Mike Campbell

My twelve year old actually made a pretty funny crack the other day. Just for backstory: The local Starbucks has a massive staff shortage right now, because a bunch of people got fired for abusing their employee discounts and giving it to their friends and family. I took my kids out for tea over the weekend to reward them for helping out with yardwork. We get out drinks and she says "I'm going to work here when I'm old enough, they get to wear those cool shirts and hats." I ask her if she'll give me a discount when she's working there and she says "No, I'm not going to get fired like all the people at Starbucks!"

The wife graduates and gets her Bachelor's degree in less than a month, and she's already got a job lined up for next year. Which means that I can finally (!) drop the PT weekend gig that's been drainging the life out of me since the beginning of the year. She gets paid by her current job through July and will also get the first chunk of her incentive bonus from the new place that month, so I originally decided to hold out until then. But, this past weekend was especially rough, so now I'm hoping I can last that long. I told my cousin that I'm debating using the CM Punk line when I put in my notice and get the inevitable "Why?" "I'm hurt, I'm old, I'm tired..........."

Wheeler Yuta is officially off the CMLL show Friday night, he’s been replaced with Matt Sydal. I would have personally preferred to see Shibata.

We have a pet rabbit, and one of my running jokes is that he's not the pet we need, but he's the one we deserve. The wife was being woken up several times by my snoring last weekend and decided to just go lay on the couch. Well he heard he coming out and decided that it must be food time. So he started kicking his damn cage at 4:30 AM. Only contributing to her irritation and lack of sleep.

That's got to be it then. I distinctly remember watching it on AMC during on overnight shift and when the sentry gun scene came on, the girl I was working with heard all the squealing and asked me WTF I was watching.

For real? I've probably seen that movie 200 times, and that's always been a staple scene for me. I thought the only DC additions were hearing Ripley talk about her daughter and the scene where Newt's father gets facehuggeed.

All the talk, both good and bad, about the Aliens 4K transfer has had me thinking about the movie for the last few days. So, with the rest of the family having gone off to bed, I saw that it was streaming on Max and turned it on. I got most of the way through (up to the pont where Vasquez and Gorman sacrifice themselves in the vent) and realized that I'd missed probably my favorite scene. When they set up the sentry guns and start blowing them away. I thought maybe I'd just been looking at my phone or my mind had wandered and I'd missed it, so I rewound and there's no even a mention of them. The scene when they're looking at the blueprints goes from Ripley seeing the pressure door and suggesting they just weld plate steel over it and repair the barricades. I even found the same scene on YouTube in case I was just misremembering, and nope, there it is. "There's a pressure door, can't we put one of the sentry units there?" In all seriousness, is there really any good reason for this scene getting scrapped? All I can think of is something related to gun violence (which is something I take seriously, as a father and the husband of a school teacher). But look at the movie we're talking about, and it's not like every other bit of shooting and killing was taken out. And it's on HBO for fuck's sake. I even did a google search to see if there was anything posted and I came up empty.

The family has been playing a ton of Disney SpeedStorm lately. It's a fun take on Mario Kart along with various missions and challenges to keep you on your toes and add some replayabilty. We wound up going down a bit of a wormhole with it last night, just as we were thinking of turning it off and doing something else. Here are the sequence of events. I wind up getting a Jasmine shard (used to unlock and upgrade racers) which causes me to grind out a few more tracks to get Jasmine upgraded. With Jasmine upgraded I can now complete a race that requires her at an upgraded level Completion of that race unlocks me Ursulla. Unlocking Ursulla gets us enough collection points to move up to the next level, and be rewarded with unlocking Balloo. All that just from randomly getting an upgrade shartd and deciding to take another ten minutes to get one character upgraded.

So sorry for your loss Curt, I've been there a few times myself and it never gets any easier.

How about Baker Mayfield?

After having a full day to process it, my only real reaction is that whatever Ryan Poles sees in Caleb Williams, Drake Maye, or whomever he decides is the Bears QB of the future better live up to those expectations, and then some. Because this is the first big move that Poles has made that has really PO'd a large portion of the fanbase.

This only leaves Chicago with four or five draft picks. Looks like Ryan Poles will be playing chicken with some other GM's to see if they make the right offer for the #1 pick.

I love it that Jay and Gunns are back to being dick heels. I honestly never liked the whole Bang Bang Scissor Gang thing in the first place. The Gunns and Acclaimed had been pretty much joined at the hip for two years now in various forms. When they started putting the boots to Darby and Billy and the Acclaimed hit the ring, I was expecting a massive beatdown by all six to send Darby off. I'm much happier with what happened instead.

Whether they stay with Darnold or try get get someone in the draft, whomever Minnesota keeps at QB just got a big load off their shoulders being able to hand off to him.

