X-Entertainment has nothing on Kamala's website.

I still watch wrestling from time to time, but it's more out of habit than anything, as I've been watching it all my life. I grew up on the WWF (now WWE, and perhaps something else in the future once they realize how stupid their wrestlers sound whenever they call it "The WWE," which literally translates to "The World Wrestling Entertainment), and along with all the other things that meant the entire world to me, wrestling meant the entire world to me. The love would grow and grow and grow, finally climaxing on those special nights when the World Wrestling Federation held a pay-per-view event. Nights that cost a lot of money to be a part of, nights when scores were settled, and nights when I stayed up late for reasons other than the fact that my parents didn't give a shit when I went to sleep.

Back then, there were much fewer wrestling pay-per-view events than there are today, and they were big occasions. Of these events, I have the fondest memories of the WWF's annual "Summerslam" show, if for no reason than the fact that it happened in late August and thus was the only wrestling pay-per-view that I could watch without worrying about having to go to school the next day. (PPV events, generally, took place on Sundays) The blend of pro-wrestling and summertime paid off in spades with my annual Summerslam party, a night when my best friends came over to watch sweaty guys fight, eat lots of Cheetos and go night swimming in my family's old pool.

I had to have had at least four or five of these Summerslam parties beginning with the first such event in 1988, and they're some of the few social excursions of the most awkward stages of my childhood that I can look back on without wanting to punch whatever idiots ruined them for me. We'd load up on every kind of junk food and soft drink imaginable, we'd break out whatever leftover fireworks we could get away with blowing up without being noticed, we'd kill each other with pillows and, once in a while, we'd look at the television and remember that we were actually there to watch wrestling. In truth, my friends barely had a passing interest in pro-wrestling by this point -- I was the only one who was still really into it. Regardles, I was the host with the most, and I couldn't very well force my guests to feign solid interest in a three hour wrestling pay-per-view just because I secretly wanted them to. The only matches that I made sure we all paid attention to starred the Undertaker, because the Undertaker absolutely fascinated the religion out of me.

If you still watch wrestling, forget what you know of today's Undertaker. Back during the era when I was hosting Summerslam parties, the Undertaker was the coolest motherfucker ever. A bazillion feet tall, dressed in all black, impervious to pain. Dude came out to church music and could roll his eyes so far back in his head that we'd start making bets over when he would trip over because there was just no way he could see anything while doing that. So, though I have almost no recollection of any Summerslam matches because we were far more interested in partying like juvenile idiots than yelling about a ref's slow count, I have a very good memory of the Undertaker's Summerslam soirees. And, in 1992, the Undertaker faced...Kamala.

Kamala had been in and out of the World Wrestling Federation a few times, and every time he came back, he was a little less menacing. During his first run years before, I was legitimately frightened by the sight of this beastly Ugandan, waddling to the ring, carrying a spear and wearing a Tiki mask large enough to suit someone five times bigger than Kamala was -- and that's saying something because Kamala was approximately 5,000 pounds. Kamala was such a savage that he actually required a handler, named Kimchee, who wore an albino Spider-Man mask and a safari hat. Though pure wrestling enthusiasts were anything but fans of Kamala's shitty offense (he could punch and almost kick...that's about it), I was still a kid who halfway believed that wrestling was real. Okay, I didn't believe that wrestling was real, but I did believe that the characters were. I could buy that Kamala knew who would be winning before he stepped through the curtain, but there was no way this guy wasn't Kamala 24/7, likely sacrificing monkeys to his evil gods whenever he had downtime.

In the ring, the terrible Kamala stalked his prey with white stripes painted on his face and moons and stars on his belly. It was absurd and awesome, and in his heyday, Kamala was such a sight that the WWF talking heads often speculated that he might even be able to snatch the world title away from Hulk Hogan himself, putting Kamala in an elite club made up of a few other 500 pound slobs and President Lindberg from The Fifth Element. He lost most of his big matches and only seemed to win "squashes" (crappy showcase matches where wrestlers beat the hell out of no-names), but in the later part of the `80s, Kamala was definitely a cause for some of my nightmares, and maybe a few dreams.

Back to Summerslam, 1992: Kamala's match against the Undertaker took place during his second, less impressive WWF run. It wasn't so much that Kamala had become less impressive, just that the scope of pro-wrestling had changed, and Kamala came off more as a misguided giant goof than a misguided guy-who-will-kill-and-eat-you. There's a fine line, and the Undertaker was itching to take that fine line and stick it straight up Kamala's raffia skirt-drenched ass. I can't remember much about the match aside from the fact that my friends and I went wild for it. Kamala and his pals took things too far and got him disqualified, and though the lack of a decisive victory in a wrestling match is often cause for fans' dismay, we let it slide this time, because it was revealed in the post-match brouhaha in hysterical fashion that Kamala was petrified of the Undertaker. So petrified that he walked backwards to the dressing room area, tripping over wires and generally becoming a darker-skinned version of Curly Joe right before our eyes. I'd gone into the match loving the Undertaker to death, but I came out of it with a much better appreciation for All Things Kamala.

