tbarrie

Changing the subject, I really like Abadon getting a high profile match for Hallowe'en weekend.

There was no theme music before the save. I thought I must have misremembered, but I just watched the clip colonial posted to confirm. You've probably been subjected to that trope so many times it's mentally scarred you to the point you hear theme music when there isn't any. My sympathies. (Okay, they did play Tay's music after she'd run Baker off. But that seems more defensible.)

You skipped a round - she faces the winner of Bunny vs Red Velvet before she gets to Rosa. But Red Velvet has shown she can have a good match with Jade before, so that should be okay. I think we'll see Rosa hand Jade her first loss in this tournament and go on to win the title, but as you say, we'll see.

Yeah, I was going to say something similar. I would have liked to see Hobbs pull out the win here too, but Cassidy winning sets Mox up to face nothing but babyfaces in the tournament and I suspect that's deliberate. Changing the subject, it sounded like the crowd had absolutely no reaction to Anna Jay putting her finishing hold on Britt Baker, which was disappointing.

Yeah, I believe that's been WWF/E's philosophy for most of their existence. I think things were different when they were the WWWF, but that was before my time.

Interesting. I remember ring announcers at least using the full phrase "World Championship as recognized by WCW International", but then, human memory is faulty. And a Google video search didn't turn up any clips where the audio was good enough for the match introduction to be comprehensible. (Well, not in the first page or so anyway.)

Was it ever officially the "WCW International World Championship", though? I remember it as the "World Championship as recognized by WCW International", which is an even more ridiculous mouthful.

12:27 for me, but I make copious use of the "Check grid" function, so it probably doesn't count.

I enjoy tainting your results with my comically uninformed film opinions and would probably do so again.

Did they show you a bunch of pictures and make you select the ones that had busses?

Oh, I'll concede it's rather unlikely they'd be found guilty in a US court of law. (From my view as an outsider, US culture in general doesn't seem to be big on competitive free markets.) And my original post may have been worded too strongly; I'm not sufficiently versed in antitrust law to say for certain whether WWE's actions crossed the line. My point was that your blanket assertion that those actions aren't illegal may be on shakier ground than you realize. To quote from the US FTC's website: Are you really 100% certain that WWE's actions couldn't be construed as "acting to maintain ... a dominant position by excluding competitors or preventing new entry"? If so, would you care to argue your point? Because it looks to me like that's exactly what they're doing.

Competition is things like putting on a better product, selling it at a better price, or maximizing your cost efficiency. Making business decisions that hurt your own bottom line (like scheduling your shows at the same time as the other guy's when they'd get better ratings unopposed, or forgoing advertising revenue during those times for no sensible reason) in the hopes that it'll drive the new guy out of the market is not competition. It's anti-competitive conduct. And it is in fact illegal.

I'm certain that making Page the guy by beating Omega for the title is still the end goal, and I'm down with that. I'm just not certain that the story ends with him winning the world title on this attempt. If he had won the elimination match and challenged at All Out like everybody expected, I'd have said it was definitely too soon for him to win the belt. But I can see an argument that coming up short there and having to regain the number one contendership represents enough adversity. Like I said, I'm unsure.

I had an MRI of my brain a year or so ago and was told said brain was completely normal. So I get where you're coming from. I was unprepared to hear that. Yours is better, though.

In my opinion, if now is the time to put the belt on Page (and I'm undecided on that), then getting the belt off of Omega is enough. Having him kick out of the One-Winged Angel would be overkill. Darby Allin should totally kick out of it some day, though. And it'll mean a lot more if nobody else has yet.