caley

My mom killed him. Sorry, all! (Not really but a few weeks ago I put this song on and my mom loves it but didn't seem happy and I asked why and she said "Well he's on his way home and it's so happy, and now he's dead." and I said "Chris Rea didn't die." Then...well...) Super sad about this one. Obviously he was great in The Wire and, of course, The 25th Hour but he was also super-great in comedies like 'Veep' and, especially, 'Cedar Rapids' where he plays a dorky insurance salesman who channels Omar at a party in order to save his friends.

I maintain that from an entertainment perspective, there are few better matches than Ulimate Warrior-Honky Tonk Man. That short segment has some of the most nuclear pops in WWF history. They ran the Beefcake injury angle to take him out of the match (I THINK it was Beefcake!) and Honky dances and brags and tells them to send out anyone. And the POP for Warrior's music is unbelievable. Then he gets in and destroys Honky and every move gets a huge pop. And then there's an enormous pop when he wins and you can see the crowd kinda looking around to see if there is going to be some sort of "Title not officially on the line" scam and when they announce it, the place goes crazy again. It's just thousands of people having the best time of their lives over and over But now the question, which one is better? The original? or the Butch Vig one?

My brother and I initially convinced ourselves that the singer guy on "My Time" opened the theme by going "Montel, is this on?" which lead to my brother coming deciding that the video should start with "Montel, is this on?" followed by Montell Williams going "Yessss!" before the song kicks in. He's SO weird. I just read a clip from a Todd Grisham interview where he talked about how Vince passed him as he was leaving the gym and referred to him by name and he was all happy, then after the weekend he was preparing to interview Edge and Christian and Vince comes in and just SCREAMS at him about how Vince must be "his BOY!" because he forgot to take the weights off the bar when he was done (It wasn't even him) and after he left Edge went "That's pretty cool, Vince is your boy!" Anyways, the story gets crazier because a producer told Grisham that Vince had spent the whole weekend figuring out how to broach the topic including discussing whether he could call Grisham the N-WORD?! Read the whole thing here, it's just nuts. Especially cuz Grisham also kinda tosses it off like "Oh well you know!" which makes you wonder how many incredibly insane things McMahon must have said and done within earshot of people who are sworn to secrecy. https://www.cagesideseats.com/wwe/404806/todd-grisham-screaming-vince-mcmahon-madman-n-word-boy-wwe-gym-workout-story-power-racist It was even more fun to drive around in a minivan blasting it. Also Chavo's theme with the "Oooooh Chavo" opening was a lot of fun to drive around to.

I fell out on Smith around 'Clerks 2' (Did not find it funny at all) and saw his standup (?) special from right before or right after he had his heart attack and was stunned at how he no longer sounded like Kevin Smith. He sounded like a guy who comes up to you on the bus to bitch about the fare increases ("And fuck man, they fuckin' charge so much now...like..fuck"). Not just physically his voice had changed (Which, you know, I get!) but he rambled and swore every second word and genuinely sounded like someone you didn't really wanna listen to. I actually think the third funniest (After 'Clerks' and the 'Clerks' animated series which kind of stands as an insane relic of early 2000s that is so stupid, so insensitive and so funny) thing that Smith ever did was the 'Roadside Attractions' series on Jay Leno. He was always trying to sneak in filthy jokes, poked fun at people but also made himself the butt of jokes, but also seemed genuinely fascinated and interested in the bizarre roadside attractions. I'm pretty sure they collected them all on the Jersey Girl DVD that I somehow own. I know movies were probably his biggest passion and moneymaker, but I lament that with the endless early 2000s reality series that were made that someone didn't turn this into a weekly series because I could watch Smith try to make dirty jokes with old ladies and make MST3K-style commentary over Christmast light displays all day long.

Sorry didn't mean to imply my post was in reply to yours, it was actually a couple previous posts in-thread!

