Jingus

All very good points. For all the hatred he endured, Spike was possibly the most noble character in the entire Buffyverse. After all, he was the only one who asked for a soul.

I was fully confident that Bush would be reelected. No opponent as weak as Kerry was gonna beat him in this time of daily terrorist attacks. And I was fullly confident that my state, Tennessee, would give its electoral votes to Bush just like we did last time. So, in short, my vote meant jack shit. It would not and could not possibly change a single thing in terms of how the election proceeded. I'd already made my symbolic gesture by voting for Nader in 2000. In 2004, I decided that I'd rather not waste the gas and time just to vote in an election which I was already certain of its outcome.

I'm not talking about punishment. I'm talking about acknowledging that Connor has committed acts of great evil. He chose to kill that virgin, he wasn't under the power of any spell. That wasn't just being a stupid teenager, it was cold-blooded murder. To put it in perspective, remember when Buffy decided that she had to kill Anya in "Selfless"? What Connor did (actually killing the girl with his own hands) was way worse than what Anya did (summoning some demon). After Willow killed Jonathon, they spent the entirety of Season 7 punishing her and dealing with that. But Connor's crimes were just sorta forgotten.

I'm just mad that Connor got treated with kid gloves by the other characters, the writers, and the fans, all because he was young and angsty and had that oh-so-traumatic childhood. If your average vampire did all the evil deeds that Connor did, he would've been staked in an instant by one of the heroes. Connor did some really vile, fucked-up shit, and yet nobody ever held him responsible for any of it.

What's the deal? It's that he's from Tennessee. TN is like a factory for brilliant psychopaths.

I do have a story for an ending to the Buffyverse that I've been mulling over for a while, and it does heavily involve Xander (and Anya does indeed make a cameo appearance), and it ties up most of the loose ends and it generally doesn't suck. It could be done as a self-contained one season series, or a multipart miniseries, or even as a theatrical movie. Problem is, even if I wrote it all down it'd just be more fanfic, of which there is already enough to fill libraries, and most of it is crappy. But I'm nobody, like everyone else, so my ideas will not be coming to a screen near you anytime soon.

The only other one I can think of (other than those already mentioned) would be the main event to one of the little ppvs in 2000. It was a four-way dance, Rock vs Benoit vs Taker vs Kane, where the storyline was that Benoit kept "unofficially" winning the championship off the Rock, but Commissioner Mick Foley kept meddling (because heel Shane McMahon helped heel Benoit win the match) and the night always ended with Rock pinning Benoit at the end. Furthermore, count me in as one who would absolutely love to see Taker vs. Benoit done right. That would be one hell of a match. 7 Come to think of it, that was a brilliant bit of writing there. Mick Foley was the only guy the smart marks liked more than Benoit at that point, so having him be the rule-enforcer that kept Benoit from finally winning the belt was dextrous move indeed. I liked Wild Pegasus's card. But who knows what next year's Mania will be? On average, we've got a pretty bad track record for predicting what will occur a year from now, except for HHH being in the main and Taker winning of course.

At least it was something different. Hard to do anything in NHB these days that hasn't already been done to death. Hell, hard to do anything new in real life too.

I'm afraid of any animal that has the power to kill me.

Anyanka, it's the friggin Buffyverse. Nobody ever stays dead forever (except Jenny Calender). If the show had kept going they would've brought Anya back one way or another. So just imagine that she got resurrected some kinda way and she and Xander are living happily ever after somewhere in Africa.

Meh. Maybe it's just personal preferences. For example, I've always thought Siaki was bland, boring, and a wee bit dangerous.

I have no particular bias towards or against nl5x. I do like his choice of avatar. That's about it. (I'm easy to please.)

I've never called anyone a nigger. Well, to their face at least. I hang out with some racist motherfuckers and when you're drinking and stoned you say a lot of dumb shit. But I've never looked at a black person and called them a nigger. I guess that's something.

"We train boys to drop fire on people, but we won't let them write FUCK on their airplane because, it's obscene!"

I can one-up ya there. I started posting on local wrestling boards under the name "Jingus" to keep my identity a secret, because I was writing reviews of the local shows and didn't want any angry wrestlers to beat my smark ass up. Five years later, there are literally hundreds of people who know me as Jingus but have no clue what my real name is.

That does bring up an interesting point: how do casinos catch counters? Since it's all done in your head, the evidence is nothing more than facial expressions. Anyone know?

