A couple in China have named their baby son Saddam SARS to mark the two important events taking place at the time of his birth, a news report said today.
The boy was born on March 20, the day the Iraq war broke out and at a time when alarm over the SARS outbreak was spreading across China.
His parents, from Hubei, have named the boy Saddam Deng SARS, the South China Morning Post reported. Deng is the parent’s family name. – the Sydney Morning Herald, via Semi-Regular Barry Petchesky
Happy now, Grut?
A belated Happy 40th Anniversary to Robert Novak’s career as a political columnist. A homeboy who’s must reading for me on the basis of Know Your Enemy. I’d be more pissed off with him if he wasn’t so astute and wasn’t such a damn good writer.
You know, I just realized that I tightened this damn thing so much that even the Pimp Section blows the flow, so I’d better do a quickie now. Ari Fleischer will be leaving the White House this summer after twenty years of serving as a press firewall. I have it on good authority that he and the Iraqi Minister Of Information will be heading up a new lobbying agency specializing in the protection and promotion of Bald-Faced, Hardcore Liars Who Are Former Employees Of Psychopaths. Ironically, I can utilize their efforts.
And here we come to the real Judgment Day, as I perform an act of self-flagellation and proceed to use the bloodied cat-o’-nine-tails on not one, but two Morons. Of course, the self-flagellation was less punishing than debating Star Trek Continuity with people like Tom Daniels (and as you can tell from his column last week, we had some good back-and-forth about it). I will never do something like that again…on second thought, no. There is something more that Enterprise deserves…
SEX AND DEATH IN VULCAN SOCIETY
It’s one thing to screw around with the Borg’s continuity, but the Killer Bs really came close to full-burn phase when they decided to do the same with the Vulcans.
First of all, though, big-time kudos to the Enterprise staff for them coming up with an episode that was essentially a half-hour of a barely-clad Jolene Blalock crawling around in heat. Definitely guaranteed to spark the loins of all red-blooded (and green-blooded) males anywhere. Almost restores my faith in God. However…
Oh, does “Bounty” open up a huge can of worms. For the sake of a fun (okay, REALLY fun) episode, they’ve caused a lot of canonical problems dealing with the exact process of Vulcan mating and reproduction.
Hey, it’s their fault. If they weren’t in love with the concept of pon farr, these questions wouldn’t have had to been asked. And I shall ask them, just to show, yet again, that WWE has nothing on these guys when it comes to storyline abuse. There’s also a practical reason for bringing this one up. UPN’s existence is highly dependent on Smackdown and Enterprise, and a weakness in one or the other can expose the whole network to problems (don’t write in bothering to contradict me on this; I simplified the statement for the sake of brevity).
So let’s start off with the obvious…
1) Since when is treating the symptoms of a viral infection while trying to establish the root cause against medical ethics, Phlox?: Phlox implied that Denobulan males have some sexual hangups, but if I was in his position, or if any of you men were in his position, it would be “wham, bam, thank you, Subcommander, now let’s work on the cure”. The standard for all medical ethics is “Do No Harm”. And what’s a little harm in alleviating the symptoms of the infection in the quickest, most efficient, and most rapid way possible? Especially with T’Pol?
Conclusion: Phlox is a f*cking idiot, both as a doctor and a male, and the production team blew a big chance to actually give him some sort of personality. Then again, he fits in perfectly on the Most Vanilla Ship In The Fleet.
2) Is it normal for Vulcan women to go through pon farr?: Apparently, yes, since we don’t get a line from T’Pol about how fascinating it is for her to be a female going through this. But this opens up a lot of problems on exactly how little Vulcans are made. I’m not going to get into Vulcan reproductive physiology in detail, but the fact of female pon farr does bring up the major issue of how and when Vulcan women achieve estrus, or whether it’s even connected to female pon farr at all.
3) The Making Of The Beast With Two Backs should have happened anyway: A mild meld is a key part of Vulcan mating practices (if the mate’s acceptable, which, by the way, we’ve never seen on any flavor of Trek; it’s always been the contrary, from “Amok Time” to present). That fact has been established by the Killer Bs themselves on their little pet project Voyager. Now here’s the big problem that they conveniently forgot about. Reference the Voyager episode “Blood Fever”. The mind meld, which not only joins two people together but also tags them as being mates, can be performed against the other person’s will. That’s exactly what Vorek did with Torres, and it put her in the same mood as he was. There was very little clothing to stop skin-to-skin contact in that decontamination chamber, and T’Pol is a lot stronger than Phlox. One “my mind to your mind, my thoughts to your thoughts” later (probably applied through a chokehold), and it’s Whoopie Time.
4) There’s a Mission-Critical Application involved here: The captain’s been kidnapped and is on his way to what the crew knows is an obvious, painful death. The first officer has been incapacitated and cannot think rationally. There is a quick treatment available to get the first officer to think rationally and be able to make good decisions. It has been shown numerous times that the Chief Engineer of the ship might just be interested, and would certainly not be adverse to the thought of, providing that treatment, and he has no medical morals to deal with (or any morals at all, right, Mister I Got Pregnant From Aliens?). So Phlox just has to call in Trip and we get the “this never happened” thing and future smirky references from Commander Redneck as our post-coital cigarette.