I'm of the opposite here, I am super excited to watch Samoa Joe in the World Title role again. My favourite run of AEW was the previous time he was champ. I was even excited when he beat Swerve the first time (Again putting me in the contrarian camp!). I think when you have guys having MOTYC all over the show, I think there's value in a big, mean world champion who maybe can't GO in the ring but is an endlessly compelling character holding the belt. Sort of like Taz in ECW, Vader in WCW, even Yokozuna in early 90s WWF. He's big, he's mean, he has a presence and you're going to have to do everything to dethrone him and it's still not enough. Now add in a team of, for lack of a better term, "lackeys" to help him. I mean it IS a little like going from Jon Moxley cheating to win in every match as champ to Samoan Joe Moxley cheating to win in every match as world champ but Joe's such a fun character that it works for me. I have a funny feeling that before long we're gonna an Elite reunion on top (Bucks dethroning FTR and Omega taking the top title), which is not something I'm looking forward to at all, so I'm going to enjoy shit-talking, over-the-hill asshole Samoa Joe World Champion while we have it.

It really is baffling. Fletcher: "Mark Briscoe, after I defeat you, you will say my full name!" (seconds later) Briscoe: "Kyle Fletcher [unintelligible noise]" Me: "Oh I guess no need for the match then..."

i LOVE Thekla. She's got this crazy physical charisma with the way she walks out, the way she moves, even the way she sells that makes her a lot of fun to watch. That said, I don't think the Triangle of Madness/spider stuff QUITE fits her. I saw a photo of her online in a bikini with a cigar (Settle down Caleynetico, I know I know!) and I think that kinda fits her better as a sorta cigar-smoking, beer-hammering badass. I think you could split the Sisters/Triangle off with another wrestler not up to much (Serena Deeb? Thunder Rosa?) and play up the spooky, evil aspects. Then push Thekla as a mean, badass type (play off the Stardom expulsion etc.), she can still be the spider, do the spider taunt (but make it more of a thing she does to show up her opponents and less "evil"), even give her a pair of lackeys whom she pushes around/corrupts.

The highlight of the show for me was Ace Austin climbing into the ring while some fan loudly said (Not quite yelled...There's a difference!): "I like your hair." and Austin, stopped, poked his head through the ropes and said "Thanks." before resuming the match. Austin has never really connected for me as a face. He's got that Sammy Guevara-esque look (and the card tricks don't help) that makes you want to see him get beat up.

I think they need to keep the "Lights out" surprise for debuts and not mess with the lights for other things. When Clon (Clone? Clown? Clune?) debuted and they tried to do some weird lighting effects, everyone seemed to be waiting for someone to come out and join and/or attack them. When Toni Storm faded to black there was as sudden excited murmur followed by silence. What a weird crowd. Completely silent and uninterested in anything Tay did, including booing her promo, only making any sort of noise when Toni was on offence, then immediately "What"-ing her promo. I half-expected Toni to say "You people are idiots" and the crowd to respond "She's right, give us hell, Toni!" I think Ricochet deserves a lot of credit for channeling his fandom of The Rock into a completely new and much entertaining character for him. He's so much more watchable as annoying guy who is genuinely talented and knows it but is also kind of a coward. We don't get the ICE ads up in Canada (Well I do sometimes during football games, especially on Fox and they left me feeling icky) but we DO get Tim Horton's ads that are almost as offensive in a completely different way.

"But Magnum, you're not dead?!" "See, son...that's how drunk you are, you're imagining me as a ghost even while I'm still alive!" I guess there's also the problem of most of the OG guys hanging on and using the gimmicks for YEARS and hanging around for "one more shot" and being reluctant to be seen as figures of the past. My other thing I would do if I ran WWE is absolutely use all these things you own and run them right into the ground from a merchandise standpoint. I'd bring back the NWO (maybe even just an NXT version!) and retro-style NWO shirts. I'd run a new DX (Heck you could have them annoying Hunter much the way he did back in the day) and sell updated shirts. I'd bring back ECW (Run somewhere that was big to ECW, tape a month's worth of episodes in one night), put it on ECW emphasizing the EXTREME nature of it (have it locked out for anyone under the age of 18) while also emphasizing that the meaning of the word Extreme has changed (i.e. no chairshots) and sell retro-style ECW shirts. Nexus, Evolution, Straight Edge Society, Four Horsemen (not sure if they own that last one or not), I would absolutely bring them all back (not all at once, maybe even for like a six month run) and sell t-shirts. It's not like modern WWE is reinventing the wheel from storyline perspective, everything is about Moments. So give them Moments and recycle stuff that was popular in a very cynical, merchandising way.