I finally caught Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning. Is it still considered part one, or are they pulling a Star Wars/A New Hope deal and retroactively changing the title? I can appreciate some of the risks they took, like killing off a well known character (at least until the upcoming sequel) and almost doing a rehash of the first movie as far as the train and not knowing if the IMF ally can be trusted. But, the whole AI plot came off to me like they wanted to do something topical, and the "entity' gives off vibes like a less cool version of Skynet.

Best case scenario: Jack gets to sit under the learning tree of Dick motherfucking Togo! When he made the appearance at the Strong show, I thought that he'd created a little buzz for himself, sort of like what Steen was able to do in ROH with his quasi feud with Cornette. But putting him in with HOT (and I'm not even so much knocking the group here) makes him just another American who went over there and got shunted into one of the factions.

It's kind of hard to say, because it could go either way. Excalibur may have been just extra emotional after seeing the Bucks threaten Tony and then suspend Hangman, so he just jumped right to the worst possible conclusion. Or, he just wasn't prepared for what was happening and just started spouting off. I'm remembering when Punk got hurt after he won the AEW Title the first time and cut that promo on Rampage, and nobody actually knew what was happening, until a couple of segments later when they had to spell out that Punk was still champion, but they needed to run a tournament for an interim champion.

I'm on Twitter, Facebook, and TikTok. I'm most active on Twitter, with my nerdy fandoms like wrestling and horror movies. I only signed up for TikTok because my wife would constantly text me links to videos she thought I'd like, and I opened one at work and it was a guy screaming "FUCK" - which if my boss was within ear shot, he would not have been impressed with. I've toyed with the idea of doing Insta, but I doubt I actually will. My work buds told me to do SnapChat and that shit literally lasted less than a day.

My first experience with Sting was at the age of six, when he was teaming with Flair and feuding with Terry Funk and Muta. I was 14 when he came down from the rafters and laid waste to the entire nWo at Uncensored 1997. My youngest daughter is 12, and she thought I was just teasing her when I told her that I'd been watching him wrestle since I was younger than her. I had to fire up YouTube and show her some actual dates on matches before she beleived me. And just to take the generational anecdotes the other way. When Dynamite was showing the highlights of the match and Sting's post match interview, I'm not ashamed to admit that I was tearing up a little bit. My phone goes off and it's my father (who only lives about 1,900 miles away) texting me to say "Don't cry, Mike."

I saw a post on Twitter saying that the Okada turn on Kingston was Angle of the Year. I wouldn't go that far, but I will fully admit thay my jaw legitmately dropped when Okada grabbed Kingston and hit the Rainmaker. Me and a friend were brainstorming (more like wishful fantasy booking) what team CMLL should send over for the tag title tournament. I'm hoping for Averno/Mephisto (since Hechicero was one of the dudes who lost his visa), and he was more in tune for Atlantis and Atantis Jr.

Chicago has thankfully locked up Jaylon Johnson for another four years.

I wonder if the outpouring of people who talk about how great he was and how much they respected him, will cause an uptick in votes and get him into the WON HOF. I have to say that it'd be pretty funny for him to get in after he passes. Considering that his reaction to getting passed over 20 years ago was basically "I don't give two shits about this goddamn hall of fame!"

When I was watching M:I Fallout last weekend, my first reaction to seeing Ving Rhames was "Wow, age is not being kind to him." It was like seeing Q out of breath and popping pills in The Living Daylights.

Every now and then, when we're watching Dynamite, Rampage or Collision, my dad will hit me with some sort of comment that I'm not expecting and make me bust out laughing. Last night on Rampage during Roddy vs. Hager, this was what he came out with. "A few more of these throws and Roddy is going to need that neckbrace again."

Since I enjoyed Mission Impossible III so much, I've been making my way through the rest of the series. Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol - Not nearly as good as MI: 3, but still a good action movie. The plot device of the whole IMF Team being disavowed harkens back to the original film, and the scene of Ethan climbing the windows the ridiculously high hotel buidling is one of the best scenes in any of the films. Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation - Another great entry in the series, with tons of callsbacks to the other films in the series. The Alec Baldwin Character talking about the NOC list from MI 1 and then the last movie with the explosion in the Kremlin. The Syndicate is definitely reminiscent of SPECTRE from the Bond series, and I mean that in the best possible way. Great scenes at the Opera and the underwater scene where Hunt has to switch out the secuity credentials. And an awesome twist at the end where it's learned how the Syndicate came to be, and the villain actually being captured and not killed. Mission Impossible: Fallout - Hands down my new favorite of the series. If only the Owen Davian character had been allowed to live, he'd have fit right in with this Syndicate group. My wife was decribing it as if it was a movie where I was actually the agent. With every possible thing going wrong and mucking things up. The only thing that I could have done without was the constant questions with who is really on who's side. I'm still not entirely clear if the Henry Cavill character was actually CIA or really just a Syndicate operative.