The world of MMA memorabilia collecting is a pretty shady and borderline maniacal place. The biggest dealer’s name is Brett, but he has to call himself “Otis” as a form of witness protection because he fears that rabid MMA junkies (no, not those) will mug him and steal his posters. As silly as that might sound, eyeball some of the most obsessive people who collect MMA stuff and you’ll understand. This guy would DEFINITELY have sex with Rickson Gracie in a heartbeat given the chance, but he’s not gay. I’m not even saying that in a prison-induced-circumstances kind of way; it’s really just a higher plane of Greek-Platonic MMA love.

I myself have succumbed to the urge to buy many MMA posters over the years, and I have some of the coolest ones out there. PRIDE butterfly poster? Check. Card-autographed Ultimate Fighter 1 finale poster? Check. " target="_blank">The Joe Rogan collection? One of each. Card-autographed Randy vs. Big Poopy poster? I have three. So when I read that Zuffa was producing a special UFC 144 poster portraying Quinton Jackson as Godzilla, I was electrified. I assumed that stacks of them would come around like most other UFC posters. I couldn’t find one on eBay, but while jerking off to the poster, my eyes strayed to the bottom and found a UFC store web address.

I threw my phone that has Google Wallet on it at my computer monitor in an attempt to order more quickly, but I failed. It appears that the UFC only produced 20 of these posters (and charged $200 apiece for them). A cynic might assume that my quest to obtain one of these babies would end thusly, but not so! I am determined to picket outside of UFC headquarters along with all of the the rape victims and chefs until the UFC decides to print more of them. Better yet, if you’re one of the 20 people who got one, please, for the love of god, give it to me. I’ll pay out the ass for it, if you know what i mean *wink*.

Nate Marquardt is an enigma. He has an unshakable faith in Jesus, but he doesn’t hesitate to bend the rules a bit in order to try to break his opponent’s neck. He is the sweetest, meekest, most soft-spoken guy in the world, but he is juiced out his ass AND his balls. Now, adding further to the enigma, Dana White believes that Nate Marquardt is “disgusting and has no business fighting” for Zuffa, but he will be returning to the Zuffa-Forza promotional umbrella, likely fighting for the Strikeforce welterweight title against Tyron Woodley later this year.

This is a very good development for Marquardt, who is probably itching for a paycheck. He was cock teased by BAMMA for several months without ever actually fighting for them, and he is a pretty generous guy (when I went to his gym as a guest, he refused to even charge me a drop-in fee,) so he deserves to be able to make some money fighting. It remains to be seen how Marquardt will withstand the cut to 170 pounds, but he really had nowhere to go in the UFC middleweight division. Ergo, Strikeforce is not a bad place for him to end up.

This move also lends Strikeforce some much-needed talent. Maybe this was Dana White’s grand plan for Strikeforce once it “handed over the reigns”: to turn it into Australia. If you’re “disgusting”, have bad BO, got hit with your second steroid suspension, or throw sucker punches, they can send you to the promotion where all the misfits earn their bread. Some pretty good fighters are misfits, so I would watch this. They could invite Renato “The Asshole” Sobral back under these auspices (David Heath shouldn’t have called him “motherf*cker” anyway.) Heck, they could even decorate the venues like Mos Eisley Cantina and invite Amanda Lucas over for the party.

MiddleEasy is clearly the Family Guy of the MMA blogosphere: when they decide to write something, they flap their fins until they pick some random idea balls from the tank, throw in an MMA link, say “baller” several times, and boom, it’s a post. So imagine my surprise when I came across their post on the Joe Lozito story, and the introductory idea ball actually related to the rest of the story. Bauzen from MiddleEasy likes chicken sandwiches, AND he had a chicken sandwich with Joe Lozito! After cleaning my pants and recovering from the shock of seeing a logical connection in a MiddleEasy article for the first time ever, I discovered that the rest of their article on the Joe Lozito story is actually pretty awesome too.

About a year ago, Lozito was just minding his own business while taking the New York subway to work when he inadvertently became a hero by stopping psychopath Maksim Gelman, who had killed four people on a murderous rampage because a hot girl didn’t like him:

There was a delay as an ‘emotionally disturbed person’ boarded the same car and proceeded to pound on the operator’s door. If you’ve spent any extended time in New York City, none of this would seem out of the ordinary. In fact, I would venture to say I’ve never experienced a completely “normal” subway ride getting anywhere in the 25+ years I’ve lived in this city. Unbeknownst to Joe, this particular unhinged man was the focus of a city-wide manhunt following four consecutive murders stemming from the night before. When the conductor essentially told the man to get lost, he turned his eyes to Joe, the person geographically nearest to him at that very moment. He reached to his belt line and retrieved an eight-inch chef’s knife, the kind you’re probably accustomed to seeing in a kitchen, stared directly into Joe’s eyes and muttered “You are going to die”.

