be a good opportunity to grab some land for himself.&nbsp; Serving Alfonzo in name alone, El Cid led a huge army comprised of Christians and Moors alike on campaign to conquer the incredibly wealthy Muslim-controlled kingdom of Valencia in 1091.&nbsp; He of course met with success, and in the span of only a few years he managed to wrest control of the strongholds of Barcelona and Valencia from the Almoravids.&nbsp; Obviously they were pretty pissed about this so they mounted a huge assault on Valencia.&nbsp; In 1094 El Cid Campeador went head-to-head with the (until now) invincible Almoravid army and despite being more outgunned than an X-Wing facing a Star Destroyer El Cid managed to kick their asses and steal their lunch money.&nbsp; This marked the first time the Spanish had been able to defeat the Almoravids, and greatly boosted the confidence of Christian knights across Iberia.&nbsp; Three years later the Almoravids tried again to take Valencia, but running into El Cid\'s army is like running at top speed face-first into a brick wall with poisonous spikes on it and then having your impaled body shot with a flamethrower and catapulted into a black hole.&nbsp; The Almoravid invasion did not advance past Valencia as long as El Cid was alive.</p>\r\n<p>However I should mention that El Cid was only alive for like another two years after that battle, finally passing away in 1099.&nbsp; When the Almoravids heard the news of his death, they immediately decided to launch another balls-out attack on Valencia in an effort to finally capture it once and for all.&nbsp; When Mrs. El Cid saw a shitload of enemy soldiers charging full-speed at the castle, she went and got her husband\'s dead body and tied it up to his horse&nbsp;<em>Weekend at Bernie\'s</em>-style so it looked like he was still alive and well.&nbsp; She then sent the horse out into battle alongside Cid\'s soldiers.&nbsp; The Spaniards and Moors saw their commander riding beside them and were pumped up by the prospect of fighting alongside Zombie Cid, but as soon as the Almoravids saw their hated enemy trotting towards them they all crapped their collective pants and made a run for it.&nbsp; Even after he was dead, nobody could take El Cid in a fight.</p>\r\n<p>Basically El Cid is the fucking man.&nbsp; Not only was he a fusion-powered juggernaut on the battlefield, but he had all the qualities that make him a true historical badass.&nbsp; He was just, he was honest, he was loved by the peasantry and nobility alike, and was considered honorable and noble by everyone he met.&nbsp; Despite being a hardcore Christian in a time where religion was a good a reason as anyone to kill people, he was especially tolerant of the Moors, as evidenced by the fact that many Muslims served in his army and in the administrative aspects of his kingdom.&nbsp; He was mutually respected by both sides of the conflict, called \"Campeador\" (Champion) by the Spaniards and \"Al-Cid\" (Chief/Lord) by the Moors, and his legend lives on today as he is still recognized as the National Hero of Spain.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/elcid3.gif\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Links:</span><br /><br /><a href=\"http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03769a.htm\" target=\"blank\">Catholic Encyclopedia</a><br /><br /><a href=\"http://perso.wanadoo.es/ibg3/med/cid.html\" target=\"blank\">The Battles of Rodrigo Diaz</a></p>','2007-10-05','55652928181','elcid_new.jpg','elcid_new - Copy.jpg','El Cid Campeador','Spanish military commander who busted serious heads in Spain during the 11th century.',''),('Hector of Troy','12th Century BC','12th Century BC','Troy','Mythological Greek Warrior','<p>Hector was the Prince of Troy, the son of King Priam and heir to the Trojan throne.&nbsp; He is known as one of the greatest warriors in all of antiquity, the first among Troy, and the leader of the city\'s defenses during one of the most epic wars ever fought.&nbsp; Throughout his life he was admired by friend and foe alike for his courage, his strength, his nobility and his devotion not only to his people, but to his family, his friends and his deities.</p>\r\n<p>Hector was hanging out in the kickass city of Troy just minding his own business when one day all of a sudden his asshole loser brother Paris decided it would be really cool to travel to Sparta and kidnap the wife of the Spartan King, a super omega-hottie babe known as Helen.&nbsp; Well if you know anything about Classical Greece, you fucking know that the&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/spartans.html\">Spartans</a>&nbsp;were probably the last people anyone in their right minds would want to fuck with because they\'re the sort of folks who would stop at nothing to kill you and break all of your stuff.&nbsp; So Paris and Helen showed up at Troy and went off to some foofy linen harem-style bedroom to eat grapes, sit on chaises-lounges and get busy while Hector all of a sudden found himself in the middle of a motherfucking gigantor war.&nbsp; Not long after Paris and Helen started flitting around town hitting up the trendy nightclubs and drinking Appletinis, about ten billion black-hulled Greek ships crashed onto the beach D-Day style, deploying a massive army of pissed-off motherfuckers hell-bent on kicking Paris\' ass, burning Troy to the ground and killing everyone they can get their hands on.&nbsp; Hector didn\'t start any shit with anyone, but all of a sudden he was the one who\'s had to defend his people against one of the most formidable armadas ever assembled.</p>\r\n<p>For nine years Hector lead his people against the Greeks, protecting the city and keeping the Achaeans at bay.&nbsp; In the tenth year, Hector\'s arm was starting to get sore from killing like eight hundred people a day so he decided to set up a duel to the death between Paris and Helen\'s husband Menelaus.&nbsp; Mano-e-mano, winner gets Helen, loser goes home.&nbsp; This is the way that true badasses would settle this shit.&nbsp; Unfortunately, Paris wasn\'t exactly a fucking Bronze Age Charles Bronson, and he was being a total whiny bitch about the prospect of having to duke it out with the goddamned King of Sparta.&nbsp; Hector told him to suck it up and get his shit together:</p>\r\n<blockquote>\r\n<blockquote><span>\"Can you be the man who carried off a beautiful woman from a distant land and warlike family, to be a curse to your father, to the city, and to the whole people?&nbsp; Are you too cowardly to stand up to the brave man whom you wronged?&nbsp; You will soon find out the kind of fighter he is whose lovely wife you stole.\"</span></blockquote>\r\n</blockquote>\r\n<p>This is a good indication of why Hector rocks.&nbsp; He&nbsp;<em>knows</em>&nbsp;his own brother is in the wrong here, and he\'s making an effort to put things right in an honorable and just manner.&nbsp; Sure, he\'s spent nine years killing Greeks on her behalf, but he really doesn\'t even give a fuck about Helen.&nbsp; He just wants to keep the invaders from burning his city to the ground.&nbsp; He does what any chivalrous cavalier worth his armor would do and protects his people.&nbsp; Anyways, Paris and Menelaus fought, but the battle ended in a draw when Paris got wounded and ran away like a bitch.&nbsp; The war was back on, so Hector once again kissed his wife and son goodbye and returned to the field of battle.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/hector1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Now the Greeks had badasses like&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/odysseus.html\">Odysseus</a>&nbsp;fighting on their side, but all told their secret weapon was the invincible warrior Achilles.&nbsp; Now a lot of people familiar with Trojan War are probably wondering why I have Hector here but not Achilles.&nbsp; Well the truth is that Achilles was a fucking bitch.&nbsp; Sure, his armor and his weapons were forged by the god Hephaestus and he was unequivocally the strongest and toughest of all the Greek warriors, but he honestly spends like two-thirds of the fucking&nbsp;<em>Iliad</em>&nbsp;sulking in a corner pouting about some stupid shit or another.&nbsp; Like when some jerk stole his girlfriend, Achilles decided he didn\'t want to fight for the Greeks anymore so he just rand back to his tent and pouted while listening to Third Eye Blind.&nbsp; What the fuck?&nbsp; If you\'re that pissed, just kick the fucking dude\'s ass and get your girl back.&nbsp; As a military commander you\'ve got an obligation to your people, and instead you\'re sitting around smoking pot with your thumb up your ass while your compatriots are out there getting spears jabbed in their eye by real badasses like Hector.&nbsp; Sheesh.</p>\r\n<p>Anyways, the renewed round of combat came at the time when Achilles has locked himself in his bedroom with his fingers stuck in his ears screaming, \"I can\'t hear you!&nbsp; I can\'t hear you!\" whenever Odysseus or somebody tried to reason with him.&nbsp; Well with Achilles out of the picture, Hector and the Trojans started whipping asses all over the place.&nbsp; There are seriously like two entire books of the&nbsp;<em>Iliad</em>&nbsp;dedicated to in-depth descriptions of Hector slaughtering every warrior he meets using everything from his spear and his sword to cleverly executed headbutts with his helmet and shield charges that busted jerks\' heads open.&nbsp; He flipped out like a ninja and pushed the Greek army back to the ocean, where he went to work trying to set the Greek ships on fire.</p>\r\n<p>Defending the Greek ships were the Myrmidons, an elite unit that served as Achilles\' personal bodyguards.&nbsp; While Achilles cried into his beer, his men did battle with Hector, and he crushed their balls up and down the coast.&nbsp; Finally Achilles\' best friend/gay lover Patroclus put on Achilles\' magical armor and went to try and stop the Trojans.&nbsp; Now Patroclus was a badass warrior, so he rallied the Myrmidons and went kicking asses and slaughtering Trojans all over the place, eventually coming face-to-face with Hector himself.&nbsp; After a brutal steel-cage Hell in a Cell duel Hector put him down like a Kenny Loggins record and stole the Armor of Achilles (<em>Bronze Plate Mail +5</em>, +3 STR, Damage Reduction 50%) for himself.</p>\r\n<p>This really pissed off our friend Achilles.&nbsp; Achilles came back to the Greek Army, rallied his forces and went marching towards the gleaming spires of Troy, driving the Trojan army before him and riding over peoples\' nuts with his chariot.&nbsp; Eventually the entire Trojan army was pushed back within the walls of the city except for one man - Hector of the Flashing Helm, the Pillar of Troy.&nbsp; Achilles dismounted from his ball-crushing chariot and advanced towards his enemy.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/hector2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Now I haven\'t said much about it up to this point, but back in the Classical Age the Gods were total cockburglars to everyone.&nbsp; They fucked with guys on both sides, and poor Hector was no exception.&nbsp; They basically showed up and told him that Achilles was going to fuck his shit up and leave him in a bloody heap outside the city gates, so when Hector saw the super pissed blood-lusted Achilles coming at him he started running away at top speed.&nbsp; This isn\'t meant to show that Hector is a pussy however - it\'s a way of showing that even the bravest of the brave sometimes succumb to the fear of their own mortality, especially when they\'re in a battle they have no chance of winning.&nbsp; After being chased around the walls of the city, Hector decided to stand and face his fate head-on, be a man about it and do battle with the invincible Achilles.</p>\r\n<p>The battle more or less went down like the first time you run into&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/lubu.html\">Lu Bu</a>&nbsp;in&nbsp;<em>Dynasty Warriors 4</em>.&nbsp; No matter how badass you think you are, there\'s pretty much no way to win, especially considering that fucking Hera, Zeus and Athena were all using their powers to give Achilles more of an unfair advantage than an entire syringe full of HGH.&nbsp; Achilles also knew that there was a weakness at the neckline of his old armor and took advantage of it, planting a spear right into Hector\'s throat.&nbsp; After Hector crumpled to the floor dead, Achilles strung him up by his heels and dragged him around behind his chariot, screaming insults at everyone and giving Jesus the finger.&nbsp; Achilles was a fucking dick.</p>\r\n<p>Eventually King Priam went to the Greeks and recovered the body of Hector, and he was given a hero\'s funeral by the Trojan people.&nbsp; His burial marks the end of the&nbsp;<em>Iliad</em>, as it\'s pretty obvious that without Hector Troy doesn\'t stand a fucking chance.&nbsp; Sure, Paris was eventually able to avenge his brother by killing Achilles with an arrow, but that didn\'t stop the Greeks from sacking Troy, throwing Hector\'s son Astyanax off the roof of the castle and taking his wife Andromache back to Greece as a slave.&nbsp; His death marked the beginning of the end for his people, as they were hopeless without the strong guidance of their fearless leader.</p>\r\n<p>Hector is one of those badasses who commands respect not only from his own people but from those he fights against.&nbsp; He\'s like&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/saladin.html\">Saladin</a>&nbsp;in that even his hated enemies had nothing but kind words about his valor, his skill, and his courage.&nbsp; He was one of the strongest, bravest, and most noble man in history and his memory would be carried on through the epic journey of his half-brother Aeneas, final heir to the throne of Troy.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/hector3.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<table style=\"width: 50%;\" align=\"center\">\r\n<tbody>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td><span><span>\"My doom has come upon me; let me not then die ingloriously and without a struggle, but let me first do some great thing that shall be told among men hereafter.\"<br /><br /></span></span><center>- Hector</center></td>\r\n</tr>\r\n</tbody>\r\n</table>\r\n<p><br /><br /></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Links:</span><br /><br /><a href=\"http://homepage.mac.com/cparada/GML/Hector1.html\" target=\"blank\">Greek Mythology</a><br /><br /><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hector\" target=\"blank\">Wikipedia</a></p>','2007-09-27','842920029765','hector_new.jpg','hector_new - Copy.jpg','Hector of Troy','Trojan prince with a fight resume that would make you piss yourself.','\"Daughter of Zeus, can you and I look on, without a final effort, while the Achaeans perish?  For that they will, and miserably too, mowed down by a single man.  See what he has done to them already.  Hector son of Priam rages with intolerable fury and there is no stopping him in his mad career.