This Week's Contemporary Hero

You may know him better as the taller half of the comedy duo behind Little Britain. Or you may know him from his numerous other TV, film, or radio roles. But we are singling out David Walliams for his heroic feats of last summer.

Mr. Walliams is a bona fide celebrity. He makes million of dollars to make people laugh and to entertain them. So why did he not only swim the English channel, but also become one of the top 50 people to ever do it and the first celebrity to ever do it as well?

While Walliams was in Africa a few years back he told someone who works for a charity organization called Sport Relief that he'd love to help them out in their charitable efforts among orphanages over in Ethiopia. This person asked Walliams if there was some sporting thing he'd like to try that could raise money for them. Walliams suggested, half jokingly, that he could swim the English channel. The Sport relief person immediately took him up on his offer.

Fast forward a year to the start of Walliams highly successful but physically demanding Little Britain Live tour of the UK. Every night Walliams and his partner in comedy Matt Lucas would take to the stage and perform sketches from their highly successful BBC show and every morning Walliams would swim and train for his English Channel attempt. Even if the tour took a night off, his training did not.

After 9 months of hard training the big day arrived and Walliams plunged into the Channel near

Dover, England. He swam through some of the roughest waters on this planet. Also in the Channel that day with Walliams were some of the biggest freighters in the world, nasty currents, raw sewage, and stinging jelly fish. Walliams plowed through, around, and over all those obstacles and in a little over 10 hours he emerged from the water and he set foot on French soil.

Now if you think swimming 21 miles in rough seas while dodging jelly fish, people's turds, huge freighters, and whatever else is in the water that day is easy, I invite you to go to your local pool and swim for an hour straight. Then when that hour is over, do it 10 more hours while people throw shit at you, toss hornets at you, and drive wave runners over your body.

In the end Walliams raised over 1 million pounds for Sport Relief. That means that those Ethiopian orphanages can stay open and provide better care to the children who live there.

Walliams didn't have to swim the Channel. He could have written a check and stayed warm and dry. But he didn't. He used his fame for good and he got a lot of people to help as well. That's why he's Monkey Muck's Contemporary Hero of the Week.

And we end this post with a gratuitous butt shot for the ladies. Here's David's butt for you ladies to enjoy:

Heroes and others

The news that Michael Vick, he's the quarterback for the NFL Atlanta Falcons for those of you who do not know, is involved in dog fighting got us to thinking about heroes and assholes.

When we were a small monkey (if that turn of phrase doesn't make our old English teachers tear their hair out then we are not sure what will, but screw them anyway since this is our blog and not theirs) we were taught to idolize people who made a difference. Now since we also loved baseball and those were some of the glory days in Detroit Tigers history, 1968 through 1973, so we also idolized one of the team members. Most white kids idolized Al Kaline, and believe me he was damn good, he's a Hall of Famer after all, but our hero was a black guy with a little pot belly who played left field by the name of Willie Horton. He could do it all in our opinion, he could slug the hell out of the ball, he could field well, and he was gracious in his dealings with the media and with fans. He seemed to us to be a stand up guy.

We stopped being a huge Tigers fan when they traded Willie and when we moved from Michigan to Virginia but our love for Willie only grew through out the years. We found out many years later that during the first nights of the race riots in Detroit in 1967, which we lived through, so that means yes, we're in our mid 40's, so bite us, that Willie, at huge personal and financial risk to himself, saw fit to try to stop some of the rioting. What he did was put on his uniform and he went out onto the streets to try to talk people out of looting and rioting. What he did was astonishing because it was against team policy, the Tigers management told all players to stay out of the mess that was engulfing the city. If he had been hurt during the fracas, then the Tigers surely would have fired him or cut his salary, this was in the dark days of baseball before free agency liberated and protected players so the team would have easily gotten away with whatever they wanted to. So for Willie to have put everything on the line to help stop the violence was an extraordinary and heroic thing to do.

It also came to our attention that Willie was born in a place, Big Stone Gap, Va, that is not too far from where we live now, Johnson City, TN. Sadly however there is no plaque or any type of honor for him at the city of his birth because Willie is black and the population of Big Stone Gap is mostly lilly white.

It came to our attention a few years ago that Wille has adopted the Boys Club as his charity of choice and that he sponsors a golf tournament in our area each spring that raises money for said club. What makes this another reason to admire Willie is that his old pals from the Major Leagues come and play in the tournament and they mix and mingle and sign autographs for any and all duffers who sign up to play. The man is still giving back, and that's why we still admire Willie so much today.

But if Willie is someone to admire, then his evil opposite must be Michael Vick.

The rundown on Michael Vick is as follows:

• He left VA Tech early to chase the big NFL bucks.
  
• When he got busted for possessing pot he lied his way out of it and he hired an army of lawyers to protect his ass.
  
• He picked up a woman using the alias 'Ron Mexico,' had sex with her, gave her herpes, and then tried to deny it.
"Viva unprotected sex with groupies!"



• He refuses to accept any blame for not leading his team to a Superbowl victory, and remember this is the team that pays him millions of dollars to do just that.



• He thinks it's okay to force dogs to fight and kill each other for his and his buddies amusement.
  

It's a crying shame that the media wants kids and NFL fans to idolize Vick when he does crap like that. And it's an even bigger shame that someone like Willie Horton, a truly good and decent human being who is a true hero, is forever confused with that murdering rapist thanks to Bush the elder. But thank goodness that we were taught who to idolize and who to vilify.

Things you can do every damn day to piss off King George

Being impeachment Saturday and all we here at Monkey Muck HQ got to thinking about how cool would it be to do something everyday to piss off the jackals in power. We put our thinking caps on our little simian heads and we came up with the following list.

1. Buy gas only at Citgo. The crude oil they make the gas from at your local Citgo station comes from Venezuela. And you know who is President of Venezuela. Plus, if you buy gas at Citgo, then the profits on that gas do not go to bush jr and his oily oil buddies.
2. Eat organic or at the very least eat food grown without any pesticides, unnatural fertilizers, or chemicals. Monsanto, a horrid company that backs the Republican party, makes it's living by making horrible chemicals that are put on or in your food. If you eat organic then you are not helping Monsanto ruin our planet or make money.
3. Recycle
4. Do your part to help stem the tide of climate change. Use fluorescent light bulbs instead of incandescent, drive less, have your car or truck tuned up so as to maximize your usage of fuel.
5. Get out and connect with one another and network for change.
6. Write your congress people and tell them how you want them to vote, they work for you after all, not that other way around.
7. Get off your dead asses and go vote when it's election time and encourage others to do the same.
8. Stop shopping at big corporate stores like Wal Mart and Target. They all contribute to Republicans and big corporate assholes like Wal Mart and Target do not have your or your communities best interests at heart, they want only one thing, your money.
9. Shop at locally owned businesses.
10. Boycott businesses that advertise on FOX Comedy Channel.
11. Write blogs and or support blogs and websites that oppose the greedy war mongering asses in DC.
12. Volunteer in your community.
13. Protest when and where you are able.
14. Be truly patriotic and oppose any attempts to curtail our civil liberties.