Hit the fast forward button for about 15 years, and we hit yesterday: The day I found out that Kamala the Ugandan Giant had his own website.

I don't know how I ended up there, I really don't. I like Kamala, but I definitely wasn't Googleing with passion for him. It just happened, like a miracle, a really stupid miracle. I'm not trying to be insulting to Kamala or anyone else I love when I say that my heroes tend to fall into the "C-level" category, and I'm often thrilled finding the online homes of such folks, often realizing that they're as available and approachable as my mailman when it's about time for Christmas tips. The personal/professional sites of these guys and gals are usually charming and hilarious, forged with little technical knowledge and bursting at the scrollbars with ignorant bliss. I doubt very many of you have been to Kamala's website, but you've probably been to plenty of like-styled sites belonging to other celebrities who aren't often stopped in the supermarket. They're terrible and wonderful sites, and windows into psyches that we were probably better off never peering into. I say with much confidence that Kamala the Ugandan Giant's website is the greatest corner of cyberspace.

I'm not sure how familiar you are with the term "splash page," but it refers to the intro page of a website that features only a logo or a picture, but no actual content. Like a virtual book cover. Sometimes they're for artistic reasons, sometimes they're there to add some ad impressions for webmasters. Kamala has no advertisements on his website, so I'm guessing that as much as it pains me to do so, I'd have to define the presence of exploding Kamala photos on his splash page as being there for artistic reasons. I was also greeted by a short, Isaac Hayes-esque funky song as I hit the site, but I wasn't quite sure why. If you're thinking that Kamala moonlights as a recording artist, you are absofuckinglutely right.

The splash page automatically transitions into the real main page, and good God, I don't know where to start. Actually, I do: The palm tree. See it? Up there on the left? In reality, it's an animated image -- the palm tree inflates and deflates for all of time. I probably would've watched it for all of time, but my attention was redirected to the small video screen on the right, where Kamala gives us a live introduction to himself and his website. The written intro details the popularity of Kamala's site -- evidently, it's gone offline due to bandwidth peaks not once, not twice, but THREE times, which incidentally enough is the exact number of demon goats Kamala can summon on command. The arrangement of content tables, graphics and the colors of both indicate that the entire site was built by someone who was web designing from their cellphone's mini-browser, but I'm okay with that, because it's fucked up enough that Kamala even has a website. If we're to suspend belief and roll with that, it's at least based in truth than the Ugandan Giant -- a man who carries a spear and who needs a human tamer to control him -- would have a pretty raw-looking homepage. If only the background was strewn with chicken bones.

The main page tells us to congratulate Kamala on recently signing a "Legends Contract" with World Wrestling Entertainment, which among other things has caused the creation of the latest and greatest Kamala action figure, which I plan to purchase RIGHT NOW. By this point I'm sure some of you have cocked brows, whatever cocked brows look like. You look down on me? Fine. But don't look down on Kamala. He's been on more TV shows than Keifer and he's had about as many action figures as Luke Skywalker. All he needs is a cereal.

Waddling through Kamala's website like a kid in a Ugandan candy store, I was shocked and appalled to see the very real and normal person behind the face paint -- a man named Jim Harris, who has been in and out of the wrestling business for over 30 years. Full disclosure: I already knew that. In fact, I've read a number of recent interviews with Kamala, proving that he's a goodhearted, humorous man who doesn't share much of the old guard's bitterness over the fact that he's not a trillionaire with a house next to, I dunno, Burl Ives. I don't think there's a person alive who isn't a sucker for gentle giants, and that's exactly what Kamala was: A man who would walk to the ring, kill somebody, walk backstage and continue knitting his Aunt Gertrude a hunting shield.

The wrestlers who fall from superstardom -- and almost all of them eventually do -- can go down many paths. Some leave the business entirely and find success in other areas. Others find more unfortunate fates swelling with hatred and booze. More respectable, albeit offbeat, are the older wrestlers who sustain themselves primarily at "indy events," these being the local wrestling events that aren't tied to any major company -- the kind of wrestling events that might even end up being hosted at your high school gym. Kamala's done plenty of those. The wrestlers might not make too much money actually wrestling, but they smack bank hocking autographs and memorabilia. Judging from Kamala's schedule as printed on his site, he keeps pretty busy. This makes me happy, because for however long Kamala lives, I'd like to believe that somewhere, somehow, he's slapping his big fat belly in-between karate chopping anyone stupid enough to get in the ring with him.