\"\r\n\r\n- Hera, Queen of the Gods'),('Toshir&#333; Mifune','April 1, 1920','December 24, 1997','Qingdao, China','20th-century Japanese Entertainer','<p>When most people think about \"badass samurai\", the image that pops into their heads isn\'t from some long-lost text about ancient warlords or heroic daimyo - it\'s the image of an unshaven Toshiro Mifune cutting down hordes of inferior wannabe poser swordsmen and littering the Japanese countryside with their severed limbs and pressurized arterial blood spray.&nbsp; The star of over 170 films, the majority of which feature him scowling, carrying a katana and lopping off more arms than a piece of Industrial Revolution-era machinery, Toshiro is remembered by many as one of the biggest badasses in the history of film.&nbsp; He epitomized the badass \"wandering ronin\" lone warrior archetype and did for samurai movies what Clint Eastwood did for Westerns - which is make them totally fucking awesome.</p>\r\n<p>All you need is one look at Toshiro Mifune to know that he\'s fucking serious.&nbsp; He\'s coarse, he\'s gruff, he\'s confident, he doesn\'t take any fucking shit from anyone and he\'s got the sort of commanding presence that forces you to respect the fact that he could kick your ass fifteen ways from Thursday afternooon and not even break a sweat.&nbsp; He comes into town, he fucks up anybody who looks at him funny, he gets it on with some random babe, and then he walks off into the sunset in search of adventure and more asses that need to be kicked by him.&nbsp; He hardly says anything, but any time he talks it sounds like he\'s fucking yelling at you.&nbsp; He\'s probably the only person on the planet who could make you piss your pants by telling you a story about puppy dogs and rainbows.&nbsp; He\'s intimidating, he\'s physically imposing, and he had the sort of badass ultra-determined walk that makes people get the fuck out of his way.&nbsp; Just check out this clip from&nbsp;<em>Sword of Doom</em>&nbsp;where Mifune gets jumped by like eight hundred samurai ready to kill him.&nbsp; The only emotion he displays is anger, and all they succeed at doing is pissing him off and getting their fucking faces chopped off.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><object width=\"560\" height=\"340\" data=\"http://www.youtube.com/v/hhkKcJ7OBuQ&amp;hl=en&amp;fs=1&amp;rel=0\" type=\"application/x-shockwave-flash\"><param name=\"src\" value=\"http://www.youtube.com/v/hhkKcJ7OBuQ&amp;hl=en&amp;fs=1&amp;rel=0\" /><param name=\"allowscriptaccess\" value=\"always\" /><param name=\"allowfullscreen\" value=\"true\" /></object></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>It\'s not only badass how he fucking annihilated an entire army of ronin warriors, but I think it says something about Mifune\'s character that the one guy who begged to be killed was the only guy whose life was spared.&nbsp; It\'s like he was saying, \"fuck you buddy, I\'ll kill whoever the shit I want to and there\'s not a damn thing you can do about it\".</p>\r\n<p>Toshiro Mifune\'s fighting style represents the ultimate duality of badassery:&nbsp; He\'s brutally efficient, yet at the same time stunningly graceful.&nbsp; There is no wasted motion in his sword strokes as he attacks with lighting-quick strikes, but at times it looks like he\'s just wildly hacking at anything that moves.&nbsp; It takes real badass powers to put on a dazzling display of technically-proficient weapon skill while simultaneously looking like a fucking berserker wild man who would like nothing better than to stab you in the head, kick your wife in the stomach and then punch your corpse.&nbsp; His blows are ruthless and powerful, and he rarely requires more than one or two strikes to bring down any foe.&nbsp; He\'s also completely fearless and has nothing but comtempt for those who display any sort of weakness or cowardice.&nbsp; If you try to throw down your weapon and run from him, you\'re only going to die with a sword in your back like a fucking chump.&nbsp; There\'s no escape from his wrath.</p>\r\n<p>I\'ll let the following compilation clip speak for itself, since it does a far better job than anything I could put into words.&nbsp; Suffice to say, Toshiro Mifune is a serious fucking badass.&nbsp; He was critically acclaimed for his work with the legendary Akira Kurosawa in timeless films such as&nbsp;<em>The Seven Samurai</em>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<em>Yojimbo</em>, he played some of the toughest characters in the history of cinema, and he was the only man badass enough to believably portray the legendary&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/musashi.html\">Miyamoto Musashi</a>.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><object width=\"425\" height=\"350\" data=\"http://www.youtube.com/v/zjK0IsJSNW8\" type=\"application/x-shockwave-flash\"><param name=\"src\" value=\"http://www.youtube.com/v/zjK0IsJSNW8\" /><param name=\"wmode\" value=\"transparent\" /></object></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Links:</span><br /><br /><a href=\"http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001536/\" target=\"blank\">IMDB</a><br /><br /><a href=\"http://www.toshiromifune.org/\" target=\"blank\">Toshiro Mifune</a></p>','2007-09-21','868068731279','mifune_new.jpg','mifune_new - Copy.jpg','Toshiro Mifune','Used his talent to create the standard image of Samurai to the modern world.',''),('Ahmad Shah Massoud','September 2, 1953','September 9, 2001','Bazarak, Panjshir, Afghanistan','20th-century Afghani Guerilla','<p>Ahmad Shah Massoud was born in the Panjshir Valley of Afghanistan in 1953.&nbsp; He would become the greatest national hero the country would ever know, standing up against impossible odds and battling oppression and intolerance throughout the land like a Fat Camp escapee attacking a cheesecake.&nbsp; Despite being outnumbered, outgunned, outsupplied and underfunded throughout his entire career as a military commander the \"Lion of Panjshir\" consistently managed to seize victory against seemingly impossible odds.</p>\r\n<p>Growing up in rural Afghanistan, Massoud was a gifted, talented and well-read young man.&nbsp; He spoke five languages fluently, studied at several religious and secular institutions, was a talented volleyball and soccer player, and eventually was accepted into the Engineering program at Kabul University.&nbsp; Now there aren\'t a whole lot of badasses out there who can boast that they have motherfucking Engineering degrees, so that\'s something special right there.&nbsp; While in school he joined the Islamic Student Union and took his faith very seriously, so you can imagine the he was a little upset in 1978 when all of a sudden the fucking heathen Atheist Communists took control of Afghanistan and decided it would be awesome to start persecuting and executing all Afghani citizens who didn\'t feel like renouncing their religion and embracing Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels\' ghosts in a giant phantasmic group hug.</p>\r\n<p>Massoud was opposed to autocracy and intolerance of all forms and hated Commies more than the most hardcore flag-waving U-S-A chanting gun-toting American survivalist, so he decided he was going to do something about this sudden influx of pinko bastards into the country he loved.&nbsp; He organized a resistance movement in his native Panjshir, and started jacking up the Reds\' shit like the Atlanta Braves in the 1995 NLCS.&nbsp; His rebel army fought the Afghani government troops for forty days, but eventually his movement was beaten down by a shitload of armored trucks, tanks, bullets and Assault-Class BattleMechs.&nbsp; Massoud quickly realized that the only way to fight back when you\'re as badly outnumbered as he was is to wage an insane guerilla war, choosing your battles carefully, striking quickly and fading back into the shadows like Che Guevara, Mao Zedong and the Rebel Alliance at the Battle of Yavin IV.&nbsp; He grabbed some history books and the VHS of&nbsp;<em>Star Wars</em>&nbsp;and started learning how to kick asses with limited resources.</p>\r\n<p>It wouldn\'t take long before he got to put his newly-learned skills to good use.&nbsp; See, it turned out that&nbsp;<em>everyone</em>&nbsp;in Afghanistan pretty much hated the fucking Communists, and the new government quickly faced widespread rebellion among many of the provinces.&nbsp; So of course they went crying to their big brother - a tiny Asian nation that was known at the time as the Union of Soviet Motherfucking Socialist Republics.&nbsp; The Russkies responded by rolling twenty billion tanks, paratroopers and helicopters across the Afghan border with the intention of Express Mailing an asskicking or two to the citizens of Afghanistan courtesy of Josef Stalin\'s poltergeist.&nbsp; Ahmad Shah Massoud flexed his enormous brass testicles and quickly organized a rebel force known as the \"Mujahideen\" to combat the invasion.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/massoud2.png\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><em>\"We consider this our duty &mdash;&nbsp;<br />to defend humanity against the scourge of intolerance, violence, and fanaticism.\"</em></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Massoud\'s mujahideen only consisted of about 5,000 freedom fighters desperately trying to gouge out the eyes of an overwhelmingly powerful Soviet army, so quick strikes were crucial to his strategy.&nbsp; His men would ambush supply and fuel convoys, rush in, beat the shit out of the Russians, steal their wallets and machine guns and then run back to the hills and caves of rural Afghanistan before the Soviets could figure out exactly how to get their heads out of their asses.&nbsp; Without the proper equipment and supplies, the Russians weren\'t nearly as effective as they could be, and Massoud\'s guerilla warfare skillz were more 1337 than a mad hax0r invading a LAN party at the senior citizen\'s center.&nbsp; He funded his operation by mining emeralds and selling them to Western Democracies, and he received aid and training from the CIA (probably - nobody would ever cop to that of course).</p>\r\n<p>Massoud\'s tactics were brilliant, and they were the only way he had a chance of defeating the massive Russian armies.&nbsp; His strategy wasn\'t to capture and fortify towns or to engage in open conflict with the enemy (where he would leave his men open to having their heads smashed underneath the treads of some T-72 tanks), but rather to constantly weaken their infastructure and fatigue their forces while growing the resistance movement and winning over the hearts of the citizenry.&nbsp; He knew that the longer he could prolong the war, the more demoralized and overextended the Soviets would become and the greater his chances were of winning ultimate x-treme victory.&nbsp; He didn\'t need to kill their soldiers, rather defeat their ideals, crush their spirits, and win over the people.&nbsp; For nine years his desperate band of rebels battled the mighty Soviet Union.&nbsp; Six times the Russians launched major offensives into Panjshir, assaulting the region with over 12,000 men, tanks, and helicopters, but they were never able to gain a decisive victory over Massoud\'s mujahideen.&nbsp; Finally in 1989, the Russians abandoned Afghanistan, leaving the country to it\'s own devices.&nbsp; But in actuality Massoud\'s war was only just beginning.</p>\r\n<p>You see, Ahmad Massoud wasn\'t one of those jackass radical Islam extremist wackos who use women and children as suicide bombers, slaughter innocent civilians and shoot anyone who tries to get funky on the dance floor.&nbsp; He believed in Democracy, religious tolerance, and equality.&nbsp; He supported women\'s rights, music, the arts, and education and was opposed to terrorism, oligarchy, repression, corruption, foreign influence and extremist brain-washing.&nbsp; Obviously these beliefs didn\'t mesh very well with a little organization known as the Taliban and their good friends Al-Qaida.&nbsp; No sooner had the Communists fallen then Massoud found himself embroiled in a life-or-death struggle with the Pakistan-funded Taliban for the future of Afghanistan.&nbsp; The Afghan Civil War was on like neckbone.</p>\r\n<p>For several years, Massoud and his pro-Democracy rebels (known to the West as the \"Northern Alliance\") fought with the Taliban and Al-Qaida, and Afghanistan was a fractured nation.&nbsp; He continually pleaded with the West for help in his struggle with these forces and his attempts to hunt down and assassinate high ranking Taliban and Al-Qaida leaders, but we pretty much were just like, \"dude if you aren\'t fucking up the Russians we really couldn\'t give a shit\".&nbsp; He bravely continued to lead his guerilla warriors into battle until he was killed in a suicide attack by Al-Qaida operatives posing as foreign journalists.&nbsp; He died on September 9th, 2001 - just two days before the attack on the World Trade Center.</p>\r\n<p>After 9/11, the United States got off its ass and started fucking the Taliban\'s shit up with the serious effing realness.&nbsp; Coalition forces joined up with Massoud\'s \"Northern Alliance\" and within the span of a few months the Taliban\'s military had been reduced to smouldering piles of black turbans and ass, and a Democratic government was installed.&nbsp; President Karzai\'s first action was to declare Ahmad Shah Massoud a national hero in recognition of his heroic actions as defender of Afghanistan for over twenty years.&nbsp; Massoud, the \"Martyred Commander\", was a tireless warrior who fought for democracy, tolerance, and freedom for his people, and should be remembered as a true badass.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/massoud.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><em>\"As long as this man is alive, no victory is possible.\"<br /></em><span>- Osama Bin Laden</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Links:</span><br /><br /><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmad_Shah_Massoud\" target=\"blank\">Wikipedia</a><br /><br /><a href=\"http://www.massoudhero.com/\" target=\"blank\">Afghan National Hero</a><br /><br /><a href=\"http://www.time.com/time/asia/2006/heroes/nb_massoud.html\" target=\"blank\">TIME: 60 Years of Asian Heroes</a></p>','2007-09-14','54666031823','massoud3_new.jpg','massoud3_new - Copy.jpg','Ahmad Shah Massoud','The best thing that ever happened to Afghanistan.','\"Our policy was always to have a good and friendly relations with everyone.\r\nBut we never have accepted being oppressed and we will never accept it.\"'),('Jack McCoy','N/A','N/A','United States','Fictional American Lawman','<p>Most of the time the phrase \"badass lawyer\" is a complete oxymoron, sort of like referring to \"scientific creationism\", a \"cool D&amp;D character\" or \"the non-slutty Hilton sister\".&nbsp; In the case of Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Jack Motherfucking McCoy however, the phrase carries more weight than a Jenny Craig commercial in a room full of Sumo wrestlers battling silverback gorillas.