PRE-EMPTIVE STRIKES:
Those of you that know who I am won’t want me to waste time reintroducing myself.
Those of you that don’t know who I am won’t want me to waste time introducing myself.
Therefore, let’s just hurry up and boogie…
That will be the last time I use the word “boogie” in this column, I promise.
Aw f*ck, now I need to type all those damn HTML tags again… Prepare for some colossal editing f*ck-up at some point, people.
Oh, and one more disclaimer – this column will generally be much longer and marginally better. Unfortunately, I ran into problems with the concepts of time, consciousness and apathy this week. Next time around I will be both on time (sorry, Widro) and worthy of your viewing pleasure…
ANTI-NEWS:
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me.
Victoria suffered some type of leg injury at the Raw show in Champaign yesterday and had to be helped to the back by Dean Malenko & Dave Hebner. No word yet on how serious the injury is.
Credit: WrestlingObserver.com
“Suffered” – or ate?
“Leg” – or foreskin?
“Helped” – or farted?
“News item” – or making it perfectly blatant that I am struggling for news items here?
What the hell happened to Victoria anyway? Psycho bitch to Bring It On Again reject to Little Miss Bland? Hopefully they’ll use her return from injury as a chance to actually do something with her character. They sparked life into Trish and she is now one of the best heels on Raw. They tried something with Lita that was instantly doomed to blow up in their faces yet has yielded some interesting moment (e.g. the Wedding from Hell) and one highly unlikely by-product by the name of Gene Snitsky. Now, assuming that Lita will be wearing the Women’s Title sooner rather than later – after all, it has been ridiculously long by the usual WWE standards – she’s going to need a new heel to feud with. So please, please, do something with Victoria. She’s got far too much talent to let go to waste just so Stacy Keibler can get ring time to imitate Kevin Nash. Since the character has a history of being somewhat mentally unbalanced, and of allying herself with similarly afflicted people such as Steven Richards, why not just team her up with Snitsky? They could pass it off as Victoria claiming she can’t actually have children due to injuries suffered in the ring at the hands of Lita (tying into this week’s fantastic promo by Trish) and so she took matters into her own hands by bringing in her new boyfriend to ensure Lita would not have that pleasure. Hey, I know it’s far-fetched but this is the kind of soap-opera gubbins that they like to include sporadically. It would certainly be far better than Anti-Anti-American Arab-Americans or Heidenreich playing “What’s That Sausage?” in the cupboard with Michael Cole. We would once again have an interesting Victoria, something for Snitsky to do other than become Bischoff’s bitch, an opponent for Lita to feud with that could mask her in-ring deficiencies, and someone other than the now-face Kane for Matt Hardy to feud with when he returns.
See?
I am so tired. The rest of this waits until tomorrow. When hopefully there will be some results in. The hour of rectification is at hand…
Bow down… bow down… before the power of Santa! Or be crushed… be crushed… by his jolly boots of doom!
Goldberg paid a visit to the Playboy Mansion last week, but according to a 1Wrestling.com source he was asked to leave after causing a disturbance. Goldberg apparently found his way into an off-limits area of the mansion and was approached by Playboy security staff and asked to leave. Our source tells us Goldberg was belligerent and confrontational and ended up being kicked out of the mansion by security staff.
Credit: 1Wrestling.com
Well, now it’s Wednesday and, having just polished off a spicy Chinese takeaway in order to ease my suffering following the election, we resume our normal service.
I also watched some Invader Zim. Hence the quotes.
But oh, oh, oh sweet Moses how could you let that happen?
To be frank, I don’t give a rat’s ass about John Kerry, Ralph Nader, the reincarnated spirit of Rameses III or any other cretins that may have been running against Boosh. The simple fact of it is that Boosh has failed each and every one of you Americans for the past four years. You all sit back and bitch about Vince McMahon exploiting 9/11 on Raw with this new Arab character and then go and elect a President who has managed to conveniently get the majority of the electorate to forget about the sinking US economy by exploiting 9/11 for a war that the rest of the world did not want and that nobody needed. Fuck him, the man is a rapist. He has raped the damn world with his Neanderthal politics. Screw out-dated allegiances to any one particular party – they’re all the same now anyway. Screw what you though of the alternatives. The simple matter of it all is that Boosh did not deserve to be allowed back in. Where’s his job evaluation? He damn sure wouldn’t have passed one. Who watches the Watchmen?
Ah, f*ck it. None of that made any real sense. I am just far too angry to express myself in words so it looks like I’m going to have to start punching the walls again. Maybe one day they’ll be broken. In the words of a man far smarter than I am – if the world is filled with the likes of you then I’m putting up a fight.
Now back to wrestling. For now.
Goldberg makes me chuckle.
And when the f*ck did 1 f*cking Wrestling get sources in the Playboy f*cking mansion?
