Ennis, Ellis, who the f*ck cares? Yeah, I’m catching a lot of heat for mixing up Warren Ellis and Garth Ennis. That’s only to be expected when you’re fervently worshipping at the Church of Our Lady Of Perpetual Exhaustion. Besides, the vet at the plant reminds me of Grandma from Preacher. So, mea culpa and all that bullshit.
Now, on to the show.
THE RIGHT-WING CONSPIRACY STRIKES AGAIN
Jeb Bush, one of the slimiest of that slimy family (and that is truly saying a lot), won’t let a woman die with dignity despite the fact that the courts are allowing her to be removed from life support. The Senate passes a ban on late-term abortion without any kind of life-of-the-mother or medically-necessary clause to it, thus making doctors liable in this country for the first time for performing a legitimate medical procedure. Doesn’t the Religious Reich know that their fifteen minutes are up?
You know, Ralph Snart wondered what I’d do if we tag-teamed up and ran for president together. I think the first thing I’d do is issue an executive order criminalizing any religious demonination that starts poking its nose into politics, with the leaders to be sentenced to death for treason. Thanks to Ashcroft and his shenanigans, all I would have to do is claim that they’re terrorists, and I’m within the law. Then I’d legalize abortion on demand and euthanasia on demand and see how fast the legislature could pass laws against those orders. At the very least, it’d be fun while it lasted.
There has to be a circle of Hell reserved for those who try to force-feed their beliefs on an unwilling people through the law. If there isn’t, there is no Supreme Being. That puts the Religious Reich out of luck both ways, doesn’t it?
The above was printed just in case you thought I was going soft on the political front.
SCRAMBLED HTML AND OTHER MINOR DISASTERS
I have no clue what happened to that one paragraph from yesterday’s column. The text scans fine, there’s no HTML errors, etc. So, for the benefit of the readers, here’s the graph that was supposed to appear right before the Short Form in yesterday’s column:
Oh, dear God, I have absolutely nothing to say today, especially in comparison to Hyatte, who somehow forgot that I’ve said some nice things about that fat f*ck Madden in my time and, of course, I was right about The Rundown being a bomb that wouldn’t get to $50M (so f*ck you, Flex Fans, and I expect at least one “You were right” from one of you retards). You want a hit? How about iTunes For Windows selling one million songs in three and a half days? Now that’s success. So let’s just turn to Raw and get this thing over with, shall we?
Ah, now I’ve figured it out. I forgot to close a quote on the link to Warren Ellis’ blog site. When it hit the next quote, it was expecting the close link tag that was included earlier, and proceeded to scramble the text. Hey, shit happens.
WHY MUST YOU TEASE US SO?
So Nash’s career is in “question”, huh? Neck fusion, spurs removed, nerve unpinched…sounds pretty routine. Nine months off or so for someone who can recover easily, but Nash has never been one of those types. And 1bullshit says that WWE’s going to push for a pay cut when his contract runs out early next year. Well, gee, no shit, guys. Nash was brought in at a write-your-own-ticket price because WWE was so goddamn desperate for something, anything, that they’d even take him back on.
Nash isn’t going anywhere. They’re going to guarantee him something thanks to the Stroke Of Trip. The thing is, Nash has always been better at anything outside the ring than he’s been at inside the ring. Remember him as “coach” of the Natural Born Thrillers? He’d make a terrific manager for somebody, and there are a lot of boring bodies that need someone like him. Or how about behind the table? His commentary’s always been high-quality, but there’s always been some sort of impetus behind it (like with the NWO). Can he survive in a commentator’s role when he has no in-ring or in-angle agenda to push? If I were WWE, I’d give him the chance. Who knows? We might just have Lawler’s replacement in a seven-foot clumsy package.
That, of course, leads us directly to Hogan. TNA has had to cancel their post-US Thanksgiving PPV due to the fact that Hogan has suffered one of the few serious injuries he’s had in his career, blowing out a wheel when facing Masa Chono last week in the Land of the Rising Yen. He’s going to have surgery a week from Friday on it, whic precludes his participation in TNA’s breakthrough attempt. Since the whole show was built around the confrontation between him and Jeff Jarrett, TNA’s decided to postpone. I’ll give the Jarretts credit here, since this is a smart business decision. There’s no free agent with Hogan’s drawing power among marks, and no one who can get the Jarretts to their goal of a cable deal quicker. They’re doing reasonably well with the weekly PPVs and the small syndie package they have, so they have time to wait. Now, I’ve said that it’s a mistake to bring him in, but that’s only from an internal standpoint (quality of wrestling, locker room cancer, etc.). But wrestling is a business first, and Hogan instantly increases your visibility, your house show draws, and your potential to go to higher places (as Bisch proved in WCW). Maybe the injury will give the Jarretts the time they need to figure out the balance that Bisch achieved in the early days of the NWO: balancing out Hogan’s ego with the hot wrestling they have on tap right now.
