Okay, now that I’ve successfully made Hevia quit, time to explain my absence, I guess…
Well, it started when I went up to Chicago a couple weeks ago. While driving through southern Illinois, the transmission on the Damn Vaninator…well, for lack of a better term, disintegrated. Fortunately, I was able to nurse it to a rest stop, where I was able to get a tow into the nearest town with a repair shop. I was able to get a rental car and head up to Chicago. After staying with my mother as long as I could take it, I went back down there (two hundred fifty miles away, mind you) and found that it wasn’t ready yet, despite the fact that they told me it would be (admittedly, they had problems getting the old transmission off, which required a welding torch and various other implements of torture). Instead of driving back to Chicago, I just headed back to Kansas in the rental car (no, no, no, I wasn’t taking the car out of Illinois, really). I had to leave early Tuesday morning to get back to southern Illinois to pick the Damn Vaninator, finally repaired, up and drop off the rental car, early enough that I blew off Raw and went to sleep. But here’s the fun part: the credit card machine at the repair shop wasn’t working. This meant that I had to travel another hundred and thirty miles round trip to the nearest branch of my bank to get cash to pay them (no out-of-state checks, thank you). Then I had to make the three-hundred-fifty mile trip back. Naturally, there were problems. The dome light wouldn’t go off, which didn’t really help when I was driving in the f*cking dark. Also, the transmission indicator started flashing when I was just outside Kansas City, despite the fact that the fluid was full and it seemed to be working perfectly fine. So I had to haul it in to the local Ford dealer here to get those things checked. Turns out the repair guys in southern Illinois forgot to hook up a few things when they replaced the tranny. Ended up paying for that too.
Well, at least that’s pretty much over. The Damn Vaninator is working, I’m still not, and recruiters that have contacted me are getting snippy about my job history being so extensive.
Now, on to Taboo Tuesday. While driving back from southern Illinois on Tuesday evening, I happened across a St. Louis wrestling radio show originating from some bar in the greater St. Louis area. Despite having an MP3 player in the Damn Vaninator along with a number of CDs loaded down with said, I decided to keep it tuned because, well, I have to admit, I was perversely curious. These guys were trying to maintain the most precarious balance possible: they were completely mark except when it suited them (specifically when dealing with the Wife-Beater situation, where they admitted straight out that Wife-Beater left because he didn’t want to job to Coachman; he gets partial credit for referring to Mickie James as Alexis Laree). It made the smart stuff incredibly jarring. The host, by the way, came across as a complete retard. I understand this, though, and accept it. Radio shows are dependent on getting guests from the wrestling world in order to get ratings. If they don’t act like dumb marks, they won’t get those guests. It’s kayfabe, really; the wrestlers know better, the radio hosts know better, but they can’t say that they know better, despite the fact that most of the audience for those shows are also smarts or smarks, and they know better.
What are they afraid of these days? That Batista won’t be thought of as TEH HAWT!!11!11!!! by girls if someone on a radio show said that he was pushing forty, married, with kids? I loathe hypocrisy, which is why I won’t participate in any of those shows. I’ve been asked in the past to appear on more than a few wrestling radio shows, but have said no (I did ask one of them for a free mic, but they said no, so I responded in kind). I don’t want to participate in any kind of deception operation.
And that is what Taboo Tuesday is: a deception operation. I was one of the very few who said it last year, and I’m one of the very few to say it this year: this whole thing is a fix, no matter what some writers on this site might think. WWE will do what it wants to do no matter what. Once a year, though, they decide to amuse themselves by couching it in an online “vote” in order to say, “Look, we’re showing what you want to have on! You voted for it!”. Bullshit, and you know it. They’ll stack the voting in certain ways to massage a certain result.
This year, they weren’t even subtle about it. Was anyone really fooled into thinking it’d be someone other than Shawn Michaels in the Triple Threat? Trip/Flair presented steel cage and two horrid match options, then just to hedge their bets, they had Flair begging for the cage. They couldn’t have been more obvious if Coal Miner’s Glove was one of the match options. The other matches were, for lack of a better term, irrelevant.
Taboo Tuesday is as interactive as a Steph voodoo doll, and just as effective. Let’s hope the buyrates are pathetic enough that they won’t try this again next year. It should join King of the Ring in the WWE PPV graveyard. King of the Ring, though, had one benefit over Taboo Tuesday: it was a good idea whose time had passed and was killed by inept booking. Taboo Tuesday should have been aborted, or at least someone should have taken a Morning-After Pill after last year. But the pharmacist probably didn’t approve it because of his imbecilic religious beliefs (apologies for the redundancy).
