AxB

RIP Uriah Rennie, 1959-2025. The Premier League's first black referee.

I've seen every Phase 4 and Phase 5 movie, all in the cinema except Eternals, Black Panther 2 and The Marvels, which were Disney+. TV-wise, everything up to What If...? season two, I think. But even so, a lot of the magic has been gone. Well, for me it's gone even more because up until Endgame I was taking my son to the cinema with me, and now he's an adult with a fiancee and a baby on the way, and doesn't want to go and watch movies with his Dad any more. But then during Phase 1 he was in first school, whilst by Endgame he was in his mid-teens.

For a while, there was a Nise Onita and a bunch of other Nise (fake) versions of FMW wrestlers in Onita Pro, at the same time as the real versions of them. Onita even wrestled Fake Onita once. As far as WWE releases, if basically Triple H is given a 'Total Budget to cut' number, and then he looks at a long list of how much everyone in WWE is paid, and he has to make the numbers match... is there a possibility that on one level, his thinking is "Don't hand AEW any more main event dream matches"? Because if he's cutting 53 year old R-Truth* and 46 year old Carlito, (and the 44 year old Miz looks to be on the way out too) but hanging on to 48 year old AJ Styles and 50 year old Rey Mysterio Jr, that's quite interesting. * Who should start doing Tenryu's "He is 53 years old" finishing move.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xg0Xd21HUg Cedric Alexander vs AJ Styles, 19th January 2014.

Scott Keith always used to rant about people putting the Figure Four on the one leg. Once I messaged him asking how Gordon Solie used to describe the hold, and he said "Targeting nine separate parts of the lower anatomy". So then I asked if that meant it damaged both legs, and therefore it's impossible to put it on the wrong leg because it damages both. And then he blocked me.

I liked Beast Mortos' new white gear & mask. Both he and Dralistico now seem to be getting on board with the idea that LFI's team colour is White, to match RUSH.

Hopefully some indie promoter books Crazy Mary Dobson vs Max the Impaler ASAP.

If the WWE policy has changed from Vince's post-03 "I'm sticking with my guys" to a Triple H/ TKO "We have to move these veterans on" concept... in a few years, the veterans they are moving on from, are going to be from the Usos/ New Day generation. And then post-Shield guys, after that.

The Miz is already announced as host of American Gladiators, and apparently has some sort of reality TV deal with his family together. We probably don't need to worry about him Cardona-ing up the indies. Considering he entered WWE originally as "That guy from off the TV", there's every chance that he goes on to a long career as a game show host and celebrity golfer, and the "Did you know he used to be a Pro-Wrestler?" becomes something the American teenagers of the future are shocked by.

Prestige Wrestling/ DEADLOCK/ West Coast Pro presents UNIT3D (Full Show): https://www.youtube.com/live/67rICiWUUjI Andrew Cass & Jordan Jewell vs Jason Xavier & JT Thorne Trevor Lee vs Cedric Alexander Matt Tremont & Jake Something vs Adam Priest & Mad Dog Connelly Prestige Wrestling World Championship Alan Angels (c) vs Jordan Oliver West Coast Pro World Championship Kevin Blackwood (c) vs Shane Haste DEADLOCK Pro-Wrestling Women's World Championship Dani Luna (c) vs Nicole Matthews West Coast Pro Tag Team Championships Cowboy Way (c) vs Sinner & Saint Starboy Charlie vs Jordan Cruz

Balatro is a bit annoying how sometimes you can get Joker drops that stack perfectly, to the point that you can just play one card hands and wind up with Chips and Mult in the Thousands, and then other times the Jokers are all perfectly good but don't synergise, so you're desperate for good hands or you won't score shit. Like on one run last night I had two accumulators, one which gained Mult from playing Two Pairs, and one which gained Chips from playing Straights. It was going really well, until it died on the 4th Ante... if they'd both been on the same hand, I could have walked through everything (unless a Boss Blind fucked me). The first time I played with the Deck that gives you 6 Jokers instead of 5, it also gave me 2 Negative Jokers as well. So I had 8 of them, and a couple were Holgrammed or Polychromed. Too easy. I'm only up to Red Stake difficulty though. There's a lot of game to be played.

Happy Gilmore 2 trailer. MJF is actually in this movie (unlike The Iron Claw, where he was cut out of everything except like one shot).

