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The website New Zealand Pro Wrestling Informer has a positive review of Irvin Muchnick’s WRESTLING BABYLON: Piledriving Tales of Drugs, Sex, Death, and Scandal at http://www.nzpwi.co.nz/home/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3575&Itemid=70.

After doing a preliminary edit, The Washington Post, in its wisdom, has declined to publish my letter in response to a story last month about the alarming number of pro wrestler deaths.

“WWE Death-O-Mania!” is the headline over WRESTLING BABYLON author Irvin Muchnick’s essay in today’s (Thursday, September 13) issue of Beyond Chron, the San Francisco online daily newspaper.

In my Beyond Chron piece today on the Congressional committee investigations of pro wrestling’s culture of drugs and death, I mistakenly identified Tom Davis, ranking minority member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, as being from Maryland. Davis represents Virginia.

Two committees of the House of Representatives are edging toward hearings this fall that will further define the blurred lines of our junk-besotted popular culture. The essential question before them is whether the lives of professional wrestlers are as highly valued as those of aging character actors and exploited children.

A rumor is swirling that World Wrestling Entertainment star Randy Orton attempted suicide within the last year. Very well-placed wrestling sources tell me that the rumor is true.

In 1987 I covered the convention in Los Angeles of the Cauliflower Alley Club, an organization of retired wrestlers, for a story for People magazine that was not published. There I met Bob Orton Sr.

Readers have pointed out that the blog item about Randy Orton’s rumored suicide attempt referred erroneously to his “Legend Killer” gimmick. Orton began using the gimmick well before Eddie Guerrero died.

Brian Stull invited me onto his “Stranglehold” show Tuesday night on KFNS radio in St. Louis to discuss the blog report on Randy Orton’s rumored suicide attempt.