('Marie Colvin','January 12, 1956','February 22, 2012','Oyster Bay, NY, USA','21st-century American Adventurer','<p>Marie Colvin was a badass, eyepatch-wearing American war journalist who survived more bullet-strewn battlefields in her 30-year career than even the most grizzled combat veterans history has ever produced. Catapulting from one war-torn hellhole of soul-sucking misery to another over a three-decade career evading bullets, air strikes and artillery shells, this fearless old-school newspaper correspondent survived killing fields from Tripoli to Chechnya, drank scotch with the world\'s most notorious dictators, sat around campfires with ferocious rebel leaders, filed dispatches from brutally-underequipped refugee camps, survived gunfights without so much as ever carrying a firearm, and had a life so friggin\' over-the-top that a newspaper story about her life was once titled \"Highway to the Danger Zone\". Oh yeah, and as long as we\'re on 1980s action movie references, she did it all while looking like a female version of Snake Plisskin from <em>Escape from New York</em>.</p>\r\n<p>Now, I don\'t really subscribe to the whole Pen Is Mightier than the Sword thing (the ratio of Claymore-swinging freak-out avengers to professional writers featured on the site should attest to that) but it\'s hard to argue with the fact that war journalism is easily the most badass writing profession that ever existed. These utterly-fearless combat-authors routinely get right up in the middle of the action, putting their lives on the line right alongside hardened soldiers despite being armed only with some specialized schooling and a laptop &ndash; two items that are about as useful in a gunfight as a broken set of iPod headphones &ndash; yet a good one doesn\'t back down from his job no matter how over-the-top insane things get. And Colvin was one of the best. A legend in her field, this hardcore woman was famous for being the first person in to whatever rapidly-expanding world hotspot happened to be ravaging the planet at the time, embedding herself with aid workers, military dictators, freedom fighters, terrorist leaders, grieving civilians, and whoever the hell else was going to give her an interview, and then getting the story out there so the rest of the world can get the point that, \"hey, shit here is really fucked up.\" Anytime seriously horrible atrocities were going down in the world, you could be damned sure that Marie effin\' Colvin was sneaking across some random minefield-encrusted, barbed-wire-laden battle line, infiltrating an ultra-dangerous cesspool where journalists are known to be beheaded and/or shot on sight, and somehow finding time to write eloquent dispatches while evading snipers, government soldiers, terrorist attacks, artillery shells, and the occasional off-target NATO airstrike. It\'s hard to argue that this doesn\'t take some serious balls.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/colvin4.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<table style=\"width: 500px;\" align=\"center\">\r\n<tbody>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td><span>\"In an age of 24/7 rolling news, blogs and Twitters, we are on constant call wherever we are. But war reporting is still essentially the same &ndash; someone has to go there and see what is happening. You can\'t get that information without going to places where people are being shot at, and others are shooting at you.\" </span></td>\r\n</tr>\r\n</tbody>\r\n</table>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Coming up through the ranks as the Middle East correspondent for the London <em>Sunday Times</em>, Colvin made her way into Tripoli right at the height of Gadhafi\'s bullshit in 1986, traveling by camel into a city that was on the receiving end of the largest U.S. airstrike operation since Vietnam and somehow finding a way to make contact with the dictator himself &ndash; no small feat, considering that the goddamned SEALs were probably also looking for the dude around the same time, only without as much success. Colvin, a Long Island native who was about as far from her Yale University alma mater as possible, survived a couple run-ins with Gadhafi\'s personal guards, got the interview, completely eviscerated him in print for his appalling human rights violations (she was notorious for not pulling any punches in her writing &ndash; as someone who doesn\'t have much use for bullshit objectivism, I appreciate this tremendously), but then somehow impressed him so much during their interview that the dude actually invited her BACK for another interview at a later date. They eventually became sort-of acquaintances, occasionally drinking scotch together over the course of the next 25 years, despite the fact that she constantly called him out for his human rights abuses and basically helped tell the rest of the world was an autocratic piece of shit he was.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/colvin1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>Colvin embedded with Libyan anti-Gadhafi rebels in 2011.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>For the next 25 years, Marie Colvin would spend the vast majority of her time actively taking cover from people shooting bullets at her, desperately trying to get a story and tell the world what the fuck was going on behind the closed borders of some of Earth\'s most dangerous warzone. In 1987 she smuggled herself into Saddam Hussein\'s Basra, reporting on the Iraqi dictator\'s mass killings of his own people at a time when Hussein himself barred any Western journalists from his country on threat of a ridiculously-painful death. Later that same year she was in Palestine, interviewing wounded refugees while Syrian artillery launched rockets into the camp and blew shit up around her. In the early 1990s she was embedding herself on the front lines in Iraq and Kuwait during Desert Storm, avoiding brutal firefights in Eritrea, surviving a civil war in Zimbabwe, traveling around with the Kosovo Liberation Army as they fought against the Serbs, getting married three times, winning a shitload of journalism awards, and maintaining her personal residence in Jerusalem, a place that was probably one of the most ridiculously-dangerous cities in the world in the 1990s. She also once racked up a $20,000 phone bill when she forgot to shut down her satellite phone, which isn\'t exactly badass but is worth mentioning nonetheless.</p>\r\n<p>While that was more excitement and danger than most people see in their entire lives combined, for Marie Colvin it was just the first half of the decade. The later years of the 1990s, Colvin spent some time living with the newly-installed Taliban regime in Afghanistan &ndash; a group not particularly well-known for being appreciative of Westerners, women, or freedom of the press &ndash; and when that became too tame she spent a couple months following a dangerous rebel leader around Chechnya while the Chechen guerillas fought off a full-scale attack by the entire friggin\' Russian army. Her assignment in Chechnya was cut a little short when a Russian fighter jet streaked through the skies and blew up the jeep she was riding in with an air-to-ground missile. Colvin crawled out of the wreckage of the burning vehicle moments before the fighter returned to strafe the busted-to-hell vehicle with a few million 20mm cannon rounds, then she hid motionless in the snow for nine hours until the coast was clear. With the road up ahead blocked by Spetsnaz paratroopers, Colvin and the surviving Chechens fled through a 12,000 foot-high mountain pass, moving deep into the Caucasus through chest-deep snow without food or proper clothing. She survived altitude sickness and starvation, crossed into Georgia, and then got herself extracted to London by UN helicopters, which is of course totally badass.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/colvin6.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>In 1999 Colvin went to East Timor, where she spent a lot of time working in a refugee camp that housed about 1,500 wounded and displaced civilians. When the camp was surrounded by the Indonesian Army (who claimed it was housing terrorists and needed to be shelled into a fucking crater) she received orders both from the United Nations and the Indonesian government to get the fuck outta there before the entire place became a gigantic charred ruin packed with dead bodies. She refused, defying the Indonesian government to blow up a Western journalist who worked for a prominent London newspaper.</p>\r\n<p>They caved. All 1,500 refugees survived.</p>\r\n<p>In 2001 Colvin went to another East Asian warzone, smuggling herself through the jungles of Sri Lanka to link up with a rebel group known as the Tamil Tigers. She followed their leader around for a few months, but eventually found herself on the wrong end of a brutal firefight and ended up standing a little too close to the splash-damage radius when an RPG round exploded in her face. Colvin crawled through the battlefield bleeding from her eye and mouth, got to safety, and then filed a 3,000-word report while she was being wheeled into surgery. She lost the use of her eye, then decided to wear an awesome-looking eyepatch, presumably just because that\'s totally fucking badass. When the Tigers were making their last stand a few months later, the last call their leader made was to Marie Colvin. He asked her to try to personally broker a surrender with the Indonesian government.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/colvin2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>Colvin devoted a lot of ink to the plight of civilians in East Timor.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Being shot in the face with a rocket launcher kind of made Marie briefly rethink some of her life choices, but after a short stint working a miserable brain-melting copywriting desk job that she hated, she said, \"fuck this,\" and went back in Afghanistan, entering Taliban-occupied territory just a few months after losing her eye to a rocket-propelled grenade. Colvin pops up again in Baghdad in 2003 during the Iraq War, when she was embedded with an Iraqi Army force searching for Saddam\'s WMDs &ndash; when she wasn\'t avoiding IEDs, airstrikes, and insurgent snipers, Colvin lived in a hunt club belonging to Iraqi Army officer Ahmad Chalabi, sleeping in a concrete room that used to be an interrogation chamber, her only possessions a chair, a table, a laptop, and a half-empty bottle of scotch.</p>\r\n<p>The rest of the 2000\'s were spent interviewing rebels in Sierra Leone, working with Palestinian hospital staff during Israel\'s 2009 attacks in Gaza, and running for her life through a back alley in Cairo while being chased after by an angry anti-Western mob. She was there during the 2011 Arab Spring revolt in Egypt, sailed into Libya a few months later to cover the story on the Libyan rebels, and traveled to Syria in 2012 despite a standing order from the ultra-corrupt Syrian Army to kill any journalists who set foot on their soil with ultra-extreme prejudice to the max, filing reports to her UK readers from a bombed-out hotel as the government shelled the city.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/colvin5.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>A bullet and shrapnel-strewn house in Homs, a few blocks away from where Marie was filing her reports.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Colvin had been sent to the city of Homs on a two-day mission to report on how the Syrian government were being assholes and blowing up their own people, but when she saw how goddamned insane everything was out there (and realized she was the only British newspaper journalist in the entire country), she decided it was her duty to get the world out to the rest of the world about what was going on there. The 55 year-old war journalist defiantly refused to evacuate, resolving to stay through the conflict even as artillery and rockets rained down on the city.</p>\r\n<p>Unfortunately, Marie Colvin had already cheated death too many times in her life, and the danger of her job finally caught up with her in Syria. She and her photojournalist, Remi Ochlik, were killed on February 22nd, 2012, when government forces pasted their hotel with a ten-round salvo of artillery and tank shells. A tragic end, perhaps, though for a woman who lived her entire life in a constant stream of war zones, one that she was prepared for. Anything less dangerous would have been too boring for her.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/colvin3.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<table style=\"width: 500px;\" align=\"center\">\r\n<tbody>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td><span>\"Our mission is to report these horrors of war with accuracy and without prejudice. We always have to ask ourselves whether the level of risk is worth the story. What is bravery, and what is bravado? Journalists covering combat shoulder great responsibilities and face difficult choices. Sometimes they pay the ultimate price.\" </span></td>\r\n</tr>\r\n</tbody>\r\n</table>\r\n<p><br /> <span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Links/Sources:</span><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://warwithoutwitness.com/index.php?option=com_content&amp;view=article&amp;id=208:tigers-begged-me-to-broker-surrender-marie-colvin-times-uk&amp;catid=38:reports&amp;Itemid=61\">Tigers Begged Me to Broker Surrender</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/public/news/article874796.ece\">Final Dispatch from Homs</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2012/02/a-tribute-to-marie-colvin.html\">New Yorker Tribute</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/9099092/Marie-Colvin-fearless-committed-essential.html\">Colvin: Fearless, Committed Essential</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://articles.cnn.com/2012-03-04/middleeast/world_meast_syria-wounded-journalist_1_president-bashar-foreign-journalists-homs?_s=PM:MIDDLEEAST\">CNN</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/9098849/Marie-Colvin-obituary.html\">Telegraph Obituary</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2104711/Marie-Colvin-Sunday-Times-reporter-leave-Syria-day-died-says-mother.html\">Daily Mail Obituary</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://www.ajr.org/article.asp?id=746\">Highway to the Danger Zone</a></p>','2012-03-09','841799523487','colvin.jpg','colvin-small.jpg','Marie Colvin','Fearless war correspondent who spent a 30-year career embedding herself in every war-torn hellhole on Earth.','\"Be passionate and be involved in what you believe in, and do it as thoroughly and honestly and fearlessly as you can.\"'),('Commander Shepard','April 11, 2154','various','various','Fictional Human Soldier','<p>If I had to sum the intergalactic adventures of intrepid explorer/warrior/adventurer/carnage-enthusiast Commander [Insert Name] Shepard up in one word, it would probably be Killboner. Between going on a non-stop mad intergalactic rampage of head-butting destruction that makes the galaxy\'s deadliest criminals, bounty hunters, and mercenaries look like ten pounds of crap stuffed in a five-pound bag, and the fact that he\'s so insanely potent he can have sex without taking off his clothes, I feel that no other word appropriately describes it. The hero of the amazing <em>Mass Effect</em> series, Shepard is a double-stuffed, leather-bound, thermonuclear badass so hardcore he can knock Turians unconscious by punching them in their chest armor and so insanely destructive that his pet goldfish have a tendency to spontaneously die of heart attacks simply because they can\'t handle the stress of living in the same room as the galaxy\'s ultimate killing machine. Everyone this guy meets either dies painfully in a fire or gets naked and dances for him, and he\'s so cripplingly confident and beloved/feared throughout the galaxy that even though even though he can\'t walk into a bar without pistol-whipping someone and his dance moves should probably constitute a war crime, he always seems to get straight into the VIP rooms in clubs whenever he wants (presumably because the Krogan bouncers don\'t want to screw with someone with more balls than them).</p>\r\n<p>Now, before I get too much further, I should mention that there are three major reasons why I feel compelled to finally write about Commander Shepard this week. The first is that <em>Mass Effect</em> is easily one of my favorite games of all time. The second is that I was up until 6am pretty much every night this week pumping 30+ hours into the most recent (and final?) installment of the trilogy, a practice that, combined with my mad dash to complete the Book Three manuscript by March 31st, has left me very little time to do anything other than ponder the more mysterious aspects of Asari anatomy and have agonizing nightmares about whether it\'s more efficient to carry an assault rifle or just spam out Adrenaline Rushes non-stop all the time. Finally, I\'m compelled to action because about a year ago that THIS happened, and as soon as I saw it I resolved to finish the series before I made it a self-fulfilling prophesy:</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><iframe src=\"http://www.youtube.com/embed/Eop_CNbgv6E\" width=\"420\" height=\"315\"></iframe><br /><br /> <span>Scroll ahead to 0:20 to witness what is either a cruel coincidence or the single greatest moment of my writing career.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Without giving away too much in the way of spoilers, Commander Shepard\'s story begins when a synthetic race of robot aliens called the Geth roll into town on a mission to <em>Titan A.E.</em> Earth\'s colonies into oblivion like a bunch of sleek, one-eyed Terminator Daleks, so naturally it\'s up to our intrepid hero to deal with the situation by pulling out their glowing eyes with his teeth and then shooting them so hard in the RAM that by the time the second game rolls around they\'re just some sad, pathetic shell of their former glory (which Shepard then in turn blows up for a second time, and possibly a third). Along the way, Shep discovers that while it might be possible to genocide the Geth out with little more than a powerful manly sneeze, a biotic singularity field, and a few thousand rounds of incendiary shotgun blasts to the sensor arrays, the Geth are just pawns for an EVEN BIGGER group of colossal planet-killing robots known as the Reapers, who are like giant robot space-squid that fire laser beams capable of splitting battleship hulls in half. Naturally, Shepard decides to genocide them out too. The Reapers respond to his declaration of war by atomizing him into outer space with a death ray the size of a small star system, but this really only succeeds in making him angry.</p>\r\n<p>Just a few hours of gameplay later, Shepard is traveling across the galaxy shredding Reapers into scrap metal with his fists, forging the scrap metal into bullets with which to kill other Reapers, and then going off to melt the ice-cold heart of a biotically-enhanced, spree-killing super-babe with a shaved head and enough tattoos to make a Yakuza underboss look like a high school chick with a two-inch butterfly tattoo on her ankle. By my count, this guy single-handedly kills at least five full-sized Reapers &ndash; which, by the way, are the sort of horrific metallic alien monstrosities that make hand-to-hand combat with a Decepticon look like a pillow-fight with Kelly Chambers &ndash; all while somehow managing to not be crushed or vaporized by a monster that sports claws the size of container ships. I suppose it helps that Shepard seems to be the only human on earth capable of wielding the gigantic mega-rocket launcher that can kill a Reaper in one shot, though for some reason he doesn\'t seem to bring that thing around with him NEARLY enough (maybe it would make life too easy for him and he prefers a real challenge?). Oh, and while we\'re on the subject of specialized equipment, Shep is also the only dude with a blade on his Omni-Tool, which for all intents and purposes means that this guy is so insanely over-the-top hardcore that he can kill even the creepiest robot-zombie alien cyber-douchebags by stabbing them in the face with a three-dimensional hologram.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/shepard1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>\"THIS is what a gun in your face feels like. It happens to me <em>every day</em>.\" </span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>It needs to be mentioned that Shepard can be male or female, good or evil, black or white (although I have it on good authority from a Chinese-American friend that it\'s really hard to make him Asian without having it look like he\'s got some kind of creepy congenital birth defect), thus proving that badassitude isn\'t tied to gender, race, or creed. And while a ton of people love the Female Shepard forever until death do them part, I have to admit I don\'t know much about FemShep, except that she\'s definitely not a blonde, she\'s voiced by the same woman who did Bastila, and she gets to have erotic lesbian shower scenes with her subordinates (which of course is badass, but only if you enjoy sexy naked women with athletic builds rubbing each other down with loofas (and who doesn\'t)). Other than that I think she\'s pretty much the same as ManShep. All things considered, I personally chose to go with the dude version, mostly because any time my wife comes home and I can triumphantly inform her that I hooked up with a blue-skinned alien chick while she was at work it\'s a good day in my book (unemployment FTW).</p>\r\n<p>Male or Female, Commander Shepard nevertheless proudly comes from the James T. Kirk School of Space Captaining &ndash; a time-honored, old-school badass code of honor that requires daring starship commanders to mercilessly obliterate enemy warships, face-punch intergalactic douchebags in whatever passes for a skull on their insectoid anatomy, massacre entire civilizations of evil genoicidal monsters, and then go home to make out with all the hot alien babes he recently widowed. And for Shepard, it doesn\'t even matter if he\'s male or female, or if his love interest is a blue-skinned alien, a hardcore space marine, or some random synthetic sophisticated sex robot from the future &ndash; the Commander can\'t friggin\' walk from the kitchen to the forward gun battery without some hot babe in a skin-tight lycra bodysuit hurling herself breasts-first at him and launching into a dialogue about how she can no longer hold back her feelings for him. Hell, there\'s one chick from a race of aliens that develop life-threatening illnesses every time they\'re exposed to hayfever, yet that chick still practically tore off her bubble-boy enviro-suit just to get all up on Shep\'s bacteria. Throughout the entire series, it\'s like as soon as some chickadee in a slinky costume walks into the frame you know that unless you\'re ragingly inept at controlling the guy he\'s going to be seducing her under the mood-lighting and terrible music of his Captain\'s Quarters just before sending her to her death on a suicide mission she has little hope of surviving. When it comes to people who don\'t want to sleep with him, Shepard Inspires such loyalty in his troops that you get guys like Garrus who are so dedicated they\'re willing to block rockets with their faces and spend long nights performing seemingly-endless ultra-complicated calibrations for weapons that pretty much never actually even get fired. \"Hey boss, did you say you want me to run into that radiation-filled death chamber armed only with a pistol and hold off five Cerberus Mechs at the same time so that you and your girlfriend can reprogram the clock on the <em>Normandy</em>\'s microwave? I\'m on it!\"</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/shepard2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<table style=\"width: 600px;\" align=\"center\">\r\n<tbody>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td><span>This is the first thing that pops up when you run a Google Image Search for \"space babes\", but, honestly, this weird alien space eyeball tentacle-monster also happens to be a good visual representation of Commander Shepherd\'s military career &ndash; drifting around in outer space groping a hot babe with his appendages while random dudes shoot him in the face with rockets at close range without doing any noticeable damage.</span></td>\r\n</tr>\r\n</tbody>\r\n</table>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>I\'d also like to point out that Commander Shepard is named after real-life American astronaut/hero/badass Alan Shepard, a man whose claim to fame is that he was the first American (and second person) to ever enter outer space. Commander Alan Shepard was a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, served on a destroyer in the Pacific Theater during World War II, and then eventually became a naval aviator and test pilot, where his job primarily involved hopping into flying deathtraps with wings and testing to see if he could fly them really really fast without the systems malfunctioning and killing him. In 1961 Shepard was carried into space strapped to a gigantic missile loaded with jet fuel, hurtling through the atmosphere at a time when rocket trajectories were still calculated by hand using slide rules, and surviving in Zero-G environments in an age where most scientists were \"pretty sure\" you could go into space without your entire body exploding like a meat grenade. Shepard was Chief of the Astronaut Office during the <em>Gemini</em> missions, mostly because he had a crippling inner-ear disease that gave him extreme vertigo, affected his hearing, and caused him to be almost-constantly nauseous, but this still didn\'t stop him from taking part in <em>Apollo</em> 14, becoming the fifth person to walk on the moon, and being the first (and, as far as I know, only) human being to ever hit a golf ball on the surface of the Moon &ndash; he\'d hidden the club from NASA by concealing it in his space suit, then assembled it in Zero-G and used it to set what has to be the current Galactic Record for Longest Golf Ball Drive. So, any time you\'re naming your fictional space captain after a dude like this, you know he\'s got to be pretty hardcore. (Of course, rather than hurtling through space on a rickety 1960s chunk of hollowed-out steel constructed by the lowest bidder, our Shepard and his band of carefree sex-crazed alien life-forms explore the galaxy in the SSV <em>Normandy</em>, a hyperdrive-capable singles bar with a stealth drive and an over-the-top frontal cannon that rivals that of most decked-out Alliance cruisers.)</p>\r\n<p>Depending on how you play him, Shepard is either the nicest dude to ever live, the cruelest hardass in history, or some combination of the two. For the most part, one thing is certain &ndash; if he can\'t shoot it, punch it, or otherwise smash it into submission with this skull, he\'ll use diplomacy, which, in most cases, consists almost entirely of convincing bad guys to shoot themselves in the head and save himself the bullet (although he did once end a 300 year-old intergalactic war just by yelling at a couple of political leaders). And while he does have plenty of good lines, the best and most badass stuff usually happens when he doesn\'t say anything and instead unleashes a badass Renegade Interrupt. And, look, I don\'t care if you\'re the ultimate Paragon of orphan-hugging fluffy goodness in the universe and you arbitrate peace accords and help Seth Green bang robo-Tricia Helfer while flying around to all your Favorite Stores on the Citadel on a rainbow-flavored Pegasus-Unicorn &ndash; if you don\'t use the Renegade interrupts your life will never be complete. I swear to God one time I actually saw Shepard punch a katana in half during a Renegade interrupt. Katanas, as we all know, are easily the most powerful weapon in any fantasy/sci-fi setting, usually providing a damage output that far outpaces missile launchers (I seriously once saw a <em>G.I. Joe</em> comic where Snake Eyes cut a space shuttle in half with a katana), but apparently when Commander Shepard gest pissed-off enough he can pimp-slap one in half with a hellacious backhand swing. He\'s just that awesome.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><iframe src=\"http://www.youtube.com/embed/sy-eRfupYbA\" width=\"420\" height=\"315\"></iframe><br /><br /><span>Here are some clips of Shepard being an asshole in ME1.<br />I didn\'t see most of these the first time playing through, but some of them are pretty tight.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Good or evil, one thing remains constant &ndash; even if Commander Shepard were the last human in the galaxy in a desperate struggle for the survival of the species, he\'d personally pull out the throats of every ultra-aggressive alien life form in existence and then repopulate the species himself with his unstoppable boners.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/shepard3.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>\"If I flee, I might trip over the dozen Krogan I killed to get here.\"</span></p>','2012-03-16','341874424230','shepard.jpg','shepard-small.jpg','Commander Shepard','I\'m Commander Shepard, and this is my favorite post on the Internet.','\"How come every time there\'s a problem you end up running to me?\"'),('Slade Deville Cutter','November 1, 1911','June 9, 2005','Oswego, IL, USA','20th-century American Sailor','<p>As people across Europe and those other continents are almost-undoubtedly already semi-aware and wildly-apathetic about, this weekend is the BIG GAME of PROFESSIONAL U.S. AMERICAN SPORTS.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s a red, white, and blue baby-back rib BBQ cook-out of freedom so thoroughly American that it&rsquo;s the only professional sporting championship I can think of where the title of the game is so copyrighted to shit that you can&rsquo;t even say the name of it in a commercial on the radio.&nbsp; I assume this is because Commissioner Roger Goodell will send a night-vision-equipped NFL Tactical Response Team of ex-Navy SEAL Super Bowl Assassins rappelling into your bathroom while you&rsquo;re taking a shower and cut your balls off with an officially-licensed NFL Team Shop butterfly knife branded to look like a game-worn Peyton Manning jersey (that&rsquo;s what I&rsquo;d do if I was commish), but it&rsquo;s possible that there&rsquo;s too much risk of concussion for the SWAT guys so maybe he made that illegal and sends a Replacement Team of out-of-work janitors who slap out obscene six-figure fines instead.</p>\r\n<p>SPORTS!</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"../images/123787210089/cutter1.gif\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>Now the temptation here would be to go with one of the all-time great NFL badasses &ndash; a <a href=\"http://www.bronxbanterblog.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/taylor_17.jpg\">Lawrence Taylor</a>, <a href=\"http://i.cdn.turner.com/si/multimedia/photo_gallery/1010/SI.top.nfl.covers/images/jack-lambert.001288167.jpg\">Jack Lambert</a>, <a href=\"http://stream1.gifsoup.com/webroot/animatedgifs1/1225465_o.gif\">Earl Campbell</a> motherfucker who dented helmets with his face and demolished his opponents like a vehicle-mounted pneumatic battering ram of human muscle punching through a rotting deer carcass &ndash; but as it turns out, one of the most badass American Football players (I&rsquo;ll only do that for you <em>once</em>, foreign readers) in history is a collegiate All-American named Slade Cutter who never made it to the Pro Football Hall of Fame.</p>\r\n<p>Instead he was a little busy fighting World War II, receiving four Navy Crosses and two Silver Stars for slipping deep into enemy waters and torpedo-humping dozens of hardcore Imperial Japanese Navy shipping transports and troop carriers into seaborne gasoline fires as one of the most successful submarine commanders in U.S. Navy history.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"../images/123787210089/cutter2.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Now, the first thing I want to mention here is that the man&rsquo;s name is Slade Cutter.&nbsp; That&rsquo;s some fucking <a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5xhfCGcAYw\">We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese</a> shit right there, and it&rsquo;s not every day a badass real-life soldier comes along whose name is even more heart-stoppingly descriptive than the unmitigatedly-terrible things video game companies decide to name their protagonists in over-the-top FPSes (&ldquo;in the gritty world of BLOOD STORM you play as Phoenix Bloodstorm, an ex-Special Forces agent haunted by his dark past&hellip;&rdquo;).&nbsp; &nbsp;Slade Cutter is a Man&rsquo;s name.&nbsp; A square-jawed man built like a brick wall who flattens Quarterbacks like flapjacks and makes out with their girlfriends while the stadium explodes behind him in slow motion.&nbsp; If that&rsquo;s not enough, his middle name is Deville, so he could always bust that out at fancy 1930s parties when he was talking to hot girls with martinis and they&rsquo;d immediately swoon out of their cocktail dresses and into his arms.</p>\r\n<p>Cutter was born on an alfalfa farm in Oswego, Illinois in November 1911.&nbsp; His father had been righteously injured playing football as a young man, so while he was growing up Slade&rsquo;s mom encouraged her boy not to get involved in the world of high-impact helmet-to-helmet contact.&nbsp; So instead of bodyslamming running backs on the field of battle, Slade Cutter learned how to play the flute instead.&nbsp; But before you say &ldquo;what the fuck,&rdquo; I should mention that this guy was so goddamn good at flauting that he won some major flute competition that was being judged by John Philips Sousa, the guy who wrote the Marine Corps March.&nbsp; If that doesn&rsquo;t do it for you, this will &ndash; when Slade Cutter was admitted to the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis in 1931 he listed his vices as &ldquo;Tobacco, Swearing, and Flute.&rdquo;&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"../images/123787210089/cutter3.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /> Yeah, I play the flute.&nbsp; Fuck you.<br />(takes huge drag on a fat Cuban cigar, blows smoke in reporter&rsquo;s face)</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Well as you can probably guess, 6&rsquo;2&rdquo;-tall, 215-pound men named Slade Cutter don&rsquo;t exactly escape the attention of high school football coaches, and when Cutter was in HS he was approached by his school&rsquo;s football coach &ndash; a guy named Paul Brown.&nbsp; Brown, if you&rsquo;ve never heard of him, is so instrumental to the development of professional football that the Cleveland Browns are fucking named after him, which would be a little more significant if the Browns didn&rsquo;t totally suck so bad (sorry, Clevelanders &ndash; you&rsquo;re some of the best/worst football fans in the country, but I don&rsquo;t think it&rsquo;s exactly ground-breaking to suggest that the only real hope for your team not to gargle farm animal balls in the foreseeable future probably involves some kind of Otto Graham / Bernie Kozar voodoo Frankenstein shit).&nbsp; Brown convinced Cutter to overlook his dad&rsquo;s crippling injuries and <em>be a man </em>about it, and by the time Cutter was at the Academy he was a world-class Tackle.</p>\r\n<p>Playing OT and DT back in the days where football player were Real Men who played both sides of the ball in knee-deep snow uphill both ways and only called Timeout to rub some dirt on their shattered femurs, Slade Cutter was an All-American athlete for the Naval Academy, quickly becoming a national star for his ability to dominate opponents.&nbsp; His personal Football Waterloo came in the 1934 Army-Navy game, when he not only slogged through ankle-deep mud to shut out Army&rsquo;s powerful offense but also accounted for all of Navy&rsquo;s points when he kicked the game-winning Field Goal in front of 79,000 screaming fans (this was back when people still cared about the Army-Navy game), booting it through the uprights from 20 yards out to win the game 3-0 and mark the first time Navy had beaten Army in 13 years.&nbsp; Nowadays he&rsquo;s in the College Football Hall of Fame.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><iframe src=\"http://www.youtube.com/embed/zC6ggT4ByDs#t=5\" frameborder=\"0\" width=\"425\" height=\"350\"></iframe></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>An all-around physical badass, Slade Cutter was also a two-time Intercollegiate Boxing Champ, rearranging the faces of Division I fighters back in the days when boxing looked a lot more like MMA without all the &ldquo;sweaty guys rolling around on the ground together&rdquo; action and fighting gloves were basically one step away from being Tong Po&rsquo;s broken glass hand wraps from <em>Kickboxer</em>.&nbsp; When he graduated in 1935 Slade was approached by a couple fighting promoters who wanted to turn him into a badass pro boxer, but Slade Cutter turned down a life of money, booze, fame, women, and face punches to serve his country on a battleship &ndash; joining up at a time in American history where it was looking increasingly likely that we were going to be at war with Germany and/or Japan very very soon.&nbsp; He went into the Navy&rsquo;s still-developing submarine program shortly afterwards, entering sub school in 1938 and going through it with flying colors.</p>\r\n<p>He was second-in-command of the submarine USS <em>Pompano</em> on war patrol in Japanese waters just eleven days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"../images/123787210089/cutter4.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Playing Riker to Captain Lew Park&rsquo;s Jean-Luc Picard, Slade Cutter kicked ass off the coasts of Tokyo Harbor and Okinawa during his first two patrols with <em>Pompano</em>.&nbsp; Park, an ultra-aggressive sub commander who ordered his officers to calculate firing trajectories in their head to save time lining up shots, taught Cutter the importance of going totally balls-out and aggressively maim the unsuspecting enemy at close range like you&rsquo;re delivering a vicious blind-side crown-of-the-helmet hit on a defenseless receiver while he&rsquo;s out of bounds after the play is over and has already gone home to have dinner with his family.&nbsp; Park and Cutter attacked early, often, and at close range, and they also attempted the first &ldquo;Down the Throat&rdquo; attack in U.S. Naval history, unleashing a technique that&rsquo;s just as badass as it sounds &ndash; you line your sub up nose-to-nose with a depth-charge-toting enemy destroyer like you&rsquo;re gonna play a nice round of chicken, then you give &lsquo;em double-tube torpedos right in their fucking faces at point-blank range.</p>\r\n<p>During two patrols in 1942 <em>Pompano </em>harassed enemy convoys delivering much-needed supplies to Japanese troops fighting on the Pacific Islands, and also survived almost being destroyed twice &ndash; once when they had to evade U.S. dive bombers that had mistakenly identified <em>Pompano </em>as a Japanese sub, and once when an enemy torpedo rocked Cutter&rsquo;s engines so bad that half the sub was flooded and the water pressure almost crushed the boat up like a ball of tin foil.&nbsp; &nbsp;For his actions ballnocking the Japanese fleet from below, Cutter received two Silver Stars &ndash; one for each tour.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"../images/123787210089/cutter5.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /> what&rsquo;s big and black and<br /> full of seamen</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>In 1943 Slade Cutter was reassigned to Executive Officer of the USS <em>Sea Horse</em>, a Balao-Class submarine equipped with 4 torpedo tubes in the stern, 6 in the bow, a 5-inch deck gun, and two 20mm anti-aircraft machine guns.&nbsp; On his first patrol Cutter&rsquo;s bullshit commanding offer was way too pussy in not ramming torpedoes down the hatches of Japanese shipping, and on the lone occasion that idiot actually found his balls and attacked he missed his target and got his fuel lines ruptured by enemy depth charges.&nbsp; So in October of &rsquo;43 the Navy was like, &ldquo;fuck this guy, you&rsquo;re out,&rdquo; and yanked the starter and put SLADE CUTTER in there to run the first-team offense.</p>\r\n<p>It was kind of like Tom Brady coming in for Drew Bledsoe and beating the Greatest Show on Turf in the Super Bowl.&nbsp; On his first patrol as Commanding Officer of the USS <em>Sea Horse</em>, Slade Cutter went right off the coast of mainland Japan, surfaced, sunk three trawlers with his deck gun, then charged into a 17-ship convoy, slipped past their destroy escort, and lit up a couple troop and supply transports with his torpedoes.&nbsp; By the time he ran out of torpedoes and had to return and resupply, he&rsquo;d single-handedly sunk 9 enemy ships and destroyed 48,000 tons of Japanese war materials.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"../images/123787210089/cutter6.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>For the next year, Slade Cutter did everything he could to keep the Japanese from bringing men and supplies to the front lines.&nbsp; Waiting patiently far below the ocean surface, he followed enemy convoys, calmly waiting for the right opportunity to strike.&nbsp; Once he had his chance, he didn&rsquo;t hesitate &ndash; he charged in, took his shots, then ran like hell as a sea of depth charges exploded around him, each one capable of blasting him to pieces.&nbsp; Blunt, straightforward, and loved by his men, Cutter repeatedly struck hard, even as the Japanese continually intensified their anti-sub defenses.</p>\r\n<p>On his second patrol, Cutter chased a convoy 80 miles over three days, snuck in, hit them hard, sank two, and survived a depth charge attack.&nbsp; On his third patrol, he discovered a ridiculously-huge convoy of two Japanese supersize battleships and five aircraft carriers sent to stop Americans at Saipan, radioed to Admiral Spruance what was going on, and resulting U.S. sneak attack &ndash; dubbed the &ldquo;Marianas Turkey Shoot&rdquo; &ndash; sank three enemy aircraft carriers.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"../images/123787210089/cutter7.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>All told, Slade Cutter would lead four patrols as commander of <em>Sea Horse</em>.&nbsp; He accounted for 21 enemy ship kills, and is credited with destroying 142,300 tons of enemy war material, both numbers being only behind <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/wahoo.html\">Mush Morton and Dick O&rsquo;Kane</a> in terms of submarine victories by U.S. ships in World War II.&nbsp; He ended the war with four Navy Crosses &ndash; one for each tour commanding <em>Sea Horse</em> &ndash; and two Silver Stars, one for each tour with <em>Pompano</em>.&nbsp; Literally every single time this man left port, he returned home with one of the three highest awards for bravery offered by the U.S. Navy.</p>\r\n<p>After the war, Cutter commanded a heavy cruiser that served as the flagship of the U.S. Second Fleet, and later became Athletic Director of the Naval Academy.&nbsp; He died of heart failure in 2005 at the age of 93.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"../images/123787210089/cutter8.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p align=\"center\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Links:</p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/12/AR2005061201503.html\">http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/12/AR2005061201503.html</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.navy.mil/navydata/cno/n87/usw/issue_9/submarine_hero.html\">http://www.navy.mil/navydata/cno/n87/usw/issue_9/submarine_hero.html</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://projects.militarytimes.com/citations-medals-awards/recipient.php?recipientid=20334\">http://projects.militarytimes.com/citations-medals-awards/recipient.php?recipientid=20334</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.ussseahorse.org/SS304History.html\">http://www.ussseahorse.org/SS304History.html</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.footballfoundation.org/News/NewsDetail/tabid/567/Article/52112/war-hero-and-college-hall-of-famer-slade-cutter-dies-at-93.aspx\">http://www.footballfoundation.org/News/NewsDetail/tabid/567/Article/52112/war-hero-and-college-hall-of-famer-slade-cutter-dies-at-93.aspx</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slade_Cutter\">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slade_Cutter</a></p>','2014-01-31','123787210089','cutter.jpg','cutter-small.jpg','Slade Cutter','All-American football player and hardcore WWII submarine commander.','\"The Seahorse sank nineteen enemy ships during the four war patrols I was the skipper. The crew got the job done. I was merely the coordinator. They were brave and talented, and I never had to be reckless. I thought of the lives of those fine men, and frankly, I was aboard too.\"'),('Khan Krum the Horrible','late 7th century','April 13, 814','Pliska, Bulgaria','Medieval Bulgarian Warrior','<p>I think it\'s a pretty widely-accepted fact these days that one of the most badass fucking things any hardcore medieval warlord could possibly do would be to cut off the heads of his vanquished foes and fashion drinking cups out of the skulls of his slain enemies. The 9th century Bulgar horse lord Khan Krum the Horrible is, in my experience studying badass history, one of the only people to ever actually pull off this towering feat of brutal head-cleaving amateur carpentry &ndash; a gruesomely-awesome corpse-mutilation made all the more noteworthy by the fact that he dished this painful-yet-delicious justice out not just to any random douchebag with a homemade crown and a bearded, stick-swinging warband, but to the almighty Emperor of Byzantium, and that he carried it out just days after that Emperor pillaged Krum\'s capital city and stole all his booze.</p>\r\n<p>The son of (we believe) a Bulgar father and a Slavic mother, Krum rose to power in Eastern Europe at a time when diplomatic power was a direct result of being a badass motherfucker. A ferocious war-loving berserker, unbeatable in single combat, and about as humorless as that one movie where Adam Sandler plays his own twin sister, this guy was so over-the-top fucking merciless that he\'s alternately remembered through history as Krum the Horrible, Krum the Terrible, Krum the Dreadful, and Krum the Other-Words-That-Mean-Bad... basically if it\'s a synonym for \"cold-hearted bastard\", you can fashion it into an epithet for the Bulgar Khan and it would fit him like Cinderella\'s glass slipper fit perfectly when Krum took it and rammed it up the ass of the last King of the Avars.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/krum1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>I prefer to think of him as Khal Drogo, only with more Emperor-killing goodness.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Thanks to his own personal scariness and wanton destruction of all who stood before him, Krum was declared Khan of the Bulgars in the year 803. He immediately went to work crushing all in his path and assembling one of the greatest and most expanisve Eastern European empires of the Dark Ages. At the head of a rampaging group of horsemen well-versed in steppe warfare and the finer arts of plundering the fucking shit out of everything and everyone they encountered, Krum led his warriors &ndash; mostly Bulgars, Slavs, Thracians, and Hellenized Macedonians &ndash; across the Carpathian mountains, over the Danube River, and throughout Transylvania, Thrace, and Macedonia. Cutting men down in single combat, Krum rode at the head of his forces, collecting the skulls of slain kings for his own personal head collection.</p>\r\n<p>After destroying a couple barbarian tribes in a volcano of blood and disembodied organs and carving himself an empire that stretched from Budapest to the Ukraine, Krum the Horrible ordered his men to ride south into Byzantine lands, destroyed a mercenary Byzantine army near the Strymon River, and besieged the traditional regional capital of Thrace (present-day Sofia) in 809. Of course, as a horse warrior in a similar vein as Attila the Hun, Krum didn\'t have much in the way of siege equipment &ndash; he could surround the city and starve it out, but he had no way to assault the walls and bring about swift death/mayhem/etc. So, Krum the Horrible offered the good people of Sofia a deal: If you guys surrender the city, we\'ll grant you safe passage and let you leave with your lives.</p>\r\n<p>The Byzantines accepted. As soon as they were free of the walls he massacred all 6,000 defenders and burned the city to the ground.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/krum2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>That might seem a little harsh, but badass, no-bullshit insanity is what Khan Krum the Horrible was all about &ndash; this guy\'s name isn\'t that similar to that of of Conan the Barbarian\'s God merely by coincidence. Just look at the hard-as-hell legal code this guy instated in his lands &ndash; robbery was punished by breaking both of the thief\'s ankles. Denying alms to a beggar resulted in the Khan taking your shit so that you could know what it was like to have nothing. Defamation and Internet Trolling and bitching about the endings of your favorite video games was punishable by death. This guy wasn\'t fucking around, and for the most part people listened. The only thing they had trouble with was Krum\'s order to ban alcohol in the empire, and his mandate that all winemakers rip out every grapevine in their vineyard. That was one law they had an OK time ignoring, mostly because what the hell kind of barbarian warlord doesn\'t like booze?</p>\r\n<p>But back to the whole Byzantium situation. Back in the early days, before all the burninating the countryside business, the Greeks and the Bulgars had a pretty tentative love/hate relationship thing going on. The Bulgars were basically like a badass tribe of mercs that the Byzantines could call in whenever they needed to have someone turned into sludge &ndash; rampaging Bulgar horsemen had helped violently depose a couple of Greek Emperors, and they\'d been called in to fight off a Turkish invasion or two, and for the most part as long as the Greeks had the gold, the Bulgars had the steel. Ok, sure, that was great and everything, but the Byzantine Emperor Nikephoros didn\'t really like the idea of a highly-organized tribe of motivated, kill-happy Bulgars cohesively unified under the command of a powerful badass who loved nothing more than to bathe in the blood of his destroyed enemies, so Emperor Nick decided that he needed to get off his ass and do something about it. He put together a large force of Byzantine troops and foreign mercenaries, marched into Khan Krum\'s lands, defeated the Bulgar leader on his home turf (Krum was not expecting a full-scale invasion by Byzantine forces and was driven off once he realized he had nowhere near enough manpower to deal with the Emperor\'s army), and then marched a triumphant, rowdy, stab-happy army of plunder-seeking mercenaries into Khan the Horrible\'s capital city.</p>\r\n<p>The mercs weren\'t kind. The city was burned, civilians were dragged into the street and murdered, and Krum the Horrible\'s personal palace and treasury were stripped down to the studs and hauled off (as a side note, when the Byzantines entered Krum\'s cellar, they found it stocked to the ceiling with bottles of the world\'s rarest and most expensive wines... I guess he wasn\'t as hardcore about temperance as he might have wanted everyone to believe).</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/krum3.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>But Krum wasn\'t about to let the Byzantines get away with this bullshittery. He had wisely withdrawn in the face of an overwhelming Byzantine force, but instead of just running into hiding, the Bulgar Khan withdrew into the interior of his land and put out a call for every able-bodied man, woman, and animal to join his cause and teach those Byzantine bastards what happens to jackasses who try to mess with a dude known by the epithet \"the Horrible\". He built a huge army, mostly of peasants, quickly circled around the slow-moving column, and set a trap for them in the mountain pass that linked Bulgar lands to Byzantium.</p>\r\n<p>Emperor Nicephoros was marching his long column through the pass, content in his victory and the deliciousness of the Bulgar Khan\'s favorite wines, when suddenly he heard shouting from the mountains above him. His scouts rushed ahead, only to find that both the entrance and the exit of the steep pass had been barricaded &ndash; the column was trapped. Then, with a ferocious battle-scream, the Bulgars rode down from the hills, hammering the strung-out column from all sides in a ferocious frenzy of steel and teeth that quickly became a blood-drenched massaacre.</p>\r\n<p>The Emperor Nicephoros was killed in battle, making him one of just a few Byzantine rulers to ever perish in combat. The dead Emperor, identified by his purple boots, was dragged to the Khan\'s tent, where Krum the Horrible promptly cut off his head and put it on a pike. He kept it as a trophy for a while, then eventually scooped out the brains, lined the skull with silver, and turned it into a drinking cup (how do you like my wine now, bitch?). From that point on, any time Byzantine diplomats would come to negotiate with him, Krum would force them to drink wine out of the skull of their dead Emperor.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/krum4.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>Krum toasting his victory with the severed head of his enemies.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>The Emperor\'s son-in-law, Michael Rhangabe, survived the massacre by bravely running for it on horseback and swimming across a river, and was appointed Emperor on his return to Constantinople (the Emperor\'s birth son, Stavracius, also survived, but he\'d been hit in the neck during the fight and was paralyzed from the waist down, so he wasn\'t really a great candidate for the throne). Emperor Michael, having now been face-to-sword with a Bulgar warrior, immediately tried to sue for peace. Krum said he\'d agree, but only if Michael would hand over a bunch of douchebag Bulgar defectors that were currently living in Constantinople so that Krum could publicly execute them in brutal and horrible ways. Michael said he wasn\'t sure about that, so Krum said, \"ok, fuck you buddy,\" and let his men on a massive raid into Byzantine lands. His forces swept across the Black Sea coast, plundering and pillaging wealthy cities and carrying off their populations as slaves. Krum the Horrible, who by this point was rocking some pretty primitive siege engines (he\'d taken in an Arab ex-pat who had taught him about the magic of the flaming catapult attack), started hitting bigger and bigger cities, bringing back treasure and loot and babes and delicious foods to his capital.</p>\r\n<p>Michael rushed out to fight the Khan, and was defeated in such a humiliating manner that Michael resigned his position as emperor on the spot and went off to be a monk. Michael\'s successor, Emperor Leo, also tried to stop the Bulgars, but got his asss kicked almost as hard. Krum went so far as to besiege Cosntantniople, but couldn\'t take it because he didn\'t have a fleet or a big enough catapult, so just raided the suburbs and then headed on home.</p>\r\n<p>Khan Krum the Horrible died in 814 of a cerebral hemorrhage, which came about spontaneously while he was thinking about how awesome it was that he\'d defeated three Byzantine Emperors in battle. Krum\'s successors ended up making peace with the Byzantines, and the First Bulgar Empire would last for another 200 years, finally dissolving in 1014.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/krum5.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Sources:</span><br /><br /><span> Borislavov, Yassen. <em>Bulgarian Wine Book</em>. TRUD, 2004.<br /><br /> Brownworth, Lars. <em>Lost to the West</em>. Random House, 2006.<br /><br /> Chary, Frederick B. <em>The History of Bulgaria</em>. ABC-CLIO, 2011.<br /><br /> Louth, Andrew. <em>Greek East and Latin West</em>. St. Vladimir\'s Seminary Press, 2007.<br /><br /> McGuckin, John Anthony. <em>The Encyclopedia of Eastern Orthodox Christianity</em>. John Wiley and Sons, 2011.<br /><br /> Rogers, Clifford. <em>The Oxford Encyclopedia of Medieval Warfare and Military Technology</em>. Oxford University Press, 2011.<br /><br /> Stavreva, Kirilka and Lynette Quek. <em>Bulgaria</em>. Marshall Cavendish, 2007.<br /><br /> Watkins, Richard and Christopher Deliso. <em>Bulgaria</em>. Lonely Planet, 2008. </span></p>','2012-03-23','700565025268','krum.png','krum-small.jpg','Krum the Horrible','Bulgar horse lord who made drinking cups out of the skulls of his slain enemies.',''),('Luís Alves de Lima e Silva','August 25, 1803','May 7, 1880','Rio de Janeiro, Brazil','19th-century Brazilian Soldier','<p>I don&rsquo;t care if you&rsquo;re one of those balls-hating shut-in Unabomber sports-industrial-complex conspiracy theorists who believe that badass 360-degree behind-the-back tomahawk monster jams are merely a weapon used by shadow corporations to repress the Proletariat &ndash; there&rsquo;s a zero percent chance that any person capable of firing up a web browser in the past two weeks hasn&rsquo;t at least been made marginally aware that perhaps maybe there&rsquo;s some kind of sporting event taking place either right now or some time in the very near future.&nbsp; You literally can&rsquo;t check your email or slam &ldquo;ultraviolent tentacle monster my little pony crossover slash porn&rdquo; into a Google Search bar without being teabagged by an onslaught of big sweaty soccer balls coming at you from every direction.</p>\r\n<p>As you probably guessed, like most Americans I have no idea what the hell is going on in international soccer, and I can&rsquo;t name more than three English Premier League teams without spontaneously bleeding from the brain.&nbsp; But I do love sports, and any time a world-altering athletic event of this magnitude is going down I&rsquo;m certainly not going to be one of those contrarian killjoy hater pretentious assholes who absolutely <em>has </em>to proudly tell everyone in the bar that I couldn&rsquo;t care less about soccer if Vinnie Jones parachuted in through the skylight and bicycle kicked me in the nutsack with one of those big Frankenstein boots astronauts wear when they walk on the Moon.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"../images/272031711290/caxias1.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>It seems like every website on earth is doing something about Brazil, ranging from hard-hitting long-form journalism about corruption and income disparity to random photos of bananas sitting in a bowl in front of a concrete wall that looks like it was spray-painted by a rainbow tripping on LSD, yet aside most people outside downtown Rio can&rsquo;t seem to mention the name of one prominent Brazilian historical figure.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Let&rsquo;s fix that.&nbsp; Let&rsquo;s set you up with a mind-blowingly badass paragon of Brazilian military might.&nbsp; A man who did for old-school Civil War Era asskicking what Pele did for soccer and Anderson Silva did for knee strikes to the gonads.&nbsp; A guy who you can name-drop to your smarmy jersey-wearing hipster/Euro friends the next time they start trying to recite the starting lineup of Real Madrid and blow their minds like they&rsquo;d just stuck their skulls into a howitzer that shoots blender attachments.</p>\r\n<p>I&rsquo;m talking about Luis Alves de Lima e Silva, the Duke of Caxias.&nbsp; The Iron Duke.&nbsp; The Emperor&rsquo;s finest.&nbsp; A man so excellent at utterly eliminating his enemies that he&rsquo;s known as &ldquo;The Peacemaker&rdquo; &ndash; in the same way that the old-school <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colt_Single_Action_Army\">Colt .45 revolver</a> was known as the Peacemaker.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"../images/272031711290/caxias2.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p align=\"center\">This is what comes up when you Google<br /> Image Search his Portuguese title, &ldquo;Duque de Caxias&rdquo;.<br /> Apparently any time you image search anything Brazilian, <br /> Google is required to include the bare shoulders of a pretty girl.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Luis Alves de Lima e Silva was born in Rio in 1803, the firstborn son of a prominent Portuguese military commander who had kicked ass with honor and distinction in Brazilian wars for over two decades.&nbsp; General Dad had big plans for Luis Alves to follow in his footsteps, enrolling his son in literally military academy pre-school at the age of <em>five</em>.&nbsp; Luis Alves grew up This Is Sparta style, learning badass shit like swordfighting when most kids are learning how to not crap their pants, and when he turned 14 he dropped out of school and enlisted as a private in a well-known infantry regiment.&nbsp; By 15 he was already a Second Lieutenant.</p>\r\n<p>The Brazilian War of Independence broke out in 1823, and Luis Alves was right there on the front lines beating asses and helping his country gain its freedom from the Kingdom of Portugal.&nbsp; Already well-known as one of the most stone-cold toughest motherfuckers in Brazil, the twenty year old infantryman was hand-selected to serve in the Emperor&rsquo;s Bodyguard, an elite regiment dedicated to kicking ass wherever the future Emperor Pedro I of Brazil needed them.&nbsp; Luis Alves distinguished himself for heroism multiple times, including one attack in the Brazilian state of Bahia when Captain Alves personally led a badass full-strength bayonet charge uphill into the teeth of a brutal series of Portuguese cannons and fortifications and somehow overran the defenders by stabbing, shanking, and point-blank face-shooting anyone who happened to be standing in his way.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"../images/272031711290/caxias3.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p align=\"center\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Brazil eventually wrested freedom from Portuguese rule, Dom Pedro became Emperor Pedro I, and Captain Alves was promoted to commander of the Emperor&rsquo;s Bodyguard and appointed to be the personal swordfighting and horseback-riding trainer to the Emperor&rsquo;s son, the future Emperor Pedro II.&nbsp; He was called into action to help stomp out dissent to Pedro&rsquo;s rule, which he did to great effect, and he also fought in the Cisplatine War, when a strongly-pro-Portuguese region in southern Brazil split off from Emperor Pedro and became the country of Uruguay, which you may have heard of before.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Well, Emperor Pedro kind of sucked at his job, and a lot of folks &ndash; including Luis Alves&rsquo; own father &ndash; eventually decided there needed to be a military uprising against the Emperor and that Dom Pedro needed to be Dom Get the Fuck Out of Here.&nbsp; Ever the loyal soldier, Luis Alves refused to join the dissent, staying loyal to Pedro until the Emperor willingly abdicated his throne in 1831.&nbsp; In order to prevent total fucking anarchy from breaking out all over the country, Luis Alves personally stepped up and formed a military police force to maintain order while a new government was created.