Does this expose Enterprise to harm on this particular mission? No. The ship’s headed into a probable combat situation, true. T’Pol and Trip will be stuck in the isolation chamber slathering themselves with Bain de Soleil Antibacterial for a while, but they’ll be a comm signal away, and T’Pol, who’s in charge, will be thinking rationally again after they get finished. Meanwhile, who’s in charge on the bridge? Oh, yes, Reid. The Tactical Officer. The guy you turn to in a fight anyway. Seems to me like the idea of Trip Boldly Going Where No Man Has Gone Before has no drawbacks, from either a logical or storyline standpoint.
So, what would have happened here would have resulted in what Phil Farrand, the author of the Trek Nitpickers Guides, would have called “Short Episode Syndrome”. No real problems like I had last week; it’s just that I have a lot of fun talking about T’Pol having sex.
BTW: I’m not going to bitch about the Tellurites looking different. Those pig masks had to go.
AND NOW IT’S TIME FOR A LITTLE WRESTLING…
First on the menu, the inferior-in-all-respects-to-my-column PPV must be discussed. Naturally, I didn’t pay for it, don’t care to watch it, etc., but I can certainly kibitz.
MY JUDGMENT IS FINAL
For some reason, I decided to write this section after Raw ended. Given WWE’s prediliction for not following through on things, I believe I can have a better perspective in retrospect on JD rather than just scribbling down the first things that come to mind. So let’s see what a little post-hoc clarity can accomplish…
…then I decided not to, because I reread a letter from Ben Nagy who summarizes and clarifies my thoughts better than I could at this point. I’d like to print it in full:
I’m a longtime reader and may become a regular correspondent if I can get over my fear of ending up on YAM. Actually. I ought to be on YAM because I watched Judgment Day.
(Even if you weren’t that damn good, kid, I have two winners in this column alone, so you’d be crowded out. Sorry for interrupting you, but I wanted to make that clear and give a little foreshaowing of what’s to come.)
Anyway, I have to attest that the whole theory about “die hards” being the only ones watching the WWE now. I think it’d be interesting to do a psychological profile of what a “die hard” truly is, because there were people at the bar I was at actually impressed by the stretcher match, the
“brilliant swerve” of the I-C Battle Royal, the fact that the Austin/Bischoff vignettes were a set up for a fake puke spit-take and the fact that Hunter Hearst Hermaphrodite screwed Nash.
It saddens me because the business is not going to get better quality-wise. Never. Not as long as people somehow find a miniscule bit of amusement in the show. Problem is, people do not recognize story holes you can drive a truck through on either end — the writers don’t recognize it and neither does the audience. The announcers were sure riled up about the “miscarriage” of justice in the battle royal, so why in the hell wouldn’t Bischoff and Austin do something about it right then and there? Right, they were paying more attention to the Smackdown tag match. Right.
How about that brutal stretcher match? Did you notice how Lesnar and Big Show kept making sure the nice orange cushy pad was on the stretcher so they could wheel one another out? Sorta defeats the purpose of their chracters trying to be mortal enemy/ruthless badasses to one another. And I spit my drink out when Lesnar pointed to his head and went and came back with his forklift. Did he remember he was certified? Would it not have been smarter to wheel the damn stretcher over the line first, knock Show out and then put him on the damn thing? Nope. Heavy machinery excites the masses I guess. Brilliant.
And I won’t go into the Nash thing because it’s the exact same match and story they did with Steiner, except a crappier match (which I never thought possible, but I should know as Vince does — With Hunter, All Things Are Possible). That should be everyone’s mantra regarding the WWE because hoping for anything else is foolishness.
Sorta dumbfounding but not really, because us “die hards” — we’re used to it.
It’s truly a wonderful thing when you can do something in which people will occasionally volunteer to do the heavy lifting for you, isn’t it? Ben, thank you for putting those words into pixels and not only saving me work, but providing us with my sentiments to boot.
THE PIMP SECTION
Williams wasn’t too thrilled about JD.
Neither was Baisden. However, he gets the rare Pimp Inside A Pimp for being the first here to predict the HITC rematch.
Neither was Nason…sorry, that’s his Indy Update. However, that does set up the next section nicely.
And now for the thing that numerous people here have been looking for since last Wednesday…
CULPAING THE OL’ MEA AGAIN
Last week, I said that it was Curtis Strange who made the “fried chicken and watermelon” remark about Tigger’s first Champion’s Dinner (given at the next year’s event, menu decided on by the previous year’s winner, in case you’re wondering). This remark was, of course, said by Fuzzy Zoeller, as pointed out to me by over a dozen people. Glad to see you’re paying attention, class.
Now, as to why I made that mistake…
I’ve been playing a lot of Links 2003 lately, and I use a custom sound file which contains a great deal of Curtis Strange commentary, so you can say that I have a case of Curtis On The Brain. Combine this with the fact that I was trying to bang out that column last Wednesday morning AFAP and that I was suffering from a severe case of hypocaffeinia, and the environment exists for lapses of memory. However, the point I was making stands.