</p>\r\n<p>I previously mentioned tough-as-shit hardnosed&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/briscoe.html\">Detective Lennie Briscoe</a>&nbsp;on this site, but I feel that Jack McCoy needs to have his due as well.&nbsp; I mean, it wouldn\'t be \"Law &amp; Order\" without the \"Order\", and Jack McCoy drops the motherfucking order all over defendants\' asses like a wrecking ball made out of electric chairs.&nbsp; He\'s a ruthless prosecutor, willing to stop at nothing to ensure that murderers and other criminals get chucked head-first into Federal Pound Me in the Ass Prison and remain there until such time as they receive a lethal injection or die from old age.&nbsp; He\'s always willing to go the extra mile to lock up jerks who he knows are guilty, even if it means he has to re-write the Constitution of the United States and slap someone\'s grandmother in the face to accomplish the task.&nbsp; He\'s impossible to intimidate, unsuseptible to bribery, unfazed by anything you can throw at him, and not even remotely afraid to drop the hammer on anyone from the lowest, most pathetic criminal dirtbag to accomplished U.S. Senators and snooty high-class foreign emmisarries.&nbsp; He\'ll do it all and he doesn\'t even give a shit because that\'s just how \"Hang \'em High\" McCoy rolls.</p>\r\n<p>Jack is the epitome of&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.geocities.com/vacred_dotal/lawneut.htm\" target=\"blank\">Lawful Neutral</a>.&nbsp; He doesn\'t give a shit about&nbsp;<em>why</em>&nbsp;a defendant committed a crime (unless of course he\'s using the information to establish motive with the jury), or whether or not their murder was justified.&nbsp; He doesn\'t want to hear your fucking bullshit sob story, and even after you tell it to him he pretty much always assumes you\'re lying or exploiting the system anyways.&nbsp; He doesn\'t give a crap about you or your feelings - he firmly believes that if you commit a crime, for whatever reason, you gotta pay for it.&nbsp; Your fragile mental condition combined with societal pressures and excessive medication caused you to brutally murder your wife with a hatchet?&nbsp; Murder two.&nbsp; Twenty-five to life.&nbsp; You tripped and knocked some random bystander into traffic and they got smashed by a bus?&nbsp; Man one.&nbsp; Reckless endangerment.&nbsp; You\'ll get twenty years.&nbsp; He\'s an emotionless automaton like fucking Hammurabi or King Solomon or some shit, which is hardcore as hell.&nbsp; The only actual human emotion he ever expresses is what I would call \"righteous indignation\", and he\'s really only even displayed that about four times in his entire career.</p>\r\n<p>On top of being completely balls-out and utterly unwilling to take bullshit from anyone on the face of the planet, he\'s also a brilliant legal mind.&nbsp; The guy is the absolute master of the closing argument, and the only cases he doesn\'t win are the ones where the cops fucked up and didn\'t get him enough evidence for conviction.&nbsp; The man could fucking convince a jury of twelve Catholics to convict the Pope of Heresy if he wanted to.&nbsp; He could call you into his office for a plea agreement, make you rat out your entire family and accept a sentence of fifteen years in prison, and you\'d still walk out of there thinking you got off easy (here\'s a secret - you did).</p>\r\n<p>Defense attorneys always know where they can find Jack after hours - sidled up at the courtroom bar with a Scotch on the rocks.&nbsp; For a man like Jack McCoy, it\'s all about two things:&nbsp; hard drinking and sentencing criminals to harsh sentences.&nbsp; Nothing else really matters, and he likes it that way.&nbsp; That\'s fucking tough.&nbsp; He\'s also an insanely good darts player, which is simply icing on the cake.&nbsp; Jack McCoy rocks.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/mccoy1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Links:</span><br /><br /><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_McCoy\" target=\"blank\">Wikipedia</a><br /><br /><a href=\"http://content.bensinclair.com/\" target=\"blank\">The Law &amp; Order Random Plot Generator</a><br /><br /><a href=\"http://youtube.com/watch?v=xVnkd7ot_pw\" target=\"blank\">Old Glory Robot Insurance</a></p>','2007-09-07','5824892817','mccoy_new.jpg','mccoy_new - Copy.jpg','Jack McCoy','He will cut your shit down, with justice.',''),('Michael Wittmann','April 22, 1914','August 8, 1944','Vogelthal, Germany','WWII German Soldier','<p>It\'s a pretty well known fact around this site that I have a tendency to award bonus badassery points to&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/indianajones.html\">men</a>&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/lopez.html\">and</a>&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/pavlichenko.html\">women</a>&nbsp;who&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/chapman.html\">made</a>&nbsp;a&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/crecy.html\">career</a>&nbsp;out of<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/murphy.html\">killing</a>&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/churchill.html\">Nazis</a>.&nbsp; So when you take into account the incredible disdain I have for all things Fascism-related, it may come as a coronary-inducing shock to many of you that I am actually featuring a fucking goddamned Nazi SS bastard as my Badass of the Week.&nbsp; Now before you fire up your e-mail client and start composing angsty letters to me informing me of a now-pressing need for me to choke to death on my own vomit and rot in the fiery inferno of the seventh layer of Hell, hear me out.&nbsp; This week\'s badass, Michael Wittman, is up here&nbsp;<em>despite</em>&nbsp;the fact that he\'s a Nazi, rather than because of it.&nbsp; The man was the most accomplished tank commander in the history of warfare, and his exploits in Russia and France (where he fucked up Allied forces left and right) were so insane that he was actually able to overcome the epically large number of bonus points he had working against him.&nbsp; After quite a bit of deliberation on the subject, I decided that just because he served a goverment comprised entirely of assclowns and douchebags doesn\'t mean that his accomplishments should go unnoticed.</p>\r\n<p>Michael Wittman joined the German army as an infantryman in 1934 at the age of twenty-one and quickly proved himself to be a high-quality soldier.&nbsp; It wasn\'t long before he was recruited into the military arm of the SS and assigned to the 1st SS Panzer Division - the elite of the German elite and a military unit so incredibly badass that every Avalon Hill tabletop wargame ever created lists it as a fucking 12-6 unit.&nbsp; Just for the record, a combat-ready regiment of motherfucking fifty foot tall robot Godzillas that shoot heat-seeking missles out of their crotches probably wouldn\'t be listed as a 12-power unit.&nbsp; So that\'s saying some shit right there.&nbsp; Unfortunately, instead of fragging the proponents of Democracy from the turret of a hardcore Panzer, Michael Wittman was instead assigned to the Scout Platoon, where he was in command of a crappy little armored car with a machine gun strapped to its front bumper while his buddies got to drive around like the bad guys in&nbsp;<em>Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade</em>&nbsp;shouting cool shit like \"Achtung!\" and \"Auf Links!\".&nbsp; Wittman sucked it up and did his duty for the Vaterland while the Blitzkrieg rocked Poland, France and Greece like a hurricane, and finally when it was time for the 1st SS Panzer to start kicking Josef Stalin in the beets, German high command assigned Wittman command of a&nbsp;<a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturmgesch%C3%BCtz_III\" target=\"blank\">StuG III</a>&nbsp;Assault Gun.</p>\r\n<p>Now the Sturmgesch&uuml;tz III technically wasn\'t a tank.&nbsp; Sure it had a big-ass 75mm gun that could punch a sucking chest wound in the Terminator, but it didn\'t have a moveable turret, and was generally considered to be more of an artillery piece than a straight-up tank.&nbsp; Nevertheless, Wittman put his skills to good use on his first day on the front lines, when he was out in the woods by himself facing a company of 18 Soviet T-34 tanks - the most badass heavy tank the Russkies had to offer.&nbsp; Wittman didn\'t even give a shit.&nbsp; He was so pumped to be out of that stupid armored car that he just went nuts with his little assault gun, killing six tanks and chasing the rest from the field.&nbsp; For his one-man assault on Communism, Wittman was awarded the Iron Cross, Second Class.&nbsp; Throughout 1941 and 1942 he continued kicking Russian asses from the cockpit of his self-propelled artillery piece, winning victory after victory despite being consistently outnumbered and outgunned by Soviet forces.&nbsp; By the time the 1st SS Panzer reached the outskirts of Moscow, Wittman and his crew had already knocked out 25 T-34s and 32 Anti-Tank Guns.&nbsp; His medal was upgraded to the Iron Cross First Class, and he was shipped back to Germany for Officer School.</p>\r\n<p>After fucking around in Germany for a while, Wittman returned to the Ostfront in 1943 in the commander\'s chair of a Panzerkampfwagen VI&nbsp;<em>Tiger</em>tank.&nbsp; While I\'ve long said that the&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/panther.html\">Panther</a>&nbsp;was the most badass tank of World War II, it should be noted that the Tiger is a close second, and in the hands of a guy like Michael Wittman it was deadlier than heart disease and more dangerous than sticking your face in a bag full of angry squirrels.&nbsp; Wittman returned to the 1st SS Panzer just in time for the Battle of Kursk - the largest tank battle ever fought in the history of the universe - and he was prepared to whomp some asses.&nbsp; In the first day of fighting alone, Wittman\'s crew recorded eight tank kills.&nbsp; After fighting basically non-stop for five straight days, the crew of his&nbsp;<em>Tiger</em>&nbsp;had taken out 30 tanks, 28 anti-tank guns, two full batteries of artillery and one of those trucks that drives around and ladles out borscht for $2 a bowl.</p>\r\n<p>As the Germans continued to fight a losing campaign against the Soviets, Wittman continued to be awesome.&nbsp; Once he recorded fifteen tank kills in a single day;&nbsp; Another time he notched thirteen.&nbsp; He was an unequalled tactician who had complete control over his machine, and he and his crew worked together seamlessly.&nbsp; He was a master of spotting out ambushes and locating concealed anti-tank gun positions, and at one point was credited with killing 66 Russian tanks in the span of only 6 months, a feat that netted him the Knight\'s Cross.&nbsp; As if he needs anything to make him more badass, I should mention that his turret gunner was a dude named Balthazar, which makes it sound like he had a fucking demon or some shit sitting in the cockpit with him.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/wittman2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<table style=\"width: 50%;\" align=\"center\">\r\n<tbody>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td><span><span>\"Wittman blasted the enemy with furious barrages of gunfire, crashed through the position and positioned himself astride the enemy\'s supply road like a wolf in a herd of sheep.&nbsp; He placed his fiery mark on the road, smashing long lines of Soviet vehicles into junk and causing mass confusion among the Soviets\".</span></span>\r\n<p align=\"center\">- SS-Sturmmann Walter Lau</p>\r\n</td>\r\n</tr>\r\n</tbody>\r\n</table>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Just to prove that this guy wasn\'t a total&nbsp;<em>pimmelmeister</em>, one time Wittman blew the shit out of some jerk T-34 and the tank caught on fire like a bag full of lighter fluid.&nbsp; The Russian crew all bailed out and started running around on fire, flapping their arms and shit.&nbsp; Wittman couldn\'t bear to see fellow soldiers in such extreme pain, so he ordered his crew to dismount and use their bedrolls to help put out the burning soldiers.&nbsp; The Russians thanked him and everybody just went on their way.</p>\r\n<p>After killing everything that moved on the Eastern Front, the 1st SS Panzer Division was transferred to France to help push back the invasion of Normandy, which (in case you haven\'t ever heard of it) was when some jackass American, British and Canadian dudes decided it would be cool to liberate Europe from the tyrannical psychotically-oppressive dictatorship of Hitler.&nbsp; Wittman was sent to the front to dish out fireballs like a Level 20 Sorcerer with a personality disorder, and was stationed near the French town of Villers-Bocage.&nbsp; This would be the place of his greatest triumph.</p>\r\n<p>On 13 June 1944 two battalions of British armor came rolling up towards the town that Wittman was supposed to be defending.&nbsp; Wittman sat there, alone, staring out from his concealed position at a group of roughly two hundred tanks, armored carriers and other vehicles.&nbsp; Knowing that his orders were to hold the town, Wittman decided there was no way in hell he was going to back down from a good fight.&nbsp; He seized his opportunity to take the element of surprise and led a goddamned motherfucking one-man suicide charge&nbsp;<em>directly into the heart of the British formation</em>, firing like a bastard all over the place.&nbsp; His initial surprise attack split the British forces in two, and he went down the line picking off tanks and half-tracks one at a time, while somehow not getting blown up by enemy tanks.&nbsp; He closed to a range of about fourteen meters, more than close enough for the weaker Allied tanks to punch through the armor of his&nbsp;<em>Tiger</em>, but he still managed to break the back of the enemy tank battalion, leaving a swath of wreckage in his wake.&nbsp; Once the armored columns were in disarray, he pushed on into the town, where he came face-to-face with another company of Sherman Firefly tanks.&nbsp; He continued firing and moving around like a spastic chicken until all of a sudden some jerkass blew one of the treads off his&nbsp;<em>Tiger</em>, leaving him immobilized in front of a horde of angry Brits.&nbsp; Instead of giving up and surrendering to overwhelming odds like some sort of pussy, he instead kept blasting away like a disgruntled postal worker, destroying several enemy tanks and forcing the survivors back out of range of his guns.&nbsp; Once the coast was clear, he and his crew bailed out of the tank and ran fifteen kilometers to the German forward HQ.&nbsp; As soon as he set foot into camp, he began organizing a counter-attack, and eventually was able to force the Allies out of Villers-Bocage.</p>\r\n<p>During his insane-o one-man Rambo-style assault on the British forces, Michael Wittman destroyed twenty-seven Allied tanks - the highest recorded tally of tanks killed in one day by one unit in the history of the world.&nbsp; In addition to single-handedly annihilating an entire battalion of Limeys, Wittman also took out a large number of armored troop transports, half-tracks and supply carriers.