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"../images/272031711290/caxias4.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /> Badass 19<sup>th</sup>-century Brazilian Army soldiers.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Everyone eventually decided that Pedro&rsquo;s son should take over and rule as Emperor Pedro II.&nbsp; Luis Alves, basically the Barristan Selmy of Imperial Brazil, continued serving as the adjutant of the Emperor&rsquo;s Bodyguard, and as the Will of the Emperor he fucking ran all around the country utterly beating the shit out of anyone who didn&rsquo;t want to fall in line.&nbsp; In 1840 he was sent to Maranhao, a state that had fallen into complete anarchy and had been overrun by rebels and bandits.&nbsp; Luis Alves personally led the attack, re-captured the critical town of Caxias, and kicked their balls in such a badass manner that Emperor Pedro decided from that point on Luis Alves would be known as the fucking Baron of Caxias.&nbsp; Probably because Caxias sounds like it would be some weird one-word mash-up portmanteau for &ldquo;kickin&rsquo; ass&rdquo;.</p>\r\n<p>But that was just the beginning.&nbsp; In 1842, Caxias went up against guys like Giuseppi <a href=\"/index.cgi?id=826774322885\">Garibaldi</a> in the so-called &ldquo;Ragamuffin War&rdquo;, fighting hardcore caballero guerilla warriors and other ragamuffin-like folks in places like Rio Grande de Sul, Sao Paolo, and somewhere called Minas Gerais that just makes me think of Baron Caxias as being like the Dark Lord Sauron drop-kicking Hobbits and plundering all the Elf babes in Minas Tirith.&nbsp; However, instead of brutally crushing out these rebellions with extreme violence, Caxias was actually surprisingly chill &ndash; he knew that curbstomping sedition would just breed more pissed-off rebels, so whenever possible he would seek to negotiate with the insurgency and offer favorable terms in exchange for peace and general submission to the rule of Dom Pedro.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"../images/272031711290/caxias5.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /> (He also didn&rsquo;t mind doing it the hard way, either.)</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Shortly after leading his troops in a brutal war that successfully deposed the dictator of Argentina, Baron Caxias retired from the Army at the age of 52 and became Brazil&rsquo;s Minister of War.&nbsp; For the next twelve years he served as War Minister, senator, and President of the Council of Ministers (twice), and as a politician he was known for being a champion of the Emperor yet still willing to compromise with his opponents.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>In 1867, however, some really bad news went down, and the services of Baron Caxias were once again needed on the battlefield.</p>\r\n<p>Despite being 64 years old and suffering from serious liver disease, the most decorated and well-known military hero in the war-torn history of Brazil didn&rsquo;t hesitate to throw on his uniform, polish his saber, and ride to the aid of his people.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"../images/272031711290/caxias6.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>In 1864, the President of Paraguay, a guy named Francisco Solano Lopez, basically decided that his country was the fucking shit and he launched a balls-out invasion of Brazil in an effort to rip away some contested territory that he thought should belong to Paraguay.&nbsp; Lopez&rsquo;s attack brought in Argentina and Uruguay on the side of Brazil, which seems like it would be a really unfair fight if you <a href=\"http://www.zonu.com/detail-en/2009-11-18-11139/South-America-Political-Map.html\">look at the size of those countries</a> on a map, but Paraguay had a fucking badass army at this time and for the first three years of the fight they honestly beat the shit out of everything in their path.&nbsp; By 1867, things were bad.&nbsp; Real bad.&nbsp; Argentina basically had to call all their guys back home to deal with a rebellion, and the Brazilian Army was looking at something close to 20,000 soldiers laid out in hospital beds dealing with a Cholera epidemic.&nbsp; Meanwhile Paraguay was building an epic string of World War I-style trench fortifications so intense that any attempt to assault then would be utter suicide.&nbsp; The Brazilians were demoralized, had been defeated multiple times, and something like 50 guys a day were literally dying from diarrhea and excessive barfing.</p>\r\n<p>Enter Baron Caxias.&nbsp; The lifelong warrior who has kicked ass up and down South America as the commander of his country&rsquo;s most elite fighting force for over 50 years.&nbsp; A living goddamn legend and military demigod.</p>\r\n<p>Caxias showed up, put a clampdown on the disease epidemic by bringing in a fuckton of doctors, organized his troops, and prepared to lead his men on an epic attack so hardcore it would simply be known to historians as &ldquo;The Deed of December.&rdquo;</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"../images/272031711290/caxias7.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Caxias&rsquo; primary objective was to not have to deal with all those bullshit cannon-infused trenches the Parguayans had set up all along their front.&nbsp; He did this by building a goddamn 8-mile-long road through the middle of the utterly-impenetrable Gran Chaco Swamp, crossing 31,000 soldiers over the Paraguay River on transports, and attacking the Paraguayan Army from the direction they least expected it.</p>\r\n<p>It worked perfectly &ndash; leaving a small force to hold the Parguayans in place, he somehow stealth-engineered an impossible road through knee-deep waters and ultra-dense scrub brush, encircled the enemy flank, and lined them up in his sights.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>His plan only hit one snag &ndash; the fighting spirit and huge balls of the Paraguan Army.&nbsp; Five thousand men of the Paraguan Rear Guard &ndash; outnumbered five-to-one by the massive might of the Brazilians &ndash; mounted a heroic resistance, somehow holding a bridge for several hours against repeated attacks.&nbsp; At one point the Paraguayans managed to send the Brazilian front lines into a full retreat, with panicked Brazilian troops crashing into the guys lined up behind them and threatening to derail the entire mission in one epic fail, but once again Baron Caxias stepped up his hero game and took charge of shit.&nbsp; Racing out on his horse, the Iron Duke drew his sword, cursed his men for cowardice, and shouted &ldquo;Those who are true Brazilians, follow me!&rdquo;</p>\r\n<p>Then the 64 year-old ex-Minister of War for Brazil fucking cavalry charged the Paraguayan riflemen by himself, with just a sword and a pistol.&nbsp; Inspired by the heroism of their leader, the Brazilians turned back, attacked, and won the day.&nbsp; The Paraguayans fought to the last man.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"../images/272031711290/caxias8.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Following this incredible attack, Baron Caxias completed &ldquo;The Deed of December&rdquo; by defeating the Paraguayan Army in three separate battles, utterly destroying their ability to fight, and capturing the Paraguayan capital of Ascuncion.&nbsp; Once that was done, he went back to being Minister of War, a post he held until 1878.&nbsp; Emperor Pedro was make him a Duke, and even though the Imperial regime isn&rsquo;t universally loved, Caxias is still seen as a paragon of honor and duty and is revered as the Patron of the Brazilian Army to this day.&nbsp; Statues of him can be found everywhere, and there&rsquo;s even a town in the greater Rio metro area named &ldquo;Duque de Caxias&rdquo; in his honor.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"../images/272031711290/caxias9.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Links:</p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/100761/Luiz-Alves-de-Lima-e-Silva-duke-de-Caxias\">http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/100761/Luiz-Alves-de-Lima-e-Silva-duke-de-Caxias</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://madmonarchist.blogspot.com/2011/09/monarchist-profile-luis-alves-de-lima-e.html\">http://madmonarchist.blogspot.com/2011/09/monarchist-profile-luis-alves-de-lima-e.html</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&amp;sl=pt&amp;u=http://educacao.uol.com.br/biografias/duque-de-caxias.jhtm&amp;prev=/search%3Fq%3DLu%25C3%25ADs%2BAlves%2Bde%2BLima%2BE%2BSilva%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26hs%3Dohq%26sa%3DX%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official%26channel%3Dsb%26biw%3D1680%26bih%3D928\">http://educacao.uol.com.br/biografias/duque-de-caxias.jhtm</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.argentinaindependent.com/top-story/the-war-that-changed-south-america-forever/\">http://www.argentinaindependent.com/top-story/the-war-that-changed-south-america-forever/</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lu&iacute;s_Alves_de_Lima_e_Silva\">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lu&iacute;s_Alves_de_Lima_e_Silva</a></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Sources:</p>\r\n<p>McCann, Frank D.&nbsp; <em>Soldiers of the Patria</em>.&nbsp; Stanford University Press, 2004.</p>\r\n<p>Rauch, George V.&nbsp; <em>Conflict in the Southern Cone</em>.&nbsp; Greenwood Publishing, 1999.</p>\r\n<p>Souza, Jesse and Valter Sinder.&nbsp; <em>Imagining Brazil</em>.&nbsp; Lexington, 2007.</p>','2014-06-13','272031711290','caxias.jpg','caxias-small.png','The Duke of Caxias','The greatest war hero in Brazilian history, this rebellion-quelling military commander personally led a hardcore cavalry charge at the age of 64.','“Those who are true Brazilians, follow me!”'),('David H. Jarvis','c. 1860','Early 20th Century','Unknown','19th-century American Sailor','<p>When word came in to the Bering Sea branch of the United States Revenue Marine Service about the most recent tragedy on the northern coast of Alaska, the news was as grim as one of those miserable medieval fairy tales about the evil demon-witch who lives in a creepy dark forest and sustains herself entirely with a diet consisting of ground-up puppy parts and the internal organs of children who don\'t listen to their parents. Eight whaling ships, caught off-guard by the early onset of the miserable, soul-sucking Arctic Winter, had become inescapably wedged into the ice pack near Point Barrow and crushed beyond all recognition, and now two hundred and sixty-five men were stranded, alone, freezing, and without foot at the northernmost point in the United States &ndash; a frigid, ball-chilling place that, on a good year, is only ice-free for about two months.</p>\r\n<p>It was Winter of 1897 &ndash; a miserable time when nobody had even heard of things like helicopter rescues, blowtorches, airlifts, Gore-Tek parkas, and those badass fucking heat packs you stuff in your mittens when you feel like your fingers are about to freeze into a cold, dead meatbrick. Rescuing these men would take a miracle.</p>\r\n<p>Or one epically-testicled badass fucking Arctic-smashing adventurer named David H. Jarvis.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/jarvis1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>Not pictured: Actual testicles.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>People like to talk a lot of shit about the United States Coast Guard &ndash; how all they really do is give hard-working taxpayers tickets every time they want to get shitfaced and smash their hooker-laden yachts into other boats, or how one of their primary responsibilities is to defend the U.S. from enemy submarines that never actually seem to ever materialize, but I can guarantee you this &ndash; when you\'re freezing your balls off in fifteen-foot seas clinging for life to a busted-apart chunk of fiberglass that once used to be your precious yacht, you\'ll be glad these dudes are out there doing their shit, hauling your ass out of the drink while simultaneously making sure a German U-Boat doesn\'t surface right under you and blast you into tuna chum with an 88mm deck gun.</p>\r\n<p>First Lieutenant David H. Jarvis of the United States Revenue Marine Service (the organization that would later change its name to the U.S. Coast Guard so it would sound more badass and less like a tax collection agency) is one of the USCG\'s most revered heroes, and this wasn\'t a guy who was about to sit back and kick a rousing hand of tiddlywinks when he knew three hundred poor suckers were out there slowly turning into meat popsickles. An eight-year veteran of the USRMS who spoke fluent Inuit and once shot a polar bear in the face, Jarvis was serving as the Executive Officer aboard USS <em>Bear</em> -- the most famous ship in Coast Guard history. As the only USCG ship in the Bering Sea, his primary responsibilities were to sail around, thwart seal poachers, protect the Eskimos from unscrupulous businessmen (Steven Segal-style), fish shipwrecked sailors out of sub-freezing waters, and give tickets to drunk yacht pilots. Jarvis was damn good at his job, and on top of his success as the XO of <em>Bear</em>, it\'s also worth mentioning that during his entire career in the Coast Guard the United States was never attacked by a ballistic missile submarine.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/jarvis2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>USS <em>Bear</em> on a typical tour of duty.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Now, the trapped sailors were stuck way the fuck north, and while <em>Bear</em> was a pretty badass ship, it wasn\'t an icebreaker, and there was no way in hell it was going to get up there and save those men. So, Jarvis, the XO of the most famous ship in the fleet (making him basically the Coast Guard version of <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/shepard.html\">Commander Shepard</a>), volunteered to go ashore, travel across the Arctic tundra of Alaska on an epic, 1,500-mile journey, and hand-deliver food and medical supplies to the trapped men. His mission was approved both by his commander, and by President McKinley, and on December 16, 1897, Lieutenant David H. Jarvis put ashore at Cape Vancouver, Alaska with nothing more than his uniform and a warm jacket.</p>\r\n<p>Jarvis assembled his away team, consisting of Second Lieutenant Ellsworth P. Bertholf (the man who would go on to become the Fourth Commandant of the United States Coast Guard!) and Ship\'s Surgeon Samuel \"Bones\" Call (a man who\'s primary responsibility was to say, \"damn it Dave, I\'m a surgeon, not a paperboy!\") and headed into the first dirt-poor town he could find. There, in a scene reminiscent of the first screen in <em>The Oregon Trail</em> for the Apple IIc, Jarvis bought 40 sled dogs, 3 sleds, skiis, snowshoes, medical supplies, and a crapload of bullets. Then he talked the local Inuit into giving him 400 reindeer, which Jarvis &ndash; who didn\'t know a hell of a lot about reindeer &ndash; could then somehow herd 1,500 miles across the Arctic and deliver as food for the starving, half-dead sailors at the edge of the world.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/jarvis3.png\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<table style=\"width: 500px;\" align=\"center\">\r\n<tbody>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td><span>Here\'s the route they chose to take. It\'s worth noting that if you use Google Maps to try and get walking directions from Cape Vancouver to Point Barrow, Alaska, it just redirects you to a website for a suicide hotline.</span></td>\r\n</tr>\r\n</tbody>\r\n</table>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>And so, in the dead of December, during a time where northern Alaska gets two hours of sunlight a day, Lieutenant David H. Jarvis and his two buddies herded 400 reindeer through the -45 degree temperatures of the frozen Arctic. Operating in constant darkness, these daring adventurers traveled on foot, hauling and pushing their sleds through difficult terrain, while snot-freezingly obscene wind chills whipped through them and blizzards sprung up without a second\'s notice. Remembering their mission, the men trudged on, through blinding snowstorms and sub-freezing Arctic wind, variously alternating between sweating their dicks off from exhausting work and having a miserable gust of air turn their sweat-soaked wool clothes into icicle jackets. Moving in temps that averaged negative-thirty, these guys herded their animals, traveling 20-30 miles a day (50 on days they didn\'t have to run for cover from brutal winds or storms), dragging their shit up steep inclines or sliding down 2,000-foot mountains by riding their sleds down like Shaun White approaching a badass snowboard half-pipe. For 99 days in the height of winter these three men crossed tundra and pack-ice, forded the Yukon River Delta a mere six months before the Gold Rush would hit, stopping only to avoid storms, exchange local Inuit villagers their exhausted dogs for fresh ones, and find enough vegetation to feed 400 goddamned deer.</p>\r\n<p>The men traveled through December, January, February, and March &ndash; 99 days, 30 miles a day, sub-zero temperatures. Finally, in mid-March, Jarvis\' team reached the stranded sailors. He still had 382 reindeer with him &ndash; plenty of food to last the winter, not to mention the medical supplies, a qualified doctor, and a hell of a lot of badass leadership experience. When he waltzed into town on a dog sled full of food, the beleaguered crews basically shit.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/jarvis4.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>But, while news of Jarvis\' badass adventure through the Arctic was hitting newspapers across the United States in a late-19th century version of the Chilean Miner Miracle, his work was just beginning. For starters, he\'d only found one of the eight ships &ndash; the other seven were spread out along a 60-mile section of the Alaska Coast, and Jarvis only found the others by sending out daily search parties in every direction.</p>\r\n<p>Even once the men were all together, fed, and healed of their most immediate medical problems, they were in bad shape, so Jarvis immediately had to go to work improving their quality of life. When this guy wasn\'t hunting polar bears, giving pump-up speeches, or distributing rations, Jarvis spent the next four months living in freezing temperatures, whipping his men into action cleaning up the filthy conditions of their ships, giving them advice on how not to get frostbite, and doing other Adama-style works of leadership heroism. Hell, the guy even organized an 8-ship baseball league to keep the men busy and entertained enough that they wouldn\'t go off and kill themselves, and he personally went in and thwarted a mutiny on one of the ships, probably with a solution that involved face-punches and/or the threat of face-punches.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/jarvis5.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>In July of 1898, seven months after putting their XO ashore, the USS <em>Bear</em> pulled into Point Barrow. As it pulled up next to the crushed hulk of a thoroughly-obliterated whaling ship, one lone figure marched across the ice towards them. Lieutenant David H. Jarvis stopped, saluted the colors, and requested permission to come aboard.</p>\r\n<p>The 265 sailors were delivered to Seattle on September 13, 1898. All but 3 had survived.</p>\r\n<p>For his actions executing one of the greatest overland arctic rescue operations of all time, David Jarvis was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal. He would retire as a Captain in 1905, run a fish-packing company in Alaska, and become good buddies with Teddy Roosevelt. Nowadays one of the most prestigious awards in the Coast Guard is the David H. Jarvis Award for Inspirational Leadership.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/jarvis6.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.uscg.mil/history/articles/johnson_overland_expedition.asp\">USCG Page on the Overland Expedition</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://www.history.navy.mil/library/online/incredible_alaska.htm\">The Incredible Alaska Overland Rescue</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://www.military.com/Content/MoreContent?file=ML_jarvis_bkp\">Military.com Article</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overland_Relief_Expedition\">Wikipedia</a></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Sources:</span><br /><br /><span> Dalton, Anthony. <em>Along Against the Arctic</em>. Heritage House, 2011.<br /><br /> King, Irving H. <em>The Coast Guard Expands, 1865-1915</em>. Naval Institute Press, 1996.<br /><br /> Kroll, C. Douglas. <em>Commodore Ellsworth P. Bertholf.</em>. Naval Institute Press, 2002.<br /><br /> Taliaferro, John. <em>In a Far Country</em>. PublicAffairs, 2007. </span></p>','2012-04-06','169179827555','jarvis.png','jarvis6-small.jpg','David H. Jarvis','Coast Guard hero crossed 1500 miles through the Arctic in the dead of winter to save 250 stranded sailors.','\"We drew up alongside them about 4pm and, going aboard, announced ourselves and our mission.\r\nIt was some time before the first astonishment and incredulousness could wear off and a welcome be extended to us.\"'),('Joseph Jacob Foss','April 17, 1915','January 1, 2003','Sioux Falls, SD, USA','20th-century American Pilot','<p>Joe Foss is one of the top-two deadliest Marines to ever sit in the cockpit of a fighter aircraft and blast the living shit out of the enemies of America and Democracy and Freedom, and all those other things that Marines generally tend to blow the shit out of people for opposing. He\'s a 26-kill World War II fighter ace, an amateur boxer, a former Director of the Air Force Academy, and a revolver-packing badass who once had his own TV show where he went around the world looking for wild game and capping them in the face with a six-shooter. Oh, and he was also the first commissioner of the football league that eventually became the AFC.</p>\r\n<p>He did other stuff too, but those are the bullet points.</p>\r\n<p>Foss was born in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, in a tiny, crappy little farmhouse that didn\'t have super important life-altering shit like electricity or cable or a microwave or a wireless Internet connection. Since this was back in the Dark Ages when you could not have stuff like that and still somehow manage to survive, Foss worked on his family farm, pumped gas for minimum wage, and went to school all day every day, generally doing that sort of walk a hundred miles uphill both ways <em>Greatest Generation</em> manual labor bullshit nobody appreciates anymore but that still makes Tom Brokaw and your grumpy old grandpa pop giant raging tandem work-boners every time they talk about it. When Joe was 17 his father was accidentally electrocuted to death (oh the irony), so Foss took over the family farm. When this human ball of congealed energy wasn\'t running the farm, helping his mother, taking care of his siblings, going to school, or working at the gas station he still somehow found a way to get his pilot\'s license and log over a hundred hours of flight time, and once his brother was old enough to take over the farm, Joe went out to the University of South Dakota, where he boxed, ran track, played football, bussed tables, logged more flight time, got his degree in Business Administration, and served as a Private in the South Dakota National Guard. So, the next time you ask yourself what the hell you would do if you didn\'t have the Internet, there\'s your answer.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/joefoss1.jpeg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>After he got out of college, Joe Foss hitchhiked and/or sprinted from South Dakota to Minnesota and enlisted in the United States Marine Corps, telling them he wanted more than anything to fly fighter aircraft. The Corps decided that at 26 Foss was too fucking old and decrepit to be a fighter pilot (a detail that makes me really feel super totally awesome about myself), so instead of putting him in the cockpit of a slick attack craft they assigned Foss to a photo reconnaissance squadron instead. But Joe Foss was a man who went after what he wanted, regardless of what assholes told him he should do, so in addition to his normal duties Foss also spent his first deployment in Pensacola logging 150 hours in a USMC F4F Wildcat fighter (despite not technically being authorized to do so). So in June 1942, when he reapplied for fighter service, he was reassigned to fighter squadron VMF-121 and deployed via aircraft carrier to a tiny, obscure island in the middle of the Pacific known as Guadalcanal.</p>\r\n<p>Hatefully described as \"the only place in the world where you can be standing in mud to your knees and still get dust in your eyes\", in October 1942 Guadalcanal was a torturous hellhole of morale-obliterating misery that devoured the souls of all who set foot on or around it in a horrific tidal wave of mud and machine guns and malaria-infected mosquitoes. While this jungle-covered death-rock off the coast of Papua New Guinea is technically situated very close to some pretty-amazingly-beautiful babe-overloaded tropical resort islands, in terms of happy fun-ness Guadalcanal in \'42 was about as close to Fiji as a gauntleted fist to the dick is to a handjob. The first stopping point in the American attack on the Japanese-controlled islands of the Pacific, Guadalcanal was home to a 2,400-foot long strip of brown sludge known as Henderson Field &ndash; the closest thing to an airfield the island had, and the place Joe Foss and the men of the \"Cactus Air Force\" called home for almost five months. Foss and his crews had to work in miserable conditions &ndash; dust and mud got all up into the aircraft, rendering many of them inoperable, and the \"runway\" was so jacked up you couldn\'t get heavy equipment on there, meaning that ground crews had to refuel and rearm the aircraft by hand, loading bullets into the feeding mechanisms the old-fashioned way. With all this bullshit going on, the U.S. pilots never had all of their fighters and interceptors operational at the same time, which was pretty bad considering that they already badly outnumbered by the enemy and were being bombed almost constantly by vast flights of Japanese bombers and attack aircraft day and night. Combine that with the fact that the First Marine Division was holding a tenuous battle line against hundreds of thousands of rabid Japanese infantrymen just a few hundred yards from the airfield and the runway was constantly being shelled by Japanese naval artillery, and you\'ve got a recipe for some relatively-sleepless nights.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/joefoss2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>Henderson Field today.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>But Joe Foss didn\'t give a crap. He sucked it up, took it like a man, and got out there to start wasting enemy aircraft any place he could catch them. His balls-out fighting style was probably best summed up with his first combat mission: This guy was flying patrol above Henderson with one other craft when he and his wingmen came across a formation of 30 Japanese A6M Zeroes &ndash; badass, battle-hardened pilots in super-deadly fighters that outclassed Foss\' Wildcat in terms of both speed and maneuverability. Foss cracked his knuckles, bit down on his cigar, and charged straight into the middle of them, machine guns blazing a hole in the universe in front of him. He waxed the first Zeke, sending it plummeting to the jungle in a gigantic awesome-looking ball of fire, took some potshots at a couple others, then got nailed from three directions and once and hauled ass back to base leaking oil from his wings and being chased hard by four enemy fighters.</p>\r\n<p>You\'d think almost being blown up would have discouraged Foss from being totally fucking insane, but this was not the case. This cigar-chomping hardass just kept getting out there, fighting the enemy with ultra-aggressive, high-risk high-reward death charges that were designed to get in so close to the enemy that it would \"leave power burns on their fuselage\". A dead-on marksman who seemingly couldn\'t miss his targets (it\'s hard to miss a guy when you\'re so close to him that his entire plane fills up your windshield), this psycho daredevil would open his throttle to 300 miles an hour, close to within 50 yards of the enemy, then smoke him and try to peel out of there before he crashed into the flaming wreckage that once used to be an enemy fighter plane. Fighting in daily combats against impossible numbers, Foss ran escort missions for recon aircraft that were looking for the Japanese navy, scrambled to fight off incoming bomber raids, and flew cover to make sure no jackasses swooped in and dropped torpedoes on the landing craft that were ferrying Marine reinforcements on the island. When that got boring, Foss and his men would perform balls-out high-speed strafing runs on Japanese ships, infantry bases, and anything else they could find that didn\'t know all the words to America the Beautiful.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/joefoss3.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>It took Joe Foss nine days on Guadalcanal to become a fighter ace. In addition to two victories early on (including the one on his first mission), this plane-smashing badass scored kills three through five on a particularly-awesome mission where he dove straight into a vastly-superior enemy formation of bombers, then turned quickly and battled the fighter screen right as it dove down out of the sun on top of him. A couple days later he was hit by a machine gun and took a shrapnel wound to the head, but not even this slowed Joe Foss down &ndash; three days after taking a piece of metal to the dome he was back in the cockpit, becoming the Marine Corps\' first Ace in a Day on October 25, 1942 when he shot down three Zeroes before 10am, landed, had some lunch, then went back out and killed three more.</p>\r\n<p>\"Smokey Joe\" Foss was finally shot down on November 7th, during an attack on a Japanese destroyer formation off the coast of the island. He was hit by a sea-landing-equipped biplane of all things, taking a few rounds from the rear-facing machine gunner <em>Last Crusade</em> style while he was in the process of reducing it to a smoking heap of melted canvas and burning wood. Foss finished killing the seaplane that had hit him, then ditched his burning aircraft in the water, almost drowned when his parachute got stuck while he was trying to punch his way out through the cockpit, and proceeded to survive five hours in shark-infested waters before finally being fished out of the drink. He was back in action the next day.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/joefoss4.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Between October and November, 1942, Joe Foss shot down 23 enemy aircraft, mostly Zeroes (no small feat considering those were the deadliest aircraft Japan had to offer), with an additional 16 kills listed as \"probable\", whatever that means. He commanded a badass unit known simply as \"Foss\' Flying Circus\", an 8-plane killteam that routinely dove propellers-first into formations five- and ten-times their own size, blasted everything that moved, and left behind nothing but charred airspace and burning enemy fuselages everywhere they went. When Foss wasn\'t leading these guys on hundreds of combat sorties in the air, he would give them rifles and send them into the jungle to fight Japanese infantry units that got a little too close to the airfield for comfort &ndash; a practice that he only stopped after his commanding officer gave him explicit orders never to go into the fucking jungle with a rifle like some kind of lunatic again. In just four months his Flying Circus ratcheted up 60 kills during the battle for Guadalcanal, and five of the 8-man crew would become aces while only two would be killed in action. Foss himself racked up 23 kills, took a month or two off when he got malaria, then came right back out in January and led a 12-man squadron straight-on to intercept a 100-craft Japanese bomber raid aimed at leveling Henderson Field into a giant festering crater. The initial attack badly damaged the Japanese formation (Foss killed three Zeroes by himself, bringing his total up to 26), and sending the surviving 90 enemy aircraft running the hell out of there without ever even opening their bomb bay doors. For being the first American since WWI ace Eddie Richenbacher to net 26 kills, Foss was awarded the Medal of Honor. Today those 26 kills are good enough to be second all-time among USMC aviators, and some people claim that when you go back and really look at everything he should probably be first.</p>\r\n<p>After the war Foss\' story gets somehow even more ridiculous. First he opened a flight instruction school, and then, while he was doing that, he not only commanded the South Dakota Air National Guard as a Brigadier-General but also served on their P-51 Mustang Demonstration Team and performed air shows across the state. He worked in Air Training Command during the Korea War, became the youngest governor in South Dakota history (serving two terms), once appeared on a TV game show, had drinks with John Wayne, Charles Lindbergh, and Tom Brokaw, and spent three years hosting his own television show where he traveled around to luxurious exotic locations and had people film him hunting and fishing and killing dangerous and/or awesome-looking things. In 1959, Foss became the first commissioner of the American Football League, helped them get a sweet TV deal, then resigned two months before the AFL merged into the NFL and basically became the AFC. He also wrote three books on dogfighting, was a consultant on a couple early air combat simulation video games, was the Director of the Air Force Academy, and was the president of both the National Rifle Association and the National Society of Crippled Children and Adults. Oh, and one time he was also detained by the TSA for trying to bring his Medal of Honor on an airplane with him &ndash; they thought about taking it away until he convinced them that thing wasn\'t a weapon, HE was the weapon. He died in 2003 at the age of 87, a true legend of the Marine Corps.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/joefoss5.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://acepilots.com/usmc_foss.html\">Ace Pilots Profile</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/02/us/joe-foss-ace-dies-at-87-also-led-football-league.html?pagewanted=all&amp;src=pm\">NYT Obituary</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://www.joefoss.com/about-us/about-joe-foss/joe-foss-biography\">JoeFoss.com</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Foss\">Wikipedia</a></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Sources:</span><br /><br /><span> Brokaw, Tom. <em>The Greatest Generation</em>. Random House, 2004.<br /><br /> Collier, Peter. <em>Medal of Honor</em>. Artisan, 2011.<br /><br /> Coonts, Steven. <em>War in the Air</em>. Simon and Schuster, 2003.<br /><br /> Tillman, Barrett. <em>Wildcat Aces of World War 2</em>. Osprey, 1995.<br /><br /> Yenne, Bill. <em>Aces High</em>. Penguin, 2010. </span></p>','2012-04-20','892647119786','joefoss.jpg','joefoss-small.jpg','Joe Foss','26-kill WWII fighter ace, former commissioner of the AFL, and one-time president of the NRA.','He had a hero\'s swagger but a winning smile to go with his plain talk and movie-star looks. Joe Foss was larger than life, and his heroics in the skies over the Pacific were just the beginning of a journey that would take him to places far from that farm with no electricity and not much hope north of Sioux Falls.\"\r\n\r\n– Tom Brokaw, The Greatest Generation'),('Uwais Qorny','February 12, 1983','N/A','Jakarta, Indonesia','21st-century Indonesian Entertainer','<p>I\'m at the point in running this website (and in my excessive non-fiction-reading career) that I don\'t usually write website articles about action movie heroes or fictional characters who mindlessly slaughter their way through hordes of garbagetown mooks in a one-sided murder-quest for conquest, justice, and the completely over-the-top brutal annihilation of every man who stands in his path, usually with a ridiculously-liberal use of fists and/or bullets. First, I spend a lot of time writing and researching historical events and my single-minded love of all things old-as-fuck means I don\'t get to watch a lot of movies these days. Second, I usually feel a much deeper connection with badass historical figures who dealt with real-life problems by taking them head-on and punching adversity in the metaphorical dick with a few thousand roundhouse punches of not-giving-a-shit-fuelled rage, and prefer writing those types of stories to those that exist only in the realm of make-believe. Third, my queue of future badasses is so obscenely long that I have a hard time justifying spending an entire week writing about a fictional character who has been genetically engineered at the molecular level by some deliciously-evil screenwriter to be an over-the-top invincible badass.</p>\r\n<p>Badass Action Heroes have fallen by the wayside.</p>\r\n<p>Then I saw <a href=\"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1899353/\">The Raid: Redemption</a>.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><object width=\"420\" height=\"315\" data=\"http://www.youtube.com/embed/A1UuZL8wfPA\" type=\"application/x-shockwave-flash\"><param name=\"src\" value=\"http://www.youtube.com/embed/A1UuZL8wfPA\" /></object>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>This clip is just the <em>first part</em> of an epic, seemingly-endless fight sequence where Indonesian action movie badass Iko Uwais kills about five hundred guys in a shitty hallway armed only with a nightstick and a combat knife.</p>\r\n<p>Aside from posting two short clips and giving a little background, I won\'t feature any spoilers for the movie because I expect (nay, demand!) that anyone who reads this website go see this fucking movie and I don\'t want to do anything to ruin it for you. The plot is as basic as you can get, and this script should be fucking taught in screenwriting classes &ndash; Iko Uwais plays a dude named Rama who works for an Indonesian SWAT Team. There is like five seconds of background on the guy &ndash; he says his prayers, trains his kung fu (or whatever), and he lives with his dad and his wife, who is hot and also pregnant. Ok, awesome, we\'re on board, we want him to win, good job. There\'s no tortured past. No bullshit white suburban teen angst tortured/reluctant/emo hero whateverness. Rama\'s team is about to go into a gigantic apartment building that serves as a hardened stronghold for an all-powerful, super-evil gang of sadistic criminal douchebag assholes who mainline cocaine and heroin off of dead babies and are much more likely to pull your corpse apart with a claw hammer than they are to donate one dollar to muscular dystrophy when the cashier at the grocery store asks them. The SWAT Team has to go in and arrest or kill every single person they find.</p>\r\n<p>Here\'s a little bit of what the literature-types like to refer to as \"foreshadowing\": The mission doesn\'t go well. Before you know it Iko Uwais is trapped in his own personal Indonesian <em>Die Hard</em> and finds himself unarmed, fighting four psycho cold-blooded murderers with machetes and sinister haircuts and <em>kicking the shit out of them like omg so crazy</em>:</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\">&nbsp;<object width=\"420\" height=\"315\" data=\"http://www.youtube.com/embed/IOF4yNpYEkg\" type=\"application/x-shockwave-flash\"><param name=\"src\" value=\"http://www.youtube.com/embed/IOF4yNpYEkg\" /></object></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>I\'ll be the first to admit that before Tuesday I honestly didn\'t really know shit about Indonesia. I could find it on a map, and I\'m pretty sure there were some battles fought there during World War II (it seems likely at least), but that\'s really about it. I honestly was not expecting them to produce a movie so fucking over-the-top hardcore that I would now easily include it among the top ten most badass movies I\'ve ever seen in my entire life (the other nine, off the top of my head right now, would be Taken, Commando, Aliens, Terminator 2, Die Hard, Dirty Harry, Predator, Rambo II, and probably either the first Bourne movie or a Korean action flick called The Man From Nowhere). I shit you not, we were in a pretty crowded theater and fucking grown men in business suits were screaming \"HOLY SHIT!\" out loud during some of the action scenes, and there was one really-awesome dude a couple rows behind me who responded to every scene with the villains doing heinous shit by nervously groaning, \"oh God... toooo much.... nooooo!\" under his breath.</p>\r\n<p>Upon doing some research, it appears that Indonesia is actually pretty fucking hardcore. Particularly related to this discussion is the Indonesian Special Forces Counter-Terrorism police unit known as Detachment 88, which is easily one of the most hardcore national CT teams I\'ve ever heard of before. Funded and trained by Australian and American special forces operatives and outfitted with top-of-the-line Western military gear, Detachment 88 is a take-no-prisoners vengeance-seeking police force whose primary objective is to hunt out terror cells, charge into their headquarters with a handful of frag grenades and a steady stream of bullets from their M4 assault rifles, and kill every fucking terrorist too stupid to put his hands up immediately. Sure, Detachment 88 catches some heat in the international community for their <em>Death Wish</em>-style vigilante murder rampage approach to police work, but it\'s like every time you turn around these dudes have cleared out some alleged terror cell with a hail of gunfire, killed some high-ranking member of whatever the Indonesian version of the Taliban is, and, in some cases, destroyed an entire city block in the process. Basically, Detachment 88\'s method of operation works like this &ndash; these guys get intel on possible bad guys, go in there Navy SEAL style, and waste everyone they find except from one guy, who they capture and torture until he coughs up the name of his contact outside the terror cell. Then they go raid that place. Lather, rinse, repeat. Say what you want about the methods (it may surprise you to find that Amnesty International is not a fan), and I can\'t speak to the effectiveness of their results in anything resembling a definitive manner, but if nothing else I think we can all agree that this is pretty fucking badass.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/ikouwais2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>Detachment 88</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>The hero of <em>The Raid</em> is Iko Uwais, an unbelievably-fast-punching Indonesian truck driver from Jakarta who has gone from sitting behind the wheel of a communications van to now standing tall as one of his country\'s most famous movie stars, mostly thanks to his ability to pummel the bejeezus out of hordes of mooks and extras and stuntmen with whatever objects happen to be laying around the movie sets at the time they unleash him. He\'s the 2005 National Champion in the Indonesian martial art, Penchak Silat, a pretty badass fighting style that combines all the best parts of Thai kickboxing, native Bali machete-fighting, and whatever it\'s called when you kick a dude in the balls and then break him in half by hip-tossing him off a table so he lands spine-first into a filing cabinet full of meth. Penchak Silat was allegedly founded by a woman who once saw a tiger fighting a monkey and then copied their combat styles and used it to beat the fucking shit out of a half-dozen drunk assholes who tried to rape her later that same day, which is a pretty awesome backstory, and while I\'m not really a student of the world\'s various fighting styles I will admit that when you see this dude flip out and kick the crap out of like a hundred smackheads in a shitty apartment building you are absolutely on board with it.</p>\r\n<p>Here\'s a clip from a different movie, where Iko saves his girlfriend by kicking the crap out of a dozen guys while dual-wielding lead pipes. I think this is based on a true story.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><object width=\"420\" height=\"315\" data=\"http://www.youtube.com/embed/biZHQqfdfdU\" type=\"application/x-shockwave-flash\"><param name=\"src\" value=\"http://www.youtube.com/embed/biZHQqfdfdU\" /></object></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>','2012-04-13','666009220428','ikouwais1.png','ikouwais1-small.png','Iko Uwais','Indonesian action hero and star of one of the most badass movies ever made.','FACE KICK'),('William E. Fairbairn','February 28, 1885','June 20, 1960','Rickmansworth, England','20th-century British Soldier','<p>William Ewart Fairbairn is one of the most badass martial arts masters the world has ever seen. In addition to developing the basis for the martials arts systems used by cops and special forces across the globe, he also invented the SWAT Team, came up with the idea of riot police, invented the police officer\'s tactical bullet-proof vest, and created the knife that was used by the SAS, Army Rangers, and Marine Raiders in World War II. He also survived over 600 non-training street fights in his lifetime as a police officer and was allegedly covered from face to ankle in scars from knife wounds he received in life-or-death battles with dirtbag criminal scumbags on the streets of Shanghai.</p>\r\n<p>Fairbarn was born in 1885 in Hertfordshire, England. As a young man he spent his spare time reading newspapers to his blind neighbor, at fifteen he took a job as a leather worker, and the day he turned sixteen he saw a recruitement poster for the Royal Marines and decided, fuck it, I\'m going to enlist. Unfortunately for Fairbairn, the enlistment age was eighteen in England at this time, but apparently his recruitment officer didn\'t give a shit &ndash; he forged the documents to allow Fairbairn to enlist, the young teenager went through one of the most brutal basic training courses offered by any military in the world in 1901, and was immediately shipped out to a British Marines station in Korea.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/fairbairn1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>You might not think this is a man who could have killed you five hundred different ways at the same time.<br />You\'d be wrong.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Fairbairn was stationed in Japanese-occupied Korea from 1903 to 1907, and he spent the majority of those four years learning everything be possibly could about the long-lost art of epically kicking the fiery rainbow-living shitfire out of every living thing on the planet until the only thing left inhabiting earth are multi-colored protoplasmic bags of liquefied organs and bone shards. Fairbairn spend his days drilling with the Royal Marines (no small feat of badassitude in itself), his nights studying martial arts with the toughest badasses Japan and Korea had to offer, and then went out on the weekends and engaged in organized-yet-overly-aggressive bayonet fighting drills with Japanese Army regulars.</p>\r\n<p>A twenty-four hour cycle of non-stop shanking, stabbing, and face-kicking was pretty damn awesome for Fairbairn, but when his tour ended in 1907 he opted to transfer out of Korea and accept a post as a patrolman with the Shanghai Municipal Police Department.</p>\r\n<p>Four months later he was stabbed a dozen times by members of a Chinese separatist gang and left for dead, bleeding out in a dark alleyway in the back streets of Shanghai.</p>\r\n<p>But William Fairbairn didn\'t die.</p>\r\n<p>He got pissed.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/fairbairn2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>EYE GOUGE</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>In the early 20th century, the British-controlled Chinese municipality of Shanghai was one of the toughest beats any cop in the world could possibly pull. An almost-lawless, dangerous city that served as a haven for gangsters and criminals from across Asia (not to mention the opportunistic Europeans who routinely passed through on their quests to screw over every person they could possibly find), the mean streets of Shanghai were almost completely overrun by heavily-armed, deadly organized crime syndicates, separatist rebel groups, pimps, drug dealers, kidnappers, and all other sundry manner of characters who are just as likely to shank your face with a pork sword then cap you in the brain as they are to ask you if they could bum a light off you.</p>\r\n<p>All that stood between an almost endless army of gangsters, revolutionaries, criminals, and other violent anti-authority types were a few hundred overworked, underpaid, unappreciated Chinese, Sikh, and British police officers who spent roughly as much time avoiding bullets as they did filling out paperwork.</p>\r\n<p>William Ewart Fairbairn decided he was going to even up the odds. And since his department didn\'t have the resources to hire new officers or purchase better equipment, he decided the only way to level the playing field was by turning himself into a badass one-man army of human destruction capable of rendering everyone in his general vicinity into BFG9000-style red giblets with a whirlwind of spinning knife attacks, then teach his badass techniques of rib-stabbing devastation to every single member of the Shanghai Police until the entire force started looking like the cast of the <em>Expendables</em>.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/fairbairn3.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>Shanghai Municipal Police, 1930.<br />Protip: Don\'t fuck with these guys.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Fairbairn\'s first step was to learn every single thing about every martial art he could possibly get his hands on. He took up boxing. He studied kung fu from the personal bodyguard to the Empress of China. He became the first Westerner to receive black belts in Judo and Jujitsu from a Japanese grandmaster.</p>\r\n<p>And he got into no-holds-barred street fights with dangerous criminals. A lot.</p>\r\n<p>Walking the streets armed only with a combat knife and a Colt 1911 trying to smash organized crime anywhere he could find it, Fairbairn was routinely jumped by gangs of men that far outnumbered him, and just as routinely reduced his assailants to crippled heaps of failure handcuffed together in the back of his paddy wagon. During his 32-year career leading the Shanghai Police\'s <em>The Raid: Redemption</em>-style violent crackdown on dangerous organized criminals, Fairbairn allegedly survived over 600 non-training street fights, receiving so many cuts and gunshots in the process that he was reportedly covered in scars across his arms, legs, chest, and abdomen.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/fairbairn4.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>Fairbairn demonstrates how to transition from a simple handshake<br />to a perfectly-executed rectum-shank.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>A lifetime of knifefighting underworld enforcers will give a man a special perspective on life, and by 1910 Fairbairn was assigned the task of training the Shanghai Municipal Police in hand-to-hand combat, knife-fighting, and combat handgunning. He threw himself into the task, combining his military training, his time mastering at least four Eastern martial arts, and his own personal experience and creating a new style of fighting known as \"Defendu\" that he began to teach to his fellow officers.</p>\r\n<p>Basically speaking, Defendu (referred to by Fairbairn as \"Gutter Fighting\") was like the predecessor of Krav Maga. The principle is simple &ndash; kick the shit out of this guy as quickly as possible, cripple and/or otherwise incapacitate him, then slap the cuffs on him. Nothing is off limits &ndash; boots, knees, elbows... hell, there was an entire section on biting and eye-gouging. The rule was simple &ndash; survive and destroy. No mercy. No holds barred.</p>\r\n<p>Not only did this training help enable the Shanghai Cops to bust out a bunch of badass Jet Li asskicking shit, but Fairbairn further improved the force by implementing some of the first SWAT-style police tactics the world had ever seen. Combining combat pistol training and knife-fighting with small-unit room clearing techniques he devised himself, Fairbairn developed a special squad capable of breaking into criminal dens and taking down every asshole inside. In 1925, when riots broke out across Shanghai, Fairbairn developed the first Riot Police Squad ever formed, developed tactics to contain rioting and limit looting while minimizing civilian injuries. His tactics are still used today.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/fairbairn5.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>In addition to innovating tactics still used by cops and special forces ops today, Fairbairn also developed published several books on shooting and self-defense, and created homemade bulletproof vests by stitching a metal plate inside a leather casing (using his old leatherworking skills) &ndash; it was heavy and kind of crude, but it could stop a point-blank round from a Mauser pistol, so who gives a shit what it looked like?</p>\r\n<p>Fairbairn\'s most famous invention however, was the combat knife he developed with his friend Eric Sykes, a weapon creatively known as the Fairbairn-Sykes Knife. Developed just prior to World War II, this narrow, 6.5-inch blade was designed specificially for stabbing between the ribs and into the soft tender parts of whoever is currently trying to kill you. Sharp enough to pierce and kill through the thickest clothing worn by any army in the world &ndash; a Soviet greatcoat (remember, the Soviets weren\'t even Britain\'s enemies at this point) &ndash; this weapon also featured a tapered handle that allowed it to be comfortably held and effectively wielded from a number of different hand grip positions.</p>\r\n<p>The weapon was so revolutionary that it was immediately assimilated into the British Army. It became the standard-issue combat knife of the SAS, the Royal Commandos, and the United States Marine Corps Raiders during World War II.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/fairbairn6.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<table style=\"width: 500px;\" align=\"center\">\r\n<tbody>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td><span>\"In close-quarters fighting there is no more deadly weapon than the knife. In choosing a knife there are two important factors to bear in mind: balance and keenness. The hilt should fit easily in your hand, and the blade should not be so heavy that it tends to drag the hilt from your fingers in a loose grip. It is essential that the blade have a sharp stabbing point and good cutting edges, because an artery torn through (as against a clean cut) tends to contract and stop the bleeding. If a main artery is cleanly severed, the wounded man will quickly lose consciousness and die.\"</span></td>\r\n</tr>\r\n</tbody>\r\n</table>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Fairbairn\'s job changed pretty dramatically as things inched closer to World War II. It started getting weird in 1937, when the Japanese Empire attacked and overran almost all of China, and suddenly Shanghai was the only place on mainland China not currently occupied by the rampaging Japanese Army. In addition to dealing with a huge influx of refugees that almost doubled the population of the city, Fairbairn\'s cops also had to deal with breaking up raging street fights between Japanese troops and Chinese citizens, stopping a Communist uprising in the city, and otherwise keeping the peace in the middle of a warzone like they were the friggin\' UN.</p>\r\n<p>The 55-year old Fairbairn was called out of service in 1940, when he resigned his post with the Shanghai P.D. and took a job working with British Secret Service. Under the badass code name \"Dangerous Dan\", Fairbairn went to work training some of the most hardcore warriors the world had to offer, training U.S. Army Rangers, British and Canadian Commandos, OSS Spy Operatives, U.S. Marine Raiders, and Special Air Service troopers in hand-to-hand combat, knife-fighting and pistol techniques. The guy\'s shit was so hardcore that there was allegedly a six-week \"Silent Killing\" course that, in addition to other things, included a section on how to kill a sentry with an ordinary stick.</p>\r\n<p>After World War II, William Fairbairn went to Singapore, set up the city\'s special riot squad, then moved to Cyprus and trained SWAT teams on counter-insurgency tactics.</p>\r\n<p>He died peacefully in his home in 1960 at the age of 75. He had never drank, swore, or bragged about his near-limitless fighting abilities once in his life. (I tried to avoid swearing in this article out of respect, but I think I lasted about one paragraph.)</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/fairbairn7.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://themartialartsreporter.com/col-william-e-fairbairn-the-father-of-modern-hand-to-hand-combat/\">Father of Hand-to-Hand Combat</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://www.cqbservices.com/?page_id=59\">W.E. Fairbairn.</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://www.ep.tc/problems/46/index.html\">Get Tough!</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_E._Fairbairn\">Wikipedia</a></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Sources:</span><br /><br /><span> Green, Thomas A. and Joseph R. Svinth. <em>Martial Arts of the World</em>. ABC-CLIO, 2010.<br /><br /> Robins, Peter and Nicholas Tyler. <em>Gentleman and Warrior</em>. CQB, 2011.<br /><br /> Stevens, Ben. <em>From Lee to Li</em>. Harpercollins, 2009.<br /><br /> Todd, Tank. <em>Military Combative Masters of the 20th Century.</em> Lulu, 2006. </span></p>','2012-04-27','447398921330','fairbairn.png','fairbairn-small.png','William Fairbairn','Martial arts badass and Shanghai cop who trained SAS and Marine Raiders in WWII.','\"Get tough, get down in the gutter, win at all costs... I teach what is called ‘Gutter Fighting.’ There’s no fair play, no rules except one: kill or be killed.\"'),('Ignacio Zaragoza','March 24, 1829','September 8, 1862','Bahía del Espíritu Santo, Mexico','19th-century Mexican General','<p>Horrible Confession Time: I had no idea Cinco de Mayo was based on a badass battle from Mexican history. I just figured it was like Mexican Independence Day or St. Patty\'s Day with Coronas or some shit.</p>\r\n<p>Horrible Confession Time, Part Dos: I learned this fact from a paper placemat at a cheesy Mexican restaurant during Happy Hour Monday night and was so overcome with a range of horrible self-guilt-related emotions that I nearly horked up a tequila-saturated enchilada. How had I survived thirty-two years without knowing that Cinco de Mayo is the story of a bunch of psychotic Mexican asskickers in straw hats hacking up battle-hardened French regular infantry with machetes? I briefly considered quitting my writing career, disabling the website, and moving to some caves near Guadalajara to partake in a life of silent penance to reflect on a lifetime of folly, but instead I decided that instead I would spend all week reading every possible thing I could find on the Battle of Puebla in an effort to ensure that you do not make the same tragic dumbshit mistakes I have made with my life.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/zaragoza1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>The badass tale of guts, glory, and Massive Mexican Asskickings begins South of the Border in the 1860s, when essentially the entire country of Mexico was one gigantic war-torn hellhole that nobody would ever want to visit. Mexico had recently just lost two wars, one to Texas and one to the United States (which, by that point, included Texas), and in the wake of that unholy carnage the citizens of Mexico then spent the next twenty or so years kicking the holy shit out of each other in a series of zany internal power struggles that left tens of thousands of people dead and depleted every last peso from the national treasury. When the President of Mexico told the great European powers that he was basically bankrupt and that Mexico had no possible way of ever repaying even a little bit of the astronomical debt they owed, the understanding, compassionate rulers of Europe put together a gigantic fleet and prepared to kick the holy fuckshit out of them in a vengeance-inspired barrage of cannonballs and death, then personally shake down every single human being in Mexico until they\'d extracted what was owed them.</p>\r\n<p>Now, normally the U.S. had Mexico\'s back on shit like this thanks to an obscenely-badass document known as the Monroe Doctrine &ndash; a no-bullshit decree where American President James Monroe basically came out and said, \"If any of you European fucks try to land troops in the Americas I will personally rise from the dead, come down there, and shove my boot so far up your collective asses that it will dent your brains.\" Unfortunately in 1862 the U.S. was a little tied up with the whole American Civil War of Northern Aggression Between the States thing and everyone know the Americans weren\'t really DTF with anybody other than themselves. So the French Emperor Napoleon III (a man notable for being the second-lamest of the Napoleons) decided, fuck it, I\'m just going to land a shitload of troops in Mexico, conquer the hell out of everything I can find over there, and if anyone has a problem with that they can take it up with my penis.</p>\r\n<p>So in April of 1862, a battle-hardened, well-equipped army of French Regular Infantry under the command of General Ferdinand Letrille, Comte de Laurencez, landed in Veracruz and began a 400-mile march towards Mexico City with one thought on their minds &ndash; dickslap all of Mexico and turn it into part of the French Empire. As part of his briefing, the Emperor Napoleon III told the Count of Laurencez that he could expect a warm reception from the Mexican people, and that women and children would be lining the streets with flowers jubilantly welcoming their new French liberators.</p>\r\n<p>It turned out that they weren\'t as excited about seeing a foreign invasion force as Napoleon had predicted.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/zaragoza2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>Mexican militia, circa 1862.<br />Be afraid. Be very afraid.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>The Mexican commander was a tough-ass hombre named Ignacio Zaragoza. Born in Mexican Texas (present-day Goliad, TX) in 1829, Zaragoza was the son of an infantry footsoldier, but he himself was skinny, nerdy, and nearsighted, and basically looked like the last fucking person you\'d ever expect to lead an army of badass Danny Trejos screaming into hand-to-hand combat with one of the world\'s most technologically-advanced professional armies. Zaragoza had dropped out of seminary to fight the infamous dictator Santa Anna (you know, the guy responsible for the Alamo) in the 1850s, but was denied entry to Mexico\'s top military academy because of his peasant status. Then he tried to enlist, but was denied on grounds that he <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/zaragoza-colbert.jpg\">kind of looked like Stephen Colbert</a>. In 1853 he finally managed to sign on with a crappy little militia regiment, where he immediately began to demonstrate his natural talent for tactics, leadership, and general over-the-top asskicking. He quickly rose from private to sergeant to captain, and by the time this guy was 31 he was a Brigadier General commanding an 8,000-strong army of volunteer troops that defeated Santa Anna in battle and helped establish a constitutional democracy in Mexico.