I'm surprised that American pro wrestling, in general, doesn't do more stories of modern wrestlers being mentored or trained by older wrestlers ("Cody Rhodes on the comeback trail goes to Magnum TA for guidance") or even just like "Lyra Valkyria leans the secret of the Diamond Cutter from DDP". I'm not sure if it would be a huge deal, but I think it would give younger wrestlers a bit of added credibility and allow you to recycle some simpler moves to be seen as finishers (Like if a big guy started using a chokeslam for a finisher, the crowd wouldn't be buy it, but if you had a taped segment where Kane teaches him the "hidden technique" of the chokeslam, you could maybe pass it off again as a finish) and would be some easy, taped segments to fill time. Like when AEW brought in Jake Roberts, he just talked for Lance Archer (and later...LFI for about five minutes), but Archer's wrestling and moveset didn't change, even if he'd just adopted Jake's short-arm clothesline it would've been kinda neat. Maybe it's just me.

I LIKE Archer. Was watching him this week tower over everyone and wonder why he doesn't get a bigger push (He's in the Mark Henry mold where the crowd reacts to his appearances like it's a big deal but he ALWAYS loses) and was SHOCKED to find out he's 48 years old!

Well they used to team together in WCW... (That's a deep cut but I offer no apologies!)

On a whim I decided to listen to his 'Live from the Sands' a week or two back and there is a 12+ minute track called 'Tea Break' that is just Sinatra talking to the crowd, telling stories about growing up ("My room was a dump, we had rats, but my family was wealthy, they just didn't like me" or something like that), riffing on the crowd (Making fun of a guy headed to the bathroom), talking about drinking, and it's amazing. At the end, the crowd calls for an encore and he says "One more? That's what all be saying at the bar in a couple minutes" before giving in. Oh, and the music is great too (Count Basie accompanying and arranged and conducted by Quincy Davis!)

I was quite excited for Darby's return but since he came back I'm finding I'm not really enjoying his matches so much anymore, and I think it's because of the way he keeps upping the violence and the bumps that it's almost like watching a snuff film. Like there's an early bump where you go "That's crazy!" followed by another where you go "Oh that might have killed him", then after 3-4 escalatingly dangerous bumps, I kinda stop watching because it's like watching and enabling someone who's trying to kill himself. At the same time, these bumps are so stupidly dangerous, that when he kicks out after being gorilla pressed from the ring through a table then wins with a couple coffin drops, it feels like the bumps are out of proportion with the signature spots. Like Darby taking a life-threatening bump doesn't really mean anything in context of a match when he later loses to a Death Rider or two. I don't know if I'm explaining it right, but it's basically me getting out while he's still alive/walking so that I won't feel guilty if he escalates the bumps/violence and suffers debilitating injury (Even that suplex he took from Kidd after the match, he basically landed on his orbital bone!). I know he's said he's ok with the pain and the injuries, but it feels like someone (Moxley? Bryan? But they're not the most sensible either) needs to sit him down and say "Cut the stupid bumps on TV down to one or two, you're popular enough that you don't need them anymore to stay over" and save the true carnage for only the biggest shows if he's insisting on it.

My brother worked at a Value Village in the 2010s-ish and walked in one day to find a SNES copy of Chrono Trigger for sale, before he could grab it, a little kid came up and asked to buy it, my brother lied and said "Oh that's not actually for sale" and hid it under the counter and bought it for something ridiculous like $5 on his break. He rationailzed it by saying "Ah that kid was too young to know what Chrono Trigger actually was and truly appreciate it." My brother still has his that cartridge, too. I can't fathom what they would charge for it now at VV.