Children, your performance in the school fundraiser was pathetic. Your parents will receive phone calls instructing them to love you less.
Steve Austin is still filming scenes for upcoming movie The Longest Yard. They are filming in Los Angeles right now, and many say that despite being out of the ring for so long, Austin has managed to keep himself in good physical shape. One source even said that he is probably in the best shape of his life, and looks more muscular than Goldberg did in his prime. Apparently Goldberg, who is also doing scenes for the movie, has been cussing out and harassing the production assistants. It is said that he is generally making life miserable for the people on the set. Most people agree with Kevin Nash, when he said that Goldberg still acts like its 1998 and he’s the biggest name around. Goldberg and Austin were at one point tight, however Goldberg is now bitter against him for the fact that Austin is still on good terms with WWE.
Credit: PWTorch.com
Oh, that’s just priceless. Goldberg spent years bad-mouthing Vince McMahon and WWE when he was ruling the roost in WCW, continued to do so when his stock dropped and dropped and dropped (with the verbal attacks getting more and more personal along the way, in particular with Triple H), and then spent the majority of his one-year WWE tenure bitching about not getting over despite never really giving the fans any reason to cheer for him 90% of the time. So exactly what did he expect to happen to his professional relationship with WWE when his contract expired and was not renewed because he was not interested (and WWE most certainly was, especially after Brock Lesnar quit)? In fact, did he even ever have a professional relationship with them?
More importantly, who on Earth wants to see an Adam Sandler football movie with some wrestlers in it? Have we not suffered enough with The Waterboy? It astounds me that it was in fact the same Sandler that melted hearts in Punch-Drunk Love and not his evil twin, Ramon Sandler, recently returned from exile in Puerto Rico to disrupt Sandler’s plans to spread love and peace throughout the galaxy with the aid of an acoustic guitar, Drew Barrymore and Rob Schneider.
Shut up, I’m very angry. Angry and tired.
Goldberg’s still funny as hell, though. I’m beginning to think the Smackdown writers are basing Heidenreich on him, right down to those pansy red mittens…
Tell me a story about giant pigs!
Andrew Martin (Test) has about nine months left before he can compete, and Matt Bloom (A-Train) has been out with an injury. They were both released by WWE today along with Monty Sopp (Billy Gunn), who had recently undergone drug rehab, due to not having plans for them upon their returns.
Credit: WrestlingObserver.com
I didn’t think it was possible for Billy Gunn to be even gayer. Then I find out his real name is Monty Sopp. HA! Loser. Anyway, ol’ Turd Tickler will be snapped up by TNA quicker than you can say “3LK win the tag titles match at Victory Road” to further prove themselves stuck in a tangent universe where people actually want to see 1998 wrestling shows in 2004. Hell, they’ll want Bloom as well although the sight of a large, pierced and hairy American wrestler could probably make him far more money over in Japan. Put it this way, if they can give Scott Norton and Bart Gunn careers then they can do a lot worse than TAFKA Prince Albert. Test, of course, won’t give a rat’s ass as he can still follow Stacy around the shows to hang out with his WWE mates, get thoroughly plastered and continue to try and convince Stacy that if she really wants to expand on that “amazing flexibility” that JR keeps harping on about then why not just try that other thing in bed tonight… c’mon, you might like it…
Hmm, underwear growth. Lovely.
Now, if they can just fire the following then I’ll be quite happy…
Jerry Lawler, Jim Ross, Mark Henry, Nidia, Rodney Mack, Rosey, Sylvain Grenier, Tyson Tomko, Josh Matthews, Todd Grisham, Torrie Wilson, Mark Jindrak and Bill DeMott.
That is all. For now.
Let’s make biscuits! LETS MAKE BISCUITS!
The No Mercy PPV did about 190,000 buys while Taboo Tuesday did about 170,000 buys. These are the first two shows in company history to do less than 225,000 buys. Here are the estimated PPV buys for 2004 (WWE’s fiscal year 2005 began May 1), according to the WWE.com key business drivers:
Fiscal 2004:
Royal Rumble – 595,000
No Way Out – 255,000
WrestleMania – 895,000
Backlash – 300,000
Fiscal 2005:
Judgment Day – 225,000
Bad Blood – 255,000
Great American Bash – 230,000
Vengeance – 230,000
SummerSlam – 375,000
Unforgiven – 240,000
No Mercy – 190,000
Taboo Tuesday – 170,000
No Mercy and Taboo Tuesday’s buyrates are initial projections which often get a bit of a bump after full buyrates are reported by PPV distributors within the year.