</p>\r\n<p>Zaragoza was serving the Mexican Secretary of War, but as soon as he heard that fucking Napoleon had landed a bunch of assholes on the Mexican coast he resigned his post in the President\'s cabinet, hauled ass to the battlefront, and took command of the Mexican forces there. After being defeated in a skirmish near the city of Acultzingo on April 28, Zaragoza opted for a tactic that had worked pretty well against uppity Napoleons in the past &ndash; he\'d withdraw into the mainland, burning everything behind him to prevent the French from using captured supplies, and draw them out into a battle they didn\'t want.</p>\r\n<p>For almost a week Zaragoza torched everything he could find, drawing the French further into unfamiliar territory. Then, on the night of May 4, 1862, the Mexican commander positioned his rag-tag band of 4,500 ill-equipped citizen-soldiers in fortifications near the city of Puebla de los Angeles &ndash; a critical city of 80,000 people positioned along the road from Veracruz to Mexico City that was absolutely vital to the French if they wanted to have any chance of maintaining their supply lines to the sea.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/zaragoza3.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>So Ignacio Zaragoza dug in, positioned his artillery, and prepared for the fight of his life. All that stood between 6,500 elite soldiers of the French Army and Mexico City were 4,500 Mexican militia troops, many of whom had less than three months of experience as soldiers. He had no money, no equipment, very little artillery (and even fewer cavalry) and no way to pay his troops, and his men were basically just wearing whatever clothes they brought with them and were carrying little more than antiquated rifles and the machetes they\'d used to cut crops on their farms back home.</p>\r\n<p>Opposing him were the French Zouaves. The Zouvaes might look funny and wear stupid-looking pants, but don\'t be fooled by their terrible fashion sense &ndash; these were battle-hardened troops who had been kicking fucking asses up and down Algeria for decades and who did their basic training by punching each other in the face with bear traps in the middle of the goddamned Sahara Desert. Trained specifically for bayonet-to-face combat in any tropical or desert climate, this was the closest thing to Special Forces the French military had to offer. These guys were not deployed with orders to \"fuck around\" or \"do whatever\", they had one goal &ndash; kill everything in sight, then stab the corpses with bayonets to make sure they\'re dead.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/zaragoza4.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>When May 5, 1862 dawned in the skies above Puebla, General Ignacio Zaragoza looked out from the bell tower of the city\'s cathedral to see three columns of French troops lined up for an all-out assault on the city. There were two major forts guarding the gates of Puebla &ndash; Fort Guadalupe on one side and Fort Loreto on the other. Both of these were strategically positioned at the top of steep hills, were bristling with nearly every cannon Zaragoza had to offer, and had lines of fire across the entire field &ndash; if the French were going to capture the city, they had to take these forts.</p>\r\n<p>The Zouaves weren\'t intimidated. They charged straight in like they didn\'t fucking give a shit (because they didn\'t).</p>\r\n<p>At 600 yards out, Zaragoza gave his men one final pump-up speech to his presumably-scared-shitless soldiers and ordered his cannons to rip them some new assholes with as much grapeshot as they could ram down their barrels. Huge shotgun bursts of human-destroying pellets shredded the front lines of the French columns, but the Zouaves didn\'t even flinch &ndash; they did what Zouaves did, which is attack, close orders, and keep coming in an orderly, unstoppable wall of Hammer Pants and curlicue moustaches. At 400 yards the infantry opened up with their rifles, pouring even more fire as the French charged ahead, utterly oblivious to the explosions around them and the bullets ripping up their comrades. When they reached the base of the hill, they climbed. When they reached the wall, they put their rifles over and shot the defenders point-blank in the face. Then they climbed over, bayonets at the ready, preparing to massacre everyone they could catch and capture the city from its rag-tag defenders.</p>\r\n<p>What they found on the other side of the wall were the 1st and 3rd Toluca Light Infantry Regiments &ndash; pissed-as-fuck Mexican badasses with bayonets and blood-stained machetes, charging ahead, screaming like madmen, swinging their scary-as-fuck swords over their heads in a berserker kill-charge that crashed into the French onslaught in a whirling torrent of blood and steel and Spanish swear words.</p>\r\n<p>For the first time in over fifty years, the French Army retreated in the face of the enemy.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/zaragoza5.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>I\'d run too.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Zaragoza didn\'t have any cavalry at Guadalupe to pursue the enemy, so despite having the advantage he had to instead somehow stop his battle-raging men from charging out across the field after the withdrawing French forces and running straight-on into a deathtrap. The French Zouaves fell back, rallied, regrouped, and prepared for a second charge.</p>\r\n<p>The second attack came across both forts at the same time. The machete-wounded Zouaves charged back at Guadalupe again, while another force of Light Infantry attacked Loreta. Both attacks were driven back with intense cannon and rifle fire, as the Mexicans were now starting to get really pumped up because hey, maybe this wasn\'t a totally fucking unwinnable battle after all.</p>\r\n<p>Seeing that he had now failed in two attempts to capture Puebla, the French commander decided instead to order a full-on balls-out attack across the entire front &ndash; he\'d take the city or die gloriously while trying. A third, final charge was mounted at Guadalupe and Loreta, as the elite of the French military prepared to grind these uppity hombres under their heel with a boot full of broken glass.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/zaragoza6.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>Battle of Puebla re-enactment.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>The rain started coming down hard as the French made their attack, and the slippery conditions weren\'t exactly great for these exhausted, wounded, beat-up dudes trying to scramble uphill for the third time that day straight into a face-full of ammunition. The attacks both reached the walls of Puebla, but as they attempted to scale the fortress walls, ferocious counterattacks by hardcore Mexican troops drove them back. On the Loreta side, the French broke and withdrew, and were immediately pursued by the small cavalry force Zaragoza had to offer &ndash; the French attempted to form squares and give them a little bit of the old Duke of Wellington treatment, but a mighty crush of Mexican cavalry smashed open the boxes and pissed-off Mexican badasses carved up the squares from the inside. On the other side, the Zouaves were once again thrown back at the wall, and this time Zaragoza let his machete-swinging wildmen chase the French all the way back across the battlefield, hacking and swinging at anything in a blue uniform. The French withdrew all the way back to Veracruz and didn\'t come back for a year.</p>\r\n<p>It was the first French defeat since Waterloo in 1815, and the first time that penniless, war-torn Mexico had defeated a foreign invader in battle.</p>\r\n<p>General Ignacio Zaragoza\'s after-action report consisted of two sentences: \"The national arms have been covered with glory. The French troops conducted themselves with valor, their commander clumsily.\" He would die four months later of typhoid fever at the age of 33 and is now on the Mexican 500-peso bill.</p>\r\n<p>Let\'s raise a drink to him tomorrow.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/zaragoza7.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.presidiolabahia.org/zaragosa.htm\">Zaragoza bio</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://www.pbs.org/kpbs/theborder/history/timeline/10.html\">PBS.org</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://latinamericanhistory.about.com/od/thehistoryofmexico/a/cincodemayo.htm\">About.com</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Puebla\">Wikipedia</a></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Sources:</span><br /><br /><span> Dent, David W. <em>Encyclopedia of Modern Mexico</em>. Scarecrow, 2002.<br /><br /> Hayes-Bautista, David. <em>El Cinco de Mayo</em>. University of California Press, 2012.<br /><br /> Iber, Jorge. <em>Hispanics in the American West</em>. ABC-CLIO, 2006.<br /><br /> Noll, Richard Howard. <em>A Short History of Mexico</em>. A.C. McLurg &amp; Co., 1903.<br /><br /> Marley, David. <em>Wars of the Americas</em>. ABC-CLIO, 2008. </span></p>','2012-05-04','61286222462','zaragoza.jpg','zaragoza7-small.jpg','Ignacio Zaragoza','Hero of the Battle of Puebla and the reason why Cinco de Mayo is a holiday.',''),('Fredegund','6th century AD','597 AD','The Kingdom of the Franks','Medieval German Politician','<p>It\'s a sad truth about medieval history that many of the most hardcore, face-crushing women from this time period get a seriously bad rap. You see, like it or not history during this age was, for the most part, written by men, and in most cases by men who were priests or monks or other holy-type people that as a rule didn\'t really have a particularly-overdeveloped appreciation for women who apparently didn\'t realize that their place was in the home making pies and popping out babies every fifteen minutes &ndash; not ruling over men and curbstomping their enemies\' teeth out of their skulls with mailed boots until everyone around them was deceased or soon-to-be deceased. As a result, some of the toughest, most ball-crushing heroines of the Dark Ages are either overlooked, under-represented, or, still worse, portrayed simply as sluts or dumbasses or bloodthirsty vengeful bitches or whatever the fuck other terrible slanderous thing the history-writers felt like portraying them as during that period of time.</p>\r\n<p>The Frankish Queen Fredegund is a rare exception to this rule &ndash; and, oddly enough, it\'s not because historians portray her in a positive light. No, with this chick it\'s because she truly was an utterly-bloodthirsty vengeance machine who rested at nothing short of the completely over-the-top torture deaths of all who stood in her path, obliterating dumbasses across the continent of Europe until every single human being &ndash; from King to Bishop to Peasant &ndash; who stupidly wound up on her bad side immediately found themselves face-down in a pool of their own blood surrounded by knife-wielding assassins, poisonous beverages, and/or well-sharpened instruments of painful torture and horrible mutilation.</p>\r\n<p>She is one of history\'s most violent and bloodthirsty queens, and her entire life was centered around the one primary tenet of unquestionable badassitude &ndash; Live for Revenge.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/fredegund1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>We don\'t know much about where one of the world\'s most epic vengeance-mongers actually came from. We\'re pretty sure Fredegund (also known as Fredegond, Fredegunda, or simply Freddie) was Frankish, meaning that she was simultaneously French, German, and Belgian without actually being any of those things, and that when she was in her late teens she was sold as a slave to the wife of King Chilperic of Souissons &ndash; a guy who at the time sort-of ruled a piece of the Frankish Kingdom (when Chilperic\'s dad died, he\'d divided his empire up among his sons rather than putting one kid in charge of the entire kingdom... I think we can all agree that this is a dumbshit move, but it\'s not like we can do anything about it anymore). Well Fredegund wasn\'t all that particularly interested in being a servant-girl to the Queen, so instead of doing stupid bullshit like brushing the Royal Hair she seduced King Chilperic, hooked up with him, then convinced him to divorce the Queen and send that annoying primadonna off to live a life of celibacy in a convent somewhere. Unfortunately for Freddie, once the king was divorced he decided to marry some annoying Visigoth Princess instead, so once again Fredegund worked her magic and had that bitch strangled to death in her sleep. After all the competition was dead or nunnified, Chilperic decided it was in the best interest of self-preservation to marry Fredegund, a woman who had now somehow awesomely gone from slave-girl to Queen of the Franks in the span of like a year and a half.</p>\r\n<p>Well, naturally being the Queen was great and everything, but now Fredegund had a new problem to worry about &ndash; the hardcore sister of the recently-strangulated Visigoth Queen just so happened to be a tough-as-shit warrior-babe named Brunhilde, and Brunhilde was not a very happy girl. Brunhilde also just so happened to be a Queen in her own right, married to Chilperic\'s brother Siegebert, a guy who was in charge of another part of the recently-divided Frankish Kingdom (still with me here?), and before long the two factions were in the process of stabbing each other in the face repeatedly and without mercy in an all-out war that stretched from Paris to Berlin.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/fredegund2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>Frankish troops like Fredegund would have routinely led into battle.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Long story short, Chilperic/Fredegund fought an epic seven-year war with Siegebert/Brunhilde, with either side sending their mailed knights charging spears-first into combat and shivving the fuck out of anyone in their paths. After a hard-fought campaign, Fredegund defeated her rivals, crushed them in battle, then had King Siegebert whacked by stabbing him in the kidneys by a pair of assassins while he was in the process of giving a speech about how he was going to get revenge and beat the shit out of Fredegund once and for all (I\'m not sure if she planned the timing to work out like that, but it\'s badass either way). With the rival King dead, Fredegund overran the rest of Siegebert\'s men, captured Brunhilde, destroyed her cities, and then had Siegebert\'s top government official (who was admittedly a greedy evil bastard known as \"The Breaker of Wills\") executed by being systematically dismembered joint-by-joint with white-hot pokers and knives (holy shit).</p>\r\n<p>Fredegund also planned to have Brunhilde whacked as well, but while she was trying to figure out some sort of awesome new cruel and unusual punishment to carry out some ass hole broke Brunhilde out of prison and snuck her out of the realm. But, whatever. Fredegund eventually tracked that guy down and had him stabbed to death by his own servants, then had his kid poisoned to death by an evil chef just for good measure.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/fredegund3.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>Fredegund sits there smiling like a badass while some asshole publicly accuses her of poisoning him to death.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>With Brunhilde sort-of out of the way, Fredegund continued her mad rampage to consolidate power for her, her husband, and their now-newborn son. First she went after the sons of Chilperic\'s first wife (you know, the poor girl Fredegund had already exiled to a monastery), killing them by infecting them with dysentery until they died of their own explosive diarrhea. Then she went after some alleged conspirators and other people that talked trash about her, having them executed on torture racks and then throwing their broken bodies to wolves or lions. After that she attacked the clergy, most of whom weren\'t all that cool with things like torture-related deaths and were stupid enough to say something like that out loud &ndash; first she whacked a dude named Mummolus the Perfect (who, let\'s face it, couldn\'t have been all that bad), then she publicly yelled at a Catholic Saint (and then silently watched the guy get stabbed and slowly bleed to death in his own cathedral), and, as if that\'s not enough, she then tried to ice the Bishop of Bayeux for investigating the murder and sticking his stupid face where it didn\'t belong (snitches get stitches).</p>\r\n<p>In true badass back-room Emperor Palpatine conspirator fashion, Fredegund\'s primary method of disposing of her enemies was by hiring easily-bribeable men to poison or shiv her enemies for her. Thanks to her own personal charm, a collection of dirty secrets that would make Nick Fury want to high-five her, and a nearly-limitless amount of gold at her disposal, the Queen of the Franks routinely hired everyone from Dukes and Priests to slaves and brigands to take up oleander-coated daggers and shank douchebags in her name. Her personal favorite method of execution was to hire a band of thugs armed with heavily-poisoned Swedish eating utensils known as <em>scramsaxes</em> (it even <em>sounds</em> like an IKEA thing) to fall upon her target in the woods, beat the shit out of them, rob them, and leave them to die slow, agonizingly-painful deaths. Then, when the brigands would return to report the kill, Fredegund would have those assholes whacked as well, regardless of whether they completed their mission or not (though it\'s worth mentioning she\'d just behead them with axes at dinner parties if they succeeded, whereas if they failed it was much worse... one poor cleric who failed to execute Brunhilde was punished by having his hands and feet cut off and then being thrown in a hole).</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/fredegund4.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>A scramsaxe.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Eventually Fredegund\'s enemies got a little fed up with all this nonsense and had her husband Chilperic assassinated (some people thing this was Fredegund\'s doing as well, but this seems unlikely). With her husband dead and her son still too young to rule, Fredegund fled Soissons to Paris, moved into the cathedral of Notre Dame, and took on the role of Queen Regent, where she controlled the day-to-day operations of the realm. Now officially in charge of the Kingdom, she ruled with an iron fist, forging alliances, sending armies into the field, and utterly crushing anyone who she considered a threat to either herself or her son.</p>\r\n<p>For the most part, things were pretty successful &ndash; she ruled solo for a decade, captured several cities near Paris, allied with the powerful Kingdom of Burgundy, won the throne for her son, and beat the shit out of a dude named Theodebert who was acting up and causing all sorts of trouble &ndash; all of which are notable achievements for anybody, let alone a woman ruling undisputed in the fucking Middle Ages. She did have a little trouble with her daughter though... Fredegund unwisely tried to marry that poor girl off to the Visigoths, but instead of accepting her into their tribe they just robbed her of her dowry and sent her back to Paris empty-handed. The girl lived at home for a while, and, as can tend to happen with teenaged daughters and their mothers, they didn\'t really get along. The highlight of this feud was one time when the daughter came out and said she should be the Queen Regent and Fredegund should retire &ndash; Fredegund, who was in the treasure room picking out jewels at the time, asked the daughter to grab something for her out of a particularly-huge treasure chest. When the daughter reached in, Fredegund closed the chest on her head and choked her shit out of her until she got her act together. As if you needed more badass shit about this woman, this story was so popular during the Middle Ages that Fredegund is sometimes cited as a possible inspiration for the Wicked Stepmother in Cinderella.</p>\r\n<p>Fredegund eventually sorted shit out with her kid, handed the reins off once her son was old enough to take over as King, and then died peacefully in her bed in Paris in 597 AD. She\'d ruled for 40 years, killed everyone who opposed her, and lived for revenge in a way most action movie heroes could only dream about. The only person who\'d successfully eluded her wrath was that annoying do-gooder Brunhilde, but Fredegund\'s son eventually settled that shit once and for all as well &ndash; he captured the 60 year-old queen, put her on the rack for three days, then had her drawn and quartered by horses. His mom would have been proud.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/fredegund5.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>LOL CRUSHIN UR HED</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://womenshistory.about.com/library/bio/blbio_fredegund.htm\">About.com</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://distractingfromthenow.blogspot.com/2009/09/queen-fredegunds-life-condensed.html\">Queen Fredegund\'s Life Condensed</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://harlotsharpiesharridans.com/blog/2009/10/27/a-discovery/\">Harlots and Harpies</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fredegund\">Wikipedia</a></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Sources:</span><br /><br /><span> Gregory of Tours. <em>A History of the Franks</em>. Digireads, 2010.<br /><br /> Frassetto, Michael. <em>Encyclopedia of Barbarian Europe</em>. ABC-CLIO, 2003.<br /><br /> Jackson-Lauffer, Guida Myrl. <em>Women Rulers Throughout the Ages</em>. ABC-CLIO, 1999.<br /><br /> Miles, Rosalind and Robin Cross. <em>Hell Hath No Fury</em>. Three Rivers, 2008. </span></p>','2012-05-11','863594922759','fredegund.jpg','fredegund-small.jpg','Fredegund','The Middle Ages\' most bloodthirsty and ruthless queen.',''),('Janos Hunyadi','c. 1407','August 11, 1458','Hungary','Medieval Hungarian General','<p>When you\'re talking about the most ultimate face-ripping asskick-a-tron murder-machines from the latter days of Medieval history, one group in particular stands out &ndash; the balls-out warriors of the Ottoman Turkish Empire. Badass hordes of scimitar-swinging wildmen armed with gunpowder rifles, iron cannons the size of VW Jettas, unlimited money, and even more limitless numbers of men willing to lay down their lives for the cause, these guys were tough-as-shit skullcrackers who were on a Mission from God to conquer the shit out of every infidel in their path, and even though they were constantly at war with roughly twenty-seven different Westernized European armies at any given time in their history they still kicked so much ass that in some ways all it took to be an Epic Legendary Hero in 15th-century Europe was to go toe-to-toe with these guys on the battlefield and not have them pull down your pants and stab you in the grundle in front of all of your troops.</p>\r\n<p>John Hunyadi, the White Knight of Wallachia, not only avoided being de-tainted by Ottoman cannonballs, he actually somehow managed to beat the hell out of them on multiple occasions &ndash; an almost-unparalleled feat of badass heathen-smiting generalship that rivals the epicness of that ridiculously-gigantic run-on sentence I just unleashed on humanity in that last paragraph (seriously, an somewhere in the world an English professor is suffering a ruptured brain aneurysm and he doesn\'t even know why).</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/hunyadi1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>Hunyadi trampling some jerk\'s throat.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>One of the greatest and most accomplished battlefield commanders of the Medieval era was born in Hungary in 1407, and, although we aren\'t one hundred thousand percent sure about it, it seems pretty likely that he was actually born of peasant stock. His background is a little iffy &ndash; we know his mother was Hungarian, and we\'re pretty sure that his father was either Romanian, Serbian, Wallachian, Klingon, Transylvanian, Bulgarian, and/or Hungarian (take your pick).</p>\r\n<p>What we do know is that Janos Hunyadi has one of the most badass origin stories you\'ll ever hear. Basically, the first time he appears in history is during a hardcore battle where King Sigismund of Hungary was fighting for his life against a seemingly-overwhelming number of Turkish warriors. Suddenly, when things were all going to hell around him, the King saw some fucking insane knight in full plate armor ride out of nowhere and plow, by himself, straight on into the teeth of the enemy and immediately proceed to start kicking the ungodly living shit out of everyone he could get his sword on. The King didn\'t recognize this warrior\'s heraldry &ndash; his tunic was white and his shield depicted a raven with a gold ring in its beak &ndash; but by the time the battle was over and this White Knight was basically standing beaten and bruised in a knee-deep pile of his enemies, the King immediately (and understandably) made him a member of his Royal Bodyguard.</p>\r\n<p>Awesomely enough, there is some evidence to suggest that Hunyadi had bought the armor on his own, created his own shield logo based on his parents\' favorite things, and taken this shit into combat despite the fact that he was neither a nobleman or a member of the Hungarian armed forces.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/hunyadi2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>He\'s the one in the center with all the dead bodies around him.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>While this was a pretty extravagant display of awesome manslaughter-related shit, in the grand scheme of Hungarian-Turkish relations the battle really wasn\'t much more than a minor skirmish. The trouble with the Turks had really got going a few decades earlier, in 1396, when a badass conquest-monger known as Bayezid the Thunderbolt (a man I do intend to get to in due time) blitzed a huge Turkish army into Eastern Europe, waved his arms around, and nonchalantly declared \"all this shit is mine now, biznatches\". The Pope shit a brick when he got the text and ordered a Crusade, and Bayzid the Thunderbolt was simultaneously attacked by an equally-massive horde of mail-clad warriors from Venice, Genoa, France, Burgundy, Germany, Wallachia, Hungary, and Bulgaria (with a few Knights Templar and Knights Hospitaller sprinkled about for extra flavor).</p>\r\n<p>Bayezid massacred the entire force nearly down to the last man. Then he laid waste to the entire Balkans.</p>\r\n<p>Well by 1439 the Turks had pressed their way all the way up to the Hungarian border, and John Hunyadi (who had cut his teeth fighting <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/zizka.html\">Jan Zizka</a>\'s troops in Bohemia and had since been promoted through the ranks and appointed commander of the southern defensive borders) was going to make damned sure that no Turks were going to be spear-humping Hungary in the face on his watch &ndash; no small task considering that a coalition of like fifteen countries (including his own Hungarians) had recently been utterly and unpleasantly crushed by the Turkish onslaught already.</p>\r\n<p>But Hunyadi didn\'t give a fuck. When the Turks blitzed into Transylvania, he did the only thing that made sense to him: Kick ass.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/hunyadi3.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>Dude was so hardcore he needed MOUSTACHE ARMOR.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>First, the Turks besieged Nagyszeben. Hunyadi ambushed them, captured their supply train, liberated all the prisoners they\'d taken during their campaign, and broke the siege. When the Turks got pissed and hunted Hunyadi down, he dressed another guy up in his armor, send him on a one-man scouting mission, and then when the enemy took the bait and charged that poor chump the real Hunyadi came out of fucking nowhere with a massive formation of Hungarian and <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/hussars.html\">Polish Heavy Cavalry</a> and T-boned their shit with a solid wall of lances and horse meat. This pissed off the Turkish Commander like you wouldn\'t believe, so that guy took 80,000 warriors and marched straight on after the Raven Knight with one order &ndash; kill that fucking guy. At a place called the Iron Gates, Hunyadi crammed his under-sized army Leonidas-style in a mountain pass, fought like hell, then staged a fake retreat &ndash; the Turks pursued Hunyadi through the pass, and once the entire army was inside the pass the Hungarians sealed it off, turned around, and wiped out their entire army.</p>\r\n<p>Thanks to his over-the-top power of Being Awesome, John Hunyadi defeated three Turkish invasions in seven years &ndash; a feat unprecedented in European history at this time. Then, in 1443, the Raven Knight took the fight to the enemy, charging through the Gate of Trajan into enemy-controlled lands in a daring attack. In a series of gore-fest destruct-o-matic slugmatches known as the Long Campaign, John Hunyadi defeated three Turkish pashas, turned back an attack by the Sultan\'s Army, captured Nis and Sofia, liberated Bulgaria, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Albania, and once gave <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/skanderbeg.html\">Skanderbeg</a> a flying bro-hoof after surviving an insane battle that (in my mind at least) probably resembled the final sequence of <em>The Avengers</em>.</p>\r\n<p>It was the first time any European commander had taken the fight to the Turks and not ended up with their helm looking like a tin can of tomato sauce that had just been run over by a semi.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/hunyadi4.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>Carrying the Hungarian flag over the wall.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Well you know how jackass bosses and record execs and other similarly-minded bloodsuckers feel about success, and so unfortunately for Janos (Janos is the more-badass-sounding Hungarian form of the name John... I am using them interchangeably simply because I enjoy confusing my readers as much as possible at all times), as soon as he proved he could beat the Turks at their own game (i.e. conquering shit), everybody was suddenly telling Hunyadi to go out there and throw the Ottoman Empire out of Europe entirely. Hunyadi tried to tell them, \"no dude it\'s cool I did what I could but I don\'t have enough peeps to go a hell of a lot further\", but the Pope and the King and other authority-types who didn\'t know shit about military commandering were all like, \"naw dude you\'re rocking out with your cock out, bro, you got this shit.\" So, ok, whatever, the Pope called yet another Crusade, and, what\'s worse, instead of having Hunyadi lead it, the King of Hungary tried to steal all the glory and take charge himself with Hunyadi basically serving as an \"advisor\" instead of \"Asskicker Prime\".</p>\r\n<p>Oh, right, and as if this wasn\'t a clusterfuck enough already, someone tipped the Turks off as to what the hell was going on &ndash; to the point where the Italian ships that were supposed to be blockading the Bosporus from Turkish reinforcement transports were actually being paid to ferry enemy troops across. So, yeah, when the Crusaders showed up hoping to surprise attack the enemy, they instead found 100,000 battle-hardened Turkish troops ready for a little beat-down vengeance. At the Battle of Varna, the idiotic King first got his ass kicked, then gave command to Hunyadi, who almost &ndash; ALMOST &ndash; pulled it out before once again being cockblocked by his boss &ndash; right as things were starting to turn, the King did an idiotic thing and charged his personal Guard straight-on into the Janissaries, who of course proceeded to kick the shit out of him and impale his head on a pike. When the King died, the Crusader army disintegrated and fell into disarray. Janos Hunyadi tried to rally the men, but failed, and on the way home he was captured and imprisoned by Vlad the Impaler\'s father, which I can\'t imagine was a particularly fun time.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/hunyadi5.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>Janos is high in the running for Greatest Portrait Ever.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Hunyadi survived dungeons in Transylvania, Wallachia, and Serbia, finally got home, formed a professional mercenary army known as the Black Guard, and spent the next ten years serving first as Governor of Hungary, then as Regent to the new King (who was not yet old enough to rule).</p>\r\n<p>The Raven Knight\'s final act of badassitude took place in 1456, when the Turks once more got pissed and marched on Belgrade with a huge force of 100,000 men who had just finished conquering and plundering the most heavily-fortified city in the world &ndash; the once-mighty Constantinople.</p>\r\n<p>Hunyadi, with only 6,000 men of the Black Guard at his disposal, put his sons in charge of the defense, fortified the walls with stone and cannons, and then went off to recruit more troops. The Turks showed up, besieged Belgrade, and blasted the walls with 200 cannons, but just as they were breaching through into the city John Fucking Hunyadi showed up Gandalf the White-style with a relief force of 30,000 pitchfork and scythe-toting peasants he\'d recruited from the surrounding countryside. The Turks, completely not expecting to get shanked in the ass with a scythe, were caught off-guard, and after ferocious house-to-house fighting the Hungarians managed to drive them back.</p>\r\n<p>They didn\'t return for 70 years.</p>\r\n<p>Hunyadi died a few months after his victory, probably of a disease he\'d contracted during the siege. He\'s currently the national hero of Hungary and Romania, and his second son, Matthias Corvinus, would go one to become King of Hungary, and is now regarded as one of the most beloved and effective rulers in the country\'s history.</p>\r\n<p>Not bad for a peasant boy who bought his own armor and wore it into battle without receiving orders to do so.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/hunyadi6.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>\"Defend, my friends, Christendom and Hungary from all enemies...<br />Do not quarrel among yourselves.<br />If you should waste your energies in altercations,<br />you will seal your own fate as well as dig the grave of our country.\"</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.roman-catholic-saints.com/hunyadi.html\">Roman Catholic Saints</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07564b.htm\">New Advent</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Hunyadi\">Wikipedia</a></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Sources:</span><br /><br /><span> Engel, P&aacute;l, Tam&aacute;s P&aacute;losfalvi, and Andrew Ayton. <em>The Realm of St. Stephen</em>. I.B. Tauris, 2005. <em>Famous Nations</em>. G.P. Putnam, 1891.<br /><br /> Lukinich, Imre. <em>A History of Hungary in Biographical Sketches</em>. Ayers, 1937.<br /><br /> Mikaberidze, Alexander. <em>Conflict and Conquest in the Islamic World</em>. ABC-CLIO, 2011.<br /><br /> Turnbull, Stephen. <em>The Ottoman Empire</em>. Osprey, 2003. </span></p>','2012-05-18','130423124057','hunyadi.jpg','hunyadi-small.jpg','John Hunyadi','The White Knight of Hungary.','\"To escape is impossible, to surrender unthinkable. Let us fight with bravery and honor our arms.\"'),('Kim Campbell','June 6, 1975','N/A','Honolulu, HI, USA','21st-century American Pilot','<p>April 7, 2003. The fourth day of the nine-day Battle of Baghdad. Fighting rages across the fire-swept Iraqi capital as American and Allied soldiers and Marines storm through the rubble-strewn streets, taking heavy fire from the deeply-entrenched, ultra-hardcore, fanatically-dedicated warriors of President Saddam Hussein\'s Republican Guard &ndash; battle-hardened troops committed to fighting a desperate last stand, dying where they stand with their fingers still on the trigger in a badass blaze of glory. Gunfire and explosions rip through deserted skyscrapers and apartment buildings as the toughest troops Iraq has to offer desperately cling to the last vestiges of their crumbling empire.</p>\r\n<p>A little north of downtown proper stood the North Baghdad Bridge &ndash; a critical crossing over the mighty Tigris River that absolutely had to be taken and held if the Allies wanted to have any chance of cutting off enemy reinforcements and capturing the city.</p>\r\n<p>The task was given to the U.S. 3rd Infantry Division &ndash; hardcore, boots-on-the-ground asskickers who\'s marched across the country and were now finally getting the chance to kick a little ass.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/kimcampbell1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>The Third stormed through the city, reaching their objective thanks to a few well-placed grenades and a couple hundred thousand rounds of 5.56mm NATO full metal jacket ammunition, but now things were getting a little hairy. On the far side of the bridge, holding the objective a mere 400 meters away, was a pissed-off swarm of Republican Guard elites, entrenched in heavily-fortified positions, looking to kick ass. As the first American soldiers set foot over the Tigris they were greeted by a barrage of RPGs and heavy machine guns zeroed-in on the choke points across the bridge.</p>\r\n<p>An epic gun battle raged as the two sides opened up on each other, but as more and more RPG fire barreled down on American lines it didn\'t take long for the officers of the Third Infantry to realize they weren\'t going to take this bridge without taking heavy casualties.</p>\r\n<p>So they called in air support. Which, in this case, was 28 year-old Captain Kim Campbell of the 75th Expeditionary Fighter Squadron &ndash; callsign \"Killer Chick\" &ndash; and her A-10 Warthog.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/kimcampbell2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>I\'ve already written a <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/warthog.html\">love story about the \'Hog</a> on this site, so it should come as no surprise that I think this is one of the most insanely-hardcore death machines ever fielded by any army in history &ndash; and you kind of have to assume that any time someone piloting one of these hardcore jets gets a callsign like \"Killer Chick\" they\'re pretty fucking serious. An Air Force Academy grad, Campbell was one of just 50 women fighter pilots in the USAF in 2003. She was already on her way in from Kuwait on a mission to fuck up some Republican Guard tanks and artillery, but when the call came down that American troops were in deep shit she immediately peeled off, opened up her throttle, and set a course for Explosionville.</p>\r\n<p>Campbell fought through a dust storm, coming in hard over Baghdad, which at the time was still mostly under enemy control. When she got near the coordinates, she dove down through the cloud cover, the wide-open blue skies immediately being replaced with a burning city, raging fires, explosions, tracer fire, and RPG contrails streaking towards American troops. Diving down through anti-aircraft shrapnel bursts all around her, Campbell had mere seconds to size up the battlefield, which is no easy task considering that she was traveling a couple hundred miles an hour through a ridiculously-chaotic warzone, pick out a camouflaged series of targets a mere 400 meters from friendly lines, and dive straight down, nose-first into it in order to unleash a massive barrage of death from the epic nose cannon on her mighty beast.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/kimcampbell3.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>I probably don\'t need to explain that diving cockpit-first into a swarm of Republican Guard regular infantry armed with RPGs and heavy weapons is marginally dangerous, but this wasn\'t Captain Campbell\'s first rodeo &ndash; she was on her second tour of duty, she\'d already logged hundreds of hours of combat flight time, and she wasn\'t about to sit there and let a bunch of assholes take potshots at her countrymen.</p>\r\n<p>Campbell dove her Warthog at a steep angle, straight at the enemy, opening up the throttle full and unleashing a few thousand 1.5-pound bullets from the 19-foot long GAU-8 Avenger Gatling Gun strapped onto the nose of her jet in the matter of seconds, then cranking the stick hard, pulling insane Gs, and hauling up out of there.. To give you some idea of the carnage this thing can bring, here\'s a video of the Avenger <a href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=riqu8hmPHd0\">ripping apart Soviet tanks</a>.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/kimcampbell4.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>The GAU-8 Avenger.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>On her final pass, Campbell unleashed her compliment of 2.75-inch high-explosive rockets, liquidating her target in the process, but immediately drawing the attention of roughly every single anti-aircraft weapon in Iraq at the time. Bullets pinged off her armor as she hammered the stick back, airbursts of AA fire exploded around her, and RPGs streaked past her cockpit.</p>\r\n<p>Then, suddenly, a huge explosion rocked Captain Kim Campbell\'s A-10, shaking the entire jet violently. A surface-to-air missile had struck the plane\'s tail, riddling the fuselage with hundreds of shrapnel holes, shredding the tail and the engine cowling and blowing out the hydraulics and horizontal stabilizers (note: these are all important parts of an airplane). The plane shook, rolled left, and Campbell found herself pointed nose-first at the city of Baghdad, spinning to the Earth in a death-spiral, her caution panel screaming at her, her controls completely unresponsive.</p>\r\n<p>In a split-second, Campbell realized she had two options &ndash; eject, let her multimillion-dollar jet explode in the heart of a city of 11 million people, and risk almost certain capture by Iraqi troops, or fight, try to regain control, and risk failing and dying in a towering fireball.</p>\r\n<p>She fought. And, since the brakes, steering, rudders, flaps and flight gear were all failing to respond, she cut the hydraulics and switched over to manual piloting mode. For those of you who don\'t know what that means, here\'s a picture:</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/kimcampbell5.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>That\'s right &ndash; it is literally a series of wires tied to rudders and flaps that you manipulate by hand-cranking on cables, and now Captain Campbell was pulling herself out of a tailspin by piloting a multi-million dollar fighter jet fucking Wright Brothers-style.</p>\r\n<p>Somehow, miraculously, she regained control using this wires-and-cables bullshit &ndash; a method of flying that A-10 pilots practice exactly ONCE during their training &ndash; pulled out of a dive, straightened the \'Hog, and then proceeded to fly over downtown Iraq in a ridiculously-crippled aircraft basically held together by duct tape and bumper stickers while a couple hundred AA guns took potshots at her.</p>\r\n<p>Oh, here\'s some shots of the damage on the plane:</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/kimcampbell6.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><br /> <img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/kimcampbell7.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>So... yeah. Despite a few close calls, Campbell stuck with her wingman, made it over the city, got back up above cloud cover, and then proceeded to manually steer her aircraft back to her base in Kuwait. She could have theoretically ejected over open ground and been rescued by friendlies in Kuwait, but on her way home Captain Campbell decided, fuck it, I\'m bringing this sucker home in one piece. She then proceeded to attempt a manual landing.</p>\r\n<p>Manual landings had been attempted exactly twice before this. The first time, the pilot crashed and died. The second time, the plane broke in half and caught fire and the pilot was only saved when fire crews pulled him out of the blaze. And now Kim Campbell was trying to do it with a plane that looked like Charlie Sheen\'s fighter at the end of <em>Hot Shots</em>.</p>\r\n<p>I wish I had some dramatic shit to insert here, but according to her flight lead, \"she landed in manual more smoothly than I landed with hydraulics.\" It was a three-wheels-down, textbook landing, despite, you know, the plane basically falling apart, and the next morning Campbell was out there flying close air support for a rescue mission over Baghdad like nothing had happened. She\'d go on to serve three tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and fly 375 combat hours, which is like 15 and a half seasons of <em>24</em>.</p>\r\n<p>For her actions in April 2003 &ndash; both eliminating an enemy position that was \"danger close\" to friendly troops and her ability to fly home with wires and cranks &ndash; she received the Distinguished Flying Cross and got a commendation from the South Carolina legislature. Of course, none of that even came close to the paper napkin that a soldier from the Third Infantry left for her in her ready room later that week. It had a simple, hand-written message on it: \"If it hadn\'t been for you guys I wouldn\'t still be here.\"</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/kimcampbell8.gif\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<table style=\"width: 500px;\" align=\"center\">\r\n<tbody>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td><span>\"Those are the risks you are going to take to help the guys on the ground. That\'s our job. That\'s what we do. Our guys were taking fire and you want to do everything you can to help them out.\"</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/Sources:</span><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://militarytimes.com/citations-medals-awards/recipient.php?recipientid=42653\">Citation</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://www.aircraftresourcecenter.com/Stories1/001-100/0016_A-10-battle-damage/story0016.htm\">Aircraft Resource Center</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://www.womensmemorial.org/Education/WHM08KitUSAF.html%3EVoices%20of%20Valor%3C/a%3E%3Cbr%3E%3Cbr%3E%3Ca%20href=\">Operation Iraqi Freedom Hero Shares Her Story</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://www.americanvalor.net/heroes/332\">American Valor</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://legacy.stripes.com/07/jun07/heroesweb/campbell.htm\">Capt. Kim Campbell</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Campbell_%28pilot%29\">Wikipedia</a></p>','2012-05-26','270670618011','kimcampbell.jpg','kimcampbellsmall.jpg','Kim Campbell','A-10 pilot who brought her plane home despite insane amounts of damage.','\"I get asked that a lot, \'What’s it like to be a female in a fighter squadron?\' Honestly, I never think about it. The important thing is to work really hard and be good at it, and then nobody cares what gender you are. I’m not a female fighter pilot. I’m just a fighter pilot, and I love it.\" '),('Allan Pinkerton','August 25, 1819','July 1, 1884','Glasgow, Scotland','19th-century Scottish Lawman','<p>Allan Pinkerton was a grizzled, tough-as-haggis, face-punching old Scotsman who came to the United States to pursue his undying lifelong dream of building barrels with his hands and selling them for cash. During his efforts to make it in the dog-eat-dog world of barrel-making, Pinkerton somehow fell ass-backwards into a career of crime-fighting badassitude that eventually led him to create the Secret Service, save Abraham Lincoln\'s life from an assassination attempt, infiltrate Confederate strongholds in the Deep South, and track outlaws like Jesse James and Butch Cassidy on horseback through the rough backcountry of the Wild West, all while running a nationwide ring of private detectives and dickpunching any criminal scumfuck foolish enough to position his groin within arm\'s reach of America\'s First Detective. Nowadays Pinkerton is remembered as the greatest detective this side of Batman, and while Pinkerton never really wore a whole lot of capes and bullet-proof Kevlar costumes like the Dark Knight, he did carry a badass double-barreled sawn-off <em>Doom II</em>-style super-shotgun and he wasn\'t afraid to use it to blast gigantic holes through his enemies\' torsos whenever the situation necessitated Charles Bronson-grade lethal force.</p>\r\n<p>Cooper-turned-supercop Allan Pinkerton was born August 25, 1819, in Glasgow, Scotland, the son of a police patrolman. As a kid Pinkerton got in trouble for routinely skipping skipping school to go hunting in the woods, but when Allan\'s dad was whacked while trying to keep order during a political riot, young Pinkerton took a job as a barrel-maker and used the income from his back-breaking manual labor to help support his mother. For a while everything was going about as well as an exciting career in barrel-making can possibly go, but when Allan was 22 he was abruptly forced flee the country when the Democracy-flavored political movement he was participating in were all declared Traitors to the Crown and sentenced to Death by Facekicks. Pinkerton and his new wife &ndash; who, by the way, had just married him the day before Allan got word that jackbooted thugs were coming to rough him up and slit his throat &ndash; grabbed whatever shit they could carry and hopped the first ship for Canada.</p>\r\n<p>That ship ran aground on some rocks off the coast of Nova Scotia and sunk, leaving Allan and his wife badly injured and shipwrecked on the coast without any of their worldly possessions.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/pinkerton1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>Enjoy your honeymoon, suckers!</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Refusing to be demoralized by something as monumentally insignificant as having no money, no home, and no possessions other than the clothes on his back, and, you know, having his own country kinda sorta trying to hang him for treason, Pinkerton just kept on keeping on. He quickly decided he\'d seen enough of Canada when he\'d face-planted into some of her rocks, and instead of settling in the Great White North he used the last two silver pieces in his pocket to catch a ride to the glamorous land of opportunity known as Detroit, USA. From there the happy young couple spent the rest of their honeymoon walking from Detroit to Chicago, spending their nights sleeping in the barns of nice people who didn\'t mind that Allan had no money to pay them for their hospitality. The Pinkertons finally settled down in a predominantly-Scottish suburb outside Chicago, and Allan went back to working in his true passion: Barrel-making.</p>\r\n<p>Within twelve months Allan Pinkerton owned his own barrel-making company, had a dozen guys working for him, went to sleep on piles of money, lived in a log cabin he\'d forged with his own two hands, and had his house set up as a stop on the <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/tubman.html\">Underground Railroad</a>.</p>\r\n<p>While it\'s hard to imagine what could possibly tear a man away from a rewarding career involving smacking barrels with a mallet for 10 hours a day, Pinkerton sort of fell into a new profession in 1849 when he accidentally broke up a massive counterfeiting ring while out looking for lumber. You see, it turns out that Allan Pinkerton was too cheap to buy pre-cut wood to build his barrels, instead preferring to save cash by just taking a fucking axe out in the woods and chopping the damn trees down himself like a Real Man. Well one day, he was out on some fucking island doing God-knows-what when he discovered a bandit hideout where some assholes were counterfeiting money (Pinkerton was just so damned good that he solved crimes without even trying) &ndash; Pinkerton told the Sherriff what was up, was deputized an honorary member of the Chicago P.D., and went back there a couple days later with a shotgun and broke the whole ring up himself. For this badass display of Robocop-grade steel balls, Pinkerton was offered a job with the Chicago Police. He accepted, despite having zero experience in law enforcement aside from his father\'s old war stories, and by the end of 1849 he\'d arrested more burglars and murderers than anyone else on the force &ndash; including a few vets who\'d been doing the job for 20+ years. Patrolling a city of 30,000 people and just 12 cops, Pinkerton was soon appointed Chicago\'s first Police Detective, and earned a reputation for being fearless, incorruptible, tenacious, and for not putting up with criminal bullshit anywhere. Eventually he became so popular for his tremendous acts of criminal-smashing awesomeness that he decided to make some extra cash by going freelance, opening the Pinkerton National Detective Agency in 1850.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/pinkerton2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>The most famous private detective agency in American history, the Pinkertons went hard after embezzlers, murderers, thieves, and myriad other jackasses across the United States, picking up the slack that local hayseed Mayberry bullshit police departments weren\'t equipped to handle. Ruthlessly efficient in their inexorable search for outlaws who need to have their asses wrecked, the Pinkertons never compromised, never accepted bribes or rewards, and refused to be distracted by bureaucratic bullshit like state lines or due process or police brutality or any of those other things that Dirty Harry Callahan never gave a fuck about once in his life. Offering their services to transcontinental railroad companies, banks, and government agencies across the country, Pinkerton\'s Agency grew exponentially in size thanks to a crazy self-aggrandizing PR machine and a spotless arrest/capture/execution record that makes Judge Dredd look like one of those sassy jerks who mediate traffic disputes on daytime television. It wasn\'t long before the Pinkertons basically morphed into an all-encompassing apparatus that was like the FBI, the Secret Service, Blackwater, and Dog the Bounty Hunter all rolled up into one badass ultra-efficient machine of gangster-incinerating justice.</p>\r\n<p>But shit was just getting started. The Agency got a bit of a break in 1861 when Allan Pinkerton was in Baltimore trying to uncover the mastermind of some continent-spanning criminal empire and somehow managed to uncover a cleverly-organized plot to assassinate the recently-elected President Abraham Lincoln on his way to his inauguration in Washington DC. Pinkerton, who was friends with Lincoln dating back to Honest Abe\'s days working on the Illinois Central Railroad, warned the prez, crashed a party in his honor, and managed to get Lincoln out of town just in time to save him from an assassin\'s bullet. He was rewarded by being appointed the first head of the newly-formed Union Intelligence Service, an organization that we know today as the Secret Service.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/pinkerton3.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>Pinkerton and Lincoln.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>When the Civil War finally exploded across the Eastern half of the country and turned all of America\'s fields and rivers into blood-soaked battlegrounds, Pinkerton used his network of agents to gather intel from Confederate strongholds throughout the South, gathering details on troop movements, city defenses, and other details critical to the Union\'s war effort &ndash; including one time when he got a female agent (Pinkerton was the first employer in American history to hire female detectives) into the Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond to sketch out schematics of the gigantic fucking submarine the Rebels were allegedly working on.</p>\r\n<p>Never one to send others to do work he wasn\'t comfortable doing himself, and in addition to leading counter-espionage operations aimed at taking down Confederate spy networks in Washington D.C. Pinkerton also personally infiltrated the South on multiple occasions. His most exciting encounter came while he was scouting out the defenses of the city of Memphis &ndash; not long after completing his mission he was discovered by the local authorities and he flee his hotel room mid-shave by climbing down a drain pipe with his face covered in shaving cream while guys ran up the stairs with guns and ropes to whack him, but he somehow managed to escape like probably through some crazy Assasin\'s Creed shit.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/pinkerton4.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>Pinkerton agents, circa 1870. Allan had guys like this at his beck and call throughout the country.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Pinkerton was eventually taken off Secret Service detail and subsequently replaced by the clowns who let Lincoln get capped in the head at Ford Theater, so instead of running the Presidents\' personal spy network he instead went back to work running his multi-million-dollar national detective agency. Tracking down badass Old West outlaws from Kansas to California, Pinkerton not only hunted the most dangerous gunslingers the country has ever seen, but he also worked security for banks, stagecoaches, and railroads, and infiltrated hardcore criminal organizations. When he wasn\'t ordering tough-looking motherfuckers to apprehend murderers and bust caps in horse thieves he revolutionized police work as we know it, inventing mug shots, spending countless hours improving the practice of handwriting analysis, and assembling a national database of known criminals from across the country.</p>\r\n<p>Oh yeah, and he also captured Cole Younger, blew up Frank James\' mom\'s house, broke up Butch Cassidy\'s gang, brought Black Jack Ketcham and the Reno Brothers to justice, personally chased Jesse James through the Smoky Mountains on horseback with a shotgun on his lap, and wrote a bunch of crime novels that would end up being listed by Arthur Conan Doyle as influences for the Sherlock Holmes stories.</p>\r\n<p>After a long and glorious life of kicking ass and recording the names in a series of jacketed folders with pictures of the offenders, Allan Pinkerton died of a probable stroke on July 1, 1884, at the age of 64 (some stories claim he fell on the sidewalk, bit his tongue, and got gangrene, but those stories are what we like to call \"bullshit\"). Allan\'s son took over the Agency after his death and ended up getting into trouble for his nasty habit of opening fire on labor disputes and union organizers, but the Agency survived and is still around today, 162 years after its founding by one of America\'s most successful and most famous cops. Pinkerton\'s name is also the title of Weezer album with \"El Scorcho\" on it, which counts for something I think.</p>\r\n<p>Oh right, and the national database of criminals (as well as most Pinkerton practices), was adopted by the federal government in 1908 when they decided to create their own national detective agency based on Allan Pinkerton\'s model of interstate crime-fighting. They called it the FBI.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/pinkerton5.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.trutv.com/library/crime/gangsters_outlaws/cops_others/pinkerton/1.html\">TruTV Crime Library</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/biography/james-agency/\">PBS</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://www.thrillingdetective.com/eyes/pinkerton.html\">ThrillingDetective</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://www.pinkertons.com/\">Pinkerton Government Services Website</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://americanhistory.about.com/od/19thcentur1/a/allan_pinkerton.htm\">About.com</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Pinkerton\">Wikipedia</a></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Sources:</span><br /><br /><span> Beyemer, William Gilmore. <em>On Hazardous Service</em>. Harper, 1912.<br /><br /> Dempsey, John S. <em>Introduction to Private Security</em>. Cengage Learning, 2010.<br /><br /> Jeffries-Jones, Rhodri. <em>Cloak and Dollar: A History of American Secret Intelligence</em>. Yale Univ. Press, 2003.<br /><br /> MacKay, James. <em>Allan Pinkerton: The First Private Eye</em> Book Sales Inc., 2008. </span></p>','2012-06-01','479605720033','pinkerton.jpg','pinkerton3-small.jpg','Allan Pinkerton','America\'s first (and most badass) detective.','\"On reading a telegraphic newspaper report of a large or small robbery, with the aid of my vast records and great personal experience and familiarity with these matters, I can at once tell the character of the work, and then, knowing the names, history, habits, and quite frequently, the rendezvous of men doing that type of work, am able to determine, with almost unerring certainty, not only the very parties who committed the robberies, but also what disposition they are likely to make of their plunder, and at what points they may be hiding.\"\r\n\r\n(Translation: I solve crimes while reading the paper.)'),('John Bartholomew Roberts','c. 1682','February, 1722','Wales, UK','18th-century Welsh Pirate','<p>Here&rsquo;s a fun pirate fact for you:&nbsp; If you took the exceptionally-infamous pirates Blackbeard, <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/index.cgi?id=53367221882\">Anne Bonny</a>, and <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/index.cgi?id=113240319839\">Edward Low</a>, combined them all into a Power Rangers MegaZord Godzilla of cutlass-swinging mayhem like some kind of murder-riffic All-Star Piracy Dream Team, and heaped their dozens and dozens of captured, plundered, burned, and mutilated enemy ships into one gigantic towering scrap heap inferno of twisted timber and shattered femurs, that super-skyscraper of carnage still wouldn&rsquo;t even come close to the number of vessels that fell victim to the single most successful pirate to ever sail the seven seas &ndash; the infamous Captain Bartholomew Roberts.&nbsp; A booty-snatching terror of the Spanish Main, &ldquo;Black Bart&rdquo; was the undisputed king of swashbuckling scurvy cutthroats, a brutal murderer who decorated his ship with the hanged corpses of his mortal enemies, and a hardcore sea-reaver who terrorized merchant shipping and painted the Atlantic Ocean blood-red from Canada to Madagascar.</p>\r\n<p>Between the years 1719 and 1722 &ndash; an astoundingly-long career considering that most pirates were lucky to go twelve months without being hanged from the neck until dead, Black Bart and his veritable armada of heavily-armed pirate warships is credited with single-handedly plundering and destroying over <em>four hundred vessels</em> ranging from friendly little merchantmen to badass gunslinging Royal Navy war frigates.&nbsp; He took on Portuguese treasure fleets, attacked Dutch colonies, and even assimilated a vanquished French warship into his pirate fleet.