Nothing like giving a little girl a dead cat and taking the last of her allowance in exchange…I am such a creep. – Lead character, Baldur’s Gate
Sounds like a dot-com business plan or Vince’s philosophy toward PPVs, really.
In Memoriam: Peggy Lee. So, was that all there is?
And with that, it’s Wednesday here at 411. That means Smackdown and Heat spoilers and various and sundry other things. First of all, there’s no further update on the WWA situation other than what Ashish has already put up. Meltzer’s saying everything might be in doubt for next month’s PPV; Ryder’s saying that everything’s a lie and everything’s peachy-keen with WWA. So let’s get into the rest…
THE PIMP SECTION
Keith On Raw. It just wouldn’t be a proper week without it.
Mahaud On Raw. It wouldn’t be a proper week without that, either.
Grut role-plays a wrestling writer and demonstrates that new ideas are needed everywhere in wrestling these days.
Nason with yet another screed on someone we haven’t heard of, but should.
YOU KINDA WISH BOTH SIDES COULD LOSE…
AOL Time-Warner filed an antitrust suit against Microsoft on Tuesday over the settlement that M$ worked out with the U$ Government, claiming that Netscape would not receive proper relief from the agreement. I don’t believe this. I’m actually taking AOL’s side on an issue. It’s a hold-your-nose thing, but still…
SO, CAN I BUY ONE OF THE BLUE LIGHTS AT AUCTION?
KMart filed Chapter 11 on Tuesday. A seventeen-billion dollar retail company goes into court seeking assistance. And it’s KMart, no less. Losing that white trash demographic to Wal-Mart must have hurt more than we thought. No word on whether or not Martha Stewart will redecorate the courtroom for the hearings.
FOX FOOTBALL 2002: NOW WATCHABLE!
Pat Summerall is about to announce that he’s going to do a Keith Jackson and sorta kinda retire. Thank God. He’d become the announcing equivalent of an old incontinent plowhorse that you’d wish someone would put out of his misery. His games were painful to listen to, and not even Madden at the top of his game (which he isn’t anymore) could lighten the load. Buh-bye.
SMACKDOWN RESULTS, COURTESY OF RAJAH AS USUAL
The big hook for this show is a Number One Contender’s Tournament for the title at No Way Out. Tonight, it’s Flex versus Angle and Booker versus Austin, with the winners to meet on Raw. Now, everyone who wrote me about predicting Austin taking the title at No Way Out, you can apologize to me Monday night.
Rob Van Dam over Billy Brass Knucks, Apparently Not An Intercontinental Title Match (Pinfall, Five-Star Frog Splash): Complete dominance by Van Dam. Highlight is the Edge run-in on Regal afterward.
Vince promises to do the Thing He’s Going To Regret at some time during the show. Hide the women and children. Apparently, the theme for tonight is cancer.
Rikishi over the Big Bossman, Jackie as Special Guest Ref (Pinfall, Banzai Drop): The purpose of this match is to get Jackie over, since she’s now “applying to be a regular ref”. And what will this do that a feud with Jazz won’t?
Steph shows Lilian Garcia that “scalding hot coffee” can be a beauty aid.
Tazz and Spike Dudley over Scott Taylor and Albert, Tag Title Match (Submission, Tazz forces Taylor to submit, Tazzmission): Spike does his usual rag doll routine. Worm gets broken up, thank God. Car crash of a match.
Trip claims that Steph has an Electra Complex. Steph claims that Trip isn’t good enough for her. Call the marriage counselor. In the meantime, Flex cuts a promo and gives me a chance to hit the can, and Vince gets even darker about his intentions.
Steve Austin over Booker T, Number One Contender’s Tournament Match (Pinfall, Stunner): By-the-numbers Austin match. We’ve seen it a million times before.
PAISLEY! gets all up in Flair’s area, and Flair admits that he has no idea what Vince is talking about.
Buh Buh Ray and D-Von Dudley over Kane and The Big Show, Single-Elimination Tables Match (Kane goes through table): Only one partner needs to go through a table in this one, thus shortening this match for the benefit of everyone’s sanity. Wacky face miscommunication causes the loss, thus giving us our Slug Match for No Way Out.
