Gordi the former AEW fan

My Christmas story this year: One of my students offered to give me a large parcel of unused land as a gift, but considering that I'd have to pay taxes on it and I don't have the funds to develop the land, I regretfully had to tell him, "I don't want a lot for Christmas." Anyway, thanks for, in a very real way, helping me get through pandemic times. I'm quite sure I'm not the only one.

Loved the attention to detail in the presentation of the main event: Sting wearing special CM Punk facepaint, Punk with the 80s Sting look, #MJFTR with matching yellow and black gear... A few crazy/dangerous looking bumps and dives in that match! Friedman's chickenshitting was glorious. Kept him and Punk apart like they were Jumbo and Tenryu in a 6-man. Hard to pick which was the biggest contrast in styles: Always Angry Adam vs Easy-going Orange, or Peppy High School Athlete vs Literal Incarnation of Pure Evil. I really hope I can see AEW live some day and sing along with Malakai's entrance music. GARBFLASSZT! NOKCHTARRRNM!! Hard to pick the single funniest heel line of the night: - Bryan's "I hurt my leg a little bit" - "Cody is a bigger dick than I am" - Rebel just mugging in the background and pounding wine - "You'll shoot your eye out" - The crowd sarcastically cheering when Nyla nd Ruby finally got the jacket off. Ruby vs Thunder Rosa could be excellent, if they decide to go that way. When is a Fish not a fish? The possibility of reDRagon vs Young Bucks down the road, too. WARDLOW ANGRY! WARDLOW SMASH!!

David and Peter Paul, The Barbarian Brothers! I always kind of hoped they'd show up somewhere as a tag team. Those guys had a great sense of humour. They were great in DC Cab, with Mr. T!

It's the season for giving (and receiving)! We ALREADY got TWO Bear Country matches this week, one on Dark Elevation (vs Chaos Project!!) and one on Regular Dark. Plus Emi Sakura, Thunder Rosa, and Andrade vs Kaun on Elevation, and Abadon. Kingston, and La Rosa Negra on Dark, plus 10 vs Leroy Patterson, which is kind of a must-see... And now we're getting the Holiday Bash SIX-MAN GRUDGE MATCH... CM Punk, Darby Allin, and Sting vs. Cash Wheeler, Dax Harwood, and 3-time Dynamite Diamond Ring Winner Maxwell Jacob Friedman TBS WOMEN'S TITLE TOURNAMENT SEMI-FINAL... “The Native Beast” Nyla Rose vs. “Destination unknown! Ruby, Ruby, Ruby” Ruby Soho (winner faces the winner of Thunder vs Jade in the tournament finals) ONE-ON-ONE... A Bay Bay vs an Orange... which, frankly, that could go either way. VENGEANCE Malakai Black vs. Griff Garrison I'm legitimately curious about where (if anywhere) they are going with Julia Hart here, and I wonder if we will get to see who exactly is "so much more than a king now." DR. BRITT BAKER D.M.D & TONY SCHIAVONE CHRISTMAS PARTY!! And some news about the OWEN HART CUP Thank you, Santa!

I think Matt Cardona is actually WAY more successful and entertaining than MJF w/r/t being a hated heel that the fans actually hate. I don't even mean that as a slight on MJF. He's successful in that regard. He's quite often very entertaining in that role. I just think Cardona has perfected the art of heeling it up for the post-modern fan base. (Hmmmm... Maybe being well-built, handsome, talented, famous, good looking, and engaged or married to someone gorgeous, while not being humble and self-effacing is a good way to get heel heat these days. Are there any other wrestlers that come to mind who could leverage that?)

Here's my bold prediction: This is gonna be another fun hour of pro wrestling. I am Gordlow's Shadow. EDIT: Hey! Waddaya know? Gordstradamus strikes again. Another fearless out there prediction? Sure, here ya go: AEW's gonna give us at least three more fun hours of pro wrestling this year.