That being said, let’s snark away…
THE TABOO TUESDAY SHORT FORM
Match Results:
Rey-Rey and Matt Hardy over Gene Snitsky and Chris Masters, Interpromotional Set-Up For Survivor Series (Pinfall, Rey-Rey pins Masters, springboard splash): Well, this was utterly f*cked up. From Edge bolting at the beginning to the blown spots to the double refs…can you have a Piss Break Match as your opener? Poor Rey-Rey, being stuck with these three stiffs in his hometown. Kinda like how I’m going to feel with Wrestlemania if Wife-Beater/Hogan happens.
Edge doesn’t care what the “fans” want. For once, Mistah Copeland and I are in complete agreement.
Let’s hope that Mike Chioda can actually learn something from being in there with Nick Patrick
Given the angles involved, shouldn’t Hardy be thanking Snitsky?
Now that’s high
Nick Dinsmore and Jimmy Snuka over Rob Conway and Tyson Tomko (Pinfall, Snuka pins Conway, splash): So is this the end of Conway’s “Legends-baiting” angle? If so, what a poor way for it to die. They can still get a SurSer-style match out of this for later this month, you know. And I still haven’t received a mea culpa from any other columnist here telling me I was right about Dinsmore from the start. You owe me, guys, and I expect subservience to your master.
Conway and Tomko: the Chicago White Sox of my favorite sport, Beat the Retard
Mick Foley (as Mankind) over Carly Colon (Submission, Mandible Claw): The only reason they threw Mankind into this is because we haven’t seen him in a while. Cactus Jack would have made for a far better match…that’s so weird to say, but Foley’s always maintained a firewall between his personae and has varied their movesets sufficiently to be able to make such a statement. That being said, this f*cker was phenomenally, mind-numbingly boring. Neither of them really tried to do anything remotely interesting. This is normal for Carly, but for Foley…there must have been some severely ruptured minds among the Foley Fangeeks out there. You think that Foley resents that must-wrestle-two-matches-a-year clause in his new contract?
When Foley watches the replay of this match, he’ll wish that move concussed him
Seen it
The Big Show and Kane over Trevor Murdoch and GarriLace Cade, Tag Titles Match (Pinfall, TBS pins Cade, chokeslam, New Tag Champions): So, what is the preferred term for Cade and Murdoch these days, America’s Least Wanted or the West Hollywood Rednecks? Whatever the case may be, they were forced to job to the Mismatched Tag Partners, only this time, they’re two huge guys! Hey, what creativity! Whatever happened to that plan to make TBS into a “special attraction”? Guess that’s out the f*cking window now too. You know, this thing was so close to a comedy match that they should have just gone all the way and turned it into one, but after the Laff Riot that was Raw the last two weeks, they must have been funny-boned out.
Hmmm, four matches, four face wins. Did Steph give “creative” a long vacation or something? It’s like a bunch of fan retards (sorry about the redundancy) booked this thing. Oh, by the way, Hevia’s right. Steph should hire two wrestlers and three respected, well-known fans to do booking on Raw. I’m sure that the three Hevia has in mind are himself, me, and Scooter. You know what? We’d do it cheap. And we’d do it right.
When Kane gets his pyro before the match, you know he’s going to win
Where will you be when your diarrhea medication wears off?
Oh, get a room
DAVE over Jonathan Coachman (and Goldust and Vader), Street Fight (Pinfall, DAVEBomb): I can’t verify if Coachman called every person in Kansas wanting them to vote for a verbal debate. I never got a call. Of course, if he’d reached me, I’d have told him a few things, like “Who the hell are you kidding trying to do play-by-play?” But that doesn’t matter, because we knew this’d be a street fight. Unfortunately, it was a street fight with no raison d’etre once Wife-Beater pulled out and the Ross stipulation was lost. However, with DAVE in there, it was a better match than what we would have had.
By the way, this is now the third time that Wife-Beater has taken his ball and gone home because of “creative differences”. Unless your name is A. J. Pierzynski, three strikes, you’re f*cking out. If you still want Wife-Beater around after this, you’re a sad piece of shit who doesn’t deserve the oxygen you consume. And that includes columnists here. I normally don’t go after fellow columnists at this site, but if I see one piece of literature in the section demanding clemency or providing justification for Wife-Beater, you’re on my shit list. And that’s a place you don’t want to be.
Oh, by the way, that’s five for five on face wins so far.
“And this one’s for the Blacktop Bully!
Trish Stratus over (in order of elimination) Maria Kanelis, Candice Michelle, Ashley Massaro, Victoria, and Alexis Laree/Mickie James (I haven’t decided yet which one I’m going to use), Women’s Title Lingerie Battle Royal: Again, you can tell that this show is being booked by no one with one ounce of creativity. Get rid of the non-wrestlers and have the other women fight it out is so obvious that even “creative” can stumble across it. But that ending…oh, yuck. I’ll give the ladies this: they showed the most workrate out of anyone so far tonight. Of course, the Flair/Trip Bleedfest is still to come, not to mention Michaels and Angle in the same ring.
