Wrestling News, Opinions, Etc. 10.08.02

Archive

Someday, these junior morons that e-mail you are going to realize there’s a world beyond 8th grade dances and rubbing one out to dad’s old Playboys in the basement. There’s this place called “reality” that’s a little more important than the outcome of a Terri/Torrie bikini match (although perhaps not to a horny 13-year-old).  I hope that one day, these pricks can be half as candid and honest about themselves to others as you are with us.  Tell ’em to ease up on the rage, and maybe learn something instead. Besides, if they’re solely looking for bland, inpalateable, sophomoric reflections on wrestling, tell ’em to go read Scaia. – Big Daddy Kurt Dieckmann, finding time to get on his soapbox between diaper changes

It’s going to be a sad day, though, when a kid can’t go into his basement and whack off to Dad’s old Playboys because everything’s on the Net.  We’ll be losing three generations of tradition there.  It’s rather reassuring to thumb through an old porn mag and find there are pages stuck together.  It shows that you’re not alone in your appreciation of the contents, and that’s pretty comforting during the emotional turbulence that normally comes with puberty.

I just realized that I’m yay close to turning this into Penthouse Forum.  “Dear Forum, I can’t believe that I’m writing you about this, but this really happened to me…”  Supposedly, Chrissie Hynde once had a job writing the fake letters that went into Forum (source:  John Lydon in his autobiography).  I wonder if we here at 411 could sell ourselves out as a staff to one of those one-handers for a good group rate.  Hyatte and Grut could contribute some good stuff on the kinky side (especially Grut), and God knows that Gamble could come up with some incredible material; it’s always the religious types who go batshit when the repression becomes too much…

For God’s sake, why am I talking about renting this staff out to a stroke mag?  Well, we do need a new challenge.  After all, once you’re the Number One Indie Wrestling Site On The Net (according to Alexa), there’s nothing much you can do except go after wwe.com, and there’s too many marks out there to accomplish beating them.  So, we have to look for new venues.  Hell, maybe with the music section, we can beat out rollingstone.com one of these days.  But I’m still in favor of us going en masse to a place where we can make up fantasies for guys to jack off to.  And if you’re doing that right now, you have more mental problems than I do.

On with the show…

THE PIMP SECTION

Deonandan gets all Santayana on our asses.

Memo to Daniels:  the Jersey Turnpike has nothing on the traffic circle surrounding the Arc de Triomphe when it comes to Stupid Driver Tricks.  Get caught in there, and you’re stuck for at least an hour attempting to find which street you want to leave out of, trying to position yourself to get to it, etc.  Plus, the drivers are all French.  Of course, it’s either that or traveling on the Metro, where you get to play “What’s That Smell?” from the moment you walk down into the station.

The ultimate in Stupid Driving Tricks, though, has to go to my old home of Frankfurt.  Streets laid out over Fourteenth Century oxen trails, name changes of said streets every three blocks, autobahns designed to force you to take glorified alleyways to actually get into the city, and no such thing as a legal left turn.  However, the airport does have a branch of Dr. Mueller’s in the basement, which does make waiting for connecting flights a whole lot more entertaining than your average branch of W.H. Smith in any US airport.

Oh, God, I’m going off on tangents again…

THE OFFICIAL “YOU’RE A MORON” INTRO QUOTE

Due to lack of stupidity last week, there’s no YAM to start off Tuesday with, so this is a bad bit of timing.  However, Unca Ed Ostermeyer came up with such a terrific quote that I have to use it, just to describe what the effect must be of becoming an honoree in YAM:

God’s mercy on the poor soul who goes after you; his first confident step on the road to literary success will put him squarely in front of a bus.

This is why I love Unca Ed.  And you should too.

SOME PEOPLE NEED TO BE BEATEN SENSELESS…OH, SORRY, THIS ONE’S SENSELESS ALREADY

Apparently someone put me back on Tommy Fierro’s mailing list, since I haven’t said what a complete f*cktool he is for a while now.  He’s promoting another one of his ISPW indie shows for later this month.  I’m not going to reproduce any details of this, except to say that if Simon Diamond, Devon Storm, Danny Doring, Bo Dupp, and Tom Brandi need money badly enough to work for Tommy Fierro, we should start a fund for them.  And Beetlejuice is involved in this.  That should be enough to send any wrestling fan screaming into the night.

Okay, so let me make it absolutely clear again, so I get off this mailing list:  Tommy Fierro is a talentless suck-ass.  He’s so atrocious that he even stands out at 1bullshit.  He challenges that brain-dead f*ckwad Mike Lano as the world’s worst wrestling writer.  He not only couldn’t make 411’s we’ll-turn-to-him-if-everyone-else-has-an-accident roster, he couldn’t even make OO’s roster, and that’s pretty bad.  The fact that Tommy Fierro isn’t on staff here is one of the many reasons why 411 is the most popular independent wrestling site in the world (according to Alexa).