It kind of boggles my mind that there are apparently people who feel that Adam Page wasn't "made" as champion by that match. Here's a complete, unabridged list of everything important that was lost by the match not ending in a clear Hangman victory: A huge pop. Here's a partial list of what was gained: Page is still champ. Bryan's undefeated streak remains intact. Respect was paid to pro wrestling tradition from the territory days. We will get a rematch, which will sell a ton of tickets and draw a lot of eyes, and give us another great match to enjoy where the outcome is in doubt until the final bell. It was absolutely the right call to go 60.

You are gonna have to make some room on your "Greatest AEW Matches" thread, my friend. That was amazing. Had me hooked right up until the final bell. Puts Page up there with classic NWA champs like Brisco, Funk, Race... with guys like Ric, Baba, Nagata, Fujinami etc etc among the "guys with great 60-minute title defenses" pantheon. Rest of the show seemed pretty damned good, but to be honest I was spent after watching that. And, after all of our speculation, I don't think there can be much doubt that they made the right call here, going 60.

I can't help but wonder if possibly this and other kinds of "they've got too many people doing a fairly specific xyz type of sequence" observations might be linked to AEW developing a video game. Having heard about the hellacious amount of money they are sinking into their games development division, it wouldn't shock me to learn that there was a bit of "tail wagging the dog" going on where, you know, if they are sinking a lot of development time into making - for example - a good Oklahoma Stampede type of animation they might want to get as much value and use as possible out of that, and could conceivably be encouraging some members of the roster to add some kind of Oklahoma Stampede variation into their actual move set... Could also be a (not the, but a) motivating factor behind them signing so many interesting names... As I've said before, my personal dream for an AEW video game is for the basic A-button moves to be a punch, an Irish whip, a collar-and-elbow tie-up, and a Canadian Destroyer.

Hey! @Phil Schneider got an article published on The Ringer! Unsurprisingly, it's really good, too: https://www.theringer.com/2021/12/14/22832728/ring-of-honor-roh-wrestling-best-matches One crazy thought that struck me while reading that: Samoa Joe vs Kenta Kobashi seems like a pretty recent match to me. Jumbo vs Tenryu '89 seems like ancient history. Yet, the distance (in time) between Jumbo vs Tenryu and Joe vs Kobashi (16 years) is essentially the same as the distance between Joe vs Kobashi and right now.

Holy fudging heck! Winter Is Coming, my lads and queens! Last year we got "It's STAAAAANNNNNGGGG!!" and Kenny deeply crushing the hearts of about 15% of the posters here by beating Mox to become the AEW World Champion. What will this year bring? Shida vs Deeb Deebs won round one (delaying Shida's 50th win), then Sheeds won their tournament match, but then Deebs got revenge by helping Nyla knock Sheeds outa the tournament... who will win the rubber match?!?!?! D-Bry vs Hangmin! WINTER IS COOMING AHHHHHHHHH I'm not COOMING AHHHHHHHHH. you're COOMING AHHHHHHHHH. You'd have to assume they're not going to take the belt off of Page this soon. You'd also have to assume they are going to keep Danielson's unstoppable win streak alive. I am on tenterhooks here. Dynamite Diamond Final: MJF vs. Dante The diamond ring is such a big part of Friedman's gimmick... but also this sure would put Dante over hyuuuuge, and he's on the verge of making that leap (no pun intended)... A Sydal vs the guy so awesome I changed my name for him. 1) I have to imagine these guys will work a very compelling David vs Goliath thing in there. 2) Sydal bumping for Wardlow is going to be sick. 3) Which is funnier: Gordlow, or Wardi? Or: Neither. Get over yourself, dude. Presumably other stuff! Maybe a big debut!

Chi-poo-soo! Yes. Chips. Oh... Chi poo soo. This video pretty much sums up my free time during normal daily life, pre-Corona, except in my case it's usually nice Japanese people (sometime even pretty joshi wrestlers like Apple Miyuki -speaking of Apples, as it were) (or handsome male wrestlers like Kotoge) teaching me about local cuisine, and I speak a little more Japanese than Mei-chan speaks English. This was legitimately eating Mexican-style tacos in Osaka with a bunch of wrestling fans from all over the world (Japan, Canada, France, and Mexico). Jorge, the Mexican guy, spent a lot of our time there explaining one thing or another about the food as Chizuki (who speaks much better English than I do Japanese) and I tried to translate it for the other Japanese people at the table. Really very very similar to that video.

