Ellsworth Toohey

http://espn.go.com/mlb/story/_/id/9635453/cleveland-indians-trot-chicken-batting-practice Fuck the Rally Monkey, here comes Chicken Al!

I can't remember if it was World Wide or Saturday Night in 1994 where they advertised Hogan & Sting against Ron and Don Harris, who I'd never seen before but knew from the Apter mags as being former USWA and Smoky Mountain tag champs, so I was kind of looking forward to it. Then the bell rings and Hogan immediately hits the legdrop while Sting gets the other Harris twin the Scorpion and submits him, all in less than 30 seconds. That was when I knew the Harris Twins wouldn't be getting a push in WCW.

He seems to have disappeared off the face of the Earth circa 2009. I remember he posted in 2007 that he needed a kidney transplant....

So I don't have any actual evidence, but at this point it's safe to say that Bill Barnwell and Yakuza Rich are the same person.

Is anything up with RiffTrax? Nothing new since March, though I assume they're just taking a break and waiting for Star Trek Into Darkness, The Wolverine, etc. to hit home video. Anyways, I've come to prefer Cinematic Titanic over RiffTrax since the addition of TV's Frank and Pearl to the group. I think RiffTrax is just Mike, Kevin, and the other guy writing the jokes, whereas Cinematic Titanic is more of the "core" writers from the early years (minus Mike Nelson, obviously).

All joking aside, Daniel Bryan did an interview last month where he talked about reaching a point where an indy wrestler has to choose between staying on the indy scene and controlling his gimmick and wrestling style...and living in near-poverty, and joining WWE and embracing their "sports entertainment" style and making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Fandango said something similar recently, where you have to embrace the idea of doing a wacky gimmick in order to survive in WWE. Mark and Jay, if they ever were to go to WWE, would have to accept the fact that their ROH days were behind them and they could very well end up in some sort of bizarre gimmick where they're incestuous hillbilly brothers or they could play the nephews of Luke and Butch and be packaged as "Bushwhackers 2K1." Though in reality they'd probably debut and immediately be told "you don't know how to work" and then be squashed dead by Ryback in a handicap match and fired the very next day, then they'd come back to ROH with their "aura" gone.

I'm just imagining that Jay Briscoe was sitting in his house/apartment/trailer on a Monday night, getting ready to drive up from Delaware to Stamford, CT on Tuesday and make an unannounced "cold call" at Titan Towers and try to get hired, and he turns on RAW and sees the Wyatt family make their debut, and he realizes that if he ever did get hired by WWE it would be for a gimmick like the Wyatts, and just starts weeping uncontrollably as his wife and children stare at him in confusion.

Turns out somebody actually recorded and saved the KTMA episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000:

Burgundy, I'm not sure what you wrote as you and Victator are on my "ignore user" list due to your insanely offensive statements you made about gun owners in the Trayvon Martin thread. Sorry sweetie!

And in a truly bizarre coincidence, NPR's On The Media this week focused an entire hour on how "content providers" STILL aren't making money on the Internet and how Google is currently developing a subscription-based version of Youtube due to the fact that all their marketing partners are bitching and moaning about how little money they're receiving in advertising revenue (literally pennies on the dollar unless you hit 1 million views, which is actually a lot harder to do than it sounds). They also speculated that Netflix won't be able to keep producing independent TV shows like Arrested Development and House of Cards and eventually even they will face serious cutbacks in original programming So I guess I get my wish and we'll have a subscriber version of Youtube by late 2014.

Yet another meltdown for Dave: http://www.courant.com/entertainment/hc-dave-chappelle-walks-off-stage-0831-20130830,0,3823831.story Either that or he's decided to segue into Andy Kaufman-style "stand up as performance art" shows from now on. Either way, dude needs to accept that fact that he'll always be remembered for "I'm Rick James, bitch!" for the rest of his life regardless of what else he does. EDIT: And I misspelled "Still" in the title header.

I am REALLY getting sick and tired of this "You may skip this ad in 5 seconds" bullshit and the superimposed ads at the bottom-center of the videos on Youtube. Will the federal government or somebody please intervene and force Youtube to start up a premium version with no advertisements? I will gladly pay $15.00 a month if it means I don't have to watch commercials before getting to the Grumpy Cat videos.

I thought Meltzer said that the Dudleys were let go in the first place because half the locker room hated them?

Has ANYONE actually employed by ESPN bitched out Tebow for his homophobia? I remember a guest on College Football Live did and Herbstreit uncomfortably acknowledged that not everyone agrees with all of Tebow's opinions.

Fox Sports 1 is down to 81,000 viewers a day, compared to 2.26 million for ESPN. http://www.awfulannouncing.com/2013/august/fox-sports-1-s-ratings-are-falling-behind.html

Let's get some "alternative medicine" idiocy going in this thread:

Basically everything Martin Sheen did in-between Apocalypse Now and The West Wing. Basically nothing but "in it for the money roles" for over fifteen years: Firestarter, the bad guy in the A.L.F. reunion movie, Spawn, The Dead Zone, Beverly Hills Brats. Weirdest of all is 1991's The Maid, where he plays a businessman who falls in love with a single mother and gets himself hired as her new nanny so he can romance her. He basically said "the hell with critical acclaim, I'd rather make shit loads of money playing hammy bad guys instead of have to suffer through another nightmare production like Badlands or Apocalypse Now." I really wish he'd do one of those Entertainment Weekly interviews where an actor sits down and goes over the reasons why he/she took roles in various movies.

Transformers: The Movie was technically the last movie Orson Welles worked on, but the obscure indie movie Someone to Love was released a year after Transformers in 1987. It's a fairly pretentious film about a heartbroken movie director who films people at a party who offer their views on love and romance, with Welles offering his views on the subject, but it's a better sendoff than Transformers. (And I like Transformers, so don't lump me in with the guys who ripped on it)

As much as I loved Captain America: The First Avenger and I'm sure I'll enjoy the sequel, I do hope that either Robert Redford, given how few films he's done over the last decade, either does another "Oscar bait" movie after Winter Soldier or that that movie where he's sailing on a boat comes out after Winter Soldier so that won't be his final film role in case he decides to focus on directing/Sundance in his waning years.

We all wish our favorite actors could go like Henry Fonda, winning an Oscar for On Golden Pond before checking out. Sadly, however, most actors die after doing an unglamorous "in it for the money" role instead. You have: - Jimmy Stewart dying after voicing "Marshall Wiley Burb" in An American Tail 2: Fievel Goes West. Not that The Magic of Lassie would have been much of an improvement. - Paul Newman kicking the bucket after appearing alongside Larry the Cable Guy in Pixar's Cars: Mater and the Ghostlight. If only he'd called it quits after Road to Perdition. - Bette Davis in the extremely low budget Wicked Stepmother, a film so bad that Ms. Davis quit halfway through and was replaced by Barbara Carrera. - Unless Gene Hackman comes out of retirement, his final role will be Welcome to Moose Port.

Seven years sounds about right.

NOW can we please get Bernie Rosenthal back as a regular character?

As long as their non-Fast & Furious movies continue to bomb at the box office, it's going to be a very long time before either Paul Walker or Vin Diesel "pass the torch."

The lack of Trace Adkins, Luke Bryan, Kenny Chesney, or Sublime with Rome makes me smile.