You know, it’s not bad enough that I have some alleged clinical therapist stalking me to prove my diagnosis false (and who is apparently against the ADA defining mental illness as a handicap; by the way, suckass, I’ve thought about making an ADA claim for four years now, but I needed a confirmed, concrete diagnosis, which I got a couple weeks ago when my shrink confirmed his current diagnosis due to my reaction to Lamictal).  Now I have to withstand Tommy Fierro invading my mailbox again.  Go away, Fierro, and take Blowjob Bethel while you’re at it.

THANK GOD I DON’T BET ON COLLEGE FOOTBALL

That wailing you still hear is that of the large bettors who lost a f*cking mint thanks to the upsets and near-upsets in the college ranks on Saturday.  Texas barely escaping OSU?  Oklahoma letting Mizzou play them tough?  The Rocky Top Horror Picture Show needing six OTs to get past Arkansas?  Cal beating Washington?  Colorado showing they have life?  Fresno State showing they can win without David Carr?  Texas Tech over the Faggies?  Vegas is very, very, very happy right now.  Talk about a house advantage.

Fortunately, some things always stay the same.  As Memphis Bureau Chief Jimmie Daniel says, Vanderbilt sucks, always has sucked, and always will suck.  And he gave me a genius comparison of Jeff (His Hair Is Perfect) Fisher to Vince McMahon along with an equally genius recap of last week’s NWA:  TNA debacle.  I can’t get down on Fisher, Jimmie; he’s an ex-Bear.  But, goddamn, what’s wrong with the Titans?  Injuries don’t explain everything.

Elliot Olshansky will never forgive me if I don’t mention that the Stat of the Week came out of the Ivy League.  Chas Gessner of Brown’s line:  24 receptions for 207 yards.  24 receptions?  That ties a single-game record held by some guy named Jerry Rice.  Brown still lost, though.

The only college football team I care about is Notre Dame, by default if anything else.  And they’re still undefeated, with Ty Willingham giving a big Fuck You to the job he left to come to South Bend.  Good work, guys.

THERE WAS PRO FOOTBALL SUNDAY?

Bears didn’t play; I didn’t care.

Yes, thanks to the deejay on the clock radio, I do know the results of last night’s game.  However, I’d like to see how they got there, and that’s waiting for me on videotape when I get home from work today.  If anything, I can always say that it’s an experiment as I try to figure out which male relatives or farm animals Favre learned sex from as a youngster.

ANGELS (AND CARDINALS, AND TWINS, AND GIANTS) IN THE OUTFIELD

Yankers, out.  D-Backs, out.  A’s, out.  Turners, out.  Could the baseball playoffs actually be…cough, gasp…exciting this year?  Fuck no (however, I will admit that the ALCS matchup of Team Trying To Be Sold versus Team Trying To Be Contracted has a certain roadkill-like fascination to it).  I don’t get excited about baseball, folks.  I grew up in a place where there wasn’t any major league baseball:  the South Side of Chicago in the 70s.  So, the World’s Most Boring Sport (Yes, Including Cricket) doesn’t have any magical hold on me.  And if there was any possibility of putting any spark in my non-existent interest, that ended thanks to the maudlin bullshit celebration of the Cardinals after sweeping the ‘Backs.  You just knew, just KNEW, that Darryl Kile’s jersey would make an appearance.  Fuck, why not just get Kevin Costner out there and see if he could have Kile walk out of a cornfield?  Screw it.

And before you newbies ask, no, I don’t have any respect for the dead (see Stringer, Korey and Olsen, Barbara; also see Father’s Funeral, Desire To Cut Heel Promo).  Glen Sprigg wrote me to say that I was channeling the late, incredibly great Bill Hicks (whom I have mentioned in here before).  That’s one thing that Hicks and I have/had in common; nothing’s sacred.

You know, I’m getting off on some weird tangents this week.  Must be because I’m writing this graph at about 1:30 AM on Sunday morning, and that’s usually the time I wake up, not go to sleep.  Bear with me, folks, I’ll get back to my first point right now.

If the Cards or Twins win it all, I’ll just chalk it up to another Dubbaya-induced fix, because they’re the best feel-good stories, and he thinks that the afterglow will be enough to clutch victory out of the jaws of defeat when he loses Congress to the Demos next month (Torricelli silliness nonwithstanding; I think that answers one question, Zach Singer, and as for the other, University of Chicago, Class of ’86, so props to you on that guess).  Won’t work, Your Illegitimacy.

