Wrestling News, Opinions, Etc. 03.19.03

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Eric, are you as tough in real life as you are in your columns? Why did the new job and new life fall apart so quickly? Why didn’t you have any fun with your neighbor? A lot can be said for brewskies and fireworks. You just don’t know the good things in life. Seriously, I’m so pissed that my weeks and weeks without you were for nothing. Goddamn it Eric, shape up! – Rotten Swindle

Two words:  Bling.  Bling.

Looks like this consultancy is gonna go through.  I’ll find out tomorrow morning.  And if it does and I work a normal forty-hour billing week, I’ll be making double what I was for less work.  Go where the money is, son.  That’s what I did going out to Redneck Heaven in the first place.

As for why the new job fell apart, it’s because I’m as tough in real life as I am in my columns.  Dude wanted a complete toady who wouldn’t take a piss without his permission, and one that couldn’t reach the decision on whether to wipe with his right hand or left without asking his advice.  Sorry, I was imported with a brain, intelligence, knowledge of the business, and skills, and I’d better damn well use them or else I’ll feel that I’m stealing.  I’m sorta dedicated that way, even when I’m not getting paid.  Like for doing this.

BTW:  Your handle forgives you everything.

And it’s a late Wednesday column here because I wanted to know what was going to happen with the talk with the head of the consultancy company.  Here’s the fun part if I get it:  most of the time, I’ll be hanging around my old plant doing their systems work.  Except that instead of paying me the chicken feed that they were, they’re going to be paying out the ass, and a good share of it goes to me.  They could have avoided this by making a little bit of committment to my future there and bumped my salary instead of jacking me around.  Well, as that automotive supply commerical goes, pay a little more now or a lot later.

Now, let’s get to wrestling…

THE PIMP SECTION

Okay, I lied, pimps first.

Syl has finished his Austin column, and, like each part, it’s a must-read.

Williams needs to brush up on his Americanisms a little better and ditch the Brit-polite stuff a bit.  When describing a match involving Albert, TBS, and Undertweener, “restroom” is far, far too polite a euphemism.

This column would go great with a triple mocha latte, especially if you dip it into the foam and…oh, sorry, that’s biscotti, not Biscuiti.

NOW FOR WRESTLING STUFF?

Okay, okay, how about a comment about the possibility of Ric Flair coming back to full-time ring action?

Here’s my take:  we all made fun of WCW for doing this.  Remember Piper-Hogan and “Age In The Cage”?  It would only be fair to slam WWE for putting a guy in his early 50s in the ring on a day-in-day-out basis.  However, we must be fair to Flair.  The guy has been an audience attractor for almost thirty years.  He still has some skill left in him, and can still do his trademark bumps and beatdown reactions (on both sides of the beating).  He’ll put people over; he’s not reaching out for Kevin Nash’s Ego Dildo(tm) with New-And-Improved Ass Cream(tm) to pleasure himself at the expense of the audience.  It’s not an embarassment for Ric Flair to be out there, not to WWE, the audience, or to Flair.

Most important of all, the audience still wants to see him, and see him wrestle.  Lou Thesz wrestled into his late 60s or early 70s because of audience demand.  If you want an example of the Ego Dildo(tm) in action regarding age, try Verne Gagne.

So let him do it.  If he doesn’t make an ass out of himself, everyone wins.

BIG DADDY STRIKES AGAIN!

Well, if I can’t put out a humorous bon mot, I can always rely on Big Daddy to do it for me:

Question du jour again has to do with Maven: Maven beats Rico, the Chubby Samoans do the run-in preempting a beatdown, and Maven deftly escapes by sliding under the ropes. Can you explain to me what law of wrestling physics dictates “When beatee eludes assailant(s) by going outside the ring post-match, the assailant(s) cannot exit the ring to pursue the beatee to inflict further punishment.” I mean, Rosie hit those ropes and got repelled like
they were made out of Kryptonite (or, more apropos, like someone put a plateful of lowfat snacks and vegetables in his path). I’m at a loss…


I think it has something to do with electromagnetic fields, graviton theory, and the weak force.  However, there’s also another possible explanation, which I call Schroedinger’s Wrestler.  If you put a wrestler in a ring and the camera goes off that wrestler to witness another wrestler making his escape from a beatdown, do the wrestlers you put in the ring still exist or not (this is assuming that being in the arena counts as being in a black box)?  Therefore, the wrestlers in the ring must stay in the ring so that the camera can get back to focusing on them, thus opening the black box and proving to the audience that yes, indeed, the wrestlers still exist.  If they branched off into the other decision, the results might be catastrophic for the universe, especially if you’re removing something as large as Rosey and Jamal from “existence”.