Hey, at least I didn’t say that Booker T and Stevie Ray weren’t brothers. Right, Rick?
(BTW: Jeremy Henderson reminded me that Curtis is not blameless in the anti-Tigger/vaguely-racist category himself, and I thank him for that. Also, I’m not exactly sure why there are separate leagues for men and women bowlers myself. And thanks for your offer, Bill Duck, but I do own a copy of The Majors and have read it cover-to-cover a number of times.)
By the way, even if you think the Colonial’s going to be a freak show, watch anyway. You may end up liking it. Hell, even BFM, who HATES golf, is going to watch this one.
YOU’RE A MORON PART I: IF THINE SLICE OFFENDS THEE, PLUCK IT OUT. OR AT LEAST AIM TO THE LEFT
Jason Skelton, a true fascist (not like my fascist bud John King), decided to try to blast me again for my supposed lack of knowledge on the subject of golf. I’m not going to quote his little invective until the last paragraph, but I will touch on some of his asinine points, most of which you can probably pick up from context:
0) See above. I wrote the previous section last Friday, in case you were wondering. Above is the explanation, which, of course, you’re going to disregard, just like the next.
1) I made the mistake of calling Hazeltine “Hazelden” last year, true, and I ‘fessed up. But think about this: you’re me. You have a literal pharmacy in your bathroom. If you have two words that sound similar, what would come into your mind first, the golf course or the drug rehab clinic?
2) Sandy Lyle actually violated USDA regulations by requesting haggis at his Champion’s Dinner. Sheep viscera are defined as being inedible, and therefore cannot be used in production of a meat product by a wholesaler. Before you ask, yes, the chefs at Augusta National are not wholesalers, but they should not be able to obtain sheep’s viscera for any reason from any slaughterhouse, since it should immediately be denatured and decharacterized after inspection by trained personnel (please, don’t ask; if you thought I was trying to block Iowa out of my memory, you can imagine what kind of firewall is up around my hands squeezing sheep intestines). And without said sweetmeat, haggis is not truly haggis.
3) Nick Price is still a good player, true. The Q-School comment was a cheap shot at his insistence that a proven world-class golfer should have to go through Q-School due to the sheer circumstance that she doesn’t happen to have external genitalia.
4) Yes, I do think Annika is better than Mickey Wright, Babe Didrickson, Nancy Lopez, Laura Davies, Juli Inkster, Amy Alcott, Kathy Whitworth, Pat Bradley, JoAnne Carner, or even Betsy King (gee, why didn’t you put her on your list with Wright, Lopez, and Didrickson?); by the way, the only ones on this list that I didn’t have the fortune to see play are Wright and Didrickson, so I’m going mostly from first-hand observation.
Choking in majors, by the way, is an accurate charge against Annika. However, remember that ten years ago, Greg Norman was the most dominant player on the men’s tour, and we all know about his rep in majors, don’t we?
And let’s compare Sorenstam with Karrie Webb, shall we, since you threw her name out as the counter to saying that Sorenstam isn’t as dominant as Tigger (I’ll get to the converse of this argument after the statistics)?
Seasons on tour: Sorenstam: 9 Webb: 7
(Just to give some perspective to everything and to prove that I’m not playing Fun With Numbers, Jason.)
Total Victories: Sorenstam: 43 Webb: 28
Victories Per Season: Sorenstam: 4.78 Webb: 4.00
Majors: Sorenstam: 4 Webb: 5 (The biggest embarassment for Annika in this area isn’t Webb; it’s Se Ri Pak, who has the same number of majors in three less seasons on tour.)
Vare Trophy wins for lowest scoring average: Sorenstam: 5 Webb: 3. In fact, the last two years, Annika’s final figures broke Webb’s record for lowest scoring average in a season, which she set in 1999.
Player Of The Year awards: Sorenstam: 5 Webb: 2
Career Money List: Sorenstam: 1st Webb: 2nd. By over three million dollars. And they’re contemporaries, so the old “we didn’t get paid as well back then” excuse doesn’t hold.
Now let’s look at the standings as of last week for this year, just to compare long-term and short-term:
Current Player Of The Year standings: Sorenstam: 2nd Webb: 14th
Current place on money list for this season: Sorenstam: 2nd Webb: 10th
Top Ten Finishes this season: Soremstam: 5 Webb: 3
(And Annika’s been playing a light schedule compared to the rest of the ladies.)
You said that in the long run, she’s had more people at her heels constantly than Tigger. Exactly who? The two women I mentioned last week: Karrie Webb and Se Ri Pak. No one else.
(In case you’re wondering, here’s Se Ri Pak’s stats for the above listings:
Seasons On Tour: 6. Total Victories: 24. Victories Per Season: 4.00. Majors: 4. Vare Trophies: 0 (Annika and Karrie have had a stranglehold on that since Pak came on tour). Player Of The Year Awards: 0 (Ditto). Career Money List: 9th. Current POTY standings: 3rd. Current place on money list for this season: 1st. Top Ten Finishes this season: 5. She’s as long-term a threat to Annika as Karrie’s been.)
