Jingus

Either this guy is a hilariously sarcastic troll, or the biggest idiot I've seen online in a long time. Either way, this could be entertaining. I'll say one thing: Eric Young truly might be the hungriest wrestler alive. Do you guys remember hearing about the time he got throat surgery to remove some polyps? Well, that was on a Tuesday, and by Saturday he was already back in the ring, working the same crappy little indy show I was employed on. (And on this particular show, he sure as hell wasn't there for the money.) He just stuck on a goofy-looking Faroocq Spartacus-type helmet and went out there and did his job. That's one tough bastard with passion for the business coming out his ears. All that being said, he was a horrible choice for Hall's replacement, since his character is a comedy midcard jobber.

It's been a few years since I read it, but as far as I can remember:

Disco's got some good points here. The 8-second rule and most people not actually paying to watch the PPVs are both common things. I do especially appreciate that he took the time to note that the stereotypical ROHbot-type smart mark that he's describing isn't necessarily the majority of internet fans. There are all kinds of different smark subcultures, from the standard twentysomethings here to the hardcore nerds at DVDVR to the idiot kids at places like Gamefaqs to the old kayfabe-lovin' fossils at Wrestling Classic. Nothing makes me groan harder than hearing a rant from some ignorant worker who logged onto two websites for five minutes and then decided he had the entire IWC's number. But anything else involving Disco: keep in mind that this is a guy who had to be taught how to throw a superkick after he'd been working for a decade (I was terribly amused watching that in the year 2003).

Believe it or not, yea, smiling damn'd villains.

Yeah, water levels, escort missions, and jumping on tiny platforms all seem to be things that nobody likes. Yet game developers have consistently been sticking those in games for decades now. Funny how that works. I don't think Pit Fighter counts, I've never heard from anyone who liked that one.

So your argument is "Well, they're gonna castrate the source material no matter what, so we might as well grin and bear it"? No. Movies like Sin City, Batman Begins, and the Lord of the Rings flicks managed to stay mostly loyal to the source, be damn good films, and make piles of money. What's the point of adapting a property in the first place if you're gonna just change everything about it that the fanboys liked in the first place? The worst about it are the video game movies, which almost always mutilate the plots of the original until the unrecognizable finished outcome is just another Hollywood action flick, but there's plenty of examples in the literary and comic worlds too. I simply don't see the point in paying a ton of money for an existing property instead of just coming up with your own original one, but then changing everything that everyone enjoyed about said existing property.

Every single action scene and fight in the book was reproduced for the movie, AND they made up a bunch of new ones as well, most notably that big stupid final shootout which was completely invented for the film version. The violce Yeah it's common, but that doesn't mean it should ever be acceptable. How many examples can you name of Hollywood making big changes in something they were adapting which ended up making the film better? Any at all? Meanwhile, there have been plenty of cases of a book or other property being adapted in a faithful manner which turned out a damn good movie.

Once again failing to mention a key point: those weren't paying fans that got turned away. Even on that night, TNA was still making people pay for ringside, but entirely filling up the bleachers with freebies. So they turned away people who got there too late for a free spot. I can't even begin to impart the sheer amount of cussing which was attacked to the name "Jarrett" amongst the fans in the parking lot after the show that night. They didn't have to worry about turning away anybody the NEXT night, iirc even the free crowd was down by half.

It is. This is example #923890 of a network being embarrassed to admit they're making money off wrestling. Personally, I do see a difference between regular and HD, but I don't care, it's not THAT much better. I think it's a ludicrous pile of cash to shell out for an incredibly arbitrary difference, that money would be better spent paying off your credit card bills or something. I don't have the money to waste on a HD set, much less the money to replace all my DVDs with a HD player and a Bluray plus yet more money for HD cable.

And I've been saying right from the beginning that the false claims about WMDs were worse than useless, they really hurt us in the long run.

They certainly didn't mention how after "babyface" Jarrett pinned "heel" Raven in their big match, the fans loved it so much that they pelted the ring with garbage.

