Yeah, I screwed up royally last week.
I told you that “a woman” was in the Cruiserweight Title match, when in reality it was Spike Dudley. Now, Spike Dudley does have the figure of a woman, but it was really nothing more than a lack of effort on my part. I tried to get something done in a hurry for Widro, and it just didn’t happen. This week, though, I’m starting the column on Tuesday, so there’s no excuses for any last minute rush jobs and errors.
Perhaps I should intentionally toss mistakes in here every week. After all, last week generated the most mail I’ve gotten since the whole Lance Storm thing went down.
WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP RASSLIN?
Ted Turner’s still in the hunt for a wrestling promotion, apparently. We get these rumors at least once a year these days, but this time he’s actually got “people” sending out feelers to various stars to gauge their interest in working for him. When you’ve got “people” handling something for you, it’s gotta be legit, right?
“Cold Stone” Steve Austin and Bill Goldberg are the two names being mentioned as possible signees, of course. That’s mostly because they are the only to big name free agents out there, with the exception of the old school WCW stars like Sting, Luger, and Man Mountain Rock.
If Ted can get television, then I’m all for him starting up another wrestling promotion. My only request is that they put the show on Thursday nights so that we’ll have a healthy alternative to Smackdown. Actually, the REAL alternative to Smackdown is called JOEY, but it won’t be airing until the fall. If Ted put some programming on opposite of Smackdown and had Austin and Goldberg appearing on it every week, I pretty much guarantee you that Smackdown would instantly get better.
SOONER THAN EXPECTED?
Booker T’s been telling people that he’s going to retire sooner than he expected to. The interesting thing is that Booker did an interview on the Wrestlemania XX DVD that said he’d planned on retiring right after Wrestlemania 19, but stuck around because he seemingly loved the thrill of performing in front of a live crowd.
Now, though, Booker’s stuck on a crappy brand with no hope of anything but a Papa Shango gimmick in the future, and so he’s thinking about hanging up the boots early and getting out od dodge before the Titanic really goes down. I say good for him, because it’s not really fun watching a guy who obviously doesn’t care about his job anymore.
TECH STUFF
<> The newest EBay craze seems to be the sale of invites to the beta testing of GMail, Google’s free email service. The high bids are running about $135 each, and Scott Keith is even selling two invites to the service.
Now, I’m just as excited about GMail as the next guy — in fact, I’ll probably use it as my permanent account as opposed to my Army or JeremyBotter.com accounts simply because of the massive storage and search capabilities. Well, that and I love Google and will support anything they do. They changed the way search is handled, they recently unveiled a new Blogger that’s so easy that ANYONE should now be able to create a blog, and now they’re offering a mail service when no one really expected them to do so. Outside of the web browser itself, Google’s search engine might be the best internet tool ever created, and to have that kind of power within an email account would be a thing of beauty. Not only do you have Google’s search tools at your fingertips, but you also get TEXT ADS just like Google displays everywhere else instead of those crazy banner ads like you see here at 411.
If you’ve been a longtime Blogger member, you’ll probably notice that you have a GMail invitation on your new Dashboard. I found this out this evening and immediately signed up, so all email from here on out can be sent directly to me at botter@gmail.com. The service is INCREDIBLE — keyboard shortcuts, the incredible search, and many more things that I can’t even begin to get into right now.
<> Does anyone else out there (Eric included) use Mozilla Thunderbird? It’s the latest and greatest in email software technology, but I can’t seem to get the Adaptive Filters for junk mail to work. It’s supposed to “learn” what junk mail is when you identify bad pieces of email in your inbox, but I’ve been using the software for two whole months and I’m STILL averaging about 160 pieces of spam mail per day in my inbox. I want to keep using TBird, as I love the interface, but if it can’t learn what’s junk mail and what isn’t I’m going to have a hard time sticking with it.
Actually, I was running 0.5 and I see now that 0.6 has been released, and it’s supposed to have improved junk mail controls. We’ll give it a few weeks and see how things work out.
<> There’s GOT to be a few digital audio specialists out there in my readership. I’m looking for a wrapper that will allow me to wrap DirectX plugins (such as AutoTune 4, which I own) and allow me to use them in a Mac OSX Pro Tools setting. Anyone out there that can help? I’m not even sure that it’s possible to run DX plugins on a Mac platform, but I’ve seen VST-to-RTAS wrappers before and they’ve worked wonders, so I’m hoping there’s something like it for DX.
<> I picked up a Palm Zire 21 over the weekend, and while it’s not the greatest thing available in terms of PDA’s, it still does what I want it to do. I needed something to keep notes, lyrics and other things while I’m in the studio
I’VE GOT MAIL
William Ricks chimes in with a few thoughts:
Um…did you promise Widro you’d recap smackdown (doesn’t deserve caps) on a weekly basis taking over from Keith? Or just for this one column? Because if it was the former then 1.) you must be more sleep-deprived than I thought and 2.) I can’t see you doing it for more than 4 weeks max.
I mean, you were so sick of giving even the brief recap you did that you didn’t even notice that Spike Dudley was the third participant in the “Anything But” Cruiserweight title match. Then again, I can see how he’d get mistaken for a woman.
I have yet to see Mordecai and Taker in the same ring at the same time so how much shorter and smaller *is* he than Mean Mark?
I promised Widro that I’d cover Smackdown in my Friday Updates mostly because, well, it’s Friday and Smackdown is a wrestling show that happens the night before. The same thing would go for Raw or NWA or anything else that was on — a lot of people don’t see the show (like me) and (unlike me) they want to know what happened. It’s my duty to give them that news, regardless of whether I enjoyed the show or not. That’s irrelevant when it comes to the news, and I should have been a lot more careful last week when doing the mocking Smackdown report.
Mordecai is no small dude, okay? He’s big by normal human standards, but by Big WWE Superstar Standards he’s just a little above average. Taker will dwarf him when they eventually do an angle, and you just KNOW they’re gonna do one at some point. The gimmick has been pretty junky thus far, but this is also one of those WWE Creations that they’re gonna stick with no matter how mad it gets or how little overness it actually achieves. That’s the WWE Way, of course.
CLOSURE
I hope I was able to make up for last week’s content this week. I mean, I know I don’t write as much as Eric (and likely never will), but this week had a lot of good stuff that I hope you enjoyed. Remember to bookmark jeremybotter.com for my blog, which has been sparsely updated recently as well. Be sure to stay tuned to Scotsmanality.com this weekend for the house show report from Scots, as it’s sure to be entertaining; he’s attending a Smackdown brand show, after all, and we all know how bad THOSE can get.
Everyone have a good weekend, and be sure to check back here for the Saturday update from Ross.