Regarding those who didn't grow up on pro-wrestling, Kamala's photo gallery would likely give them a heart attack. Dozens of photos of the giant in various stages of undress, sometimes chewing on spears, sometimes eating people, sometimes posing with Elvira (no seriously), sometimes pointing to the sky as if to say, "God, I'm going to chop off this guy's foot and use it to curse his family FOR YOU!" Christ, I love Kamala.

And then there's the music. Kamala's music. Kamala's a musician, and for that to happen, it means that someone somewhere is a magician. I cannot believe Kamala pens and sings songs, but the proof is in the voodoo pudding: Every page of his site streams a different song sung by Kamala himself, and while it's hard to imagine that lyrics like "I left a condom on her clothing line" are going to bring these tracks to the Top 40 charts, in a world where lovely lady humps are the new Beatles, you just never know.

It's hard to explain what it's like for me to hear Kamala sing. It'd be difficult enough to just know that Kamala sings, but to actually hear it? My brain grew legs, swam to my eardrums and demanded to know if they were playing tricks on it.

As for the photo gallery, well, even the filenames of the pictures are hilarious: db_KAMALA___ELVIRA1.jpg, db_OPEN_MOUTH_KAMALA1.jpg, db_kamaladuggan1.jpg, and it just goes on and on. My only regret is that Kamala isn't fringe enough to work the filenames into his song lyrics. It'd be so punk. I feel like I'm not making a big enough deal about this singing Kamala stuff, so here goes:

KAMALA SINGS SONGS!

I prefer to think of Kamala as a crazy psychopath, in part because I like to think of things in redundant terms, but mostly because my eyes can't process the image of a 400 pound man with stars painted on his belly any other way. In truth, Kamala is an entrepreneur. He can't spell it, he can't pronounce it, but Kamala is an entrepreneur. He has branched his small empire outward, into the world of music and beyond, emphasis on the first two-thirds of "branched" because that's what Kamala sleeps on. He's got more than a wrestling career and a music career, though -- Kamala has merchandise!

On his merchandise page, Kamala of course offers his CD. Costs 15 bucks -- a steep price for a CD that only contains a few songs, but the price point is justified because the CD cover is actually an autographed picture of Kamala. "Enjoy, signed Kamala the Ugandan Giant." Six words that are certainly worth 15 bucks, and I bet he dots the "i" with a little music note doodle, too. Forget the CD, though. For ten bucks more, you can buy homemade Kamala SPEARS. KAMALA SPEARS! IS ALSO HIS POP STAR PSEUDONYM! And the spears? He fucking CHILDPROOFS THEM! Whenever life has me down, I will picture Kamala sitting in his old rocking chair, smoothing out the sharp edges of his homemade spears. And life will have me down no longer. For the richer folks out there, 35 bucks lands you a genyooine Kamala Jungle Skirt. One size fits all. Why can't it be Christmas or my birthday right now? Let's pretend it is.

One of the new trends when it comes to professional wrestler websites is "INSERT WRESTLER NAME TV," a code term for wrestlers who have friends with piss poor video equipment and expertise, enabling them to bring themselves to the Internet live and in person, or something like it. That takes us to "KAMALA TV," a section of the site that hasn't really been built yet, but promises to eventually give us a "behind the scenes visual look at this legendary legend of the ring." The asshole in me wonders if "legendary legend" was meant tongue-in-cheekly or if they're just dumb, but the kid in me wonders if I can hook the damn computer up to my big screen plasma whenever Kamala gets off his ass and launches it.

A sample video is all we can see as of this writing, featuring Kamala signing autographs in sheep's blood and playing with action figures. My appetite has been successfully whettetedded.

Kamala is awesome, and so is his website. I love, love, love his website. It helps me to understand why Charlie Brown picked the tree he did. It makes me realize why people go to animal shelters and adopt blind cats when there's perfectly healthy ones in the next cage over. And it really boosts my appreciation for the web at large. As a child, I watched Kamala on television. Never would I have ever imagined that over a decade later, I'd have the ability to send him electronic love notes, much less hear him sing about "booty girls." This is all very magical for me, which makes perfect sense, because magic is how Kamala turns dead owls into coin money.

Click here to visit Kamala's website.

Reverend Slick was right. Kamala is a man. And a really cool one, at that.

-- Matt (3/07/06)