&nbsp; For his balls-out assault, Wittman received the German equivalent of the Medal of Honor and was hailed as a hero throughout the Third Reich.&nbsp; High Command offered to give Wittman a chance to retire and work in Berlin as a tank instructor but Wittman refused, stating that his duty was to engage the enemy.&nbsp; He had asses to kick, goddamnit.&nbsp; He returned to the front almost immediately, and on 8 August 1944 he was killed in action when he was fired on simultaneously by eight million different British and Canadian tanks, anti-tank guns, bazookas, bomber aircraft and nerf rocket launchers.&nbsp; His tank was obliterated to the point where his remains weren\'t found until like two years after the war ended or something.</p>\r\n<p>Despite being a goddamned Nazi, Michael Wittman was perhaps the greatest and most daring tank commander the world has ever seen.&nbsp; During his career, he recorded 138 tank kills, 132 anti-tank gun kills, and destroyed hundreds of trucks, carriers, artillery, and errant sportscars.&nbsp; There\'s even a report that he fired his tank gun at a Russian submarine once, probably just to be awesome.&nbsp; The guy was completely balls-out, afraid of nothing, and capable of killing anything with wheels and/or tracks.&nbsp; He was an accomplished commander, a skilled tactician, and a worthy adversary for Allied forces on both sides of the European Theater.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/wittman4.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>\"At this point, enemy tanks have ceased to be a strain on my nerves.\"</span></p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><span>- Michael Wittman</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Links:</span><br /><br /><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Wittman\" target=\"blank\">Wikipedia</a></p>','2007-08-31','75749911070','wittman1_new.jpg','wittman1_new - Copy.jpg','Michael Wittmann','The top-scoring tank ace of all time.',''),('Anne Cormac','March 8, 1702','April 1782','Ireland','18th-century Irish Pirate','<p>Anne Bonny was a crazy mean-ass pirate bitch who sailed across the Carribean Sea fucking up anybody who looked at her funny and generally being a kickass scourge of the seas, making a name for herself by hacking the arms off of merchant sailors, stepping on their necks, and then shooting them out of a cannon face-first into a brick wall.&nbsp; She was originally born in Ireland around the turn of the 18th century, but being that she was the illigitimate daughter of a wealthy lawyer named William Cormac and his hot maid she wasn\'t really all that well-received when she came into the world.&nbsp; Mrs. Cormac took out an ad on the&nbsp;<em>Cook County Times</em>\' front page proclaiming William\'s adultery, and since that shit was really frowned upon in Irish society back in those days the Cormac clan had to relocate to Charleston, South Carolina for a more low-key life of lawyering, growing tobacco and watching a lot of college basketball.</p>\r\n<p>Anne was raised in Charlestown, but from an early age it was pretty obvious that she wasn\'t going to be the snooty Posh Spice high-society brain-dead debutante that her father was hoping for.&nbsp; At the age of fourteen she took over as the primary housekeeper for the estate, and promply got into a heated fight with a maid that resulted in Anne stabbing her in the gut with a steak knife&nbsp;<em>Fatal Attraction</em>-style.&nbsp; A year later some jackass horn-dog dude tried to rape her so she beat the holy living shit out of him with her bare hands before bashing his unconscious body half a dozen times with a tire iron.&nbsp; The dude was so badly fucked up that he had to be hospitalized for months.</p>\r\n<p>In addition to her headstrong take-no-prisoners attitude and her insanely quick temper, Anne further frustrated her father by not wanting to date any of the high-society douchebag foppish metrosexual guys he was trying to set her up with.&nbsp; Instead, at the age of sixteen she ran off and married a small-potatoes pirate named James Bonny and moved to Nassau - a den of piracy that at the time was one of the seediest locales this side of&nbsp;<a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mos_Eisley\" target=\"blank\">Mos Eisley Spaceport</a>.&nbsp; Things went OK for a while, but as you can probably guess Anne wasn\'t the sort of badass babe who was going to be happy sitting around at home being a bored-ass housewife, and she didn\'t really fit in with many of the prissy bitches on the island.&nbsp; For instance, one time she went to a fancy-pants high society ball where she was introduced to the sister-in-law of the Governor of Jamaica.&nbsp; This bitch made some catty remark about how Anne\'s shoes don\'t match her fucking purse or something, so Anne hauled off and sluged her right in the fucking face.&nbsp; The bitch went down like the&nbsp;<em>Titanic</em>&nbsp;and lost two teeth for her troubles.&nbsp; Needless to say, this didn\'t make Anne too popular.&nbsp; To further complicate shit, around this time James Bonny decided he was going to start selling out all of his pirate buddies to the Governor of Nassau in exchange for some cash.&nbsp; Since Anne really didn\'t want to be married to some slimy fucking stool pidgeon rat bastard, she started exploring other options.&nbsp; It didn\'t take long before one presented itself.&nbsp; A small-time pirate known as \"Calico\" Jack Rackham arrived on the island and took a liking to Anne.&nbsp; At this point in time, Calico Jack was more reknowned for his flamboyant wardrobe and inherant personal charm than he was for his tireless sword arm and piracy-capabilities, but Anne seized the chance to set sail for badassery.&nbsp; Jack and Anne hooked up at a keg party one night and the two fled the island on Jack\'s ship, the&nbsp;<em>Revenge</em>, and began a beautiful career in nautical terrorism.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/bonny1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Since pirates weren\'t really the sort of folks who took too kindly to fighting alongside women, Anne disguised herself as a man in order to fit in with the crew.&nbsp; She quickly made a name for herself as a total hardass who didn\'t even bat an eye while hacking up sailors with her trusty cutlass or blasting motherfuckers with any of the six pistols she carried on her belt at any given time.&nbsp; She didn\'t shy away from killing, she worked ship with the best of them, and she spewed forth enough profanity to make a marble statue of the Virgin Mary start crying tears of blood.&nbsp; She led boarding parties onto enemy vessels, she made prisoners walk the plank, and she essentially was considered the toughest, most badass pirate on board the<em>Revenge</em>.&nbsp; You know that\'s fucking sweet, because if your ship is named The&nbsp;<em>Revenge</em>&nbsp;you have to assume it has some crazy ass motherfuckers on board.</p>\r\n<p>After several months kicking ass at sea, finally one of her fellow crewmen caught onto the fact that she had boobs.&nbsp; At first this caused a clamor, and one jackass pirate matey decided he was going to kick the little lady\'s ass because OMG how the shit can a hardcore buccaneer be expected to fight alongside a woman and still be considered worthy of his eyepatch and hook hand?&nbsp; He took two steps towards her.&nbsp; She drew her cutlass.&nbsp; He whipped out a broadsword.&nbsp; Two minutes later, Anne Bonny was chucking his bloody, lifeless corpse over the side of the boat.&nbsp; Nobody else ever fucked with her again.&nbsp; Later on in her high seas adventures the&nbsp;<em>Revenge</em>&nbsp;would actually take on another female crewman, a fellow badass bitch named Mary Read, and the crew enjoyed a period of unparalleled success, earning tons of gold and plunder from various ports and merchant ships.</p>\r\n<p>Unfortunately, we all know how most of these pirate stories turn out for our intrepid outlaws.&nbsp; In October of 1720 the&nbsp;<em>Revenge</em>&nbsp;captured a Spanish galleon laden with gold and treasure, and everybody decided to get wasted to celebrate their victory.&nbsp; Well right around the time the crew was on her second rendition of \"What Shall We Do with a Drunken Sailor\" a ship full of British Marines pulled up and all of a sudden the pirates found themselves about to get seriously fucked up by the Limeys.&nbsp; Anne and Mary were the only two crewmen who could hold their liquor, so the two of them put up a valiant last stand against the onslaught of enemy soldiers.&nbsp; After holding off the Brits for almost an hour, the women were finally overwhelmed and the crew of the&nbsp;<em>Revenge</em>&nbsp;was captured.&nbsp; Anne was so pissed at the cowardice and uselessness of her fellow pirates that as she was being hauled off by the Brits she started firing her pistols at her own men.</p>\r\n<p>The crew of the&nbsp;<em>Revenge</em>&nbsp;were all thrown in prison and sentenced to Death by Hanging.&nbsp; Once it was revealed that Anne was pregnant with Calico Jack\'s baby, her sentence was commuted and she was released (a common practice for the times).&nbsp; Before she left jail, she stopped in to pay Jack a visit.&nbsp; She calmly walked up to the bars of his cell, looked him dead in the eye and said, \"I&rsquo;m sorry, Jack, but if you had fought like a man you would not now be about to die like a dog\".&nbsp; Then she turned on her heel, strode out the front door, and completely vanished from history.</p>\r\n<p>Anne Bonny is one of those&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/connor.html\">Sarah Connor</a>-type chicks who would just wouldn\'t want to fuck with if your life depended on it.&nbsp; She drank hard, she fought hard, and she proved herself to be a complete badass in every way.&nbsp; She took shit from no one, upheld all the necessary attributes of badassery, and has been remembered as one of the toughest pirates to ever sail the Earth.&nbsp; Not bad, considering that she was also one of the only women to ever perform the job.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/bonny2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Links:</span><br /><br /><a href=\"http://www.authorsden.com/visit/viewArticle.asp?id=8852\" target=\"blank\">Ahoy Matey, That Pirate Has Breasts</a><br /><br /><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Bonny\" target=\"blank\">Wikipedia</a></p>','2007-08-24','53367221882','bonny_new.jpg','bonny_new - Copy.jpg','Anne Bonny','A pirate with breasts. And balls.',''),('José Doroteo Arango Arámbula','June 5, 1878','July 16, 1923','La Coyotada, Mexico','20th-century Mexican General','<p>The notorious outlaw who would come to be known as Pancho Villa was born in 1878 in a tiny rural Mexican town to dirt-poor parents indentured on an enormous hacienda owned by some rich jerk.&nbsp; When he was only fifteen years old his father died and he went to work as a sharecropper on the plantation, picking strawberries and shit for like two cents and hour and leading the miserable life of an underprivileged menial laborer who barely had enough cash to feed his hungry family.&nbsp; You see, back in the early 20th century shit in Mexico was really fucked up.&nbsp; All of the power was consolidated into the hands of a bunch of super-wealthy asshole&nbsp;<em>haciendados</em>&nbsp;who lived in these insanely huge houses and made millions of Pesos off what was essentially the slave labor of their employees.&nbsp; They climbed to the top on the backs of the poor, kicked puppies, ate babies, crapped in gold-plated toilets and did whatever they wanted to whomever they wanted at all times.&nbsp; Anybody who had a problem with that got stuffed face-first down the garbage disposal.</p>\r\n<p>As a young man Pancho Villa didn\'t set out to change the entire economic and social structure of Mexico.&nbsp; He didn\'t grow up with grand, idealistic plans of bringing freedom to the oppressed and righting the wrongs that were being done to his people.&nbsp; He was just a regular guy.&nbsp; Then one day he came home from work to find the owner of the hacienda in the process of trying to rape his twelve year-old sister.&nbsp; This shit would not abide.&nbsp; Villa punched the dude in the mouth, kneed him in the balls, pulled out his revolver and shot the rat bastard right in his stupid face.</p>\r\n<p>Needless to say, after this incident took place Villa needed to get the fuck out of town in a hurry.&nbsp; He kissed his family goodbye, grabbed two bandoliers of rifle ammunition, got on his horse and rode off to hide in the Sierra Madre mountain range where he joined up with a gang of awesome sombrero-wearing banditos who were sick and tired of being oppressed by The Man.&nbsp; This group of desperados rode around the countryside robbing wealthy haciendados, attempting to break the power of the oligarchy, and having crazy Robin Hood-style adventures.&nbsp; Over time the banditos elected Villa their leader, and thanks to his \"rob from the rich and give to the poor\" policies and his totally sweet moustache was viewed as a hero among the underprivileged peoples of Northern Mexico.</p>\r\n<p>Then one day in 1910, an hombre named Francisco Madero decided he was going to incite a revolution in Mexico and overthrow &uuml;ber-corrupt Presidente-por-Vida Porfirio Diaz.&nbsp; Madero had heard of Villa\'s exploits, and recruited him to lead a cavalry force in the war.&nbsp; Villa agreed and bravely led his crack team of hardcore motherfuckers known as&nbsp;<em>Los Dorados</em>&nbsp;(\"The Golden Ones\") against Diaz\'s Federalist soldiers, crushing the undisciplined conscript troops in battle after battle, and recruiting malcontent citizens and army deserters into his ever-growing army.&nbsp; After only a few months, Madero\'s forces emerged triumphant and Diaz was removed from power.&nbsp; Some asshole tried to lead a counter-revolution against Madero, but Villa\'s cavalrymen quickly put him out of his misery by bashing him over the head with a sack full of beer cans and stuffing him into a hole in the middle of the desert.</p>\r\n<p>But Democracy in Mexico wasn\'t going to be that easy.&nbsp; Almost immediately following the Revolution one of Madero\'s top&nbsp;<em>Generales</em>, a motherfucker by the name of Victor Huerta, decided it would be really awesome to be a total dick to everyone and seize power for himself.&nbsp; He murdered Madero, threw Villa in prison and declared himself Dictator of Mexico.&nbsp; What a cockmaster that guy was.</p>\r\n<p>Well it takes more than four iron walls to hold Pancho Motherfucking Villa.&nbsp; He broke out of prison and immediately went to work living for revenge like a true badass.&nbsp; He crossed the Rio Grande in 1913 with eight men, two pounds of coffee, two pounds of sugar, and five hundred rounds of rifle ammunition with one thought on his mind - kill that motherfucker.&nbsp; His force marched towards Mexico City, recruiting deserters, mercenaries, idealists, and disgruntled peasants along the way, putting together a powerful fighting force known as The Division of the North.