Robert S

Random observation: is there an unwritten law that every crime series that lasts more than one season needs a Stranger on a Train episode? An excerpt from Wikipedia on crime shows with a Stranger on a Train episode: CSI (2x), NCIS, Castle, Bones, Law & Order, Due South ...

I agree in principle, though I would say it is more like someone using Meltzer (or whoever) for that purpose.

Dolph Ziggler challenging for the world title really matches the Horror Show theme. If I ever decide to watch that show, I definitely know which match I will skip.

I recently finished Ni No Kuni 2 (incl. getting the platinum) and while the game is decent, it feels like a ton of wasted potential. The fighting system itself is better than the one from Ni No Kuni 1, but on the other hand the story is really bland and pedestrian (especially compared with Ni No Kuni 1) and there are a lot of game mechanics that feel either unfinished or badly integrated. For example, you (are at least me) spend a lot of time building up your "kingdom", but at least the resource gathering stuff is just not worth it. You end up with lot of loot that you have no use at all for, as the only real usage for that is crafting weapons and armor. And except the end-game stuff (for which you cannot get the material via the kingdom but have to use the post-game dungeon), you usually get same quality of weapons and stuff via normal item drop by enemies. The whole higgle mechanic is really cryptic and for most of the game, I just did not bother with them (only for the post-game bosses, I looked up a decent set of higgles). Also, I have never bothered using an eatable (I don't know if they are really worth it) and did not bother to choose equipment beyond base stats criteria. Though that real-time strategy thing - while not really deep - is at least a fun addition. Most of the characters except the two first ones you get, after they join the party, they have barely anything to do as part of the plot. There are also no subplots for them (well, maybe with that Twitter-ish thingy, but I did not bother using that). Disclaimer: I played the game using the middle difficulty mode. Also, I got the Kingdom Hearts Deluxe (or whatever it is called) pack half a year ago, and I recently finished Birth by Sleep and thought that that game was pretty good and had some clever gameplay mechanics. Playing the game with three different characters and having the story of each world unfold playthrough-by-playthrough is quite a neat idea.

My favorite Hogan-in-Japan spot is him spinning out of a hammerlock into a single-leg trip. I don't know, if that spot has a name, but I usually associate it with Tiger Mask (Sayama), so Hogan doing that same spot is extra-funny.

I am sad to say that this is not a US-specific phenomena. I am still shuddering thinking about what I have heard very intelligent people say over the last couple of months in that regard. The only difference might be that people here mostly grumble but in the end follow the rules to a certain degree for some time.

Come on, (Roberto) Fishman was right there.

50+ is the demographic, that watches TV the most. NXT's 0.4 from the table in Jericho's tweet puts them in the bottom quarter of the the list. Aand AEW's 0.29 is one of the lowest value in the whole column. So compared to other TV programs both have a relatively young audience (though AEW's one is definitely younger than NXT's).

So the Kings of Cable right now are Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham?

Yeah, I am not buying that. To think that such a video in this form is a good idea, needs much more than speech impediment. For god's sake, he started with "I'm Mike Quackenbush", basically saying that everything afterwards might be a work.

Using his promo-voice is also not the smartest choice if he wants people to take this as a heartfelt apology.

In continental Europe, none of the things you mention above are usually eaten for breakfast (okay, you can get some scrambled eggs in hotels that regularly deal with "outside" guests). Pancakes etc. are lunch/dinner food over here.

So good-bye Jerry Lawler, Steve Austin (is he currently under any contract?), Michael Hayes, Vince McMahon ...?

I suppose you mean "the day before Lent starts" (unless British people are so stern that they combine carnival and lent).

Sigi was not a founder of SWF, the SWS was founded by a group in Oberglatt (who trained and wrestled amongst themselves; I think Danny Michaels was the first president of the group), though Sigi joined at some point in 2000 and was at least promoting some shows (I guess if the show took place in St. Gallen or Thurgau, they were promoted by him). After the Oberglatt group mostly withdrew, a non-wrestler called Fabio Sessa became the head. He was the brain of the whole US invasion thing with booking lots of big named US talent (which caused the end of the promotion).

There was (and still is) a very small Swiss scene, that started about in 99. At first, there was a small local group that did shows in front of friends and family. In 2000, the expanded a bit, which is also when Claudio joined. At that point, they started to run about 10 shows a year in the German speaking parts of Switzerland. In 2004, that promotion tried to run a big show with lots of international guests (they got DDP, AJ Styles, Abyss, Disco Inferno and Sonny Siaki; Jeff Jarrett was booked for the show as well but no-showed as his wife got diagnosed with cancer - the contact to US talent went, I assume via Joe E. Legend to Scott D'Amore, who was also at the show). That show bombed spectacularly and the promotion shut down. Later on, some people tried to promote on a less regular basis, though also booking the occasional US talent (I was at a show in 05 that had Austin Aries defend his ROH Title and Honky Tonk Man was working the main event). Most of the people either were just not interested in working internationally, i.e. more than once or twice a months or were just not that talented. The most prominent wrestler besides Cesaro is Cesaro's former tag team Ares, who was main eventing wXw for some time and moved to the US, where he wrestled for Chikara a bit. Don't quote me on that, but I think he is married to Allison Danger (which is why he moved to the US). A couple of other guys worked semi-regularly in Germany and Italy. The Swiss shows when I attended them semi-regularly in the early 2000s usually were about 3/4 local Swiss talent and 1/4 German and Austrian wrestlers. And of course, if you want to go further back in history, there is René Lasartesse, a long time star of the German Catch scene. He died a year and a half ago at the age of 90. He attended one or two of those shows mentioned above in the early 2000s, an apparently told the people there that he tried to run shows himself in Switzerland in the 70s or so and failed. His conclusion was that wrestling as a business does not work in Swiss culture.

