Wake Up Call: Jean Claude Van Damme, 50, announces MMA comeback

Big news, everyone: Jean Claude Van Damme will do the voice of Master Croc in Kung Fu Panda 2: The Kaboom of Doom, to be released next year. And speaking of Kaboom of Doom, it also appears that his plans for an MMA comeback fight are still on.

Van Damme, who just turned 50, announced that he is going to fight Thailand’s Somrak Khamsing in either an MMA/Muay Thai/ or kickboxing event in Las Vegas in April 2011. Khamsing is an Olympic boxing gold medalist who converted to MMA. Van Damme once had a serious cocaine habit, has been diagnosed as bipolar and reportedly suffered a heart attack in October. What could possibly go wrong?

Jean Claude had a 20-2 record as a professional, but retired in the early 1980s. Someone want to tell him that Timecop wasn’t real?

Meanwhile, there is possibly nothing funnier than Van Damme playing Jean ValJean in Les Miserables:

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ABOUT LAST NIGHT

What you missed while cavorting at the beach with a giant metal hen …

• Still The Man: Stan Musial to receive Presidential Medal of Freedom.

• Yemen’s beach volleyball team blames loss in Asian Games on cheerleaders. There’s sentence you don’t see every day.

• Drunken Browns fans decide to tackle someone they can handle; an eight-year-old boy wearing a Jets jersey.

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TODAY IN MARK TRAIL …

The absurdity of the storyline … the teleportation from the horse corral to the duck pond in an instant … this must be one of Mark’s hashish dreams.