THE PIMP SECTION
No one in Wrestling. So go read the other sections, especially Games. Especially since Baxley’s right about Gargoyles being what the various Star Trek casts did on their summer vacations. Let’s see, off the top of my head, Jonathan Frakes and Marina Sirtis were regulars, while Brent Spiner, Michael Dorn, LeVar Burton, John DeLancie, and Kate Mulgrew all put in multiple appearances. Give credit to Disney; on the evidence of Gargoyles and Hercules alone, you can’t deny that they don’t skimp on the voice casts of their TV work.
SMACKDOWN SOMEWHAT SPOILED
Obviously, there has to be a new general manager thanks to the events of No Mercy and Linda’s Fun With Towels. Unfortunately, their choice is definitely a case of locking the stable door after the horses have all fled. Let’s just say it’s someone I was pushing for a while back for this position, and someone they definitely could have done something with at the time of the brand split. But, as was the case with Bisch, too little, too late.
Benoit, Angle, and Cena in a tag contest is a wonderful sight. So why ruin it by making Albert the fourth participant?
Why haven’t they thought of an angle involving the fact that Tajiri’s mist can have long-term effects on someone’s vision until this? Let’s just hope that Nidia gets better before this goes completely soap opera, because a Noble/Tajiri feud is too good to get pissed on this way.
Has the face turn of Haas and Benjamin finally begun? Possibly. But it’s more likely that the jobber run of Haas and Benjamin has begun. Wait until you see which WWE star returns to perform the dirty deed.
Oh God…it’s bad enough that the Raw tag titles have been totally wrecked, possibly beyond repair. Now it’s Smackdown’s turn to suffer that same fate. Fortunately, the sheer number of good pure tag teams on Smackdown might hold this off long enough for a reclamation job to be done.
In the main event, our new GM shows that he can do the old Pat Patterson routine of changing stips while the match is in progress. Of course, this isn’t the first time that our new GM has been compared to Patterson in some way.
It’ll be an interesting show to say the least.
MAILBAG!
Short one today because I’m short of time and had to weed through all of the Warren Ellis/Garth Ennis mail for good material.
Old Friends get first pop as usual, so before I get to Charlie Owens, let me pass on best wishes to everyone in the audience from Jeremy Botter, who’s in Iraq right now. He says that he’s getting mortared and shooting people, but having been through the shit that went down on Delphi during its heyday, it’s probably a relief for him. Iraqi fanatics are a lot less easier to deal with than Sean Shannon on a tirade.
Now on to Charlie, who poses a very interesting question given Hawk’s passing:
Let’s say they killed off the split tomorrow. (Stop cheering and read the rest of my question.) And let’s say Hawk and Animal (in their prime and breathing) showed up and said “We want in.” How would you handle things? Which teams stick together, which teams implode and feud, who gets the tag belts, and so on. I think you have to had the Duds and the LOD feud for a while, without the tag belts,(you know, the whole “who’s the best team ever” feud) while Cade and Jindrak defend against the Bashams, just to get the new blood flowing.
An in-their-prime Road Warriors/Dudleys feud would be a near automatic (and, as you said, you wouldn’t have to turn the Dudleys; this would be a Respect Feud). The matches wouldn’t be pretty (LOD even in its prime wasn’t the most aesthetically-pleasing of tag teams), but they’d have a lot of import. At this point, I’d let Cade go solo and reteam Jindrak and O’Haire, priming them for the Dudz post-blowoff (I’m going to try to keep the rosters as stable as possible, so O’Haire’s the only guy switching shows, and in order to feud with the Dudz, LOD has to be on Raw). If Cade can’t handle himself solo, turn Rene Dupree and team Cade up with him; that’d be one exciting young tag team. As for Dupree’s current partner, I think that Rob Conway has the same level of potential that Cena did a year and a half ago, and you can use Cena as a template for developing Conway as a solo star.
As for what an in-prime and…well, living LOD would do after blowing off the Dudz, there are a lot of options available. The best, I think, would be to give Jericho and Christian a shot at them. This would have the secondary effect of freeing up the IC-level competition for guys like Lance Storm who deserve some elevation but have no real place to go.
The belts would start out with the Dudz, since they have them now. LOD wins the blowoff, but drops the straps to Chris Crass, and they would have a nice, extended feud that would turn out some damn sweet promos on top of it.