Credit: WWE.com
I’m sorry; I just can’t see why people are treating this like the end of the world as we know it. Sure, I might have expected No Mercy to fetch 200,000 buys but it probably will do that base number once the final buyrate is tallied. Anybody that expected Taboo Tuesday to do as well as that given the premise and the date of the event is deluded enough to be elected President of the… Okay, enough of that. But if you would look at this in a positive manner for once then you would see that WWE managed 360,000 PPV buys in October 2004, as opposed to the 250,000 (roughly, it’s hard to tell exact numbers on that graph) that they managed in October 2003. How can that not be seen as a good thing by the company? Sure, you have to factor in the production costs of the extra show. But you also have to factor in sponsorship deals, DVD sales and the extra merchandise shifted at the event – not to mention that if there hadn’t been a PPV on that week there would most definitely have been another house show to produce anyway.
Of course, the other “bonus” PPV of 2004 took place back in June, when the combined might of Bad Blood and the Great American Bash tallied up to 485,000 PPV buys as opposed to the 400,000 buys that Bad Blood 2003 (roughly) fetched on itÃ?á¢??s own the year before. So that makes a 21% increase in PPV sales for June, plus a 44% increase in October. The only other months to have shown a growth were March (purely for the anniversary attraction of WrestleMania’s 20th birthday) and January, which can either be attributed to being a fluke or to the brand extension finally casting some doubt into people’s minds as to who would win the Royal Rumble (precisely why Triple H and John Cena should be 2005’s last two men in the match, but that’s just my fantasy booking spiel coming to the front once more… maybe I’ll explain my WrestleMania XXI card in depth next week…). Regardless, all the other months have dropped.
Now, since Linda McMahon is convinced that the majority of WWE’s audience now watch either Raw or Smackdown and not both, you should be able to see where this is going…
Two PPVs a month, every month.
You can’t blame them really. It makes financial sense, even if adding in extra PPVs to the “Big Four” months is a big mistake in my eyes. Of course, there’s always the possibility that they are waiting to see how well New Year’s Revolution does in January before they make a final decision on that.
Incidentally, who the hell thinks up these new names? Taboo Tuesday? New Year’s Revolution? Why not Vincent’s World of Whacky Whimsical Wrestling?
Your head smells like a puppy!
New Jack had all charges against him stemming from the incident last month where he stabbed his opponent in the ring 14 times dropped. The incident landed New Jack in jail for three weeks while he got together enough money to post bond. The story was originally picked up by the Associated Press.
Credit: PWInsider.com
Okay, so who is the bigger moron – New Jack for planning on stabbing his opponent 14 times during a match, or his opponent for letting New Jack stab him 14 times during a match? I mean, it’s like finding the most incompetent, blinkered, pseudo-fascist daddy’s boy of a politician in the world and then giving him access to the little black box for another four years… I really need to stop doing that…
I’m gonna roll around on the floor for a while. KAY?
There is no specific reason why WWE is running an angle where Eric Bischoff has the next month off other than the fact that they want to run an ‘inmates running the asylum’ angle for an extended period of time.
Credit: PWInsider.com
Bollocks they don’t know where they are going with it. This week’s Raw practically screamed out that there is an Eric Bischoff vs. Ric Flair match in the making, presumably at NYR (screw the full name, it’s dumb… besides, acronyms are fun for all the family…). They are going to tease this Flair face turn as slowly as an arthritic burlesque dancer it would appear, so they may as well wait until January and then have Evolution decide that they need Bischoff more than they need Flair after they have to put up with the faces running Raw for a month.
By the way, if they have Maven in charge of the show and he relegates all the main-eventers to Heat for the night and bumps up the likes of Val Venis and Steven Richards to headline Raw then that could well be the single greatest thing I have ever seen in my life. And I look down in the shower.
Aw, but I wanna watch the Scary Monkey Show!
Survivor Series will be on Sky Box Office, according to an advertisement on Smackdown. It’s the first time ever that a ‘Big Four’ supercard will have to be paid for by the British public. PWTorch.com reader Paul Clay of Shipley, England writes: “This has caused confusion as this new deal was reported to start taking place in January 2005 in which eight supercards will be PPV only – including for the first time ‘The Big Four’ – and six supercards aired for free.”
Credit: PWTorch.com
Okay, anybody out there who can afford to subscribe to Sky in the first place can certainly afford to get a broadband connection. And anybody that has a broadband connection and is bitching about having to pay for PPVs is a dolt. There are places to go, Dude. You don’t want to know, believe me. I could get you a toe by 3 o’clock this afternoon – with nail polish.
RANDOM BITS OF POO:
Andy Campbell loves Dawn Marie. He also lives in Ohio. Stupid Ohio. Stupid Dawn Marie. Stupid Andy. Stupid me. Stupid link. SHUT UP OKAY SORRY.
Go and check out Mike Ryu and his movie column over at our forefather’s site. He commands your attention.
