Technico Support

Hayes is sad and pathetic.

I watched about half of Wrestle War 89 last night. Some random thoughts: One big thing that stood out to me was how I'd watch this stuff as a kid (I was 14 when this show aired) and I automatically assumed all these wrestlers were consummate professionals and super competent. Like, of course they are highly skilled...you couldn't make it to the big time if you weren't, right? Watching today, holy shit. Ranger Ross, for example, was so fucking green in retrospect. Butch Reed carried that dude to something damn near watchable but god damn, it was a struggle. Whatever happened to Ross anyway? Why did Dick Murdoch and Bob Orton do a bullrope match? I don't recall Murdoch as a babyface feuding with Gary Hart's stable of misfit toys. And then they finished the match with a pretty heavy angle, with Orton hanging Murdoch. Strange for a match so low on the card. Did anything ever come of it? I skipped over the SST vs Dynamic Dudes, as any sane and rational human should. The last match I watched was Luger vs Hayes. WCW had some weird stables happening in early 89. I think it was the fallout of Windham, Blanchard, Anderson and Dillon leaving, but this was around the time where the aforementioned strange Hart stable, and then out comes Michael Hayes as a single with Hiro Matsuda. Damn, just a bizarre pairing. I seem to recall Matsuda managing Flair for a little while around this time as well. This was an okay match. What really stood out to me was how underrated Luger was as a worker and how much charisma he had. Also, and it goes without saying, how important secondary titles were back then. Luger was seen as a main event guy, ready to challenge the World champ whenever, and here he was with the secondary belt and nobody thought any less of him. Crazy, I know. Decent by the numbers match...shine, heat, comeback, heel cheats to win and Nick Patrick takes the worst phantom bump you will see if you live to be 130. Also, fuck, Michael Hayes was bad at wrestling. I know he was the mouth behind the Freebirds and had the charisma but it's amazing he couldn't even pick up a thing watching from the apron all those years.

Wouldn't have turned heel or wouldn't have lowered himself to do a program with Bret? NOTE: "Both" is an acceptable answer.

Good call. They also look like cables instead of the actual ropes they use. Maybe back then they used whatever rings were available in the town for house shows.

The Walking Dead has been renewed for another season. No word yet on The Bridge.

I never listen to critics when it comes to reviews of sci-fi or horror. There's no use. Most are afraid to risk their reputations by admitting to enjoying a "genre picture." It reminds me of why Roger Ebert is probably the last great reviewer. He judged every film relative to its genre and what it set out to accomplish, not relative to all cinema ever made. He gave The Devil's Rejects 3 out of 4 stars, for fuck's sake.

Well, the man did drown a bag of puppies once.

Awesome photos, man. Thanks! Were the Flair/Nikita and Bunkhouse Stampede shots from the same show? I ask because I remember going to a Bunkhouse Stampede tour stop in Baltimore and Flair/Nikita was on it, so I figured that was the main for more than one show on that tour.

Perfect outcome. Skins lose but keep it close enough to keep their fans cocksure for when RG3 returns. Is that where Skins fans are now regarding the QB situation? I haven't heard a peep from all the typical fair weather Skins fans at my company here in suburban DC in quite a while so I'm not sure. I guess the bloom is off the Kirk Cousins rose?

Don't take "Mania 3" literally. You could say Mania 2 or 5, Summerslam 88, whatever. I mean to illustrate how Vince used to actually get guys over and then rely on them to draw. As opposed to today where nobody is booked strong enough to draw and then he just calls the stars of yesterday when he needs them.

It would be funny if it wasn't so sad and apparently true. Building new stars who can headline is the exception to the rule nowadays and I'm positive your scenario, with Vince hitting the "old draws" panic button, is correct. But damn, sometimes you have to just push forward. I'd be really into the spectacle of an Austin comeback, so I'm, being a hypocrite here, but come on. Steve Austin was huge 16 years ago. Vince didn't try to get Sammartino, Backlund or Graham for Mania 3, did he? There were some really down Wrestlemanias in the early 90s when the company was trying to build back up between the end of the 80s era and the start of the Attitude era but they just went ahead with the guys they had instead of relying on cheap crutches. Eventually, these old draws won't be able to do it anymore and then what will they have? There was a rumor that there was some infighting regarding the main of the next Mania, with Vince wanting Rock vs Brock. Sigh.