Oh, yeah, six of six for the faces. Please note, Civilization IV (which I am graciously allowing BAXLEY! to review) is on my HD. So is Quake IV. So is AOE 3. And I’m watching this shit.
That reminds me, I have to pick up a twelve-pack
Do you think Debussy had this in mind when he wrote the Chansons de Bilitis?
If he didn’t have that in mind, he definitely had this in mind
Tajiri’s idea of foreplay
Hevia’s idea of foreplay
Ric Flair over Trip, Intercontinental Title Steel Cage Match (Flair escapes cage): WWE is kicking themselves repeatedly in the nuts right now. With the addition of the steel cage, this match was a Money Match. And they wasted it on Taboo Fucking Tuesday. Now they’re going to have to surpass this one. How? Are they going to use Flair’s escape to do Hell in the Cell, where there is no escape rule? Remember, that’s Trip’s “special match”, and it’s the only way to escalate this. But the timing sucks. They’d have to do it at Survivor Series. They can’t wait until Royal Rumble because, let’s face it, Trip is right now the prohibitive favorite for the Rumble Match because you know he’s got to have a title shot at WM (of course, he could already be holding the belt by then, in which case Royal Rumble is also out because Cena has to finish up his program with Angle at SurSer, and winner gets Trip).
You know how I’d like to see this program end? With Trip cutting a promo and saying “I was wrong. You still have it. You’re still the Nature Boy,” and offering his hand in forgiveness, which Flair accepts. No stabs in the back, no double-crosses, no turns. They’ve proven that they work too well together to keep apart for long. That’d be a nice change from the normal crap that they’ve been feeding us.
Just a reflection here: Mickey Jay was in the ring for this one as ref. Meanwhile, remember that radio host in St. Louis that I was talking about? Well, during the Taboo Tuesday preview show he was doing, he was pimping an appearance by Earl, Dave, and Brian Hebner at a T-shirt shop in St. Louis this upcoming weekend. How the mighty have fallen.
Now, the match…you know, this one’s already polarizing fandom. The old-school guys like me are eating this thing up like there’s no tomorrow. The younger guys are comparing it unfavorably to Angle/Benoit and even (cough, gasp) Edge/Hardy. No f*cking way. Angle/Benoit was a better match on an absolute scale, but that’s only because it involved two of the best wrestlers in the world at the top of their game. This was different. It was something special. This was an Early-Eighties Jim Crockett Promotions Cage Match. We’ve always suspected that Trip would love nothing better than to have been in Charlotte back then, having cage matches with Tully Blanchard and Magnum TA and Nikita Koloff and Dusty Rhodes and, yes, Ric Flair (and this match played the nostalgia card better than the Misawa/Kawada match back in June). At Taboo Tuesday, he got to live out his fantasy, and responded with his best match since he and Michaels went at it two years ago (yes, even better than the WM match with Batista). Yes, Trip’s incredibly guilty of not giving a shit when he’s in there with opponents that he doesn’t want. This one, though, he wanted, and wanted bad. He came through perfectly. And Flair’s intensity was absolutely believable. They played the angle to (not to overuse the term) perfection, and it paid off in spades. The only flaw in the whole sequence was making this match for the title. Two guys with an acknowledged twenty-six world titles between them fighting over a secondary belt? No. No. No. Sorry, but no. It tipped the ending so bad that it could have spoiled it if not for the match quality.
You know, we’re two months away from deciding Match of the Year. Right now, this is my winner. I’d even put it ahead of either of the A. J./Daniels Iron Man matches, the A. J./Daniels/Joe Triple Threat, and the Angle/Michaels WM match (which I said at the time wasn’t an MOTYC, and my opinion hasn’t changed). It’s not a technical tour-de-force like the others, but I didn’t come into it looking for technical innovation. I came into it looking for copious quantities of blood and two guys behaving like sneaky, conniving bastards while putting on a very good pure wrestling match that was a throwback to the days when I was still in college and had a sex drive worth speaking of. That’s what I got. And it was immensely satisfying. You got the feeling about halfway through that Trip knew it was a great match, and that he wanted to give Flair one final MOTYC to put on his CV, so he turned it up a notch. It was his way of paying tribute. You know what? It was the right and proper thing to do, something that you haven’t been able to put on Trip’s plate for a long time.
It’s time for WWE to start thinking about The Best Of Ric Flair Volume 2. And this match should be on there.
And do I need to say it? Seven for seven for the faces, with only Angle standing in the way of a complete sweep.
Flair is the only man who can pull off wearing magenta trim on his robe
This is like the Karate Kid beating up Mister Miyagi
Trip’s expression is just priceless. He looks like Eddie Haskell.