I am not sure if Otsuka ever cared about having an MMA career beyond getting a payday or two. I mean on the same day he fought Vovchanchyn in the PRIDE GP qualifier (which he lost by decision), he wrestled on a BattlArts show (the BattlArts show took place a couple of hours before he MMA fight). That's a double shot of a special kind. At least the pro wrestling show was in Korakuen Hall while the MMA show was in the Tokyo Dome, i.e. he had a very short walk to get from one show to the other.

Actually the fourth, Dimitrov, Troicki and Coris already tested positive. But looking at the pictures going around about the event, they basically tried everything to get infected.

"Cheese" can be so many different things, that I would not make a general statement like "I like / don't like cheese". For example, I could never eat cream or mold cheese. On the other hand, I could not live without 9 to 12-months riped hard cheese. Consider the tradition the making of such cheese has here locally, I probably would have to hand in my passport if I would not like that kind of cheese. The way that cheese is still produced to this day (some kind of three stage pasturing - in the winter in the valley, in spring and fall in low altitude mountain pastures and in the summer in high altitude mountain pastures), is even on some UNESCO cultural heritage list. And I am still amused that there is town on this world called New Glarus. The original Glarus is a Swiss canton valley that to some degree seems to be stuck in the 18th century. For example, to this day they still use the so called Landsgemeinde: the monthly votings are done literally in a public forum, voting is done by public gathering via raising of hands. At least Glarus is not Appenzell (another Swiss canton, relatively close to Glarus). There women's right to vote was only given in 1991, after they Appenzell was ordered to do so by the Swiss Federal Court (the Landsgemeinde there in 1990 still voted against women's right to vote).

The best characters are those, who Red plays of more real, straight, than the playful stuff he does with all the FBI people. So I also like Dembe who has somewhat turned into Red's voice-of-reason. The other characters really require a huge suspend-of-disbelief to take them seriously. I mean how often did they learn the lesson that the means of using (get used by) Red's informations don't justify the ends, how often have you heard Director Cooper go on about how Red has finally crossed the line etc. Acting wise, I suppose they do an adequate job.

They should have renamed The Blacklist into The James Spader Show long time ago, as he is the main (only?) reason for watching that show. That title would be much more politically correct too. ? (there have been recent debates in software development etc. circles about getting rid of terms like "blacklisting" and "master-slave")

I suppose a reason for the short-series style is that radio series came first. I also heard people saying that the laters books (3 and 4) are the highlight or the Hitchhiker book series, though I must admit, that I never got past book 2. I began with book 3 a couple of years ago, but it was just a bit too British for me. I was always feeling like I was missing some context to a joke or two. Like what happens when reading Terry Pratchett, just to a much greater extend (as with Pratchett, the English-culture-heavy jokes usually are just side jokes).

I am about halfway through the first book and I am not completely sold. I started with the German translation, because why not, or at least so I thought. But the German translation turned out to be pretty bad. Some technical terms for example, were translated inconsistently or even wrong. Even the title was translated to "Die drei Sonnen" (meaning "The Three Suns"), even though the literal translation of the three-body problem ("Das Dreikörperproblem") is a well known term in mathematics or and physics (disregarding the fact, that the VR substory is actually a four-body problem). I am still not the fan of the flowery language. It does not appear to be that bad to me in the English translation (even though clearly existing and out-of-place for how the story is told otherwise), but that might just be that being a non-native speaker reduces the effect on me. Another problem of the German translation is, that it lacks the footnotes of the English translation, which are sometimes really helpfull. There is an annex with some explanations, but they are not directly linked to the text passages. One reason why I choose to read this book was to see how political (or not political) it would get. So far, it's really obvious how the Cultural Revolution during Deng Xiaoping became what Stalinism became in the Soviet Union during Krushchev.

They could easy do a whole 30 for 30 about Operation Puerto and its cover-up. Just look at the long, long list of Spanish cyclers that have been named and how many in the end were suspended. The only one I can see is Valverde, and his suspension was due to the efforts of the Italian NOC. Apart from that, it only hit non-Spaniards like Basso, Ullrich and Jaksche.

Of the one hour or so that Armstrong was talking on that 30 for 30, I don't think he was talking openly (i.e. without playing a character or whatever) for more than 10 minutes, and 8 of those minutes were when he was talking about his childhood and cancer. Floyd Landis probably put it right when he said that for Armstrong lying is easier than being himself. If you (like me) are jaded enough to watch a sociopath for 3 hours, this is a very entertaining watch, especially when they put Lance's statements in contrast to some actions he took over time, for example calling Emma O'Reilly a whore. And regarding cycling (or actually all endurance sports), I am very jaded. Doping was probably part-of-the-game forever, got turned to 11 in the early 1990ies with just the idiots (and the very unlucky ones) being caught. In all likelihood, this is still ongoing, just the methods have gotten more sophisticated, that it got even harder to detect dopers. The best chance to catch dopers nowadays seems to be by catching the doctor carrying out the doping practices and hoping that he talks.