Within seconds, the knife traveled into & out of Joe’s arms, shoulders, and head; a total of seven times. Joe immediately planted his legs on the vinyl-coated floor and shot for the most important single-leg takedown of his life while the train came to a screeching halt. A passenger must have triggered the subway’s emergency brake lever upon seeing the savage attack commence. Bleeding profusely, Joe wrestled the man to the ground, disarmed him, and more or less single-handedly brought an end to the Maxim Gelman 24-hour killing spree, while the rest of the subway’s patrons resisted getting their hands dirty. Several moments later, two New York police officers emerged from the conductor’s cabin, where they had resided for the duration of the train’s course. They immediately arrested Gelman and graciously accepted credit for apprehending NYC’s most wanted man while Joe continued to bleed out onto the dirty floor of the subway car. Nobody knows exactly what prompted two armed personnel sworn to protect and serve the people of New York to wait as long as they did to come out and pick up the suspect they were specifically stationed to look out for that day. It was nearly 25 minutes after the attack began when the train proceeded to the next station and Joe finally made it into an ambulance where his bleeding cuts were tended-to. To date, he credits his survival to a single compassionate passenger, Alfred Douglas, who found some clean napkins to compress his most critical wounds and kept him alive long enough for medics to take control of the situation.

Even with long-lasting emotional and physical scars, Joe managed to sneak some humor into his allocution at one of the nutcase’s sentencing hearings, which happened on February 15 (after da jump):

“This guy has a lot of time he has to start serving… I don’t want to keep him here.” Joe proceeded to acknowledge Alfred Douglas for saving his life by giving him first aid after the attack. He then looked directly into Gelman’s eyes. “When you attacked and I took you down, you went down real easy.”

“You didn’t take me down, you jerk-off,” Gelman fired back.

Looking at the courtroom, Lozito responded, “Look, it’s the funniest Russian since " target="_blank"> Yakov Smirnoff.” A brief moment of laughter overcame the courtroom. Joe proceeded. “I appreciate that you chose me, I really do… Maybe if you’d continued your extreme cowardice, you would have picked on another person, a woman and maybe she couldn’t defend herself. Or a child.”

Gelman resumed interjecting, “You fucking jerk-off. Moron!”

“Why are you so angry?” Lozito mocked back.

Clearly infuriated, Gelman began hollering loudly, forcing the judge to tell him to keep quiet.

“Just think about the lives you have changed,” Lozito resumed, then listed the names of Gelman’s four victims. “They’ll never get to walk the face of this earth because you’re a spoiled little boy who nobody listened to as a kid. Instead of taking your ball and going home, you threw a tantrum. I wish you all the best. I hope you rot in your cell and you have hell to look forward to, so enjoy it.”

Given a last chance to speak on his own behalf, Gelman’s final words were simply “Kim Kardashian, will you marry me?” followed by one last insult towards Lozito, “That jerk-off can suck my dick.”

“No thank you, for the record,” Lozito replied as he took his seat and awaited the judge’s sentencing.

“We’ve been subjected today to something of this man’s evil, unrepentant nature,” Judge Carruthers said. “Remove him.” He handed down an additional 25 years in prison to the pre-existing 200 year sentence.

And now for why we care: when asked how he managed to halt the slaughter being inflicted by a lunatic with a large knife, he simply said, “It’s something I’ve seen guys do in the UFC on a regular basis, but without the knife.” We’ve seen lots of stories of robberies being foiled by MMAers, but this is perhaps the highest-profile case in which a regular citizen was empowered to stop a bad guy just because he watched MMA on TV. But MMA is still illegal in New York because it has no place in a dignified society. It’s immoral, yucky, and according to New York Assemblyman Bob Reilly’s scientific, unbiased survey, 67% of crotchety old hags oppose it. And come on, how could the completely impartial Culinary Workers Union Local 226 steer us wrong?

Lozito is now suing the city for the negligence of the police officers who hid in the train conductor’s booth rather than pursue the killer they were stationed there to pursue, even after passengers informed them that something very very not good was happening. Being from New York Sh*tty myself, I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen police behave this way on a less extreme level. New York is pretty much like the Grand Theft Auto video game franchise: when you do something minor like jaywalking or killing a few people, you only have a one-star pursuit rating. This means that the cops are really more interested in their coffee and donuts than having to fill out paperwork because they put a collar on you. Knowing New York, they’ll just take a drop from their neverending money bucket to pay Lozito a settlement and the cops who are the subject of this lawsuit will either keep their jobs or be reassigned to easier ones. The world will keep turning, the sun will rise in the east, and jacked female fighters will still get popped for steroids.