12 weeks into the diet, 1 week to go. Half a kilo above my goal weight. Down almost 15 kilos in 12 weeks. Under 100 kilos for the first time in years and years. Plan is to maintain until Spring and try another fast and three months of dieting to see if I can get really lean.

OK. Listen. The combined billed weight of The Lucha Brothers is a disgustingly scrawny 370 pounds. Not even 200 pounds per brother. FTR, on the other hand, weigh in at a manly combined billed 446 pounds! Almost 100 kilos each. So, the result of this match is a forgone conclusion, right? Nope! What the hell, AEW? At least they got the women's match right, with Nyla being billed as having 40-plus pounds on Anna. Dang. Hook looked pretty good in there. Some of the credit for that probably belongs to Fuego, who bumped and sold really well for Hook's offense... which, ahem, cough, is the only acceptable role for a normal-sized human being inside a pro wrestling ring. Speaking of ordinary-sized regular human beings: Two such persons in the main event to set up another match down the road with another sub-190-pound pip-squeak? With all of their friends and cronies with (here comes the up-to-date cultural reference!) buggy-whip arms hanging around ringside. What gives? Little dudes fighting little dudes is OK for a mid-card comedy match once in a while, maybe... but the main event of a pro wrestling TV show?? Good thing I had my fainting couch cleaned last week. It's like AEW thinks that looks, charm, talent, charisma, athleticism, ring savvy, and all of those other kinds of "icing" are more important than the "cake" (as in beef-cake) (which is size and muscularity). Some of those guys have potential, though, if they'd just get on dangerous doses of anabolic steroids, human growth hormone, human chorionic gonadotropin. selective androgen receptor modulators, creatine, and insulin, and start injecting synthol into their lats, traps, bis, tris, pecs, delts, rhomboids, and so on... Seriously, I am hoping Hook looks just as good bumping and selling as he did on offense. You know, then just get him on the gas to fill him out and you've got a superduperstar in the making.

I dunno, man. One guy yelled out a slur. Seems like rock solid proof that everyone in the arena and by extension everyone in the surrounding geographical area is also a hateful homophobic bigot. Maybe it's possible to argue that any time you get 9000+ people together there are inevitably going to be at some assholes in the crowd, but I think it's a lot easier just to blindly pass judgement. Luckily, I live in Japan. I'm quite happy to be lumped in with the "knowledgeable, respectful pro wrestling fans" stereotype. Unless I go to a joshi show. In that case I'm probably getting lumped in with the "creepy perverts" stereotype instead.

Settle down, thevastmajorityofusnetico special 6-person tag bout: Tay, Anna, Ruby vs Nyla, Bunny, Penelope. Settle down, Tony and Britt shippers, and asphyxiation enthusiasts, special singles match: Bay Bay vs Wheeler Settle down, Jim Cornettico tag team title contest: FTR vs Lucha Brothers - sadly not 2 out of 3 falls. Settle down, @Jijinetico debut extravaganza: Hook vs Fuego! Hope all y'all are able to avoid the spoilers until then!

https://barbend.com/devon-larratt-arm-wrestle-adam-scherr-braun-strowman/ Adam Scherr (Braun) vs legendary Canadian arm-wrestler Devon Larrett. Scherr does not exactly come across as a likable fellow in the video.

Another white hot crowd, another great pro wrestling TV show... And not only really very very good pro wrestling up and down the card, but also top notch Sports Entertainment during the Royale with Cheese. Wasn't expecting the crowd to boo Punk and cheer MJF, even in Lon Gisland. That genuinely caught me by surprise (and entertained me). Cody vs Sammy makes sense and should be excellent. Also: Cody's arm! Yikes! Loved seeing Hungee in the main event! Bryan's selling was so good. Love seeing Rocky in AEW, and the return of SUE! was maybe my favourite thing on the entire show. And the Ropongi Vice theme to top it all off!! This is going to sound like I'm being facetious, but I am genuinely looking forward to reading about whatever the various haters and nit-pickers find to complain about this week. I enjoy all of this so much, it's sometime really interesting to compare how other people experience it. Edit: @just drew got my back! I don't agree with any of it, but I can see where it's coming from. Maybe someone can complain about the Bucks wearing pink and black to the ring? No respect for tradition, those guys! Killing the business.

