Technico Support

I ended up going to Kohl's instead, where store brand workout shorts, likely made in the same sweatshops as Adidas, Nike, and Under Armor, cost 1/3 the price.

All this. People still treated Luger like a star but his time to be champion had long passed. Shit, he'd been screwed out of the title due to a dumb blood stoppage (who the hell thought that would be a good finish?) in the same building in a PPV main event three years prior. That is when he should have had a title run. 1988. Sting's injury forced more Flair/Luger matches with bad finishes to the point where they made Luger so played out and stale.

Holy fuck. Comparing current Jericho to the latter-day WCW incarnation of the Freebirds is so on the money.

That would have been better than what we got. Hell, Ross coming out and saying, "Ric has decided to not re-sign his contract. The title is vacant. Because of these unusual circumstances, we've changed tonight's card and will feature an eight man tournament to determine your new WCW champion." I mean shit, it was a 12 match show. An 8 man tourney with no double eliminations is only 7 matches. Do that and keep the non-tourney guys for tag matches. Sure, there'd be a lot of midcarders in the tournament but shit, maybe that would elevate guys and it's not like Mania 4 didn't have midcard guys in the tournament. Anything would have been better than Luger (who had already had 1000 title shots and people didn't really care about) going in cold against unpushed tag wrestler Windham.

I'm dreading Ross calling Nyla Rose's matches. How will he awkwardly shoehorn Jim Barnett "jokes" in?

Independent contractors, everybody!

Awesome!!!! Good luck, buddy. In fitness news, I set out for my normal five miles and change run this morning and started screwing with my normal route, like "let's just go this way instead, etc" and later, when I went to handy dandy mapometer.com, realized I'd run 6.4 miles. What's funny is I kept seeing signs for a 10K happening in the area this weekend. And I just accidentally ran a 10K. Shopping for workout shorts at Dick's, I noticed some cool Adidas running shorts on the rack, but they had no XXL. So it's one of the following: They don't think XXL dudes run They only got like one pair in stock and it sold They got a lot in stock and they all sold, and there's some "dudes of size" running club around here just rumbling down the fucking street scaring everyone

Another thing I just noticed, checking out prowrestlinghistory.com, is that the building was roughly half full (7000). I wonder how many people of those empty seats were people staying home due to Flair not being there. Then again, look at this card: Even if the main hadn't been changed, and we got Flair vs Luger in the main and Windham and Scott Steiner added to the other match as a six man (the original plan), that's still a terrible card. And Flair vs Luger had been done to death by then.

People chanting "we want Flair" before and throughout the show. Booing like crazy for the "we called Ric and tried to make a deal but he wouldn't come" announcement. The attempt to put heat on Flair did not work at all with the Baltimore crowd, who was always pro Flair. Pretty much a "fuck this company" and "why are we at this awful show" vibe for the whole thing. Windham was barely a midcarder at the time so nobody bought him in the main event fighting over the world title. Everybody knew they were just putting the belt on Luger. Race running in to direct Luger to piledrive Windham got zero reaction from the puzzled crowd. Nobody gave a single fuck that Luger was apparently turning heel. The the second half of the main event shitshow, a mixed tag, went two minutes because man/woman physicality was not allowed by the state athletic commission. Overall, the feeling was that nothing they booked would have gotten any type of positive reaction because the company was such a massive heel that night that it cast a shadow over everything. Still, they did nothing to even try. You start the show with a "capture the flag" scaffold match and end with the shit sandwich I just described, you're lucky the people didn't burn the building down. They should have rebooked the card and had at least a four-man tournament, maybe putting Sting over to send the crowd home a little happier. But putting suddenly heel Luger over JTTS Barry Windham went over like a fart in church.

The best and, at the same time, worst part of the whole Eliminators saga is how it gave us the expression "shoot retarded."

I've seen both the WWF and NWA (Crockett) titles change hands. I was at the Bash when Sting beat Flair in 1990 and at Survivor Series 1995 when Bret beat Diesel. I also saw the WCW title switch, sort of, at the 91 Bash when Luger beat Windham for the vacant title at that awful, awful show. Heel vs heel, I think I saw Flair defend against Koloff at a Bunkhouse Stampede tour stop. Pretty good.

Watching PCO wrestle and realizing I saw him work in person 25 years ago really fucks with me.

If you don't want to get political, I'll spoiler this. I stopped watching WWE in January of 2017. I watch PWG, been a fan since 2010, buying their DVDs when they come out, though I worry about their future as indy guys are being snapped up like crazy. I watch New Japan on AXS, and that's about it.