I personally wouldn't mind going to college throughout my entire life. I think continuously learning about everything would be a wonderful way to live. I'd just need a job where I could make enough money to support myself and pay for my schooling, and a really good university. Them's the stumbling blocks.

What was that one Alanis video where she just stared at the camera for three minutes straight? The girl may be annoying, but she certainly ain't afraid to buck convention and try to do something different.

Yeah, I know the reasons behind it all, but I just never bought it. Connor was so goddamn stubborn about hating Angel (despite ALL evidence showing that he was in fact one of the best men on the planet and a champion to millions) that it made me just wish that he'd never been born in the first place. Also I hate how Connor's evil actions were always instantly forgiven just because he was young and had a hard life. When Willow kills a human, it takes forgoddamnever for her to be redeemed; when Connor does it to give birth to Jasmine, it's forgotten by the next episode. Major double standard. And yeah, Doyle ruled. It was amazing how a character could be around for less than half of a season and yet still be so fully realized as a three-dimensional person, and be able to affect my emotions so strongly. EDIT: you know what would've satisfied me with Connor? An episode in which some other character beat the fuck out of him and made Connor realize just how much pain and destruction he had caused. Angel could never have done that obviously, but plenty of other people could've: Spike, Buffy, Ilyria, Faith, Willow, the list goes on and on.

My favorite position is lying back while the woman rides on top of me cowgirl style. Does that make my sexual practices okay with the womynist crowd?

I hate both parties too. I disagree with a lot of Bush's policy decisions, and absolutely loathe his superhero-level power to enrage everyone around the globe. He kinda reminds me of a good friend of mine, actually: a smart guy, but he has an almost magical talent for phrasing things badly or saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. I know Bush truly means well, and believes in what he's doing. But having him as a president seems about as appropriate as having me as a surgeon: I'd really want to cure the patient, and might even have the correct idea of how to do that, but lack of knowledge about the details and general clumsiness would inevitably lead to one big "Whoops!" in the end. As for the rest of the Republican party, they all kinda blur together in my mind. Colin Powell was the only one I ever actively liked. Other than that, it seems like mostly a club of rich white guys whose main goal is to stay in power. As to the Democrats, they're no better. They're just as bad. But in different ways. The only thing as bad as a Biblethumper is some jackass atheist who assumes that all Christians are arrogant Biblethumpers. Or a treehugging hippie who is completely ignorant of all proven scientific fact yet who has made it his mission in life to "save the planet" when it is categorically impossible to either save or destroy our mother earth. And for chrissakes, I'm a liberal, but even I despise people like PETA and NAACP whose only goal in life is to make everyone else's difficult. So what's left? I voted for Nader in 2000. I actually hit both his and Gore's button simultaneously and let fate decide, since I knew damn well that Bush was gonna win my state so my vote didn't matter anyway. I didn't bother voting at all in 2004 because I knew damn well that Bush would be reelected. As an American citizen, I feel generally disenfranchised and powerless to control any of the workings of my country's government. Nobody up there seems to represent me. I wish there were a third major party, a centrist party based on the idea of "we've got problems, let's find PRACTICAL solutions to them". But right now there ain't. Oh, and on the deal with Frist: trying to circumvent the Constitution when it's convenient to do so isn't a good thing. Filibusters should be protected, because anyone can use them, any Senator who feels like doing so. It's always been the last resort of minority parties who have a serious bone to pick and feel like the majority is overrunning them. To do away with it would be doing away with one of those much-lauded "checks and balances" that help keep this government running.

Those ratings are indeed interesting. They seem to indicate that people hated Austin as a heel, and not in a good moneymaking way. Also, Rock=ratings.

Randomness: I was going through my tape collection today and came across an old Chris Harris vs. James Storm match from back in 2000. To further accentuate the weirdness of the situation, it took place at an NWA show at the Nashville Fairgrounds (aka "Asylum"), and Tiny the Timekeeper was the referee.

You guys are a bit harsh on Apollo. I've seen him wrestle live dozens of times, and he's pretty good for a guy his size. Got kind of a Batista vibe going on. Sure, he's a bit clumsy and doesn't have the best cardio in the world, but what do you expect from someone who's six and a half feet tall and over three hundred pounds?

Oddly enough: the only place I've ever heard the term "Irish curse" before today was in Mick Foley's first book. Well, Denis Leary alluded to it one time, but then again he uses pretty much every Irish joke ever invented at one point or another.