Now, let’s look to the men. You say that Tigger’s gap between the rest of the tour is a canyon compared to Sorenstam’s. Pardon me, but doesn’t Tigger have a boatload of competition? Lefty’s always been there (choke-artistry in the majors notwithstanding). So has Davis (who is having one f*cking incredible season, by the way). Ditto Boring Ol’ Ernie. Ditto the Second Veej, who just won the Lord’s on Sunday (beating Nick Price by one; how ironic). Duval’s yo-yoing from that status all the time depending on his health. Sergio got your typical Vince McMahon Push: hot at the beginning, tapered off, now steady and there most weeks. David Toms has broken through into the Every Week Threat Circle. And then there’s the guys who are just below the radar screen who will jump up and bite you on the ass if you’re not watching, guys like Jim Furyk (fifth place at the Nelson) and Scott Verplank (fourth place at the Nelson), just to name two. And what about the foreign players like Darren Clarke, the Goose, Mike Weir (he’s from Canada, and that makes him foreign to us US people), and the dynamic duo from the Deutsche Bank, Padraig Harrington and Thomas Bjorn? They don’t get that much pub, but they’re competition nonetheless, and at a very high level.
Tigger has much harder competition than Annika does, period. Look at how he got mashed in the Deutsche Bank this weekend, and he was two-time defending champion. Just like you’re a two-time YAM winner.
5) Looking at the field for the Colonial, I sure can’t tell about any criteria for entering other than an invite from the yahoos in Fort Worth, but I’ll believe it if you say there are. The Masters has a pretty STRAC list of what you need to do to get in, though. Exempt invites are pretty damn hard to come by from Hootie and his blowfish. Probably the only reason they gave Greg Norman ones is to see how he’d f*ck up on Sunday yet agian. They’re vicious that way. And, personally, if they decide to do it, I’d love to see Annika play Augusta, just like you.
6) Now here’s the one area I wanted to quote, the one that pushed you straight into YAM territory again, bucko:
6)Finally, I would adjust the spelling of Tigers name if I were you. “Tigger” is nothing more than a slur to enable some to say Tigger rather than nigger. I doubt a good liberal like you means it that way but there is no question that is the origination and the intent of that spelling and pronunciation. No doubt you are appalled at your insensitivity and you should be.
Oh, Jesus Fucking Christ…no, I am not appalled by my insensitivity due to the fact that I am not being insensitive. In point of fact, the reason I call him Tigger does not come from the derogation of half his genome. It is courtesy of the Sherman Brothers, who, when providing musical adjuncts to A. A. Milne’s stories of a bear of very little brain, came up with something for Paul Winchell to sing regarding a certain character:
“The most wonderful thing about Tiggers, is that I’m the only one”
The emphasis is for your benefit (shit, I just should have thrown in a [strong] tag). I am celebrating Mr. Eldrick Woods’ uniqueness on the course. This is a guy who comes along, as the cliche goes, once in a generation. He is a marvel to watch. As a native Chicagoan, I had the pleasure of watching God play basketball many times, and I find the same exhilaration from watching Tigger play a sport I truly love.
Do not assume what I’m thinking, oogums. You would usually be very, very wrong.
I dislike Tiger for a number of reasons but it has nothing to do with race and his brilliance can not be denied.
As your idol Limbaugh would have it put to him, ditto. There’s an old saw in the Army about race relations: it doesn’t matter what your skin color is, while you’re in the Army, you’re only one color: green. Green. The exact color of the three jackets he owns, not to mention the one that Veej has hanging in the locker room there.
I am not ready to crown him the best over Jack but he’s getting close and it appears only an injury can stop the inevitable.
You know how difficult it is to end a YAM with a statement that I agree with the winner? Not just yet, but damn close. Damn, damn close.
YOU’RE A MORON PART II: DON’T BE STUPID, BE A SMARTY, COME AND JOIN THE NAZI PARTY
Let’s move on to a subject that Mr. Skelton would probably also counter me about. Last week, I cited a story brought to me courtesy of The Only Man More Liberal Than I Am, Zach Singer, about two Oakland students who had the Secret Service called in on them due to supposedly threatening remarks that they made about Dubbaya during a classroom presentation. Well, just to prove that someone can try to justify the unjustifiable, Andrew J. comes out with what might be one of the stupidest YAM winners in existence:
There’s nothing wrong with this. Two kids jokingly mad commetns about killing the president, and the Secret Srvice scared ’em a little. Do you knwo what would have happened if they had gotten a lawyer? It would become official, it would have gone to trial, and they would have gone to JAIL, you understand? It’s better to just spook these guys a little so they don’t do it again. (The Secret Service would do this regardless of PATRIOT’s existence, and Larry Felson’s words are hearsay, as he wasn’t even there at the time. Do some reseach next time!)