&nbsp; No other crew in European history even comes close to a record like that.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/291458210338/blackbart1.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Despite sporting a super sweet, dastardly-sounding nickname like &ldquo;Black Bart,&rdquo; Bartholomew Roberts honestly wasn&rsquo;t what you expect when you think about the most dangerous ball-crushing oceanic marauder to ever hoist a mainsail made out of the flayed skins of his foes.&nbsp; This Welsh gentleman was tall, attractive, good with women, drank a nice warm cup of English breakfast tea every morning, and enjoying walking the deck wearing an expensive red silk coat and a super fancy hat that was so awesome that several contemporary sources make a specific point of talking about how fucking dapper it looked.&nbsp; Even his nickname, Black Bart, is believed to have come from his dark, swarthy complexion rather than his murderous tendencies and unquenchable desire for endless vengeance and plunder.</p>\r\n<p>Hell, Black Bart didn&rsquo;t even really wanna be a pirate in the first place.&nbsp; This hard-working guy originally tried to be a legitimate sailor, working as Second Mate on a slave ship called the <em>Princess of London</em> that operated out of West Africa.&nbsp; When his ship was overtaken and captured off the coast of Ghana by the already-infamous dread pirate Howell Davis in 1719, Bartholomew Roberts gave everyone the finger and refused to join the pirate crew despite their none-too-polite invitation.&nbsp; It was only really when some dude with a hook for a hand threatened to cut Roberts&rsquo; balls off and use them to chum the waters for Great Whites that Roberts changed his mind and decided to join Davis&rsquo;s pirate crew as a navigator.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/291458210338/blackbart21.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Roberts&rsquo; skill at running a ship, experience as a formerly-legit nautical officer, and red-hot temper that exploded with the fury of a thousand gallons of liquid-hot magma quickly earned him a place of respect among his newfound pirate friends, and thanks in part to Roberts&rsquo; sailing chops the crew was able to launch a successful attack on a Dutch merchant ship that just so happened to be carrying the goddamn Governor of Accra and his personal cache of 15,000 pounds worth of silver coinage.&nbsp; It would be one of the biggest hauls in the history of European piracy, and Roberts had only been on the job for like a week and a half.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Not long after that, Captain Davis got the brilliant idea to start shit with the Portuguese island of Principe, a small port just off the southern coast of Nigeria, and it didn&rsquo;t work out all that well for him.&nbsp; Davis put on a disguise, sailed into shore, and walked right up to the island&rsquo;s Governor, pretending to be a pirate hunter looking for Portuguese help.&nbsp; Davis&rsquo; plan was to trick the Governor into coming aboard his ship, capture him, and hold him for a huge ransom, but some asshole tipped the Governor off about the plan and instead of pulling off a sweet kidnapping/extortion plot Captain Davis was unceremoniously gunned down by Portuguese infantry right in the middle of the Governor&rsquo;s Palace.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Black Bart had been a pirate for a mere six weeks.&nbsp; He was already so popular with his men that they voted him in to replace Davis as Captain.</p>\r\n<p>Captain Bartholomew Roberts&rsquo; first official order was to avenge Captain Davis&rsquo; death.&nbsp; Charles Bronson style.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/291458210338/blackbart31.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Screaming into battle with two flintlock pistols and a terrifying-looking cutlass Black Bart led his men storming into town, destroyed the garrison, threw all the fort&rsquo;s cannons into the ocean, shelled the town with a couple broadsides of raking cannon fire, and set three Portuguese trading ships ablaze in the harbor on his way out of town.&nbsp; From that point on, Black Bart Roberts was officially at war with every single person on Earth &ndash; including, at times, members of his own crew.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Roberts set sail from Africa, crossed the Atlantic Ocean, and started wrecking shit in South America.&nbsp; Off the coast of Brazil, he caught a super lucky break and just so happened to run into the Portuguese Treasure Fleet &ndash; 42 ships filled to the brim with gold and silver from the New World.&nbsp; Unwilling to take his 26-gun vessel against the two massive 70-gun Portuguese warships that were escorting the fleet, Roberts instead hatched an awesomely-diabolical plan.&nbsp; First, he ran a Portuguese flag up his mast, fell into formation with the fleet, and sailed up to the smallest little ship he could find.&nbsp; He got real close like he was just going to say what&rsquo;s up, but then at the last second he and his pirates jumped onto their ship and threatened to kill everyone aboard if they didn&rsquo;t tell him which vessel in the treasure fleet had the most loot to plunder.&nbsp; Once those dudes pointed out the main treasure ship, Black Bart sailed right up to it &ndash; in broad fucking daylight because he had ridiculously gigantic Black Bart gonads &ndash; boarded the thing at the head of a swarming mass of fucking cutthroat pirates, captured it without firing a shot, looted 90,000 gold coins from the ship&rsquo;s hold, and then peeled the fuck outta there before the two hulking battleships could get close enough to fire on him.&nbsp; Besides the crap-ton of gold, the crown jewel of the haul was a fucking fist-sized blood diamond hand-cut as a present for the King of Portugal that was probably worth more cash than you&rsquo;ll make in your entire life.&nbsp; Because he was the big pimpin&rsquo; style of pirate, Roberts naturally wore this priceless hunk of gemstone on a chain around his neck for the rest of his life.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/291458210338/blackbart5.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Not long after this epic haul, some of Roberts&rsquo; crew mutinied and tried to make off with a big portion of his hard-plundered gold.&nbsp; So, in order to keep his men in line moving forward, Black Bart set up a well-defined series of Pirate Rules that still survive to this day.&nbsp; He promised that every man on the crew was guaranteed to have a vote on important subjects and an equal share of the loot, but also said that there would be no women or gambling on the ship, no drinking below decks after eight PM, and if you wanted to fight a fellow crew member to the death you had to do it on land and not on the ship.&nbsp; Roberts, naturally, didn&rsquo;t always adhere to these rules himself &ndash; one time a crew member was pissing him off so he ran the guy through with his sword right then and there.&nbsp; When another crew member mentioned that hey, you know, this kind of goes against your Pirate Rules, Roberts ran that guy through as well.&nbsp; In case you&rsquo;re curious how badass pirates can be, that second guy responded to being impaled by punching Roberts in the face.&nbsp; Roberts, infuriated that the man would strike a superior officer, ordered the already-stabbed man be flogged in front of the entire crew.</p>\r\n<p>Oh, and as another semi-hilarious side note, if you were an Irishman you didn&rsquo;t count as a crew member.&nbsp; This is because the guy in charge of the mutiny had been Irish, and nobody on earth could hold a grudge like Bartholomew Roberts.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/291458210338/blackbart4.png\" alt=\"\" /><br /> One of four Jolly Rogers used<br /> by Black Bart Roberts.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Roberts plundered South America and the Caribbean for a while, but eventually headed up to Newfoundland in 1720 after the governors of Barbados and Martinique hired a bunch of asshole pirate-hunters to try and murder him.&nbsp; In Newfoundland, a freezing-cold portion of Canada that really probably wasn&rsquo;t expecting to be on the receiving end of a fucking pirate raid, Bartholomew Roberts attacked and destroyed something like 30 or 40 ships ranging from fishing boats to French warships.&nbsp; In Trepassy Harbor alone Black Bart sunk and burned 22 ships while they were anchored in port, mostly just to be a dick.</p>\r\n<p>Throughout the rest of 1720, Roberts headed back and laid waste to the Caribbean.&nbsp; Calling himself &ldquo;The Admiral of the Leeward Islands,&rdquo; Black Bart commanded four ships and over 500 men in an epic rain of carnage and destruction that left dozens of ships and the port city of St. Kitts in smoldering ruins.&nbsp; From the deck of his flagship <em>Royal Fortune</em>, a 42-gun frigate believed to be the biggest and most well-armed pirate ship in Caribbean history, Roberts wrought havoc on merchant shipping across the New World.&nbsp; He burned 20 ships in Martinique Harbor, captured a brigantine that happened to have the Governor of Martinique on board, and then hung the governor from the yardarm of <em>Royal Fortune.&nbsp; </em>To really drive home that point about holding grudges, Roberts spent the next couple months sailing around with the governor&rsquo;s dead body suspended above his ship&rsquo;s deck as a warning to others.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/291458210338/blackbart6.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br />The Dread Pirate Roberts takes<br />No Survivors.</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>When things got a little too hot Black Bart sailed <em>back </em>across the Atlantic again (no small task in the early 18<sup>th</sup> century), and went back to work destroying ships off the coast of Senegal, burning and looting with impunity.</p>\r\n<p>Eventually, however, luck caught up with Black Bart.&nbsp; On one rainy, windy morning in February 1722, Black Bart looked through his spyglass and saw the approaching sails of HMS <em>Swallow </em>&ndash; a British ship-of-the-line that was a little bigger and better-armed than <em>Royal Fortune</em>.&nbsp; Even though Bart probably had plenty of time to escape with his life, the pirate captain instead flashed his nuts once again, woke up his hungover-or-possibly-still-drunk-from-last-night crew, and ordered them to man their guns and go toe-to-toe with a Royal Navy warship in the battle of their lives.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/291458210338/blackbart7.JPG\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>The <em>Swallow </em>closed in on the <em>Royal Fortune, </em>appearing through the mist, rain, and wind, and quickly pulling even with the notorious pirate vessel.&nbsp; Both ships turned and unleashed devastating broadsides simultaneously, ripping apart the air with the sound of over forty cannons belching out grapeshot, cannonballs, and other horrible things.</p>\r\n<p>No sooner had the smoke cleared than Captain Bartholomew Roberts slumped over the gunwale of the ship, his throat torn in a blaze of glory out by a screaming burst of jagged grapeshot pellets.&nbsp; His men dumped the 40-year-old Captain over the edge into the ocean, following a standing order not to let the enemy capture his body.&nbsp; They surrendered <em>Royal Fortune</em> shortly after, and the British Crown ensured that every man in the crew was executed by hanging.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>The last of the great pirates &ndash; and by far the most successful &ndash; was no more.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/291458210338/blackbart8.JPG\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Links:</p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://latinamericanhistory.about.com/od/Pirates/a/Bartholomew-Black-Bart-Roberts.htm\">http://latinamericanhistory.about.com/od/Pirates/a/Bartholomew-Black-Bart-Roberts.htm</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://latinamericanhistory.about.com/od/Pirates/tp/Ten-Facts-About-Pirate-Black-Bart-Roberts.htm\">http://latinamericanhistory.about.com/od/Pirates/tp/Ten-Facts-About-Pirate-Black-Bart-Roberts.htm</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.thewayofthepirates.com/famous-pirates/bartholomew-roberts.php\">http://www.thewayofthepirates.com/famous-pirates/bartholomew-roberts.php</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.thepirateking.com/bios/roberts_bartholomew.htm\">http://www.thepirateking.com/bios/roberts_bartholomew.htm</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartholomew_Roberts\">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartholomew_Roberts</a></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Sources:</p>\r\n<p>Cordingly, David.&nbsp; <em>Under the Black Flag</em>.&nbsp; Random House, 2013.</p>\r\n<p>Farman, John.&nbsp; <em>The Short and Bloody History of Pirates</em>.&nbsp; Millbrook, 2002.</p>\r\n<p>Johnson, Charles.&nbsp; <em>A General History of the Most Notorious Pyrates</em>.&nbsp; Books on Demand, 2009.</p>\r\n<p>Little, Benerson.&nbsp; <em>How History\'s Greatest Pirates Pillaged, Plundered, and Got Away With It</em>.&nbsp; Fair Winds, 2010.</p>','2014-05-16','291458210338','blackbart.jpg','blackbart-small.jpg','Bartholomew Roberts','The most successful and dangerous pirate to ever live.','\"A merry life and a short one.\"'),('John Paul Stapp','July 11, 1910','November 13, 1999','Bahia, Brazil','20th-century American Scientist','<p>If you were making a list of borderline-psychotic dudes who made insane careers for themselves simply by routinely putting their lives on the line by volunteering for suicide missions in the name of science on pretty much a daily basis, United States Air Force Colonel Doctor John Paul Stapp would easily be placed at or near the very top of this list. A human crash test dummy who spent his ridiculously-hardcore life designing rocket-propelled death traps and then voluntarily strapping himself to these unstable jet fuel-stuffed devices simplty to see if he could use them without spontaneously evaporating into a 2,000-foot-long vapor trail of blood, Stapp became famous not only for being the scientific genius and innovator behind incredible inventions that saved the lives of millions of people across the globe, but also for being the only guy crazy enough to test out those inventions in life-or-death, lets-build-a-rocket-sled-and-ride-it-600mph real-world situations.</p>\r\n<p>The Fastest Man in the World was born in Brazil in 1910, the son of Baptist missionaries from Texas. He grew up in the Lone Star State, studying at elite Texas universities, receiving several advanced degrees in Biophysics and other disciplines that sound really fucking impossible, and then picking up his MD in his spare time when he wasn\'t writing theses on theoretical physics so over-the-top complicated that by the time this dude was out of school he could wield a slide rule like Bruce Lee swinging nunchucks and beating the shit out of those assholes in <em>Enter the Dragon</em>.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/stapp1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Stapptook his med degree and PhD in Biophysics and enlisted in the Army Air Corps in 1944, serving through World War II in some capacity I was never able to find clarification on, and then by \'46 he was getting his Gordon Freeman on working as a medical officer in biophysical research. His first research breakthrough came later that year, as he was studying the effects of altitude sickness and decompression sickness (\"the bends\") in pilots. He studied this by stripping a B-17 bomber down to its wire-frame skeleton and then personally flying it with an open cockpit in an unpressurized cabin for 65 hours of total flight time at an altitude of 45,000 feet. After somehow not dying from air bubbles in his bloodstream or his head collapsing or freezing to death, J.P. Stapp eventually discovered that if you huffed pure oxygen for 30 minutes prior to take off a pilot could withstand impossibly high altitudes without their brain blowing out through their skulls and their recently-empty heads then collapsing down like a crumpled-up piece of paper. This breakthrough led to the development of high-altitude aircraft (primarily spy planes and strategic bombers), HALO parachute insertion tactics, and, oh yeah, the space program.</p>\r\n<p>After cracking that nut, Colonel Doctor Stapp then went on to study the effects of rapid deceleration on the human body. His primary goal was to find and develop new technologies for keeping pilots alive in plane crashes, but as a side note he also took a keen interest in understanding how many Gs a person could pull before their skeleton ripped out through their body and flew out into the stratosphere. The common understanding at the time was that the human body could handle 18 Gs (Note: A G is the equivalent to the force of gravity, so 18 Gs of pressure would mean you have 18 times the force of the Earth\'s gravity pressing against your body trying to crush you to death). Stapp wasn\'t sure this was the case, since it had never really been tested, so he went out and just voluntarily exposed himself to way more than that just to see if it would kill him. He went out, found a 2,000-foot-long railway track at Edwards Air Force Base in Los Angeles that had previously been used to conduct research on V-1 rockets, and then built a 1,500-pound ROCKET SLED on it, strapped himself in, and hauled fucking ass as fast as it would carry him.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/stapp2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>Stapp\'s rocket sled. His last words before riding this thing for the first time were,<br />\"I assure you, I am not looking forward to this\".</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>The rocket sled\'s first run took place on April 30, 1947. The thing flew off the tracks and exploded. A year and a half later the sled stayed on the tracks, accelerated to 150 miles an hour, and slammed to a stop, sending the crash-test dummy flying face-first through two feet of solid wood and catapulting the mangled corpse 710 feet down range. The next time they were about to take it out, John Paul Stapp personally walked over to the sled as it sat on the tracks, threw out the crash test dummy, and told his team, \"We\'re not using this. I\'m going to be the test subject.\" Despite the objections of his team, he gave the order to launch and immediately took a Rocket Sled 200 miles an hour, then slamming short to a stop that racked his body with 35 Gs.</p>\r\n<p>By June 1951 the Rocket Sled had gone through 74 successful human-operated runs. Stapp had already broken several ribs, a couple limbs, fractured his wrist twice, and had detached retinas that left him temporarily blinded. This, however, did not stop him from breaking the Land Speed Record for Railed Vehicles in 1952, when he took some ridiculously-overpowered, open-cockpit rocket truck 632 miles an hour down the track in an obscene display of brass balls no human has ever displayed before or since.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/stapp3.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>But, while accelerating from a dead stop to a speed faster than a .45 caliber handgun bullet in the span of five seconds is impressive, it\'s important to remember that Stapp\'s research was in deceleration &ndash; not acceleration.</p>\r\n<p>He went from 632 miles an hour (1,017 kmh for my metric friends) to a dead stop in 1.4 seconds.</p>\r\n<p><em>1.4 seconds.</em></p>\r\n<p>He pulled 43 Gs during the decel, which is roughly the equivalent of driving a Maserati into a brick wall at 120 miles an hour. He went blind for 45 minutes afterwards, broke a couple ribs, had burn marks on his skin from the friction caused by <em>fucking dust</em> whipping against his skin, and started spontaneously bleeding liquid awesome out of his eyes, but somehow walked out of the damned sled under his own power. This shit went down in 1954 but to this day it is STILL the fastest any human has ever traveled on a railed vehicle, and the fastest any human has ever gone in an open-cockpit vehicle.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><object width=\"420\" height=\"315\" data=\"http://www.youtube.com/embed/s4tuvOer_GI\" type=\"application/x-shockwave-flash\"><param name=\"src\" value=\"http://www.youtube.com/embed/s4tuvOer_GI\" /></object><br /><span>Stapp\'s record-breaking ride is featured here.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>It\'s important to note that while J.P. Stapp\'s research is unequivocally badass as fuck, it also ended up saving millions of lives and made possible the invention of some truly amazing technological advances not only in aeronautics but in automobiles. Part of his research involved Wind Blast tests &ndash; basically, he\'d go up in a fighter jet, jet it to 570 miles an hour, then blow off the canopy and see if he could survive the wind pressure (he could, as long as he had the proper harness and supplemental oxygen). This research meant that it would be safe to go on and build faster and faster fighter aircraft without worrying about unnecessarily killing good pilots. Stapp also invented a new harness for paratroopers so they could survive crash impacts if their transports went down, and a better harness for combat pilots to keep them alive even after sustaining some truly horrific crash impacts.</p>\r\n<p>While all of this is admirable, Stapp\'s biggest contribution to life-saving came in his study on car crashes &ndash; something he yet again tested himself, mostly by strapping himself into steel frame devices and smashing them into things. He invented crash test dummies as we know them, helped work on the car safety belt, and was a key component in convincing President Lyndon B. Johnson to sign a law in 1966 that required auto manufacturers to include seat belts in every car they built &ndash; a law that has, without a doubt, saved millions of people from untimely painful deaths.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/stapp4.gif\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>Stapp testing some deceleration/crashing shiz.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>When he wasn\'t smashing into things at high velocity, Stapp was also pretty awesome because he was witty, funny, and super personable. Like, for instance, Stapp invented Murphy\'s Law &ndash; the rule that \"anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.\" (Murphy, it turns out, was a USAF Captain who was working with Stapp on the rocket sled project and kept having shitty things happen to him.) This saying quickly took off to the point where it\'s a common household saying, though I must say I prefer the under-quoted Stapp\'s Law &ndash; an awesome feat of misanthropy that states, \"The universal aptitude for ineptitude makes any human accomplishment an incredible miracle.\"</p>\r\n<p>Despite a career of trying to kill himself in new and unusual ways, mostly by subjecting himself to car accidents and then withstanding more Gs than any human being who has ever lived, John Paul Stapp survived his life as a mad scientist, lived to be 89, and died in his sleep at home in 1999. When hearing about the death of his good friend, fellow badass <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/kittinger.html\">Joseph Kittinger</a> simply remarked, \"I hope St. Peter has his seat belt on when Dr. Stapp shows up.\"</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/stapp5.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.stapp.org/stapp.shtml\">Stapp.org Bio</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://www.nmspacemuseum.org/halloffame/detail.php?id=46\">Space Hall of Fame Bio</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://www.af.mil/information/heritage/person.asp?pid=123006472\">Air Force Bio</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://www.ejectionsite.com/stapp.htm\">EjectionSite.com</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stapp\">Wikipedia</a></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Sources:</span><br /><br /><span> Norton, Trevor. <em>Smoking Ears and Screaming Teeth</em>. Open Road, 2011.<br /><br /> Spark, Nick T. <em>A History of Murphy\'s Law</em>. Periscope, 2006. </span></p>','2012-06-15','135657223961','stapp.jpg','stapp5-small.jpg','John Paul Stapp','The Fastest Man Alive.',''),('Candido Mariano da Silva Rondon','May 5, 1865','January 19, 1958','Mimoso, Brazil','20th-century Brazilian Adventurer','<p>Candido Mariano da Silva Rondon stood five feet, three inches tall, weighed about a buck twenty soaking wet and holding onto a set of steel barbells, and took an oath never to kill another human being, even in self-defense. He was also one of the most daring and intrepid explorers to ever live, a terrifyingly-intimidating little motherfucker, and one the most badass men to ever set foot in the Amazon River Basin and emerge alive on the other side.</p>\r\n<p>One of Brazil\'s most revered heroes was born in May of 1865 in a ridiculously-gigantic province in western Brazil known as Mato Grasso, a name that literally translates just to \"Great Wilderness\", because, fuck it, let\'s call a spade a spade here. His father was a Brazilian dude of Portuguese descent and his mother was some mishmashed cocktail of various native Amazon Indian tribal populations, but pretty much all those two folks ever did for little Candido was donate their genetic material, because by the time this kid was two years old he was already an orphan. Raised in extreme poverty by his dirt-poor uncle, Rondon grew up catching his own food, eating freshly-carved monkey meat (awesome), pimp-slapping piranhas, and learning everything he could about the Amazon and all the crazy shit that lives there. When he was 16 Rondon left the uncharted expanses of Great Wilderness, traveled five weeks down the Amazon River in a canoe he Bear Grylls\'ed out of a tree he\'d chopped down with his own two hands, arrived in Rio de Janeiro, and promptly enlisted in the National Military Academy there. Despite basically not having enough money to afford food or clothing (he no shit had to take a leave of absence during his Sophomore year so he could be hospitalized for starvation) Rondon willed himself through the grueling Academy (showing up a bunch of entitled punks from prestigious douchey families in the process), and graduated with a degree in Engineering and a healthy respect for a hard fucking day\'s work.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/rondon1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>The Great Wilderness</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>As a young Lieutenant Rondon sort of participated in the national revolution that overthrew Pedro II, the second (and last) Emperor of Brazil (seriously, who the hell knew Brazil had Emperors?!), but where he really got a chance to flex his badass engineering nuts was when he was called on to head up the Rondon Commission &ndash; an ambitious national project aimed at installing telegraph poles and establishing a reliable comms line between the major Brazilian coastal cities and those little backwater townships way the fuck in the interior of the gigantic country. The impetus for this project happened back in the late 19th century, when Paraguay or Uraguay or one of those other &ndash;aguay countries decided they were going to launch a sneak-attack invasion of Brazil for some reason that isn\'t important right now, and by the time the Brazilian government realized they were even at war there were already Praguayan troops marching around the Matto Grasso like they owned the fucking place. The Brazilian government understandably wanted to avoid shit like \"not knowing we\'re at war\" in the future, so they called in Colonel Candido Rondon, gave him a couple hundred men, sent him out into the uncharted expanses of one of the most treacherous and dangerous locales on earth &ndash; the fucking <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/koepcke.html\">Amazon Rainforest</a>, and told him to build the largest telecommunications relay in the Southern Hemisphere out of a fat spool of wire and whatever trees he managed to cut down while he was in the forest.</p>\r\n<p>Rondon didn\'t give a shit. He just grabbed a sweet-looking helmet, a hunting rifle, and his favorite pet dogs and marched his battalion out into a place that had previously been labeled \"Whatever\" and/or \"El Dorado?\" on official Brazilian maps.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/rondon2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>Yeah, have fun installing telephone poles and running wires through this shit.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>For the next <em>twenty-four years</em>, Rondon went on hundreds of expeditions across 14,000 miles of wilderness &ndash; filling in maps, setting up telephone poles, building bridges, taking measurements, founding cities and towns, and basically Lewis and Clark\'ing his way through the goddamned Amazon like he didn\'t give a shit. Thanks to a steady diet of starvation, disease, waterfalls, poisonous and/or man-eating wildlife, and surprise ambushes by pissed-off spear-hucking natives, Rondon would routinely enter the forest with 80 or 100 men and come back out a year later with 30 half-dead, horribly-sunburned, mostly-naked guys crawling out on their hands and knees begging for potable water. As you can probably imagine, it was more-or-less considered a punishment for any soldier to be assigned to Rondon\'s Vattalion and, what\'s worse, when the Colonel\'s ultra-deadly work had basically killed off all of the worst soldiers the Brazilian military had to offer the high command essentially started just shipping him a bunch of convicts &ndash; most of whom wouldn\'t have hesitated to shank Rondon in the kidneys with a fork and steal his wallet if it meant they no longer had to chop town trees and whittle them into telephone poles in the torrential rain and stifling humidity of the Amazon rainforest. Nevertheless, the tough-as-hell, 5\'3\" tall Colonel refused to take their bullshit for any reason, and somehow whipped his rag-tag group of misfits and violent criminals into a telecommunications machine that laid out 1,100 miles of telegraph poles at a rate of 11 poles per mile over the course of a quarter-century.</p>\r\n<p>Of course, it\'s worth noting that the men followed Rondon mostly because he was fucking tough as shit and wouldn\'t put up with anything even remotely resembling dick behavior. This was a guy who refused special treatment, got down in the muck with the men hauling shit around, and he expected every asshole in his command to pull his weight or die face-first in the dirt trying. During his adventures across the rainforest Rondon hunted jaguars, survived being mauled by piranhas twice (the second time cost him a toe), fought a puma while armed only with a large stick, and once killed a 15-foot anaconda with a brick of TNT while he was dynamite fishing for lunch for his troops. On one occasion, some of his men decided they were going to mutiny, kick Rondon\'s ass, and go AWOL, so when the Colonel got wind of the plot he had the would-be conspirators dragged out in front of the battalion and beaten with bamboo rods for an hour while everyone watched and laughed. Another time some of his troops got way too drunk and started wreaking havoc in some little border town, so the Colonel personally rode his horse into every saloon in town until he\'d rounded them all up.</p>\r\n<p>This guy was serious.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/rondon3.png\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>Screenshot from the biographical video game based on Rondon\'s life.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Despite being a totally intimidating little motherfucker, Rondon was also an avid believer in the social theory of Positivism, a philosophy that basically says, \"Hey everybody is actually pretty cool so let\'s not fucking go around randomly killing each other with shovels\". A man who hated violence in all its forms, Colonel Rondon applied his philosophy most efficiently when it came to dealing with the native tribes, constantly reminding his men that they were utterly forbidden to attack even the most ultra-violent Amazonian headhunters, even in self-defense. Like, seriously one time Rondon himself discovered a previously-unknown tribe of naked dudes and was immediately shot square in the chest by an arrow that had been dipped in the venom of a poison dart frog &ndash; a poison so deadly it can kill 100 men with one dose. Rondon didn\'t flinch. He just calmly turned around and rode away with the arrow still sticking out of him.</p>\r\n<p>He came back a few days later. The natives, impressed by his mega balls, didn\'t attack him this time. Rondon walked up, played a phonograph recording of Wagner for them, and within a month this guy could speak their language pretty much fluently (Rondon spoke 10 Indian languages, as well as Portuguese and French) and had their permission to build telegraph poles on their land. Sure, his men weren\'t always super into just sitting there and having dudes shoot blowgun darts at them and Rondon\'s military career often resembled that scene at the beginning of <em>Raiders of the Lost Ark</em> where Indy\'s running away from those thong-wearing spear-swinging dudes, but you can\'t argue with results.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/rondon4.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>Rondon making friends with the natives.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Rondon was in the middle of his rainforest adventures when he got a seriously weird text in 1914. Apparently, our boy <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/roosevelt.html\">Teddy Roosevelt</a> was on his way to Brazil to have a fucking hardcore expedition into the middle of the Amazon wilderness, and the government of Brazil decided the only man badass enough to escort him on the mission was Colonel Candido Rondon. Faced with the possibility of escorting a former U.S. President on a journey down the Amazon River, Rondon simply said he wasn\'t a fucking babysitter and he didn\'t have time for that bullshit. When his commanders informed him that Roosevelt wasn\'t interested in some leisurely cruise and instead wanted to explore an uncharted tributary of the Amazon known as the River of Doubt, Rondon slammed down the phone and spent the next five weeks walking to Rio to meet T.R. personally.</p>\r\n<p>The River of Doubt was pretty near and dear to Colonel Rondon\'s heart, mostly because he\'s the guy who discovered it. The Colonel had come across the waterway while he was in the middle of a 600-mile, 237-day expedition that had resulted in the death of almost every man and ox he\'d taken with him, and since Rondon was half-dead of malaria at the time he discovered it he didn\'t bother the fuck around trying to measure it (note: Rondon is such a badass that he still walked out of the forest under his own power, refusing a stretcher because he wasn\'t about to show weakness in front of his men), and instead just called it the River of Doubt because he was like, \"I doubt anybody can go down this shit and live.\" He knew the source, but not the length, the size, or any of the geographic details. It was uncharted, unknown, and ridiculously dangerous, so of course this crazy motherfucker was totally down to rock it.</p>\r\n<p>The only catch this time was, you know, now he had to make sure that he got Theodore Roosevelt and his son Kermit Roosevelt out of there alive.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/rondon5.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>The Roosevelt-Rondon Expedition departed in February 1914, took a two month journey on boat and mule just to get to the source of the fucking river, then spent another three months navigating the terrifying rapids and dizzying waterfalls of the River of Doubt. For ten hellish weeks they battled clouds of stinging insects, torrential rain, ridiculously-deadly diseases, anacondas, jaguars, and 15-foot caimans, riding a set of hand-carved wood canoes through world-class rapids, schlepping them down 30-foot waterfalls, and stopping only to take surveying measurements or camp out in three inches of mud surrounded by poisonous vipers and malaria-infected mosquitoes. Roosevelt injured his leg, which got infected, and then almost died of malaria, but when the Prez was down Rondon stepped up, took charge, and made fucking damn sure he was going to get the American out of there alive, even if he had to put the big man on his 5-foot shoulders and carry him out of there step by step.</p>\r\n<p>The journey was grueling, dangerous, and almost killed one of the most badass men in American history, but Rondon somehow pulled that shit out &ndash; putting a 1,000-mile tributary of the Amazon River on the map in the process and documenting a number of species of flora and fauna that had previously been unknown. Rondon, ever the modest one, decided after they were done to change the name of the river to the Rio Theodoro, after his buddy Teddy Roosevelt.</p>\r\n<p>After this little adventure Rondon went on to create and become the first director of the Indian Protection Service, a government organization dedicated to preserving the customs and autonomy of Amazon Indian tribes. He ran the Service for over a decade, became a key figure trying to save indigenous populations of the Amazon, founded a few national parks, and eventually became Marshal of the Brazilian Army, which is like the highest rank there is. Roosevelt listed him as one of the four greatest explorers of his time, the Brazilians named a State after him, and these days he\'s featured not only in their geography but also on their currency. He died in 1958 at the age of 92.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/rondon6.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.theodorerooseveltcenter.org/Learn-About-TR/Themes/Strenuous-Life/Candido-Mariano-da-Silva-Rondon.aspx\">Theodore Roosevelt Center</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%C3%A2ndido_Rondon\">Wikpedia</a></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Sources:</span><br /><br /><span> Diacon, Todd A. <em>Stringing Together a Nation</em>. Duke University Press, 2004.<br /><br /> Millard, Candice. <em>The River of Doubt</em>. Random House, 2006.<br /><br /> Page, Joseph A. <em>The Brazilians</em>. Da Capo, 1996.<br /><br /> Roosevelt, Theodore. <em>Through the Brazilian Wilderness</em>. C. Scribner\'s Sons, 1914. </span></p>','2012-06-22','932194225924','rondon.gif','rondon-small.gif','Candido Rondon','Amazon explorer and hardass Brazilian engineer.','\"Die if you must, but never kill.\"'),('Yue Fei','March 24, 1103','January 27, 1142','Xiaoti, China','Medieval Chinese General','<p>During his 20-year career kicking the shit out of anything and everything in central China, uber-soldier and 12th-century mechano-badass Yue Fei personally fought in 126 battles, never lost a single engagement, rose through the ranks from Private to Overall Commander of Imperial Forces, invented a half-dozen styles of boxing and martial arts, and wrote a bunch of flamingly-epic poetry about how he was going to drink the blood of his slain enemies with a twist of lemon and then chase it with a shot of Jager. Nowadays he is revered as a national hero of China, a paragon of patriotic loyalty, and the ultimate symbol of honor, duty, and face-obliterating medieval barbarian-quelling vengeance.</p>\r\n<p>Naturally, as you might expect from any man famous throughout for his unswerving loyalty, rigid obedience, and unquestioning patriotism, he was betrayed by his own government, imprisoned as a traitor, and executed for treason.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/yuefei1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Yue Fei came from Luke Skywalker-like beginnings, born in 1103 to a dirt-poor family of moisture farmers in Henan Province. As an infant he managed to survive a major flood that wiped out much of his village, allegedly thanks to his father, who according to some legends put the baby Yue Fei into a clay pot and floated it in the water as the Yellow River flooded his farm and washed away most of the countryside.</p>\r\n<p>As he got older, Yue Fei grew strong, working long days on the farm and spending his nights studying martial arts under a highly-respected village elder who also so happened to be a badass archery instructor and kung fu master. Yue read Sun Tzu\'s <em>Art of War</em>, the <em>Three Kingdoms</em> and other works of tactics or classical heroism intensely, and mastered the <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eighteen_Arms_of_Wushu\">Eighteen Weapons of War</a>, a traditional assortment of Wushu asskicking devices that ranged from time-honored staples like swords, axes, hammers, spears, quarterstaves, and halberds to some seriously off-the-wall shit like the trident, the chain whip, the hook sword, and whatever the hell a Meteor Hammer is. In addition to being a badass master of random-yet-awesome-sounding hand-to-hand weapons, he was apparently also a hardcore sniper with the bow and the crossbow, allegedly being able to routinely shoot nine of ten arrows through a bullseye at 240 yards, and was so dedicated to the Emperor that his mother actually tattooed the phrase \"Serve the country with the utmost loyalty\" in huge Chinese characters across his entire back (in an awesome twist, any time anyone ever questioned his devotion Yue Fe would rip his shirt off and show this to the man who dared fuck with him).</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/yuefei2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>During this period of history the region we now know as China was divided into three regions &ndash; the Song Dynasty was the main Chinese empire, but at this point they were on the decline thanks in no small part to incompetent leadership and rampant douchebaggery at all levels of the government. To the north of Song territory lie the Jin, a barbarian empire of Manchurians, and to the West they had the Liao, which was some other kind of barbarian group that was considered subordinate to the Han Chinese. Well in 1122 the Song and the Jin decided they were going to get together and fuck the Liao up, young 18 year-old Yue Fei enlisted in the Song Imperial Army as a private and went straight on into the front lines of combat, halberd in hand.</p>\r\n<p>Unfortunately, the afore-mentioned asslownage of the Song commanders became readily apparent in the war early on, and despite Yue Fei personally acquitting himself with honor on the battlefield it was the Jin who did most of the heavy lifting in the war. The Jin conquered the Liao, assimilated the land into their Empire, then decided, fuck it, you Song assholes are a bunch of pussies so we\'re just going to kick your ass and take your shit too. In 1125 the Jin betrayed their alliance, double-crossed the Emperor, invaded the Song lands, conquered the 16 Northern Provinces of China, sacked the capital city of Kaifeng, captured and enslaved most of the Imperial Family (forcing the Empress and Princesses to be personal servants of Jin aristocrats), executed all of the Emperor\'s top advisors, and spent most of the year 1127 plundering, looting, destroying, and/or otherwise trashing every single nice thing the Song ever had. The only member of the Imperial family who managed to escape the carnage was the ninth son of the Emperor, a dude named Gaozong, who fled across the Yangtze River, set up a new capital, and desperately tried to regroup.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/yuefei3.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Yue Fei\'s unit had been stationed in the south of the Empire, but when this guy heard what was going on he\'d hauled ass to Kaifeng and immediately hurled himself into the fray, launching guerilla attacks at first, and then even mounting a full-scale assault on the former Song capital in a desperate attempt to free the Emperor and his family. Yue Fei even managed to retake part of the city, leading just 800 men in an attack against 50,000 warriors of the Jin Empire, but even though this desperate assault broke through the lines and bought some of the citizens of Kaifeng a chance to escape the destruction Yue Fei ultimately wasn\'t able to hold the position and was forced to fall back across the Yangtze, seething with rage and swearing ultimate blood-drinking vengeance on his enemies. While the Song licked their wounds and tried to recover from the insane ass-reaming they\'d just suffered at the hands of the Jin, Yue Fei dedicated himself even more hardcore into his quest for ultimate military supremacy. He dove into classical epic stories of heroes from days gone by, swearing to emulate them in greatness. He studied kung fu with the Shaolin Monks, created \"Eagle Claw\"-style martial arts, developed Xingyi Boxing, mastered 108 joint locks, and apparently (according to some sources) invented something called \"Feet-Poking Boxing\", which sounds like a creepy fetish porn but is probably something awesomer than that.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/yuefei4.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Even though the Jin were burning down their homes and the now-deposed Emperor was being dragged through his old capital in chains, the New Song Dynasty\'s first order of business was to consolidate their own power south of the Yangtze so that they could have a base of operations to launch attacks against the Jin. Yue Fei was just the man for the job. In a series of campaigns lasting three years, Yue Fei beat the shit out of every bandit and seditionist he could find, bludgeoning them into the ground with his bare hands and then conscripting any survivors into his army. When the Song\'s rapidly-growing power started to concern the Jin, they launched an attack across the Yangtze, sacked a couple cities, and forced Emperor Gaozong to flee the capital, so Yue Fei pulled the e-brake on his barbarian-quelling badassitude, hauled ass to the capital, beat the shit out of the Jin, and sent them crawling back to their mamas. When the Jin tried to invade again in 1133, 1134, and 1135, he crushed them all three times despite being heavily outnumbered, occasionally beating their sacks so hard that some of the enemy soldiers were deserting the Jin army and swimming the Yangtze so they could join up with Yue Fei. Yue Fei was eventually appointed Marshal of the Song Forces, making him overall commander of the Imperial Army, and he continued to be super popular and awesome, beloved both by the population and his own men. Sure, he was a totally fucking ruthless taskmaster (he once ordered one of his own sons be executed for failing to jump a moat on horseback while besieging an enemy castle) but he was also pretty fucking awesome too &ndash; he ate all of his meals with his men, slept in the same kind of tents as them, and always ran out into battle at the head of his army, telling his men nobody was to attack until he\'d personally fired the first arrow at the foe. One time he gave a set of priceless silver dishes to a Private who had shown exceptional heroism in battle. Another time he got really fucking drunk and beat an insubordinate Corporal half to death with his fists &ndash; the Emperor sent him a note saying, \"Stop kicking the shit out of your own men until the war is over, then do whatever you want\".</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/yuefei5.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>\"This time we will kill the foreigners all the way to Manchuria, where I\'ll get good and drunk with you gentlemen!\"<br /><br /></span></p>\r\n<center><span>- Yue Fei addressing his troops in 1137</span></center>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>But while Yue Fei had absolutely no problems ruthlessly crushing the shit out of barbarians, Manchurians, bandits, and whatever else on the battlefield, he couldn\'t play the political game for shit and never fully realized that his chief enemies were scheming against him in his own government. The chief antagonist was some asshole named Qin Hui, or Qin the Long-Legged. Qin was the chief advisor to Emperor Gaozong, and this Grima Wormtongue motherfucker wasn\'t about to give up his newfound power quite so easily &ndash; he knew that if Yue Fei was actually able to launch a successful invasion of the Jin, recapture Kaifeng, and liberate the captive Imperial Family, then Gaozong (and by extension Qin) would be out of a job. So, in 1137, when Yue Fei presented a foolproof plan to crush the Jin and achieve vengeance once and for all, Qin the Long-Legged convinced Emperor Gaozong not only to deny the request, but to transfer half of Yue Fei\'s army out from under his command, give it to some other asshole instead, then sign a peace treaty with the Jin.</p>\r\n<p>Yue Fei was pissed, but he was also idiotically loyal and refused to question the Emperor. Of course, he wasn\'t surprised in 1140 when the Jin betrayed the peace treaty and launched four full-strength Armies across the Yangtze with the express purpose of stomping out the rest of the Song Empire like a dude stamping out a bag of shit on his front porch.</p>\r\n<p>Yue Fei mobilized his army, and, despite being outnumbered five-to-one by a horde of barbarian horse warriors attacking him from four directions at the same time, managed to kick the fucking shit out of every last one of those motherfuckers.</p>\r\n<p>Then, before he could get orders to break off the attack, he crossed his army over the Yangtze, beat the unholy shit out of whatever pathetic remnants of the Jin Army he could find, recaptured ten of the sixteen provinces, and laid siege to Kaifeng. Victory &ndash; and vengeance &ndash; were finally within striking distance.</p>\r\n<p>It was then, in the moment of his greatest victory, that Yue Fei received his orders to break off the attack, withdraw, and return to the capital.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/yuefei6.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>FUUUUUUUU</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>When Yue Fei got word to pull out of Jin lands and abandon the siege of Kaifeng, he couldn\'t fucking believe it. He sent back a protest letter, telling Gaozong that he needed six days to win the war once and for all. He received twelve letters back, each one an order to return home.</p>\r\n<p>Yue Fei considered disobeying. He really did. But his sense of honor wouldn\'t allow him to disobey a direct order from the Emperor himself. It just wasn\'t going to happen. He delayed for five days in order to give the people in the ten provinces he\'d retaken enough time to withdraw south to friendly lands, then headed back to the Imperial Court to speak with the Emperor.</p>\r\n<p>When he got there, Qin the Long-Legged had him thrown into prison, branded as a traitor, then poisoned to death in his cell by an assassin. He was 39 years old. There\'s a pretty obvious first season <em>Game of Thrones</em> reference to be made here, but I\'ll abstain for the sake of spoilerage.</p>\r\n<p>The story, however, does not end here. You see, the public was more than a little pissed about this, and the pressure on the government to make shit right was so overwhelming that fucking Emperor Gaozong eventually had to retire from the throne and pass the crown off to his son. His son, in 1163, publically absolved Yue Fei for his crimes, declared him a national hero, and built an opulent stone temple to house an elaborate tomb for the Imperial General and his family.</p>\r\n<p>But here\'s the best part &ndash; just outside Yue Fei\'s tomb are four iron statues representing Qin the Long-Legged, his wife, and his two closest assistants. They\'re all depicted on their knees groveling for forgiveness in the direction of Yue Fei\'s tomb. Any time tourists visit Yue Fei\'s temple, they\'re encouraged to curse at or spit on the statues, and, for most of the 1930s, the local police had a really hard time getting people to stop urinating on them.</p>\r\n<p>Hey, it might not have been the folks he was actually trying to get his revenge on, but if you\'re going to get vengeance that\'s a pretty fucking sweet way to do it.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/yuefei7.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>PWND</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://chineseculture.about.com/library/weekly/aa041301a.htm\">About.com</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://history.cultural-china.com/en/47History592.html\">Cultural-China.com</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://www.travelchinaguide.com/attraction/zhejiang/hangzhou/yuefei.htm\">Tomb of Yue Fei</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://www.chinaculture.org/gb/en_madeinchina/2005-07/21/content_70831.htm\">ChinaCulture.org</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yue_Fei\">Wikipedia</a></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Sources:</span><br /><br /><span> Deng, Yinke. <em>History of China</em>. CICC, 2007.<br /><br /> Hammond, Kenneth J. <em>The Human Tradition in Premodern China</em>. Rowman and Littlefield, 2002.<br /><br /> Mah, Adeline Yen. <em>China</em>. Random House, 2011.<br /><br /> Mote, Frederick W. <em>Imperial China 900-1800</em>. Harvard Univ. Press, 2003.<br /><br /> Wills, John Elliot. <em>Mountain of Fame</em>. Princeton Univ. Press, 1996. </span></p>','2012-06-29','700921327621','yuefei.jpg','yuefei-small.jpg','Yue Fei','China\'s ultra-loyal, ultra-tragic barbarian-quelling warlord.','\"My wrath bristles through my helmet, the rain stops as I stand by the rain;\r\nI look up towards the sky and let loose a passionate roar...\r\nLet us ride our chariots through the Helan Pass,\r\nThere we shall feast on barbarian flesh and drink the blood of the Xiongnu.\r\nLet us begin anew to recover our old empire before paying tribute to the Emperor.\"'),('John Clayton, Earl Greystoke','October 1912','N/A','England','Fictional British Adventurer','<p>You have to be really fucking confident in your badass cred to not only be willing to sprint through the forest in a leopard-print man-thong with a combat knife between your teeth, but to then have the utmost certainty that you\'ll be able to brutally and remorselessly disembowel anything that stands between you and whatever busty maiden you\'re currently trying to rescue from the merciless clutches of whatever foul beasts, savages, monsters, or dinosaurs happen to be imprisoning her at that point in time.</p>\r\n<p>While the insanely-iconic jungle hero Tarzan more or less these days is considered some brainless one-with-nature neo-transcendentalist <em>Jungle Book</em> \"Can You Feel the Love Tonight\" motherfucker with a grasp of English grammar that makes the big guy from <em>Of Mice and Men</em> look like Patrick Stewart reciting a soliloquy from <em>Hamlet</em>, but the real Tarzan &ndash; the one that was created by Edgar Rice Burroughs back in 1912 when men were fucking MEN and all they wanted out of life was to make out with hot chicks and take warm relaxing showers in the arterial blood spray of their enemies &ndash; was a hardcore pipe-hittin\' assripper with the uncompromising sense of honor of a chivalrous English gentleman, the intelligence and cunning of a globe-trotting international man of mystery, and the vine-swinging agility of an Olympic <em>Pitfall</em> gold medalist, all wrapped up in the body of a giant naked monkey man with fists strong enough to knock a twenty-foot boa constrictor snake unconscious with one swing.</p>\r\n<p>And, oh yeah, pretty much every illustration of the guy looks roughly like this:</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/tarzan6.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><br /> <img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/tarzan7.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><br /> <img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/tarzan8.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><br /> <img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/tarzan9.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><br /> <img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/tarzan10.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span> Even though Disney tried to soften him up a little, make no mistake about it &ndash; Tarzan will fuck your ass up.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Tarzan was born with the name John Clayton the Third, Lord Greystoke, and his life kind of went from boring to awesome when his idiot dad took the family out on a three-hour tour and ended up getting everyone shipwrecked in the fucking Congo. Greystoke the second tried to Bear Grylls a log cabin and some other crap together like a dumbass but was so cripplingly inept that his wife spontaneously died of embarrassment and then he was beaten to death by some giant asshole talking gorilla. The homicidal Super-Ape then decided he couldn\'t really just kill Lord Greystoke\'s little baby, so he took the kid back to his village and passed him off to some super-nice lady Ape who named him Tarzan (meaning \"White Skin\" in Monkeyspeak), spit river water in his mouth baby bird style to nourish him, and eventually taught him how to swing around on vines and choke panthers to death with one clenched fist while headbutting the teeth out of a crocodile. Tarzan grew up, pounded his chest a lot, trained himself to be a badass by eating only the raw meat of animals he\'d run down on foot and killed with his own hands, and basically was just out-of-control crazy all the fucking time.</p>\r\n<p>Well one day while Tarzan was out in the jungle killing pterodactyls by grabbing their leathery flap-wings and then swinging them head-first into trees, he accidentally stumbled upon the cabin his dad had built. Tarzan went in, learned about his family\'s roots, taught himself to read, learned to speak French, ate some lunch, and then returned home to find that some asshole band of local cannibals had come to town Imperial Stormtrooper style and smoked a bunch of Apes out of existence &ndash; including Tarzan\'s adopted mom.</p>\r\n<p>This was bad.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/tarzan2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Tarzan responded by setting traps all through the jungle, hanging entire hunting parties of cannibals upside down by their ankles, then going down the line stabbing every one of them in the stomach until they died painful deaths. Then he burned their village down. By the time he was done with them, the only surviving cannibals were leaving tribute in the jungles so Tarzan wouldn\'t come fuck their shit up. The talking monkeys were so psyched about this recent turn of developments that they started calling Tarzan the hero of their people. This didn\'t work for the Ape Leader (you know, the dude who killed Tarzan\'s real dad), but when the Ape Chief tried to have Tarzan whacked our hero beat the shit out of him and took over as King of the Great Apes. Because seriously fuck that guy.</p>\r\n<p>Tarzan the Ape-Man is pretty fucking awesome because he represents the ultimate duality of human heroic badassitude. On the one hand, he\'s the ultimate noble leader &ndash; he\'s tall, handsome, friendly, considerate, well-spoken, and has a sense of chivalry and honor that always compels him to defend the weak, do the right thing, and help out anyone in need. Of course, on the other hand, he\'s a fucking psychotic savage who runs around in a loincloth killing tigers with a combat knife and his pearly whites, and as you have just seen, his sense of vengeance compels him to utterly fucking violently murder the shit out of anyone who wrongs him and then grind their de-meated bones into the faces out of all their family members.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/tarzan3.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>While it\'s true that every woman Tarzan has ever met was so desperate to jump into his banana hammock that basically the entire female population of the Congo spent the majority of the 1910s trampling each other in an epic continent-spanning cat fight over his nuts, Tarzan\'s only true love is Jane Porter, a super-hot American babe who coincidentally found herself shipwrecked on the exact spot Tarzan\'s family crashed, exactly twenty years from the date of Tarzan \'s wreck. Tarzan saves her from some bastards, gets her to fall in love with him, lets her go home to the States, then tracks her to the exotic woods of rural Wisconsin, where the sheer sight of his ultimate manliness (and his ability to kill lions with a spear) convinces her to ditch her loser husband and live with Tarzan in some crazy Ewok tree fort he built with his bare hands and a bag of nails he drove through the lumber with his teeth.</p>\r\n<p>Unlike other badasses from literature, despite not being able to walk to the grocery store without having to fight women off with a club he always stuck with the one woman &ndash; which is admirable in itself &ndash; and you can be damn sure that any time some savages or cannibals or giant pissed-off rhinos threatened this chick and she was being menaced threateningly on the cover of some pulp fiction mag with half of her clothes ripped off Tarzan was just seconds away from dive-bombing her antagonist knife-first from the tallest tree in the forest like some kind of psychotic blade-wielding Stuka with a malfunctioning altimeter.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/tarzan4.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>As if this isn\'t crazy enough shit for you, things get really out of control after the first couple books. Sure, there\'s the normal shit you\'d expect &ndash; Tarzan fights every single kind of jungle animal, poachers, foresters, cannibals, savages, and other shit. He rides elephants, panthers, and lions, has a pet spider monkey, rules over an army of sentient talking Apes, and face-punches a man-sized sea horse because what the fuck is a man-sized sea horse doing having the audacity to stand around like an asshole doing whatever the fuck it is that sea horses do. Typical stuff. But there are also some pretty insane adventures as well &ndash; like one time he was captured by Beast Men who lived in a temple filled with the treasures looted from the Lost City of Atlantis, so Tarzan got the high priestess to fall in love with him, tricked her into letting him go, robbed the treasury, escaped, and used the cash to build himself a stately fucking plantation in England. Another time his son was kidnapped by evil Russian Counts and sent to live with a tribe of cannibals, so he charges into their village Skeletor-style on the back of a black panther, burns it to the ground, saves his kid, and kills the Count. During World War I Tarzan mistakenly though the Germans incinerated Jane to death, so he fucking went ape, declared war on Germany, fed the German commander and a bunch of his closest advisors to a lion, destroyed some random lost desert civilization that happened to get in his way, and then realized, oh snap, Jane\'s actually alive, sorry about that guys, my bad. Then he flew to the Earth\'s core on an airship, ended up in some a prehistoric Land of the Lost place, killed a carnivorous triceratops with his fists, and broke her out of captivity. He drinks an immortality elixir that means he never dies. He learns to speak every human language. He serves with the RAF over the South Pacific in World War II. He fights the Japanese, the Romans, the Knights Templar, the Soviets, Leopard Men, Beast Men, Ant Men, and Frenchmen. He\'s left for dead in the desert at one point, fakes death, then grabs the closest vulture with his fist and eats it raw, the nutrition giving him the strength to go on and walk the other half of the way through the desert.