Normally I’d bitch and moan about Trip doing a Flair Flop, but in this match, it just seemed right somehow
Now here’s how the Master does it
The Flop I was cool with, but the Figure-Four…that’s getting a little too close to the border there
On behalf of the millions of us who have wanted to give Trip the finger, tell him “f*ck you”, and call him a motherf*cker, thank you, Ric Flair. We can live vicariously through you.
Do you ever get the feeling that Trip and Steph regard blading as foreplay?
I’d say “You’ll believe a Flair can fly”, but I’ve overused that one
Flair reaches territory where only Steph, Vince, and Shawn have been
John Cena over Shawn Michaels and Kurt Angle, WWE Title Triple Threat Match (Pinfall, Cena pins Michaels, F-U): And the biggest F-U was given to the audience, which has to endure at least a few more weeks of Cena holding the f*cking strap. Who the hell is booking this?
No, Mister Anderson, this does not deserve four and a half snowflakes. You know why? First of all, f*cking Cena was in it. That drops it one star by itself. Second, a guy who spent 75% of the match outside on the floor got the pinfall. Said guy didn’t even bother to sell the effects of being put through the Spanish Announce Table once he made it back in. That extended body scissors sequence was in there to pad the match time (although Angle and Michaels did a good job selling it). It deviated from the standard Triple Threat Formula only in keeping one of the wrestlers out of the ring for an extended period of time rather than short transitions. The fact that Angle and Michaels were carrying him was flaunted. No, this does not deserve such effusive praise.
They’re getting damn close to the breaking point on Cena right now. The audience, except for the rabid fangirls who think he’s sooooooo cute, has turned against him. He’s been exposed time and time again as an inferior wrestler. People are sick of the gimmick. If he holds on to the strap past SurSer, there’s almost certainly going to be audience revolt. They’ve kept the belt on him far too long. Time to get rid of it and get him into a program with someone who can assist him and make him look good. Maybe it’d be a good time for a heel turn as well (in which case, the ideal person to put him up against would be Michaels). Just do something with him. Don’t stand pat.
And a face went over in every single match on the card. Please, go ahead, tell me that there’s no problems with the booking. Then allow me to laugh in your face until I turn blue.
“Dear Lord, please punish Hunter and Ric for forcing me to follow their match with something involving Cena…”
If we can airbrush out the guy to the left who’s laying down, things would look so much better
Cena displays his qualifications for the Pro Bowlers’ Tour
Cena now displays his complete inability to sell a clothesline
Michaels and Angle realized that Cena hadn’t had his initiation into the World Champions Club
Now they force Cena to learn a hard truth: the Spanish Announce Table has a better workrate than he does
Angle demonstrates how to do a proper kneelift, to those of you who still think that Trip does a good one
As good a way to waste time as any while Cena recovers
Uh, isn’t there supposed to be a third person in this match?
Oh, there he is. Shit.
Michaels is so great he gets his own lens flare
Angle Developments:
Prescience: And speaking of announcers, with Coachman in a match, who’s going to be with Lawler in the booth, if anybody? They can just correct the whole JR situation in one fell swoop by bringing in Styles to team with Lawler, then have Vince be “impressed” by Styles and give him the job permanently on Raw next week. – Yr Humble Scrivener, the Super-Secret Writers’ Forum, Tuesday morning prior to my leaving to pick up the Damn Vaninator and prior to the rumors of Styles being in the booth hitting the Net.
God, I’m good.
And, by the way, anyone who denigrates Styles for this performance is a Ross Apologist who can’t understand that Ross, like the old incontinent, near-paralyzed hound dog that he is, should be put out of his misery by being put on the wwe.com material. That way, we Raw viewers will also be put out of our misery.
Enjoy it while it lasts, Lawler. Coachman’s his perfect partner and you know it.
One more time for old times’ sake
Okay, someone tell me what’s wrong with this caption
Grecian Formula’s greatest failures
Look carefully at the fact that Michaels received only 46% of the votes, then tell me that Taboo Tuesday voting isn’t fake
1994 WCW called. They want their wrestlers back.
“The lights are on, but you’re not home…your mind is not your own…”
With 0 votes taken into consideration when it came to match planning
From reading the commentary by my fellow columnists here, I’m getting the feeling that they’re falling into the old “last two matches were great, therefore a great PPV” trap. Oh, guys, I’ve warned you about that how many times now? Yes, the last two matches were great, but they were proceeded by six matches that kinda, like, sucked. The divergence in quality is so wild (and blame can and will be assigned, starting with Wife-Beater) that the final judgment must be expressed, yet again, by a Transvestite Elf Agent:
Okay, I’ll be back later this week with a TNA Two-Hour Whore Special/Smackdown Double-Team, and then it’s back to normal next week. So, until then, enjoy.
