Ellsworth Toohey

Dear Valiant, Deep down you already know how this latest "return" by Christopher Priest to Quantum & Woody will end: The series cancelled with horifically low sales in the four digits, and Priest whining on his blog and the Newsarama boards about how he was screwed by his editors and they didn't advertise the book enough and the fans didn't support the book and then finally a full-on meltdown with Priest railing against fans who'd rather read Battle of the Atom instead of "smart" books like he writes. I don't care how nice a guy he is towards his fans, Jim "Christopher Priest" Owsley is like the Lex Luger/Sid Viscious of comics. No man has ever gotten so many "chances" as this guy and failed so consistently. At least Sid and Lex never whined in public afterwards.

http://deathvalleydriver.com/forum/index.php?/topic/527-instituting-a-stfu-grown-folks-talking-rule/ Enjoy your nap, Vic.

http://www.avclub.com/articles/the-big-bang-theorys-character-and-cast-progressio,103291/ The above is a really good article discussing the growth in popularity of The Big Bang Theory, but it also makes a lot of good points about how right now a lot of critically acclaimed shows are actually doing horribly in the ratings: You can praise Arrested Development all you want, nothing changes the fact that its ratings were terrible in comparison to Family Guy or The Simpsons or that Community has horrible numbers in comparison to Eric Christian Olson's current series NCIS: Los Angeles. "One voice against a thousand. Artistic value is achieved collectively by each man subordinating himself to the standards of the majority." - Ellsworth Toohey, via Ayn Rand (And yes, I'm fully aware that Rand intended Toohey as a straw villian. Doesn't change the fact that Breaking Bad had 6 million viewers versus Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s 21 million.) Oh, and not only is Wilfred moving to FXX, it's also cancelled because it only had 440,000 people watching it.

http://www.suntimes.com/sports/baseball/cubs/22871275-573/13-cubs-moments-to-forget-in-dismal-13.html

That had to be the most disingenous tribute by Vince ever. I'm guessing Tony Garea & Pat Patterson pressured him to do it. But anyways, the man responsible for giving "Boston Bad Boy" Tony Rumble, one of the most delusional and self important goofs to hit the indy scene, his first big break, thus dooming poor Boston wrestling fans to almost decade of Rumble's awful "Piper's Pit" style interviews, the man who sired the awful Jumpin Joe Savoldi, has passed.

In all seriousness,I REALLY hope Bob Ryder and Jeremy Borash are shit canned soon. In "real life" Borash is supposed to be a decent guy, but Jesus Christ he came off as such a tool on the old Xplosion recap show which I was required to watch every week when I "worked the truck" for SUN Sports/FOX Sports Florida. I just want him gone completely from pro wrestling. Let him go host ISKA kickboxing shows or something. Ryder, obviously needs to be fired because of all the pop-ups and spyware, hypocritically going after WWE during the Corporate Ministry "cross/symbol" 'controversy," and blindly defending WCW when it was revealed that buying Benoit/Guerrero merchandise would show up as Hogan/nWo merchandise in the sales tracking computers. Too bad Dave "Last Call" Scherer doesn't work for TNA too so I could see him get fired as well.

Raven Mack always has the weirdest screen names. This one is better than when his name was in Japanese kanji, or when he had a frowny face as his screen name.

Layla's most recent publicity photo.

Or maybe they trick Bully Ray by offering him to come in for an "audition" in a "Legends" match against Vader and then they tell Vader 'do to Bully Ray exactly what you did to Nikita Koloff at Halloween Havoc 92.'

Perception is stronger than reality. It's better that Time-Warner executives see headlines like "DC is anti-gay" or "DC sexualizes female suicide" rather than whatever the truth actually is as the negative press will make them put the heat on Didio and friends. If the truth was reported, than Didio wouldn't be acting like a total asshole on Twitter and making himself look bad to his corporate overlords.

Okay, I'll freely admit I've never seen a Truth Martini match/interview in my life, but just seeing these two photos makes me want to see 911 or 3 Minute Warning run in and beat him senseless.

I'd only want Bubba brought back if it was for a semi-shoot beatdown by Kane and The Undertaker ala Kronik at SummerSlam 2001. At 34, Mickie is a tad past her expiration date for WWE standards. Still surprised Ivory lasted as long as she did.