THE OBSERVER CONTINUES TO TROLL FOR BULLSHIT

Anyone catch Widro’s News McNugget via the Observer about Booker “coming clean” in his “I Did Time” promo so there’d be no media criticism of making an ex-con a WWE champion, despite the fact that the news was broken by The Smoking Gun months ago?  I think that Widro got the header wrong.  It isn’t an “interesting” theory, it’s a “nonsensical” theory.  Let’s give some concrete examples from television and even from the WWE since the Observer seems to think of them as a special case after the conservative-led advertiser targeting of a few years ago:

Steve Austin, wife-beater, was reemployed by WWE with no one from the mainstream media objecting.  It was only certain cranks on the Internet who objected, myself included.

Eddy Guerrero, a model drunken driver, is currently employed by WWE after going through rehab and getting one king-size continuous push since his return.

Billy Gunn, arrested thirteen years ago for D&D, was in one of the highest-profile angles of 2002.

Tim Allen did time for carrying enough coke on him that he could be considered a dealer by the law.  Except for a few minor complaints which were quickly quieted by ABC prior to the premiere of Home Improvement, nothing happened.

Kelsey Grammer has involved himself in various and sundry misadventures over the years, yet no one pushed to get him off of Cheers or to cancel Frasier.

There are numerous other examples that I can cite, but let’s stick to Booker.  He was convicted for that Wendy’s armed robbery, did nineteen months, and has not got into trouble with the law since.  This was sixteen years ago.  I don’t think that any group, no matter how twisted, would use that fact against WWE if they handed him the belt at WM.  Okay, except for Phil Mushnik, but you know what I mean.  The Observer is either stupid for making a speculation like this, or WWE is stupid and egotistical to think they’d get media backlash for this.  Maybe it’s a little of both.

THE SKY CONTINUES TO FALL

Even though Ashish didn’t put it in the main header this time (he knows better to do that now that I’m back), Brian Bates still requested me to reprint, yet again, my rant on ratings panic that I originally did on October 30th of last year for the benefit of those noobs in the audience who didn’t read it back then.  I’ve edited it a little to get rid of older, inapplicable references, added some parentheticals about what was my speculation at the time that ended up turning into fact, and it even could be updated to include the return of Austin and The Rock, but the gist stays the same:

There’s a tendency in the IWC, led by the Judas Goats named Meltzer and Keller, to treat each week’s ratings as something separate and discrete, only fit to be compared to the week before.  You’ve seen what that leads to:  headlines of doom when the ratings go down, champagne corks popping when they go up.  This is, of course, followed by a complete lack of mea culpas the next week when the opposite occurs; instead, the actions continue.

When ratings drop, everyone scrambles to find an excuse when the ratings go down.  However, what happens after a big angle’s blown off without any real closure when the casual audience doesn’t come back
(as, indeed, they have not)?  Oh, yes, the lines about people being permanently alienated will come out.  It’s so predictable.

But no one’s looking at the real long-term here.  Ever since Wrestlemania 17, the ratings have looked like a moguls run.  Two-week bump for some new event or someone coming back, then a slide downhill until the next bump hits.  Since WM17, ratings are down more than 40%.  But no one looks at it that way because our eyes are focused simply on this week and last week when it comes to ratings.

WWE knows this.  They not only know this about the smarks of the IWC who are posting about this subject, they also know it about the marks as well.  They remember that they’re always one hot angle away from getting the casual audience back, and they play toward that end.  So here’s what going to happen, folks:

Big Sump Pump shows up.  Ratings go up for two weeks.  Ratings then slide back to where they were, or lower.  Steiner gets credit for the bump.  The IWC is clueless or silent about why the ratings went down again
(and that’s exactly what happened).

Don’t believe me?  That’s how it happened when Flex came back from his Scorpion King filming, and when ECW was revived, and when Flair came back, and when the NWO came back.  But no one seems to remember that.

It’s only during the periods of ratings calm that people remember the disease, and her name is Stephanie McMahon.  In terms of being a horrible booker, she might not be up there with Ole Anderson and Dusty Rhodes just yet.  However, Ole and FatDust had to answer to people above them who didn’t possess one-half of their genome.  Steph has probably done more root damage to wrestling than anyone.  It’s been under her run that WWE blew the most golden opportunity they ever possessed.  She had to have given a thumbs-up to Katie Vick (and we can speculate all we want about whether she’d have done so if Trip hadn’t been involved; it doesn’t matter at this point).  But most of the writers in the IWC are blind to this seemingly-obvious fact because they don’t have the habit of looking at the long-term or remembering recent history.