</p>\r\n<p>And, yeah, sometimes Burroughs gets some shit for being racist, sexist, and/or for making fun of every race and culture that isn&rsquo;t England or the United States, but that hasn\'t prevented him from enduring as an iconic hero for 100 years after his creation. He\'s been in 26 books, 80+ movies, and hundreds of comics, radio programs, and TV shows. He\'s been a musical on Broadway. There\'s Tarzan on Ice. He was in the first graphic novel ever made, 1972\'s <em>Tarzan of the Apes</em>. He inspired Jane Goodall to go into the forest and research chimps and shit, and inspired Gene Roddenberry to write some fucked-up TV pilot filled with weird freaky fetishist sex stuff, which is weird as hell, but probably less weird than the Bollywood flick Tarzan the Wonder Car, which is apparently about a purple sports car that becomes possessed by dead spirits and tries to kill all of its former owners. I honestly have no idea what the hell that is all about.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/tarzan5.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.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/readfile?fk_files=785551\">Project Gutenberg</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://www.edgarriceburroughs.com/index.php?option=com_content&amp;view=article&amp;id=3&amp;Itemid=104\">Edgar Rice Burroughs official site</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://www.tarzan.org/history_of_tarzan_part1.html\">Tarzan.org</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://www.waitsel.com/classic_literature/Tarzan.html\">Tarzan Bio</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarzan\">Wikipedia</a></p>','2012-07-14','429594919068','tarzan.jpg','tarzan6-small.jpg','Tarzan','The original noble savage, and one of literature\'s most hardcore badasses.','\"As the body rolled to the ground Tarzan of the Apes placed his foot upon the neck of his lifelong enemy and, raising his eyes to the full moon, threw back his fierce young head and voiced the wild and terrible cry of his people.\"'),('Sir Isaac Brock','October 6, 1769','October 13, 1812','St Peter Port, Guernsey, UK','19th-century British General','<p>In case you assholes haven\'t noticed, it doesn\'t take a fucking mathematical genius archaeologist to realize that this year marks the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812 &ndash; you know, that other blood-and-guts battle between the United States and the British that nobody ever talks about, mostly because it\'s one of the only wars in the first 200 years of American History that didn\'t end with some red, white, and blue badass chomping on a half-eaten cigar while forcibly impaling a foreign military commander through the abdomen with a sharpened stake proudly displaying the Stars and Stripes Don\'t Tread on Me America Fuck Yeah Spangled Banner. Hell, aside from the fact that the most popular battle of the entire war (The Battle of New Orleans) took place <em>after a truce had already been signed</em> (this is both awesome and irrelevant and awesome in its irrelevance), most people wouldn\'t know the difference between the War of 1812 and the outtakes real of <em>The Patriot</em> if you hit them in the back of the head with a history textbook bound in the dried skin of Australian action movie heroes.</p>\r\n<p>Here\'s the short version: Thirty years after the American Revolution the British were still hanging around in North America like assholes stealing all our commerce and taking our jobs and inciting the Indians to scalp us, so we decided, fuck it, we\'re going to conquer Canada because what the fuck is the point of that place anyways. We had a massive army, home field advantage, a nationalistic blood rage of Manifest Destiny, and a few unopened cases of well-shaken-up cans of whoop-ass we\'d been holding onto since the days of our boy George Washington. The Canadians had a few hundred untrained militiamen armed with snowballs, a lumberjack, a couple grizzly bears, and trees.</p>\r\n<p>They also had 42 year old Major-General Sir Isaac Brock &ndash; one of the most balls-out, borderline-psychotically fearless British generals ever produced, and a man who didn\'t even give a fuck despite being outnumbered three to one in every engagement of his entire career. And he\'s the only reason why Quebec and Ontario aren\'t currently American states.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/brock5.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<table style=\"width: 500px;\" align=\"center\">\r\n<tbody>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td><span>\"His personal appearance was commanding; he must have been six feet three or four inches in height; very massive and large boned, though not fleshy, and apparently of immense muscular power.\"</span></td>\r\n</tr>\r\n</tbody>\r\n</table>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Isaac Brock was born in 1769, the same year as distinguished hardcore badasses like <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/wellington.html\">The Duke of Wellington</a>, Napoleon Bonaparte, and super-famous historical lawyer Karl Salomo Zachariae Von Lingenthal, the man who wrote some seminal early works on jurisprudence in the German Empire, particularly as it pertains to the separation of church and hahaha just kidding nobody gives a shit about that stuff I just included him on this list because he has a funny-looking name and I needed a third person to fill out this list. Brock was from a super-wealthy posh family that lived on some random island in the middle of the Channel, but since he was the 8th of 14 kids he pretty much gave on the possibility of sitting on his ass and waiting to inherit his dad\'s millions. But that wasn\'t Brock\'s style anyways &ndash; this guy was fucking fearless, and, regardless of his rank, this is a man who NEVER sat back when he could be out there on the front lines, leading the charge, screaming into battle for glory and honor and victory and all those other things they print on the back covers of FPS video game cases (no kidding, this guy never even had a girlfriend (or, as far as we know, a boyfriend), because he claimed didn\'t want someone to tie him down or to be there to mourn him when he inevitably died screaming on the field of battle). At the age of 15 he used his family\'s cash to buy himself the rank of Ensign in the 8th Regiment of Foot, serving in the Channel, then in Barbados and Jamaica, proving himself such an effective commander (albeit in peace time) that by the time he was deployed to combat in 1799, the 20 year-old Brock was already a Lieutenant Colonel.</p>\r\n<p>Lt. Col. Brock\'s first military action came on the shores of the Netherlands, when he was deployed to fight the French and the Dutch in one of those random wars the Europeans seemed to love so much back in these days. He\'d been ordered to command a column to attack a Dutch city, but as he was marching out he saw a group of hash-smoking Netherlanders cunningly trying to flank him, so Brock did exactly what you\'d expect of the ranking field officer on the battlefield &ndash; he told his second-in-command to continue the mission, personally took command of six companies, and then charged them out across sand dunes right towards the flanking enemy force, rushing out at the head of his men waving his sword around like a fucking boss. He was knocked down by a cannon shell that exploded dangerously near him, hopped right back up, told his men to stop standing around like assholes, continued the attack, and smashed the enemy force.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/brock1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>After a brief stop-over where he traveled to Copenhagen aboard Admiral Horatio Nelson\'s flagship, <em>HMS Mothafuckin\' Victory</em> in 1801 and captured the city on a tsunami of blood with an amphibious attack that utterly-annihiliated the irritatingly-wussily-named League of Armed Neutrality, Brock was sent to Canada to command all military forces in Upper Canada. At first Brock was bored shitless by this bullshit posting (especially since he was missing out on all the glory of fighting Napoleon on the continent), but things started getting interesting around 1811 when rumors started boiling up about a potential full-scale American invasion of Canada.</p>\r\n<p>Ok, time to get serious.</p>\r\n<p>Brock\'s situation wasn\'t good &ndash; he was being asked to defend Ontario and Quebec with seven forts, 1,000 British regular soldiers, and about 11,000 civilian militia (and, by Brock\'s estimation, only about 4,000 of those guys were \"trustworthy\" with a weapon), facing a modernized army that outnumbered him five to one. He asked for reinforcements from the Crown, and was told that Upper Canada was \"undefensible\", and that there was no point sending more troops. When Brock protested, his commanders told him to basically \"just do whatever\", hang back, turtle up, defend his position, and try not to let your inevitable crushing defeat seem too humiliating.</p>\r\n<p>Fuck that. Brock went on the offensive. He built warships in the Great Lakes. He repaired crumbling defenses. He told the newspapers that if the Americans conquered Canada they\'d sell the land to Napoleon, who would then come into town on a ship made out of the bones of dead English Kings and personally sodomize every single Canadian he could catch. He bought rifles from local traders. He required all Canadian men between 18 and 60 attend mandatory militia training.</p>\r\n<p>Oh yeah, and he made good friends with the local Indian warriors, most notably a dude named Tecumseh &ndash; a balls-out scalp-happy warrior brave who took one look at Brock and reportedly said, \"Ah, now THIS is a man!\".</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/brock2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>High praise from these guys.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>The United States declared war on Canada on June 18, 1812. Brock, an intelliegence mastermind who made it his business to know what the fuck was going on in the world, somehow got news of the Declaration of War <em>before the American invasion force</em>, and, instead of waiting for them to try to cross into Canada, instead ordered his men to charge straight ahead and sucker-punch them in the balls before they even knew the bell had rung. He moved his men into place under the cover of darkness, surrounded them with artillery, and effected the surrender of an entire U.S. regiment without firing a shot.</p>\r\n<p>But Americans don\'t give up that easily &ndash; this was just one part of the invasion force, and within days a second unit under the command of General William Hull charged across into the Great White North with 2,500 men looking to beat those mulleted Canadian freaks to death with their own hockey sticks. Brock\'s forces in the region consisted of about 300 redcoats, 400 Canadian militia, and a few hundred Shawnee Indian warriors. Brock was ordered to have his troops hold their ground and defend. Instead he personally rode out, joined up with the men on the ground, and ordered them to ignore Hull and charge straight into American territory instead.</p>\r\n<p>Hull had barely reached Canada when he received word that the American border fort at Michilimackinac had fallen without a shot, completely surrounded by a superior British/Canadian force.</p>\r\n<p>Hull panicked about the possibility of being outflanked by a large British force, and immediately withdrew his entire army to the city of Detroit. Brock surrounded it and laid siege to Detroit &ndash; no small feat, considering that the garrison inside the city outnumbered him three to one.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/brock3.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Again, however, Brock didn\'t give a shit, and what he did here was seriously so fucking awesome that even though I\'m American and we\'re getting our asses kicked here I still have to give respect where it\'s due &ndash; Brock had his Shawnee Indian warriors deck themselves out in their scariest war paint, had them march around the city screaming like demons while brandishing their ferocious-looking tomahawks. Then he sent a letter to General Hull, who, it just so happens, was fucking terrified of Indians. The letter said, \"It is far from my intention to join a war of extermination, but you must be aware, that the numerous body of Indians who have attached themselves to my troops will be beyond control the moment the contest commences.\" Then it went on to say that unless Hull wanted to see his wife and kids \"bleeding under the tomahawk of a savage\" he should chill the fuck out and give up.</p>\r\n<p>Hull bought Brock\'s bluff and fucking surrendered Detroit without firing a shot. Sir Isaac Brock\'s heavily-outnumbered force of 900 men had just captured the largest garrison in the Northern United States &ndash; 33 cannons, $60,000 worth of muskets, 2,500 men, and a warship which was subsequently named HMS <em>Detroit</em> presumably out of spite. It was the sort of humiliating defeat that, up until the last few years, Detroit sports fans had come to expect from those men who were supposed to represent them.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/brock4.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Suddenly, shit in the War of 1812 got real. Instead of thinking they suck, our docile neighbors to the North forgot they were Canadians and started getting totally pissed off out of their minds. Brock\'s astonishing victory earned him the title \"Hero of Upper Canada\", and his men got really fucking pumped to fight and possibly even win this war. Brock took a second to get Knighted, then hauled ass back to Niagara, where he took command of the defenses there, shifting men around, building forts, installing artillery positions, and repeatedly requesting permission to attack Buffalo.</p>\r\n<p>Things were going pretty well until the night of October 13, 1812, when General Brock received word that 3,000 men under the command of General Stephen Van Rensselaer had begun a full-scale invasion across the Niagara River, attacking the city of Queenston. Brock popped out of bed, threw on his full military dress uniform, jumped on his horse Alfred, rode 7.5 miles to the battlefront, and looked on in horror as a powerful American unit took up flanking positions on the hill overlooking Brock\'s artillery.</p>\r\n<p>Brock did exactly what you\'d expect. He found the first group of soldiers he could find &ndash; a badly-depleted Company of the 49th Regiment of Foot &ndash; and ordered them to charge straight up the hill against a full-strength Battalion of American sharpshooters. Before the men of the 49th could even pick up their rifles, General Isaac Brock, Overall Commander of All British Forces in Upper Canada, was already halfway up the hill, running full fucking speed ahead, on his own, in his fucking full dress uniform, firing his pistol and pointing his sword menacingly at the 800 or so dudes pointing muskets at him. The 49th was obviously inspired, and charged after their General. Brock was hit in the hand, stumbled, but kept going, right up until he caught a musketball in the chest and collapsed to the ground. According to legend, with his dying breath he screamed \"Press on!\" to his men (although this is debatable).</p>\r\n<p>The 49th captured the hill, turning the Americans back and preventing them from gaining a foothold for their invasion of Canada. To this day, the spot where he died boasts a 200-foot-tall monument marking the border between Canada and the United States.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/brock6.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>\"Most of the people have lost all confidence. I however speak loud and look big!\"</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.warof1812.ca/brock.htm\">War of 1812 Bio</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://war1812.tripod.com/brock.html\">Sir Isaac Brock</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Brock\">Wikipedia</a></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Sources:</span><br /><br /><span> Brock, Sir Isaac. <em>The Life and Correspondence of Major-General Sir Isaac Brock, K.B.</em> Simpkin, Marshall &amp; Co., 1847.<br /><br /> Farwell, Byron. <em>The Encyclopedia of 19th-Century Warfare</em>. W.W. Norton, 2001.<br /><br /> Fryer, Mary. <em>Brave, Bold, and Born to Lead</em>. Dundurn Press, 2004.<br /><br /> Heidler, David Stephen, and Jeanne T. Heidler. <em>Encyclopedia of the War of 1812</em>. Naval Institute Press, 2004.<br /><br /> Taylor, Alan. <em>The Civil War of 1812</em>. Random House, 2011.<br /><br /> Turner, Wesley B. <em>British Generals in the War of 1812</em>. McGill-Queen\'s, 1999. </span></p>','2012-07-27','312478119684','brock.jpg','brock-small.jpg','Sir Isaac Brock','Balls-out \"Hero of Upper Canada\" who captured Detroit during the War of 1812 without losing a single man.','\"To capture an army that counts three to one\r\nA fortress and a state, hardly losing a man,\r\nWill long be remembered, a capital stroke,\r\nAnd quoted uniquely, \"The Glory of Brock.\"'),('Albert Ernest Clifford Young','February 8, 1922','November 2, 2003 ','Beech Forest, Victoria, Australia','20th-century Australian Athlete','<p>Let me start with this: I hate running. Like, I really fucking hate it. I know some people out there can\'t get enough of that shit, and they dream of nothing more than chugging organic free-range veggie smoothies and talking about their ultra-rigid interval-training regimens while stair-stepping their way up around the outside of Sauron\'s Tower in Mordor, but as far as I\'m concerned intense cardiovascular exercise is a torturous labor on par with the cruelest deviltries this side of some sadistic Spanish Inquisition asshole burning your eyes out with red-hot pokers and then spitting lemonade into the sockets to disinfect the wound. I mean, seriously, unless I\'m stretching out a double in beer league softball or fleeing the crushtastic knobby tires of that self-propelled Mack Truck from <em>Maximum Overdrive</em> I\'d just as soon strangle myself unconscious with a jump rope than put in the obligatory hour a day on the treadmill I need to ensure that I don\'t lose the ongoing World War I\'m waging with my burgeoning love handles.</p>\r\n<p>Despite my own aversion to the whole \"one foot in front the other as rapidly as possible until your lungs shrivel into raisins which then subsequently catch on fire, your legs feel like they\'re made out of cheap post-consumer recycled rubber, and you wish nothing more than the sweet release of a swift death\" thing, I have nothing but respect for those psychotic lunatics who pursue the sport (is that the right word for it? Runners seem to think so&hellip;) of Ultramarathoning. Ultramarathoning, for those of you who lack the ability to process compound words, are like regular marathons, only FUCKING ULTRA. In its purest form, Ultramarathoning is basically just a bunch of human-looking robots running as fast as they can forever. Races don&rsquo;t go around a track, they span ZIP codes, and they aren\'t measured in meters, they\'re measured in how many DAYS it takes you to finish the course.</p>\r\n<p>Arguably the toughest ultramarathon ever conceived in the black recesses of some running-obsessed sadist\'s disturbed mind is the Westfield Sydney to Melbourne Ultra Marathon &ndash; a 566-mile foot race that started in a mall parking lot in Sydney, Australia, and ended in another mall parking lot in Melbourne, a good 875 kilometers away.</p>\r\n<p>Here\'s a map of the course, or, as it was most likely captioned in the pamphlets handed out before the race, WELCOME TO HELL:</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><object width=\"466\" height=\"350\" data=\"http://maps.google.com/maps?f=d&amp;source=s_d&amp;saddr=Westfield+Parramatta,+Church+Street,+Parramatta,+New+South+Wales,+Australia&amp;daddr=Westfield+Doncaster,+Doncaster+Road,+Doncaster,+Victoria,+Australia&amp;geocode=FZf7-_0dCBwACSHgLPP5aH0BDykrk9BnIKMSazHgLPP5aH0BDw%3BFbd0v_0d33CmCCHAzhp-99anoCklZoXzb0fWajHAzhp-99anoA&amp;aq=0&amp;oq=Westfield+Doncaster&amp;sll=-35.802395,148.06369&amp;sspn=7.527285,16.907959&amp;hl=en&amp;dirflg=w&amp;doflg=ptm&amp;mra=ltm&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;t=m&amp;ll=-35.802395,148.06369&amp;spn=3.96989,5.88094&amp;output=embed\" type=\"application/x-shockwave-flash\"><param name=\"src\" value=\"http://maps.google.com/maps?f=d&amp;source=s_d&amp;saddr=Westfield+Parramatta,+Church+Street,+Parramatta,+New+South+Wales,+Australia&amp;daddr=Westfield+Doncaster,+Doncaster+Road,+Doncaster,+Victoria,+Australia&amp;geocode=FZf7-_0dCBwACSHgLPP5aH0BDykrk9BnIKMSazHgLPP5aH0BDw%3BFbd0v_0d33CmCCHAzhp-99anoCklZoXzb0fWajHAzhp-99anoA&amp;aq=0&amp;oq=Westfield+Doncaster&amp;sll=-35.802395,148.06369&amp;sspn=7.527285,16.907959&amp;hl=en&amp;dirflg=w&amp;doflg=ptm&amp;mra=ltm&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;t=m&amp;ll=-35.802395,148.06369&amp;spn=3.96989,5.88094&amp;output=embed\" /></object><br /><small><a style=\"color: #0000ff; text-align: left;\" href=\"http://maps.google.com/maps?f=d&amp;source=embed&amp;saddr=Westfield+Parramatta,+Church+Street,+Parramatta,+New+South+Wales,+Australia&amp;daddr=Westfield+Doncaster,+Doncaster+Road,+Doncaster,+Victoria,+Australia&amp;geocode=FZf7-_0dCBwACSHgLPP5aH0BDykrk9BnIKMSazHgLPP5aH0BDw%3BFbd0v_0d33CmCCHAzhp-99anoCklZoXzb0fWajHAzhp-99anoA&amp;aq=0&amp;oq=Westfield+Doncaster&amp;sll=-35.802395,148.06369&amp;sspn=7.527285,16.907959&amp;hl=en&amp;dirflg=w&amp;doflg=ptm&amp;mra=ltm&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;t=m&amp;ll=-35.802395,148.06369&amp;spn=3.96989,5.88094\">View Larger Map</a></small></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Google seems to believe that, barring any sort of sleep or exhaustion or <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/australia.html\">Australian wildlife</a>-related horrible death along the way, your average jackass should be able to walk this brain-crushingly obscene 566-mile course in 185 hours &ndash; about 8 days. Now, around the time of the 1983 edition of this yearly race, your average world-class uber-android athlete could complete this course by running the equivalent 21.6 marathons back-to-back-to-back over the course of 7 days, with a daily regimen of sprinting for 17 hours straight, sleeping for 7, then getting back up and doing it again the next morning. It\'s a race so fucking excruciating that you couldn\'t have it as an Olympic sport because if you were going to host the Games in London you\'d have to start at the base of Big Ben, run all the way to the Eiffel Tower by way of the Chunnel, turn around, come all the way back, touch the base of Big Ben again, then make a left and sprint to the finish line at Stonehenge before both Bob Costas and Dan Patrick completely lose their shit from lack of sleep and start devouring each others\' brains on national television. It\'s the Boston Marathon if the Boston Marathon ended in Richmond, Virginia. It\'s a foot race so goddamned intense that the purple line representing the course is still clearly visible when you zoom all the way out on Google Maps. Fuck, I get tired after playing NHL hockey on the Xbox for five or six hours in a row, and that rarely involves any physical activity more strenuous than repeatedly moving one or both of my thumbs a fraction of an inch.</p>\r\n<p>As you can probably imagine, the grand prize drew elite athletes from across the world, each seeking not only the cash, but the pride associated with winning the most intense physical test of physical endurance human civilization has ever offered. Tough, dedicated guys in their 20s and early-30s, in the prime of their lives, hardened by years of training into perfect physical specimens, most of them decked out in top-of-the-line aerodynamic racing gear and $400 running shoes provided by wealthy global corporate sponsors like Nike, Reebok, Adidas, and New Balance (just kidding, nobody wears New Balance haha).</p>\r\n<p>And there, standing amid the greatest runners the world had to offer in 1983, was this guy:</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/young2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Cliff Young was a toothless 61 year-old potato farmer from Beech Forest, Victoria, who\'d lived in a one-room bark hut with six brothers and sisters during the Great Depression and showed up to the starting line of the race in overalls and <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wellington_boot\">rain boots</a>. The assembled media took one look at him, shoved a microphone in his face, and asked him what it was going to be like when he keeled over and died of a massive heart attack a hundred and fifty meters in to the 875-kilometer race.</p>\r\n<p>He told them, \"I grew up on a farm where we couldn&rsquo;t afford horses or four wheel drives&hellip; whenever the storms would roll in, I&rsquo;d have to go out and round up the sheep. We had 2,000 head, and we have 2,000 acres. Sometimes I would have to run those sheep for two or three days. It took a long time, but I&rsquo;d catch them. I believe I can run this race; it&rsquo;s only two more days. Five days. I&rsquo;ve run sheep for three.\"</p>\r\n<p>Ok, whatever, old man, good luck with that.</p>\r\n<p>It also didn\'t help his case when the starter\'s pistol went off and this guy started running like this:</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\">&nbsp;<object width=\"420\" height=\"315\" data=\"http://www.youtube.com/embed/2OD96zocXRU\" type=\"application/x-shockwave-flash\"><param name=\"src\" value=\"http://www.youtube.com/embed/2OD96zocXRU\" /></object></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>The field blew him off the line like an \'87 Camaro drag racing against the Amish. The pack traveled dozens of miles in the first day alone, pounding their pavement with the ergonomic soles of their cross-trainers while this old geezer shuffled along like a dumbass in his Wellington gumboots, his pace nowhere near that of the elite ultramarathoners who by this point were tens of miles down the road away from him.</p>\r\n<p>Then night came. Exhausted from 17 hours of pushing their bodies to the limit, the racers all made camp by the side of the road and went to sleep.</p>\r\n<p>All of them, that is, except Cliff Young.</p>\r\n<p>You see, it turned out that when Cliff Young said he chased sheeps around his farm for three days, he meant he\'d single-handedly manually herded a flock of frightened ruminants across 2,000 acres of farmland for <em>three days straight without stopping or sleeping</em>.</p>\r\n<p>When the rest of the field woke up the one morning and saw the tiny shadow of a 61 year-old man shuffling along a few dozen miles down the road ahead of them, they realized they were in trouble. Cliff Young, an overalls-clad sexagenarian potato farmer who had previously been diagnosed with arthritis in most of his leg joints (he claimed he\'d \"ran it out&hellip; like running the rust off an old car\") was beating the best athletes in the world &ndash; men more than half his age &ndash; in a sport that was exclusively dependent upon pushing the human body to the limits of its physical ability.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/young4.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Surviving in hot chocolate and cups of water, Cliff Young shuffled down the highway for five days, fifteen hours, and four minutes straight. The media hype surrounding his ridiculous tortoise-and-the-hare bullshit was so intense that when Young jogged to the finish line in Melbourne he was greeted by TV cameras and a screaming horde of cheering fans.</p>\r\n<p>He\'d broken the all-time record for the Westfield Sydney to Melbourne Ultra Marathon. By two days. When he got the check for ten thousand dollars, he told the organizers he wasn\'t actually aware there was a prize for winning. Then he said he felt bad that he should get the prize money when everyone else worked just as hard as him, so he divided the ten grand equally among all the participants in the race.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/young5.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Cliff Young became a celebrity in Australia overnight. Six-Day races were named after him. He married a 23 year-old Aussie babe with daddy issues (they divorced five years later&hellip; shocking, I know). Athletic trainers started studying his running style, eventually deciding that while it looked ridiculous, the \"Young Shuffle\" was actually one of the most efficient ways to travel while conserving the most energy &ndash; three other athletes used the technique to win the race in subsequent years.</p>\r\n<p>Young continued running, setting six outdoor world endurance records despite the notable handicap of being basically old as hell. At the age of 63 he ran 150 miles in a 24 hour period. In 1997 he tried to circumnavigate Australia to raise money for disadvantaged homeless orphans, but the 76 year-old had to drop out after just 6250 kilometers (3,800 miles, or roughly the distance from Key West, FL to Whistler, BC) when his only crew member (a trainer who, by the way, was making this trip in a car) passed out from illness. In 2000, at age 79, he became the oldest man to finish a six-day Ultramarathon, and he did it while he was dying of cancer. He passed away in November 2003, at the age of 81, still running his family farm. He had run over 20,000 kilometers during his racing career. It is said that never kept any of his prize money, instead donating it to charities or giving it to friends as gifts.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/young6.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>\"He was an ordinary guy who achieved extraordinary things.\"</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Links/Sources:</span><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://www.elitefeet.com/the-legend-of-cliff-young\">The Legend of Cliff Young</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://www.coolrunning.com.au/ultra/1997032.shtml\">Interview with Cliff Young</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://www.aura.asn.au/CliffYoung.html\">From Gumboots to Glory</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/11/03/1067708126175.html\">End of the Road for Cliff</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliff_Young_%28athlete%29\">Wikipedia</a></p>','2012-08-03','459184720707','young.jpg','young2-small.jpg','Cliff Young','\"I like to finish what I start doing. I like to see it through to the end, to the best of my ability.\"','61 year-old potato farmer who won the world\'s most grueling endurance race.'),('Casimir Pulaski','March 6, 1745','October 11, 1779','Warsaw, Poland','18th-century Polish General','<p>Despite totally kicking serious ass, Casimir Pulaski still gets a hard time from most modern-day uptight dickwad military historians. Even though during his lifetime Pulaski was revered as a living legend, the savior of American Democracy, and one of the most godlike military minds of his generation, nowadays a lot of bored revisionist-history types like to sit back in their La-Z-Boys with a snifter of cognac talking shit about how this 18th-century Polish Count was too much of an inflexible hardass to be considered effective, and how his strategy of brazenly charging balls-first towards the enemy even after the battle was obviously already lost wasn\'t exactly the best way to keep your soldiers alive. They say he was foolhardy, reckless, and placed battlefield glory above anything resolving common sense or self-preservation. They say the fact that his flat refusal to take orders from anyone who wasn\'t either a member of European nobility or a Congressionally-appointed superior officer made him a poor fit for service in the Revolutionary American military. The people who make these arguments use well-thought-out hypotheses supported by primary source documents, painstaking historical research, and a basic fundamental understanding of military tactics and strategy.</p>\r\n<p>I couldn&rsquo;t care less. In fact, the idea of some uptight Polish Count telling George Washington to go fuck himself because he wasn\'t knighted by the King of England and then riding off into the sunset to randomly instigate a one-man charge saber-first into a British infantry regiment for no good reason makes this guy EVEN MORE awesome.</p>\r\n<p>Now look, I don&rsquo;t give two shits that this hardcore horseback-riding demolition machine was terrible at following orders, or that he never backed down from a good fight no matter how badly the battle had turned against him or how ridiculously he was outnumbered. As far as I\'m concerned, any man who, in one lifetime, kicks the asses of the Russians, the Germans, and the Redcoats, charges blade-first into battle on horseback assaulting cannons with a sword at every opportunity, saves George Washington\'s life on the battlefield, drinks shots with Benjamin Franklin, creates the fundamental organizational and training doctrine for every American cavalry unit ever assembled (without actually even being able to speak the English language no less), then dies in a blaze of glory with a Royalist cannonball through his face is pretty fucking badass, and you\'re going to have to do better than some bullshit argument about his lack of appreciation for late 18th-century tactical small-unit reconnaissance practices to convince me that this guy isn\'t such a hardcore patriot that any mention of his name deserves to be accompanied by Hulk Hogan\'s \"I Am a Real American\" entrance music from <em>Wrestlemania I</em>. This was a man who took conventional military doctrine &ndash; touchy-feely bullshit like \"don\'t have your men court-martialed and beaten with sticks when they fail to follow orders\" and \"you probably shouldn\'t launch full-speed cavalry charges against enemy artillery when they\'re behind hardened fortifications and outnumber you five-to-one\" and rammed it up the asses of anyone who came in his path in a face-shanking explosion of rectum-rupturing devastation that spanned three continents and almost two decades.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/pulaski1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Ok, so back in the good old days Poland used to be this uber-powerful, skull-crushing world power that stood as a mighty heathen-skewering bulwark against repeated Ottoman Turkish attempts to plunder Europe a new asshole with extreme ultra-violence. But by the 1760s, however, this once-proud European world power was just a sad hollow little candy-coated shell of its former self. Reduced to serving as a Protectorate of Russia, Poland\'s leaders were all hand-picked by the Tsar, and anyone who had a problem with their new Russian overlords could expect to find themselves rotting in a Moscow dungeon being forced to eat borscht every night until they died of it. The Tsar called the shots, forced the Polish Parliament to pass whatever bullshit laws he thought sounded interesting, and basically just told the entire country to kiss his Converse or he\'d pummel them senseless with the largest army in Europe.</p>\r\n<p>But, as I\'ve alluded to earlier, Count Casimir Pulaski wasn\'t a guy who liked it when people told him the odds. And this guys wasn\'t afraid of those Tsarist assholes &ndash; he was a proud member of the aristocracy, a man who had been practicing his riding and shooting skills since he was eight years old, and he decided that no jackass Russian fuckstick was going to push him around just because they were capable of fielding an army that would outnumber the entire population of his country. So, in 1763, at the age of 15, Pulaski, his father, both his brothers, and 300 noblemen raised an army, revolted against the Tsar, and declared open rebellion against Russian tyranny throughout Poland.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/pulaski2.png\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Pulaski was captured by the Russians in one of his first battles, most likely because he spurred his horse on and charged them straight-on despite being badly outnumbered and outgunned. The Russians threw his reckless ass in prison, but eventually told him they\'d let him go if he promised to stop fighting them. Pulaski told them sure, that sounds great, but then as soon as those dipshits let him go he was like \"LOL LOOSERS\" and re-joined the rebellion. Riding up and down the countryside launching lightning raids on Russian forts, garrisons, and supply depots, Pulaski quickly became famous throughout Europe for his daring attacks, hauling ass into hardened enemy bases on horseback in a blaze of musket smoke and blood-stained swords, chopping up anyone traveling slower than his steed, and then riding off into the night leaving behind a towering inferno of burning Russkies and s\'mores.</p>\r\n<p>For almost ten years Count Casimir Pulaski battled the Russians in an endless string of skirmishes, pitched battles, and guerilla raids across Poland. Appointed commander-in-chief of revolutionary forces in 1768, Pulaski still continued to lead his armies from the front lines, personally launching a night raid on Krakow, defending the fortified cloister at Czestochowa from a full-scale Russian assault, and breaking the siege of Starokonstantynow with about a hundred guys armed with two-by-fours and a roll of duct tape. In his wild melees against enemy cavalry and artillery units he was shot in the arm and slashed in the hand by a saber, was captured by the Turks and the Russians, escaped from both, met the Emperor of Austria, won a major pitched battle against the Tsar himself, and took part in a failed attempt to abduct the King of Poland and force him to grow a pair of balls so he could stand up to the Russians. When Pulaski\'s father and brothers were killed in action, he assimilated their units into his own. When the Prussians saw how much fun the Russkies were having looting and plundering Poland and decided to get in on the fun, Pulaski charged their asses as well. When the King of Poland confiscated Pulaski\'s land, stripped him of his wealth, and declared him an outlaw and an enemy of the Polish people, this determined war-mongering asskicker fled to Turkey, joined the Turkish Army, and participated in a 3-month campaign against the Russians that set most of the Crimean peninsula on fire.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/pulaski4.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>Polish lancer.&nbsp; Not pictured: His lance.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Unfortunately for Pulaski, his revolution was eventually crushed by the overwhelming power of the enemy, and broke, wounded, and unable to find an army, the Count moved to Paris, where lived in poverty, and spent some time in debtors\' prison. Then, in 1775, the defeated cavalryman met a dude named Benjamin Franklin who just so happened to be looking for a few good military commanders to help his fledgling revolution in its struggle against royalist douchebaggery. Pulaski, already renowned as one of the best guerilla cavalry commanders in Europe, heard Ben\'s story, got pumped up about beating up a whole new batch of Euro king-lovers, took the first ship to America, and was immediately appointed commander of George Washington\'s personal bodyguard force. In Pulaski\'s first military engagement the British broke through American lines and started bearing down on Washington himself, so Pulaski unhesitatingly led the 30-man bodyguard unit straight into combat, charging the rapidly-closing enemy while still wearing the military dress uniform of the Polish hussars. Pulaski was wounded in the melee, but is credited with saving the life of the commander-in-chief of Continental Forces and the future First President of the United States. Washington rewarded him by inducting the Count into the Freemasons and appointing him the first overall commander of all American cavalry forces.</p>\r\n<p>General Pulaski responded to this honor by writing the book on American cavalry. Literally. As in, he wrote the manual for American cavalry tactics, strategy, training, and organization, basing it largely on time-honored Polish cavalry customs dating back to the days of the <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/hussars.html\">Winged Hussars</a>. Some of the fundamentals set up by Pulaski are still employed in current U.S. cavalry operations, a detail that usually gets Pulaski referred to as \"The Father of American Cavalry\". Which is awesome (natch).</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/pulaski3.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<table style=\"width: 500px;\" align=\"center\">\r\n<tbody>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td><span>Legend has it that the American cavalry\'s taste for napalm in the morning is derived from Pulaski\'s typical breakfast during the Revolution: Musketballs and firebombs, straight up, on the rocks with a fifth of vodka and the tears of his enemies.</span></td>\r\n</tr>\r\n</tbody>\r\n</table>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Casimir Pulaski continued to prove himself in battle against the loyalists time and time again, waxing the redcoats in the face with a sword any time he could find them. He fought at Brandywine Creek. He covered the American withdrawal during the Battle of Germantown. He set up a secure perimeter around Valley Forge while the army was in winter quarters. He assisted Mad Anthony Wayne in a balls-out attack that captured the town of Haddonfield from the British.</p>\r\n<p>Despite being placed in overall command of every Colonial cavalry unit in America, Pulaski was a war-mongering hardass who just wasn\'t smiling unless he was there on the front lines embedding the point of his saber into the fleshy part of his enemies. When George Washington suggested that maybe the Overall Commander of American Cavalry Forces shouldn\'t be out there at the head of his men charging enemy towns with a sword raised over his head, Pulaski resigned his post and requested permission from Congress to set up his own independent mercenary unit that could act without military or Congressional oversight whatsoever. The result was Pulaski\'s Legion &ndash; six companies of cavalry and infantry comprised of Maryland militiamen, disenfranchised British deserters, and hardcore soldiers of fortune from Ireland, Germany, Poland, and France. Equipped with the best swords, armor, and guns Pulaski could afford with his own personal funds (which were quite extensive once his sister managed to free up the holds on his family\'s wealth), these guys were notable because they employed two companies of Lancers &ndash; which is exactly what it sounds like &ndash; dude charging across the battlefield with fucking lances, European feudal knight style, then pulling out pistols and muskets and capping fools at close range when need be. Charging into combat under a banner hand-embroidered by Moravian nuns from Bethlehem, PA, Pulaski raided British camps in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and South Carolina, charging anyone he could find with reckless/badass abandon, without orders or any regard for his own safety. Sure, he got some of his guys bayoneted to death in their sleep by some New Jersey-based British ninjas once, but he also helped defend the city of Charleston from British siege by bum-rushing a force that outnumbered him three-to-one while he was basically dying of malaria.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/pulaski5.png\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Casimir Pulaski\'s last ride came in 1778, during his defense of the British attack on Savannah. Despite being heavily outnumbered by a ridiculously-huge force of redcoats, Pulaski knew his only options were to surrender or launch a Butch and Sundance blaze of glory death charge. So, without thinking twice, the former Overall Commander of American Cavalry Forces launched a psycho assault straight into the teeth of the enemy, hoping that his attack would rally the morale of his troops to fight even harder and hold the city. He was blasted with grapeshot at extreme close range and died of his wounds at the age of 34.</p>\r\n<p>Now, as I mentioned in the beginning, there are some historians who claim this guy was worthless as a military commander. He didn\'t win his revolution, most of his heroic attacks were cavalry charges launched in battles that had already been lost (albeit not by him directly), and while he sided with America in the revolution he still thought aristocratic societies were the bomb and never really \"got it\" with regards to liberty and equality and democracy and all that shit. I\'d argue that if this guy was so terrible, they probably wouldn\'t have honored him by naming ten American cities, a county in Illinois, a half-dozen bridges, two highways, a skyway, a fort, a Polish warship, four American warships, and a <em>Star Trek: The Next Generation</em> character after him. He wouldn\'t have been one of only 7 foreign-born people in history to receive honorary United States Citizenship, or have his face on a U.S. postage stamp. And he definitely wouldn\'t have had his name on the side of the Cold War American nuclear ballistic missile submarine, the <em>USS Pulaski</em>, a fun little detail that means that if we had actually gone to Matthew Broderick <em>Wargames</em> Thermonuclear War with the Soviets in the 80s then Pulaski would have had the last laugh in his life-or-death murder-feud with the Russians.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/pulaski6.png\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<center><span>\"He died as he lived &ndash; a hero, but an enemy to kings.\"<br /><br /> &ndash; The King of Poland, upon hearing of Pulaski\'s death</span></center>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Links:</span><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://www.polishamericancenter.org/Pulaski.htm\">Polish-American Cultural Center</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://polskiinternet.com/english/casimirpulaski.html\">Polski Internet Bio</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://www.poles.org/PulaskiBio.html\">Timeline of His Life</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casimir_Pulaski\">Wikipedia</a></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Sources:</span><br /><br /><span> Denslow, William R., and Harry S. Truman. <em>10,000 Famous Freemasons from A to Z</em>. Kessinger, 1959.<br /><br /> \"Casimir Pulaski\". <em>American Monthly Magazine</em>, vol. 37, August 1910.<br /><br /> Griffin, Martin Ignatius Joseph. <em>Catholics and the American Revolution</em>. Author, 1911.<br /><br /> Lanning, Michael Lee. <em>The American Revolution 100</em>. Sourcebooks, 2009. </span></p>','2012-08-10','821629121782','pulaski.jpg','pulaski-small.jpg','Casimir Pulaski','Polish rebel who invented American Cavalry and led a Legion of European lancers in the American Revolution.','\"I came here, where freedom is being defended, to serve it, and to live or die for it.\"'),('Saparmurat Atayevich Niyazov','February 19, 1940','December 21, 2006','Gypjak, Turkmen SSR, USSR','21st-century Turkmen Politician','<p>You can say what you want about His Excellency Saparmurat Niyazov Turkmenbashy the Great, Father of the Turkmen People, President of Turkmenistan, and Chairman of the Cabinet of Ministers (unless of course you happen to live in Turkmenistan, in which case saying anything bad about this dude will probably get you arrested and/or possibly beaten with sticks), but you and I both know that if we were ever given supreme totalitarian dictatorial control over an oil-rich third-world developing country we would play it exactly the same way he did &ndash; by abusing the hell out of our power, banning everything we don\'t like or understand, and bending the entire landscape of the country according to our fickle whims. I mean, this is a dude who changed his language\'s word for bread to his mother\'s name, renamed the month of September after the book he wrote, and once tried to build a permanent structure made out of ice in the middle of the damned desert just to prove that not even the weather could stop him from completely and utterly dominating everything that stood before him. He\'s an epic world leader and crazy person who takes the whole over-done \"delusional megalomaniac tyrant\" thing, flips it on its head, and makes it so absurdly awesome that you actually find yourself pulling for the dude.</p>\r\n<p>Born February 19, 1940, in the former Soviet Republic of Turkmenistan, the most badass world dictator of the 21st century basically came from an absolutely dirt-poor ass-nothing family that found itself constantly mired in horrific tragedy. His grandfather was purged by Stalin in the 30s for the crime of owning his own business. His father died fighting Nazis in North Ossetia during World War II. His mother and both his siblings were killed in a horrific earthquake that leveled the city of Ashgabat in 1948, and 8 year-old Saparmurat Niyazov only managed to become the sole survivor of his nuclear family by spending eight days digging his way out of the ruined rubble of his crushed apartment with his bare hands. When he clawed his way out of the rubble Saparmurat was given a little rudimentary medical treatment by EMTs and then shipped off to some miserable Soviet-run orphanage in the middle of the Caucasus mountains. This cannot possibly have been an easy life, but Niyazov persevered, got a scholarship to Leningrad Polytechnic, earned his degree in Power Engineering (which is like regular engineering but more Xtreme), took a crappy job in a tiny little electrical routing station near his hometown, and secretly plotted and schemed how he might assume complete uncontested control over his homeland and rule it with an iron fist. This is, of course, something almost every miserable desk-job employee does in his or her spare time, but as it would turn out Niyazov somehow possessed that extra drive/insanity to actually make this happen in real life.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/niyazov1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>To this end Niyazov got hardcore involved in politics, rising through the ranks quickly to be chosen First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Turkmenistan (basically the supreme ruler of the Turkmen SSR) at age 45. He assumed a hardline communist position, firmly opposing touchy-feeling freedom-of-the-press bullshit like Perestroika and Glastnost, but when the military coup to overthrow Gorbachev failed in 1991 this guy immediately changed his shit, declared Turkmenistan an independent Western-style Democracy, and arranged for free and open Presidential elections across his country.</p>\r\n<p>Saparmurat Niyazov ran unopposed and won the position with 99.9% of the popular vote. He was so excited about this that he bypassed the usual process and immediately gave himself an annually-awarded national medal for \"furthering the goals of the Turkmen people.\" Then he went out and founded the Association of Turkmens of the World, an organization that existed only so Niyazov could officially and formerly announce himself supreme ruler of all ethnic Turkmen people on the planet. To appropriately commemorate this new responsibility he then officially changed his last name to Turkmenbashy, an honorific title that means \"Father of all the Turkmens,\" which is kind of along the lines of <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/ataturk.html\">Ataturk</a> only this title self-appointed rather than heaped on him by millions of devoted followers. Then, since Niyazov wasn\'t all that keen on other people digging into his beeswax, one of his first actions as Supreme Authoritarian All-Powerful Dictator was to declare that Turkmenistan would be permanently neutral in all matters of foreign affairs, and that it would never join any economic, political, or military alliance ever. Niyazov had this proposal typed up on letterhead and got it passed through the United Nations as an official declaration signed by all 185 UN member countries.</p>\r\n<p>As a testament to his great act of international diplomacy (and to demonstrate his neutrality to everything except his own raging megalomania), Niyazov ordered the construction of a 250-foot tall \"Neutrality Arch\", a towering marble analogue for his boner topped by a id=\"mce_marker\"2 million gold statue of himself mounted on a mechanical axis that rotates 360-degress every day so he\'s always facing the sun.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/niyazov2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Ruling his own private Tropico from a $60 million gold-plated white marble presidential palace, Saparmurat Turkmenbashy the Great next proceeded to go on an epic binge of totalitarian despotism unrivalled since the days of psycho Roman Emperors appointing their pets to lofty Senate positions. He created a new Turkmen alphabet, basing it on the Latin one instead of the Cyrillic. He renamed the months and the days of the week after himself, his book, members of his family, and Turkmen heroes from history, including guys like <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/alparslan.html\">Alp Arslan</a> who weren\'t actually Turkmen but whom he took credit for anyways. He changed the word for bread to the name of his deceased mother. He named several schools, two airports, a city, some theaters, a brand of vodka, two kinds of cologne, a kind of tea, and a meteorite after himself. He plastered the entire country with hand-painted portraits of himself, his mother, and his book, put his face on every denomination of currency, ordered every citizen of his country fly a Turkmenistan flag over their homes at all times, and wrote a new national anthem so that every sporting event started with a choir singing about how great he was. He changed the programming of all three national state-run television channels so that at any time during the day the citizens of Turkmenistan would flip on the TV and see a real-time live feed of Niyazov holding meetings in his presidential office. Instead of the FOX or NBC logo at the bottom of the screen, Turkmenistan national TV naturally had a portrait of Saparmurat Niyazov emblazoned in gold instead.</p>\r\n<p>Saparmurat Turkmenbashy the Great then abolished the death penalty, algebra, physics, P.E., the Internet, the Hippocratic Oath, libraries, and free press. He also banned recorded music, smoking, beards, and chewing tobacco, outlawed the ballet, opera, the circus, symphonic orchestras, and the National Academy of Science, and had musicians arrested for lip synching at concerts because he thought that was the biggest load of crap ever. He ordered that every car imported into the country have the steering wheel taken out and moved over to left-hand drive instead of right-hand drive because he wanted people to drive on the wrong side of the road, but while he was doing this he did not also order that the stereos be removed from these cars &ndash; he just made it illegal to listen to them. He banished dogs from the capital because he thought they smelled bad. He banned gold teeth, saying that if people wanted to harden their teeth they should chew on soup bones instead. He forbid make-up on women, because Turkmen chicks were hot enough already and didn\'t need it. They were so pretty in fact, that if you were a foreigner and you wanted to marry a hot Turkmen babe, you first had to pay a $50,000 fee to the government in order to get a permit to have the ceremony performed.</p>\r\n<p>Then, content that he\'d put in a good day\'s work, he ordered the construction of more gold statues of himself.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/niyazov3.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<table style=\"width: 500px;\" align=\"center\">\r\n<tbody>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td><span>\"If I was a worker and my president gave me all the things they have here in Turkmenistan, I would not only paint his picture, I would have his picture on my shoulder, or on my clothing... I&rsquo;m personally against seeing my pictures and statues in the street - but it&rsquo;s what people want.\"</span></td>\r\n</tr>\r\n</tbody>\r\n</table>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>When Turkmenbashy the Great wasn\'t populating the capital with larger-than-life statues of his parents or hand-embroidered depictions of himself riding bears into the sunset on a unicorn rainbow, he wrote a towering work of literary greatness called the Ruhnama. In the Ruhnama Niyazov almost completely fabricates the entire history of the ethnic Turkmen people dating back to the days of Noah\'s Ark, retconning their entire history to include many significant figures who almost certainly were not Turkmens. Niyazov then goes on to provide spiritual guidance, self-help advice, and a couple literary poems he wrote about Turkmenistan, then finishes it off with whatever random personal anecdotes popped into his head while he was writing the thing.</p>\r\n<p>Naturally, when he was done and the book was published Niyazov was so pumped up by how awesome it was that he awarded himself the National Award for Literature, ordered copies put in every library and school in Turkmenistan, made it mandatory reading at every level of elementary and collegiate education, and had questions related to his book added to the drivers\' license test and the civil service exam. Considering it one part history book, one part religious text (in 2006 Niyazov declared on state television that anyone who read the book cover-to-cover three times would automatically get into heaven), on par with the Bible or Led Zeppelin IV, Niyazov told all the mosques in Turkmenistan to shelve it in a place of honor next to the Qur\'an. When some mosques protested, understandably saying that this was probably a little sacrilegious, Niyazov had those mosques demolished.</p>\r\n<p>Niyazov would later have a copy of Ruhnama jettisoned out the airlock of a Russian shuttle so that he could inform his people that he had conquered outer space.</p>\r\n<p>Oh, and he built a 50-foot statue of his book in the middle of the capital of Turkmenistan just because he could:</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/niyazov4.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>At 8pm every night, this thing opens up and a video recording plays a passage from the book. As an author, I dig this. If I could have something like this constructed out of <em>BADASS</em>, I\'d probably live inside it like James and the Giant Peach.</p>\r\n<p>Despite all of this insanity, perhaps Niyazov\'s most widely-appreciated act of despotic awesomeness was when he declared he was going to build an \"Ice Palace\" in the middle of the scorching sands of the Kara Kum desert. Envisioned as a permanent structure constructed entirely out of solid ice, the Ice Palace was supposed to fit 1,000 people, and, awesomely enough, was going to involve an ice skating rink inside so that the people who lived in the desert could learn to skate if they wanted. How the hell he intended to pull this off and keep this damn thing standing in 100+ degree temperatures is beyond me, but you kind of have to love this dude\'s desire to give the finger to geography and climate and global warming and sanity by ordering something like this. It was supposed to be part of a bigger \"Disney-style\" complex that would include roller coasters and the world\'s largest aquarium, but I haven\'t been able to dig up any pictures of the completed project so it\'s unlikely that this ever happened.</p>\r\n<p>I mean, think about it. This is an ice palace:</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/niyazov5.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>And this is Turkmenistan:</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/niyazov6.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Now, it\'s important to mention that despite his tyrannical iron-fisted grip on Turkmenistan and the fact that he was brutally oppressive and kept his people in poverty while living in a billion-dollar mansion, Saparmurat Turkmenbashy was also weirdly kind of beloved by his people. Sure, part of this is because if you talked smack about him you got your ass thrown in prison, but it\'s also partly because he took Turkmenistan from a poor Soviet Republic to a self-sufficient economy that internally produced 85% of its goods and materials and made billions in trade thanks to the fact that it is situated on one of the world\'s largest deposits of natural gas. True, he put most of that money into his insane projects, but he also provided free clean water, gasoline, electricity, natural gas, and table salt for his people, built up agriculture where there was none, declared the second Sunday in August \"Melon Day\", and kept his people out of the bloody, expensive international conflicts that tore apart the region around him.</p>\r\n<p>But tyrants, even the most benevolent dictators, are not always universally-loved by everyone, and Niyazov was no exception.</p>\r\n<p>Two main stories circulate about people who maybe somehow for some reason weren\'t in love with this guy. The first time was in 2002, when three gunmen opened fire on Niyazov\'s presidential limo in an assassination attempt that may very well actually have been staged by Niyazov himself (this is debatable). The Presidente-por-Vida of Turkmenistan responded by arresting his only political rival the following day, throwing the dude in prison, and then making that guy run against him in only the second presidential election Turkmenistan would ever have. Running against a guy currently imprisoned for treason isn\'t as hard as you might think, especially when you control every aspect of the government with an authoritarian death-grip, and Niyazov won the election with 99.9% of the vote (he could never quite get that last 0.01%). He then told the traitor that he\'d release him from prison on one condition &ndash; that the guy write two books:&nbsp; One about how he plotted the assassination attempt, and the other about how great Niyazov is.</p>\r\n<p>The guy did it.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/niyazov7.gif\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>The second minor civil disturbance during Niyazov\'s reign took place in the Summer of 2004, when some jackasses went around in the middle of the night and put up a bunch of fliers saying that maybe Saparmurat Niyazov Turkmenbashy the Great wasn\'t all that great after all. Niyazov gave his police force one week to find the traitors. When they failed, he fired his Cabinet, the Chief of Police, and the Director of the Police Academy on live national television.</p>\r\n<p>Saparmurat Niyazov, supreme ruler of Turkmenistan, died in 2006 of a heart attack at age 66, after single-handedly ruling a country of 5 million people for over 20 years. He was buried in the biggest mosque in the world &ndash; the id=\"mce_marker\"00 million Kipchak Mosque, a building of his own construction that he decorated with gold-leaf inscriptions of passages from his book &ndash; and left his empire to his dentist. His wife and kids might have been a little bitter about not taking over the reigns of government, but don\'t worry about them &ndash; they\'re living pretty nicely off the two billion dollars Niyazov siphoned off the top of his governmental operating budget and stashed in Swiss and German banks.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/niyazov8.