If you’re anywhere near Union Square, New York then pop along to Virgin Megastore tonight at 18:30 and get your copy of Adam Copeland on Edge signed by, um, Edge. He’ll also be in Austin, Texas on the 8th; Westlake, Ohio on the 12th; Franklin, Indianapolis on the 15th; Southgate, Michigan on the 19th; Kingston, Ontario on the 20th; the delightful Cheektowaga, New York on the 22nd; Wynnewood, Pennsylvania on the 27th; Whitehall, Pennsylvania on the 28th and Nottingham, Maryland on the 29th. Damn, that’s a lot of books. Here’s a handy checklist to keep a hold of…
Damn, she’s hot…
Fox tried to ban this footage from getting out as the movie is still very much in pre-production, but now that a torrent has been released they’ve no hope in hell of stopping this one from spreading around fanboy bachelor pads the world over. Yes, just click here for your first look at the Fantastic Four in action from the upcoming movie. It all looks pretty good so far except for Dr. Doom, who sadly looks like the retarded lovechild of C-3P0 and that Nazi gimp from Hellboy. Prove me wrong, Story…
NEXUS SPOTLIGHT:
As many of you know, I am a comic book junkie. My bank balance certainly knows… Anyway, this is a little off-topic section that I’m going to include just to give the rest of you a heads-up on three of the best titles available each and every week. Since most people I speak to online about this column seem to be vaguely interested in comics but don’t really know where to begin in the face of decades of continuity and stereotypically socially challenged comic book store employees, I figure this might help. Of course, for all of your comic book needs then all you need to do is check out the Nexus, Inside Pulse’s very own comic book site staffed by people much wiser than I.
So, this week’s required reading…
Astonishing X-Men #6
For those of you that haven’t already heard about this one, Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel and Firefly, the God among Geeks himself, recently inked a deal with Marvel Comics to do a 12-issue X-Men story. He teamed up with artist-extraordinaire John Cassaday and the result was this, quite simply the sharpest, coolest, sexiest superhero comic book on the market today. Seriously, you’d have to go way back to the early ’80s for the Claremont/Byrne Uncanny X-Men or Wolfman/Perez New Teen Titans to see anything that could rival this. The basic plot is that a mysterious medical research company has been experimenting on Colossus for several years, keeping him captive against his will while his friends and family believed him to be dead. The experiments yielded a drug that can apparently remove the mutant gene from mutant’s DNA without killing them. While investigating this, Colossus was found by his ex-girlfriend Kitty Pryde. Now, just as they were about to shut down the laboratory for good, they have to contend with Nick Fury and S.H.I.E.L.D….
JLA Classified #1
Yes, it’s another JLA title hot on the heels of JLA Elite that was launched a few months ago. However, this one promises something a little bit different. For one thing, it’s written by Grant Morrison, whose 3-year stint on the main JLA title in the mid-90s was the saving grace of the DC Universe at the time. For another, Hip to be Square is playing on Winamp. Anyway, Morrison is coming off an incredible hot streak with the likes of New X-Men, Seaguy and WE3 astounding those brave and/or high enough to try and interpret them. He will be on this particular title for just three issues, yet you really don’t want to miss them as they are going to provide the foundations for his Seven Soldiers epic due out in 2005. It employs a technique called ‘modular storytelling’ that I’m not at all familiar with but apparently it boils down to this… Each issue can be read individually, yet forms part of a seven-issue arc. Each arc can be read individually, yet forms part of an overall 49-issue arc. And it all kicks off here, with something involving the JLA going MIA and leaving Batman to fend off Gorilla Grodd and the Ultra-Marines. Sold!
Superman/Batman #13
This has been DC’s best-selling ongoing title of 2004, yet it is pretty damn far from perfect. Sure, Michael Turner’s artwork is exemplary, but writer Jeph Loeb has really dropped the ball with his consistent plot-holes and so I’m dropping the book after this issue, which wraps up the Supergirl from Krypton arc. Basically, if you like big action scenes in your comics then you’ll probably get a kick out of this issue, which sees the titular World’s Finest heroes and Wonder Woman tackle Darkseid. Also, if you’d like to see whether or not the DCU has a Supergirl then this will provide you with the answers. If not, then give it a miss. However, according to some, this title is going to provide the set-up towards a major DC event to rival Crisis on Infinite Earths next summer… Some say the clues are already there…
These books are all available now. Unless you’re in the UK like me, in which case you need to wait until tomorrow. Son of a bitch…
END CREDITS:
This column has been brought to you in conjunction with…
R.E.M.’s Around the Sun
TLC’s Crazysexycool
Rod Stewart’s Stardust – The Great American Songbook vol. 3
AOL IM: KingKongBurnside
Iain Burnside is currently astonished that Edge is cool again for the first time since SummerSlam 2001… “He’s still bald, too…”