*raises hand* My parents never took me to church or really discussed/explained religion to me. They both considered themselves to be Presbyterians but never took part in it. Instead my father took me to the planetarium and had me watch Carl Sagan documentaries, so when my maternal grandfather died when I was 8 and all of a sudden my mother started dragging us to church every Sunday, hearing this guy on the pulpit talk about how the Earth was only 2,000 years old and about Noah's Ark, which I knew from PBS and National Geographic documentaries to be completely inaccurate, made me leery of religion. When I was 14 I was sent to a Bible Camp which, unbeknowest to my parents, was run by Evangelicals and exposed me to nutcases who believed that only a chosen few Christians would ascend in something called "the Rapture" and showed me just how hateful and prejudiced "loving" Christians could be. When I got to college, I began dabbling in left-wing socialism and was exposed to Christopher Hitchens for the first time and from there began reading Richard Dawkins, James Randi and Sam Harris. At the same time I took history classes that focused on the real-life history of the Middle East and the actual origins of the Abrahamic religions, and how much of Christianity was based around early myths and religions. That was when I finally began to realize that religions were the invention of ancient peoples to explain why the Sun rose and set everyday and to explain how the world worked. The 13 years since then have certainly been an interesting journey. My father remarried to a woman who I hardly speak to, due to her fanatical obsession with New Age mysticism (she's heavily into "energy healing") and I no longer speak to two of my closest friends from high school due to their insistence on Judaism being a "race" of people while I advocate David Cross's view that Judaism is simply a religion that people can adopt or abandon at will and shouldn't be defined by (but then I believe in post-racialism: "I don't see a black man in front of me, I just see a man"). Politically, I don't really call myself a socialist anymore, though I do believe that the government does have a role to play in people's lives (people on food stamps should NOT be allowed to use them to buy junk food, only healthy food, and the WIC program should be abandoned entirely. If you are so poor you're on food stamps to begin with, you should not be having children. You're just making the problem worse by birthing children into poverty).

Go listen to the Jerry Weisman podcast, it's all pretty much summed up there. His role in the death of JC Bailey, scamming people with "going out of business" sales/gimmicks, providing drugs to other wrestlers, etc.

http://www.prowrestling.net/artman/publish/miscnews/article10033236.shtml The cynic in me says he's faking it for whatever reason, though if he actually does have cancer I can't say I feel sorry for the son of a bitch.

That Hollywood Game Night on NBC was awful. Nobody wanted to be there. I'm guessing Maya Rudolph and a drunk Jason Sudeikis were there as part of the deal to get released from their Up All Night and SNL contracts, and Amy Poehler was covering for Will Arnett as part of their divorce settlement.

I still remember "The Shah" Hack Myers showing up on a couple World Wide episodes circa 1995 as a pure jobber and R.S.P.W. going nuts with half the guys saying that Hack was getting what he deserved for abandoning ECW and the other half being mad that Hack wasn't getting a push. I think it was either Brett Schwann or Jim Finch (ECW webmasters at the time) who finally revealed that Hack had moved to Florida to try to catch on full-time with either WCW or WWF and that he was REALLY desperate for the money when he worked the World Wide tapings and that obviously things hadn't gone as planned for him.

It refers to the "Big Wednesday" show where Scott Norton won the IWGP title.

As the title says, where would you personally rank Shinjiro Otani and Tatsuhito Takaiwa among the all-time greatest tag teams? They were far and away the best team in the world in 1998 and 1999 and their "Big Wednesday" match against Black Tiger II and Chris Jericho was my personal choice for 1998's MOTY. It's a shame, to me, that they aren't better remembered both in Japan and here among the Internet crowd the way that Tenzan and Kojima and MIsawa/Kobashi are.

I'm assuming the manager in the "Dream Warriors" promo was a relatively svelte Damian Kane?

http://youtu.be/cvGJd8Ol_II?t=5m53s

And the new Batwoman writer should be really political. I want Kate Kane to be totally "in your face" with her homosexuality and Judaism towards the other members of the Bat-Family.

Could we actually maybe get a lesbian comics writer to handle Batwoman now, instead of two men?

Now my question is, did they actually bother to tell DC about these plots ahead of time or did they just show up in the submitted scripts?

They weren't exactly setting the sales charts on fire. That thing read like a shoot interview diatribe where a writer complains about how his carefully planned six month feud between Primo/Epico vs. The Wyatts was ruined by Vince just one day announing that the Colons would be turned into Los Matadores. Williams' wikipedia page shows he only ever did one job for Marvel, a Wolverine Annual in 1995. I hope he and Blackman are able to hold their tongues going forward, seeing as how they'll be constantly told by Marvel editorial to make whichever comic they land over their to be "more like the movie version that's coming out next month." Hopefully we'll get a new artist.