I just find it somewhat odd that there are multiple people jumping on me for saying the factually true statement that we never stole Iraq's oil, while against the dude who thought the government faked 9/11 the only backup I got was friggin' Czech of all people. I'm sure that played a factor, of course. But that's ignoring all of Bush's other good friends in every walk of life which wouldn't benefit from this war. I don't think that the oil companies and the arms manufacturers together are such a strong force that they can direct this country's policy regardless of what the 99% of the other people in the country want to do.

Yeah, it did. They dumbed down the political and societal commentary, and played up the action scenes and romance which were mostly afterthoughts in the book. Like, in the movie's opening scene, Natalie Portman is a twentysomething beauty queen and professional office worker, who while gets randomly harassed by Evil Policemen while walking down the street. In the book, her character is a scrawny teenage street girl who is so desperate for money that she tries prostitution, and manages to solicit some really evil policemen who tell her in no uncertain terms that they're going to rape and murder her. Also the character of V is really hero worshipped in the film, while the graphic novel is much more ambiguous about him, there's a whole subplot about a woman whose life he ruins when he kills her husband which was completely dropped for the movie.

What are you trying to say there? WWII didn't magically end the depression. It helped, with the government handing out phat deals to contractors and unemployment falling to damn near zero in order to cover the massive industrial effort. But the finances involved were a huge gamble, with the USA borrowing unprecedented sums of money and selling endless reissues of war bonds in order to make ends meet; if we hadn't so decisively won the conflict, we would've been up shit creek. A war can only possibly have a longterm positive effect after it's over, and then only on the winners; we had to rebuild the economies of Germany and Japan from the ground up with Allied money before they could stand on their own two feet again. Meanwhile, to further the comparison, it's clear we're neither ending nor winning the Iraq conflict any time soon, it's a money pit, which makes the theory that we're doing it to make money dubious at best. Okay. Hadn't seen that one before. I could buy that as one of the motivations. Also, don't miss this key point: That runs directly contrary to the theories proposed here, that Bush was building a C. Montgomery Burns Sideways Drilling scenario in order to steal the entire oil output of Iraq and run away laughing, which is ludicrous and not what happened at all. Greenspan's saying that Bush thought Saddam might attack other countries in the region. (Which of course he had a track record of doing.) So even if Greenspan's completely right, although it changes the nature of the motivation from a humanitarian crusade to an economic one, it's still the same thing in practice that the government has been saying all along, that they thought Saddam was a danger to other people. The lie was just how much the administration cared about the people themselves.

Normally I find people who point out one-letter spelling typos which don't turn the word into a Freudian slip or something similar to be nitpicking pedants, but now THAT'S funny.

Sounds like either a con artist or just selfish bitch trying to get a free lunch. Did she even have a police report about the "stolen" item in question?

Contact the athletics/PE/whatever department and just ask them what it is. Though if I had to guess I'd say it's probably not weight training, because they usually mention the weights. Physical Conditioning has "jogging and push-ups" vibe to it.

According to the story you posted, the guy driving the car when he was arrested hid the gun on him, thinking the cops wouldn't search the paralyzed guy. I'm interested to know exactly what crime they were pulled over for which necessitated pulling a quadriplegic out of the car and patting him down.

Was the pun there intentional?

Yes, the oil companies and the others like Haliburton which managed to profit off the war aren't hurting. But I think it's more a case of them jumping on the opportunity that came their way than any kind of master plan which involved dragging us into a prolonged armed conflict for no possible economic upside. The government spent so much on military expenditures that it's overall a big financial loss for America. Warfare does tend to have a negative effect on economies, y'know. People say "well Bush is from an oil family so all he cares about is oil", but that's nonsense, it completely ignores the much larger political picture. Bush certainly has his biases, some of them so extreme that I have to shake my head in amazement, but his opponents tend to characterize him as being legit retarded, which is not the case for anyone savvy enough to become president. If the Republicans wanted nothing more than to line corporate pockets, there are many other methods which would've been much easier than starting a war. I'm not saying that it's inconceivable that some of the people involved were thinking of paying back a campaign contribution or two, since that's the nature of politics and it likely played a role. But it's simplistic bull to say that we went to war just to get oil, since it would've been a hell of a lot easier to just buy more of it and spend much less than invading and occupying another country costs.