In completely unrelated news, The Baggage Handler Wrestling Federation (BHWF) is holding a tournament this Saturday to determine its first ever Intercontinental Champion. Catch "Payback on the Tarmac" exclusively on iPPV!

Breaking Bad doesn't have any Kid rock or AC/DC in it. Vince will hate it.

One that I found myself thinking about for some reason:I hated "Taken." It was a jingoistic pile of crap. Every single non-American character in the film was a racist caricature and every single one was a bad guy. It was all us vs. them. The whole lesson was, "don't let your pretty white daughter travel to one of those dirty foreign countries. Filthy foreigners will kidnap her and sell her into the sex trade and their horrible foreign officials will even be in on it." So the viewer is taught to hate the film's non-Americans and then cheer for the American good guy as Liam Neeson (joke's on you! He's not from here!) brutally dispatches them in a parade of torture porn. Just a disgusting, vile movie.

It's already been said but, god damn, Kelly and Corino are awful. They had an exchange where they discussed Bennett crying over almost breaking Whitmer's neck. How fucking dumb. The guy is a heel. He is not supposed to be remorseful. Unless a face turn was coming (like Nikita crying for Magnum T.A.), what was that exchange supposed to accomplish?

holy shit that story

Sam Worthington sits alone atop the "shitty at doing an American accent" hall of fame. In any role he plays, you can hear the Australian accent sneaking in.

I will fight you, sir. Franka Potente was amazing on this season of The Bridge. But then again, I'm not sure what her accent was supposed to be. She's a German actress playing a...Mexican with a German name?

Exactly. WWE doesn't do nuance. Remember, Hassan and Daivari started as Americans of Middle Eastern descent who were sick of being treated badly by other Americans post 9/11. That was a pretty well thought out gimmick but it didn't take long for Vince or whoever just just say, "fuck it, make 'em terrorists!"

Of course, but they're not seen as a "dirty organization." When Mike Tomlin tried to trip Jacoby Jones from the sidelines, nobody said, "yup, typical Pittsburgh." The point I'm making is that I'm guessing (but don't care enough to research stats to win a dumb internet argument) every team has roughly the same amount of bad apples as Baltimore has had over the past decade plus, but only Baltimore is painted as some mythical evil organization that gleefully welcomes criminals and scumbags. It's pretty lame. I think it comes from two places: hatred of Ray Lewis (completely legit; the guy is a grade A douchebag who no doubt did something horrible that night) and a little jealousy of how well the team has done since its inception. But in all, I think the Ray Lewis thing happening so early in the team's existence did a lot to paint the team in that light.

That's why there's zero reason to get invested in WWE. The whole company runs based on Vince's bizarre issues, biases, preferences and general all around pettiness. And he's constantly changing his mind. He killed a push and tried to turn a guy heel for who knows what reason. He would turn down money if the voices in his head told him to.

I forgot all about that. Only WWE would turn a guy heel because he's too over.

Nah, it was the first thing I checked for. Sad thing is I had to check and see if Adam Bomb was still alive and was surprised the see he is.

There's nothing especially wrong with Cena, he's just the most glaring example of WWE's problems as a whole. The unstoppable superhero was great back when there was only a few hours of TV a week and you never saw the dude except for PPVs and SNME. But there's so much TV, they're just burning through matches and storylines so fast, and he's on top for every single show so much that people are sick of him. If it wasn't Cena, it would be somebody else. If they insist on this much TV every week, they really need to change how they do things, because Super Cena going over strong 10 times per month is too much.

IWC = it's the Special Olympics and everyone is calling everyone else retarded