Please note your own statement, oogums: “Two kids joking made comments (or if it’s you, ‘mad commetns’) about killing the President”. Please note, these are high school students. Anyone in any country who has had any kind of side-by-side educational experience where they and their peers are going through puberty knows this fact: such institutions are incubators for humor which would be considered inappropriate or tasteless by older people. It’s been a tradition since time began for the younger generation to do anything outrageous to offend the elders. Every adult knows this, since they at one time did it themselves, and thus take that particular social phenomenon into account when judging those situations.
Let me give you an example from personal experience. Imagine being a high school student in Chicago in December 1978 on the day they started bringing out bodies from John Wayne Gacy’s house. By the next morning, the hallways were turned into the equivalent of the fields where male deer go to figure out alpha status during rut season. In order to survive and thrive, you had to come up with a humorous remark involving clowns, crawlspaces, pederasty, and kiddie murder. And you had to do it a number of times a day, for weeks on end. All of those remarks, in retrospect, were incredibly tasteless, demeaning to the deceased (many of whom were our age), and highly offensive. But not at the time. All the remarks were were a mental pain in the ass trying to figure out something that would top your friend.
So you have two high school kids making joking remarks about killing the president. Yes, from an adult perspective, that is tasteless and possibly offensive. So was the remark I made to friends within hearing distance of teachers when I first heard about the attempted assassination of the senile old f*ck: “How the hell could Hinckley miss?” There was one small difference:
My teachers knew that what I was doing was typical adolescent “say it to offend” behavior. They didn’t call the f*cking Secret Service!
If this woman was normal, she would have blown this off. This situation is just teenagers being typical teenagers. But this teacher was either retarded or brainwashed by the whole post-September 11th environment that allowed things like the Patriot Act to take place.
So you say that the SS were there to “scare them a little”. If the teacher was judging that some sort of discipline should be meted out for these remarks, how about either taking them aside and telling them that their remarks weren’t appreciated, or calling their parents and telling them what happened? Bringing in the SS for joking remarks by a pair of teenagers is like seeing one weed pop up on your lawn and deciding to flood the entire neighborhood with Agent White.
And why the hell didn’t the SS, a group of supposedly mature adults with well-trained minds, didn’t blow this bitch off? “Oh, come on, lady, it’s a pair of kids. You don’t need us. We’re too damn busy anyway. Call us if you think they’ve become members of al-Qaeda.”
You also say something about calling lawyers? Yeah, that’s exactly what I would have done, because if the federal prosecutor was also a brainwashed drone and decided to bring up charges, the moment it hit a judge, the judge would have thrown it out. “It’s teenagers. Get real, and stop wasting my time. Next!”
But let’s just say that the SS, the prosecutor, and the judge were all scared to death of the Patriot Act, and this thing went to trial. Remember, this is the Bay Area, Ground Zero for the ACLU. These kids would become First Amendment martyrs before the first day’s testimony ended. Both liberals and conservatives would have had the same reaction when reading the first trial story: “Is this what it’s come down to? They’re hauling kids into court on felony charges for doing what every teenager does by nature, and there was no harm involved. Something’s very wrong with all of this.”
If some f*cked-up shit like this was happening to you, the one thing you’d want to do is put it on the record and go through the process. The ACLU would fork the attorney’s bills, so no skin off your nose, and, if you really hated Dubbaya that much, you’d do something worse than kill him: you’d embarass him and Attorney General Bormann in a very public fashion. To a politician, bad publicity is worse than death. And if anyone knows that death isn’t an impediment in politics, it’s John Ashcroft, the man who lost his Senate seat to a corpse.
Also, you say the other teacher’s statements that he gave to the press were hearsay. Well, when I was a teacher, I found that the gossip I got from other teachers about things that went on in other classrooms was, by and large, very accurate. So I believe him.
By the way, the Scared Straight principle doesn’t really apply here. These kids weren’t at risk of taking a shot at Dubbaya. Maybe selling Jenna Bush some E at the next Stones concert she attends, but that’s about it. Again, it’s a sledgehammer used where a tack hammer would have sufficed.
No, this whole situation wouldn’t have happened without the Patriot Act and the atmosphere of fear that surrounded its birth. It would have been blown off like it should have been. The teacher was a silly bitch who overreacted to a situation thinking that it might save her own skin should someone else have taken offense and gone to the principal. So, for doing that, she gets the reward of herself and the entire local school system being portrayed as recidivist, reactionary idiots.
This is a sign that we’re now entering the Truly Paranoid Phase of Political Correctness. Yesterday, the Supremes rightly told a school district in northern New Jersey that if you decide to ban T-shirts with Jeff Foxworthy jokes on them because they will be offensive, you might just be a redneck. So, without this SS thing, there was still hope that the 90s could finally end. However, this bitch in Oakland brought the game to a brand new level and put it on a different board, and the general atmosphere of fear that allowed an abomination like the Patriot Act to blossom is the reason why.
I just hope that the school’s musical this year was “Bye Bye Birdie”. “Why can’t they be like we were, perfect in every way…what’s the matter with kids today?”
What’s the matter with you is that You’re A Moron.
Two YAMS really made up for a long dry spell in that area. Congratulations to both of them for their stupidity.