My mom used to use a can opener as a Pavlonian tool to let our cats know that it was dinner time. They heard the opener whirring, they knew there was a bowl of tuna in the kitchen with their name on it. Of course, it meant that we had to use a manual opener for our own food, or else we'd be swarmed by pussy every time we tried to eat, and not in a good way.

Oh yeah, I'm gonna see it, and I hope it's good, but keep in mind Hollywood's godawful track record in adapting Alan Moore's work. They turned From Hell from a deeply fascinating look at human society and psychology into a bullshit serial killer/conspiracy theory thriller, randomly fucked around with the plot of V for Vendetta for no good reason, and all I gotta do is say the words League of Extraordinary Gentlemen to make anyone who saw it throw up in their mouth a little. Moore's long, dense, challenging plots just don't translate well to the big screen.

To me, it's a matter of the level of complaining versus the actual harm that's been done. The economy has been better before than it is now, sure. But while there are big problems, it's not like we're headed for another Great Depression. Unemployment is low, productivity is high, and the stock market is still breaking its own records on a regular basis. It's hard to go into nitpicking detail about a lot of this stuff, because I'm not an economist, we'd need Popick back in here to thoroughly explain a lot of this stuff. I just don't understand why people feel the need to invent or exaggerate stuff about how evil and incompetent Bush is, when there's any number of real, proven examples out there of massive failures under the current administration's watch. We've got the failure to capture Bin Ladin, the bungled handling of the Iraq occupation, the mistakes or lies about WMDs, the neutering of the CIA, the castration of the EPA, Bush's awesomely awful public speaking skills, the illegal immigration debacle, the subprime mess, gay marriage bullshit, Haliburton, Enron, Citigroup, the airlines, Plame, SCHIP, the 2000 election nightmare, continuing to support assholes like the Saudis, and my very favorite, Dick Chaney shooting a guy in the face and then bungling a pathetic attempt at covering it up. I mean, that's not ENOUGH? We still need to invent bullshit conspiracy theories about how we murdered thousands of our own citizens in apparently the only government coverup which ever managed to work, and pissed off the entire world in order to lose money on oil?

Yeah, sort of. One time I ordered a movie from them, and a month later it had never arrived. I contacted them, told 'em what happened, and within the next two weeks I got two different copies shipped to me.

How exactly did they carefully plan for Clinton to independently decide to have a cigar party? Firstly, why not? Secondly, see my last post above yours for some other possible motivations. ...what? So you're claiming we DO get all of Iraq's oil, all to ourselves, for free? Proof, please. Right here. Iran isn't so much more dangerous that it would have made a difference with our military, and they've got a tyrant too. As for "starting a war on our soil", you think that's a bigger stretch than the government masterminding 9/11? So you buy into those "the CIA is funded by heroin" theories? Once again, even if Uncle Sam directly pocketed every nickel from that poppy crop, we'd still be in debt from the military expenditures it took to get us there. What are you basing that on? Our economy has been growing ever since the end of WWII. It slowed down some after 9/11, but it didn't stop, and returned to normal afterwards. Most credible projections all predict further continued growth. For one thing, it kinda makes the countries who loaned us the money our bitches. It's in their best interests to make sure that America remains strong in order to pay back the debt. Also, the government debt is actually just a fraction of the total that America owes; corporate debt is a roughly equal number, and stuff like social security is another huge chunk. And like I said earlier, why do you insist that we spent billions of government dollars on Iraq in order to make private corporations millions of dollars in oil? Do you actually have the figures in front of you, showing that Exxon made a mint off this? The higher costs start at the very source. Or did you think that all those oil fields that the Iraqis set on fire were a cheap fix? Oh bullshit. If you're gonna insist on keeping the details to a minimum so will I, but I will bring up one thing. What about the people on the planes? Did the government just toss them into the Phantom Zone? Were all the relatives and loved ones who got cell phone calls from the passengers on the planes ALL just lying? Also, was Bin Ladin such our puppet (when contrary to popular belief, he was never trained by the CIA) that we faked all those other terrorist attacks that Al Quaeda committed all across the globe?