It was a beer twofer this weekend. First off, the county liquor store near my job (one day I'll list all the weird Maryland county-by-county peculiarities W/R/T hooch), the one with the really bad beer selection, had Bell's Two Hearted, which is just bizarre. I had heard a lot of good things about it before, had it once on tap years ago and didn't get the fuss, so I decided to try it again. I looked it up and some craft beer such and such had voted it the best beer in America, so I figured it was worth it. Well again, I wasn't too impressed. It was a lot more balanced than I expected, lightly hoppy but also a little malty. It was okay but I felt like it was almost trying to be something for everyone and, in that, nothing about it really stood out. Above average and inoffensive, but not memorable. We decided to grill at the last minute yesterday so I needed more beer. Having to work today, I didn't want anything too high over 5%. The new local beer and wine place had Sierra Nevada "Sierraveza" in cans, so that was the one I went with. I didn't expect much more than a bland-ish crisp lager, hopefully one step up from Bud. I was pleasantly surprised! There's a decent malt bite to this that I was not expecting at all. Not a fan of Heifeweizens, I typically don't like that bubble gummy malt flavor, but this was just right. Delicious and probably the better of the weekend's two beers. A shocking upset. Some Mike Tyson Buster Douglas shit here.

The dude is a work. He knows exactly what his audience wants to hear, and that's commentary of the "old man yells at cloud" variety. The majority of his listeners believe wrestling hasn't been good since Crockett went out of business, so that's what he caters to. Like with Prichard, I just can't deal with a podcast where the guy is so obviously lying or working. Jesus Christ that's disgusting. I wonder if it really was fear of not being able to get good food at certain times of the day or if he's one really picky eaters, like picky to the point of OCD. I once had a friend whose palate was so dull and unsophisticated and unadventurous that, on a trip to NEW YORK, he insisted on Olive Garden. I wonder if Cornette is like that.

I don't feel like jobs are supposed to suck but I do feel like people who work for WWE should understand exactly what it entails regarding booking. Working for WWE and getting mad about your spot on the card constantly changing at the whims of a deranged old man is like being a sanitation engineer and getting mad because you smell like shit by the end of the day. Things that make me angry about WWE's treatment of its employees: the independent contractor bullshit and all the awful treatment that goes along with it, kayfabing the talent about where they're working in the immediate future Thing that shouldn't matter because this shitty company is booked by a lunatic: the mercurial nature of your position on the card

LOL this isn't Avengers: Endgame. Who gives a fuck if it gets out that midcard guy #23 and midcard guy #72 will be trading wins on a different show in a month? Not telling someone about a change in work and travel schedules until the last second is unprofessional as fuck.

Reminds me of one awful manager at my company. I don't know anyone who likes her and so many people who have worked under her ended up changing departments. A few weeks ago, someone told me that she frames subordinates leaving as "I transform these people into great employees who springboard into better things at the company." It's fucking tremendous the shit people tell themselves to stay the good guy in their particular story. On the Sasha front, I just can't fathom how anyone who works for WWE doesn't know the score and understand exactly how this company works. Unless you're one of the top 2-3 people in the company, you're always going to be "underutilized" and subject to pushes and depushes, title wins and losses, on a whim. They might put you in a marquee match one month and two months later, you're rotated down the card and not even on the show. This is just WWE's MO. If you're not a top guy, you're a role player. Titles don't mean shit, either. Vince doesn't give a fuck who the Women's Tag Champs are.

Yep, put me in with the "really cool concept, bad execution" crowd. As a Clash or a series of TV matches, as @AxB suggested, it would have been more palatable. But to do A) a gimmick show and b) with that kind of booking, at Starrcade? Oof. As a 15 year old, I did love the concept and it made the round robin tournament a staple of my wrestling gaming, like CotG, TNM, etc, from then on.

A few years ago, I had two of mine removed. One came out easily. The other, they had to crush to get it out. I felt no pain but had to go back a few days later, as they left a painful shard of tooth stuck in my gums. They told me it happens all the time.

I had Lagunitas' Summer release, "Lagur," over the weekend. Now I'll preface this by saying I love Lagunitas' stuff, but you really need to like IPAs a lot to enjoy their offerings. Because just about everything they make pretty much tastes like a West Coast IPA. It might be an IPA with brown sugar or a "Pilsner" that still tastes like IPA, or a session IPA that tastes like IPA with water added. Whatever you buy, that's what you're getting. It's 31 flavors of a similar West Coast IPA. So I bought "Lagur" last Thursday, the whole while wondering if they would have the balls to call something a lager but then it just tastes like IPA. You already know the answer. I liked it, it tasted good, but it wasn't what I was in the mood for. So if you want a lager, get something else. If you want to try this beer and you know what you're in for, go for it.

I had HBO, Showtime, and some other premium stuff, so my monthly cable and Internet bill was something like $180. I dropped everything but Internet, built my own router so I wasn't renting theirs (it's Verizon, so I had to ask their guy to work some cabling magic as well), and then got Sling and the premium channels' apps, and it came out to like $120. It's a decent savings but I can see the margin getting thinner. After seeing DTV's increases, I researched other TV replacement services and only Sling was still in that $20-30 price range...so these guys are starting to see dollar signs and are missing the point of why people turn to them in the first place. This would be like the Goodwill Store approaching Nordstrom's prices.

It seems cord cutting services are fucking themselves and everyone else and possibly sending the whole thing into an early grave. I was going to switch from Sling to DirectTV Now and save a few bucks a month, but I noticed DTV overhauled ALL their packages to the point where it's now something like 15 per month more than I pay for Sling. And most of their packages are now more expensive than cable. WTF dudes.