ANOTHER DUBBAYA FIX WITH CORPORATE AMERICA INVOLVED (OR, IT’S JUST LIKE ENRON, ONLY MORE ABSORBENT)

So Georgia Pacific is putting on the equivalent of a himbo pageant to crown a new Brawny Paper Towel Guy.  And, gee, four of the five finalists happen to be firemen, the 2002 equivalent of GI Joe.  I admire what firemen have to do; it’s one of the world shittiest and most dangerous jobs, and God bless them for being there.  However, the hero-worship of them has to stop.  Please.  Start worshipping other people who don’t obviously save lives but you’ll damn well miss if they weren’t there.  How about people who prevent you from being poisoned and killed by meat products?

Ah, back to the whole Brawny thing.  Why change the Brawny Paper Towel Guy just because sales are slipping?  I like the Brawny Paper Towel Guy.  I personally blame their dropping sales on putting him in denim a few years back.  After all, if it was obvious that he was a lumberjack, women knew he was okay, and men were disarmed because we knew he put on women’s clothing and hung around in bars.

(Look, if you must steal, steal from the best.  Just ask Fred Carlton.)

The point is, don’t replace an advertising icon unless you have to, not because sales may be slipping.  The Brawny Paper Towel Guy has fueled women’s desires and gay fantasies for almost three decades.  This is a depressing way to end a great career.  Sorta like Ric Flair.

And speaking of Ric Flair, let’s turn to the show he’s on:

RAW SOMEWHAT SPOILED

As I said, I taped the Bears game and decided to treat myself to a little sleep instead of waking up at midnight and catching Raw.  So I’m just going to read Keith and PK and kibitz…

Booker/TBS in a cage…oy vey.  My head hurts just thinking about that one.

Trip/D-Lo, blindfolded.  Any chance they could loan some of those blindfolds to the audience so they don’t have to watch shit like this?

I guess that someone believes that Monty Python and Benny Hill have conditioned a US audience to automatically think that any Englishman in drag is supposed to be funny.  Frequent correspondent Beau Landaiche said that Dustin seemed a little too into the showgirl outfit during this match, and I believe him.  Poor Regal.  Wasn’t it just two years ago that the guy participated in one of the greatest one-on-ones in history at Pillman 2000?

I am not going to do another goddamn essay about Hardcore not being considered Hardcore unless the word “Hardcore” is in the name of the match.  I already shot my wad with that one.

Okay, I kinda regret missing the combination of My Beautiful and Beloved, Trish, Victoria, bras, panties, and a paddle.  However, since I’m still on Paxil, I’m not regretting it as much as I would have had I been off it by now.

Hmmm, I thought that in order to be a legal prostitute in Nevada, you had to be 21 years old.  Isn’t that far too old for Lawler?  Well, at least we know that the girls might have some fun, because God knows what would have happened if Stevie Richards won that match.  He’d be too confused that he actually went over that he wouldn’t know what to do next.

Personally, I’m kinda glad I missed the main event.  I was one of the few people to criticize TLC III for being so obviously booked and scripted, with no flow.  Imagine what I would have said about this one had I actually watched it.

AND IN OTHER WRESTLING NEWS…

So who is the Mystery Partner going to be on NWA:  TNA to substitute for Scott Hall as Hall heads to another extended session in rehab?  “Former World Champion”, huh?  Well, if we take them at their word that it’s going to be a former Heavyweight World Champion with a belt that’s actually recognized, that lets a lot of suspects out because they’re in Vince’s camp.  I can think of a few that it might be right now:  Luger, Sid, Sting, and ‘Roid Boy are the obvious suspects, since none of them can/will work for Vince.  My money’s on Steiner given the whole NWO connection.  The Jarretts would kill to get Steiner under contract, since you need a ‘roided-out ego freak under contract to truly consider yourself a major promotion these days (see H, Triple).  Plus, it gives them “mark credibility” by having someone as inexplicably popular as Steiner in the fold.  Steiner also seemed to work at his “best” when being booked by Russo.  So, it’s a good fit.  It’s also a good excuse for me to put the Hamilton back in the wallet each week in case I had some actual desire to whip it out.

There may be some further explanation forthcoming about the TE3 chick who went batshit at another website (not wrestling-related), and it’ll come from an inside source at WWE who knows everything about the situation.  I’ll keep you updated if the stuff gets posted by tomorrow.

I’m tapped out for today.  Tomorrow, Smackdown Somewhat Spoiled, maybe more about the TE3 chick, and I’ve got a guest shot coming up in Gamble’s next column.  Remember, stay with 411 for everything dealing with wrestling and more.  We’re not Number One for no particular reason, you know.