Would me simply writing about someone’s stupidity be considered an honorific? If so, then, WWE, start to feel blessed…
THE SHORT FORM
Match Results:
Buh Buh Ray and D’Von Dudley over Three-Moron Warning (Pinfall, Buh Buh Ray pins Jamal, 3-D): Painful to watch, horribly booked, and all in service to Rico leaving Three-Moron Warning to strike out on his own. We can’t even tell if it’s a face turn for Rico or a face turn for Rosey and Jamal. That’s mostly because of the fact that, well, we don’t care. However, there is a subtext to be seen into with Rico’s departure: he used the same animated and exaggerated poses as Novocaine Helms does. Do we have a Superhero In Training in the wings?
Rob Van Dam and Kane over Chris Crass, Tag Titles Match (DQ, Don’t Fuck With Nick Patrick): This is one of those matches that you can easily figure out what’s being said into the ref’s earpiece. In this case, it was “Tell ’em to drag it out, Nick, we have some time to fill”. I can understand a Dudz/Three-Moron Warning match to be slow and draggy, so what’s the excuse here? It wasn’t painful to watch, but it definitely hurt. The Conchairto, actually, would have been a relief from this misery.
Rodney Mack over Spike Dudley, White Boy Challenge (Submission, Blackout): Remember when I recommended that Gillberg get involved in this angle? Would have been a perfect opportunity to get him in this way, huh? However, I still think they blew this booking. Have Spike last out the five minutes instead of tapping at 4:59 like he did. Then have Teddy Long call him a playa and say that, since he must have picked up something from being around D’Von all his life, he’s a white boy with a difference. It’s just about time for Spike’s annual push anyway, and this would have been a cute way to do it.
Derrek Croney, though, has some nasty thoughts in this vein:
Do you think they could be “thuggin’ & buggin'” its way to buidling a new ‘Goldberg’, using Rodney Mack…?
One Goldberg’s bad enough. A second Goldberg who’s not over in the least and who needs to be carried by Spike Dudley to a watchable match…don’t even think it.
La Resistance over Big Sump Pump and Test, Rematch From Last Night Match (Pinfall, Grenier pins Test, rollup): Oh, please let the departure from this satanic little menage of My Beautiful and Beloved pay dividends. Now here’s how I’d book it: have her turn heel and manage La Resistance. It’d help their push and their masculinity quotient. You could also use the “French are better lovers” excuse to satisfy those in the audience who only think in cliches.
BTW: I’m sorry, Mister Baisden, but I’ve decided it isn’t the berets that make La Res look faggy; it’s the yellow pads and trim on the tights. Shockingly tasteless choice for Frenchmen color-wise. Maybe My Beautiful and Beloved can recommend an American designer who can butch them up a little.
C. J. Wright does ask me this: Should I offer my congratulations to you now that it seems that Ms. Keibler saw the light concerning Big Sump Pump and Test? Not yet. I will graciously allow La Res to use her to get them over, but she knows that she can come back to daddy at any time and a cup of hot cocoa, a smile, and a dose of whatever virus T’Pol picked up will be waiting for her.
Bill Goldberg over Lance Storm, Revenge Match (Pinfall, the usual): Okay, now the booking at JD makes sense. Christian gets Booker, Jericho gets Goldberg. Good for all parties involved. Too bad that the Clique’s still around, though. This would make for a nice pair of main-event feuds in an alternate WWE where there was still justice.
Trip over Ric Flair, World Title Match (Pinfall, Pedigree): This match can’t really be judged on wrestling merit at all. The only criterion was: did it give the fans what they wanted to see? This was Flair Country. Flair didn’t make an ass out of himself in the ring. He got in some decent moves and provided the crowd with what could only be described as a good old-fashioned wrestling match circa the late 70s or early 80s. And, oh, yeah, Trip was there too, for some reason.
But I’m not the best person to gush about this. I’ll let someone else handle it:
Flair carries a third rate worker to a three star match. Yea it wasn’t MOTY, but it was good, it carried the story line, and it was logical. Many of the elements of that angle tonight have been done before, but they do work. I’m actually INTERESTED to see what happens with Flair, and where this whole thing goes. Plus, to see Flair reverse the first Pedigree like that, using
just his back and no arms… well the guy does have bitch tits, but I’d like to be in his shape NOW, never mind when I’m pushing 50.
And that’s why I’m proud to wear the nickname,
Slick Rick
Thank you, Mister McBride. Well put indeed.
Angle Developments:
Loopholes: Austin did end up forgetting more than Flair’s name in his little group of “former world heavyweight champions”. What Austin implied with his list was former WWE world champs only (and Flair’s a member of that club). However, have a look at that belt that Trip’s carrying. The existence of that particular belt means that the people who carried that belt around their waist or shoulder also would qualify for Trip’s opponent as being “former world champions”. So, tack on the names of Booker T, Scott Steiner, and Bill Goldberg as active Raw wrestlers who qualified for Austin’s litany.