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>\"If one upsets his wife or daughter, he is not a Turkmen since they are very pleasant by nature,<br />and their souls are pleasant too.\"<br /><br />- Saparmurat Niyazov, <em>Ruhnama</em></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://presidentniyazov.tripod.com/\">Tripod Site Extolling His Virtues</a> (I love this)<br /><br /> <a href=\"http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6199021.stm\">BBC Obituary</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/3554626.stm\">Turkmen Leader Orders Ice Palace</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=12316714\">NPR</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://www.economist.com/node/8466143?zid=309&amp;ah=80dcf288b8561b012f603b9fd9577f0e\">The Economist</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/21/AR2006122101653.html\">Washington Post</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saparmurat_Niyazov\">Wikipedia</a></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Sources:</span><br /><br /><span> Halpern, Micah D. <em>Thugs</em>. Thomas Nelson, 2007.<br /><br /> Knowlton, MaryLee. <em>Turkmenistan</em>. Marshall Cavendish, 2006.<br /><br /> Wallechinsky, David. <em>Tyrants</em>. HarperCollins, 2006. </span></p>','2012-08-17','773155722100','niyazov.jpg','niyazov8-small.jpg','Saparmurat Niyazov','The most insane dictator you\'ve never heard of.','\"There are no opposition parties, so how can we grant them freedom?\"'),('The Dahomey Amazons','c. 1645','c. 1894','Kingdom of Dahomey, Benin','19th-century Beninese Soldier','<p>The Dahomey Amazons are the only documented all-female official front-line combat arms military unit in modern history. Tough, uber-intense asskicking women single-mindedly devoted to hardening themselves into ruthless instruments of battlefield destruction, these machete-wielding, musket-slinging lady terminators were rightly-feared throughout Western Africa for over 250 years, not only for their fanatical devotion to battle, but for their utter refusal to back down or retreat from any fight unless expressly ordered to do so by their king. If you were some poor conscript douchebag militia soldier hanging out around your barracks and you saw these scary-as-fuck kill-chicks suddenly start charging out of the woods in your direction, screaming their war chants with their muskets barking fire and their signature double-edged two-foot-long machetes brandished threateningly over their heads, you had one fleeting moment to overcome your crippling panic and defend yourself. Because if you failed to kill them &ndash; and I mean if you failed to kill <em>every single last fucking one of them</em>, some murderous woman was going to club you unconscious with a musket butt, drag you back to her capital, chop off your head with one swing of her machete, boil the skin off of your decapitated face, and then use your skull to decorate the royal palace.</p>\r\n<p>Created around 1645 by the Dahomey King Ada Honzoo, the Amazons weren\'t initially designed to serve as frontal assault shock troops sent in to crush the enemy\'s spirits (and skulls) in a frenzied wave of bloodlusted fury. Instead, they started out as a small team of women who specialized in bringing down elephants, and who would go out on organized, efficient pachyderm hunts while the men were out fighting in wars. Eventually, possibly due to a lack of manpower or possibly because of their ruthless efficiency, Ada Honzoo promoted them to his personal bodyguard unit, expanding the unit to 800 women warriors with spears, bows, and war clubs, which in turn grew in size to an elite military unit of over 4,000 warriors. As a shout-out to their roots the Amazons chose to honor their heritage by naming their first battalion the Elephant Destroyers. The second battalion, it should be noted, were known as the Reapers &ndash; women who ditched those pesky flintlock muskets and instead went to battle armed with a razor-sharp three-foot machete they wielded with two hands.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/dahomey1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>\"Give a dog a bone and he will break it and eat. So will we do with the cities of the enemy.\"</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>The Amazons were recruited in a number of ways. Sometimes they were volunteers &ndash; women who were sick of their bullshit day-to-day lives, poor women seeking battlefield glory, or even the occasional royal concubine who decided she was much more comfortable cutting people in half for the King than she was producing male heirs for him. Even more awesomely than that, however, was that if a woman was \"too misbehaved\" to make a proper wife for a nice Dahoman boy, the girl\'s father (or husband!) could appeal to the King and His Royal Highness would conscript her into the Amazons. Sure, maybe Joe Asshole didn\'t need an uppity woman talking shit about how she didn\'t want to be a fucking housekeeper, but the King figure he could put her talents to work for the good of the country (and he did). Once a woman was in the Amazons, she became off-limits &ndash; she was forbidden to have sex (because if she got pregnant she couldn\'t fight), and the crime for any man laying even a single finger on an Amazon was instant death.</p>\r\n<p>The Amazons went through intense physical training that far exceeded anything the male soldiers were willing to undertake. They wrestled, fought, and underwent grueling calesthenics and brutally-long runs on a daily basis. They climbed a thirty-foot wall lined with thorny brambles without showing pain. Recruits were sent into the woods with just a machete and told to survive for nine days. They trained for live-fire exercises by arming enemy prisoners of war with clubs, positioning them behind a stockade, and then assaulting it and killing everyone they could catch. Yeah, it\'s fucked up, but that\'s just how it was &ndash; the Amazons were in constant competition for glory with the male units, and they knew that if anyone was going to take them seriously either at home or on the battlefield, they needed to be twice as hard as anyone else out there. And they were. They kept their weapons and uniforms clean, marched in lock-step precision, and when these women sprinted barefoot and pissed into combat beneath their unit battle flag &ndash; a Voodoo fetish made from the bones and skin of dead enemy soldiers &ndash; everyone who saw them pretty much pissed themselves and ran for it.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/dahomey2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>\"With these guns in our hands and powder in our cartridge boxes, what has the King to fear?</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>So, thanks to these crazy chicks and their unstoppable thirst for the warm blood of their recently-eviscerated enemies, King Ada Honzoo and his successors not only kept his woefully-undersized tribe from being crushed by the powerful enemy kingdoms that surrounded him, they crushed them so brutally that by the time the dust and blood spray cleared the Kingdom of Dahomey was a massive empire stretching across Western Africa. They conquered the Kingdom of Savi in 1727. Later that same year, they conquered the Whydah people, then publicly executed 4,000 prisoners of war as sacrifices to the Voodoo gods. They crushed the Allada. They captured Okeadon when Amazons snuck over the walls during the night, unlocked the gate from the inside, then watched as the rest of their sisters flooded into the city in a wave of murderous fury, collecting so many skulls that the King of Dahomey built a throne out of it and still had extras to decorate the walls of his royal palace.</p>\r\n<p>The Dahomey Amazon motto was \"Conquer or Die\". These women swore an oath to die facing the enemy (any Amazons that fled a battle without being ordered to withdraw by the King himself were summarily executed on the spot), and, quite honestly, these chicks didn\'t have much tolerance for anyone else who didn\'t adhere to their admittedly-strict rules. And&hellip; they took it a little far sometimes. Like, after they\'d conquer an enemy city, while the King and his men were pillaging and introducing themselves to their new subjects, the Dahomey Amazons would spend the next couple days running through the wilderness looking for enemy soldiers who had fled the battle. If they caught them, they\'d drag the terrified warrior back by his hair. Then they\'d spend the next couple days cutting the guy\'s ears off, gouge out his eyes, and cutting off his fingers &ndash; a process that would take 3 days &ndash; and on the fourth day they\'d mercifully drag him before the king, decapitate him, and then lick his blood off the blade of their weapon. Then the guy\'s skull would be thrown onto the pile with the rest, the Dahomey would break out into one of their heroic battle chants, and then everyone would get really fucking hammered on rum and gin and dance until the sun came up.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/dahomey3.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>Blood for the Blood God. Skulls for the Skull Throne.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>In the 1850s King Gezo expanded the number of women soldiers to 6,000 &ndash; roughly half of his fighting forces. Under his command, the Dahomey conquered all of present-day Benin and most of Nigeria, including capturing several crucial ocean ports that allowed them to set up a lucrative trade route with the Europeans where they would sell captured POWs into slavery in exchange for guns and bullets. Kicking back on a throne made from the skulls and severed heads of vanquished enemy kings, surrounded by his loyal Amazon bodyguards, the King merely had to wave around his scepter (an awesome-looking thing fashioned from the leg bone of a defeated rival), and his fanatically-loyal warriors would pull their enemies apart limb from limb until all that remained was a sea of blood.</p>\r\n<p>It got to the point where every year there was a popular festival where the most senior Amazon commander would come to the king and make an argument for which rival civilization the Dahomey should obliterate next. The king would listen to his advisor, pick one target, and then the commander would go back to her unit, give her soldiers the name of a city, and they\'d crush that entire civilization to dust with machetes and musketballs.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/dahomey4.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>\"Whatever the town to be attacked, we will conquer or bury ourselves in its ruins.\"</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Well, as is the case any time you\'re talking about 19th-century African history, the Dahomey eventually bit off more than they could chew when they ran into the full might of a powerful, ultra-wealthy European nation with a modernized military and no compunctions about using it. One of the main differences is that this time it was the African nation that started the shit, mostly because they had no fucking respect for the French (or anyone else for that matter).</p>\r\n<p>It started in 1890, as King Behanzin was continuing his family\'s tradition of beating the shit out of everyone around them. One day he chose to capture some jackass bullshit port city that was horning in on his slave trade action, and he patentedly refused to give a shit that the town he was sending his Amazons to fuck up was actually a French protectorate. The Amazons assaulted the walls, set the city on fire, and rushed into the governor\'s palace. They found the Governor standing there, clutching the tri-color French flag, screaming about how \"this will protect me!\"</p>\r\n<p>The Dahomey Amazons decapitated him, made the guy\'s wife wrap the severed head up in the flag, then delivered the bloody head of the brutally-executed governor to their king still wrapped in a French flag.</p>\r\n<p>Awesome.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/dahomey6.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Well, the French thought this was a little less than awesome, and they declared war on the Dahomey. The Dahomey responded by assaulting the French city of Kotonou on March 4, 1890, rushing straight-on into the walls despite the fact that the Amazons were using flintlock muskets and the French had fucking Gatling guns and cannons. At first the French were a little hesitant to open fire on an army of gunslinging women, but they found their resolve pretty quickly when the first line of Amazon troops hit the wooden stockade, pulled it apart with their hands, then stuck their muskets through the holes and blasted the defenders at close range. At one point during this battle the Dahomey even made it over the wall, and one French soldier write about seeing his best friend decapitated with one swing of a machete from a pissed-off Amazon. When a second soldier knocked the weapon out of the woman\'s hand with his rifle butt, she threw him on the ground and tore out his larynx with her teeth.</p>\r\n<p>Her <em>teeth</em>.</p>\r\n<p>The French turned the tide of the battle when they had a fucking gunboat start opening fire on the Dahomey, and quite honestly no amount of bravery is going to save you when you\'re carrying ancient out-of-date muskets and your enemies are launching artillery shells and shooting at you with machine guns. The attack was driven off.</p>\r\n<p>I won\'t get too much into the gory details, but from this point on it gets kind of bad for the Dahomey Amazons. They fought bravely, nobody can deny that, battling the French in 24 pitched battles between 1890 and 1894, but ultimately their sword-swinging mayhem was no match for a modern industrial world power with top-of-the-line weaponry. Their charges were beaten off by intense gunfire, and in hand-to-hand combat the twenty-inch French rifle bayonets had roughly twice the reach of the Dahomey knives and machetes. The French conquered Dahomey in January 1894, driving King Behanzin into exile.</p>\r\n<p>Of the 4,000 Dahomey Amazons under King Behanzin\'s command, nearly all of them were killed hurling themselves fearlessly into battle. Only 50 women survived, and most of them, awesomely enough, went to the United States and joined Buffalo Bill\'s Wild West Show.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/dahomey5.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<table style=\"width: 500px;\" align=\"center\">\r\n<tbody>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td><span>\"There they are, 4,000 warriors, the 4,000 black virgins of Dahomey, the monarch\'s bodyguard, motionless in their war garments, with gun and knife in hand, ready to leap forward at the master\'s signal. Old or young, ugly or beautiful, they are wonderful to look at. They are as well built as the male warriors and their attitude is just as disciplined and correct, lined up as though against a rope\".</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://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/history/2011/09/dahomeys-women-warriors/\">Smithsonian History Blog</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://www.epa-prema.net/abomeyGB/resources/amazons.htm\">The Amazons of Dahomey</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://hitchcock.itc.virginia.edu/Slavery/details.php?categorynum=2&amp;categoryName=&amp;theRecord=128&amp;recordCount=240\">Dahomey Amazons</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dahomey_Amazons\">Wikipedia</a></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Sources:</span><br /><br /><span> Cummins, Joseph. <em>History\'s Great Untold Stories</em>. National Geographic, 2007.<br /><br /> Edgerton, Robert B. <em>Warrior Women</em>. Westview, 2000.<br /><br /> Forbes, Frederick Edwyn. <em>Dahomey and the Dahomans</em>. Longman, 1851.<br /><br /> Shaw, Albert. <em>The Review of Reviews</em>. Review of Reviews, 1892. </span></p>','2012-08-24','969516523244','dahomey.jpg','dahomey-small.jpg','Dahomey Amazons','The only full-time all-female combat arms military unit in modern history.','\"If soldiers go to war they should conquer or die.\"\r\n\r\n- Motto of the Dahomey Amazons'),('Neil Armstrong','August 5, 1930','August 25, 2012','Wapakoneta, OH, USA','20th-century American Pilot','<p>Here\'s a fun fact: As Neil Armstrong was descending the Lunar Module towards the surface of the Moon, hurtling 50,000 feet towards the rocky surface of an alien landscape at a little over 60 miles an hour, the entire instrumentation panel failed on him. And by \"failed\", I mean it didn\'t just die, I mean it flipped it\'s shit and went totally insane HAL 9000-style, screaming at the Apollo 11 mission commander with alarms and klaxons and warnings about how there was too much telemetric data coming in for the state-of-the-art Lunar Module computer to process and holy shit pork chop sandwiches oh my god WTF we\'re all gonna die. Undeterred by the ominous beacons of his impending fiery mutilation, Neil Armstrong did what pretty much nobody in their right minds would have done.</p>\r\n<p>He turned the computer off.</p>\r\n<p>So here was Neil Armstrong, harnessed into a cramped little aluminum coffin packed with all the technological computing power of a TI-85 solar-powered calculator, fighting the controls trying to manually place a two-passenger missile packed with jet fuel on the surface of an interstellar object nobody has ever attempted to land on before, and to do it delicately enough that it doesn\'t crash, fall over, explode, or otherwise bring about the brutally-violent deaths of everyone inside. The Lunar Module had just twenty seconds of fuel left in the tank, and only had one control &ndash; Activate Thruster &ndash; meaning Armstrong\'s job was like playing Atari <em>Moon Lander</em> on an Etch-a-Sketch while inside the trunk of a car doing 270 down the Autobahn where any slight fuck-up sends you catapulting through a steel wall and subsequently ripped apart by the vacuum of space like those guys in <em>Event Horizon</em>.</p>\r\n<p>It was an impossible task, only marginally possible for the greatest pilots and video game enthusiasts the world has to offer. He\'d have one shot at it -- and his actions would either make world history or bring about his terrible premature death.</p>\r\n<p>We, of course, all know how the story ended:</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/neilarmstrong1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>Bam.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>The first man to set foot on any celestial object other than Earth was born Captain Kirk style on a small farm in middle America. Born in Ohio in August 1930 and growing up during the Great Depression will teach a man some shit about himself, and Neil Armstrong learned values like the importance of hard work, busting his ass for 40 cents an hour as a stock clerk in a pharmacy before and after school. When this guy wasn\'t smoking Math tests like Cuban cigars or playing baritone in a presumably-awesome jazz band called the Mississippi Moonshiners, he became an Eagle Scout, helped work the farm, and got so fucking pumped about aircraft that he built a homemade wind tunnel out of shit he found around town so he could test out custom model airplane designs he made by combining multiple kits together into some badass Frankenstein aircraft shit. He earned his pilot\'s license on his 16th birthday, and before this kid could even legally <em>drive</em> he was working a day job test-flying 65-horsepower two-seater prop planes that had just been repaired &ndash; taking these formerly-busted little wooden planes out on joyrides to see if they could be piloted without falling apart and crashing back down to earth. He\'d got the job by default because nobody else wanted it, and ended up logging so many hours as a teenage test pilot that the Navy offered him a scholarship to study Aeronautical Engineering at Purdue (provided he commit to spending a couple years as a naval aviator when he was done).</p>\r\n<p>Neil Armstrong did two years at Purdue, then transferred to NAS Pensacola, earning his wings at the age of 20 and shipping off to the Korean War, where he was the youngest kid in his squadron. He flew 78 combat missions in a Grumman F9F Panther, an early model jet fighter, where he earned three Air Medals, evaded capture and was rescued after being shot down behind enemy lines, and survived an emergency crash-landing on the deck of the USS <em>Essex</em>. When all that was done, he said fuck it, I\'ll go back and finish my degree and marry a beauty queen sorority girl because WTF else do I have going on.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/neilarmstrong2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>Like he owns the place.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>While the military thing wasn\'t really doing it for him, flying was in Neil Armstrong\'s blood. After school he went to Edwards Air Force Base outside Los Angeles and spent the next seven years working as a research test pilot &ndash; which is basically the exact same thing he was doing when he was 16, only instead of flying rickety wooden propeller planes he was hurtling through the stratosphere at three times the speed of sound in the cockpit of an experimental test fighter that was packed with enough rocket fuel to vaporize sheet metal. As a research test pilot, this self-proclaimed \"white-sock, pocket-protector, nerdy engineer\" (he hated working out and once said, \"I believe that every human being has a finite number of heartbeats, and I don\'t plan to waste any of mine running around doing exercises.\") not only had the exciting/terrifying job of testing out wildly-unstable jets capable of shredding the sound barrier like a cheese grater dismembering a tomato, but then when he was done he got to write a report about what was awesome about the plane and what needed to be fixed.</p>\r\n<p>Neil Armstrong logged over 3,000 hours at the controls of over 200 aircraft ranging from canvas gliders that only used a dashboard compass for navigation to supersonic experimental jet fighters with gigantic rocket engines grafted onto the fuselage, piloting anything, any time, anywhere, regardless of how likely it was to blow up in his face and kill him. When this dude wasn\'t ripping off hellaciously-righteous loop-de-loops in <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/yeager.html\">Chuck Yeager</a>\'s X-1B, streaking through the stratosphere at Mach 5.7 at an altitude of 207,000 feet in the cockpit of an X-15 hypersonic rocket-powered suborbital jet fighter, or testing out aircraft that ended up being the basis for fighters like the F-14 and the F-18, he was flying as the \"chase plane\", following some other nutcase in a human-propelled death-missile and making notes about whether or not he thought that poor bastard in front of him was about to explode in a cloud of jet fuel and awesomeness due to some minor technical oversight in the structural design of the machine he was piloting.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/neilarmstrong3.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>Yes, that is a very interesting point.<br />But, in my defense, fuck you, I\'m Neil Armstrong.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Armstrong\'s interesting skillset as both a hardcore twitch-reflex hotshot pilot and a ultimate mega-engineering nerd got him tapped in 1962 to become the first civilian to join the American astronaut program. With his fat salary of $27,000 a year, Armstrong underwent intense training to prepare him for what he was about to face.</p>\r\n<p>In 1966 Neil Armstrong became the first U.S. civilian in space when he commanded the Gemini 8 mission &ndash; a mission that would attempt the first-ever spaceship-to-spaceship docking operation. Armstrong masterfully maneuvered the Gemini 8 capsule alongside some random unmanned rocket in orbit around the earth, linked the two vessels up, then almost became mildly annoyed when suddenly one of Gemini\'s thrusters activated, sending the two linked spaceships into an out-of-control spiraling series of endless space barrel rolls. Armstrong, never one to panic no matter how insanely the mission is going down in flames, simply flipped a switch, undocked with the space junk, turned on his re-entry controls (while still in space!), righted the roll, calmly informed Houston that the mission was coming home early, and masterfully dropped his tiny capsule from outer space into the Pacific Ocean.</p>\r\n<p>He wore sunglasses while doing this. He was just that fucking cool.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/neilarmstrong4.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>You had to try really hard to throw something at Neil Armstrong that would generate any kind of emotional response. I don\'t really remember where I saw this, but my favorite Neil Armstrong story goes like this: One morning, Buzz Aldrin or Michael Collins (I can\'t remember which) came into the office to get started on work. Neil was sitting at his desk, working on some paperwork, and just looked up for a second to say \"good morning\" before going back to his writing. Buzz/Michael went to the NASA shift lead to ask what was going on that day, and was told by the NASA techs that the missions were scrapped today because about an hour ago Neil Armstrong was running a test flight on the Lunar Landing Module when it\'s equipment failed and it plummeted to the earth and exploded in a giant fireball. Neil had almost died, but had somehow managed to eject a mere 200 feet from the ground and parachuted to safety with only minor injuries. When Buzz/Michael protested that he\'d just seen Neil two seconds ago, the NASA guy was like, \"Oh, yeah&hellip; he\'s filling out the after-mission report.\"</p>\r\n<p>So you can see why he was pretty much the perfect man to be sitting at the controls of the Lunar Module (yes, the fully-realized version of the vehicle that had almost blown him into blood vapor in the previous paragraph) as it attempted the first-ever human descent to the Moon. In July, 1969, the 38-year old Armstrong was selected as mission commander on Apollo 11, strapped to a ridiculously-gigantic Saturn V rocket, and catapulted into space by a massive controlled explosion that propelled him from 0 to 243,000 miles an hour in two seconds. He spent ten days in space, landed the Lunar Module on Manual mode, and spent two and a half hours bouncing around on the moon collecting rocks and shit while one-fifth of the world\'s population watched slack-jawed on their TV sets. While they were out there, Neil and <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/aldrin.html\">Buzz Aldrin</a> planted a U.S. flag, a plaque commemorating international peace, and a monument to dead U.S. and Soviet astronauts/cosmonauts, talked to Richard Nixon on a radiophone, and planted a reflector dish in the Sea of Tranquility that allowed some nerds in Austin Texas to shoot a laser into space and measure the exact distance from the Earth to the Moon, mostly so that people throughout the world would know that this dude traveled 232,271 miles FOR SCIENCE.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><object width=\"420\" height=\"315\" data=\"http://www.youtube.com/embed/RMINSD7MmT4\" type=\"application/x-shockwave-flash\"><param name=\"src\" value=\"http://www.youtube.com/embed/RMINSD7MmT4\" /></object></p>\r\n<table style=\"width: 500px;\" align=\"center\">\r\n<tbody>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td><span>\"The landing approach was, by far, the most difficult and challenging part of the flight. Walking on the lunar surface was very interesting, but it was something we looked on as reasonably safe and predictable&hellip; Pilots take no special joy in walking: pilots like flying. Pilots generally take pride in a good landing, not in getting out of the vehicle.\"</span></td>\r\n</tr>\r\n</tbody>\r\n</table>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Neil and Buzz got the LM back off the ground, rejoined the Command Module, hurtled through the Earth\'s atmosphere at 35,000 feet per second, and returned home to a massive parade in their honor. Armstrong met the Queen, the Pope, the President, and the Shah of Iran (there\'s an interesting urban legend that Armstrong heard the Muslim call to prayer while in space and immediately converted to Islam, but he repeatedly denied this story), received medals of honor from 17 different countries, and also had a couple airports, streets, and even a piece of the Moon\'s geography named after him.</p>\r\n<p>Fairly certain that he was never gonna top that, Neil Armstrong retired from astronauting a year later and bought a farm in Ohio. That was going well for a while, but in 1979 he got his wedding ring stuck in the gears of a grain tractor (Neil Armstrong was still working a farm!) and had the thing rip his entire finger off, but in true Neil Friggin\' Armstrong fashion he just calmly walked over, picked up the finger, put it on ice, and drove to the hospital to get it re-attached. He went on to work as a Professor of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Cincinnati, was an administrator at NASA, ran his own aerospace tech company, and once sued his barber for selling a lock of his hair on eBay for $3,000 (Armstrong told him to either return the hair or donate the $3k to charity&hellip; the guy donated).</p>\r\n<p>Any time anyone ever asked him about him being the first human to ever set foot on the Moon, Neil Armstrong would just say that it was the culmination of over a decade of hard work by over 400,000 people and leave it at that.</p>\r\n<p>He died last Sunday, August 25, 2012, at the age of 82.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/neilarmstrong5.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.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/about/bios/neilabio.html\">NASA Biography</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/26/science/space/neil-armstrong-dies-first-man-on-moon.html\">NY Times Obit</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://space.about.com/od/astronautbiographies/a/Biography-of-Neil-Armstrong.htm\">About.com</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/aug/26/neil-armstrong\">The Guardian</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://www.wired.com/autopia/2012/08/neil-armstrong-aircraft/?pid=2232\">The Aircraft and Spacecraft of Neil Armstrong</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Armstrong\">Wikipedia</a></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Sources:</span><br /><br /><span> Aldrin, Buzz. <em>Reaching for the Moon</em>. HarperCollins, 2005.<br /><br /> Hamblin, Dora Jane. \"Neil Armstrong Refuses to Waste Any Heartbeats.\" <em>LIFE</em>. July 4, 1969.<br /><br /> Hansen, James R. <em>First Man</em>. Simon and Schuster, 2006.<br /><br /> Nelson, Craig. <em>Rocket Men</em>. Penguin, 2010. </span></p>','2012-08-31','793176023797','neilarmstrong.jpg','neilarmstrong-small.jpg','Neil Armstrong','American hero.','\"There can be no great accomplishment without risk.\"'),('Jacklyn H. Lucas','February 14, 1928','June 5, 2008','Plymouth, NC, USA','20th-century American Marine','<p>Everyone with half a functioning brain knows that diving on a live hand grenade to save your friends is one of the single most selfless, balls-out heroic acts of valor that any human being can perform. It takes a special, rare kind of person to come face-to-face with their own destruction, resist every natural impulse of self-preservation, and unhesitatingly give themselves up in a final, purely-selfless feat of bravery, trading in the most precious thing a human has to offer &ndash; their life &ndash; so that others might live. It\'s such a paragon of ultimate selfless human sacrifice that nowadays it\'s the standard go-to analogy for everything from taking all the blame for a team-wide corporate fuck-up to unselfishly talking up the homeliest girl at the bar while your buddy tries to hook up with her best friend (who is invariably about a thousand times hotter than him and wouldn&rsquo;t spit on him if he were melting in a pool of Hydrochloric acid some twisted bizarro alternate universe where tan silicone-augmented vat-grown bar-hopping college chicks are irresistibly attracted to sweaty neckbeards). It\'s such a heroic testament to the will of the human spirit that more Medals of Honor and Victoria Crosses have been handed out for this single act than for any other deed in the history of combat.</p>\r\n<p>Unfortunately, despite this being a universally-acknowledged feat of righteous heroic awesomeness, the fact that the entire action is over in three to five seconds combine with some horrifically-tragic consequences for the hero to make grenade-hopping a pretty tough subject to write a Badass of the Week article about.</p>\r\n<p>Unless, of course, we\'re talking about Jack Lucas of the 1st Battalion, 26th Marines.</p>\r\n<p>Because Jack Lucas jumped on not one <em>but two</em> grenades to save his friends.</p>\r\n<p>And lived.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/lucas1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>Your typical grenade explosion.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Jacklyn H. Lucas was born on Valentine\'s Day, 1928, in some rural town in North Carolina with a population so tiny that if everyone in the entire county showed up at UNC for a basketball game they probably couldn\'t sell out one section of the Dean Smith Center. Cursed with one of the most terrible first names in history, Jacklyn did the Boy Named Sue thing and spent his entire life training to be so ungodly hardcore that anyone who referred to him by any name other than Jack would end up forcibly swallowing their own genitalia, eventually enlisting as a cadet at Edwards Military Institute in Salemburg, NC.</p>\r\n<p>Things were going fine for a while, but Jack\'s life changed pretty dramatically on December 7, 1941, when he got news that a super-secret ninja sneak-attack of Japanese fighter-bombers had just craterized the American battleship fleet at Pearl Harbor into a towering inferno of twisted metal.</p>\r\n<p>He kind of took it personally.</p>\r\n<p>So while Lucas\' 13 year-old idiot classmates were all hanging around their school doing dipshit teenage boy stuff like slam-dunking M80s into public toilets and superglueing their friends\' lockers shut, Lucas just got pissed. Like, super pissed. Like King Kong stopping by on the way home from work after a miserable day at the office only to find that the badass frozen yogurt place down the street is totally out of banana sherbet so he just snorts a line of PCP and goes Falling Down on everyone pissed. He stormed out of his military school (the first of many times he\'d be listed AWOL in his professional career), went across the border to Virginia, bribed some notary public to swear he was 17, then hitched a ride to the nearest Marine Corps Recruiting Station, marched his hefty 5\'8\", 200-pound frame through the front door like he owned the place, forged his Mom\'s signature on enlistment paperwork, and shipped out to Parris Island for US Marine Corps Boot Camp.</p>\r\n<p>At thirteen.</p>\r\n<p>Lucas made it through the most intense basic training the United States military has to offer, was made a Marine at 14, and was subsequently assigned to work a crappy manual labor job as part of the Training Battalion on Parris Island.</p>\r\n<p>Jack Lucas responded to this unsatisfactory posting by abandoning his station, hitching a ride to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, grabbing the first USMC officer he could find, and telling him there was a clerical error and he was supposed to be stationed on the front lines in a combat arms role.</p>\r\n<p>They made him a truck driver at the Marine Corps base on Pearl Harbor.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/lucas2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Unsatisfied by his current status of \"not blowing the shit out of the enemy at all corners wherever he could find them\", and denied in all of his requests to transfer to a front-line infantry unit, Jack Lucas spend the next couple of years raising hell across Honolulu. He was arrested for starting a drunken bar fight. He was disciplined for going AWOL so he could head into town and meet girls. He was busted by a Military Policeman for walking through the barracks with a case of beer, then was subsequently arrested for punching that same Military Policeman in the face when that power-tripping asshole tried to take the beer away from him.</p>\r\n<p>Tired of spending his nights in the brig and worried that the war was going to end without him every hoisting a rifle in battle, Lucas finally decided, fuck it, I\'m going to go to war and I don\'t give a shit who wants to stop me. He went down to the docks, snuck aboard a military transport ship headed for the front lines, then spent a month living off crumbs hiding from the crew because he was worried if they discovered him they\'d ship his ass back to Hawaii for a court-martial.</p>\r\n<p>Of the 40,000 Marines who hit the beach at Iwo Jima on or around February 20th, 1945, 17-year-old Private Jack Lucas of the 1st Battalion, 26th Marines, 5th Marine Division was one of the only infantrymen who assaulted the beachhead without a weapon. He changed that pretty quickly. He grabbed one off a dead man in the surf, racked the slide, and charged into battle.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/lucas3.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Rushing through the brutal, endless curtains of strafing machine gun and artillery fire that raked the beach, Lucas grabbed his newly-acquired weapon and charged ahead, undaunted by the explosions and bullets zipping all around. He ran ahead, reached the relative safety of the treeline, and fell in with a four-man fireteam that had already started working their way through the dense jungle, trying to clear out one of the most tenacious and ferociously-hardcore enemies the United States ever faced.</p>\r\n<p>Lucas and his men were making their way through a ravine, fighting every step of the way, when suddenly some bad shit started to go down. It turned out that the Japanese had dug this ridiculously-intricate series of caverns and secret passages that ran through the entire island, so just as Lucas and his buddies thought they were going to launch their final assault on a Japanese machine gun nest, they came to the horrible realization that all 11 men in that pillbox had gone into a tunnel, crawled underneath them, and popped up directly behind the Marines.</p>\r\n<p>The Marines turned to fire, and in Jack Lucas\' much-awaited first moments of real battle his first round went through the helmet of an enemy soldier, killing him on the spot.</p>\r\n<p>His second round jammed in the rifle. I guess that\'s what happens with rifles you pick up in ankle-deep water on blood-soaked sandy beaches.</p>\r\n<p>It was at this point that Jack Lucas saw the live hand grenade that had just landed at his feet. He threw his body on it without hesitation, screaming for the other Marines to take cover.</p>\r\n<p>When a second enemy grenade landed within arms\' reach, Lucas grabbed it and jammed it under his body as well.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/lucas4.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>The Type 97 Fragmentation Grenade is a 16-ounce metal ball stuffed with 65 grams of TNT and a 5 second timed-detonation mechanism. Now, a common misconception about hand grenades is that they create some huge fiery explosion that blows people into the next area code like they were launched out of a flaming death-catapult, then they proceed to ignite everything in the general vicinity up to and including the Earth\'s atmosphere. But, while the explosive power unleashed by a frag grenade is certainly not the sort of thing you want to wake up to every morning, what kills the majority of people isn\'t the bomb but the flying bits of shrapnel. Basically, the explosion is just a catalyst that shatters the metal outside of the grenade and sends tens of thousands of tiny, razor-sharp metal splinters hurtling through the air in every direction, shredding anything in their wake, and killing or maiming anyone or anything within 100 to 150 feet. You ever wonder why some grenades look like pineapples? It\'s because when the bomb goes off each little section of the pineapple morphs into a bullet firing off into some random direction. It ain\'t pretty.</p>\r\n<p>And Jack Lucas just had two of those little bastards blow up straight into his torso. Sure, his friends survived thanks to his heroism, but all that metal has to go somewhere, and where it went was straight into Lucas\' body.</p>\r\n<p>The rest of the Marine fire team, pumped-up by Lucas\' bravery and the fact that they weren\'t currently all dead, proceeded to fight like demons and push the Japanese back, driving them from the position and capturing that sector.</p>\r\n<p>When they came back to take the dog tags off of their fallen brother, they noticed that not only was Lucas alive, he was actually still conscious.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/lucas5.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>I don\'t want to go on the cart.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>The true unsung heroes of Iwo Jima &ndash; the Navy Corpsmen &ndash; were called in on the spot, hauling the severely-fucked-up Lucas out of there on a stretcher while simultaneously using their .45 pistols to fight off a Japanese banzai counter-attack. They fought through the warzone, got Lucas to a hospital ship, and it took 21 surgeries for them to remove 250 pieces of shrapnel from every major organ in his body.</p>\r\n<p>Seven months later, Jack Lucas personally walked up to Harry S. Truman and received his Medal of Honor in person. He\'d already made a complete recovery.</p>\r\n<p>He was six days past his seventeenth birthday &ndash; the youngest Marine to ever receive the award.</p>\r\n<p>After the war, Lucas went home and fulfilled his promise to his mother to finish school, attending his first day of Ninth Grade with his Medal of Honor around his neck. He finished college, went on a USO speaking tour, was married three times, survived his second wife\'s attempt to hire a hitman to murder him (she hadn\'t got the message from the Japanese that this guy was impervious to conventional weapons), and then, at age 40, decided to get over his fear of heights by enlisting in the 82nd Airborne as a paratrooper. On his first training jump, both parachutes failed to open. As his team leader astutely pointed out, \"Jack was the last one out of the plane and the first one on the ground.\"</p>\r\n<p>He fell 3,500 feet through the air without a parachute. He attempted a badass commando roll just as he was about to splat on the earth Wile E. Coyote style.</p>\r\n<p>He not only lived, he walked away unscathed.</p>\r\n<p>Two weeks later, he was back in the plane on his second training jump. That one went better. Four years later he finished his tour as a Captain in the 82nd Airborne Division.</p>\r\n<p>His adventures in miraculously surviving death now complete, ran a successful business selling beef to people outside Washington, DC, wrote an appropriately-named autobiography titled <em>Indestructible</em>, met every president from Truman to Clinton, had his original Medal of Honor citation laid out in the hull of the USS <em>Iwo Jima</em>, and died in 2008 at the age of 80. From cancer, of all things.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/lucas8.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.history.navy.mil/photos/pers-us/uspers-l/j-lucas.htm\">History.Navy.mil Article</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://articles.latimes.com/2008/jun/06/local/me-lucas6\">LA Times Obit</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24988705/ns/us_news-military/t/wwii-vet-who-earned-medal-honor-dies/#.UEo3lyIUflY\">MSNBC Obit</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/06/us/06lucas.html\">NYTimes Obit</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacklyn_H._Lucas\">Wikipedia</a><br /><br /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Sources:</span><br /><br /><span> Bradley, James and Ron Powers. <em>Flags of Our Fathers</em>. Random House, 2012. <br /><br /> Frantzich, Stephen. <em>Honored Guests</em>. Rowman &amp; Littlefield, 2011. <br /><br /> Leckie, Robert. <em>Strong Men Armed</em>. Da Capo, 2010. <br /><br /> Lucas, Jack, and D.K. Drum. <em>Indestructible</em>. Da Capo, 2006. <br /><br /> Willbanks, James H. <em>America\'s Heroes</em>. ABC-CLIO, 2011. </span></p>','2012-09-07','939538924712','lucas.jpg','lucas-small.jpg','Jacklyn H. Lucas','Dude jumps on two grenades, falls out of an airplane.  Survives.',''),('Jack Pritchard','c. 1950','N/A','New York, NY, USA','20th-century American Lawman','<p>I actually have kind of a tough time writing about firefighters on this website. No, it\'s not because I don\'t have a healthy respect for the fact that these men and women are some of the most universally-acknowledged badasses the planet has to offer, or that their job description routinely forces them to repress their natural human self-preservation instincts to levels that border on suicidal insanity, but rather it\'s because these are people who go out there every single day of their lives and do this shit most of us could never get up the balls to think about attempting, and any crazy, over-the-top act of firefighter pulling-babies-and-kitties-out-of-burning-orphanages heroism I could post on this site would differ very little from a typical twelve-hour work day for almost any firefighter in the world. Faced with life-or-death situations on a routine basis, every firefighter worth their uniform knows they would risk their own lives to try and rescue some idiot who forgot to turn the stove off from being immolated inside his home, and every year dozens of brave men and women are lost saving innocent lives and prevent raging infernos from reducing our homes, towns, and cities to smoldering piles of smoking charcoal ash. It\'s thankless, hard, ball-breaking work, but rather than complain about the long hours, lousy government salary, or how much it sucks to show up at work and have a gigantic fireball explode in your face and send you flying backwards down a flight of stairs, firefighters totally fucking love every minute of it. That\'s how insane they are.</p>\r\n<p>So when you find a guy who has been cited for bravery six times by the city of New York for going above and beyond this already-lofty call of duty during his 30+ years of service and who is widely-recognized as one of the toughest, bravest, and most hardcore fireman the FDNY has ever seen, it\'s pretty fucking noteworthy.</p>\r\n<p>Let me introduce Captain Jack Pritchard.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/pritchard1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Standing all of five foot five and weighing in at a little over a hundred and fifty pounds, John J. Pritchard joined the Department in 1970 and quickly joined up with Rescue 2, an elite unit of the FDNY that specialized in showing up first to the scene, pulling people out of burning buildings while the structure collapsed around them, and then getting the hell out of there before they were crushed to death by flaming cinderblocks or asphyxiated from an insane amount of smoke inhalation.</p>\r\n<p>Pritchard\'s first documented experience putting himself at \"extreme personal risk\" for the sake of being totally fucking awesome came in 1975, when Rescue 2 responded to a three-story building that, by the time they got there, had already been lit up like a Kuwaiti oil field fire. With the first two floors completely engulfed in raging, rapidly-growing flames and a developmentally-disabled boy allegedly trapped up on the top floor, Pritchard didn\'t even wait for orders before he sprung into action like a boss. He grabbed a ladder, threw it up against the side of the building, and sprinted to the top, smashing out a window and entering the building. The window was just a little too small to accommodate the oxygen tank he had strapped to his back, so naturally Pritchard did the completely batshit insane thing, took off his O<span>2</span> tank, and <em>climbed into the smoke-filled burning building without any supplemental oxygen</em>.</p>\r\n<p>Crawling around on the floor in an effort to avoid being immediately killed by the massive obscene amounts of black smoke that blackened the entire interior of the building, Pritchard made his way through the boy\'s apartment, desperately trying to find him before it was too late. When he couldn\'t find the boy in the apartment, he went out the front door into the hall, where he found the kid laying at the top of the apartment building stairwell, his clothes on fire. Pritchard smothered the flames, grabbed onto the kid, and prepared to head back, but the second he turned around the bullshit front door of the apartment closed and locked him out. Unable to breathe, with flames catching his uniform on fire and part of the ceiling coming down on top of him, Firefighter Jack Pritchard did the only logical thing that came into his mind in the heat of the moment.</p>\r\n<p>He grabbed the kid, held him tight, and leapt over the banister rail towards the second floor.</p>\r\n<p>Pritchard hit the ground hard, crashing into the second floor, where a hose team shot him with some water and evacuated both Pritchard and the boy to ambulances. He\'d sustain second-degree burns on large swaths of his body, but it would take a hell of a lot more than that to keep Jack Effin\' Pritchard down.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/pritchard2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<table style=\"width: 500px;\" align=\"center\">\r\n<tbody>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td><span>\"You have to prepare yourself as a firefighter and say to yourself that this is normal. You say this is what separates the people who are running out from the firefighters that are running in. You understand the consequences of not going in outweigh the ones if you do go in.\"</span></td>\r\n</tr>\r\n</tbody>\r\n</table>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Pritchard\'s next major battle with flesh-melting heat came on August 2nd, 1978, when he was there for one of the most tragic days in FDNY history. It was early in the morning when a huge fire had broken out at Waldbaum\'s Supermarket in Brooklyn, trapping several shoppers and construction workers inside. Fire teams had gone in to get those people out, but they\'d run into trouble &ndash; a lot of it.</p>\r\n<p>Jack Pritchard\'s shift had ended a half-hour ago, but it\'s not like that was going to stop this guy from hauling ass mask-first into a raging inferno to save his firefighter brothers. Rolling up to the front of the market while firemen swarmed along the rooftop hosing down the out-of-control blaze, Pritchard immediately threw on his fireproof coat and sprinted into the store, seemingly completely oblivious to the smoke and fire swirling around him. Running through the halls of the supermarket without a mask, oxygen tank, or hose line, Pritchard found one of the trapped firemen inside, pulled him out to safety, and then turned back in horror as the roof of the market collapsed, dropping a dozen firefighters down into the blaze. Pritchard sprung into action, rushing back into the store looking for trapped men. On three separate occasions he rushed into the market, ignoring massive burns all down his arms and chest, digging men out from under the rubble with his bare hands, dragging them to safety, then running back into the burning store. When the structure finally collapsed on itself, six firefighters were still inside. It was one of the deadliest days in FDNY history, though if it wasn\'t for Pritchard that number would have been even higher. For his actions saving the lives of four firefighters at extreme personal risk to himself, Jack was awarded the James Gordon Bennett Medal, the highest award for individual bravery offered by the City of New York.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/pritchard3.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>For the next 20+ years, Jack Pritchard fought pretty much every major fire in Brooklyn, putting out so many blazes that he\'d actually developed effective new tactics for putting out fires in neighborhoods and apartment buildings. He prided himself on being the first man to every fire in the city, a point he drove home one cold winter night when he tried to drive his fire truck over the Rescue 1 team when they\'d beaten him to a blaze &ndash; Rescue 1\'s commanding officer only managed to avoid a make-out session with the Rescue 2 fire truck grill by diving head-first into a snow drift as Pritchard screamed by at full speed. A brash, ball-busting prankster who swore with the best of them and never backed down from a fight, Jack was also famous for breaking into his co-workers\' cars, stealing any food he could find, and then setting it out in the Firehouse kitchen so the entire team to could eat it. He never backed down from a fight, never took sick time, once had two ribs broken in a fist fight with his commanding officer, and routinely preached that there was nothing a firefighter could encounter that couldn\'t be solved with two Asprin and a healthy amount of burn cream (they say that his entire upper body is covered in scar tissue because despite his many visits he never stayed in the hospital long enough for his wounds to heal completely).</p>\r\n<p>Pritchard eventually proved himself such a hardcore little bastard that he was promoted to captain, transferred out of Rescue 2, and given his own command &ndash; Engine 255 on Rogers Avenue, Brooklyn, a unit that was better known as Captain Jack\'s Jolly Rogers.</p>\r\n<p>Captain Jack drilled the Rogers into one of the most efficient Engines in the city, demanding nothing less from his men than for them to have the fastest response times in the five boroughs. Of course, it\'s not like Pritchard let his new promotion get in the way of running into burning buildings at the head of his men, either &ndash; when he responded to one house fire in 1992 he saw a badly-injured fireman being dragged out of there after failing to rescue the resident trapped inside, so Captain Jack, commander of Engine 255, just threw on his mask, ran in there, crawled through the burning house, carried the 70 year-old occupant out of there, and then spent the next two months running his unit from the burn ward.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/pritchard4.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Pritchard\'s most famous action took place in July of 1998, when the Jolly Rogers were called to a massive fire in a six-story apartment building in the heart of Brooklyn. Arriving on the scene in under three minutes, when Jack leapt out of the fire truck cab he was immediately met by a woman screaming that her baby was trapped up on the fourth floor in a smoke-filled room that was also on fire.</p>\r\n<p>Captain Jack didn\'t hesitate. He told his men to get to work, then immediately ran up the stairs without bothering to grab a hose or a mask or an oxygen tank. He charged up to the fourth floor, and saw smoke pouring out from under the door of the apartment. Unable to smash through the locked door, and with time running out, Pritchard suddenly noticed that the woman\'s keys were still in the lock on the door, so he took his bulky gloves off, turned the key, opened the door, and was almost knocked unconscious by a backdraft fireball exploding in his face.</p>\r\n<p>But not even a fucking flamethrower to the face was going to keep this madman from saving the baby inside this place, and Jack immediately dropped down and began crawling through the black smoke towards the sound of the crying child. He made his way to the nursery, where he found the baby laying in a plastic playpen. The flames and smoke were so intense in the room that there was no way for him to pull the kid out of there without catching it on fire, so, even though he wasn\'t wearing his gloves, he fucking didn\'t the most insane shit ever and <em>grabbed the melting plastic playpen with his bare hand</em> and began dragging it out of the room. Burning the shit out of his hand every step of the way, and sucking down unhealthy amounts of carbon monoxide, Pritchard dragged the playpen through the apartment, calling out to his men to meet him at the door. With the playpen (and his hand) melting under the insane heat, Pritchard toughed it out, pulling the kid to safety and getting the baby out of there alive. For his actions he became only the second New York firefighter to receive the Bennett medal twice, and the first one to ever receive three Class One medals for \"extreme personal risk\" (he also has five Class Two and Class Three medals, but those are only for \"great personal risk\" and \"unusual personal risk\", so no bigs or anything).</p>\r\n<p>Jack Pritchard retired from the force with the rank of Battalion Chief. In 1999, when the 29-year veteran was receiving a prestigious medal for his service to the city, he didn\'t give a big acceptance speech. He just said, \"It\'s a real honor to be a firefighter,\" and walked back to his seat.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/pritchard5.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.nyc.gov/html/fdny/html/medal_day/2003/medals/archermedal.shtml\">NYC.gov</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://articles.nydailynews.com/1999-06-04/local/18091785_1_highest-honor-dozens-of-other-firefighters-awarded\">NY Daily News</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://www.nyfd.com/brooklyn_engines/engine_255/engine_255_history3.html\">NYFD.com</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://nyfd.com/Medals_all/Medals-FDNY.html\">List of FDNY Medals</a></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Sources:</span><br /><br /><span> Downey, Tom. <em>Last Men Out</em>. Macmillan, 2005.<br /><br /> Hashagen, Paul. <em>Fire Department City of New York</em>. Turner, 2002. <br /><br /> Middleton, Michael. <em>Medal of Valor Firefighters</em>. McGraw-Hill Professional, 2003. </span></p>','2012-09-14','420430625151','pritchard.bmp','pritchard4-small.jpg','Jack Pritchard','One of the FDNY\'s most decorated firefighters.','\"If you\'re ever trapped in a fire, he\'s the one you want coming for you.\"'),('Basil the Bulgar-Slayer','958','December 15, 1025','Constantinople, Byzantine Empire','Medieval Greek Politician','<p>Emperor Basil the Bulgar-Slayer was an asskicking colon annihilator so insanerballs fucking hardcore in his ability to de-face Bulgarian people that history remembers him solely for his relentless ability to gruesomely disfigure his enemies until every man who opposed him was left horribly mutilated beyond recognition and stumbling aimlessly around the wilderness vomiting uncontrollably.</p>\r\n<p>When Basil inherited the throne of Byzantium in 963, he didn\'t really have a whole lot of badass shit going on for him. This is mostly because it\'s tough to be a bone-crushing warlord when you\'re three years old and your name is Basil. Thankfully Basil\'s dad was smart enough to set a regent up to look after him, but that dude &ndash; Basil the Chamberlain &ndash; while crafty, was also a court eunuch, and the commander of the Byzantine Army figured that dude wouldn\'t have the balls to fight, launched a rebellion aimed at overthrowing Baby Basil and installing himself as the Emperor, and besieged a major port city on the Byzantine coast. Basil the Chamberlain (sorry, but there is more Basil going on here than there is in the supply closet at a fucking Olive Garden), a true Lannister at heart, responded by recalling a great war hero named Phocas from exile, putting Phocas at the head of his army, then attacking the rogue commander\'s fleet and melting it to shit with a gigantic heaping portion of medieval napalm known as Greek Fire.</p>\r\n<p>Ok, well that was fun, but Basil the Chamberlain eventually got a little too big for his pants and started deciding he was going to start running shit himself. He started acting like the emperor, giving orders, wearing the robes, and doing other bullshit stuff, while our friend Basil the Future Bulgar-Slayer just sat back and waited. The teenager was wise beyond his years, a true genius in the fine art of back-stabbing dicking people over, and he acted all weak and stupid and out of touch while he secretly consolidated his power. Just before he turned eighteen (the age at which he legally assumed the throne), Basil the Chamberlain tried to come up with some bullshit rumor about how our Basil was secretly working with the Muslims, but our friend B got the drop on that asshole, assume the throne a little earlier than expected (thanks to massive support from the army), had the Chamberlain and Phocas arrested as traitors, exiled, stripped of their lands and wealth, and then declared all of their \"horseshit laws\" torn out of every law book in the kingdom. Stuff that in your pipe and choke on it.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/basil1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>Medieval artwork depicting Greek Fire.<br />This masterpiece was discovered in 1453 on the back of a Trapper Keeper in the ruins of Constantinople.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Even though he was now the supreme undisputed ruler of the wealthiest empire on Earth, Basil the Bulgar-Slayer had himself a little bit of a problem. Namely, you guessed it, the Bulgars. You see, about a hundred years earlier some psychotic Bulgar motherfucker awesomely known as <a href=\"/krum.html\">Khan Krum the Horrible</a> had united the previously-scattered tribes of the Bulgars under one banner, assembled a massive horde of screaming rabid warriors, conquered a huge swath of land across the Balkans, and not only defeated three Byzantine Emperors in battle but killed one of them and turned his decapitated skull into a wine goblet that he made Byzantine diplomats drink out of every time they came to talk to him.</p>\r\n<p>Now, under the leadership of Khan Samuel (seriously, what the fuck kind of name is that for a badass barbarian warlord?), the Bulgars were more powerful than ever, and they were having a tremendous time fucking laughing it up while attacking Byzantine towns and capturing all their land and valuables. This sort of was a problem for Basil the Bulgar-Slayer. So he took an army of six thousand men and marched them straight into Bulgar lands to give them a little scientific demonstration of exactly how far a man can fit his head inside his own anus. As you probably guessed, Emperor Basil the Bulgar-Slayer met the enemy head-on in battle, screaming like a madman, charging emphatically towards his foes with a shimmering sword in one hand and a murderous hatred in his eyes, and <em>got the fucking shit kicked out of him</em>.</p>\r\n<p>Huh?</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/basil4.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br />.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>So&hellip; while Basil\'s heart was in the right place, it turned out that this guy didn\'t really have any experience at leading armies in combat. The Bulgars retreated from him, he laid siege to the first city he could find, failed to take it, and then when he was marching home with his tail between his legs Khan Samuel ambushed him at the Gates of Trajan, crushed Basil\'s army, wounded him in combat, and captured the imperial seal. The beatdown was so impressive that the Pope (!) declared Samuel the new Tsar of Bulgaria &ndash; which was a huge insult because up to this point nobody really even recognized Bulgaria as it\'s own shit and they all kind of thought of it as like some uppity part of Byzantium.