&nbsp; His army consisted entirely of cavalry, and he was one of the first military commanders in history to utilize the railroad as a means of rapidly transporting men and artillery across long distances so they could join battle more quickly.&nbsp; He purchased supplies and equipment from the United States, raising money by robbing trains and raiding haciendas, and won battle after battle against Huerta\'s men.&nbsp; After only a few months he liberated the state of Chihuahua and appointed himself provisional Governor.&nbsp; His legend grew among the people, who viewed him as a larger-than-life folk hero.&nbsp; One of the other benefits of being such a popular motherfucker was that he ended up getting married to twenty-six different women.&nbsp; To put that into perspective, I couldn\'t get twenty-six chicks to sign my fucking high school yearbook.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/villa3.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Villa\'s campaign for revenge against Huerta was quick and efficient.&nbsp; He won every battlefield engagement with the enemy, and his use of unorthodox guerilla tactics were more effective than a tack hammer to the groin.&nbsp; At the Battle of Tierra Blanca he hijacked an enemy locomotive, loaded it up with explosives, and sent it crashing into an enemy train depot, destroying tons of critical supplies.&nbsp; At Ciudad Juarez, he captured an enemy coal train, removed all the coal, loaded in his own guys, drove the train into town unscathed, then took over the town&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/odysseus.html\" target=\"blank\">Trojan Horse</a>-style.&nbsp; Perhaps his greatest victory came during the assault on the mountain fortress of Zacatecas, where his men charged up an incredibly steep peak and captured a heavily-defended fortress that, until that point, had been considered impregnable.&nbsp; Oh yeah, and fucking Zacatecas was also the home of one-third of Mexico\'s Silver Reserve, so this daring victory essentially broke the back of Huerta\'s war machine and ended up being more humiliating than standing in a crowded women\'s clothing store holding your girlfriend\'s purse while she\'s in the changing room.&nbsp; In a matter of weeks Villa entered the gates of Mexico City, linking up with fellow badass revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, who had just finished kicking asses in Southern Mexico.</p>\r\n<p>Unfortunately in addition to being the master of cavalry tactics, Villa was also the master of getting fucked over by assholes.&nbsp; No sooner had he entered Mexico City than some jerk named Carranza took over and kicked Villa out of town.&nbsp; Villa put his army back together and assaulted Carranza\'s forces, but he ran face-first into a new invention known as the \"heavy machine gun\", which cut his cavalry to pieces faster than a paper shredder from hell.&nbsp; Outnumbered, outgunned, and outfinanced, he was forced to withdraw to Chihuahua and regroup.</p>\r\n<p>As he was preparing to gear up to take over the country for a third time, Villa once again asked the U.S. for help.&nbsp; This time, the Americans told him to get bent.&nbsp; They were going to support Carranza in this battle.&nbsp; Understandably, this really fucking pissed Pancho Villa off.&nbsp; In 1916 he took his cavalry and mounted the only successful foreign invasion of U.S. soil in the 20th century, riding into the town of Columbus, New Mexico, kicking the asses of the U.S. 13th Cavalry, and looting a shitload of guns and ammo before escaping back across the border.</p>\r\n<p>This pretty much pissed off the Americans.&nbsp; A few days after the raid, a force of 6,000 U.S. Cavalrymen under the command of badass General John \"Black Jack\" Pershing crossed the border with the explicit purpose of fucking Pancho Villa\'s shit up.&nbsp; They turned over every stone in Northern Mexico, even going so far as to use aerial reconnaissance (the first time this tactic had ever been used by the U.S.), rabid bloodhounds and GPS satellites to triangulate his position, but they could not find Villa.&nbsp; It was as if he had completely disappeared.&nbsp; After months of searching, the Americans returned home empty-handed.</p>\r\n<p>While it was a sweet feat of badassery to escape the likes of Black Jack Pershing, the inability to rely on the U.S. for support essentially killed Pancho Villa\'s hopes of re-building a viable fighting force with which to defeat Carranza\'s machineguns.&nbsp; However by 1920 Carranza had been deposed and replaced by new leadership, and Villa declared his retirement.&nbsp; His days of siestas and golfing didn\'t last long though, as he was assassinated in 1923 while driving in his car.&nbsp; That\'s just the way it goes sometimes, especially when you\'re really good at making enemies everywhere you go.&nbsp; In true badass fashion, his last words were:&nbsp;&nbsp;<em>\"Don\'t let it end like this.&nbsp; Tell them I said something.\"</em></p>\r\n<p>Pancho Villa was the first true revolutionary leader of the 20th century, and his tactics and strategies shaped the way that guerilla war would be fought in years to come.&nbsp; He was a valiant revolutionary, a badass general, and the sort of dude you really didn\'t want to fuck with under any circumstance.&nbsp; He took a small group of loyal followers and turned them Luke Skywalker-style into a powerful upstart rebel army capable of defeating the most seasoned regular soldiers, building himself into a larger-than-life legendary folk hero and champion of the people in the process.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/villa1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Links:</span><br /><br /><a href=\"http://history1900s.about.com/cs/panchovilla/p/panchovilla.htm\" target=\"blank\">About.com</a><br /><br /><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pancho_Villa\" target=\"blank\">Wikipedia</a><br /><br /><a href=\"http://www.smcm.edu/aldiv/ilc/spanish/FA03/ilcs101/04/tshumburg/index.htm\" target=\"blank\">Pancho Villa and the Mexican Revolution</a></p>','2007-08-17','26881782484','villa2_new.jpg','villa2_new - Copy.jpg','Pancho Villa','Tried to take the corrupt rulers out of Mexico. At least he tried.',''),('Henry Walton Jones','N/A','N/A','United States','Fictional American Adventurer','<p>As soon as you hear the trumpet section start belting out the most&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/staples.html\" target=\"blank\">inspirational</a>&nbsp;theme song in the history of music, you know that some fucking serious shit is about to go down.&nbsp; It means that the most badass archaologist/historian in history is about to do something insane like swoop in on his bullwhip, swing across a ravine, sucker punch an SS officer in the back of the head, grab the girl and the long-lost priceless artifact, hop on a horse and start riding away while being chased after by motorcycles, airplanes, arab warriors, Nazi stormtroopers, cultists riding in baby carriages and drunk rampaging elephants.&nbsp; It means that Indiana Jones is doing what he does best - being a fucking balls-out badass.</p>\r\n<p>Dr. Henry \"Indiana\" Jones was a Professor of Archaeology in the 1940\'s, where he lived the normal life of a college faculty member.&nbsp; He taught classes, he held office hours, and he spent his summers performing research and writing books.&nbsp; Except while most history professors out there choose to spend their much-needed research time pouring over ancient volumes of primary source material in dusty classical libraries, Jones opts for a little more hands-on approach;&nbsp; Instead of writing a book about some treasure of the ancient or medieval world, he just throws on his hat and leather jacket, travels to some fucking remote part of the world, navigates trap-filled tombs, fights indigenous populations of primitive third-world island countries, snatches the item from it\'s last-known resting place and narrowly escapes before the entire tomb collapses down on top of him and ten thousand Nazi infantrymen machinegun him to death.</p>\r\n<p>One thing I dig about Indy, other than the fact that his job is to basically travel the entire planet seeing all kinds of awesome remote places and having insane adventures, is the fact that he\'s really a no-bullshit kind of guy.&nbsp; He\'s tough as hell, but you don\'t see him doing any sort of fancy-pants martial arts or judo flips or anything.&nbsp; When somebody pisses him off, he just reaches back and slugs the guy in the face like a real man.&nbsp; None of that crazy acrobatic bullshit.&nbsp; If the face-punching doesn\'t do the trick, he can pull out his bullwhip and crack the shit out of someone like a spiteful dominatrix.&nbsp; I like the bullwhip as a melee weapon because it\'s eccentric but not fruity, not like if he was fighting people with a tape measure or a giant toothbrush or something.&nbsp; As far as signature weapons go, it\'s respectable, plus it doubles as a means for him to get out of some tight spots, mostly by virtue of the fact that he has the uncanny ability to hit something and have the whip wrap around it in such a way that it can somehow support his entire body weight.&nbsp; Failing that, he doesn\'t have problems pulling out a revolver and shooting anyone damn fool enough to fuck with him.</p>\r\n<p>Not to say that Indiana Jones is all just tough-guy asskickings and feats of unparalleled strength.&nbsp; He\'s also completely fucking brilliant.&nbsp; He not only uses his extensive knowledge to pin down where a certain item is buried, but he\'s well-versed in pretty much every legend and myth out there, meaning that he\'s highly prepared for any sort of insane shit that his line of work might throw at him.&nbsp; This is pretty critical, because by \"insane shit\" I mean like spike-filled pit traps, blades that pop up out of the ground, bottomless cliffs, poison dart traps, gigantic rolling boulders... you name it, and he\'s almost been killed by it half a dozen times.&nbsp; He also speaks like two dozen languages, so he can effectively make himself understood anywhere he decides to travel to, which is key when you rack up as many frequent-flier miles as Dr. Jones does.</p>\r\n<p>Jones is also the master of the chase sequence.&nbsp; He\'s demonstrated time and time again that he\'s an expert and running away from things, be it on foot, car, motorcycle, horseback, tank, speedboat, zeppelin, airplane, roller blades, ice skates, mine cars, or unicycles.&nbsp; If it can be used as a means of locomotion, Indy has used it to escape from people who are desperately trying to kill him, or he\'s had other people use it to chase him down.&nbsp; His crazy-ass ability to drive every sort of vehicle ever created has saved his ass more times than he can probably remember, and he doesn\'t even flinch in situations where he needs to be completely balls-out and jump a motorcycle over a thirty foot wide ravine, fly a plane through a narrow tunnel fifteen feet above the ground or slide underneath a stone door right before it closes.</p>\r\n<p>Indiana Jones is the ultimate adventurer and the epitome of what every historian worth their copy of&nbsp;<em>The Art of War</em>&nbsp;wishes they could be.&nbsp; He journeys across the globe, meets all sorts of interesting people, gets it on with hot foreign babes, cracks Nazis in the face with his right fist, has all kinds of adventures, sees ancient forgotted relics up close and personal, and is highly-regarded among his colleges for his contributions to the field.&nbsp; Perhaps even more amazing than all of that, he actually manages to make history and archaeology cool, which is something that few people can accomplish.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/indianajones1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Links:</span><br /><br /><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Jones\" target=\"blank\">Wikipedia</a><br /><br /><a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTiurFf5hlg\" target=\"blank\">Trailer for&nbsp;<em>The Last Crusade</em></a></p>','2007-08-10','32952182764','indianajones_new.jpg','indianajones_new - Copy.jpg','Indiana Jones','The most badass archaeologist to ever throw a Nazi into an airplane propeller.','\"Nazis. I hate these guys.\"'),('Edward Michael Grylls','June 7, 1974','N/A','England','21st-century British Adventurer','<p>Bear Grylls is the host of TV\'s&nbsp;<em>Man Vs. Wild</em>, a show almost completely centered around him parachuting into the harshest climates on the planet, chopping down trees with a butter knife, building homemade flotation devices out of bamboo shoots and shoelaces and then slaughtering two-thirds of the indigenous species of that particular region using only his bare hands and his teeth.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Bear got his start whomping balls in the British SAS, which is pretty much one of the most badass military units to ever strap on steel-tipped boots and kick terrorists square in the junksack.&nbsp; He was trained in survival, mountaineering, parachuting and hand-to-hand asskicking by the most hardcore drill sergeants this side of&nbsp;<em>Full Metal Jacket</em>&nbsp;and served actively in a bunch of crazy fucking black ops shit right out of a Chuck Norris movie, until all of a sudden one day his parachute ripped in half while he was plummeting to Earth and he ended up breaking his spine in fifteen places and having his legs eaten by rabid lions.&nbsp; Bear was so badass though that he ended up knifing the lions to death with a rusty shiv and re-attaching his legs using only a pocketknife and a couple vines tied into perfect sqare knots.&nbsp; Since the SAS has this crazy policy where they don\'t employ dudes with broken backs, they let Bear go off into the wild on his own.&nbsp; Within two years he had miraculously rehabilitated himself to the point where he became the youngest British dude to ever summit Mount Everest.&nbsp; After that he went off and put himself through three months of basic training in the middle of the Sahara Desert for the&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/danjou.html\" target=\"blank\">French Foreign Legion</a>&nbsp;just for fun.&nbsp; Once he sufficiently proved the size of his enormous nuts to the French dudes, he decided it was time to start up&nbsp;<em>Man Vs. Wild</em>&nbsp;and prove to the rest of the world that he was the most hardcore motherfucker to ever punch a rattlesnake in the mouth.</p>\r\n<p>Now&nbsp;<em>Man Vs. Wild</em>&nbsp;is ostensibly a program designed \"to show you how to survive in the wild\" by teaching you all sorts of insane fucking survival techniques.&nbsp; In actuality, the show is more or less \"look at how fucking awesome I am\", because Bear Grylls does all sorts of superhuman insane shit that no other human being on the planet should ever be able to accomplish.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/grylls2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Two things strike me as being totally balls-out about Bear Grylls.