Well, Jesus, the French Open just started and Agassi’s already out. That kills a lot of interest on this side of the pond, Roddick or not. And it’s a big signal for him to retire to Steffi and the kids. Chubby Chad couldn’t build on momentum from a Saturday 61 and Steve Flesch took advantage, but no one cared about the Colonial this year because Annika wasn’t there. The US Women’s Open did the smart thing and let in Michelle, amateur status or not. Monty and Chubby Boy are going to have a hard time making the penis possessors’ equivalent. And the best news for us watchers of golf: Curtis Strange is leaving the ABC booth to go play on the elders’ circuit. Thank you, God. Now let’s have the Mouse work on the ESPN football announce crew.
Okay, if you thought the reference in Randle’s column was a little confusing, here’s the scoop: over in our super-secret writers’ forum, we were discussing what to do now that Scooter’s left a void in re Smackdown recaps. We were talking about whether or not we needed a replacement, etc., and if we did, what kind of replacement we should do. We wanted something that would be a contrast to Melchor’s show recap and Burnside’s Friday report. I suggested, stupidly, that I could do a stand-alone Short Form for Smackdown.
I mean, it is logical. I’m a known quantity, the Short Form has proven popular in this column, it won’t be taking anything away from Melchor and Burnside…it works. It even works so well that Biscuiti, Matt Isomer likes it, and he doesn’t like anything. So, I’m going to try it this week and see how it goes. If people like it, then I’ll stay with it until Scooter decides that I’m desecrating Smackdown and comes back. Don’t expect it to be up right after the show, because I’m in a UPN void, meaning I have to download it. You can just treat it the same as you do the Raw Short Form.
And now that that’s cleared up, on with the show…
THE PIMP SECTION
Nute can use YAM any time he wishes. It’s called “a perk for being a 411 writer”. All I request is acknowledgement. As for how I range on his Unpopular Opinions: 1) I still feel sad about it, but it doesn’t eat me up. 2) Correct. 3) actually sorta contradicts 5), if you think about it. If they hadn’t blurred the lines of kayfabe, the lines between player and character wouldn’t have been blurred, thus making backstage behavior, especially in the case of Wife-Beater, relevant. Since 5) is correct, Matt must be off-base about 3). 4) In retrospect, true, but the only one who said anything like that at the time was Shannon. 6) Yeppers. 7) Oh, yeah, and the IWC treats analysis of them so wrong that it’s pathetic.
Nason gives his perspective to the TNA/ROH imbroglio.
Campbell, David Variant, Fried, and Obal have got the WWE’s B shows rocking.
Livingston gets a hold of some of Campbell, Mike Variant’s Jap shit and graciously reviews it for our benefit.
Murrey has gone above and beyond: he talks about a TV show I’ve never heard of.
CKOne uses the Flames as a point of national pride and pimps me. Good kid.
Bradford should have put this in the Plays With Dolls Zone, not Black. But it’s funny as hell.
Melchor talks about some groups I’ve heard of and some that I haven’t, which is only to be expected, I guess.
Laflin writes better on NyQuil ™ than most people write when perfectly coherent.
Hayhurst needs to stop talking about the friggin’ Architect, and you people need to stop writing him about it. Stat.
It’s Last Tango In Ziegler as he tackles The Dreamers.
THEY’RE STILL AROUND…
So the warning gets reprinted…
We still have people advertising spyware on this site. Therefore, I will still provide the links to effective, easy-to-use, functional anti-spyware programs.
Spybot and AdAware. The ONLY two spyware removal tools to trust. Do NOT buy any spyware removal tools, because none of them work better than these two, and all of them except these two are suspect.
SpywareBlaster. Will nuke twelve hundred different potentially malicious ActiveX controls, and now has the ability to prevent a number of non-ActiveX methods of installing spyware for people who use Mozilla/Firefox.
SpywareGuard. From Javacool, like SpywareBlaster. It’s a real-time scanner for spyware. A decent first line of defense.
