Jingus

Bill Behrens publicly denied the Sabu story. But even if it were true, it's probably just a lie to get him to go away because someone in the office doesn't like him. After all, this "homegrown" company did feature four ex-WWE/WCW guys in their last main event, and seems awfully shy about putting that title on Joe.

My parents (mom and her current husband) tolerate each other well enough, but we're so fundamentally different that it's hard to talk much about anything. She's an aging limosine liberal, obsessed workaholic, dangerously paranoid about germs, phobic of life in general, vaguely Protestant, and she likes Patrick Swayze movies. He's an aged Iowa farm boy, classically trained bass singer, obsessed workaholic, painfully square and whitebread, Christian in a fuzzy nondenominational way, and spends his spare time banging away on the piano while singing stuff that was written three hundred years ago and in German. So neither one of them are exactly perfect matches for a jaded slacker agnostic "child genius gone to seed" who is obsessed with pro rasslin like myself. I get along real well with my little brother, though. He's gone through so many phases that he can match my width of interests in random obscure shit. He's been a stay-at-home nerd who did nothing but play video games, a goth who was obsessed with Nine Inch Nails and partying on the weekend, a popular kid who had a dozen different girlfriends in high school, an Eagle Scout, a bass player and speaker system expert, a trigger-happy cop wannabe with a degree in police science, a married family man with a smoking hot wife who's not afraid to tazer someone in a drunken argument, and finally ended up in his current position, somewhere a few hundred feet underwater as a Navy weapons tech, literally the guy with his finger on the button of apocalypse in a nuclear submarine. Yet he's still just a cool guy who I can talk to about almost anything.

When I was a little kid, it was all about Transformers, but there were several others fighting for second place: Ghostbusters, Back to the Future, and Short Circuit. When I got a bit older it was Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and all the Rambo and Alien flicks. Albeit those last two usually being in "taped off Fox in the middle of the night" type of things. I don't think my parents allowed me to see a single R-rated movie in the theater until I was thirteen fuckin' years old. I can't believe some of the shit you guys got to see. EDIT: and oh yeah, real men cry while watching The Little Mermaid or The Last Unicorn.

No, TNA will be shitting themselves with excitement to get ahold of Carlito. He's not quite an Angle/Booker level acquisition, but I'd argue he's almost as big a star as Christian was. Plus, this is the same company that employs Billy Gunn and Kevin Nash, they'll hire any-damn-body who got famous with the WWE. It took them weeks to realize "um, maybe this isn't a great idea" with friggin' Test and Rikishi, and no matter how much the IWC says that Carlito is lazy, he's way better than either of those two loads. Carlito would be helped a lot by the simple fact that, with the nature of his gimmick, he doesn't have to change much after leaving the WWE. His name is really Carly, his hair always looked like that, and if they never managed to stop Scott Hall from throwing toothpicks and "Hey yo", I doubt they can demand Carlito stop biting apples and "thas cool".

Didn't see Simpsons, but the rest was weak. -King of the Hill seems to be stuck in that late-season-Seinfeld mode, where they've been on the air long enough that anything they do is either a rehash of previous episodes (how many MegaloMart vs. Small Business episodes does this make now?) or something which just feels wrong and contrary to the tone of the show (last week.) -Family Guy, as always, has some staggeringly funny individual jokes, almost every episode there's something which has me on the floor laughing. The problem is, you have to sit through a lot of tedious bullshit to get there. What was the point of sledgehammering us over the head with political commentaries like Soldiers = Stupid, Illegal Immigrants = Noble, and Rich Americans = Satan? -American Dad would've been a lot funnier if they hadn't gone so overboard with the 40 Year Old Virgin parody. Also, it contradicted a lot of earlier episodes where I swear I remember Stan either killing or aggressively trying to kill various people. So, overall, the best animation I saw all night was when Hank & Dean thought Brock was wrestling a phantom spaceman when he was just fucking a really ugly chick on a Venture Brothers rerun.

I'd rather watch Satan rape Jesus right in his holy hole than listen to this goddamned drivel. (The entire concepts of sin and hell are some of the most brilliant bit of psychological manipulation in order to gain political power that I've ever seen. How To Take Over The World: 1. tell everyone that there's just one real God, and that he can kick any other god's ass. 2. Tell people that they're not just wrong, that they're dirty and evil by nature. 3. Tell them that they can't solve the problem themselves, but have to rely on a higher power (which was specifically the Catholic clergy back when they created this dogma) in order to be saved. 4. Tell them, if they don't follow every word you say, after they die they're gonna BURN FOREVER. All in all, a beautifully all-inclusive form of spiritual blackmail which has served the church well in being the most dominant religion on the planet for the past two millenia.) Also, look at this cocksucker's screen name: "xFrodo Bagginsx". Brilliant, considering he's a non-human fairytale creature which exists in a paganistic world full of magic and wizards, precisely the kind of stuff which Christian doctrine maintains is all the work of the devil.