Tony Kahn on Busted Open Radio, as quoted on some bullshit newz site or other: “Like we have a great audience right now,” Khan said. “People get so caught up in like micro trends. I’ll give you a great example. Like there are a lot of people out on Black Friday and also on Thanksgiving Eve. And so for Dynamite in particular, I was just getting DVR numbers back today. And the Thanksgiving Eve episode, you know, a lot of people are out that day. And we did a great audience. It was by far the biggest audience we’ve done on Thanksgiving Eve. It’s our third show on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving and it was our biggest live audience yet. And it wasn’t quite as big as some of the other audiences we’ve had recently because I think of the holiday. And then I got the DVR numbers back this morning and it was the most watched episode when you factor in the DVR in a long time. So with that plus seven lift, the Thanksgiving Eve episode was a huge, huge, huge rating success. And, you know, a lot of times people get so caught up in these trends, the show this week, finished third on cable and that’s massive for us. Anytime we finished that high, everybody’s very happy with it and our share was really, really good for the night. And it was a really strong number put up this week. And the fact is, there are tons of people growing up on AEW. Anytime I come on with you guys like all the aggregation sites will pick it up and pull the quotes out and look for anything juicy to say and often they’ll intentionally take the stuff out of context. They probably won’t use this quote because it talks about what they do. So I’m guessing this won’t make it onto the aggregation sites because it’s actually a very process oriented quote describing the process of running a wrestling aggregation site and taking people out of context, which is an art that they’ve mastered. So in this case, I think the fans, there’s a lot of people that have grown up with GCW, as maybe their third alternative. There’s a lot of people that have grown up with AEW. And we have taken a place in the wrestling universe that didn’t exist for a long time. There wasn’t a viable second national company with all due respect to the other companies that have been out there or were out there trying to fill that space. For a long time, there hasn’t been a viable national alternative. Nothing that’s ever gotten the kind of penetration we have, you know, on great channels like TNT and TBS, since the death of WCW, over 20 years ago. So the fans have been waiting over 20 years ago, for a time like this and now, Dynamite has been on over two years, we’re going on year three, as a company with AEW. There’s a lot of people that watch AEW and instead of getting caught up on whether the number goes up by .02 or .03 each week, I think I don’t want to lose the forest for the trees. We have a lot of fans, and they’re pro wrestling fans. One of the mistakes WCW did is they had a great audience with pro wrestling, on television, and then around 97, the WWF I guess around maybe late 96, the WWF started doing stuff that was just as good or better. And they had great main event talent, but they weren’t the biggest names yet and they built those people up. And you saw slowly but surely, the fans responded to what was great pro wrestling, and then WCW instead of responding to that by continuing on doing more great pro wrestling, maintaining the great audience and base that they had, they got away from it. And I don’t want to do that. So one thing you can always count on with AEW is if you tune in to Dynamite on a Wednesday, or tonight, if you tune into Rampage on a Friday like tonight on TNT, you’re going to see a lot of great wrestling, I promise, I’m not going to make it a whole show with talking. The only show I can ever think of where a large percentage of the total volume of the show was taken up with the talking is the First Dance, which was a very, very special case. And I don’t think anybody there that night or anybody that watched it was upset that one time a few months ago when a lot of the show was [talking] but for the most part I would say literally 99% of the time on our TV shows, you can count on a lot of great wrestling. And for me as a fan that would always be enough to get me to support a company because if I knew that a few times a week, I could tune in and I was gonna see great wrestling matches and wrestlers I cared about that means so much. And for a long time people didn’t have that, and at least not consistently. And I think there have been times in the last two decades where WWE did offer that consistently and has had good runs of doing that but when AEW started there was a reason why the fans [clamored for it] and there’s a reason why I think we’ve had the success we’ve had and it’s because of the fans and it’s because there’s a huge appetite in this country for pro wrestling and great pro wrestling matches every week. Khan was asked about people getting caught up on the live TV numbers when there are several ways to watch AEW: “Ratings are a huge piece of it and it is a big deal when they come out the next day but you know, there is some context that goes into it. You really need to watch the next week as the DVR numbers come in. So for the Thanksgiving Eve episode, the DVR numbers tell a really interesting story that there was a ton of delayed viewing but people did catch up on the show and they really wanted to see it and it ended up being our most watched show of the month…”