IE-SpyAd. Throws numerous ad-related URLs into IE’s Restricted Zone, where they won’t display or affect your system. Bookmark this one, since it’s the only one that doesn’t have an in-program update.
Of course, only download them from the links provided above.
With AdAware and Spybot, check for updates using their internal update function at least once a week. Run them at least once a week or whenever you think you might have problems. Remember, the new version of Spybot has browser protection capabilities, so have that run at startup and leave it running. Check for updates to SpywareBlaster once a week. It only needs to be run once initially in order to establish protection. Then, after it downloads updates, just click on the line that says “Enable Protection For All Unprotected Items” (definitely run that one, since they just put in another database update in the last couple days) and kill it. It doesn’t need to be active. For IE-SpyAd, bookmark the site and check for updates twice a week, since it has no kind of internal updater. Since all it does is add Registry entries, it doesn’t eat up anything.
If you’re having trouble with spyware or a browser hijacker, or think that you do, head over to the SpywareInfo Forums, where the pros there can help you diagnose and get rid of stuff. Currently, I’m in training over there as an assistant, and they’re good, knowledgeable people.
IF THE PICTURES ON THE CAVE WALL ARE THE BIGGEST PIECES OF NEWS, DOES THAT MEAN PLATO WAS RIGHT?
I think I’ll talk about Fahrenheit 911 winning the Palme D’Or tomorrow, but Shrek 2, that has to be handled right away.
First of all, Ashish’s blurb about it being the ninth-fastest film to reach $100M at the box is, in a strict sense, wrong. Ashish reads the f*cking chart at Box Office Mojo and doesn’t look at it, if you know what I mean. Shrek 2 took five days to reach the hundred mil mark, falling just short of it on Saturday. There are two films that made it in three days (Spider-Man and The Matrix Reloaded) and two that made it in four days (Return of the King and Attack of the Clones). That means that Shrek 2 is in a tie for fifth place on the Fastest Films To $100M List with four other films, not ninth place. God, I want to slap him sometimes…
Here’s something that our PHB didn’t mention: Shrek 2 did set the record for highest five-day box for a film with a Wednesday opening, beating out Return of the King by just over a million. Honestly, I didn’t expect that. I knew it’d come in at over a hundred for the weekend, but I didn’t expect it to get to the $125M mark. It had the second-highest opening weekend in history next to Spider-Man. And its Saturday haul was the highest single-day performance by any movie ever. It’s already the second-highest-grossing picture of the year next to Mel Gibson’s holy snuff film, with no one expecting either Spidey or the Anti-Christ Harry Fucking Potter to be able to catch up. It made back its costs in five days, the ultimate indicator of success in Hollywood.
By the end of this holiday weekend here in the States, it should easily be over the $200M mark. That’ll put it in fifth place money-wise among computer-animated features, where its predecessor sits second under that piece of shit Finding Nemo. It’s already outgrossed every non-Pixar animated Disney film of the last eight years except for Dinosaur and Lilo and Stitch, and it’ll have passed both by Friday. Somewhere, Jeff Katzenberg is jacking off over a picture of Michael Eisner, going “Who’s your daddy? WHO’S YOUR DADDY!?”…
…that isn’t a very nice image, is it?
Well, the question needs to be asked: does it deserve all that money? Yes, it does. It’s a terrific movie in any sense (the in-jokes come so fast and furious that you can’t blink, and I get off on those). Of course, I’m predisposed to loving it. I loved the first film. I owe John Cleese (and, of course, his five partners in crime) more than you can ever imagine. I’m a major Jennifer Saunders mark. The animation definitely shows what state-of-the-art is all about. So, of course, this one’s hitting me deep in my areas of weakness. Of course, some people disagree. Check out some of the retards on IMDB:
I expect this movie to sink like a Brick after the first Weekend. Shame on Hollywood for producing a movie for families just for the sake of having an offering for families. More adult feel than kid feel. – Jeffnusa
No shit it has an adult feel. That’s because it’s not a movie made for kids. They’re not going to get the in-jokes. We are. And if it drops fifty from its first weekend, that’s still a $50M haul. Putz.