&nbsp; First off, the man will eat fucking anything.&nbsp; He\'ll bite the heads off of live rodents and insects, he\'ll chow down on crazy shit like pirahnas, tarantualas and rusty thumbtacks... fuck, the dude once drank an entire water bottle filled with his own piss in an effort to stay hydrated in the middle of the goddamned&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/australia.html\" target=\"blank\">Australian Outback</a>.&nbsp; It doesn\'t get more hardcore than shotgunning your own urine.&nbsp; It\'s like the Holy Grail of Survivalism - you either have the nuts to do it or you die an excruciatingly painful death by dehydration.&nbsp; Secondly, the dude has a climbing ability the likes of which make The Amazing Spider-Man look like the fucking last kid up the rope in gym class.&nbsp; He\'ll be standing there looking at a cliff face that better resembles a pane of sheet glass than it does a rock wall, and he\'ll just be like, \"no problem, I\'ll just climb up this fucking wall and get out of the canyon\", and shimmy up the wall with about as much difficulty as it takes a regular person to tie their shoes.&nbsp; It\'s so awesome that it borders on retarded.</p>\r\n<p>Another sweet thing about Bear is that his answer to everything is to just suck it up and do some fucking pushups like a real man.&nbsp; It doesn\'t matter if you\'ve just fallen face-first into freezing cold water, jumped into a pool of molten magma or had your arm bitten off by a polar bear - as long as you do some goddamned pushups you\'ll be fucking fine.&nbsp; Stop being a baby, walk it off, and get going.&nbsp; He also doesn\'t give a shit about putting himself in life-threatening situations purely for the enjoyment of his viewers.&nbsp; At least once per episode he does some stupid-ass thing like purposefully jumping into a vat of quicksand, leaping off a thirty foot cliff into a pool of glacial water, getting himself trapped underneath some ice or showing you how to survive if an alligator tries to chomp down on your head or something.</p>\r\n<p>Bear also proves something that a lot of people tend to forget - that humans are the most badass motherfucking animals on the planet.&nbsp; A lot of humans tend to \"get soft\" by living up the cushy city life, but it\'s nice to see guys like Bear getting out there and showing the fucking animal kingdom that we\'re still the toughest bastards around.&nbsp; He kills a rabbit by sharpening a stick into a point and chucking it with enough force to dent sheet metal, he builds a bow and arrow out of bamboo and skewers pirahnas with it, he beats trout to death with his bare hands, he can make fire just by rubbing his hands together really fast and yelling and he can build rafts and shit out of things that theoretically shouldn\'t actually even be able to float.&nbsp; Darwin would be proud.</p>\r\n<p>Basically, Bear Grylls is totally fucking sweet to the max and&nbsp;<em>Man Vs. Wild</em>&nbsp;is one of those shows that puts hair on your chest every time you watch it.&nbsp; He\'s the ultimate survivalist, a tough-as-nails adventurer, and the sort of guy who can walk up to Mother Nature herself and give her a right proper bitch-slap across the face.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/grylls1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Links:</span><br /><br /><a href=\"http://www.beargrylls.com/\" target=\"blank\">beargrylls.com</a><br /><br /><a href=\"http://www.discovery.com/manvswild\" target=\"blank\">Man Vs. Wild</a></p>','2007-07-27','35861814306','grylls_new.jpg','grylls_new - Copy.jpg','Bear Grylls','Has more adventure in his left nut than you have in your entire body. And he drinks his own piss.',''),('Thain Wendell MacDowell','September 16, 1890','March 27, 1960','Lachute, Quebec, Canada','WWI Canadian Soldier','<p>Thain MacDowell was born in Quebec in 1890 and would go on to become one of Canada\'s greatest war heroes, proving himself as a balls-out asskicker during his service to the crown in World War I, where he knocked kraut faces in two of the most pivotal battles of the war and racked up more bling than a multi-platinum rapper and his entire entourage combined.</p>\r\n<p>In a bloody war where the average life span for an Allied Infantry officer was roughly equivalent to the amount of time it takes him to yell \"over the top!\", Captain MacDowell gallantly led a company of the 38th Canadian Battalion in its quest to find a bunch of German people and make them become death as quickly as possible.&nbsp; At the Battle of the Somme in 1916, which at the time was the bloodiest battle in the history of warfare, he won the Distinguished Service Cross for bravely sprinting up to three separate German machine gun nests along the Desir&eacute; Trench, face-kicking the shit out of the gunners with a steel-toed boot embossed with the words \"Fuck the Kaiser\", and then subsequently capturing fifty-three prisoners who surrendered to him immediately after seeing him rabbit-punch a German machinegunner in the neck and explode his entire head into a fine red mist like a really disgusting water balloon.&nbsp; During the fighting, he got shot in the hand but he didn\'t even give a shit.&nbsp; He sucked the bullet out of his wound and spit it with such velocity that it ended up killing three guys, changing direction mid-flight like the Oswald bullet that killed JFK.</p>\r\n<p>While he wanted to go on with his quest to impale German soldiers with their own stupid pointy helmets, MacDowell\'s officers told him he should head back to London and get some medical attention for the gaping gunshot wound he had received at the Somme.&nbsp; After a brief stint there, he quickly returned and resumed command of his company of the 38th Battalion, just in time for the Battle of Vimy Ridge, which would turn out to be one of the turning points of the war.</p>\r\n<p>E-mailer Greg sent me a succinct and badass account of what was to be the Canadian Military\'s finest hour:</p>\r\n<blockquote>\r\n<p>For the first couple years of the war, the Allied Powers were generally getting stomped by the Germans and having an all-round crappy time thanks to stuff like the introduction of chemical warfare.&nbsp; One of the toughest strongholds along the German defensive line was at Vimy Ridge.&nbsp; The Germans had the area fortified with barbed wire, tunnels, three lines of trenches, machine gun nests and a ridiculous amount of artillery.&nbsp; Both the British and the French failed multiple times to take and hold the ridge, including one ill-fated attempt where the French lost 150,000 men, including 3000 Foreign Legionnaires.&nbsp; Meanwhile, the CEF (Canadian Expedentiary Force) had been gaining a reputation amongst the Allies for being extremely hardcore, despite having very few professional soldiers in their ranks and craptacular gear and weaponry (thanks to some douchebag general back home giving all of the government contracts to his rich buddies).&nbsp; So the Brits called up one General Arthur Currie, commander of the CEF, and asked him to take a shot at Vimy.&nbsp; Currie accepted and proceeded to gather up all 5 divisions of the CEF into the Voltron-esque Canadian Corps.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>The Corps spent months preparing for the battle by digging tunnels and rehearsing the battle on a scale replica of the ridge (!).&nbsp; When the time finally came, the Corps kicked things off with the largest artillery barrage in history up to that point that lasted an entire week, interspersed with trench raids at night.&nbsp; Over 1,100 cannons of every kind imaginable kind including crappy little field artillery dragged by mules, naval guns mounted on train cars and probably 16th century trebuchets and bottle rockets shelled the ridge so much it could be heard over a 100 miles away in England.&nbsp; The Germans aptly dubbed this \"The Week of Suffering.\"&nbsp; After Currie decided the Germans had had enough Howitzing, infantry was sent in to storm the ridge.&nbsp; The Canadian infantry employed a number of new tactics for the time including platoon-based orders, aerial reconnaissance, and a creeping barrage, which means the Canadian had to run around killing Germans while trying very hard not to get splashed by their own artillery.&nbsp; Thanks to extensive planning and coordination, friendly fire was minimal.&nbsp; After 2 hours the ridge was taken with 2 to 1 casualties inflicted on the Germans plus 4,000 prisoners taken.&nbsp; The Germans were heavily demoralized and a big hole was punched in their defensive line, contributing greatly to the Allied victory.</p>\r\n</blockquote>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/macdowell2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>It was during this battle that Captain MacDowell would prove himself to be among the ultimate badasses of the war.&nbsp; On 10 April 1917 MacDowell, along with two Privates who served as runners for him, climbed up the ridge near the area known as \"The Pimple\" - a tall hill near where the fighting was fiercest during the campaign.&nbsp; During all the confusion and artillery shit that was exploding all over the place MacDowell and his runners became separated from the rest of their company, but no badass military commander worth his sidearm would ever let that stop him from completing his mission.&nbsp; As the group reached the ridge, they came under fire from two separate German machine gun nests.&nbsp; MacDowell quickly hit the deck and put his insane D-League Softball skills to the test, chucking grenades all over the place like a freak.&nbsp; He blew the shit out of one of the nests, killing the weapons team, and managed to render the second machine gun inoperable.&nbsp; Once the guns were knocked out, MacDowell rose to his feet and started determinedly marching towards the gun emplacement and glaring at the lone surviving German machinegunner.&nbsp; The dude took one look at this crazed Canadian, double-checked that his weapon was in fact broken, and immediately ran like a bitch into a tiny tunnel that had been dug into the side of the trench.</p>\r\n<p>Well MacDowell wasn\'t about to let this kraut get away.&nbsp; He ran to the edge of the tunnel and shouted in for the German to surrender.&nbsp; Nothing.&nbsp; He carefully took two steps into the darkness before noticing a huge hole in the floor with a ladder going straight down.&nbsp; Since he wasn\'t about to back down from the opportunity to deliver a right proper thrashing to a deserving individual, MacDowell climbed down the 55-step ladder into a small passage 75 feet underground.&nbsp; He instructed his runners to wait outside for him.</p>\r\n<p>Once at the bottom, MacDowell took a few steps into this strange lair.&nbsp; Before he knew it he turned a corner and came face-to-face with the German machinegunner he had been chasing, as well as two German Infantry officers and seventy-five enlisted soldiers, all with their guns drawn and aimed directly at MacDowell\'s face.</p>\r\n<p>Now this is the point in the story where most non-badasses would crap their pants, surrender, and/or be brutally machinegunned to the ground in slow motion while sad violin music plays in the background.&nbsp; Not Captain MacDowell.&nbsp; He had a plan.&nbsp; And gigantic balls the size of small planets.</p>\r\n<p>MacDowell calmly looked over the room of angry gun-toting Huns, before turning around and yelling at the top of his lungs, \"Third Corps!&nbsp; Fourth Corps!&nbsp; We\'ve found them!&nbsp; All units proceed down the ladder and prepare to attack on my mark!\"</p>\r\n<p>Seventy-seven soldiers dropped their weapons and raised their hands in surrender.</p>\r\n<p>In order to keep his ruse from being discovered, MacDowell sent his prisoners up in groups of twelve, where his runners were waiting to tie them up and take their weapons away.&nbsp; After successfully capturing seventy-seven men using nothing but his nutsack, MacDowell and his men continued to hold their position for five days until the rest of the Battalion caught up to them and relieved them from duty.&nbsp; For his actions at Vimy, he was personally awarded the Victoria Cross by the King.&nbsp; After the battle, he returned to the UK to be treated for shell shock and for a gunshot wound he suffered at Vimy before returning to work at Battalion Headquarters until the end of the war.&nbsp; He was the only one of the four Canadaians awarded the Victoria Cross at Vimy Ridge to survive the war.</p>\r\n<p>MacDowell\'s success at Vimy is a perfect example of how badassery not only involves being awesome at hand-to-hand combat and gun-to-face combat, but it also means having the massive brass balls it takes to bluff your way out of a situation when you\'re facing death straight in the eye and not only survive the encounter but emerge victorious.&nbsp; During the war he was single-handedly responsible for the capture of 130 German soldiers, destroyed multiple enemy machine gun nests and won the highest award for bravery offered by the British Commonwealth.&nbsp; So the next time someone tells you \"Canada Sucks\" you can tell them about Captain MacDowell and his insane ability to make German people surrender to him even when they have no good reason to do so.&nbsp; Or you can just throw down your hockey gloves and your lacrosse stick, take off your lumberjack shirt, chug your Molson and bash their face in with your bare hands.&nbsp; Whatever works for you.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/macdowell1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><br /><span>\"They were all big strong men...<br />They had plenty of rations,<br />but we had a great time taking them prisoner.\"<br /><br />- Cpt. MacDowell</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Links:</span><br /><br /><a href=\"http://www.wwii.ca/page9.html\" target=\"blank\">Canada at War</a><br /><br /><a href=\"http://www.legionmagazine.com/features/victoriacross/04-11.asp\" target=\"blank\">Legion Magazine</a><br /><br /><a href=\"http://www.cfc.forces.gc.ca/macdowell.html\" target=\"blank\">The Private Hell of a Hero</a></p>','2007-07-20','368143516103','macdowell_new.jpg','macdowell_new - Copy.jpg','Thain MacDowell','One of the bravest Canadian badasses in World War I. Proving that the Canadians weren\'t nice all the time.',''),('Jean Danjou','April 15, 1828','April 30, 1863','Chalabre, France','19th-century French Soldier','<p>The French Foreign Legion is without a doubt one of the most hardcore military units ever assembled, and is probably one of the most badass organizations this side of the Praetorian Guard or the original N.W.A. lineup.&nbsp; Around the time of its inception it was comprised exclusively of foreign soldiers led by French officers and had a reputation of being a tough-as-nails assortment of scoundrels and degenerates the likes of which would make Mos Eisley Cantina look like the lobby of the Ritz Carlton.&nbsp; The lack of any background checks on incoming recruits meant that the Legion was largely comprised of criminals, mercenary thugs, and various assorted evildoers escaping their homelands for one dubious reason or another and who had probably received the death sentence on no less than twelve systems.