I blame this tendency on wrestling itself.  We’re all trained to do things like forget about angles when they disappear and aren’t blown off.  We forget about things like one of my favorite topics to bring up, the Immunity Battle Royal.  Would Test have needed his Testicles and My Beautiful and Beloved to get over if they programmed him as an annoying bastard from the moment he won that thing?  Feuds just disappear into nowhere, and we shrug our shoulders and go “Oh, well”.

The whole point is this:  Steph’s responsible for the disease, but we as fans are responsible for the lack of treatment.  Nason made a damn good point:  boycotting WWE programming is not equivalent to boycotting wrestling.  There are alternatives if you look for them.  However, in the area of ease and convenience, boycotting WWE programming is to most people like boycotting wrestling right now.  What that means is simple:  the disease has taken root.  How long is it before it becomes terminal?


I love reprinting that.

SMACKDOWN SOMEWHAT SPOILED

It’s nice to see that Charlie Haas and Shelton Benjamin are performing well in the SE aspects of being a heel tag team.  This is what training in SE under Jim Cornette can do for your career, people.  Cut to the chase and learn from the master.

What did Eddy and Chavito do to get teamed with Rikishi, even for one match?

The Angle-Lesnar promo looks to be a gold-medal winner, even with the presence of the Bitch of the Baskervilles.  Might be worth watching just for that.

Unfortunately, there’s going to be no closing match because we have to get in the big SE on the Smackdown side for WM firmed up.  The good news is:  Mean Gene is involved!

Okay, enough wrestling for now.  You all know what time it is, don’t you?

YOU’RE A MORON:  NOT EVEN FOX NEWS WOULD HIRE HIM AS AN INTERN (SORRY, ELLIOT)

And our winner this week is Patrick Van Slyke.  Get this one, people:

Lets get this right, on one side there is this man that rapes woman, kills people if they deface his picture, gases his own people, controls all information his people get, beats his own people to the point they can to longer talk,see or hear. His people are put to death for saying any thing bad about him,his goverment or counrty.  Builds himself homes filled with
gold and jewels.  Has a bank account of billions and his people starve.  And this is the good guy?  I guess that’s what a lot of people think.


Nice description of Dubbaya, except that some of that stuff is still on Ashcroft’s agenda and/or being handled by the conservative didacts.

Sorry I as an American whould like to see these people given the chance to live free, just as we wanted 200 years ago, by the way have you ever heared of B. Arnold, he also worked with the French.

Have you ever studied American history?  During the Revolutionary War, the French were, kinda, like, our allies.  And Benedict Arnold worked with the British, the same as Dubbaya’s doing right now; however, Tony Blair isn’t Lord North, so I’m not going to criticize him.

Oh don’t give me the crap that Bush want the oil, we get 99% of our oil from South America to that is a bunch of crape.

I’ll pause for a minute to let the sane people in the audience laugh their f*cking asses off at that statement…




…Everyone done laughing?  We have any injuries out there that need to be treated, like sore ribs, busted diaphragms, wet pants?  Good.

I never could respect Mr. Clinton, he ia the type of man that makes me sick, however he was the president of the counrty I love, I would have never,not that anyone would have cared, gone on any tv show or over seas and said what a creep he was,

Which makes you different from the GOP leadership in the 90s, who made a living out of going on TV and telling the world was a sleazeball Bubba was.

he stood for America and when he was president I would defend him with my life.

So if you did that, what exactly are you defending?  Your right to be offended by the existence of the Leader Of The Free World?  Funny, I don’t see that anywhere in the Bill of Rights.  Must be some secret part of the Fourteenth Amendment.

People who disagree with Bush have every right,

Damn right.  That’s definitely in the First Amendment.  Well, for now.

but what I hear more is Hate for Bush rather than anything else.

Let’s see…the Patriot Act, the ill-timed tax cut, moving the government back into a deficit after bipartisan efforts to balance the budget during the Clinton Administration, the economy still going down the tubes, involvement of his administration in Enron, alienating half of NATO, turning the UN into a laughingstock…gee, what’s not to hate?

Since the election

Fraud, you mean.

we have heard nothing Good about Bush, no matter what he does there are people who will always put him down.

So, according to you, one bit of criticism despite kudos from both conservatives and liberals (and I have heard James Carville praising some of Dubbaya’s decisions on Crossfire) means that there was “nothing” good said about him?  Public opinion has to have unanimity to count?  What is this, the “a little bit pregnant” school of opinion polling?

One backlash of this is I’m aready seeing the crape tha to be a soldier is to be a murder, and all the other blame the army ect for every thing.

Should I pause another minute for people to laugh their asses off, or have you still not changed your pants from the last time?  Hope you haven’t; it’ll save on laundry.