Vince goes even darker. Goldust goes even more obtuse. Billy and Chuck go even gayer. Angle just goes after “What?” prevents him from cutting a promo.
Trish Stratus over Jazz, Non-Title Match (DQ, Jazz uses ropes a little too much): Total dominance by Jazz, but keeping her away from the title is no way to get her over.
Kurt Angle over Flex, Number One Contender’s Tournament Match (Pinfall, UT chokeslam): Jericho’s also involved in the fun and games, all designed to make sure that Flex doesn’t lose cleanly. How sweet of them.
Supposedly, Vince reveals to us what we already know about the surprise: he’s going to kill the WWF with a lethal dose of poison, and as he turns his chair around, an NWO logo can be seen. Way to blow the surprise, Vince.
Show ends with Austin and Angle having it out as a prelude to their match on Monday for the Number One Contendership.
YOU’RE A MORON: YOU’RE A STROKEJOB, AND CAMUS WAS RIGHT
From “Rocky94260@aol.com” (double retard just for the handle):
I’d like nothing better than to give you my floor tix to No Way Out. Yeah
right!!!!!!!!!! You are a f*cking strokejob, and noone would ever give you
tickets. So give it up you God damn loser.
So you have floor tickets before they’ve gone on sale? I’m impressed, asshole.
And a wonderful bit of racial tolerance during the time in which we honor Martin Luther King in the US from “NyrFleury14rulz@aol.com”:
you sicko the Arabs are the killers let them kill themselves they kill innocent people every day guess 9-11 didn’t teach you anything about these subhumans
Theo Fleury would wash your mouth out with soap if he heard you talk like that. Then he’d knock your teeth in.
What the hell is it about AOL people being complete dicklicks whenever they fire up an e-mail client? I remember from the stats we had available at The Smarks that about 35% of our readership came from AOL, so I’m not surprised at the preponderance of letters from AOLusers. However, the number of them that are written by wastes of sperm and ova are out of proportion to the readership. I’ve had some great, engaging letters from AOL people in the past, don’t get me wrong, but AOLers seem to go out of their way to prove that they’re the trailer trash of the Internet. Pretty much every candidate for You’re a Moron comes from AOL. It’s just something I like to think about on occasion.
MAILBAG TIME!
The ex-Boss, Luke Johnston, reminded me of a key fact that I’ve been slipping up on with my Tommy Fierro slams. There is actually one person in wrestling journalism worse than Fierro, someone who can actually cause greater physical and psychological trauma to read. That someone is Mike Lano of the San Francisco Chronicle. Lano not only has the habit of writing like a retarded sixth-grader, but somehow manages to link anything back into a discussion about Ray Stevens and/or a pimp for one of his favorite SF-area wrestling schools. His championing of Jerry Lawler after his departure from the WWF last year reached ludicrous heights, just to give one example of his “unbiased, journalistic” approach. He is an embarassment to other people with newspaper wrestling columns who actually do a creditable job, like Cody Monk and Ric Russo. I’ll save you a link to Lano for fear of being charged with contravening the Geneva Convention.
Frequent correspondent Kurt Dieckmann wants me to credit Jericho for his intense Raw promo and for being able to shut out “What?”s. Acknowledged. Great job by Jericho on that one. The less we all hear “What?” and hear what the performers are actually saying, the better. Except in cases like Austin’s promo.
Dave Prizoch (one of the cool AOL people I alluded to above) asks When you say you don’t listen to any music post-’92, does that mean any music that came out post-’92 or any artists who debuted post-’92? I didn’t say I don’t listen to music post-’92, I said that I didn’t like most of it. Of course, there’s been some great music to come out in the last ten years, but most of the artists that have debuted during that time don’t yank my crank. There is a rule of thumb, though: no matter how much I dislike a popular artist, there will always be one song by that artist that I will like. Seemingly, everyone from Nirvana and Pearl Jam to the Backstreet Boys and even Britney Spears qualifies under that rule. As for who I’d compare Iago to, I’d go with Jericho. In fact, I wanted Booker and Steph to have an affair just so Vince could be in the ring one night and Jericho could walk out and say “I am one, sir, that comes to tell you that your daughter and the Moor are making the beast with two backs.”