I will proceed to ignore the proximity of the words “Shaniqua” and “naked” in the same sentence, though, Charlie.
Of course, Regular Andrew Ormberg has the flip side of this as a comment:
I thought the LOD tribute was a bit much. WWE tries passing the Duds as the greatest tag team of all time, but they don’t hold a candle to the Road Warriors, Midnights, RNR, British Bulldogs or Edge & Christian (I know you weren’t big fans of them, but they reeked of awesomeness). Plus LOD won the WWF, NWA and AWA tag titles, while the Dudleys have only won the WWF and ECW (I know they technically won the WCW, but when
Vince bought the company those belts became WWF belts IMO.) And the Dudleys are more the modern-day version of the Bushwhackers than Hawk/Animal.
Agreed that all of those teams are better than the Dudleys (and I never hated Edge and Christian as wrestlers, I just loathed the way they were booked; the whole Bill and Ted thing wore out its welcome very quickly). I’d also add a bunch of others on the list, starting with the Freebirds (just to piss Keith off) and continuing with Tully and Arn, Strike Force, hell, even Demolition Mark I. However, considering how absolutely dead the tag scene is on the Raw side, the only thing they have with any sense of continuity is Buh Buh Ray and D’Von. So they get pimped. Comparing the belts is really a non-issue, because you can’t do a one-to-one between the territorial days (the end of those days in the case of LOD) and now. The Dudz would have been given the WCW belts if they’d been part of one of Bischoff’s numerous talent raids on ECW; they may not be great wrestlers, but they can definitely work a crowd. No, not the greatest, but they’re the only thing the Raw side has. That’s why I’ve been pressing for the elimination of the Raw tag belts. All roads there lead to Dudleyville.
Brad McCann asks me another question: who’s the best wrestler to never hold a world title (viz. a discussion with a friend concerning Van Dam)? He mentions Benoit, but Benoit did hold that title in WCW for one fleeting moment until the lack-of-brain trust over there decided to appoint Sully booker and Benoit blew out of town so fast their heads spun. This is one of those questions that would just open a can of worms. Everyone’s got their favorites, and it’s not something you convince someone else about easily, and for the sake of argument I’m going to restrict this to the US, because I don’t even want to try to figure out who’s won what in Japan and what’s considered a world title over there other than the Triple Crown. I know the answer sure isn’t Van Dam, though. I’m going to go with one of the obvious choices here and say Ted DiBiase. To my dying day I’ll be convinced that one of Vince’s stupidest moves was to change the booking of WM4 to give the title to Savage.
Richard Gaida asks me about Gregg Easterbrook’s termination from ESPN.com due to alleged anti-Semitic remarks made in a blog about Michael Eisner and Harvey Weinstein. First of all, I’m glad to see that cocksucker go down. He had one of the worst cases of East Coast Bias in all of sports media. As for the anti-Semitism thing…I’ve read the remarks, but I don’t think that they were necessarily anti-Semitic. Easterbrook asked simply how Jewish movie executives can countenance the glamorization of violence considering history. However, that definitely goes against the fact that there’s a long history in Hollywood of Jewish executives not bringing attention to their ethnicity, and doing so still rubs some executives the wrong way. But the reason he got canned is simple: Easterbrook worked for ESPN, which is owned by Disney. He specifically went after the head of Disney and the head of one of Disney’s subsidiaries. In other words, he bad-mouthed the boss in public. Buh bye, Greggie.
And, finally, Douglas Sudia decides to cheer me up about my new place of residence:
One more note about Nebraska:
Pick a highway, set course and drive west. After about 2 1/2-3 hours you should be in the middle of the state. Then, drive into the hills
and think of Vince’s charming version of hillbillies, think of Hillbilly Jim and his crazy antics and good natured heart…then seek out and meet real actual hillbillies (a lone cabin on a hill in the middle of the state? Hillbilly.), and then you will know fear.
Dude, after six months in Looziana, a year in rural Ohio, and a couple months of Mulletville, Iowa, not even Nebraska rednecks can cause me fear. I have become thoroughly immune to white trash. Drunk white trash, like the crowds at a Nebraska football game, now that’s another matter. Besides, Pankonin’s relatively close. If I start getting that way, I’ll just show up on his doorstep curled up in the fetal position.
Okay, that’s it for me. I already have something in mind for Fleabag’s column, so if I can pick myself up off the floor and get some energy together, that sucker will get put to bed. As for me right now, gotta get to work, so enjoy yourselves, read the rest of the week here, and I’ll see you whenever I do.
About Eric Szulczewski
