Doc Townsend

I feel like Rhea would have gotten over if they were still able to run shows with crowds.

Edge may be the one man on Earth who looks better with a man bun. Not exactly good, but... better. I'm surprised Mickey Rourke isn't in this.

Well, if social media is to be believed, the explanation is Kate Kane is dead. Not a fan of that idea, but it sounds like the people who had to work with Ruby Rose might find it cathartic.

I'm not a big fan of his, but to be fair, I thought the material sucked. He and Jonathan Banks and Jim "Highlander" Byrne were better than the material. The revamped show changed the aesthetic and tone of the show to a fairly radical degree and didn't do much to make the new characters interesting or likable. The first arc mostly seemed like a riff on Miami Vice and at the end of the arc, they appeared to be dropping the "deep undercover" aspect of the show. I kinda think that was network interference. Once of the knocks on the show was that the long arc made it hard for new fans to jump in.

First two seasons are very good-great. The back half of season one gets most of the attention thanks to Kevin Spacey and Joan Severance chewing scenery, but i really liked the first half of the season which was a fairly straightforward "infiltrate the Mafia" storyline. Season 2 had a so-so white supremacist storyline, but followed it up with two much better story arcs. The guest cast was great. The garment trade arc featured Ron Silver, Jerry Lewis, Stanley Tucci, and Anthony Denison (Crime Story). The third arc of the season is the Dead Dog Records arc. Tim Curry was the villain. The writers really ran with the record angle. Supposedly, some of the rockers who guested in the arc told the writers unsavory stories from their careers and the writers used some of that. Glenn Frey was surprisingly good here. The show was running out of steam by season 3. The first arc had good guest stars, but the season is just sorta there. Some of the plots were wacky. The first arc had Vinnie unexpectedly becoming head of a local mafia family through fairly unlikely happenings. Then he foiled a plot to devalue the yen, but it was really a plot to discredit him (?). Then he wound up working as a sheriff in Washington state and met the Green River Killer. Then he ends up with $42 million in cash so he rents a room in a flophouse and takes a job dumping toxic waste, because that's totally what you do when you have $42 million. That's a lot for one season. Season 3 is mostly skippable except for Robert Davi as the big bad of the first arc of the season. Ken Wahl left the show after season 3. There was a fourth season with Steven Bauer in the lead. Avoid this like the plague. But, yeah, watch/dvr the first two seasons. They're a lot of fun.

If they're going for "best match ever", they need to run one of the legitimate contenders for that monicker, then photoshop Randy's and Edge's head into the footage. I mean, I don't think Edge's head is going to look right on Misawa's body, but what can you do?

Edited

Does that work.? I've never really had much interest in pirating media (or anything else), but it seems like large sites get shut down by copyright holders once in a while without really abating the problem. I'm guessing it's not that hard to download a comic, album, or wrestling match?

Well, yeah, but Savage only turned to rap after Hogan got him blackballed from Metallica. Metal was Savage's first love.

As a consumer, I would prefer this. I much prefer reading complete storylines so I trade-wait most books these days. I kinda feel like the era of monthly comics is drawing to an end. But.... if you switch to first-run tpb's that contain the content you would have put out in six monthly issues of Batman, I wonder if that doesn't kill the local comic shop industry. If you only need to pick up one or maybe two trades a year to keep up with a Snyder Batman series, do you need to go to the comic shop all that often? Probably not. I kinda doubt you'd be getting a huge number of tpb's a week, so customers probably have a lot less reason to make regular trips to the lcs. Some customers will always want to pick up new content as soon as it's released, but well, there are digital options. I kinda think killing off monthlies kills a lot of shop's browse/impulse spending. I also phasing out physical issues of single copies might result in customers spending less money. Maybe you just switch the people who want a monthly fix to digital and retain your customer base that way. Personally, it would result in me spending a lot less money. I mostly trade-wait, but there are books I want to check out before I invest in a tpb, or don't want to wait 6-18 months for a trade. I've been reading John's Shazam book monthly because the trade compilation of the first 12 issues isn't due to be released until December 2020. But.... picking up monthly issues is usually a waste of money for me. Occasionally, I decide to read an issue and don't continue with the book, but what usually happens is that I buy the monthlies to read then pick up the compilations for my collection. This is what happened with Doomsday Clock. I also usually regret picking up monthlies when the delays hit (Doomsday Clock), so it wouldn't be all bad if monthlies were discontinued. Any way the DC move goes, it might be the demise of local comic shops. That was probably inevitable anyway due to a shrinking customer base and the switch towards digital, but still...

If Breeze has been "saying the same shit for years", I missed that. Yeah, that's different. I don't pay much attention to what players do or say off the field. Not really that interested. And expecting guys to live up to your expectations on Twitter is just setting yourself up for disappointment.

I think it's reasonable to think that your teammates - who have actually known you for years (in some cases) - would reach out to you privately. That's not what happened, and at least some Brees' teammates didn't give him the benefit of the doubt before speaking out publicly, so maybe there's a bigger problem in the locker room that it seems? I'm not a public figure, so maybe it's just too different a situation, but it would never occur to me to rip someone I know personally on Twitter without making an effort to talk to them first.