</p>\r\n<p>Basil swore vengeance at all costs. Unfortunately he had other shit to worry about.</p>\r\n<p>Yeah&hellip; so it turns out that when that Phocus asshole heard that Basil just got his pants beat inside-out by the Bulgars, he came swooping back into town already decked out in the purple Imperial robes and wearing a crown that looked like a knock-off of the Byzantine emperor\'s diadem. He convinced the entire Byzantine army to defect to him, marched into Constantinople without a fight, and started ordering everyone around like he owned the place, and when Basil got back to his hometown he received word that some other dude\'s ass was occupying Basil\'s personal throne.</p>\r\n<p>This is the part of the film where it looks like all is hopelessly lost. Basil has been crushed by the Bulgars. His own army has deserted him. But Basil refused to give up. He just clenched his fist, listened to some fucking rad music, and decided to say fuck everyone &ndash; ok douchebags, you wanna play like that? I\'m going to go get the Russians. And the Vikings. And we\'re going to fuck your shit up. With violence.</p>\r\n<p>So Basil, who himself was Macedonian, married his own sister off to the King of Russia (Russia, at this time, was populated almost exclusively by the Viking descendents of <a href=\"/rurik.html\">Rurik</a>), formed a gigantic mercenary army of battle-bearded axe-swinging motherfuckers, and proceeded to epically crush Phocas\'s stupid ass with fire, broadswords, and the massive weight of his own ironclad testicles. Running into battle carrying an icon of the Virgin Mary and a gigantic sword, Basil ran into the fray, defeated Phocas, massacred every noble who had supported the usurper, and then took his assembled army and personally marched it into the Middle East to beat the shit out of the Fatimids because, seriously, fuck those guys.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/basil2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>Basil\'s Viking army became known as the Varangian Guard.<br />These hulking Norsement would serve the Emperor\'s Bodyguard for the next 5 centuries.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>As emperor, Basil taxed the shit out of the nobles, who he hated for betraying him, and gave huge tax breaks to the farmers, mostly because he knew those poor suckers were the ones who were going to join the army and fight for him. He didn\'t wear jewelry, never wore a crown, didn\'t don the opulent imperial robes, and lead his army from the battlefield instead of from his gold-plated palace. He never married, didn\'t have scores of babes running around all over the place, and didn\'t really think about anything other than how the fuck he was going to avenge himself on the Bulgars for kicking his ass.</p>\r\n<p>He eventually found his chance. Tsar Samuel, who by this point still had zero respect for Basil or his half-Viking half-Byzantine army, continued to push his luck and launch raids to capture Byzantine lands, and once Basil had consolidated his power enough he decided it was time to exact blood vengeance on his enemies. He took a massive army &ndash; six times the size of the one he\'d taken to Bulgaria before &ndash; and marched straight on into battle. The Bulgars, badly outnumbered, tried to fuck with him again. They fell back, refused to fight, then prepared another trap for the Byzantine Emperor aimed at destroying his ballsack yet again. In 1014 they set a trap in a valley, preparing to hold it Thermopylae-style. Unfortunately for them, instead of running into the valley like a dipshit Basil saw through their flimsy bullshit, marched half his army around, and attacked them from both sides at once. Fifteen thousand men surrendered. The rest were killed in battle.</p>\r\n<p>Basil the Bulgar-Slayer decided to let his captives go free. But first he ordered his men to leave just one functioning eye for every hundred prisoners.</p>\r\n<p>Every single fucking POW had his eyes burned or gouged out. The 140 lucky bastards with one eye remaining had to lead the rest of them home. When the procession got back to the castle, Tsar Samuel had a heart attack and died on the spot. By 1018, Basil had conquered the entire Bulgar Empire.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/basil3.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>If you\'re Bulgarian now might be a good time to avert your eyes HAR HAR HAR</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Interestingly, Basil wasn\'t actually a huge dick to the Bulgar people once he\'d crushed their armies. The peasants were made full citizens of the Byzantine Empire, with all the rights and privileges that entails. The nobles were given positions in the Imperial court in Constantinople, a move that got them out of there country and put them somewhere that Basil could keep an eye on them (huh huh). He didn\'t destroy the Slavic Orthodox Church, but instead downgraded it and demoted their Patriarch to an Archbishop under the oversight of the church in Constantinople. His moves as a conqueror ensured that the Bulgar lands would be part of the Byzantine Empire for the next 170 years.</p>\r\n<p>Basil II died in 1025 at the age of 65 while preparing an invasion of Sicily.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/basil5.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://xenohistorian.wordpress.com/2010/10/17/basil-the-bulgar-slayer/\">Xenohistorian</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://launchistory.blogspot.com/2012/08/basil-bulgar-slayer.html\">Launchistory</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://www.roman-emperors.org/basilii.htm\">Roman-Emperors.org</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/europe/eu07b.html#Basil2\">Introducing Basil II</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basil_II\">Wikipedia</a></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Sources:</span><br /><br /><span> Gibbon, Edward. <em>Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire</em>. Everymans, 1993.<br /><br /> Myer, Will. <em>People of the Storm God</em>. Interlink, 2005.<br /><br /> Stephenson, Paul. <em>The Legend of Basil the Bulgar-Slayer</em>. University of Wisconsin Press, 2003.<br /><br /> Williams, Henry Smith. <em>The Historians\' History of the World</em>. Outlook, 1904.<br /><br /> Wolcott, Martin G. <em>The Evil 100</em>. Citadel, 2004. </span></p>','2012-09-21','396268825985','basil.jpg','basil-small.jpg','Basil the Bulgar-Slayer','The scourge of Bulgarians.','\"It would be tiresome to recount the vicissitudes of this war; to narrate the cruelties which were perpetrated in detail would be disgusting; they can easily be imagined if one reflects that the Greeks, violent by nature and embittered by hatred, were frequently called on to exercise the right of retaliation, and they employed the rudest and most inhuman mercenaries for that purpose.\"'),('Yusuf Alchagirov','c. 1933','n/a','Kabardino-Balkaria, Russia','21st-century Russian Bearfighter','<p>Less than a week ago, 80-year-old Russian shepherd Yusuf Alchagirov was minding his own business, not pissing anyone off, just working his farm in the ultra-rural, super-hilly backwater province of Kabardino-Balkaria along the Russia-Georgia border.&nbsp; He\'s lived a quiet life with his wife, family, and fellow villagers, working these fields since the days of Joseph Stalin, going through the daily-grind of sheepherding and farming presumably without ever having to literally headbutt any predatory wildlife unconscious in a life-or-death struggle for his own survival.</p>\r\n<p>But November 1, 2013 would be unlike any of the previous 29,200+ days of Yusuf Alchagirov\'s life.</p>\r\n<p>Today he was going to find himself locked in hand-to-hand combat with a pissed-off 1,000-pound Grizzly Bear armed with razor-sharp six-inch claws the size of kitchen knives and teeth specifically designed for crunching bone and disemboweling the meaty parts of organic life forms.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/9634649523/alchagirov1.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>You see, it was on this day that Yusuf, who didn\'t have access to badass ATVs and shit and was still manually running down his sheep down on foot <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/young.html\">Cliff Young</a> style despite literally being older than the <em>Luftwaffe, </em>found himself trotting through an old raspberry field near his farm and directly into a crude trap laid for him by one of nature\'s most gigantic and cold-blooded killers.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>I guess the story goes that Alchagirov\'s dumbass sheep ran off like a bunch of assholes and wandered into the fields, but right as our old man hero was about to round them up and send them back to their pens he looked behind a nearby raspberry tree and saw a gigantic-ass brown bear sitting there, crouched in attack position, just waiting for this geezer to show up, rub a bunch of delicious berries on his head to season himself up, and then leap directly into the bear\'s open jaws like a Salmon during spawning season.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/9634649523/alchagirov2.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br />GET IN MAH BELLAY</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Now, it\'s important to mention that Russia is basically getting fucked up right now by some kind of crazy Bearmageddon.&nbsp; Apparently there\'s been a lot of flooding recently, meaning that a bunch of bear food has been destroyed in the northern parts of the country, and now brown bears are rampaging across the countryside devouring everything they can find.&nbsp; Their favorite food is Geologists, having <a href=\"http://en.ria.ru/russia/20130527/181370046/Bear-Kills-Geologist-in-Siberia.html\">eaten three of them</a> in the last calendar year, but in addition to hating scientists they also like to <a href=\"http://en.ria.ru/russia/20131005/183956283/Russian-Couple-Call-for-Backup-as-Bear-Breaks-In-Eats-Borscht.html\">break into homes and steal borscht</a> from peasants because they are total dicks and have no respect for oppressive Capitalist concepts like private property or the freedom from not being eaten by bears while you\'re trying to take a piss in the wilderness.</p>\r\n<p>Yusuf Alchagirov had already had enough of this bear bullshit.&nbsp; The 80 year-old man froze for a second, staring unblinkinglyto the predatory eyes of a voracious, man-eating, half-ton killing machine that was preparing to massacre and devour him in a flurry of spikes and gore.&nbsp; Only one thought passed through his mind:</p>\r\n<p>I\'m going to fuck this thing up and wear his balls as a hat.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/9634649523/alchagirov3.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>The bear charged.&nbsp; Yusuf acted fast &ndash; he pulled off his jacket, threw it over the bear\'s head, and then fucking punched the bear in the fucking face as hard as he could.&nbsp; But the old \"bag over the head punch in the face\" thing just pissed the bear off more, and the thing threw the coat off its head and chomped down with its ridiculously-massive jaws, locking them onto Yusuf\'s arm, ripping into bone and flesh with its slathering fangs.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Yusuf Alchagirov did exactly what you or I would have done in that situation &ndash; he <em>grabbed the fucking bear\'s lower jaw, </em>wrenched it off his arm, and didn\'t let go.</p>\r\n<p>Oh yeah, and by \"what you and I would have done in that situation\", I meant to say \"the exact opposite of what you and I would have done in that situation.\"</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/9634649523/alchagirov4.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Wrenching the bear\'s head with one arm, Alchagirov dug in his pocket for a knife, pulled it out, and prepared to face-shank the bear.&nbsp; The bear, prepared for such a move and extraordinarily livid that he was getting his ass kicked by an 80 year-old man, slapped that shit right out of the old shepard\'s hand, ripped its jaw free, and grabbed the shepherd up in a badass 1000-pound bear hug, lifting Yusuf three feet off the ground.</p>\r\n<p>Yusuf Alchagirov, his feet dangling like that dude being choked out by Darth Vader at the beginning of the first <em>Star Wars</em> movie,</p>\r\n<p>He HEADBUTTED THE FUCKING BEAR IN THE FACE WITH HIS FOREHEAD.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/9634649523/alchagirov5.gif\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Let\'s think about this for a moment.&nbsp; Bears have big teeth.&nbsp; Their mouths open wide enough to fit a man\'s head inside, and their jaws are powerful enough to decapitate you.&nbsp; But this guy smashed the bear so hard in the nose with his head that it not only stunned the bear, it made it drop him.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Then he kicked it in the balls.&nbsp; A lot.</p>\r\n<p>I am not joking.</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/9634649523/alchagirov6.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p align=\"center\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>The two warriors went at it, octogenarian vs. bear, for a few more minutes.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Here\'s roughly how I picture the battle going down.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><object width=\"320\" height=\"240\" data=\"http://gifs.gifbin.com/012012/1325704339_old_man_slaps_bear.gif\" type=\"video/quicktime\"><param name=\"src\" value=\"http://gifs.gifbin.com/012012/1325704339_old_man_slaps_bear.gif\" /></object></p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/9634649523/alchagirov7a.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/9634649523/alchagirov7b.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/9634649523/alchagirov7c.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/9634649523/alchagirov7d.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/9634649523/alchagirov7e.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/9634649523/alchagirov7f.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/9634649523/alchagirov7g.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p align=\"center\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;The bear, having enough of the headbutting dick-kicking action of Yusuf Alchagirov, suddenly remembered it was a FUCKING BEAR and decided to put an end to this epic battle once and for all.</p>\r\n<p>It grabbed the 80 year-old man, lifted him once again, and threw him off a cliff.&nbsp; He plummeted dozens of feet, slammed into the rock below, and fell unconscious.&nbsp; The bear, still seething with fury, dusted himself off and casually walked away in search of other human life to snuff out with his teeth.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/9634649523/alchagirov8.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>But Yusuf Alchagirov, bloodied from being punched, clawed, and bitten by a 1,000-pound Brown Bear and then thrown off a cliff, didn\'t die.&nbsp; He woke up seven hours later, picked himself up, and walked back home.&nbsp; On the way there he found a team of villagers that had been sent to find out why he\'d missed dinner.&nbsp; He\'d broken four ribs, had a couple bite wounds and bruises, but was otherwise OK.&nbsp; Yeah, he\'d lost the fight by TKO, but it was like the Jamaican Bobsled Team of Kicking Bears in the Dick.</p>\r\n<p>When he got home his loving wife made him three traditional pies as a \"Congratulations for Not Dying\" present.</p>\r\n<p>He ate them all.&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Three pies.</p>\r\n<p>Because that\'s how he rolls.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"/images/9634649523/alchagirov9.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Links:</p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&amp;tl=en&amp;js=n&amp;prev=_t&amp;hl=en&amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.kp.ru%2Fdaily%2F26152%2F3041307%2F&amp;act=url\">http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&amp;tl=en&amp;js=n&amp;prev=_t&amp;hl=en&amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.kp.ru%2Fdaily%2F26152%2F3041307%2F&amp;act=url</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.businessinsider.com/80-year-old-russian-man-survives-after-bear-throws-him-off-cliff-2013-11\">http://www.businessinsider.com/80-year-old-russian-man-survives-after-bear-throws-him-off-cliff-2013-11</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/31/man-80-fights-bear-survives\">http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/31/man-80-fights-bear-survives</a></p>\r\n<p><a href=\"http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/shepherd-80-head-butts-angry-bear-article-1.1505920\">http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/shepherd-80-head-butts-angry-bear-article-1.1505920</a></p>','2013-11-08','9634649523','alchagirov.png','alchagirov-small.jpg','Yusuf Alchagirov','80 year-old man headbutts bear, kicks it in the balls, is thrown off a cliff.  He lives.','\"I got off easy.  If I had chickened out and not fought, the animal would have immediately torn me apart and I would not be sitting with you.\"'),('Š&#263;epan Mali','Unknown','September 22, 1773','Unknown','18th-century Serbian Politician','<p>Stephen the Little was a skinny, middle-aged ordinary white dude from Montenegro who became the supreme dictator of his country by somehow convincing all of Western Europe that he was Tsar Peter the Third of Russia, a feat that was made much more difficult by virtue of the fact that it was a relatively well-known fact that Tsar Peter the Third of Russia was very very dead and there were quite a few Russians who had been there when it happened. Willfully ignoring any and all challenges to his obviously-untrue wild statements about being at the top of the Russian Imperial royalty food chain, Stephen the Little improbably embedded himself as the glorious leader of Montenegro, brought a period of unprecedented peace the region, ended political infighting among the people of the Balkans, personally fought off a massive Turkish invasion force with nothing more than an unruly pitchfork-swinging mob and ridiculous amount of luck, resisted the political intrigues of Catherine the Great, and then died in his bed content in the knowledge that he was the greatest and weirdest hero his country had ever known.</p>\r\n<p>Awesomely enough, we really don\'t know much where this guy came from. Maybe he really was the Tsar, and truly had escaped from a tragic fate at the hands of would-be assassins to seek asylum with his Slavic brethren (he wasn\'t). Maybe he actually was a hero sent by God to deliver the people of Montenegro from the clutches of Ottoman tyranny (also unlikely). Our best guess is that he\'s probably just some regular Serbian guy from Montenegro, though some historians speculate he might have been from Russia or possibly somewhere on the Dalmatian Coast near Herzegovina. Nobody knows for certain, which is part of what makes it so fucking cool. Hell, we don\'t even know the dude\'s real name &ndash; Montenegrin history refers to him only as &Scaron;&#263;epan Mali, meaning either \"Stephen the Little\" or \"Stephen the Small\" depending on the translator, although even that\'s a weird oxymoronic epithet because contemporary sources basically describe this dude as being a totally average, unremarkable guy of ordinary height, normal physical strength, and generic looks. All we really know for sure is that in 1767 a thirty-five year old dude named Steve showed up on the border of Montenegro wearing the ragged robes of an Orthodox monk and telling everyone he was Tsar Peter III, the former (but now deceased) supreme ruler of All the Russias &ndash; a man who by all accounts had been strangled to death four years earlier on the orders of his wife Catherine the Great and was now being used as fertilizer in an undisclosed location somewhere in Imperial Russia.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/stephenthelittle1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>This is not Stephen the Little. It\'s Tsar Peter III.<br />Please note that he looks absolutely nothing like the guy at the top of the page.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Sure, this wasn\'t the first time some jackass had gone around trying to convince everyone he was Russian royalty, but up until this point roughly every attempt at retconning your way into Russian history earned the imposter a one-night-stand with excruciatingly painful death. About a hundred years earlier some asshole showed up in Russia claiming to be Ivan the Terrible\'s son Dmitry (who was also dead, BTW, beaten to death by Ivan in a bout of drunken nerd-rage after a heated debate about whether Klingons or Jem\'Hadar were the most badass alien species in <em>Star Trek</em>), but after a couple weeks of that nonsense the False Dmitry broke his leg jumping out of a palace window in a futile effort to avoid the angry mob that eventually tore him apart limb from limb and had his pieces shot out of a cannon in the general direction of Poland (where the imposter was allegedly from). That worked out so well for him that two other dudes decided THEY were going to be False Dmitries as well, and both of them ended up being decapitated within months of their announcements and then having their heads used as doorstops and paperweights in the Imperial palace.</p>\r\n<p>So, I guess we\'ve established that it took some balls to come out in Early Modern Eastern Europe and make wild accusations about being royalty, but it just so happened that Stephen the Little\'s nickname was definitely not a reference to his gigantic brass ones. In addition to an excess of testicles, Steve also had two Russian guys who swore he was really the Tsar, and the three of them had this amazing and completely untrue tale of heroism about how they all escaped Catherine\'s assassins, fled across Russia, got thrown in prison, escaped in a daring display of vertical leaping and other badassitude, then ran through waist-deep snow barefoot in the rain uphill both ways until they\'d reached Montenegro. The story, while compelling in it\'s over-the-top pulp fiction radness, didn\'t convince the supreme ruler of Montenegro at the time -- a decrepitly-old Bishop named Sava who had actually met the real Tsar Peter. But, whatever, that guy was feeble and powerless and nobody pays attention to old people anyways so the citizens of Montenegro flipped out, baked a gigantic cake, made Stephen the ruler of their Council of Nobles, and had the Patriarch of the Serbian Orthodox Church send him a fucking awesome new horse. Once he was in charge, Stephen used cunning, diplomacy, and his own magnetic natural charisma to unite the warring tribes of Montenegro for the first time in centuries, organize the first national census, order construction of a massive network of roads, and set up a central police force that was allowed by law to cap thieves and robbers and other criminals on sight. He was beloved by his people, brought crime to an all time low, and somehow momentarily convinced Yugoslavian people to stop killing each other all the time. One awesome old historian claimed that this guy\'s ability to successfully run a country should have been proof enough to the people of Montenegro that he wasn\'t the actual Tsar Peter, because that guy was a fucking tremendous tool and Catherine probably did her country a favor by having that douchebag whacked in an alley somewhere.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/stephenthelittle2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>The Real Tsar Peter III\'s horse.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Ok, so as you might have guessed, Tsarina Catherine the Great of Russia was a little interested to hear that there was some asshole running around claiming to have boned her, so she sent a powerful Russian noble and thirty of his best men to publicly declare that Stephen the Little was definitely not her ex-husband. When the Russian delegation reached Podgorica, Steve personally met them at the gates of his capital with open arms, three gigantic casks of his finest vodka, and two dozen of the hottest women in Montenegro.</p>\r\n<p>He had found the Russians\' weakness.</p>\r\n<p>The Russian delegation left a week later, content with having Stephen the Little serve one day of house arrest in his palace bedroom as punishment for his crimes. Despite most of these guys HAVING BEEN THERE when the real Tsar Peter III was executed, none of them said shit about this guy not actually being the true fugitive dictator of Russia.</p>\r\n<p>Somewhere a trio of False Dmitries rolled around in their graves.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/stephenthelittle3.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>Well hello there.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>By this point in history the Ottoman Turkish Empire had blitzed throughout Greece and now shared a border with Montenegro, and these guys really weren\'t too keen about living next door to a unified Christian mountain kingdom cohesively organized under a competent ruler. Naturally, the Sultan decided to wax them into oblivion. He put together a force of 60,000 of the most feared warriors in the world, marched into Montenegro, and proceeded to start laying waste to everything he could find. Stephen the Little responded by putting together 10,000 Montenegrin volunteer citizen-soldiers armed with pitchforks and foul language (they couldn\'t afford bullets or gunpowder) and decided, what the hell, it\'s worth a try. He formed a solid wall of Serbian-ness across the narrow Ostrog Mountain Pass outside the town of Niksic and prepared to do his best impression of Leonidas holding the Gates of Thermopylae.</p>\r\n<p>The Turks were the most technologically advanced army in the world. Sixty thousand men who had conquered all that stood before them for centuries, these battle-hardened asskickers were equipped with state-of-the-art muskets, cannons, and grenades, and they were more than capable of jamming them up the asses of anyone who fucked with them. They outnumbered the defenders six to one (maybe more&hellip; according to one source this battle was 100,000 Turks vs. 2,000 Montenegrins), didn\'t give a shit about anything, and were more than confident that they were going to beat these guys so hard that their grandchildren would be born with congenital birth defects and weird-shaped dented heads.</p>\r\n<p>But Stephen the Little\'s men were mostly Serbians, and if there\'s one thing you should know about the Serbs, it\'s that these guys love to fight. And they\'re pretty good at it.</p>\r\n<p>The Turks attacked, hurling everything they could at the defenders in a bloody, vicious battle that took a grisly toll on both sides, each army\'s men lashing out with everything from bayonets and musketballs to wooden spears and running knee strikes to the ballsack. When the smoke cleared on a vicious day of no-holds-barred face-stomping, the Montenegrins were seriously fucked-up, obviously, because despite what this website might lead you to believe that\'s typically what happens when you\'re outnumbered by an obscene margin by guys who are better equipped and better trained than you. But still, despite being badly bloodied and losing almost half of their army, the Montenegrins held the line, and Stephen the Little, blinded in one eye by a nice heaping dose of shrapnel to the face, continued to urge them to fight on and defend their homeland.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/stephenthelittle4.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>Modern-day Montenegrin military training. Yeah.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>The next day it rained like a motherfucker, and nobody wanted to come out and fight because they didn\'t want to get their hair wet and also because gunpowder doesn\'t work in heavy rains. The day was cold and miserable and the only cool thing was when an awesome bolt of lightning streaked down from the sky, hit a powder keg in the Turkish camp and blew up in a gigantically-fucking-rad mushroom cloud that everyone agreed was totally Metal.</p>\r\n<p>The next morning, the Turks packed up their shit and left. They ignored the shattered Montenegrin Army, marched off into the distance, and left Stephen the Little standing alone on the battlefield.</p>\r\n<p>Stephen was a hero across Eastern Europe overnight. Sure, we later found out that the Russians had been in the middle of planning an attack while the Ottoman Army was away, so the Sultan was forced to order his army to stop wasting time ob this Fake Peter asshole, turn North, and go beat the shit out of some real Russians instead, but fuck it, right? If this public relations genius could convince the entire world he was a dead Tsar that bore absolutely no physical resemblance to him it wasn\'t that much of a stretch to think he could dial this up as, \"I\'m a war hero who defeated the Ottomans because God is on my side, and the only reason they\'re currently beating the piss out of Russia is because they know they were overmatched by our military power.\" Which is of course exactly what he did.</p>\r\n<p>Stephen the Little was the champion of Christendom. Songs and praises were sung not only among his own people (who were already convinced he was the greatest thing since LeBron James), but throughout Europe, with tales of his \"epic victory against impossible odds\" being told from the British House of Commons to whatever the fuck the 18th century equivalent of the New York Times was in the New World. Nobody else fucked with Stephen again, and he ruled competently and intelligently for the next six years. He died in 1774 when he was strangled to death in his sleep by his personal barber, a Greek dude who was being paid off by the Turks to turn on his boss. Everything in Montenegro kind of went downhill from there.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/stephenthelittle5.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Sources/Links:</span><br /><br /><span> Denton, William. <em>Montenegro</em>. Dalby, Isbister &amp; Company, 1877<br /><br /> Pavlovic, Srdja. <em>Balkan Anschluss</em>. Purdue University Press, 2007.<br /><br /> Roberts, Elizabeth. <em>Realm of the Black Mountain</em>. Cornell University Press, 2005..<br /><br /> Stevenson, Francis Seymour. <em>A History of Montenegro</em>. Elibron, 2005.<br /><br /> Tozer, Henry Fanshawe. <em>Researches in the Highlands of Turkey</em>. Kessinger, 2004.<br /><br /> <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%A0%C4%87epan_Mali\">Wikipedia</a> </span></p>','2012-09-28','581535626986','stephenthelittle.jpg','stephenthelittle-small.jpg','Stephen the Little','Ordinary dude tries to impersonate the Tsar of Russia, becomes ruler of Montenegro.',''),('Carl Akeley','May 19, 1864','November 18, 1926','Clarendon, NY, USA','20th-century American Adventurer','<p>That, my friends, is Carl Akeley. To say this bearded badass is the world\'s greatest taxidermist is kind of like saying Wayne Gretzky was pretty good at hockey or that bacon is sometimes edible if you cook it right. He\'s a man who not only excelled at the art (craft? sport?) of taxidermizing animal carcasses, he basically invented it. He also, you know, killed a fucking leopard with his bare hands as it was in the process of devouring him, drank beers with <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/roosevelt.html\">Teddy Roosevelt</a>, survived having his chest cavity stomped inside out by an elephant, passed through a crocodile-infested river by riding a dead animal as a raft, had a pet monkey named J.T. Junior, and survived being charged straight-on by three rhinos at the same time, and he did it all in the name of science and education and being totally fucking awesome whenever possible. Perhaps most interestingly of all, despite the fact that this dude mowed down dozens of wild animals from the Olympic Peninsula to the Horn of Africa with a bitchin\' as hell nickel-plated double-barreled elephant gun capable of firing a <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/akeley-nitroexpress.jpg\">.577 caliber bullet</a> that was roughly the size of a George Foreman grill and would have made Charlton Heston prematurely ejaculate, today he\'s also fondly remembered by tree-humping granola types everywhere as one of the greatest early voices the wildlife conservation movement, and he was personally responsible for setting up one of the most important wildlife preserves on the planet. So, see? Bipartisanship FTW.</p>\r\n<p>And even the most bitter rivals have to agree that this was a guy who really put himself out there for his work:</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/akeley1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Carl Akeley was born in 1864, a quiet, soft-spoken, pale skinny farm boy from upstate New York who loved animals and nature like almost to an unhealthy degree that bordered on obsession. While all of his friends and other assorted jackasses were out studying and frolicking and throwing rocks at girls this kid was out in the woods drawing realistic pictures of animals and plants in his own blood and teaching himself to paint so that he could create more lifelike renderings of the shit he was observing the fuck out of in nature. In 1883 he told college to get bent, ran off to Rochester, and took a job making shit money apprenticing with a dude named Henry Ward who was basically the only semi-competent taxidermist in world at this point in time. Akeley played <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/tesla.html\">Tesla</a> to Ward\'s Edison, working his ass off for eleven hours a day, six days a week, with no breaks or sick days, and raking in about $3.50 a week for his efforts.</p>\r\n<p>While giving slave labor to Ward, Akeley kind of got the idea about how this stuffed animals shit was supposed to work, but taxidermy in the 1880s basically meant you took an animal skin, stuffed it with straw, sewed it up and call it a day. As you can imagine, the end result generally looked like a vaguely-animal-shaped pile of shit. Akeley thought this was a rampagingly idiotic was of going about things, so he decided if he going to spend all day covered in animal guts the end result better fucking look real &ndash; because if these exhibits can\'t be used to give museum-goers an accurate look at wildlife, what the hell is the point? He dedicated his life to <a href=\"http://youtu.be/LJP1DphOWPs\">Chuck Testa</a>-ing together the most lifelike dead animals around, a process that, among other things, involved creating a lifelike sculpture of the creature out of plaster and modeling clay, paying special attention to the musculature, behavior, and skeletal structure of the creature, and going out of his way to make it look like it was still alive. To take it a step further he then put the animals in lifelike environments, devising new ways to create lifelike trees and plants out of wax, wire, thread, and other bullshit, and took painstaking care to ensure that any museum exhibit he designed was as lifelike and realistic as possible.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/akeley2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>Taxidermy museum exhibits, circa 1883.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/akeley3.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>Akeley\'s version.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>After bouncing around at museums in Chicago and Milwaukee, Akeley ended up at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where he agreed to work for free as long as the museum would finance him on a bunch of trips to Africa to collect specimens (i.e. shoot things). Now, sure, it might offend some folks\' delicate ASPCA sensibilities to think about a guy being funded to travel to Africa in the 1910s, cap wild animals, and bring their hides back to be displayed in museums, but for Akeley this was a mission of conservation rather than one of pretentious personal glory. Akeley lived at a time when essentially every asshole with a few extra bucks and a functional trigger finger was going to Africa and machine-gunning gigantic bullets in every direction on <em>Oregon Trail</em>-style hunting trips, and Akeley was concerned that this wanton, senseless destruction of wildlife would end up completely depopulating entire swaths of the African countryside. So he went on a simple mission &ndash; observe these wild animals, get between two and five various breeds of African wildlife, preserve their hides, and memorialize them in lifelike sculpture so they\'d look <em>exactly</em> like they did in the wild. Essentially Akeley wanted his great-grandchildren to know what a hippopotamus looked like running free in the African brush even if hippos had been extinct for decades. Feel free to debate the merits of this all you want, but this whole taxidermy aspect of the story is basically ancillary to what I want to talk about, which is all the crazy fucking badass shit that went down while he was on these expeditions.</p>\r\n<p>The first &ndash; and probably awesomest &ndash; story comes one evening after a long day of hunting and observing wildlife in Somalia. Akeley was headed back to the spot where he\'d bagged a hyena and a bigass warthog earlier in the day, but when he got there all he saw was a couple of big bloody streaks leading off into a thick brush. Akeley froze, realizing what was happening, and when a noise came from the brush, he raised his rifle and fired to try and scare it off. Suddenly, out of the thicket came this gigantic fucking leopard screaming towards him teeth-first like a psychotic killer cat being launched out of a horrible predator-launching cannon. Unable to get his weapon back around quickly enough, Akeley dropped his gun and threw his arm up just in time to prevent the vicious beast from ripping out his throat. The leopard latched on to Akeley\'s left hand, chomping down with all its might, and kicking at him with its back legs like a rabid 80-pound feral housecat intent on brutally mutilating him beyond recognition and burying his body in the back yard. When his attempts to pull his hand out of the leopards\' jaws only made the creature bite down harder, Akeley, locked in a life or death fistfight with one of the most perfect predators nature ever created, did one of the most insane things ever &ndash; he punched his fist <em>further into the leopard\'s mouth</em>.</p>\r\n<p>Yes, you are reading that correctly. Carl Akeley, noted philanthropist and respected wildlife conservationist, punched a fucking leopard in the esophagus <em>from the inside</em>. The leopard gagged, Akeley pulled his hand out, and then he took the thing, bodyslammed it to the ground, and jumped on it with both knees, crushing it to death. Akeley, bleeding profusely from horrific wounds on both hands, clawed to shit, still recovering from a recent battle with malaria, and barely able to stand, then picked up the leopard (despite a shattered hand), threw it over his shoulder, walked back to camp with it, and taxidermized it for a museum exhibit.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/akeley4.png\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Another life-or-death duel with nature took place on the slopes of Mount Kenya a few years later. Akeley and his crew of African porters had just seen the biggest goddamned elephant Akeley had ever seen in his entire life (and this guy saw a lot of fucking elephants, FYI), so they decided to track it for a while and maybe bust some caps in its ass. Despite an intense, driving rainstorm Akeley followed the behemoth pachyderm into a thick wooded area, where he and his porters suddenly lost the trail. Then, just when they were ready to say fuck it and turn back, all of a sudden this HUGE FUCKING INSANE ELEPHANT comes busting in out of nowhere and bitch-slaps Akeley in the face with its dong-like trunk, cutting the shit out of Akeley from ear to ear (leaving a badass scar), breaking his nose and knocking him into the mud. With no time to go for his double-barreled elephant gun, Akeley popped up to his feet, wiping the blood out of his eyes just in time to see the 13-foot tall, two-ton rampaging creature lunge straight at his chest with a gleaming ivory tusk. Akeley grabbed the tusk with one hand and slipped himself between the two tusks &ndash; a move he figured might keep him safe from being impaled to death by six-foot ivory spikes &ndash; but the elephant responded by smashing its entire head down into the mud, slamming Akeley hard to the ground and crushing him with a 24,000-pound battering ram made out of elephant meat and pure unadulterated hatred. Akeley broke a half-dozen ribs, one of which punctured a lung, and blacked out from the concussive force of being <em>headbutted by a fucking elephant</em>. The psycho pachyderm then chased the natives around for a while before running off unharmed into the woods to kill again. The natives, seeing Akeley\'s crushed, motionless body, believed him to be dead, and since it was against their religion to touch a corpse they just built a fire and left him flat on his back in the rain in three inches of wet mud like assholes. Akeley woke up five hours later, got help, spent three months in the hospital, and as soon as he could walk again the 46 year-old explorer was right back at it again.</p>\r\n<p>And this shit is just for starters. One time in Uganda he shot a gigantic crocodile as it was basking on the far side of a large river, but when he and his porter swam across to get the body suddenly the porter was grabbed by a croc from below and dragged down to his death. Akeley made it across, and, hesitant to swim through crocodile death-infested waters, went back across riding the dead crocodile like a raft and paddling with his rifle. Another time he was in the Congo when suddenly a herd of elephants stampeded right through the area &ndash; giant elephants were popping out of nowhere, completely oblivious to his presence, and with the noise of all the trees falling down it was impossible to tell where they were coming from. Akeley barely made it out, and only after a few close calls and commando roll <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/tarzan.html\">Tarzan</a> shit. He also claimed to be charged over 20 times by various breeds of rhinoceros, including one time when he was sitting on the ground minding his own business when suddenly three rhinos charged him at the same time from three different directions. When asked how he got out of that one, Akeley just brushed it off, basically saying something along the lines of, \"Eh, it\'s no big deal, their eyesight is terrible and for them it\'s all about the charging and less about achieving the kill anyways.\"</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/akeley5.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Traveling throughout Somalia, East Africa, and the Congo between 1896 and 1926, Akeley worked his ass off, sleeping less than 4 hours a night, working day and night despite horrific conditions and continual bouts with malaria and dysentery, all to collect and preserve animal and plant specimens that had never been seen before in the United States. To help with his work he invented a portable video camera, a device that would be used by Hollywood studios to film World War I battlefront newsreels, and he used it to become the first man to film gorillas in the wild or to record the African tribal lion hunt ritual in Uganda. He wrote articles for National Geographic, went hunting with Teddy Roosevelt, trained a pet monkey, married a woman 20 years younger than him (she was such a badass mountain climber that she has a peak named after her in the Canadian Rockies), and invented a gas-powered cannon that sprays concrete around like a blowtorch. He\'d developed that system, known as shotcrete, to quickly build plaster molds, but Roosevelt adapted it and used it to built the Panama Canal. So there\'s that.</p>\r\n<p>When he was on the top of a mountain 10,000 feet above the Congo Carl Akeley also discovered a new species of mountain gorilla that had never been observed in the wilderness before. He taxidermized a couple of them, turning them into perhaps the most impressive museum exhibit ever created, but then he felt bad about shooting them so he convinced the King of Belgium to set up a massive wildlife preserve to keep them safe. Since that worked out so well, Akeley then went on to convince Roosevelt to set up the American National Parks Association and establish a shitload of national parks and wildlife preserves in the States, including some pretty key parks designed to protect the California redwoods &ndash; an interesting detail that makes him both an avid hunter and one of the world\'s first environmental conservationists.</p>\r\n<p>In 1926, while on expedition in the Congo to observe (not shoot) gorillas, Carl Akeley caught a fever and died at the age of 62. He\'s buried where he fell, near the top of a mountain, between two peaks measuring 11,000 feet in elevation. 86 years after his death, his life\'s work is still immaculately preserved in the Akeley Hall of African Mammals at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan\'s Upper West Side.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/akeley6.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://fieldmuseum.org/about/carl-akeley\">The Field Museum Bio</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/permanent-exhibitions/mammal-halls/akeley-hall-of-african-mammals\">The Akeley Hall of African Mammals</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/ideonexus/sets/72157608457863014/\">Some great photos of Akeley\'s work</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Akeley\">Wikipedia</a></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Sources:</span><br /><br /><span> Daniel, Hawthorne. \"He Killed a Savage Leopard with His Bare Hands!\" <em>Popular Science Monthly</em> December, 1925.<br /><br /> Madden, Dave. <em>The Authentic Animal</em>. Macmillan, 2011.<br /><br /> Martin, Paul. <em>Secret Heroes</em>. HarperCollins, 2012.<br /><br /> Merrit, Jim. \"Carl Akeley: The Man Who Loved Africa.\" <em>Field &amp; Stream</em>, January 1991. </span></p>','2012-10-05','85752027253','akeley.jpg','akeley-small.jpg','Carl Akeley','Hunter, conservationist, killed a leopard with his bare hands.','\"I felt no pain, but I certainly never thought for a moment that I would come out alive. I was rather calm, as a matter of fact, except for a tremendous and wildly pleasant thrill I felt, knowing that I was battling for my life.\"'),('Hawa Abdi Dhiblawe','c. 1947','N/A','Mogadishu, Somalia','21st-century Somali Doctor','<p>There are few things in the world more depressing than the knowledge that a 65 year-old Somali gynecologist has bigger balls than you could ever hope to achieve even if you gave yourself steroid collagen injections to the scrotum every night and set up an induction port that allowed you to inflate them with an air pump like a basketball or those high-top sneakers from the early 90s.</p>\r\n<p>Meet Hawa Abdi. A woman who has never raised her fist in anger against another human being, but also one who could perform three C-sections on dirt-poor women, wash her hands, then go straight outside, stare down an army of gun-toting hardcore fanatical Somali militiamen, and with four words send them running for their lives on a light-speed rainbow of shame and self-loathing without even fucking blinking. A woman once appropriately described once as \"one part Mother Teresa, one part Rambo.\"</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/hawaabdi1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>You don\'t have to on the Digitally-Enhanced Deluxe Double-Stuffed Special Edition Director\'s Cut Remastered Blu-Ray/DVD Combo Pack Quarter Pounder with Cheese version of <em>Black Hawk Down</em> to know that Somalia is a pretty righteously fucked-up cesspool of soul-crushing misery that, in terms of gigantic screaming hellholes, falls somewhere in the realm of Satan\'s asshole, Eastern New Jersey, and that river of lava beneath Mount Doom that melted the One Ring and flayed Gollum alive <em>Terminator 2</em> style. This is nothing against the people who live there, many of whom are honest, upstanding people who really want nothing other than to live their lives without having to worry about some hash-smoking dope fiend child soldier smacking them in the back of the face with an unsharpened machete, but any time you\'re talking about a country that has been officially designated by the United Nations as \"Totally Boned\" you\'ve got to at least consider the argument that maybe this nation isn\'t the best place to host Girls Gone Wild Spring Break Drunken Debauchery Dance Party 2013. The longest running failed state on the planet, Somalia is a war-torn wasteland of anarchistic warlord-controlled destruction so miserable that the UN has referred to it in official documents the \"worst humanitarian crisis on the planet\" and a place so totally fucked that all international aid groups have completely pulled out of the region due to safety concerns and a complete lack of cooperation from local leaders. The capital city, Mogadishu, is in ruins. 1.5 million people have been displaced. It\'s the sort of thing to make you almost think twice about not bitching and crying just because you can\'t get decent enough service on your Verizon iPhone to upload your Comic-Con photos to Facebook (almost).</p>\r\n<p>Unlike many of those people trapped in this war-shredded country without any hope of escape, Hawa Abdi doesn\'t have to put up with this bullshit. She\'s rich. She\'s respected. She\'s an internationally-recognized physician trained in some of the best medical schools in the world. Any country in the world would grant her asylum. But fuck that &ndash; Somalia is her home, saving peoples\' asses is what this woman does all day every day, and she\'d rather die than turn her back on a countryman in need.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/hawaabdi2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>A typical grocery store parking lot in Mogadishu.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Mama Hawa was born in Mogadishu in 1947. Born to a wealthy family, she got a good education, received a full scholarship to study medicine in Soviet Ukraine, earned a law degree, survived having a tumor removed from her brain, and then went on to become one of her country\'s first female OB/Gyns (this is a big deal in a country under Sharia law, where some dudes don\'t really see the point in a woman doing anything other than cooking dinner and shooting out babies). In 1983, fresh off her successes in Mogadishu and looking to set up her own practice, Mama Hawa opened up a tiny, one-room free clinic for women and children on her family\'s farmland, 15 miles from Mogadishu, offering cheap, good health care to dirt-poor families who would never have been able to afford it otherwise.</p>\r\n<p>People traveled from across the land to see her, some women carrying their infants for days on foot across the countryside, and before long Mama Hawa was seeing hundreds of patients a day. That number increased exponentially after basically the entire fucking country exploded into civil war in 1991 and roughly every single man in Somalia picked up a rusty AK-47 and proceeded to bash all of his enemies to death with it. As if it wasn\'t enough that the entire country became enveloped in an unbelievably-violent death feud of furious anger, other neighboring countries like Ethiopia tried to take advantage of the fucking anarchy and invade, further throwing the country into an epic downward spiral of violence and brutality.</p>\r\n<p>Dr. Hawa didn\'t blink. She sold all of her jewelry, liquidated her assets, sold off parts of her land, and pleaded for humanitarian aid from NGOs. Despite the destruction, war, and subsequent famine ravaging the land all around her, Hawa Abdi spent the next 29 years providing a safe haven for the displaced, turning her tiny one-room shack into a 400 bed hospital, and her 1,300-acre farm into a refugee camp where 90,000 displaced Somalis received free food, clean water, free health care, and a clean place for women to give birth. She built a school that educates 850 children between the ages of 7 and 18. She negotiated for fishing boats and farmland so her people could grow and fish for their food. She personally spent 12-hour days, 7 days a week, delivering babies, treating gunshot wounds, and setting up IV lines for malnourished children, and she\'s done it all through donations and her own personal funds, without hardly any international funding or aid.</p>\r\n<p>Oh, and this isn\'t even the badass part yet.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/hawaabdi3.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Despite all the good this woman was doing for the displaced people from her country, apparently there are some pretty magnificent pieces of human garbage who felt like it was totally bullshit how this woman was using her own money to help people &ndash; over the last 20 or so years about a dozen local warlord douchebags tried to shut her operation down at gunpoint solely for the sake of being basically the biggest asshole pricks the world has ever seen. They\'ve blocked aid, raided her camp with machine guns, and threatened her life dozens of times.</p>\r\n<p>Hawa Abdi could give a shit. She\'s not impressed by dickless bullies preying on the weak and the wounded, and she\'s more than prepared to lay it all on the line for the sake of defending her people and exposing these spineless asshats for the chumps they truly are. In the early 2000s, when an International Red Cross aid truck was blocked by a local militia band, Dr. Hawa rolled up her sleeves, walked out there alone, stood between the militia and the Red Cross trucks, and told those jerkwads she was going to personally take the food to her people &ndash; if they wanted to stop her, they were going to have to put a bullet in her. The militia leader protested, Dr. Hawa argued back, shook a finger at them disdainfully, and told them to slow their fuckin\' roles, and when the sun set that night not only had the militia troops allowed the aid to come through, but they personally gave the good doctor\'s supply convoy a full military escort all the way to the hospital.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/hawaabdi4.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>Cute guns, but Hawa Abdi is not impressed.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>One of the biggest threats to Hawa\'s camp came in May of 2010, when a rampaging band of 750 Somali pirate motherfuckers showed up at her front door with AKs, RPGs, and mortar launchers, demanding that Dr. Hawa come out and surrender the hospital. Hawa Abdi, 63, unarmed, walked out there to meet them. She told them to get lost. They said they needed to talk. She invited their leaders to dinner &ndash; a pretty generous offer that I have no doubt had all of those assholes\' heads spinning. While they were considering the offer, she sent the word out for the women in the hospital to get their shit together and sneak out as quickly as possible, a move that probably saved a shitload of lives.</p>\r\n<p>At dinner, the leaders of the militia told Mama Hawa that since she was a woman she had no business running anything. She told them, \"I\'ve been working for the country for the past 20 years. What have <em>you</em> done?\"</p>\r\n<p>This didn\'t go over well.</p>\r\n<p>The militia terrorist baby-kickers attacked, opened fire with machine guns, mortars, and rocket launchers, shot the place up, looted everything worth looting, broke every generator and piece of medical equipment they could find, beat a bunch of people up, and took the men, women, and children inside prisoner. Dr. Hawa was thrown under house arrest, barricaded in her room by armed guards. They told her to sign the papers and hand over her shit. She told them to get fucked. They told her not to do interviews. She got a cell phone and gave interviews to anyone who would listen.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/hawaabdi5.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>You\'re gonna have to do better than that.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Between the international media, a national outcry among the Somali people, Dr. Hawa\'s own outcry, and a fiery revolt among Dr. Hawa\'s imprisoned people that bordered on full-scale rioting, the bullshit militia suddenly started to lose their nerve. They came to Hawa and told her they\'d leave and let her run the joint, but only if she signed over the rights to the place to them. She told them to piss off. Then they said they\'d leave and let her keep the place, if she\'d just get it up and running so that the militia troops would stop getting heat from the media and the populace. She told them she\'d only re-open the place if she got a public written apology from the militia leader, a dude who has been on basically every NSA terrorist watch list of the last decade.</p>\r\n<p>She got it.</p>\r\n<p>The militia left, she got a written letter apologizing for the damage, rebuilt the place, got the hospital generators back on-line, and went to work saving lives once again. Since 2010 she\'s fought off another rebel attack on her hospital, and is currently battling some bullshit attempt by rich fucks to seize her land, but a woman like this isn\'t one who\'s going to back down from a fight, especially when there are tens of thousands of lives hanging in the balance.</p>\r\n<p>She\'s just been nominated for the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/hawaabdi6.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.dhaf.org/\">Donate to the Foundation</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/www.somaliareport.com/index.php/post/3140/\">Interview with Dr. Hawa</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://www.asafeworldforwomen.org/womens-rights/wr-africa/wr-somalia/1039-dr-hawa-abdi-under-siege-in-somalia.html\">Under Siege in Somalia Interview</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://www.glamour.com/inspired/women-of-the-year/2010/dr-hawa-abdi-and-her-daughters\">Glamour Person of the Year</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/11/hawa-abdi/8664/\">The Atlantic</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/mar/08/hawa-abdi-100-women\">The Guardian</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2011/aug/23/somali-doctor-puts-aid-agencies-shade\">Another Guardian Article</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/16/opinion/16kristof.html\">NY Times Column</a></p>','2012-07-20','654320528332','hawaabdi.jpg','hawaabdi-small.jpg','Hawa Abdi','65 year-old Somali gynecologist who saved thousands of lives and fought off local militias for 30 years.',''),('Mary Fields','October 1832','October 1914','Hickman County, TN, USA','19th-century American Adventurer','<p>Up until her death in 1914 at the age of 82, Old West badass \"Stagecoach\" Mary Fields had a standing bet at her local saloon: Five bucks and a glass of whiskey said she could knock out any cowboy in Cascade, Montana with a single punch.</p>\r\n<p>After the third or fourth dumb asshole tried to take her up on it, nobody ever had the balls to do it again.</p>\r\n<p>A mysterious, behemoth, don\'t-fuck-with-me woman too badass for a backstory, best guesses say that Stagecoach Mary was born on or around 1832&hellip; although up until her death the date itself was such a mystery that the town of Cascade closed their schools and businesses to celebrate her birthday whenever the hell this hard-drinking, hard-smoking, hard-swearing frontierswoman told them to &ndash; which was, on average, about twice a year, usually once around March and again sometime in October. We know that she spent the first thirty years of her life as a slave in Hickman County, Tennessee, and that she\'d spent some time working on a Mississippi steamboat Proud Mary Tina Turner-style, but aside from all that rollin\' on the river stuff all we can truly be certain of is that this six-foot tall, two hundred pound bulldozer of a woman rolled into the rough-and-tumble frontier town of Cascade in 1884 with a six-shooter and a flask of whiskey in her work apron, a well-worn ten-gauge shotgun on her lap, and a home-rolled cigar clenched between her teeth, just daring anyone to fuck with her or look at her funny or give her one reason to break his face into bone splinters with an iron-fisted right hook. She would go on to be the toughest goddamned mail carrier you\'d ever want to meet, a Montana legend, and the sort of over-the-top head-crushing asskicker that forged the Great American West.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/fields1.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Mary rode into Montana from Toledo, Ohio, where she\'d been working as a carpenter at a Roman Catholic convent. Apparently one of her best friends, a woman named Sister Amadeus (who may or may not have had some personal connection that dated back to Mary\'s time as a slave in Tennessee), had come out to Cascade to open a school for Blackfoot Indian girls, but when the dainty Sister Amadeus got sick with pneumonia and was hacking her delicate little lungs out our girl Mary jumped on a coach and hauled ass out there to help her. Mary took a job working for the Ursuline Nuns at St. Peter\'s Mission in Cascade, where she made nine bucks a week to do hard-as-fuck menial labor shit like chopping wood, digging holes, and building a schoolhouse and a chapel with little more than her bare hands, a pocket full of nails, and a carpenter\'s level. When she wasn\'t tending the chickens, maintaining the convent\'s garden, or swearing and headbutting people unconscious for even the slightest offenses (one nun famously remarked, \"May God help anyone who walks on the lawn after Mary has cut it\"), the 52 year-old badass made weekly 120-mile supply runs out to Helena to pick up food and medical gear for the convent.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/fields2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>Visit Lovely 1884 Cascade, Montana!</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Now, running a stagecoach a couple hundred miles by yourself in the Old West was no fucking picnic &ndash; this was a lawless land, filled with dangerous tomahawk-hucking Sioux Indian war bands, murderous gunslinging outlaw bandit douchebags, and all manner of vicious wild beasts capable of shredding a person into ground beef, and if a six-shooter bullet didn\'t find a way to bring about your premature untimely gruesome death the forty degree below zero wind chills would. On more than one occasion thick snow drifts blocked off Mary\'s route, piling up so high the horses couldn\'t move through it, and since there was no shelter anywhere for miles she would survive the night not by taking shelter, but by <em>hopping out of the cart</em> and pacing back and forth on foot next to the stagecoach in an effort to keep warm. Then, if they died, I\'m assuming she Han Solo Ice Planet Hoth\'ed it, but who knows.