Yeah, I know! Right? It's so easy! It seems like Tony Khan doesn't even realize that all he needs to do is cater specifically to the very narrow tastes of every single person with a keyboard and internet access. If he did that, surely ratings would skyrocket. Oh well, guess we'll have to suffer through more weeks of Punk and Bryan wrestling on free TV and other lame stuff like that.

The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers cartoon on tubi or whatever is absolutely heinous. Just a f'n travesty. Aggressively anti-funny. I LOVED the comics when I was in high school. Wildly inventive and subversive. The gender and sexual politics and so on were very much of their time, but if you can get past that the comics are still pretty entertaining today, and the art work is often excellent as well. And Woody Harrelson, John Goodman, and Pete Davidson are all capable of being very funny and have all been in some stuff that I liked a lot. So, my hopes were high. The cartoon is just utterly, irredeemably wrong-headed, mean-spirited, and relentlessly lowest common denominator. Heartbreaking. I got through one and a half episodes before tapping out forever. I think the people who made it felt like it would be hilarious to really lean into the "of it's time" stuff. Yeesh. I should have listened to @thee Reverend Axl Future when he warned us all off of this garbage On the upside, tubi does have this: https://tubitv.com/series/300005691/the-best-of-the-carol-burnett-show?start=true so I'm still happy I went there to check out the lousy cartoon, because it lead me to a motherload of nostalgic laughs anyway.

I really, really, really hope the new AAA Mega Champion gets a match in AEW against Kenny once Kenny is all healed up. I really really really hope he comes to visit AEW regardless. The new champ is:

I was there live, in the building, for this one! Last show of Winter Navigation 2005. My first trip to Japan, with my girlfriend at the time who is now my wife and the mother of our two children. The sound system in the Yokohama gym was awesomely, deafeningly loud. When Misawa's theme hit and I started screaming MI! SA! WA! you couldn't so much hear every other person in the arena screaming it, as you could feel it. It was awesome. I 100 percent literally got goosebumps. Now, I am happy to be able to say I was there in person, but I remember feeling a little bit mad that Misawa lost the match, first time I ever saw him live, and to make things worse an "outsider" got the pin! I also remember being a bit bummed out that in the Genichiro Tenryu & Shiro Koshinaka vs Junji Izumida & Kenta Kobashi match, they were obviously holding out on giving us a full-on Tenryu vs Kobashi brawl in order to build anticipation for a future singles match (which I believe actually never happened). On the upside, at least I got to see Misawa, Kobashi, Tenryu, Koshinaka (and Nigel McGuinness, Tamon Honda, Low Ki, Bison Smith, SUWA, Scorpio, Akiyama, Kikuchi, Ricky Marvin...). Minoru Suzuki was on the card! (teaming with Naomichi Marufuji against Akitoshi Saito & Masao Inoue) The Main Event was Taue vs Morishima in a mentor vs mentee GHC title defense, which was awesome live. That picture is actually from NOAH's Budokan Hall show in March 2009, when we finally moved here (and the last time I was in Tokyo, if you don't include changing planes in the airport). Couldn't find any pics from '05.

Well. Dang! Maybe they are saving 2 outa 3 for FTR vs LB proper. Perfect TV episode. Lots of fast, exciting action. First time I've seen Nese wrestle and I really enjoyed it. (friend told me his WWE gimmick was literally "he has abs" which... I guess, that worked for Rick Rude!) Best thing is they set up PAC vs Malakai and another FTR vs LB match for later. That's good TV!