Category: Русев Удря, Русев Мачка!

February 28, 2018 /

Русев Удря, Русев Мачка. I just noticed the original post about it turned three years old last month. That might have been the day I fell on the icy driveway, I don’t know. In other words, I was thinking about other things. Death and such–I was in quite the Bray Wyatt mood all month. But it’s a day worth noting for The Spectacle of Excess. It’s the post that got us on the IWC map.…

October 18, 2016 /

If you follow this blog, you know I’ve been making a lazy, extremely unscientific study of the word “machka”, a seemingly humble Bulgarian word that has taken on a heightened significance as Rusev’s rallying cry and chief buzzword. My post a few months ago called On the Progress of Machka and Its Relevance in Wrestling Theory laid out a hodge-podge of graphs and whatnot to show what happened to traffic on this site’s posts about…

May 28, 2016 /

The image is a sign I made for Rusev when I went to a Smackdown in Phoenix last October. Sadly I forgot it in the trunk of my rental car, but at least I took a picture. It has been a wild month here at The Spectacle of Excess. I started this blog two years ago just so I could have a space to shoot my mouth off into the void about wrestling and Shakespeare and Roland Barthes and…

January 21, 2016 /

Image Courtesy of Punkrockbigmouth (punkrockbigmouth.tumblr.com) If this were medieval times, I would give my handkerchief to my champion and this blog’s patron wrestler-saint Rusev, and blow him a kiss for good luck as he heads into this year’s Royal Rumble. All his fellow international wrestlers in the League of Nations did was come out and talk smack at Roman Reigns and Chris Jericho, who were blah-blah-blah-ing it in the ring. But Rusev was more artful. He painted for us a metaphor of…

June 2, 2015 /

So Rusev and Lana broke up, apparently to complicate the narrative so WWE could extricate itself from the much too effective political satire it had created with Lana and her big pictures of Putin and Red Square. It was great, but it was a minefield, and both Lana and Rusev are too good to be allowed to hit a wall of controversy or wash out as corny and innocuous cultural stereotypes. Trust me, we don’t…

May 29, 2015 /

Based on my What Rusev is Saying post from months ago, Google sends me boatloads of traffic on the topic of Rusev, Lana, what they’re saying and what they’re up to. Recently I’ve had several search terms to the effect of why is rusev bulgarian again. It’s a real puzzler, isn’t it? Suddenly, after their break up, Rusev is waving the Bulgarian flag. So representing Russia was all because Lana is such a pretty girl?…

May 18, 2015 /

UPDATE! I was totally wrong here! Somebody who speaks Bulgarian corrected me on Twitter, check it out: @AndreaGregovich when he screams “aaa predavam sa”  this means i qiur — Mario (@bloodicha1) May 18, 2015 So thank you to Mario for setting me straight on the words that I struggled with (predavam sa), and I owe Lana an apology. But now the match seems even more hokey. This means Rusev forgot how to speak English, he…

February 28, 2015 /

I’ve taken a look at the analytics. When people hear Rusev udrya Rusev machka they hear udrya as mudria, kidrya, pudrya, and budrya. An impressive number of hits to my earlier writings suggest that the search engine gods have deemed me an internet expert on this topic. I couldn’t be more proud. In a month and a half my original Rusev post has more than 200 hits. For some nerd’s literary wrestling blog that’s less…

January 13, 2015 /

“Русев удря Русев мачка!” Have you wondered what it is Rusev is saying at the beginning of his entrance music? It’s been driving me crazy because I couldn’t make it out. Then I finally saw it in one of his tweets and spent a little time with Google Translate. Rusev udrya Rusev machka! is Bulgarian. It’s hard to hear in his entrance: I always thought I heard budrya instead of udrya. Machka stumped me because…

October 3, 2014 /

It is a curious state of affairs and a reflection on the liminal nature of kayfabe that WWE feels it must apologize to the people of Russia about Big Show’s satirical disrespect to their flag on RAW this week. Recall that WWE readily apologized about Lana’s mention of the Malaysian Airlines plane in Eastern Ukraine, while Lana herself dismissed the kerfuffle about what she said as “blah, blah, blah… propaganda.”  These apologies are calculated —…