&nbsp; Of the hardcore thugs that escaped life to join the Legion, only a handful actually managed to make it through the most brutal basic training program in military history without deserting, going home and crying to their mothers, or suffering a severe case of Death By Bludgeoning and/or Heatstroke.&nbsp; What remained after ten weeks of ball-busting training in the middle of the Algerian desert was a rugged cadre of disciplined motherfuckers who would just as soon shiv you in a parking lot with a broken spork as they would look at you.&nbsp; It\'s a legion of badasses, and at no time in history did they prove that more than at the Battle of Cameron under the command of Capitaine Jean Danjou.</p>\r\n<p>In 1863 the French Emperor Napoleon III was being a dumbshit and trying to fuck with Mexico for some reason that is inconsequential in the grand scheme of things.&nbsp; The important thing for this story is that the French Army was besieging the Mexican town of Puebla, and it wasn\'t really going so hot for them.&nbsp; French command ordered that a crucial convoy carrying three million Francs and several hundred pounds of ammunition be brought up to re-supply the seige, and gave the 3rd Company of the Foreign Legion the task of making sure the supplies reached the front.&nbsp; Well unfortunately, half of the goddamned Foreign Legion were crapping their pants with dysentery and consumption brought on by the harsh Mexican climate, including half of the 3rd Company\'s soldiers and all of their officers.&nbsp; But little things like explosive diarrhea don\'t keep military units from completing their orders, so the 62 men who were still capable of self-locomotion formed up and prepared to march.&nbsp; Since there were no officers left to lead the detachment, the Foreign Legion\'s Regimental Quartermaster, Captain Jean Danjou, volunteered to personally command the mission.</p>\r\n<p>It took a total badass to command a unit of mercenaries and criminal dirtbags, and Danjou fit the bill perfectly.&nbsp; He was a veteran of many combat operations, having served in Algiers, fought the Russians in the Crimean War, battled the krauts in the Austro-Sardinian War, and stomped nuts in Morocco.&nbsp; He had his left hand blown off in combat years ago, and sported a badass fake wooden hand that he occasionally used to beat the shit out of disobedient soldiers or play hilarious practical jokes on his superiors.&nbsp; He also had a mustache and goatee that proved he meant business.&nbsp; Just check out that portrait if you don\'t believe me.</p>\r\n<p>3 officers and 62 enlisted men headed out on 30 April, marching 15 miles before deciding to stop at Palo Verde for some much-needed rest.&nbsp; Unfortunately, that rest was not to be had.&nbsp; As soon as the legionnaires sat down, they heard the rumbling of horse hooves that indicated the rush of incoming cavalry.&nbsp; Danjou immediately ordered his men to fix bayonets, form up into a square Duke of Wellington-style, and prepare to repulse the Mexican horsemen, who by this point were hell-bent on putting the pointy ends of their cavalry sabers right up the legionnaires\' asses.&nbsp; They were not successful.</p>\r\n<p>The Legion began a fighting withdrawal back to the nearby town of Cameron, repulsing three separate cavalry charges while sustaining minimal casualties to themselves.&nbsp; When they reached Cameron, they holed up in an inn in the middle of town, which was protected by a ten foot high wall and was surrounded by a tight courtyard that would make it difficult for any sort of cavalry maneuvers.&nbsp; Little did Danjou know, he was facing more than just cavalry.&nbsp; His sixty men were going to make their last stand against an onslaught of three Mexican infantry battalions and one cavalry battalion, comprised of a total of 1,200 men and 800 cavalry.</p>\r\n<p>The Mexican commander approached the Cameron Inn under a flag of peace.&nbsp; He told Danjou, \"you guys are basically fucked so you might as well just give up\".&nbsp; Danjou looked at him cooly and responded: \"We have munitions.&nbsp; We will not surrender.\"&nbsp; The Legion began to fortify their position, and the Mexicans attacked.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/danjou1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Sixty men stood in extreme heat without any sort of food or water, battling it out against a force of 2,000 enemy soldiers.&nbsp; The legionnaires hadn\'t had anything to eat or drink in over twenty-four hours, they were exhausted from marching, and they were in a hopeless situation, but like true badasses they stood their ground and fought with everything they had - guns, knives, bayonets, elbow strikes to the groin, you name it.&nbsp; Danjou ran up and down the line encouraging his men and firing his pistol into the endless horde of Mexican infantrymen who continually hurled themselves at the inn.&nbsp; Legionnaires fell to the earth dead and wounded, ammunition ran low, the inn caught fire, but through it all Danjou shouted over the flames, \"The Legion dies; It does not surrender!\"</p>\r\n<p>As the onslaught began to take its toll on the legion, Danjou was dropped by a sniper round in the chest.&nbsp; While you\'d think this would end the story, his death only made the Legionairres EVEN MORE PISSED, and they continued to battle the Mexicans.&nbsp; Finally, after eleven hours of battle, only five men remained.&nbsp; They were completely out of ammunition, and almost too exhausted to even stand.&nbsp; Rallied by the inspiration of their fallen captain, the five survivors fixed bayonets and charged out from behind the protective walls of the inn, right into the heart of the Mexican formation.&nbsp; Three were killed by gunfire, and two were beaten down by Mexican rifle butts.&nbsp; Just as the Mexican troops were preparing to tear the two survivors into tiny&nbsp;<a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibs\" target=\"blank\">gibs</a>, their commander called his men off.&nbsp; The Mexican general approached the two half-dead men and demanded their immediate surrender.</p>\r\n<p>The men looked the commander in the eyes and demanded their immediate safe passage home, accompanied by their wounded, their fallen captain, their weapons and their regimental flag.&nbsp; The Mexican commander looked back at them and said, \"What can I do with such men?&nbsp; No, these are not men, they are devils.\"&nbsp; He granted their request, and the Legion withdrew from the field.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/danjou2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Over the span of 11 hours, 65 men resisted a force of 2,000 well-trained and well-armed Mexican soldiers, killing 300 and wounding an additional 300.&nbsp; They were slaughtered nearly to a man, but their bravery under the command of Capitaine Danjou has since become legendary.&nbsp; To this day, whenever the Mexican Army marches past the monument that was erected at the spot of the battle, they present arms as a sign of respect to the brave men that faced them that day.&nbsp; The word \"Cameron\" now appears on the regimental flag of the Legion, and in France and throughout the Foreign Legion, every April 30th is known as \"Cameron Day\", where the wooden prosthetic hand of Jean Danjou is brought out and paraded around and French citizens celebrate the ultimate badassery that was displayed that day.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/danjou.gif\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Links:</span><br /><br /><a href=\"http://www.military.com/NewContent/0,13190,Wilson_022805-P1,00.html\" target=\"blank\">The Battle of Cameron</a><br /><br /><a href=\"http://www.globusz.com/ebooks/LuisSilva/00000015.htm\" target=\"blank\">The Foreign Legion at Camerone</a><br /><br /><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Danjou\" target=\"blank\">Wikipedia</a></p>','2007-07-13','352802417164','danjou_new.jpg','danjou_new - Copy.jpg','Jean Danjou','Commander of the French Foreign Legion so badass the nation of France leads an annual parade with his fake hand.','\"The Legion dies;  It does not surrender!\"'),('The Predator','N/A','N/A','Unknown','Fictional Alien Warrior','<p>The Predator is a goddamned professional top-rate intergalactic asskicker who flies around the galaxy in an invisible spaceship killing tough-ass alien warriors and turning their skulls into beer mugs just for shits and giggles.&nbsp; That alone should make them worthy of a spot on this list, but there\'s much more to the Predator than just spending the last several centuries playing out a really high-tech remake of&nbsp;<em>The Most Dangerous Game</em>&nbsp;and leaving a trail of dismembered mutilated alien carcasses littered throughout the galaxy.</p>\r\n<p>For starters, the Predators are fucking tough as shit.&nbsp; You can shoot them in the chest, hack off their arms and crunch them in the scrotum with a tack hammer but they\'ll still find a way to tear out your spinal column Sub Zero-style with their one good hand and then use your severed head to violently bludgeon all of your squad mates to death while shouting the word \"motherfucker\" at your grandmother.&nbsp; They\'re stronger than like three roided-out Arnold Schwarzeneggers put together, they can take like 100hp of damage without even blinking, and they can jump like fucking Carl Lewis on a trampoline on the surface of the moon.&nbsp; They\'re also the ultimate duality of badassitude because they\'ve got awesome dreads and cool-as-shit green blood, but they\'re also really really fucking ugly.&nbsp; It takes a true badass to simultaneously look awesome and disgusting.</p>\r\n<p>As if it\'s not enough that they could beat a pickup truck in an armwrestling competition, they\'ve also got all sorts of badass technologies that help make them the ultimate killing machines and the most hardcore motherfuckers in the universe.&nbsp; They\'ve got a totally sweet active camouflage that makes them pretty much invisible to the human eye, their helmets allow them to see every spectrum of light ranging from infrared to ultraviolet, and their body armor is pretty much impervious to everything this side of that whack-ass acid blood the Aliens secrete every time a Predator jams a pair of rusty scissors into their eyes.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/predator1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br />Attempting to take on a Predator in hand-to-hand combat is a mistake.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Probably the most badass thing about the Predator is his massive arsenal.&nbsp; He\'s got more melee weapons than an entire longboat of viking warriors, packing everything from wrist-mounted retractable twin blades that make Wolverine\'s claws look like dulled plastic kiddie butter knives to a seven foot long telescoping harpoon the likes of which could kill every whale in existence at the same time (assuming you threw it at the right angle).&nbsp; In the rare situation that he doesn\'t get close enough to shiv you like a maladjusted prison inmate who forgot to take his anti-psychotics, he can also fire motherfucking buzzsaws out of his suit that are capable of slicing through an entire SWAT team in one shot or blow your goddamned head off with a shoulder-mounted laser cannon.&nbsp; If for some reason none of this manages to kill your stupid face, he\'s also got a fucking nuclear warhead strapped to his arm capable of turning everything within twenty square miles into a giant pile of charred ass.</p>\r\n<p>Another awesome aspect of the Predator is his honor code, which has been the mark of hardcore badass warriors throughout history.&nbsp; For example, Predators won\'t kill unarmed non-combatants, which is pretty damned admirable.&nbsp; Sure, they\'re only refraining from pulling your eyes out because you\'re such a pathetic target that there\'s no honor to be gained by your complete and total destruction, but hey, at least you\'re not getting skinned alive and hung upside down from a tree in the middle of the jungle somewhere or having your legs blown off at the knee by a plasma caster.&nbsp; For Predators, it\'s all about the honor, and the honor comes from killing worthy opponents.&nbsp; That\'s badassery right there.&nbsp; If they can\'t get the job done, they also understand the benefits of taking everyone else in the universe down in flames with them.&nbsp; Since nobody gets the better of a Predator warrior and lives to tell the tale, if he\'s about to die from his wounds he activates the self-destruct on his wrist and leaves behind a gigantic fucking smoking crater in his wake, obliterating himself and any bastard lucky enough to get a cheap shot in on him.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/predator2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Links:</span><br /><br /><a href=\"http://members.iinet.net.au/~jaherne/thehunted/weapons/index.php\" target=\"blank\">The Predator\'s Weapons</a><br /><br /><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predator_%28alien%29\" target=\"blank\">Wikipedia</a></p>','2007-07-06','355269618238','predator_new.jpg','predator_new - Copy.jpg','The Predator','Your worst extraterrestrial nightmare.',''),('Lyudmila Mykhailivna Pavlichenko','July 2, 1916','October 10, 1974','Belaya Tserkov, Russia','WWII Russian Soldier','<p>A lot of countries out there are missing out on approximately 50% of their untapped badassery potential by not letting women into their military combat arms.&nbsp; I know a lot of folks out there are all like \"OMG d00d WTF ROTFLOL chicks with guns YAH R1GHT ORLY SRSLY\", but what those jerks don\'t get is that there are women out there like Lyudmilia Pavlichenko who are just as adept at jamming a high-caliber bullet into your eye as even the most badass dude is.&nbsp; In her service to Mother Russia during the Great Patriotic War (aka World War II), Lyudmila was a fucking kickass bitch from hell, notching more confirmed kills than any woman in modern military history and racking up kill counts that make Freddy Krueger look like that one Teletubbie everyone thinks is gay.</p>\r\n<p>Pavlichenko was a regular average college chick at Kiev State University in the Ukraine when the goddamned Nazis decided they were going to be total fucking assholes and invade the Soviet Union for no reason at all other than to try and show the rest of the world how big their dicks were.&nbsp; This obviously pissed off a lot of Russians, because they weren\'t really down with having bombs dropped on them or being run over by tanks, so a couple million confirmed Communists decided they were going to enlist in the military and start kicking some Fascist asses like Indiana Jones.&nbsp; Pavlichenko wasn\'t any less patriotic than her fellow Russkies and was super pumped to partake in some of the Nazi face-punching action.</p>\r\n<p>She marched down to her local recruiter and told him she wanted to \"get in on the major asskickings\".