“Shrek 2” is self-consciously more hip than the original. The original has lots of contemporary references, to be sure, but not so many as to make it inaccessible to audiences some number of decades in the future. This one did and it detracted from the impact. – Bob Stout
Funny, I watched the original a couple nights ago and specifically looked for the self-consciously hip attitude. I found more of it in the first film than this one.
Why this film wasn’t rated PG-13, is beyond me. TOO much sexually implied humor was in this film. The worst coming from The Gingerbread finding out that Pinnochio wears a pink thong. There isn’t much kiddie humor, which is why this is NOT a kids film at all. Most kids, well, atleast the ones I know, wanted to see this film for COMEDY THAT IS AIMED TOWARDS KIDS. There isn’t any in this film. It’s more of a film for us adults rather than children. THAT’S why I don’t like this film as much as the first. – PowerPadMan
More like Maxi-Pad-Man, if you know what I mean. No, you imbecile, kids like humor that’s oriented toward adults. There’s an element of the forbidden fruit there that’s irresistible. The first movie had a lot of sexually-implied humor as well, and it didn’t hurt its appeal. You’re an asshole who probably buys into the whole “family values” scam.
Enough of those assholes. Let’s move on to someone who’s not an asshole, namely the only man who can out-curmudgeon me here at 411, Hyatte (but only when he’s on; it takes supreme effort on his part to defeat me at my normal level). Let me correct some of his misconceptions:
1) The movie did cost $70M to make. Why? Well, they had to pay for all those render farms, servers, etc., and for the men and women who programmed them, all while playing Keep Up With The Jobses in the realm of State of the Art. When all is said and done, though, Shrek 2 will pay for itself and for A Shark Tale. That f*cker’s going to be pure profit.
2) The voice actors didn’t come cheap, but most of them had something to prove, which makes this an ideal opportunity for them at any price. Mike Myers is coming off Cat In The Hat, which has done root damage to his rep. Ditto Eddie Murphy and his magnificent career decisions of late (Haunted Mansion being the most egregious example). Cameron Diaz, as we both know, Hyatte, has a rep for being an unhygenic overhyped set-destroyer who somehow escaped blame for both Charlie’s Angels films because Lucy Liu was even more of a bitch than she was. Julie Andrews has officially reached Academy Award Whore status. Antonio Banderas is almost grateful that he has the Spy Kids films on his CV. Rupert Everett’s a f*cking joke. Jennifer Saunders, despite her undeniable comedy writing talent, still thinks she’s stuck in the shadows of her Cambridge pals (Emma Thompson’s Oscars must gall her), and has this neurotic compulsion to make it known that she can be funny even if she doesn’t have Dawn French or the eternally-beautiful-and-God-I-want-to-f*ck-her-even-if-she’s-pushing-sixty Joanna Lumley at her side. They all have reasons to do this puppy, the least of which is that, going into it, they knew it’d be a big hit.
3) Let Keith have his role model. Fairy Godmother is mine.
Well, it takes all kinds to make a world. But it takes people like me to rule over the rest of you. Comments like the ones from IMDB make me want to pull the old World Domination plans out of storage and go for it. God knows you’ve done worse. I’m thinking 2000 here, of course.
You want a little wrestling news? Okay, but just a little. I’m starting to try out new pills to replace the Lamictal and I’m not certain of how much news I can give you.
SOMETHING HONESTLY SINCERE
I’d like to throw a Get Well to Jerry Jarrett, who just had a triple bypass. He had a spell of vertigo last week that put him into the hospital. While there, they did the standard tests and found arterial occlusion that was apparently too far gone for standard angioplasty. So they cracked open his chest and went to work. Fortunately, this is 2004, where a triple bypass is like pulling a tooth. If memory serves, he should be out of the hospital in about a week or so.