JVIALL316 (not one of the cool AOL people I alluded to above) inquires viz. Trip/Austin at WM: If that doesn’t happen, are you gonna admit that you were wrong or try to
play off that you didn’t actually say this? I was just wondering. I will not admit that I was wrong. I will state that the WWF was wrong for not giving us that match. Same as I did last year.
Memo to Rob Bemis: We Bears fans don’t want Drew Bledsoe, and there’s no way that Angelo will bring him in due to impending cap problems in retaining players the Bears already have. He agrees with me that turning Booker face would be a good idea (the man has taste), and says that he’d let Jericho run through Austin at No Way Out and Trip at WM in order to establish him. That’d be the smart idea, Rob, but I don’t think it’ll happen. They’re pathologically afraid to take risks with matches at WM, especially these days, and the choice becomes either trusting Jericho to main-event WM and sell PPVs or having him drop the title and set up a sure money match for WM. I’m afraid they’ll choose the latter ten times out of ten. And to deal with most of 1bullshit’s crap, try Pop-Up Killer combined with Ad Subtract. It’s the combination I use.
Charles Mayo points out that the message on the 1-800 number that the Godfather reffed is a not-so-veiled reference to White Wolf’s Vampire role-playing game. People are still playing that? Geez. Thank God it never appealed to me enough to actually play it. I knew people who did, and they creeped me out.
Andrew Tomlinson asks me You mean, you’re not going to go to the Bradley Center box office to get tickets and meet your beautiful and beloved? Capitalize “beautiful” and “beloved”, please. I am an old-fashioned Victorian-type romantic, content to worship from afar. Well, that and the fact that not even my Beautiful and Beloved can make me get up early on a Saturday morning and freeze my ass off in downtown Milwaukee waiting for tickets.
Sunny Awashti apparently wants to qualify as my official stalker:
Just dropping you a line to say you are a LEGEND! You are the most out there net columnist around! I love the way you hate The Rock. You even have a good, simple, funny name for your column. You may have been fired from The Smarks, but if you ask me, you got out at the the right time. The new Smarks sucks, with a lot of boring talentless people who think they’re funny posting crap in 100000000000000 diffrent categories. You are truly “out there” and offer a great alternative type view not only on wrestling, but on life. And that way you shredded that idiot who said you were racist for not liking The Rock was classic. Luv ya Eric, keep up the good work!
Well, Sunny, thanks for those words, first of all. Now, on to business. I don’t think that the “new Smarks” sucks. They have one of the best collections of writers on the Net, even without me there. Jon Richardson, KJP, Elliot Olshansky, Justin Baisden, Greg Dillard, JJ…all a great bunch of guys and damn good writers to boot. So don’t hold The Smarks in contempt. Remember, they’re not 1wrestling.
Lotsa comments about the Shakespeare column last week. olympichero wrote me a wonderful essay dealing with how the WWF can utilize standardized plot themes more effectively, and even made a case for Othello as heel and Iago as face. Nunya Business wondered why I didn’t include Kurt Angle as a well-developed three-dimensional character. Honestly, he slipped my mind due to the imbecile act they made him perform last year. However, he is well-developed, just not as developed as Austin and Trip. Nunya was also amazed that Meltz would go off with his mouth half-cocked like that. Hey, it’s Meltzer, and we can’t do anything about him if he wants to blow his credibility.
Brett Wortham wonders about the Australian Taliban that was captured (he being a good antipodean and all) and why he’s being tried in a US court rather than being extradited to Australia. The US, being the detaining authority, has first rights on trying him in a military tribunal, especially since he’s being charged with war crimes against US citizens. It’s a Geneva Convention issue, really, and is quite acceptable by international law.
I’ll close it up for this week and turn it over to Grut. Have an enjoyable weekend and keep reading.
About Eric Szulczewski