&nbsp; The jackass recruiting sergeant took one look at this 24 year-old college babe and was all like, \"hey toots don\'t you think you\'d rather be like a nurse or something?&nbsp; I\'ve got this \'sexy nurse\' costume I found at the adults-only Halloween costume shop... why don\'t you slip that on instead?\"&nbsp; But like any good badass, Lyudmila wasn\'t going to waste her time stitching up bullet wounds when she could be out there creating them, so she judo flipped the recruiter through a plate glass window, stomped his balls with a high-heeled shoe and then whipped out her motherfucking MARKSMANSHIP CERTIFICATE because OH YEAH she joined a shooting club at age 14 and was such a crack shot with a bolt-action rifle that she could load her gun with rubber bullets and use it to program her number into your cell phone from three miles away.&nbsp; The sergeant took one look at the&nbsp;<em>Official Certificate of Ultimate Badassery +5</em>&nbsp;and attached her to the Red Army\'s 25th Infantry Division.</p>\r\n<p>Using a&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.surplusrifle.com/russianmosin189130/index.asp\" target=\"blank\">Mosin-Nagant 1891/30</a>&nbsp;7.62mm rifle with a 4x optical scope, Pavlichenko took to the wilderness around Odessa and started a rather prolific career in Nazi Hunting.&nbsp; In the first several months of the war, she notched 187 confirmed sniper kills and earned a reputation as someone not to be fucked with.&nbsp; It is a little known fact that this is the reason why even to this day \"187\" is gangsta code for \"capping someone in the motherfuckin\' head\".&nbsp; After Pavlichenko had pretty much managed to kill every single sentient creature in the greater Odessa area she was transferred and fought in the Svastopol Campaign on the Crimean Peninsula, where she scored another 122 stone-cold headshots, giving her a combined total of 309 confirmed kills, including 36 confirmed German sniper kills (one of whom had himself notched over 500 kills).&nbsp; That\'s more people than fucking Charles Bronson killed in all the&nbsp;<em>Death Wish</em>&nbsp;movies combined, and if you check it against&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.moviebodycounts.com/Top-Characters.htm\">moviebodycounts.com</a>&nbsp;you\'ll see that not even fucking Rambo can touch this bitch in terms of sheer asskickery.&nbsp; I\'m not exactly sure what the tabulation process looks like over there, but I\'d imagine she\'d also probably get some bonus points simply by virtue of the fact that she was killing Nazis.</p>\r\n<p>Sadly, someone eventually dropped a mortar shell on her and blew her shit up.&nbsp; I don\'t think I need to tell you that she was so badass that she survived having some heavy artillery explode in her face, but obviously it slowed her down a little and she had to be taken off active duty.&nbsp; She spent the remainder of the war working as an instructor at Russian sniper school, where she educated a whole new generation of dead-eye balls-out snipers.&nbsp; After the war she completed her degree in History at Kiev State and got a job as a military historian working for the Soviet Defense Ministry.&nbsp; I\'m going to go ahead and give her extra badass cred for finding a job in the fucking field as well, because God knows I\'m not doing shit with my History degree these days.</p>\r\n<p>For her service to her country and her ability to fuck up Fascists with the unholy realness, Lyudmila Pavlichenko was promoted to Major, awarded the Gold Star Medal (the USSR\'s highest honor) and given the title \"Hero of the Soviet Union\".&nbsp; She was a crack shot, a skilled sniper, and a fucking badass.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/pavlichenko.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Links:</span><br /><br /><a href=\"http://www.soviet-awards.com/digest/pavlichenko/pavlichenko1.htm\" target=\"blank\">Mankiller: Lyudmila Pavlichenko</a><br /><br /><a href=\"http://www.snipersparadise.com/history/pavlichenk.htm\" target=\"blank\">Sniper\'s Paradise</a><br /><br /><a href=\"http://ww2db.com/person_bio.php?person_id=296&amp;list=Ground\" target=\"blank\">WWII Database</a></p>','2007-06-29','870580019089','pavlichenko1_new.jpg','pavlichenko1_new - Copy.jpg','Lyudmila Pavlichenko','Female Russian sniper with a dickload of confirmed kills.',''),('Sir Francis Drake','1540','January 27, 1596','Tavistock, Devon, England','16th-century British Admiral','<p>Possibly one of the only things more badass than being a professional pirate is the life of a privateer.&nbsp; You get all of the benefits - the pillage, the adventure, the glory, but with a much lesser chance of finding yourself on the wrong end of a noose.&nbsp; As long as you have some sort of government sponsor instead of being considered a criminal and a murderer, you\'re a goddamned national hero.&nbsp; Sure, you have to give most of your plunder to the crown, but what good is plunder if you have to spend your winters holed up in a dingy cave somewhere instead of kicking back with some fly honeys on your pimp-ass plantation?&nbsp; Privateering is the life, and the most badass of the privateers was Sir Francis Drake.</p>\r\n<p>Drake was just your average boring old British limey sailor delivering goods to the Spanish Main when all of a sudden one day in 1569 he got cocked over by the Spaniards while ashore in San Juan de Ulua.&nbsp; His ship was ambushed and he survived by jumping overboard and swimming to safety, and like any good badass from that day forth he swore he would live for revenge by plundering and pillaging Spanish settlements throughout the Carribean by putting a huge cannon between his legs and cock-slapping Spaniards in the face with it.&nbsp; He led balls-out pirate expeditions up and down the South and Central American coastlines in from 1570 through 1573, with his greatest accomplishment coming in 1573 when he captured the Silver Train - a huge train of pack mules carrying something like eight gajillion tons of silver, fifteen DVD players and a mint-condition Mickey Mantle rookie card.&nbsp; Drake smacked the donkeys, kicked some ass, and ganked all the shit he could carry before heading back home.</p>\r\n<p>Drake\'s most famous expedition came in 1577 when he set sail to become the first Englishman to circumnavigate the globe.&nbsp; He went down the Eastern coast of South America sacking cities, pillaging ships and robbing liquor stores, then went through the Straits of Magellan before going back up the West Coast and hitting all the unguarded Spanish cities on the coast there.&nbsp; By the time he hit Panama he only had one ship, the&nbsp;<em>Golden Hind</em>, and eighty men left in his crew (some bitch had tried to incite a mutiny so Drake responded by kicking him in the junk and dropping an anchor on his head).&nbsp; He went on to capture the Spanish galleon&nbsp;<em>Cacafuego</em>, which if my Spanish serves me correctly translates to \"burning shit\", where he recovered thirteen chests full of gold, twenty-six tons of silver and more jewels than you could fit inside a ten gallon hat.&nbsp; By the time he sailed around the world and returned home he only had fifty-nine men left, but for his awesome bitchin\'ness he was knighted by the Queen in 1581, declared a national hero, elected mayor of Plymouth and made a Member of Parliament.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/drake1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br />A reproduction of H.M.S.&nbsp;<em>Golden Hind</em>.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>He wasn\'t finished whomping jerks yet though.&nbsp; In 1585 he sacked towns in Colombia and the Dominican Republic.&nbsp; Then he faxed King Philip II of Spain a picture of his bare ass, causing a renewal in hostilities between England and Spain.&nbsp; Drake had so badly pissed off Philip that he put together the largest fleet that had ever been assembled - the Spanish Armada, consisting of 150 Spanish galleons, ten Imperial Star Destroyers and a half-dozen trained porpoises with swords attached to their heads.&nbsp; Drake was the assistant commander of the heavily-outgunned British force that opposed the Armada, but even though it looked hopeless he had a fucking plan.&nbsp; He was all like, \"dude let\'s set some motherfucking ships on motherfucking fire and send them right into the Spanish Fleet\".&nbsp; So the British did.&nbsp; The entire Spanish fleet caught on fire like a pumpkin filled with gasoline and broke apart in confusion, allowing Drake the chance to personally capture the Admiral of the Spanish Navy and steal his cool Admiral Hat.</p>\r\n<p>After the sweeping victory against the Armada, Drake decided to chill out back at home for a while.&nbsp; He build a sweet mansion like the kind you see on&nbsp;<em>MTV\'s Cribs</em>, got hitched to some duchess babe with huge cans and walked around downtown Plymouth with a sweet pimp cane made out of gold-plated diamonds.&nbsp; Eventually he got bored of the good life and set sail for the Caribbean in 1595, but after a failed attempt to sack Panama he caught dysentery and was killed by his own explosive diarrhea.</p>\r\n<p>Drake was fucking sweet as hell, because he was not only a badass pirate motherfucker who captured enough gold and silver to bankroll the New York Yankees, but he was also a national hero among Brits for his unequalled ability to beat the crap out of Spanish people.&nbsp; He was tough, daring and incredibly skilled, and was so hatefully remembered by the Spanish that for many years they actually celebrated the anniversary of his death.&nbsp; That\'s fucking awesome when you can piss off your enemies so badly that they celebrate your death years after it happened.&nbsp; That\'s the sort of goal that every badass should hope to achieve.</p>\r\n<p>As if he wasn\'t badass enough in life, Francis Drake is just as fucking tough in death.&nbsp; During all of his adventures, Drake carried with him a custom-made drum that bore his coat of arms.&nbsp; Legend has it that when Mother England is in times of great peril, the drum starts beating like Tommy Lee at a Motley Crue reunion.&nbsp; It happened during the British evacuation of Dunkirk and again during the Falkland Islands War, and rumor has it that if England ever gets into really super-omega deep shit, Drake will actually come sweeping into town like the ghost army from&nbsp;<em>Lord of the Rings</em>, grab the drum and use it to bash the shit out of anything that threatens the well-being of his country, proving that even though he\'s been dead for four hundred years he\'s still a goddamned force to be reckoned with.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/drake2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<table style=\"width: 50%;\" align=\"center\">\r\n<tbody>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td><span>\"The most famous anecdote about Drake relates that, prior to the battle, he was playing a game of bowls on Plymouth Hoe. On being warned of the approach of the Spanish fleet, Drake is said to have remarked that there was plenty of time to finish the game and still beat the Spaniards.\"</span></td>\r\n</tr>\r\n</tbody>\r\n</table>\r\n<p><br /><br /></p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Links:</span><br /><br /><a href=\"http://www.indrakeswake.co.uk/Education/drakeslife.htm\" target=\"blank\">In Drake\'s Wake</a><br /><br /><a href=\"http://sirfrancisdrakehistory.net/\" target=\"blank\">Sir Francis Drake History</a></p>','2007-06-22','420115219989','drake_new.jpg','drake_new - Copy.jpg','Sir Francis Drake','Took down the Spanish Armada with nothing but ambition and a bunch of ships he set on fire.',''),('Arthur Du Mosch','1958','N/A','Israel','21st-century Israeli Adventurer','<p>Picture this:&nbsp; You\'re at home.&nbsp; In bed.&nbsp; Sleeping.&nbsp; Your wife is next to you, your young daughter is next to her (she had a scary dream earlier in the night and wanted to sleep in bed with you guys) and your little kitty is nestled under her arm.&nbsp; Everything\'s peaceful.</p>\r\n<p>Then all of a sudden you hear the huge crash of breaking glass all around you, followed quickly by a heavy thud and the sound of rapid breathing.</p>\r\n<p>You sit up quickly and glance around the darkened room, desperately trying to figure out what the fuck is going on.</p>\r\n<p>You come face-to-face with this:</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/dumosche1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>A really pissed off leopard has just motherfucking come busting in through the bedroom window like&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/snakeeyes.html\" target=\"blank\">Snake Eyes</a>&nbsp;the goddamned commando ninja and leapt into bed with you and your family, who are all now shrieking hysterically and in imminent danger of becoming a Costco-sized package of Soylent Green flavored Whiskas.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Well, if you\'re fucking Arthur Du Mosche, you don\'t do what most normal rational human beings would have done (which is panic, by the way) - you get SUPER FUCKING PISSED and wrestle the damn bloodthirsty feline to the floor before slapping it into a goddamned Figure Four leg lock like you were Ric Flair and Steve Irwin morphed Voltron-style into an unstoppable asskicking machine.&nbsp; According to&nbsp;<a href=\"http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/28/AR2007052800382.html\" target=\"blank\">this story</a>&nbsp;Du Mosche, a 42 year-old Jerusalem man, who at the time of the incident was wearing nothing more than underwear and a t-shirt by the way, wrestled with this thing and pinned it to the floor for twenty minutes while he waited for the animal control folks to show up and haul the motherfucker off to an animal sanctuary.</p>\r\n<p>That\'s pretty balls-out right there. I mean the dude went from dead-ass asleep to locked in mortal hand-to-paw combat with a hungry predator in the span of about two seconds and still wound up sticking it to the leopard like he was made out of tranquilizer darts.&nbsp; And not only is this guy a badass for showing this wild cat who the&nbsp;<em>real</em>&nbsp;king of the jungle is and almost instinctively fighting off a freaking ninja-style ambush, but I\'d argue that it\'s even more badass that he&nbsp;<em>didn\'t</em>&nbsp;kill the thing.&nbsp; Not only does it take infinitely more strength and skill to pin an animal to the ground for twenty minutes than it does to just break it\'s neck or something, but you can\'t imagine that there are a whole lot of fucking leopards running around downtown Jersualem, so not only is he whipping ass but it\'s like he\'s like saving the environment or some shit at the same time.&nbsp; How can you argue with a good honest eco-friendly assbeating?</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/dumosche2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br />OMG PWNED</p>','2007-06-15','773439420494','dumoshe_new.jpg','dumoshe_new - Copy.jpg','Arthur Du Mosch','Pinned a leopard to the ground with his bare hands.',''),