Separate TNA from Jerry Jarrett, if you can. There’s lots of nasty things that you can say about what TNA’s done under his stewardship. However, most of those things devolve on Jeff Jarrett, not Jerry. The sins of the son shouldn’t be put on the father. Jerry Jarrett has always been one of the smartest guys in the business, with an incredible wealth of knowledge. I’d say that he’s at or near the top of the list on knowing about wrestling and the wrestling business, with Verne Gagne his only competition. Most importantly, he’s considered by everyone to be a class act. It’s assumed by almost everyone with a little knowledge that even though he approved the ROH talent cutoff, he didn’t instigate it. He’s not that type of guy.
Wrestling needs more Jerry Jarretts. That’s why I’m hoping he recovers soon and recovers fully. That way, maybe he can go to his reprobate son and put the “slap” back into “slapnuts”.
WHY I GAVE UP ON GAMING CONVENTIONS AND COLLECTIBLE CARD GAMES, ALL IN ONE PACKAGE
From a press release that Ashish printed:
In a unique twist, professional wrestler Buff Bagwell will step into the “gaming ring” to challenge game fans at Origins 2004 on June 24-25 in Columbus, Ohio.
Bagwell, a five-time WCW tag-team champion, will play Filsinger Games’ Legends of Wrestling card game against gaming fans. All the playing cards from the first two editions of Legends of Wrestling will be eligible for the Can You Beat Buff challenge.
“The whole challenge is to see if game fans can humble Buff in the gaming ring,” said game creator Tom Filsinger. “If your wrestler wins, you’ll get a Limited Edition Buff Bagwell playing card created just for Origins plus plenty of bragging rights.”
Oh, this is just too good to be true. For those of you with long memories, you may recall that my dislike of Mistah Marcus Alexander Fagwell, a.k.a. Buff Stuffs Gerbils, is right up there with my dislike of Jeff Hardy, and for most of the same reasons (ego, apathy, substance abuse, propensity to do shit in the ring that could hurt his opponents, etc.). And, unlike most other people in the IWC, I had my hatred for him down on record prior to the whole Booker T match mess which led to the abort button being pushed on Plan A for the Invasion. He killed the most important angle in wrestling history in the cradle due to his overweening egotism. Let us not forget that.
And now, in order to eat, he has to shill a collectible card game for a fourth-rate game company that, personally, I’ve never heard of, and I keep up with this kind of stuff. That’s because no one other than the most desperate of indies wants him in a ring. Everyone in the biz still remembers the shit that he and Big Sump Pump were pulling in WCW, and the shit they were throwing into their bodies. Bagwell is the living exemplar of ‘RoidMania, even moreso than Steiner. No one wants to take a chance on him. And now he, like Sable before she was inexplicably rehired by Vince, has to shill for his supper at the lowest-rent venues possible.
Aw, poor baby. You’re not getting what you deserve. However, not even ravenous pit bulls would want to touch you. Maybe a continuous loop of Moolah and Mae’s appearance on Leno last night with you getting the Malcolm McDowell treatment…
AND FROM THE SAME LEFT-COLUMN BLURB…
TNA Impact! will air at 1PM on Fridays in the Midwest. That means that when factoring in daylight savings time, the show will air an hour earlier in the Midwest than in the East. – I hope that it wasn’t Ashish (in point of fact, Suck Woodhead said the same thing, so I’ll put the blame on him…and Memo to Suck Woodhead: TNA’s broadcasts in Chicago won’t really be preempted by games of the alleged baseball team on the North Side because THEY’RE MOSTLY ON FUCKING WGN, not FSN. White Sox games, though, will preempt them since FSN carries the Sox.)