I forgot about that match. It definitely happened in APW. I went to a number of APW shows around that time, but not this one. I do have the show on a VHS tape. Cagematch says the date was 5-17-2003. Here's the match. It's on Youtube.

I think Joey was working intergender matches in the smaller indies before he and Candice worked together in PWG. Could be wrong, but that's the way I remember it. I know I've seen the Chikara intergender stuff since I've got an almost complete set of Chikara shows up to the end of the BDK angle, but I remember almost nothing about those matches. Lufisto and Mickey Knuckles were probably working competitive intergender matches around the time I was seeing intergender stuff on the West Coast, but I've managed to see very little of either woman and know practically nothing about their careers.

My gaming collection seems to be getting better by the day. Noticed that importing is getting harder and more expensive (Amazon UK estimated anywhere from a few days to 6 weeks for an order I placed last night w/ what is normally priority shipping; one of my regular eBay importers added $20-#30 to his shipping charges), so I'm making it a priority to grab imports while I can. Found a number of imports on Amazon US, been scouring eBay, placed large orders with Play-Asia and Amazon UK, etc. Have about two dozen import PS3/PS4 games in the mail from various sources (already own 70+ imports for those two consoles). A lot of good games in those orders. Alienation should arrive in the mail today. A couple other Housemarque games are in the mail. Also been buying a lot of collectible editions lately. My PS3 collection is heavy with collectible editions. PS4 not so much. Lately, been replacing PS4 titles with the limiteds. Got the first print boxed edition of Nioh Complete Edition on Saturday (I already had the standard edition of the game - which is itself an import title). Going to do a deeper dive into indie games later in the month. Already own a lot of indie physical editions, but there are probably a lot of games I've overlooked. Kinda amusing that two of the most powerful gaming machines ever (PS4 and Switch) spurred a retro indie game revival.

Agreed. I'm turning the sound off way too often.

That Mongo Twitter account is reminding me that Mongo wasn't actually very good at pro wrestling (which is not news to anyone who watched a lot of that period of WCW). How he got paired with the Horsemen, I'll never understand. I assume it was either his legit athlete cred or he got the boys into the kind of clubs in the 90's that Ric Flair used to be able to get into in the 80's (when being a pro wrestler could still get you into those kind of clubs). Mongo frequently looks so uncoordinated that it's painful to watch. There's a gif of him in the .gif thread where he goofs up two attemtps to irish whip him, nearly falls off the turnbuckle, and misses a double stomp but lands so awkwardly it looks like he might blow out both knees - and this is all in the space of about 45 seconds. That said, Mongo definitely had charisma. He wasn't great on the mic, but he had enough personality to get the crowd into it anyway. And I do enjoy his wacky idea of selling.

Outside of Chyna, the first time i started noticing official competitive matches between men and women wrestlers was the California indies in the mid-2000's. Joey Ryan worked a fair number of matches against local talent including Candice LeRae. I don't think the larger (lol) CA promotions like PWG were doing intergender matches yet, but I was attending a lot of tiny indies at the time. I remember a couple Joey Ryan intergender matches which were really uncomfortable to watch. A little too "realistic" even compared to what promotions do today. He basically beat the stuffing out of a few people. I think there was blood. Honestly don't remember the promotion, but I'm thinking it was whatever shows Gary Yap was running at the time. I was following a number of promotions that flew under the radar around that time (smaller, no tv, no nationwide dvd distribution, etc.) PWG started doing intergender stuff with Joey and Candice Le Rae a short while later. 2010-ish? They were tag team champions in 2012 so it was before that. Around the time PWG started, I started seeing intergender matches in East Coast promotions. I don't really remember sanctioned intergender matches in the 90's. There was the stuff with Chyna and other promotions started pushing the envelope. but it was generally spots with male wrestlers and sorta-feuds with part-time wrestlers and managers (who presumably weren't as tough or well-trained as a full-timer).

Haven't we said something like that after any number of controversial incidents, though? I'm not even going to try to list all the insensitive, tasteless gimmicks Vince had trotted out in the wake of various world events. The dude that went to Saudi Arabia in the wake of most every other country and nation condemning them for a a journalist's murder isn't going to keep ""Black Lives Matter" in his forebrain for more than a month. Killings will probably be doing Pretty Ricky again before the year is out. Maybe by SummerSlam.

I feel like it was the change in philosophy and audience expectations. The early Clashes felt like big events. You didn't have frequent ppv's and weekly tv was mostly squash matches back then. Clashes felt like special events on par with PPV' s and they were free. As the 90's went on, both WCW and WWF started catering a lot more to TV audiences. The quality of the weekly tv shows started improving as he companies started booking fewer squashes and more competitive matches, and the PPV's started being more frequent because... well, money. Late Clashes didn't seem as special because we were getting good cards on Nitro and fewer Rick Steiner vs. Mike Jackson squashes. Conversely, WCW started running PPV's every few weeks so they wanted to save some of the A-level matches for the PPV. They kind of booked themselves into a corner where they wanted CotC to be more special that that week's Nitro, but not up to the level of a PPV.

Sorry. My mistake. I thought maybe i was missing something.

Uh, are you Scott Steiner? If you are 44-years-old in 1987, you'll be celebrating your 77th birthday sometime in 2020.

The Seth Rollins Story

Mongo works Rick Steiner. What can go wrong?