The Ravin’ Cajun his own self expands on this: So, wait- WWE now wants us to remember something that happened TEN YEARS AGO? I consider my memory to be good, but hell, even I forgot about Ric Flair’s cup of coffee with the WWF Title. Was it obvious to you, or am I not alone? Well, it was obvious to me in a sense. But it was probably lost on a larger portion of the audience, like you said, Beau. That’s why if he’d included Booker, Goldberg, and Big Sump Pump in that list, it would have come across as better in a number of respects, since not even the most green watcher of wrestling can separate Ric Flair from the Big Gold Belt.
Austin also forgot one other name, and I was CERTAIN that this was the direction they’d go in: himself. After the verbal abuse that Trip suffered in the ring, and with Flair at his side, even in his condition, I don’t think he would have passed up a chance to go after Austin. But, it’s Flair Country and all that, so I guess this time it’s cool.
Of course, Austin versus Trip would itself be a bit of a travesty, as Regular Ian Wright notes: Austin’s knees are now so bad that he has to wear a brace on both of them even when he is just coming out to give a promo? Probably, but I think that WWE feels that the braces are part of his look now, so he’ll go to the ring with them at any time in order to keep the uniform appearance thing going.
Memo To Christian: New outfit, works. New haircut, works. Now get rid of that goddamn butchered theme music.
(And “Jeff Jarrett without the guitar” is a rather cruel judgment, don’t you think, Slick Rick?)
Reaching For The Obvious: Did anyone not know that when Austin told Bisch that female companionship would help his hangover, that Moolah and Mae would NOT be involved in this? It’s not funny if it’s telegraphed as badly as this was.
And Speaking Of Obvious…: Why in the name of heaven does Bisch have to “prove” himself in the redneck category in the first place? What’s more redneck than a titty bar? What’s more redneck than bringing your wife to a titty bar? You can gussy the thing up, sell memberships, and call it the Gold Club if you want, but a titty bar’s still a titty bar. By this scale, Bisch is even higher on the Redneck Meter than Austin is.
A Match Made In Hell In The Cell: Oh, great, we get another Trip/Nash main event at Bad Blood. But, gee, all of the suck is going to be surrounded by chain-link fence, so I guess that makes it spiffy-neato, huh?
MAILBAG!
Memo to my fascist bud John King: Hey, I just said that what the Texas Demos were doing was fun to watch, nothing else. It would have been just as fun to watch if it had been some state’s GOP doing the same thing. And you must admit that it did work. The legislature couldn’t make quorum, the bill’s dead. It was a rare combination of circus theatrics and realpolitik, and we both have to appreciate that. Speaking of dead, I will be if you ever mention the name of Carol Moseley-Braun to me again. I never had to hold my nose as much punching her slot in that card.
As for Texas itself, having lived there for a few years, I must agree with the sentiments sent to me by Unca Ed His Own Self:
Texas.
Where you can shoot your two-timin’ wife and her vaquero lover and get off with a warning.
Where they made a museum out of one floor of the old Texas School Book Depository, instead of the whole building.
Where you have to remove the rattlesnake from your car’s engine block before your morning drive to work can begin.
Texas. It’s a whole ‘nother state!
Kurt Hopke, proud native of Austin that he is, also decided to get his two cents in:
Had to comment on the Texas politics because that’s my neck of the woods. Tom DeLay is indeed the devil. Once upon a time my parents lived in Sugar Land, and actually invited Mr. DeLay into my HOUSE! EVIL IN THE HOUSE! Anyway, do you remember that psychopath a few years back that ran into the Capitol building shooting, clipped a security guard, got real close to breaking into a congressman’s office before he was finally taken down? Guess who’s office it was? DeLay.
Anyway, the district they’re really trying to divvy up is Lloyd Doggett’s in Austin, where I live now. He’s been pretty good about speaking up against the war and being a democrat in a republican world and we don’t have any complaints. In the last election, he ran unopposed, I think if I remember correctly. The crazy thing, though, is that none of this was on the state agenda until DeLay showed up at Speaker of the House Tom Craddick’s door, and suddenly, it had to be done RIGHT NOW. So the Demos did what they had to do. It’s pissing a lot of people off, but I’m thinking it’s pretty funny, especially seeing idiots like Gov. Rick “I’m new at this and I need to ease into the job so don’t actually expect me to make any important decisions or actually do anything (Actual Quote)” Perry and Craddick get flustered. Craddick has flat out said he’s refusing to negotiate, which works right into the demos hand, who only have to hold out until Friday.
I think it’s great, and the best thing is, no one will remember this come election time.
and nope, still no Weapons of Mass Destruction.
Texas has a habit of churning out populist Democrats who are able to cross over into the Republican domination: Doggett, Jim Hightower, Ann Richards. They definitely have something that DeLay only wishes he could have: a human soul.
Now, back to you, John: as for me being a Neo-Trotskyist, well, $93 million over the weekend can fund a permanent revolution quite easily. However, I see Keanu more as Zinoviev.* But I’d like to know how you’d feel about this quote:
Revolution starts at home, in your heart, in your refusal to compromise your beliefs and your values.
Trotsky? Lenin? Nope. Rick Santorum.