Huh? What does Daylight Savings Time have to do with this, unless you’re in Indiana? Abso-f*cking-lutely nothing. Impact (and stop with the f*cking exclamation points; we intelligent commentators don’t use it for Smackdown, so we won’t use it for this either) will air at 1PM CT in the Central Time Zone, which is 2PM ET. It will air at 3PM ET in the Eastern Time Zone. Whether this is CST, CDT, EST, or EDT is irrelevant. It will always air one hour earlier in the Central Time Zone than in the Eastern Time Zone, even after we go off Daylight Savings Time. Unless you live in the parts of Indiana that don’t go on Daylight Savings Time, in which case it becomes confusing. In the ET portion of Indiana, it would obviously come on at 3PM since they’re in the Eastern Time Zone. But they don’t go to Daylight Savings Time. Which means that during Daylight Savings Time, Impact would actually be broadcast there at the equivalent of 4PM ET, which would be an hour later than ET and two hours later than CT. Hope you’re following this. There will be a quiz later.
(And in case that hasn’t confused you, here’s a little tidbit from Jackass Johnson at 1bullshit Junior: Fox Sports Net isn’t carried in the areas of Philly that are serviced by Comcast, which, from my understanding, is most of Philly. TNA was trying to cut a deal with Comcast’s internal sports channels to broadcast Impact in the Philly market, and probably in other places that Comcast services without benefit of FSN. The Philly deal is done, but Impact will be broadcast there at midnight on Saturdays/Sundays, which means that it will air there 33 hours after ET broadcasts and 34 hours after CT broadcasts. And, again, Daylight Savings Time is irrelevant, except in the ET zone of Indiana, in which case Impact would be broadcast in Philly only 32 hours later than there, but only for half the year.)
Thank God nobody mentioned anything about Mountain Time Zone. That would have blown some low-wattage brains.
And speaking of low-wattage brains, let’s head over to Raw and the Short Form…
THE SHORT FORM
Match Results:
The Jesus Impersonator over God Himself (Pinfall, spear): For some reason, Edge and Flair weren’t on the same page. This match seriously dragged. They never got into synch, which is very, very surprising given the participants. It just felt…bleh. It should have been a lot more special than it turned out to be. Maybe inflated expectations caused that view, I don’t know. However, the build-up to Orton/Benjamin is going very well, so something good came out of this.
The Joe In Me brought up something that I noticed:
Speaking of Flair, what’s with the mismatched tights and boots lately?
Man, not even Flair could pull off those violet boots with the black tights…or were the boots lavender? Either way, it’s severe enough to call in the Fab Five. They were almost as distracting as Mike Chioda’s antics.
La Res over Novocaine Helms and His Pet Bitch (Pinfall, Grenier pins Helms, rollup): Yes, I ignored it and made myself something to eat instead. I shouldn’t have. After all, these are the last two real tag teams left on Raw, and if the blurbs printed last week are right, La Res has a good chance of holding the title again…oh, please, I’m deluding myself. Nothing could have made me care about this match. Nothing.
Chris Jericho and Shelton Benjamin over Randy Orton and Dave Batista (Pinfall, Benjamin pins Orton, powerslam): Were my eyes deceiving me, or was Batista not being carried because there wasn’t a need to do so? The guy’s actually become a servicable power wrestler, and that could be noticed in this match due to the fact that if he hadn’t had the ability to perform, he would have stuck out like a sore thumb. I do question the whole Trish situation. Now, I understand that technical SNAFUs can’t be helped. However, what was she doing out there in the first place? There was no need to bring her out during the match as a distraction considering the apres-match. Just let her come out afterward, then proceed as planned. And Memo to the retards in the audience: a powerbomb through a table is not enough to generate a “Holy Shit” chant anymore. This is 2004, not 1994.
Victoria over Baldy Holly, Apparently A Non-Title Match (Pinfall, Widow’s Peak): Advice for Victoria: 1) Get TATU back, and 2) Stop the Jennifer Beals shit on the entrance ramp. Seriously. You’re ruining a lot of masturbatory fantasties among IWC members. Decent match, though.
