The Czech Republic

Oh great, another Confidential telecast that requires me making a run to Barnes & Noble. Last time, (Bradshaw) I had to get my Dumbshit-to-English dictionary.

I beat you to it by mere minutes, nay, seconds.

What was? I missed it. By the way, it would be funny/sad if I accidentally posted this on a Friday or Sunday

So here one is. I can't let my peeps down. Discuss the show I forgot to preview right hereabouts.

Great work, Rob. The only problem with the Booking Report is a small cosmetic one, that being sometimes it's hard to read the Smackdown blue text on the teal-green background unless you really focus on it.

I learned from this thread that "cocksmith" is tragically under-used in my vocabulary.

And then Cena is replaced by Shawn Michaels at the last minute. What exactly WAS the excuse there from WWE? I know King was in legal trouble but what excuse did they come up with? Lawler chickened out? sick? missed flight? paid Shawn off? I want to say the cop-out was Lawler knew he was better than the Harts so he let Michaels get the match, but don't quote me.

Except Bobby Heenan is funny and Bill Walton is just an ass.

More like the Tony Schiavone of basketball.

Birthday present is decided.

That was awesome. Flair needs to do The Who impressions more often. Evolution should all do Who impressions! Flair can be Pete Townshend, and HHH can be Roger Daltrey. Randy Orton should do Keith Moon.

27! I win! But I've gotta keep Reachin' For Reagan and getting my score up.

I think that Banky should be a moderator. I also think that ex-convicts should be able to vote.

The German track stars said "veranda relay race!"

haha, maybe he said "let me see that thong" and she didn't so he shot her, lol! i think that's because she had dumps like a truck so he shot her truck, lol2003! that sisqo is funny but i liked disqo better hahahaha

I just watched that episode! It's a really old one, where Marge goes to prom with Artie. I think it's along the lines of, "Whenever I do something, part of me says yes and part of me says no. How could the one thing in my life that I've ever been sure about be wrong?" Pretty profound for teenage Homer if you ask me.

Your answer for everything is to get laid you dirty slut. You get ass hair stuck in your teeth and call her dirty?!?

Yeah, but then you have players like Ichiro and Yao Ming in other sports coming in and being huge fan favourites, so I don't know how much water that theory holds. I'd base it on how well a typical ignorant American can locate the country of origin. China? Yes. Japan? Sure. Slovenia? Good luck. Estonia? Gotta be kidding me. Russia is the exception, but they're inaccessible because their names are so freaking hard, and still to this day, some people "don't like those Commies."

In regards to the eternal debate of high score vs. low score: Both have their merits, but I don't want to see one or the other all the time. A low-scoring game in which the goaltenders are standing on their heads fending off all sorts of scoring opportunities for the better part of sixty minutes is entertaining. Watching endless stalling in the neutral zone after a fluke goal is not. Watching the best snipers in the league send the puck into the net time after time on both teams is entertaining. Watching the goaltenders slack off and just let everything in like a sieve as you said, is not. I'm not a Typical American High-Score Junkie, I can appreciate a 0-0 tie forty-five minutes into the game. But I'm not going to "mark out for the trap" like Bob Barron. Seriously, that's weird: ::June, 1995, Bob and others are watching the Devils bore their way to the Cup:: (bored by Jersey's trap) "What is this? They're not doing anything. This game sucks." (transfixed to the screen) "HOLY CRAP, GUYS.....HOOOOOO-LY CRAP!" In regard to the WHA being XFL-like, they should learn from Vince's mistakes and simply make small changes and nothing too radical. Keep it at five skaters, play on regular or international ice, I don't care, but no touch-free icing. And don't rely on goons and marketing the players, or gimmicked camera angles, and so forth. If they can give us a product with quality akin to the 1980s NHL, or even the early 90s, I'll be happy. I don't know where I stand on the salary cap. We need a happy medium between the NHL and NFL. Even though I'm not crazy about the same few teams running everything, it gets hard for me to follow the NFL because everything is just too ebb-and-flow with teams. In conclusion, fuck the Devils.

RIAA pushed me into a puddle of mud! (Which isn't as bad as listening to Puddle Of Mudd.) And on the last day of school before Christmas vacation, TheMikeSC raised his hand and said "Mrs. Albright, you forgot to give us homework!"

Africa's backward cultural rituals are so entrenched that all the Peace Corps presentations involving bananas and condoms won't save them. Of course bananas and condom presentations aren't exactly stopping things here either.,

Before I clicked the link I thought she got raped at an Andy Warhol exhibit and was traumatized in that regard. But yeah "the dentist that specializes in teeth" was good for a laugh.

I didn't know it was physiorogical, I arways just figuled that they could plonounce their Ls and Rs collectly just by being immelsed in collect plonunciation.

I conceived the idea for this post this morning, and had planned a big formal essay on the rise and fall of the NHL through the 80s and 90s, but it's late and I'm tired, so I simply can't put together a nice slick post, and for this I apologize. Basically, what I intended to say was that over the years, the NHL has fallen from a competitive to a distant fourth in terms of major league sports popularity, with debatable sports like golf and NASCAR nipping at its heels. Either despite or as a result of expansion and mainstreaming of hockey by Gary Bettman and the rest of the league, the NHL seems to be not succeeding but faltering in many regards. The NHL television contract, which is small change compared to the other three leagues, expires after this year, as does the collective bargaining agreement, ostensibly resulting in another lockout. Even less exposure, in addition to labor unrest, is once again jeopardizing the league's future. Hopefully, the new WHA will fill the void in more ways than one: providing major-league hockey to compete with the trap-happy NHL, and restoring classic NHL markets that were deemed not viable by Gary Bettman. Add in the fact that merchandise sales are not where they should be. Conversely, we can argue that due to being mostly gaudy and expensive, sweater sales are exactly where they should be. The NHL is trying to bolster jersey sales at the expense of tradition, a tactic which evidently most of us cannot see working. Maybe I'm not looking hard enough, but there doesn't seem to be a star player in the NHL the way baseball has Bonds and Sosa, NBA has Kobe and Shaq, and the NFL has Favre and Urlacher and others. Of course there won't be another Wayne Gretzky. But we need someone to be an ambassador for the sport, to achieve widespread popularity and respect. Many of the popular teams like Detroit and New York are focused on stars of the past. With Patrick Roy, Mike Richter, Kirk Muller, and Doug Gilmour all recently retiring, the players from the 80s and 90s, the league's better days, are slowly being phased out. But back on track, there's no player that represents hockey right now. Our talent pool is large but shallow, if that makes sense. There's a lot more to say, and I'll leave that to the rest of you, because I'm tired. I apologize for a disjointed mess in lieu of a polished essay (I'm actually getting the gears spinning on a paper for econ regarding the NHL's economic systems and marketing problems), but hopefully our discussion can salvage this. I'll leave with these quotations regarding management and league quality: "I sympathize with the hockey players, because they bust their ass, give you good return on your money, and legitimately love what they're doing . . . and that new commissioner Gary Bettman seems like some sort of Napoleonic creep." -Dennis Miller in 1994 regarding the lockout "Who would pay to watch this?" -Brett Hull regarding the NHL's quality of play

Bah. I liked the skate logo that the Canucks had when they were Cup contenders.