Now, you’re not a neo-con, so I’m not tarring you with that brush, but what did you think about Santorum getting walked out on and jeered at during a graduation at a Jesuit school, of all places? The SoJ’s made a living for hundreds of years equating homosexuality with bestiality and incest. You think there’d be a little sympathy there for his remarks, huh?
* – Yes, it’s not a very humorous remark, and it’s a stretch, but I had to get the reference in sometime in this column, didn’t I?
Naturally, the Only Man More Liberal Than I Am, Zach Singer, has to chime in about politics:
1. How about Dubya vowing to bring the SUICIDE bombers in Saudi Arabi to justice. I swear. It boggles the frickin mind.
You know that his supporters are going to spin it by saying that what he was saying was that the people behind the suicide bombers would be brought to justice, but that still doesn’t erase the record. You know, Dan Quayle isn’t looking so bad after all right now.
2. Do we go after SA? We should…and we shouldn’t. It’s really a heck of a slippery slope that we’ve avoided confronting at all costs. Stop being hypocrites [although we’ve made a heritage of it], or piss off the entire Muslim world by, basically, going after Mecca.
Personally…THIS…scares the SHIT out of me.
I think that even the Dubbaya Junta has enough brains to stay out of this quagmire. Actually, they already used their ten-watt mental capabilities on this possibility and avoided it. There was enough evidence at hand to do some stuff in Saudi vis-a-vis al-Qaeda after September 11th as there was to justify intervention in Afghanistan. However, Dubbaya’s in the oil bidness, and he knows as much as any high-level oil guy the basic lesson of even appearing to f*ck with the House of Saud. It’s that more than religious considerations that would have prevented him from taking action inside of SA, I’m sorry to say.
Memo to Regular Joshua Crawley: I’ll promote you to regular as many times as I wish. If it’s more than once, just consider it a true honor that I would cover my butt this way rather than insult a Regular by being negligent about his or her status.
Tramel Raggs asks me about the recent local girls’ hazing incident here in the Chicagoland area and why I didn’t comment about it. I don’t comment about spoiled rich teenage bitches doing a bad drama club production of “Lord of the Flies”, simple as that. However, he does make one point in another area:
Either way, in your recent column you mentioned eMule as the P2P client to use. I use eMule for games and programs, but it just goes so F-ing SLOW. I’ve been downloading Enter the Matrix since Wednesday and it’s still not even CLOSE to being done. Sure, the progs you’ll get off of there are 99% the real thing, but I could have downloaded 7 bad programs before I got the good one on Kazaa and still been done by now.
Please remember, Tramel, that I did say the eDonkey network is pretty slow. That’s mostly due to the fact that most of the server/clients are in Europe. FastTrack is faster on transfer because there’s more people on the network, period (I’m still one disk short of Enter the Matrix myself as I write this, so I can understand). However, eDonkey’s been growing by leaps and bounds recently (you couldn’t get a damn thing off of there a year ago), and there are good reasons why:
1) Well-kept-up indexing websites like ShareReactor and ShareLive. It’s a nice public way of doing a shout-out of “Hey, I got this, and I’m sharing it”.
2) More secure, verified hashing than FastTrack. As you said, what you download is what you get. Not to mention the fact that viruses and trojans aren’t spread by eDonkey yet, unlike with FastTrack.
3) It’s no secret that FastTrack is being heavily monitored right now by the **AAs (could that have something to do with a certain movie released late last week, one which I already have courtesy of the eDonkey network?) and has been used to spread fake files ala Madonna’s famous “What the f*ck are you doing?” MP3s. eDonkey still isn’t being monitored that heavily (although I did get a nasty-gram from Universal via my ISP for having a copy of Red Dragon in my shared folder a couple months ago; I’ve been laying a bit low since). It’s more important than ever that you put a jimmy cap on your pirating willy by using ICMs like ZeroData Bad IP Block List in conjunction with Sygate Personal Firewall Pro (ed2k hash link), and keep them updated as much as possible.
4) The event that may bring a lot more people to eDonkey will be when the new version of Shareaza gets out of beta. Gnutella, G2, eDonkey, and BitTorrent, all in one package that has built-in, frequently-updated ICM capability, along with the possibility of ending once and for all the eMule modders’ piss-war against each other (believe me, you don’t want to know how petty the developers can be). If you can live without FastTrack, it’ll be the only client you’d really need. Personally, I can live without FastTrack. If I want high-quality MP3s, I use Gnutella (and the way BearShare’s been going lately, I’m dying for Shareaza to get out of beta). If I want movies, TV episodes, or games, I turn to eDonkey. The only thing that FastTrack has been the best at is with small-size video files (20-100M) and, of course, porn. However, there are a number of indexing sites for eDonkey that focus simply on porn files being shared, so the gap may be closing.
So, all things considered, you can live with the “slowness” for now. Personally, I feel that getting the stuff that I want right the first time is a better use of my time than downloading every f*cking thing in sight JIC it’s the right file.
Although I have no goddamn clue what I’m going to talk about tomorrow, I trust you that it won’t be as long as this one was. However, it’ll still contain something of merit. I think. Until that time, enjoy yourselves.
About Eric Szulczewski