Jason Wolfe wishes to chime in:
Who thought it’d be a good idea to turn Victoria into a cross between a teen-bop diva and a pole dancer? Wouldn’t that gimmick be better suited for Nidia, who has some dancing experience?
The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced they were trying to do some kind of cross-promotional thing with Stripperella, and they just used the wrong person. And, Jason, some of us who were not blessed so by nature would like to have a little more chest hair, so kudos to Palumbo for ditching the razor.
The Joe In Me also has an averse reaction to the New and Unimproved Victoria:
Holy shit, I just got served by Victoria. It’s on now. I absolutely love Victoria, but she is without a doubt the WORST (FEMALE) FACE EVER. At least she didn’t kiss any babies on her way to the ring. And kudos to Gail Kim for preventing her from doing that standing moonsault. Way to make yourself useful, Gail. And HOW IN THE HELL did Lawler not know that Molly was a brunette? She has had brown hair for the better part of two years now. Good to see Victoria finally use the Widow’s Peak not once, but twice, for the first and second times in what seems like months (because it IS months).
Uh, TJIM, you’ve probably blanked it out like some trauma, but do you remember how horrible Ivory is as a face? And how horrible Madusa was as a face? Victoria hasn’t descended to that level yet, fortunately.
Our Lord and Savior and…Nick Dinsmore? over Garrison Cade and…oh, God, Jonathan Coachman? (Pinfall, Dinsmore pins Coachman, flying headbutt): Oh, my God…I’m going to have nightmares about this one. I just know it. This match was so wrong on so many levels that it can’t be described. The mere fact of Benoit being in the same match with Coachman is the most obvious. But the thing that most upset me, of course, was the fact that they were having Benoit, the World Champion and the greatest North American technical wrestler of our era, leech heat off of the retard. This angle is getting over, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it other than to cause grievous bodily harm to Nick Dinsmore. I don’t want to do it, because I liked his OVW work, but if it has to be done, it has to be done.
Angle Developments:
What? No Tongue?: Aw, Matt and Lita told each other that they love them. How sweet. How nice. How….BLEEEEEGHHHHH!! How much is a new keyboard?
Matt Hardy and Amy Dumas have been a couple for years now. So why are they totally unconvincing when I hear them say that they love each other? If you’re really in love, it doesn’t matter whether or not there’s a camera in front of you (with an attendant national live TV audience). You can at least put some emotion into it. At the very least, don’t have Kane and Lita do some kind of bizarre tribute to Roy Orbison.
Hell In A GM’s Office: Here’s one for Haley’s list: as Michaels was being dragged away from Trip during the brawl in Bisch’s office, instead of letting himself be dragged away, Trip decided to get one last shot it. It was a fist to Michaels’ lower back, thus showing the audience that he’ll do anything, anytime to exploit Michaels’ biggest weakness. This is going to be one Helluva Cell match. And I wrote that before the closing schmozz, which was a wonderful set-up for the announcement we all knew was coming.
One more comment from The Joe In Me, I think:
That was one of the most awesome, AWESOME brawls I’ve ever seen in wrestling, lasting through the ENTIRE SHOW and culminating with Bischoff announcing a Hell in a Cell match between the two for Bad Blood. The Hell in a Cell makes complete sense in storyline terms, and one could actually feel the impact of the announcement. I got goosebumps, mainly because that should be one of the greatest matches in WWE history.
Very well structured. And major, major kudos to Bisch on the delivery of the “bombshell”. He put a nice little pause between “Hell” and “In” so that the audience could say the rest with him. It brings across the impression to the viewer, especially the casual viewer, of how important this match really is. It shows you what a pro Bisch is on the mic.
So, tomorrow…oh, well, Mailbag! definitely. The YAM winner from last week tries to do a witty comeback, and I decided to split the joy between here and Black. Whatever pops up in the news that floats my boat. You know, the usual. I’ll wing it and get something out there that you’ll like.
About Eric Szulczewski