The best casting story about Boogie Nights is Paul Thomas Anderson always wanted Burt Reynolds for the role of the porn producer/father figure role but Reynolds was dead-set against being in a movie about pornography. So Anderson interviewed other actors for the role and sat down with Warren Beatty, halfway through their discussion, Anderson looked at Beatty and said "You think you should be playing the Dirk Diggler role, don't you?" and Beatty agreed. He was 60 when the film came out! As much as I love the way, I can't but wonder what could have been, if it had been Beatty at 59 fighting with his mom at the beginning of the film.

Apparently, per my Facebook, it was 7 years ago that Jim Neidhart died, so I wanted to re-post my two favourite Neidhart stories, per Bret Hart's book "The next morning we were working out in the weight room at the University of Saskatchewan. It was poorly equipped, but it was the only gym in town. When Jim strolled in, his shades were pushed back on top of his head, and he was wearing a T-shirt and a pair of Stu’s long, black wrestling leotards. He proceeded to stack plates and more plates onto the bench-press rack. I looked at Jake. “He’s got to be kidding. That’s over five hundred and fifty pounds.” Jim pulled his shades down, leaned back, slammed the weight up and down three times and then said, “This bench press is bullshit.” And he walked out, leaving everyone stunned. I’d already heard about his potential for wildness. When Jim was a shot putter at UCLA, he went berserk one night on alcohol and downers, tore up his motel room, tied some bedsheets together, strapped a fire extinguisher to his back and leaped off the fourth-floor balcony like a gorilla, swigging down three floors and crashing through the windows of his coach’s room. “

That is why they titled it 'The Office: An American Workplace" as they originally had designs on doing a whole bunch and using the subtitle for all of the spin-offs but 'Parks and Rec' which was a sort-of spin-off is basically as far they got before doing any more. Personally, as someone who thinks the American Office had 4 solid seasons and was basically unwatchable over the last several seasons, I kinda think they realized they had run out of workplace-related comedy (As evidenced how they are constantly, needlessly, often incomprehensively outside of the actual workplace for the last few years!) and deep-sixed the idea of doing any more workplace comedies.

It was honestly THAT bad of a bump. Oh, you're not talking about her standing and hitting her own face on the chair part?!

I like Bayne well enough as a wrestler, but she's kinda...boring. She does the same thing every match, shrugs off offence, hits a power move, does that same tired kicking dirt on her opponents thing. She does that taunt EVERY match. And it's kinda the only thing she does outside of hitting her moves. I'm not some huge Tay Mello fan, but the match she had a few weeks back against Bayne kinda showed what a massive divide there was between them, Bayne went through the motions, hitting her moves, and Melo was all over, playing to the crowd, showing fire and personality. Right now, for me, Bayne is kinda like Test: big, athletic, hits her moves cleanly and gives me no reason whatsoever to care. Someone like Statlander (even pinballing back and forth from face to heel to face to back to heel again?!) pulls off the power wrestler moves with a lot more watchabiitiy.

Not up to this moment yet but I'm super happy for her. Saw her at a local indy show just before she returned to TNA and did the "Hot Mess" stuff that got her hired eventually by WWE, so JUUUUST before her career took off and I don't think I ever felt worse for a wrestler than her. All intermission-long creepy guys were coming up with their kids who did not care one bit and going "He/she really wants a pic with you" and she was unbelievably sweet to every dirty guy putting their arms around her/leaning into her.

Adam Pearce posting a tearful farewell video on Twitter which turns into a Rickroll with a big smile by the end was quite the indictment of modern attention spans where various wrestling aggregators and personas retweeted it with variations of "Screw TKO!", "Will miss you man!" and "What are WWE thinking?!" making it clear that none of them actually watched the video past the first 30 seconds or so.

I was at a co-workers party one time (Have never been a party guy) and was introduced to said co-worker's boyfriend who trained in MMA, he asked me about PRIDE and I'd never heard of it so he ran out to his car and got his VHS tapes and was showing me them and explaining everything and his GF got SO mad that we had turned this work outing into a bunch of dudes watching MMA party. 20+ years later, my dad has knee surgery and one of the guys helping him with his physio was said former co-worker's (now ex) boyfriend! The world is a weird, small place sometimes.