I know several people who were there that night. They DID have an ambulance, at least they took him out of there in one. He still died anyway. This isn't improving the business when it puts companies OUT of business. Yes, working conditions need to improve, but with that we're talking about medical benefits and lighter schedules for the big stars who've already made it to national television. Not telling the weekend warriors of the indies that they aren't allowed to wrestle, whether they want to or not, unless they've got some millionaire backing their promotion who can pay for all this crap. Would it be nice to have a full medical team at every wrestling show? Sure. But it's mostly unnecessary, and you can count on your hands the number of promotions in the entire country who can afford it.

Actually having medics at the show just isn't necessary. If someone gets hurt, they get driven to the hospital. If someone gets REALLY hurt, call an ambulance. And I've worked a few hundred shows, and never once had the experience of needing an ambulance. I know it happens sometimes, but that's in really, really rare cases, like one in a thousand or more. Wrestlers know the risks and willingly accept them, and obviously they're not clamoring for this kind of safety net, so why bother forcing it on them? Hell, do they have doctors standing by for stuff like high school football games? Not at any of the ones I went to, and you'd think that protecting underage kids in a legit contest would be more important than babysitting consenting adults in a choreographed performance. I don't know how much EMTs cost, but it can't be cheap. Doctors and ambulances are probably a LOT more. Require a doctor, two paramedics, and an ambulance, and it's safe to say that's hundreds and hundreds of dollars in expenses. Small promotions simply have no chance of affording that; most of the ones still around barely stay afloat as it is. Forcing restrictions on them like this would cause over 90% of indies to close down. And not just the little armory outlaws, but ones you've heard of. If the Georgia regulations pass, say goodbye to every single independent wrestling federation in that state from NWA Anarchy on down, because none of them are big or profitable enough to afford it.

During the weekly PPV days, nobody was under exclusive contract, iirc. But none of the guys I mentioned were there just "once or twice", they were there every week for months, especially The Wall/Malice who was a regular main eventer.

What? No, wrong. Curt Hennig, The Wall, and Crash Holly were all working for TNA every week when they ODed.

There's no excuse not to have EMT's anyways. Yeah there is. Namely, that the majority of indy promotions in the country would go out of business if that was required. Independent promotions don't have any money in general. I'd say 90% of indies are just tiny feds that most people have never heard of, drawing less than a hundred folks to some National Guard armory somewhere. Big-timers like ROH and its ilk are very much the exception.

Yep, submitting to a hold sure does make someone look weak. Why, just look at those pussies in the UFC. There's so many tapouts there, the whole roster must be a bunch of girly-men. The problem with wrestling's mentality towards tapouts is that, over the years, they simply came to see holds as a way to kill time, and never emphasized the fact that you really can break someone's arm with a properly applied top wrist lock. So once holds became "that stuff we do to warm up the crowd before we get to the REAL offense later on", nobody wanted to lose to a hold anymore. Problem is, MMA is exploding in popularity in this country, and more and more people are being educated that a good choke or armbar can end a fight in seconds, so it makes the wrestlers look insanely unrealistic and phoney when they scream and writhe and struggle in a hold for minutes on end. Abyss is on the booking committiee?! That guy is so scatterbrained he could never remember that he'd ever met me before. As in, "Hi Jingus, I'm Chris, nice to meet you." "Um, dude... I managed you on that indy show... it was ten days ago." He's introduced himself to me literally a dozen times over the course of a couple of years.

Closed?

Oh Christ yes was that annoying. Pretty much every game with the words "Mega Man" in the title is guaranteed to have at least a couple of parts which will result in thrown controllers. Ah, back in the day when game developers constantly confused "fun" with "so hard it makes children cry". Every single level in Ghosts & Goblins. I loved that game for the creepy atmosphere and wide variety of different monsters, but Whoa Jesus was it way too difficult, anyone who claims to have beaten it without cheating is a god-damned liar. The fifth level of Castlevania. Just in case a miracle happened and you got past all those axe knights, here comes the Grim Reaper, and he's gonna rape you to death. Any time you had to pick up the goddamn key in Super Mario Bros. 2, because of that annoying enemy which kept following you and you couldn't get away from. (Yeah, you could drop the key and he'd go away, but you had to pick it up again sooner or later.) The last level in every Double Dragon game, where they got nigh unbeatable. Yeah, I'll gladly take my bare hands against guys with machine guns or who can throw magic fireballs, thanks. That one level in world 8 of Super Mario 3 where you had to jump on a fleet of super-fast mini airships. I always just said Fuck It and used a P-Wing at that part, because doing it normally was almost impossible.