The Army’s job in to act in the interest of the country when military action is involved.  This may entail killing people to do so.  Each servicemember accepts this fact when he or she takes the oath.  I know I accepted it when I took the oath.  I haven’t heard Word One about anyone criticizing the Army for doing its job.  This is why you’re in You’re A Moron, kid.

Here we go again,lets please the Bush haters and punish not only the people we need to set free(sad as it is only American can do this, the people don’t have any way to do it, the leat time the people did this if you listen to any who lived, where waiting for some
help, it never came. We look the other way.


Can anyone translate this sentence into English?  I’ll try to break it down to individual points to see if I can comprehend it…

“Punish the people we need to set free”:  How are we punishing them by maintaining a status quo?  And here’s a good point:  how do we know they all want to be free?  Look at Eastern Europe and see how many people are still missing the control that they were under after fourteen years of being “free”.  It’s easier not to have to think.  Am I in favor of a dictatorial government?  No.  But don’t make a blanket statement like that.

“Waiting for help that never came”:  Presumably you’re talking about January-February 1991.  Who stopped the military action from going into Iraq, an action that was approved of by virtually the entire world because Iraq was an aggressor state that invaded and conquered Kuwait?  The head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Secretary of Defense, and the President.  These days, you know them respectively as the Secretary of State, the Vice-President, and the President’s father.

Do I wish there was another way, Yes, I hate war it scares me. It’s never pretty.  To many people on both sides suffer.

“I’ll take ‘The Fucking Obvious’ for six hundred, Alex”…

If Saddam and his sons and the rest would just leave, they could all go to France,

Yeah, it worked so well for the Shah of Iran in dealing with Khomeini.

maybe he could be thier PM.  They seem to trust him so much.

Nah, Chirac’s doing a decent job, from what I’ve heard.

The he could start all over. Or take his billions and live like a king with his sons, But no all he want is to keep his people as slaves and kill  Americans.

Really?  That’s a pretty shallow motivation.  Most people would settle for the “absolute power” part of it and not bother to antagonize the most militarily powerful (per capita) country on Earth.

And how will the Dixie chicks and others feel if Bush is right, if Saddam as a nuck aimed right at us we know nothing about?

Oh, yeah, I’m losing a lot of sleep worrying about those nucks.

Sleeper cells here with gas ready to use it?

A tactic that the KGB, who ended up doing it all over the world (a fact that the SVR has admitted to), never bothered to use even during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when it looked like the world was headed for Armageddon.

I thught this  was was nutz till I listend to the Iraqie peole who have gotten out of the country, Till I heard the woman speak, I don’t live there I don’t know what goes on day to day, oh you hear, but to hear them speek, you see more and more why they call him a little Hitler.

You also hear the same thing from Cuban refugees, but I don’t see Dubbaya preparing to invade Cuba, despite the fact that Castro’s been a thorn in the US’s side for far longer than Saddam.

So on the ever of war I pray there is some other way,

There ain’t.  Dubbaya made that clear.

we all do, I lived though the Vet. War, which by the way Although I protested the war, I made sure I supported our troop, they desered to be honored, not put down by us.

How did you beat the draft?  Illiteracy?

But I do support the President,

And I don’t.  That’s my right.

for even if Suddam doesnt have the wepons, the people will be free to have the choice how they want to live.

And who are we to make certain of that?  This area of the world has been f*cked over good by the paternalism of “well-thinking nations”.  You know what caused this shit in the first place?  It was 1918, and the French and British were carving up the old Ottoman Empire for their spheres of influence.  Iraq, Jordan, and what became Saudi Arabia were created as gifts for the Arab Allies during the war.  And even then, the British had arguments among themselves on who to pimp.  T. E. Lawrence (as played by Peter O’Toole) wanted to reward the sons of Faisal (as played by Alec Guinness).  He pimped them enough that this policy became the official British line.  Faisal Junior got Iraq, Abdullah got Jordan (and Abdullah’s great-grandson and namesake rules there today), and they would have got the Holy Cities as well if St. John Philby (father of my hero Kim) didn’t manipulate things to get Ibn Saud the territory.  Things have been going to shit ever since.  Santayana again, buddy.

Even as an American so may of my freedoms have been taked away by our goverment over
the last 15 years I guess it’s easier to under stand what it would be like
to have none.  Think about it


Let’s see, fifteen years.  That puts us under Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Dubbaya.  Please tell me what freedoms were taken away under Clinton (and the DMCA doesn’t count).  For that matter, tell me what freedoms were taken away by Bush.  They’re still there, but they’re being eroded by the Dubbaya Junta in the name of “national security”.  Think about that the next time you support him.

Sorry, that took longer than I thought, but it was a definite YAM winner.  I’ll cut this off so I can still submit this while it’s Wednesday.  Have a good one, and I’ll see you next week.