If you’re like me, you simply ignore the ring girls in MMA broadcasts because if you were to stare at them for more than a few seconds, you would have to open up porn in another window until you’ve “calmed yourself down”. One recent innovation in the MMA ring girl space is the ability to “calm yourself down” with photos of the same girls you’ve just seen on the MMA broadcast. When it was discovered that a ProElite ring girl was doing hardcore porn on the side, ProElite exec T. Jay Thompson simply stated that “Our ‘win a date with a ProElite ring girl’ contest just got a whole lot more popular!”

But over in UFC land, baby Jesus forbids that a woman who’s paid to cavort around in her underwear could tinker with her own vajayjay on camera. It’s okay to be in Playboy, but any suggestion that you might actually use those tender bits for something other than pointing them into the air like bazookas is unacceptable. Several different sources have reported a rumor that UFC octagon girl Chandella Powell could have been fired from the UFC because she did not disclose her former alias, “Mariah Ashton”, under which she performed in several softcore Internet porn shoots.

It had long been known that Chandella Powell was a former Playboy model, but when she underwent her Jekyll-and-Hyde-like transformation to Mariah Ashton, things got kind of crazy. Let’s just say that if Chandella’s job was to hold up the ring cards, Mariah’s job was to open the curtains. After hours of intense scrutiny in the Fightlinker forums, we have concluded that they are indeed the same person. Chandella’s twitter has been silent since Feb. 11, and she wasn’t at the Sanchez vs. Ellenberger card last night, so there might actually be some truth to this.

It didn’t look good for her budding movie career when Gina Carano’s voice was changed in the movie “Haywire”, but evidently our favorite cute-but-sometimes-fat fighter/actress (fightress?) is pretty well liked in Hollywood. Gina impressed enough people in the 42nd-ranked Action Heroine movie since 1980 to land another leading role even though “Haywire” grossed only $18.5 million at the box office, which was probably half of Ewan McGregor’s coke-and-hooker budget for the shoot.

After rumors that Carano could be cast as Wonder Woman never led to an official announcement, the news dropped yesterday that she will be starring in “In the Blood” by director John Stockwell. The plot seems like an estrogen-charged quest for revenge, which is really the best kind of quest for revenge because it is most likely to erupt into hot sex at any point:

After making her breakthrough with the action vehicle Haywire, the MMA fighter-turned-actress is coming on board to star in In the Blood, an action thriller being directed by John Stockwell (Into the Blue, Blue Crush).

Described as being in the vein of Taken, Blood is set in motion when a husband disappears while vacationing in the Caribbean with his wife, to be played by Carano. The grieving wife passionately and recklessly pursues the men whom she believes kidnapped and killed him. Bennett Yellin and James Robert Johnston wrote the script.

“This role will showcase not only Gina’s fighting skills, but also her acting abilities as her character struggles to reign in her violent past,” Stockwell tells The Hollywood Reporter.

Steven Soderbergh he is not, but John Stockwell isn’t the worst director to be paired with if you’re a nubile young lady of considerable attractiveness but questionable acting skill. Not only did John Stockwell play Cougar in Top Gun, he has also directed several chicks-in-bikinis themed movies, such as Blue Crush and Into the Blue. Stockwell also directed the Showtime series “The L Word” (okay, some would say “ran it into the ground”) for its last few seasons, which bodes very well for the prospect of hot girl-girl scissor business in this film.

Also attached to the film is writer Bennett Yellin, who is responsible for such fine work as ‘Paul Reiser Out on a Whim’ and ‘Joy Ride 2: Dead Ahead.’ He’s best known though as the writer of Dumb & Dumber. Which means we might have Gina Carano stepping on rakes while chasing kidnappers and taking giant stinky dumps:

Because Haywire was good, but needed more Carano potty time. Gina will begin filming the movie in late spring or early summer, so for those of you who are hoping to see her fight again, consider your hopes dashed like Gary Goodridge’s brains.

Seemingly bored after his rape tweet apology-and-donation tour, Forrest Griffin has taken to calling kids with cancer “dumbasses” on twitter. He followed this up by deleting only the first tweet in the series and explaining the obvious: by calling this kid a dumbass, he was simply “trying to help [the kid] find his happiness in life”. No word yet on whether he will have to visit more cancer patients to atone for this, but that probably wouldn’t be the best idea in the world.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I am quite satisfied with Griffin’s twitter logic. Want to make a profound observation about the pervasiveness of sex crimes in society? Call rape “the new missionary”. Think a kid with cancer should be an inspiration to us all? Call him a stupid dumbass. Then say that Oprah would be proud of you. Brilliant! Many would say that based on this, Griffin’s twitter escapades have completely jumped the shark and that he should quit tweeting before he gets lynched by every dishevelled, afflicted population on Earth. However, being a glutton for inappropriateness, I think he should- nay, needs- to keep it up.