</p>\r\n<p>One of the more famous tales of Stagecoach Mary\'s badassitude came one evening when was charging through the countryside on one of her runs to deliver food and medicine to underprivileged nuns when suddenly out of nowhere a pack of psychotic fucking wolves charged in and attacked her horses, freaking them out, ripping them up, and flipping the entire cart on its side. Mary jumped out, used the overturned cart as cover to keep her from being mauled from the back when she wasn\'t looking, and then, with only a small lamp as her light source, she fought off several attacks from this pack of ferocious beasts throughout the night, first by blasting them with a shotgun at close range, and then switching to her revolver when she ran out of buckshot. The next morning she muscled the cart back upright, got everything back in place, tracked down some of the horses, made the rest of the trip back, and brought everything to the convent intact &ndash; except for a keg of molasses that had cracked during the battle, which the asshole Bishop made her pay for out of pocket (that guy was a serious bastard).</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/fields4.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>These are the sort of stagecoach folk Mary rolled with.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>When Stagecoach Mary wasn\'t cracking rabid wolves in the fucking face with the stock of her ten-gauge or single-handedly building schoolhouses for poor Native American girls, you could find her in the saloons of Cascade drinking men under the table like the chick from <em>Raiders of the Lost Ark</em> and chomping on homemade cigars so potent that hardly any gunslinger in town had the stomach to handle them. You\'d think maybe some folks would have tried to fuck with her, considering that she was, you know, a black woman in a society that at the time wasn\'t particularly well-known for its attitudes towards racial and gender equality, but Stagecoach Mary wasn\'t the sort of badass chick that was going to let people tell her what the fuck she was going to do or how she was going to do it. At a time when non-prostitute women weren\'t allowed to drink at saloons, she received special permission from the Mayor to be served at any bar in the city any time she wanted, for life. Any time some asshole messed with her, she fucked him up. Like, one time a guy called her a rude name outside a saloon, so she looked at him for a second, said nothing, then grabbed a big fucking rock out of the street and clubbed him in the skull with it repeatedly until other cowboys finally restrained her. This chick gained such a reputation for being the shit out of uppity gunslingers that didn\'t show her the proper respect that the Great Falls Examiner newspaper once cited this hard-drinking, quick-tempered asskicker as having \"broken more noses than any other person in Montana,\" and nobody ever debated the claim.</p>\r\n<p>Well, as you might imagine, you can only be a hard-drinking, foul-mouthed Convent employee for so long before your endless profanity-laced diatribes start to rub the saintly-types the wrong way, but for Mary, it wasn\'t her mouth but her unquenchable thirst for vengeance that eventually got her in trouble. Apparently one day the convent handyman got all butt-hurt that Mary made more money than him, so he went around town passive-aggressively bitching and whining and sobbing hysterically to anyone who would listen about how a black woman shouldn\'t make more money than him because oh boo hoo woe is me I\'m so fucking emo it\'s a tragedy and I\'m totally posting about it on MySpace when I get home. When Mary got wind of what was going down, she cracked her knuckles, rolled up the sleeves of her work blouse, pulled out the break-top five-shooter Smith &amp; Wesson .38 she kept under her apron at all times, stormed out behind the nunnery, challenged that jackass to a duel, and in the ensuing close-quarter gun battle she literally popped a cap in his ass, shooting him in the buttocks while emerging unscathed herself.</p>\r\n<p>Naturally, this got her fired. But it was <em>totally</em> worth it. Seriously, fuck that guy. And fuck the Bishop for firing her, even though discharging a firearm with malicious intent on the grounds of a Roman Catholic convent is probably about as worthy a cause for dismissal as you can probably ever hope for.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/fields3.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>A S&amp;W .38 \"Lemon Squeezer\" like the kind Mary carried with her at all times.<br />Also pictured: Whiskey. Which is also appropriate.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Now out of work, Mary opened two restaurants in Cascade, but they both failed because she gave out too many free meals to needy people and also because she kind of sucked at cooking. So in 1895, she applied for a job with the United States Postal Service delivering mail throughout the Montana Territory. For her job interview, she and a dozen hardened Old West cowboys half her age were asked to hitch a team of six horses to a stagecoach as quickly as possible. The 60-year old Mary Fields blew them all away, hitching the horses and then having time left over to run to the saloon, grab a shot, come back, and smoke a cigar while laughing at the other cowpokes. She became the second woman &ndash; and the first black person of any gender &ndash; to work for the U.S. Post Office.</p>\r\n<p>Now, being a postal employee might not trigger images of ultimate gunslinging badassitude, but running a postal route in 1880s Montana was basically the Old West version of driving a mail truck through <em>Boyz in da Hood</em>-era Los Angeles on check day. For the next six years, 60+ year old Mary Fields rode a stagecoach packed with money and expensive parcels through the Montana territories delivering mail anywhere, any time, through any terrain and weather and all manner of danger. Braving blizzards, heat waves, driving rain and screaming winds, Mary never missed a day of work, never failed to deliver a single letter, and was never late once. Fuck, I\'ve been late to my day job three times this week and the bus route is walking distance from my house, and here\'s this chick steering a horse-drawn carriage up a mountain cliff to deliver a thank-you card from grandma to some backwater farmer on time. If the snow got so high that the horses couldn\'t keep going (this is fairly common in a place with regular sub-zero wind chills), Mary would tie them to a tree, throw her mail bag over her shoulder, and fucking <em>walk ten miles through waist deep snow</em> and twenty mph headwinds to deliver a letter to some random schmuck on a farm in the middle of ass-nowhere Montana. When the weather wasn\'t completely soul-suckingly frigid she had to worry about outlaws and Indian attacks, although she does mention that the latter wasn\'t very common &ndash; for most Sioux, she was the first black person they\'d ever seen, and since they didn\'t know what the deal was they usually just left her alone. If anyone got a little too close for comfort she of course also carried that trusty ten-gauge shotgun (a ten-gauge, for the record, has an even bigger bore than a twelve-gauge) that according to her personal experience was capable of \"cutting a man in half at closer range.\" It was doing this job where Stagecoach Mary earned her nickname, because any time you needed something delivered on time you didn\'t fucking call FedEx, you had this chick roll around the west with a boomstick, a pet eagle (!) and a mule named Moses and that was a hell of a lot more reliable than any overnight delivery service you could ever ask for.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/fields6.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>Good, bad, I\'m the guy with the gun.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Stagecoach Mary retired in 1901and opened the most badass laundry service Cascade, MT has ever seen. Here\'s an example: One time Mary was at the saloon playing poker and drinking whiskey, when suddenly she heard a voice outside the saloon that caught her attention &ndash; it was some deadbeat motherfucker who\'d gotten his laundry done but hadn\'t paid his bill. The 72 year old ex-Postal employee calmly excused herself from the card table, walked outside, grabbed that jerkburger by his shoulder, spun him around, and completely flattened him with one punch. Then she leaned over the guy\'s crumpled body in the middle of the street and calmly told him the pleasure she\'d just derived from busting his face with her fist in was far more enjoyment than she\'d ever get from the two bucks he owed her, so they\'d just call it even. Thanks for your business, and have a nice day, see you in hell asshole.</p>\r\n<p>When Mary wasn\'t cleaning clothes and/or people\'s clocks, she babysat all the kids in town whenever their parents needed to get away, became friends with Gary Cooper (AFI\'s 11th greatest male film legend of all time, and the dude who played <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/york.html\">Sgt. York</a> in the movie), got free food and booze anywhere she went, and went to every single home game the Cascade baseball team ever played. According to local sources, she would give flowers from her garden to any player who hit a home run, and rain a hellacious fury of fire and brimstone profanity-laced horribleness on any unlucky umpires who made bullshit infield fly rule calls against the home team. Despite her gruff exterior, Mary was also kind hearted, and so beloved by the town of Cascade that when her home burned down in the fire of 1912, everyone in town got together and built her a new one.</p>\r\n<p>After a life that was far more exciting than anything most people will probably ever experience, Stagecoach Mary Fields finally died of liver failure in 1914. She\'d lived to be 82 &ndash; no small feat considering she fought wolves, trudged through freezing rain, drank hard, brawled harder, revolted against every cultural stereotype the planet had to offer, and routinely punched out cowboys half her age.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/fields5.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>Mary and the Cascades.</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.blackcowboys.com/maryfields.htm\">BlackCowboys.com</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://womego.com/articles/mind-spirit/books-women/history-lesson-stagecoach-mary\">Stagecoach Mary</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://billingsgazette.com/news/features/magazine/article_c3a25388-8991-5cf4-a505-01374274e6ad.html\">Billings Gazette</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://www.toledoblade.com/local/2010/02/08/Stagecoach-Mary-broke-barriers-of-race-gender.html\">Toledo Blade Article</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://www.badreputation.org.uk/2011/10/12/unsung-heroes-stagecoach-mary-fields/\">BadReputation.net</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Fields\">Wikipedia</a></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Sources:</span><br /><br /><span> Hazen, Walter. <em>Hidden History</em>. Lorenz, 2004.<br /><br /> Holland, Barbara. <em>They Went Whistling</em>. Random House, 2002.<br /><br /> Slatta, Richard W. <em>The Mythical West</em>. ABC-CLIO, 2001.<br /><br /> Wagner, Tricia Martineau. <em>African American Women of the Old West</em>. Globe Pequot, 2007.<br /><br /> Wishart, David J. <em>Encyclopedia of the Great Plains</em>. University of Nebraska Press, 2004. </span></p>','2012-10-12','512548528618','fields.jpg','fields-small.jpg','Stagecoach Mary','Hard-drinking, hard-fighting Old West mail carrier.','\"She was one of the freest souls to ever draw a breath or a .38.\"\r\n\r\n- Gary Cooper'),('Murad IV','July 26, 1612','February 9, 1640','Istanbul, Turkey','17th-century Turkish Politician','<p>While the Ottoman Turkish Empire still ruled an expansive swath of Asia and Europe in the early 17th century, things had really started to go downhill since the good old days of Suleiman the Magnificent gleefully riding a babe-laden chariot from Ankara to Vienna on a freeway he\'d paved with the corpses of dead European infantrymen and the bloody remnants of nonbelievers and infidels. Sultan Ahmed I was the man in charge in the late 1610s, but a rapid succession of unfortunate horrible bullshittery had really started to take its toll on the once-proud empire. First, Ahmed died for some reason. His son Osman took over, and thanks to rampant corruption and insubordinate nobles he wasn\'t able to generate enough revenue to pay his soldiers, so in 1622 his own troops stormed the palace Praetorian Guard-style, sentenced him to death by \"compression of the testicles\" (yikes!), mailed his ears to his family in a box, released Ahmed\'s brother Mustafa from prison and made him Sultan instead. Mustafa, affectionately known to Turkish history as \"Mad Mustafa\" (which sounds more like the moniker of a late-night infomercial used car salesman than the name of an Emperor), is a dude who\'s primary claim to fame is that he was always surrounded by a pair of naked servant girls and that he frequently broke into hysterical laughing fits where he\'d start cackling uncontrollably to himself for absolutely no reason at all even if nobody was talking to him (which, to be fair, I might do as well if I was constantly accompanied by twin Slave Leias). Despite the excessive boobage Mad Mustafa was, unfortunately, a rampagingly-incompetent ruler, and within a year of becoming Sultan the Safavid Persian Empire charged out of Iran, beat the shit out of the Turks, captured Baghdad, and conquered the territory of present-day Iraq away from the Ottoman Empire. Mad Mustafa was completely broke and powerless to do anything about this, so the army revolted once again, removed him from power, put him back in power six months later, then overthrew him yet again, this time in favor of Ahmed\'s son Murad.</p>\r\n<p>As we shall see, Murad would grow to become a pretty strapping dude, but at the time he was declared Sultan Murad IV in 1624 he was only 11 years old, and because nobody really wanted some pre-teen punk telling them what to do a bunch of incompetent ultra-corrupt noblemen locked Murad up and spent the next nine years running the country into the ground on his behalf. Corruption, crime, and avarice were rampant, cities and provinces across Turkey either refused to pay taxes or outright rebelled, European armies were winning military victories in the West, and the Persians continued their slow, steady assault on Turkish lands. Pissed off by all this bullshit but not really knowing what to do about it, the army revolted yet another time in 1632 (for those of you keeping score at home, that\'s the fourth time they\'ve stormed the palace in the last two paragraphs), broke into Murad\'s courtroom, and beat the Grand Vizier to death right in front of the 20 year-old Sultan of the Ottoman Empire.</p>\r\n<p>That was kind of the last straw. That night, Murad IV\'s balls finally dropped, and he grew a pair that would have made the dome of the Hagia Sophia look like one of those plastic fuckers in the ball pit at the McDonald\'s PlayPalace down the street.</p>\r\n<p>And he had a couple scores to settle.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/murad2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>In a scene that I imagine was reminiscent of <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/speirs.html\">Ron Speirs</a> taking over during the attack on Foy in <em>Band of Brothers</em>, Sultan Murad IV, sick of having his empire run for him by a bunch of inept dickwads, sacked up and told everyone that he was in charge, and anyone who had a problem with that could file a complaint with the sharp edge of his fucking ridiculously-gigantic broadsword. First he had all of his corrupt advisors strangled to death in front of him. Then, slowly, all of the leaders of the army revolts &ndash; the men who had executed Murad\'s father and brother and deposed his uncle &ndash; started turning up dead, one by one, strangled to death in their beds or shanked in a dark alley behind a tavern somewhere. On Murad\'s orders, over 500 high-ranking military officials were executed both publicly and privately, and he also whacked the Grand Mufti (basically the head of the Supreme Court of Islamic Law &ndash; Murad is the only Turkish Sultan to ever have the balls to have a Grand Mufti assassinated), and all of his questionably-loyal brothers except his youngest, a psychiatrically-challenged nutcase known as Crazy Ibrahim, who he locked in a prison known as \"The Cage\". Murad then outlawed coffee, smoking, and drinking in his empire, made these offenses all punishable by death, and closed every bar and coffee shop in Turkey claiming that they were places where people could meet up and talk shit about the government and play a lot of shitty music he wasn\'t in the mood to hear. Murad restored his economy by executing every semi-corrupt government employee he could get his hands on, telling his police and troops that if any public official was caught accepting bribes or skimming off the top of his tax collecting duties he was to be executed on the spot, without trial, and left to rot wherever he died. Murad then took the money he generated by quelling corruption (and there was a lot of it, not surprisingly) and used it to pay his soldiers, making them temporarily happy, and as soon as they didn\'t have anything to bitch about he sent them off to war to win glory for the Sultan or die trying, because honestly either one was a win for Murad.</p>\r\n<p>Of course, it also bears mentioning here that even though the sentence for public intoxication was immediate no-questions-asked summary execution by scimitar, Murad himself was a crazy raging alcoholic who once wrote, \"Even if rivers become wine they wouldn\'t fill my glass.\" When someone asked him about the double standard, he said, \"Wine is such a devil that I have to protect my people by drinking all of it.\"</p>\r\n<p>Then he probably had that guy beheaded.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/murad3.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>Turkish Starbucks, circa 1635.<br /><br />\"Sorry guys, I don\'t meant to piss in your mochachinos here but this is an espresso-free zone.<br />Nobody\'s getting out of here alive.\"</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Now, in addition to suddenly coming to the realization that he was the most powerful human being in the world and could respond to any threats to his rule with iron-fisted over-the-top bloody vengeance/justice, Sultan Murad IV was also a gigantic scary motherfucker who was built like Ben Wallace, fought like Anderson Silva, and (allegedly) killed more people than Ray Lewis. A ridiculously-behemoth war-mongering hardass, Murad\'s favorite hobbies including hunting (he was a crack shot with a rifle or bow), competitive javelin throwing, and wrestling against three or four jacked dudes at the same time and crushing each one of them in half one after the other. So, naturally, when it was time to fight some fucking Persians, Murad IV assembled his army, grew out his beard, and grabbed his own personal Royal Armory: A panopoly of badass shit that included a custom-made rifled musket with a laser sight, flash/sound suppressor, and ACOG scope, an Odysseus-grade longbow, a 130-pound steel mace, and a massive broadsword that weighed in at 110 pounds. Now, a decent skeptic would say, \"WTF nobody can go into combat wielding a one-handed sword that weighs as much as Lady Gaga,\" but you\'d be wrong, because both the mega-sized mace and the giant sword are still hanging in the museum at the Imperial Palace in Istanbul and Turkish chroniclers have devoted a lot of ink to the fact that nobody other than Murad could even lift the damn things let alone use them to rip apart enemy troops like a samurai sword through an over-ripe watermelon. Sure, his bodyguards had to work pretty hard to make sure their Sultan didn\'t get himself KIA wading into the middle of enemy formations <em>Dynasty Warriors</em>-style, but the rank-and-file troops naturally had to respect the fact that their leader was out there kicking ass and sleeping on the ground right along side them.</p>\r\n<p>At the head of a mighty horde of hundreds of thousands of Turkish warriors, Murad IV embarked on his Imperial March World Beatdown Vengeance Tour 1636. First he marched East, through Asia Minor, stopping at every single city that had refused to pay taxes and either deposing, executing, or otherwise horribly mutilating the city leadership for failing to appropriately Kneel Before Zod. When he left Anatolia he quelled a rebellion in Lebanon by crushing their army, having their leaders beheaded and dragged through the streets, then hanging their impaled corpses outside the city. Next he headed up into Azerbaijan, where he kicked the shit out of the Persians in the Caucasus Mountains, massacring their armies and capturing a few cities before swinging south and assaulted Baghdad. The City of Peace held out for about forty-five seconds before Murad IV personally knocked down the door by throwing his mace at it like Thor\'s Hammer punching through a sheet of construction paper, storming his troops through the breach and putting the entire Persian population of the city to the sword. The Persian commanders were marched through Istanbul in chains, and their rulers forced to sign a treaty that gave the Ottoman Empire control over Iraq, establishing a border between Persia and Turkey that would last until the end of World War I (over 280 years later!). When asked about his victory, the last Turkish Sultan to personally lead an army on the field simply looked wistfully into the air and remarked, \"Trying to conquer Baghdad was almost more beautiful than Baghdad itself.\"</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/murad4.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Meanwhile, while Murad was out East smiting Safavids left and right, back in Europe the Russians decided to go to war with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which is apparently a thing. Since Murad was a little busy wading through ankle-deep rivers of blood covered in the entrails of his slaughtered enemies, he dispatched the governor of Turkish-controlled Bulgaria &ndash; a guy named Abaza who had rebelled against Murad\'s father many years earlier &ndash; to take advantage of the situation. Abaza went in, plundered some towns in the Ukraine, and as he was doing that Murad bought off the Tatars and gave them a shitload of gold to sack Moscow just to be dicks. Which they did. When the Poles eventually defeated the Russians in the war and consolidated their power against the Turks, Murad made peace with the Polish King and told him that Abaza was acting on his own without any authorization and without the Sultan\'s knowledge. Then he recalled Abaza and had him executed. Bam. Two birds, one stone. He brought in plenty of slaves and money and military glory, suffered no negative repercussions from the Poles, and found a semi-legit reason to do away with a malcontent. Fucking genius.</p>\r\n<p>Despite leading two wars at the same time, Murad IV became the richest of the Late Ottoman rulers, mostly just by cutting out corruption and instilling order throughout the government and the military. In order to ensure that his rules were being followed, Murad was famous for going out into the city in the middle of the day, dressed in normal robes, and carrying a sword under his clothes. If he saw someone doing something he didn\'t approve of, he whipped out his blade and decapitated them. Of course, the things he didn\'t like weren\'t always things that were specifically illegal &ndash; like one time he beheaded a musician for playing a Persian song in a bazaar. Another time some annoying chicks were singing really loudly and really badly so he had them all tied into sacks and thrown in the river. On yet another occasion he saw some perverted asshole climbing onto the roof of his house to try and look into the Sultan\'s harem (the place where his hundreds of hot girlfriends lived) so he drew a rifle and sniped the would-be Peeping Tom from a hundred yards away.</p>\r\n<p>It should also be mentioned here that when Murad had a few too many he\'d sometimes get a little carried away. As one source claims, \"Very often at midnight he stole out of the women\'s quarters through the private gate of the palace with his drawn sword, and running through the streets barefooted with only a loose gown around him, like a madman, killed whoever came his way.\"</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/murad5.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>Murad\'s swords.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>When he wasn\'t rampaging naked through the streets drunkenly decapitating people, Murad IV was also a poet, a calligrapher, and a lover of art and science. He hired architects from India\'s Mughal Empire (you know, the guys who built the Taj Mahal) to come build amazing structures in Istanbul. He refurbished the mosque in Mecca. He encouraged science and military tech, including one time when he offered a fat sack of gold to help fund a guy named Hezarfen Ahmed Celebi undertake the longest unpowered sustained flight history had ever seen, sailing 15 miles across the Bosporus on a homemade glider. Of course, when Murad actually saw the contraption in action he got a little nervous, told his closest advisor, \"This is a scary man. He is capable of doing anything he wishes. It is not right to keep such people,\" and exiled him to Algeria &ndash; a fate which, honestly, is actually a lot better than simply choking him to death with his own contraption.</p>\r\n<p>Sultan Murad IV\'s hard-partying ways caught up with him fairly early, and he died of liver failure in 1640 at the age of 27 (Ottoman sources say it was gout, but that\'s less exciting). With his dying breath, Murad ordered his men to find his little brother Crazy Ibrahim and choke him to death &ndash; a balls-out move that, if his men had carried it out, would have meant the end of the Ottoman Dynastic line. His troops weren\'t comfortable with carrying out Murad\'s orders to snuff the last scion of the Ottoman Royal Family out of existence, so they made Crazy Ibrahim Sultan instead. Ibrahim would go on to plunder every jewelry store in Istanbul, assemble a harem of 280 of the fattest virgins he could find, drown most of them in a river, and finally be deposed after the army got pissed, stormed the castle, and whacked him out. Old habits die hard.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/murad1.png\" 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://deathaday.blogspot.com/2008/02/february-9-murad-iv.html\">A Death a Day</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://madmonarchs.guusbeltman.nl/madmonarchs/murad4/murad4_bio.htm\">Mad Monarchs</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://fascinatinghistory.blogspot.com/2005/06/smoking-kills-murad-iv-and-his.html\">Fascinating History</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://www.theottomans.org/english/family/murat4.asp\">TheOttomans.org</a></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Sources:</span><br /><br /><span> Agoston, Gabor and Bruce Masters. <em>Encyclopedia of the Ottoman Empire</em>. Infobase, 2009.<br /><br /> Cooper, J.P. <em>The New Cambridge Modern History</em>. Cambridge Univ. Press, 1979.<br /><br /> Somel, Selcuk Aksin. <em>Historical Dictionary of the Ottoman Empire</em>. Scarecrow, 2003.<br /><br /> Tezcan, Baki. <em>The Second Ottoman Empire</em>. Cambridge Univ. Press, 2010. </span></p>','2012-10-19','816112829569','murad.jpg','murad-small.jpg','Murad IV','Iron-fisted ruler of the Ottoman Empire.','\"He had grown to manhood in a world of danger and duress. His character was tempered to the hardness of steel in the harsh and bitter experiences of his youth. A ferocious and inexorable resolve to be the master in his own house would henceforth dominate his actions. It is not surprising that in the eight years of life remaining to him he was to become perhaps the most feared and terrible of all the Ottoman sultans.\"\r\n\r\n-J.P. Cooper, The New Cambridge Modern History'),('Sir Christopher Carandini Lee','May 27, 1922','N/A','London, England','20th-century British Entertainer','<p>For me, Halloween has always been about two things &ndash; choking down so much goddamned candy that my intestines harden into a supersaturated congealed sugar sausage, and hanging out on the couch with a pretty girl and a bag of fun-sized Mega Caramel Deluxe Choco-Bomb Diabetes Bars watching Dracula movies and waiting/praying for the opportunity to run outside and blast the punk kids in my neighborhood in the face with either a fire hose or an Airsoft rifle. I may be alone in this, seeing as how for some inexplicable reason apparently nobody else on the planet seems to be even a little bit burned out on goddamned zombies yet (yes, I got really into them from 2004, when I saw the remake of <em>Dawn of the Dead</em>, but the zombie genre peaked with <em>World War Z</em> in 2006 and I haven\'t given a shit about them since), but for me it just does not get any better than the original gangsta of flesh-ripping, babeage-macking vampires running around in a crypt being creepy as fuck and spraying around more carotid arterial blood spray than Maximilien Robespierre with a gas-powered chainsaw and supreme uncontested judicial power over the Revolutionary Tribunal (am I right here, all you 18th-century French Revolution buffs? Hello? This thing on?).</p>\r\n<p>And, to that end, Christopher Frank Carandini Mothafuckin\' Lee WAS Dracula. He played the bloodsucking impaling-happy non-sparkling Wallachian Count in the most perfect Dracula movie ever made, <em>Horror of Dracula</em>, then reprised the role in seven sequels over the next 15 years &ndash; giving an entire generation of humanity nightmares for life, coating himself in a swimming pool\'s worth of fake movie blood, and somehow managing to constantly surround himself with ridiculous concentrations of hot babes with twin puncture wounds on the sides of their necks and borderline-pornographic amounts of blood-stained cleavage.</p>\r\n<p>He\'s also a 6\'5\" tall world champion fencer, speaks six languages, does all of his own stunts, has participated in more on-screen sword fights than any actor in history, served for five years defending democracy from global fascism as a British Commando blowing the shit out of Nazi asses in World War II, and became the oldest person to ever record lead vocals on a heavy metal track when, at the age of 88, he wrote, performed on, and released a progressive symphonic power metal EP about the life of Charlemagne (because why the fuck not?).</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<table cellpadding=\"15\" align=\"center\">\r\n<tbody>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/christopherlee1.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></td>\r\n<td><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/christopherlee1a.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></td>\r\n</tr>\r\n</tbody>\r\n</table>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>The most prolific actor in motion picture history, Christopher Lee was born somewhere in England in 1922. His mother was an Italian Countess who was actually descended from the line of Charlemagne, and she was so important that she was allowed to wear the royal seal of <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/frederickbarbarossa.html\">Frederich Barbarossa</a> and so MILF-y she had her portrait painted by something like a half-dozen famous Italian artists. One of Lee\'s ancestors on that side was the Papal Secretary of State who refused to attend the coronation of Napoleon and is buried in the Pantheon in Rome next to Raphael (the painter not the ninja turtle), which seems like kind of a big deal. Lee\'s father, meanwhile, was a distant relative of Robert E. Lee and was multi-decorated war hero who\'d served as a Colonel in the 60th King\'s Royal Rifle Corps during World War I and the Boer War. Growing up, Lee studied Classics at Wellington College, where he was also a champion squash player, a ridiculously-badass fencer, and spent his spare time playing on the school hockey and rugby. After college, Lee took a bullshit job working as an office clerk (that\'s a Classics major for you), where his pay was one pound a week &ndash; and by one pound a week I think it means his entire compensation for busting his ass 8 hours a day was that every Friday around 4:30 a really cool guy would walk by, fist bump him, and say something like, \"Hey, nice job man! Hang in there bro!\"</p>\r\n<p>Shit got real in 1939 when Christopher Lee quit his day job, caught a boat to Finland, and decided to enlist in the Finnish Army to help them fight off the <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/hayha.html\">Soviet invasion of Finland</a>. Lee got geared up to kick some commie asses up and down the frozen wastes of mid-Winter Finland, but didn\'t see much action, returning home in 1940 to deal with a much bigger and more England-centric problem: Nazis.</p>\r\n<p>Christopher Lee enlisted in the Royal Air Force in 1940, where he worked as an intelligence officer specializing in cracking German ciphers and skulls and any other Nazi bullshit he came in contact with. In North Africa he was attached to the <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/mayne.html\">Long Range Desert Patrol</a>, the forerunner of the SAS, where he would jump in a badass fucking four-wheel-drive jeep with a gigantic machine gun mounted in the back, drive hundreds of miles behind enemy lines, survive the scorching heat of the Sahara Desert, then sneak-attack Luftwaffe airfields by rolling up on them at sixty miles an hour with his .50-caliber machine guns blazing out curtains of white-hot Nazi-smiting justice, planting dynamite on their airplanes, then peeling ass out of there leaving nothing but bullet-riddled corpses and gigantic explosions in his wake. After working with the LRDP, Lee was assigned to the Special Operations Executive &ndash; better known as <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/winstonchurchill.html\">Winston Churchill</a>\'s Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare &ndash; a group that did shit like lead a twelve-man assault that destroyed the German top secret nuclear weapons development facility in Norway and assist brave Eastern European partisans and rebels sabotage Nazi supply lines to prevent them from bringing reinforcements up to fight the Soviets. His service records are sealed and Lee doesn\'t talk much about his service (when pressed on the subject, he reportedly asks his interviewer, \"Can you keep a secret?\". When they excitedly say yes, he leans in close and says, \"So can I.\"), but we do know that by the time he retired as a Flight Lieutenant in 1945 he\'d been personally decorated for battlefield bravery by the Czech, Yugoslavian, English, and Polish governments and was good friends with Josip Broz Tito, so draw your own conclusions.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\">&nbsp;</p>\r\n<table cellpadding=\"15\" align=\"center\">\r\n<tbody>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/christopherlee2.png\" alt=\"\" /><br /><br /><center>A Nazi train derailed by partisans in Yugoslavia.</center></td>\r\n<td><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/christopherlee2a.jpg\" alt=\"\" /><br /><br /><center>The Long Range Desert Patrol.</center></td>\r\n</tr>\r\n</tbody>\r\n</table>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Christopher Lee went into acting in 1948, before myself and roughly 95% of my readership was born, and persevered through a tough 10-year stretch of bit parts and minor roles. He finally got a big break in 1957, when he got paid id=\"mce_marker\",300 to play Frankenstein\'s Monster for Hammer Films &ndash; a part he easily earned if for no other reason than just because at six foot five he was &ndash; and still is! &ndash; the tallest actor in Hollywood. He took the Dracula role the next year, spent the next decade ingesting gallons of fake blood (probably preferable to wading through knee-deep piles of real-life dead Germans while Nazi tanks fire 88mm cannons and spray machine gun bullets at you), and his career kind of blew up from there.</p>\r\n<p>In addition to his iconic, definitive role as Dracula, Christopher Lee has also portrayed some of the most memorable villains of all time. Sure, everyone knows him as Sauroman the White from <em>Lord of the Hobbits: Return to Fellowship Towers</em> and Darth Tyranus from those otherwise-terrible Star Wars prequels (which is notable in itself because Tyranus was supposed to have been Qui-Gon\'s mentor, and Liam Neeson, between being Zeus, Aslan, Hannibal, Qui-Gon, Ducard, Oskar Schindler, and your dad in Fallout 3 is basically the mentor character in every work of fiction since 1993), but for my money it doesn\'t get any better than when he played the ultimate Bond Villain in <em>The Man with The Golden Gun</em> -- a role he got thanks in no small part to the fact that Bond creator Ian Fleming was not only Lee\'s cousin, but the two men had fought together in the SOE during WWII. So Lee was basically part of the team that inspired James Bond, then he went on to play a fucking Bond Villain who lives on an island surrounded by hot babes and Tattoo from <em>Fantasy Island</em>, drives a car that turns into an airplane, uses renewable solar energy to try and destroy the world, and revolutionizes the badassitude of carrying pimped-out firearms. So Awesome.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/christopherlee3.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>I won\'t get too much into it, but Christopher Lee has basically been in every movie ever, from billion-dollar Academy Award winners to the sort of shit that Elvira pimps on Channel 875 at four in the morning on a Tuesday. He\'s almost always the villain, and as such has probably died on camera more times than anyone ever. He\'s been Fu Manchu five times. He was the definitive Count de Rochefort in a couple <em>Three Musketeers</em> movies. He\'s been The Mummy, Frankenstein\'s Monster, Willy Wonka\'s Dad, the Emperor of China, the Grim Reaper, Lucifer, <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/rasputin.html\">Grigory Rasputin</a>, Charles Marlow, <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/ramesses.html\">Ramses</a>, Tiresias the Blind Prophet of Thebes, Vlad the Impaler, one role where he\'s simply credited as \"Ship\'s Vampire\", and another where he\'s \"Resurrection Joe.\" He\'s hosted SNL and been in Police Academy, the Last Unicorn, Charlie\'s Angels, Season of the Witch, Gremlins II, a Polish Tales from the Crypt-style TV series and a softcore porn based on the works of Marquis de Sade, but he was also in Lord of the Rings, <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/shakazulu.html\">Shaka Zulu</a>, A Tale of Two Cities, The Wicker Man, <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/mobydick.html\">Moby-Dick</a> and the Hamlet with Lawrence Olivier. He\'s worked with <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/vanhelsing.html\">Peter Cushing</a>, Jimmy Stewart, <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/spartacus.html\">Charlton Heston</a>, Errol Flynn, Patrick Stewart, Stephen Spielberg, Orson Welles, Vincent Price, <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/horseman.html\">Christopher Walken</a>, Sam Eliot, Jeff Bridges and Jayne Mansfield, but also Nicholas Cage, Heather Graham, Sacha Baron Cohen, Tom Arnold, <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/starshiptroopers.html\">Casper Van Dien</a> and Armand Assante, and he once appeared in a movie called \"Howling II: Werewolf Bitch\" with the dude from <em>Space Mutiny</em>.</p>\r\n<p>He\'s the only person to play both Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes (he was also Sir Henry Baskerville). His characters have executed both Charles the First of England and Louis the Sixteenth of France (and, as a badass side note, Lee is so into the idea of public executions that in real life he can recite every official executioner in England since the 15th century). He\'s portrayed Englishmen, Egyptians, Spaniards, Transylvanians, Frenchmen, Greeks, Poles, Chinese, Indians, Italians, Wallachians, Romans, Germans, Arabs, Gypsies, and Russians, played the lead role in the biography of Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, speaks English, German, Russian, Swedish, Italian, and French, can do any English accent he wants, and sings everything from opera and death metal in a hardcore bass voice. IMDB credits him with 274 acting roles, Guiness says he\'s appeared in more films than anyone ever, and the Oracle of Bacon lists him as the Center of the Hollywood Universe because anyone in history links to him in 2.59 steps (he links to Bacon in 1). If that\'s not enough, Lee\'s movies have grossed more than any actor ever &ndash; his top five alone grossed $4.4B (number two is Harrison ford with $3B) and that doesn\'t even include the new Hobbit stuff and whatever the fuck else he\'s got in the works. He\'s such a veteran pro that he filmed every single scene in Star Wars 3 in a single day, and even though he\'s never received a Best Actor nomination he\'s been in 4 movies nominated for Best Picture and he can rest assured that even the shittiest movie of his career is probably a fuck of a lot more entertaining than <em>The English Patient</em>.</p>\r\n<p>He\'s also developed something of a reputation for being a dick to fans and for having a seething contemptuous disdain for fajitas, which makes him even more badass in some ways.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/christopherlee3a.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>\"I gave you the chance of aiding me willingly but with these fajitas you have elected the way of pain.\"</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Lee also belongs to three stuntman unions, does all of his own stunts, once busted his face smashing head-first through an actual plate glass window for a scene, injured himself falling into an open grave while portraying Dracula, and once had his hand slashed open during a drunken sword fight with Errol Flynn.</p>\r\n<p>Oh, and while we\'re on the subject of swordfights, Lee has appeared in more on-screen sword duels than any other actor ever. A masterful fencer, he\'s been in everything from cutlass fights on the decks of waterlogged pirate ships to rapier duels in seventeenth-century France to taking on a couple guys one-third of his age with a lightsabers and a fistful of force lightning on the deck of whatever the fuck they called Imperial Star Destroyers in the prequel movies.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/christopherlee4.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>CHRISTOPHER LEE FUCKING LOVES THIS SHIT</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>A classically trained singer, Christopher Lee also released a heavy metal hardcore symphonic power metal concept album about Charlemagne when he was 88 years old. He\'s played with Rhapsody and Manowar, and on his 90th birthday he released a metal single called \"Let Legend Mark Me as the King\" with music written by some of the guys from Judas Priest.</p>\r\n<p>No, I am not joking about this. I am actually streaming a track about Pepin the Short off <a href=\"http://www.myspace.com/charlemagnemusical\">his MySpace page</a> as I type and it\'s actually pretty good.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/christopherlee5.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>\"One should try anything he can in his career, except folkdance and incest.\"</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Christopher Lee is also a master golfer who once played with Jack Nicklaus and is the only actor to be a member of the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers, the most prestigious country club in the world. He\'s been married to the same Danish supermodel for 44 years, is the Commander of the <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/valette.html\">Order of St. John</a>\'s of Jerusalem, a Knight Bachelor of the Order of the British Empire, and once received a medal from Mikael Gorbachev.</p>\r\n<p>He\'s still acting at 90 years old.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/christopherlee6.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<table style=\"width: 500px;\" align=\"center\">\r\n<tbody>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td><span>\"When you\'re involved in a war it\'s the old saying \'if your name\'s written on the bullet, there\'s nothing you can do about it\'. So you just banished it from your mind. Of course I was scared on some occasions and anyone who says they aren\'t scared during an operation probably isn\'t telling the truth. I know about six people who had no fear. Literally none. Whether that was due to a lack of imagination or because they\'d conquered it, I don\'t know. In fact one was Iain Duncan Smith\'s father, who was one of my closest friends. But during a war, people are taught to kill and they have the blessings of the authorities to do so, so if it\'s your life or somebody else\'s, you want to be quite sure it\'s not yours.\"</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://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000489/\">IMDB Page</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://christopherleeweb.com/pages/biography\">Official Biography</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://thestuview.blogspot.com/2011/05/top-10-christopher-lee-performances.html\">The 10 Greatest Christopher Lee Performances</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Lee\">Wikipedia</a></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Sources:</span><br /><br /><span> Clark, Mark. <em>Smirk, Sneer, and Scream</em>. McFarland, 2004.<br /><br /> Guiley, Rosemary. <em>The Encyclopedia of Vampires, Werewolves and Other Monsters</em>. Infobase, 2004.<br /><br /> Paul, Louis. <em>Tales from the Cult Film Trenches</em>. McFarland, 2008.<br /><br /> Wright, Michael. <em>What they Didn\'t Teach You About WWII</em>. Random House, 2009. </span></p>','2012-10-26','349769329893','christopherlee.jpg','christopherlee-small.jpg','Christopher Lee','World War II Commando, master fencer, Dracula.','\"I\'ve seen many men die right in front of me - so many in fact that I\'ve become almost hardened to it. Having seen the worst that human beings can do to each other, the results of torture, mutilation and seeing someone blown to pieces by a bomb, you develop a kind of shell. But you had to. You had to. Otherwise we would never have won.\"\r\n\r\n-Christopher Lee, discussing his service in World War II'),('John Nicholson','December 11, 1822','September 23, 1857','Lisburn, Ireland','19th-century Irish General','<p>Captain John Nicholson was a cranky, humorless, God-fearing, self-proclaimed clairvoyant Irishman who commanded regiments of hardcore kukri-swinging <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/gurung.html\">Gurkha</a>, did battle with ferocious <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/massoud.html\">Afghan</a> tribal warriors, crossed swords with blood-raging <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/babadeepsingh.html\">Sikhs</a> and rampaging <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/yadav.html\">Indian</a> mutineers, kept the severed head of a convicted outlaw on his desk as a warning to criminals, and used to hunt Bengal Tigers on horseback using only a cavalry saber. Between riding down apex predators and crushing the skulls of all who opposed him in a bloodsplosion of gruesome vengeance, Captain Nicholson was so damned effective as the ultimate paragon of Victorian English colonial badassitude of diplomatic iron-fistedness that he was worshipped as a god in some rural sections of the Punjab until the mid-1980s, is forever remembered by the British history texts as the \"Hero of Delhi\", and is equal parts respected and despised by roughly everyone on the Indian subcontinent.</p>\r\n<p>And you know that when contemporary 19th century writers make extra-special care to sing praises about a guy\'s beard when they write stories about him, he\'s probably about as badass as they come.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/nicholson1.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 a man cast in a giant mould, with massive chest and powerful limbs, and an expression ardent and commanding, with a dash of roughness; features of stern beauty, a long black beard, and a deep sonorous voice. There was something of immense strength, talent and resolution in his whole frame and manner, and a power of ruling men on high occasions which no one could escape noticing.\"</span></td>\r\n</tr>\r\n</tbody>\r\n</table>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Nicholson was born in Lisburn, a suburb of Belfast in Northern Ireland, on December 11, 1822. Aside from him attending some school I\'ve never heard of before there isn\'t much to say about his early life, since on the day that Nicholson turned sixteen, his uncle &ndash; a Member of Parliament and a prominent lawyer for the British East India Company &ndash; bought Nicholson a commission in the British Army, enlisted him in the Bengal Infantry, and put him on a boat to India on a mission to go spread death and destruction and Christianity and cups of tea and other civilized things to the savages in the name of the Pax Britannia.</p>\r\n<p>So, at a time when most kids his age were wearing out Pac-Man arcade machines and feathering their mullets up so they\'d look totally sweet in their driver\'s license photos, Ensign John Nicholson of the 27th Native Infantry Regiment was charging across a bullet-riddled battlefield, sword raised high above his head, leading a ruthless platoon of battle-forged hardcore Indian Sepoy soldiers in a non-stop uncontrollable deathmatch against the ferocious tribal warriors of rural Afghanistan. Participating in the First Anglo-Afghan war from 1839 to 1842, the young Ensign was decorated for bravery during the Ghazni Campaign, when he was part of a column that force-marched 147 miles through the mountains and deserts of Afghanistan, captured Kandahar from the enemy, then personally led his daring Sepoy soldiers on a frontal assault against the city of Ghazni, using ladders to cross a moat and scale 70-foot walls while tens of thousands of Afghans hurled musket fire, arrows, and cinderblocks violently towards his dome. Once he and his men breached the walls, they forced their way to the city center, where they were cut off, surrounded, and forced to engage the enemy hand-to-hand with bayonets and swords until more troops could be brought up to help them exploit the breakout.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/nicholson2.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>The assault on Ghazni.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Shortly after the battle, Nicholson\'s battalion was attached to a unit that was sneak-attacked by the enemy, surrounded, and captured fierce battle. Never one to bow down in the face of obscenely-overwhelming odds no matter how redonkulous the situation, the enterprising Irishman escaped by simply bribing his guard to unlock the gate, then walked out of an Afghan prison and fled on foot across Afghanistan to regroup with his men. No problem.</p>\r\n<p>By the time Nicholson got back to British lines the war was over, but just a few years later Nicholson got the chance to prove himself yet again, this time in the Anglo-Sikh War of 1845. Fighting in a unit alongside Neville Chamberlain, Nicholson was a rampaging enemy-smiting bastard and the only thing this motherfucker was interested in appeasing was his foot up the asses of anyone who stood opposed to him on the field of war (ok, it wasn\'t THAT Neville Chamberlain, it was <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neville_Bowles_Chamberlain\">a different one</a>, but still). In yet another display of his gigantic raw testicular gigantitude, Nicholson assaulted and captured the city of Multan and defended it against a withering Sikh counter-attack despite taking a nasty kirpan dagger wound to some unspecified part of his anatomy. Fighting these worthy adversaries was such a fulfilling experience for Nicholson that he couldn\'t stay away from it, and he earned even more military honors for capturing the city of Attock during the Second Anglo-Sikh War in 1848 when he bluffed the city into surrendering even though he was dying of cholera and was outnumbered three-to-one by the defenders. His successes and victories against these valiant warriors were so impressive that after the British East India Company finally annexed a huge portion of the Punjab from its Sikh rulers, Nicholson was appointed administrator of the most lawless, toughest, most inhospitable province they had: Northern Kashmir &ndash; a half-Sikh, half-Muslim region in present-day Pakistan that at the time shared a tenuous border with Afghanistan.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/nicholson7.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>FACE STAB</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Now the Punjabis are a tough group of people, but Nicholson &ndash; a stern, unflinchingly-badass Irishman who knew a thing or two about cracking skulls &ndash; somehow won their respect. He learned to speak Urdu. He learned their culture and their code of honor &ndash; a code of honor that demanded that no offense go unpunished &ndash; and he took it to heart. Sure, he was known for his foul temper, his authoritarian practices, and his propensity to whip out a cast iron club and beat people with it when they took too long to explain something, but Nicholson was also universally respected as fair, just, and honorable, and he brought food, medicine, aid, and order to the people of Punjab, personally adjudicating most disputes and punishing everyone from corrupt politicians to violent criminals with sentences ranging from public flogging to summary execution without trial. And he didn\'t have any time or interest in bullshit bureaucratic red tape, general fucking around, or anything else that required him to suffer fools. One time a psychotic religious fanatic charged him with a dagger in the middle of the street, so Nicholson flung the dude to the ground, grabbed a rifle off a British sentry, and capped the guy point-blank in the back of the head with a .577-caliber minie ball. Another time he heard a rumor that his cooks were planning on poisoning his soup, so he stormed into the kitchen and ordered them to taste it. They refused. He fed some to a monkey he found somewhere. It died. He had every cook on staff hanged from a post outside the mess hall, then went back and ate dinner. One yet another occasion, he put a huge price on the head of a notorious outlaw, but when it took bounty hunters too long to bring him in Nicholson personally rode out to the dude\'s village, by himself, killed the bandit leader in a sword fight, decapitated his corpse on the spot, brought the head back to Multan, and displayed it on his desk for months as a warning to everyone about what happens when they fuck with the Queen\'s representative in Punjab.</p>\r\n<p>It took John Nicholson five years to take the most lawless, wildest region of present-day Pakistan and to not only render it completely free of crime, but to make himself so well-respected, feared, and beloved in the process that the Cult of Nikal Seyn was formed to worship \"The Lion of Punjab\" as a living god. As of a book I read from the 1980s, this cult was still in existence in some remote mountain regions on the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan. That\'s like Augustus Caesar shit right there.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/nicholson3.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>The Ango-Sikh War</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>Everything was going pretty great with regards to decapitations and things until 1857, when roughly two-thirds of the Indian Army suddenly rose up, revolted against the East India Company, overthrew their British overlords, and demanded Indian autonomy and freedom from Victorian bullshit. Now, I can kind of see where some of <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/rani.html\">the mutineers</a> were coming from, because who the fuck wants to be ruled by a faceless evil global corporation based halfway around the world, but when the mutineers started massacring British prisoners of war and executing their wives and children you can probably see what Captain John \"Eye for an Eye\" Nicholson wasn\'t too interested in any sort of negotiation that didn\'t involve ramming a bayonet into someone\'s fucking throat and then headbutting their corpse into a ditch.</p>\r\n<p>The 34 year old Captain, already an 18-year veteran who had survived three of the British Empire\'s most vicious wars, was brevetted a Brigadier-General and dispatched to ride 300+ miles to Delhi to crush the revolt at its source and personally overthrow the last <a href=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/babur.html\">Mughal</a> Emperor of India. Under his command were three cavalry regiments and seven battalions of Punjab infantry, as well as his personal bodyguard of 200 fanatically-loyal Muslim Multani tribesmen &ndash; hardcore motherfuckers who received no pay for their service, took orders from no man except Nicholson, and slept every night outside the door to his private quarters so that nobody could enter. This detachment hauled ass 40 miles a day through the brutal heat and 110% humidity of the Indian summer, stopping only to wipe out disorganized regiments of mutineers, crush them in battle, and execute their leaders by strapping them back-first to the business end of cannons and blowing them apart with point-blank canister shot.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/nicholson4.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>When Nicholson and his wild army of madmen reached the outskirts of Delhi they found a demoralized, beaten down army of Brits, loyal Sepoy Indian troops, and Gurkhas camped along a ridge overlooking the fortress-city. Nicholson walked right up to the commanding officer, a no-nuts, overly-cautious, ridiculously-old douchebag who was only in charge because the unit\'s three highest ranking officers had all died of cholera in the last calendar month, and demanded that he attack the city at once. General Douchebag was like, \"Whatever chump including your assholes there are only 8,000 dudes here and there are like 35,000 motherfuckers entrenched behind 120-foot alls and a moat so why don\'t you fuck off?\", but Nicholson wasn\'t about to take that as an answer. When he pressed the General for info, the guy was like, \"Oh well we have like 13-mile long train of artillery-toting elephants coming to help out, so let\'s just chill until that gets here.\" Nicholson was like, \"How the hell are you defending it?\" and when the General responded with, \"Uhhhh&hellip;\" Nicholson got his men together, ran out with 2,500 troops, charged straight-on into the center of a 6,000-man unit that had been sent to destroy the supply train, crushed it without mercy while only losing 800 of his own troops, then personally escorted the siege guns to the front so they could blast the walls of Delhi at point-blank range.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/nicholson6.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /><br /><span>Assault on Delhi.</span></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p>The morale of the defenders changed immediately, and the once-weary troops now started referring to Nicholson as \"The General\" even though he was technically only a Captain and not at all in charge of the operation. Nicholson demanded that General Douchebag attack, and when that asshole still refused, Nicholson sent a request that he be removed from power. When it looked like that would be a possibility, the General, fearing for his job, finally ordered the assault, and in the early hours of September 13, 1857 Captain John Nichols personally led the column that charged towards Delhi\'s Kashmiri Gate. Supported by siege artillery, Nicholson\'s men &ndash; Brits, Indians, Punjabis, and Gurkhas &ndash; ripped through the walls, battling the enemy hand-to-hand with rifle butts and bayonets, refusing to back down or give ground despite being outnumbered 4-to-1 in some crazy Mogadishu-style street warfare madness. After scaling the outer walls, capturing the parapets, breaching through two gates, and creating a solid entry point for more British troops to pour in, Nicholson urged his troops to keep fighting, and press the attack while the enemy was reeling. His men, exhausted from hours of nonstop battle, then watched in awe as their commanding officer personally led the charge down a crowded street, revolver blazing, sword fighting a swarm of enemy troops while snipers took shots at him from rooftops and windows. Nicholson, battling to the end, was hit in the back by a sniper\'s bullet and fell in the street. He knew the wound was mortal the moment it hit him.</p>\r\n<p>It took Captain John Nicholson nine days to die. He only allowed himself to go after he knew the battle was over, that Delhi had fallen, that the Mughal Emperor had been captured, and the rebellion crushed. He was so resolute in his determination that at one point, on his death bed, he heard a rumor that General Asshead was considering calling off the attack, and his only response was, \"Thank God I have yet the strength to shoot him if necessary.\" At his funeral, his loyal Multani horsemen &ndash; brave, fearless, gigantically-badass warriors whose code of honor mandated that any man who shed a tear was to be punished by being flogged by women &ndash; threw themselves son his grave and wept.</p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\"><img src=\"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/nicholson5.jpg\" alt=\"\" vspace=\"8\" /></p>\r\n<table style=\"width: 500px;\" align=\"center\">\r\n<tbody>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td><span>\"Brigadier-General John Nicholson is now beyond human praise and human reward. But so long as British rule shall endure in India, his fame can never perish. He seems especially to have been raised up for this juncture. He crowned a bright, though brief, career by dying of the wound he received in the moment of victory at Delhi. The Chief Commissioner does not hesitate to affirm that without John Nicholson Delhi could not have fallen.\"</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://www.1911encyclopedia.org/John_Nicholson\">Britannica 1911 article</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://johnnicholsonofindia.wordpress.com/about/\">Victorian Blogs Bio</a><br /><br /> <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Nicholson_%28East_India_Company_officer%29\">Wikipedia</a></p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\r\n<p><span style=\"color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;\">Sources:</span><br /><br /><span> Holmes, Richard. <em>Sahib</em>. HarperCollins, 2011.<br /><br /> James, Lawrence. <em>Raj</em>. Macmillan, 2000.<br /><br /> Perrett, Bryan. <em>At All Costs!</em>. Arms and Armour, 1993. </span></p>','2012-11-02','181861630630','nicholson.jpg','nicholson-small.jpg','John Nicholson','Victorian British war hero who kept a human head on his desk and hunted tigers with a sword.','\"Gifted in mind and body, he was as brilliant in government as in arms. The snows of Ghazni attest his youthful fortitude; the songs of the Punjab his manly deeds; the peace of this frontier his strong rule. The enemies of his country know how terrible he was in battle, and we his friends have to recall how gentle, generous, and true he was.\"'),