There's every possibility that Mariah goes to WWE for two or three years, does whatever she does there, and then that contract starts winding down and she decides it's time to test the market once again. I did see something from Meltzer saying that WWE tends to offer less money than AEW does, because they're banking on the Wrestlers being enough of a mark for the company and it's mystique that they think of it as a dream job. And there's photos of Mariah attending Mania 38 (as a fan).

Bronson was MJF's tag team partner when they both broke in.

AEW is very good at telling people "Size doesn't really matter" with the roster. Orange Cassidy is a small guy, and he's credible. Darby Allin is tiny, and he's credible. With Adam Cole, it's not the lack of size, it's what he fails to do with it. Honestly, him playing Ricky Morton is the best use for him. If you don't have any offence that looks good, base your matches around not getting any offence.

Jeff Cannonball, New Jersey-based indie/ Deathmatch wrestler (he got soe attention during the pandemic for his Short Soda reviews on social media), he hadn't wrestled for a good few months, because he was dealing with some health issues. And then, he posted this: His family are looking for help here: https://gofund.me/94cae8f0

Isn't there another Wrestler in WWE who very closely resembles Mariah, facially? I remember when Mariah first showed up on AEW TV, lots of WWE fans were saying she was just AEW copying a WWE wrestler (but they got quiet on that pretty quickly once it became clear that Mariah was far more experienced and better in the ring than the WWE wrestler was).

They had a guy who was a former Professional Footballer under developmental contract for a while. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuart_Tomlinson The issue is, WWE would want someone who had played in the Premier League (or one of the other top flight leagues around the world), but literally all of those players would want more money than Vince/TKO would ever be willing to pay them. So you get a guy whose career peaked in the third division of professional football, and that's going to be a hard sell. Like plenty of ex-NFL players have showed up in WWE doing a gimmick other than "I'm an ex-NFL player", and they are the elite of the elite in American Football. The elite of the elite in Football play for Champion's League clubs, and in the World Cup (unless they're from a tiny insignificant country).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=30W7l__f8EE Masashi Takeda vs Isami Kodaka (Big Japan, 20th of June 2018)

So the Portuguese Man o'War Aldo Montoya was Justin Credible's idea?

Dr Doom being an Iron Man alt I can abide, but Reed Richards being an alt of Kilgrave/ The Purple Man, that's just not right.

If Kyle can carry Adam Cole to a great match, then he's a true miracle worker. This, this is going to be a test for him. Love how what would ostensibly be a WAR 6 man actually makes sense in context. But in a pre-AEW world, this match line-up looks like you just hit Random on FirePro a bunch of times.

The strangest thing to me in the chat was how many people were talking about the board as if it was a defunct, near forgotten relic of a former era. I'm out there like "It stil exists, guys!". Hopefully the video gets a million billion views and all of the unsigned free agents start to get to be more in demand as a result. Because an awful lot of them followed the first rule of entertainment on that show, and left us wanting more.

That's a different group of Ohio-based heels. OVE (Ohio vs Everything) was the TNA-ified version of Oi4K (Ohio is 4 Killers) was Sami Callihan, Jake Crist, Dave Crist, and sometimes Madman Fulton and briefly Rich Swann. 44OH! was Ricky Shane Page, Atticus Cogar, Eddy Only, Eric Ryan, Bobby Beverly and Gregory Iron. But then they split into two rival 44OH factions... they had been black and green, so Atticus Cogar, Otis Cogar, Eric Ryan, Bobby Beverly and Gregory Iron became 44OH Yellow, whist Ricky Shane Page, Vincent Nothing, Alice Crowley and Christian Napier became 44OH Blue. And then a few months of gang war later, every member of both factions decided they were sick of their leader's shit and both groups disbanded on the same night. And Christian Napier is now a heel ref, allied with the Cogar Brothers in GCW (him being in the rival faction to them was a big "Here's a knife in your heart"angle, because he's their IRL cousin).

Mauro pre-NXT, when he was doing Pride FC and Boxing, he was very good. Knowledgeable and enthusiastic. But in NXT, he became very forced. Like he was desperate to crowbar in as many pop-culture references as possible. Plus, Wednesday Night Wars era NXT, it was pretty shit. Take the worst parts of 2024 AEW (meaning the Adam Coleiness of it all) and the worst parts of current WWE (meaning the forced 'jokes' that only Triple H and Shawn Michaels think are funny) and combine them, that was what the dying days of Black and Gold NXT was like. And Mauro was front and centre trying to give it the hard sell as the greatest thing he'd ever seen. It really diminished him by assoication.