Cheech Tremendous

Week 4 updates Congrats to Still Fly who has pulled way ahead in both total pounds and loss %. That's quite the impressive weight loss for four weeks. KOAB gets this week's award for most erratic weight. He's had a 24-pound swing from peak to trough. That's insane. Overall, it appears that the Super Bowl was a rough go for this week. Also, if I don't get updates from Kinetic, Pbone or Cyber Mark by next week, I'm dropping them.

I've been known to hang with both crews. They say it's because I swing a mean sack of doorknobs.

Just about every argument for bringing those guys in has started with the caveat "if booked properly." I think we all know that's a pipe dream. That was Steph's first year in charge and creative was just awful. They fucked up everything they touched for years. The original invasion could have worked too if booked properly. It's all about selling a storyline. Hall and Nash couldn't draw flies to shit in WWF, but they were the biggest stars in the world when they jumped to WCW because of how they were booked. The Invasion was a failure because of politics and total ineptitude in the front office, not because it was Booker instead of Hogan.

Jeter can also hang at SS even if he's terrible defensively. Nomar can't play short, or any other position on the diamond at this point in his career. That significantly drops his value even if he was healthy enough to get 400 at bats. The bat isn't good enough to carry him at DH, so where exactly does he fit in?

WWE really hadn't run a friend turns on Hogan angle since Savage in '89, had they? Besides, when Bruno was champion they did it all the time and hardly ever faced a backlash. When did they do the Fred Ottman turn? Wasn't that in late 1990 or early 1991? Not sure if that counts as a Hogan turn or not. Regardless, copying the Savage angle just two years later with Warrior in his place seems a little lazy. It might have worked, but I don't see it being a match that could draw 100,000. Not in 1991 after the Golden Era had basically ended.

I don't think so. The most likely scenario is Warrior turning heel and the whole "friend turns on Hogan" schtick was really overplayed at that point. Going face/face again would have been equally challenging, especially when the entire crowd knew that Hogan was getting the belt back. I guess maybe it could have worked with proper booking, and it was probably the plan in the spring of '90, but there were viable reasons why that wasn't on the table by the time Mania VII came around. Doesn't mean that what they ended up with was better, though. In hindsight, everything looks better than what we got.

Isn't that exactly what happened? Bischoff tried to negotiate a sale at $600 million one year prior; Vince bought it for $2.5 million.

You can get whatever you want in the omelet. I don't even remember what I had in mine. The throwing up was about 50% from the egg and 50% due to the copious amounts of alcohol I had before hand.

Didn't the Invasion PPV do like 750,000 buys? That's really good for a PPV built around DDP and Booker T. as invaders. How many more buys could they have realistically gotten by bringing in the big guns? Those were the days when hitting a million buys would have been the absolute max. Given the contracts that Hogan, Hall, Nash, Flair and Goldberg were on, I just don't think it would have been feasible to bring them in. You are talking upwards of maybe $10 million in contracts for what? 250,000 buys? That doesn't pencil out. The argument is that the Invasion would have had more legs with WCW stars. I don't buy it. Booking killed the invasion storyline more than anything, and I don't see that being any different with a bunch of primadonnas backstage. You have to remember that the biggest selling point was essentially seeing WCW stars fight the WWF. That novelty wears off once you see these guys on television week after week. Eventually they brought in those guys and they usually popped one big buyrate before fading back into the pack. I can't see that being different if you brought them all in at once. You have to consider the law of diminishing marginal returns when talking about the invasion. Each additional star added would have brought just a few more extra buys. I just don't see it as a financially feasible, even though it's what I (and most of you) really wanted to see.

Oops, my bad. I'll go back and fix.

I miss the old days of videos on MTV and VH1, but you can't fault their business model. Those trashy reality shows do monster ratings and on the whole, it has made both stations far more profitable and popular. As a supporter of good taste, I'd like to see the music back, but even I know that it wasn't a "bad" move for them. The problem is VH1 and MTV kept the original names of the stations when they got away from showing music. Had they used entirely different names for their channels I think they'd avoid a lot of this backlash.

Excellent point, Bob. All my life I've heard how overrated Ryan was because of the Ks and no-hitters but lackluster numbers otherwise. Those people do have a point, but he was still an above-average pitcher for more than 20 years with the occasional lights-out performance. Al hit it on the head: good pitcher with HOF credentials, but not one of the all-time greats. Jeter over A-Rod would be a laughable choice. The only thing that Jeter is better at is banging models. Important, yes, but not enough to outweigh the on-the-field stuff.

This is the best draft ever!

I was 191 last night. That's a four pound gain from last week, but that was artificially low due to a stomach virus that sapped me of all my fluids. Overall, a total of four pounds lost in four weeks is about where I want to be. I'll update the excel chart and get it posted this evening. I was thinking we'd go one more month. That would be 8 weeks total. Does that sound reasonable to everyone?

In five years we'll get a DECLASSIFIED thread in Graphics and I'll finally be satisfied.

Wilt Chamberlain, Pete Maravich and Red Auerbach are all very dead.

Hey VX, where is Salvador Molly's? I think they SW on the show, but I can't place it. Maybe I'll see you there. I'll look for a guy wearing a Vitamin X nametag.

How could someone dislike King Kamala?

I would have Morgan, Kent, Sandberg, Biggio and then Alomar Robinson Cano? Sorry... I just had to.

Is anyone going to ever tell us who red29 was? The suspense is killing me.

Voodoo donuts, actually. Those massive pancakes are from another place. I just called up a buddy to see if he wanted to go get some of those habanero fritters. We've got it penciled in for this weekend. I'll report back with my success (or lack thereof). The preview next week shows the 12-egg omelet from Beth's in Seattle. I've actually eaten one of those. I threw up all over the park next to Green Lake on the walk home. Too much egg.

Picked this up at another board and found it interesting. Here is a list of the the teams with the ten highest payrolls in 2008 accompanied by their projected opening day payroll in 2009. Yankees: 209.850M (2008 209.081M) Mets: 142.542M (2008 137.793M) Detroit: 126.600M (2008 137.685M) Boston: 128.005M (2008 133.390M) White Sox: ~97.500M (2008 121.189M) Angels: ~113.500M (2008 119.216M) Dodgers: 74.640M (2008 118.588M) Cubs: 137.145M (2008 118.345M) Seattle: ~95.000M (2008 117.666M) The Met, Yankees and Cubs all increased payroll, but the other seven have all reduced their commitments. The Dodgers and White Sox may still have some deals in them, but neither will probably go past $110 million.

I haven't been there in years and even then I mostly lurked. Over time WWE managed to kill my love for almost any wrestling discussion, be it current or old school. It's a miracle I even still pop into the General folder here.

That board is full of TNA-hating goths.

The only message boards I've ever been to are Sons of Sam Horn, this place and Wrestling Classics. I don't board that hard outside of TSM.