The plot thickens: Benoit's father's lawyer, Cary Ichter, is one of the five commissioners named on this new board.

What, you mean NJPW's Monster Gaijin of the 1990s vs. Monster Gaijin 2K7?

My best friend when I was 12 rotted internally and died of some mystery ailment that the best doctors in the country were never able to identify. That's the closest I got. Well, aside from a few suicides and ODs involving people I knew after I got into wrestling.

Have you ever been to a live building demolition? They absolutely cover the ground with barricades, warning signs, there are cops everywhere, all that kind of stuff. They also get on the bullhorn and yell a bunch of verbal warnings too. So if some short-bus moron was such a gargantuan dumbass that he ignored all that shit and wandered into a building marked for implosion anyway, well, I think they got what they deserved and it's frigging hilarious. Unless it was a kid. Or a mental patient who didn't know the difference. Or a legit retard. Or... well, not so funny if I actually think about it. But still, they do block off the building pretty well, so I don't know how someone could be smart enough to sneak in there but dumb enough to think it's a good idea.

It's still prohibitively expensive. The majority of independent wrestling companies don't consistently make a profit, in fact they tend to lose money. Check out Ian Rotten's recent "Going out of business" ploy which helped sell an assload of merchandise for IWA Mid-South and pay off some of his debts. I don't think a single indy promoter in the state of Georgia has an extra $10K just lying around, even if they will eventually get it back. Plus, paying for a full security staff, a doctor, two EMTs, and an ambulance would easily run the costs into thousands of dollars per night, and that's before you take into account the talent payroll, building rent, insurance, advertising, all the equipment you need (ring, sound system, ringside barricades, etc). No, that's not the only bad thing. These new rules would effectively make it impossible to run any wrestling show anywhere in the state of Georgia. True, there's no big ROH-style company running there now, but this commission would guarantee that there never will be one in the future either. And there are plenty of mid-level companies which would get fucked in the process: NWA Anarchy would have to close down, and Women's Extreme Wrestling couldn't tape any more PPVs in Atlanta like they have done before. As for the nose-and-mouth thing, Bix pointed out that it could actually be a case of Benoit backlash, with them wanting to avoid anything which seems like smothering a person. Of course, these new rules completely fail to address any of the actual problems which might've led to Benoit snapping in the first place.

I went back and played it again, and did worse. Out of a bunch of tries, the highest I got this time was 11. Milky's right, the map is too damn small, plus the control is way too sensitive. You can know exactly where something is, click in the general right place, and still be five hundred miles off. It's badly colored too, they only used like three colors to try and differentiate every country on the planet, and a lot of them are just hard to see: Great Britain and Iraq always took me a minute to find because of the weird color scheme, even though obviously I knew where they were. Also it seems like a lot of the time I passed or failed a level just due to the number of random African or Asian countries I didn't know. But even in the hardest level, they'll still pitch you softballs like some city you've never heard of in an easy country like France or something which guarantees you decent points.

Oh HELL yeah, I should've thought of those myself. Absolutely pointless, brutally boring, needlessly difficult bullshit to clutter up an otherwise good game. Thank god they did indeed cut way back on them in the sequel, making them fairly short and inoffensive.

That's not even vaguely comparable to the DTMBro. This guy was apparently doing nothing wrong. I do wonder what the ranger's motivation for arresting the guy was, the way the article was written they didn't even ask the officer or anyone else what their side of the story was.

Lots of games do that thing where the difficulty suddenly ramps WAY up on a particular level. The first Castlevania, who could forget the part in level 4 when you get outside and suddenly those goddamn birds swarm you, and drop hordes of hunchbacks that fill the entire screen and killed you dead in like five seconds. Or in Resident Evil, when you go back to the mansion and suddenly all the zombies have been replaced by those nasty-ass green monsters that literally tear your head off. Or in Hitman 2, where you went to Japan and suddenly a fairly easy game turns into a sniper-filled nightmare where you'll be randomly shot dead from miles away with no chance of dodging. There were SEVERAL parts where I wanted to tell Battletoads to go fuck itself. Most of the racing sequences, especially where in the last couple levels they got damn near impossible, throwing obstacles at you faster than your average Sonic game. But yeah, the final tower was the worst, even with a game genie and the best cheats possible I still couldn't beat it. I hate it in any game where they space out the save/continue points too sparsely, so that if you die you gotta spend half an hour just getting back to where you were. Lots of the final dungeons in various Final Fantasy games are like that, where they've got like one save point in this massive level, and the random enemies wandering around are so strong that you're more likely to get killed by them than the last boss. One big example was Castlevania III, where if Dracula killed you, you had to go WAY back through the level just to get to him again.

Any time any sort of action/adventure game stops everything to make me go through a damn maze. I call it Golgo 13 syndrome, but I've seen it many times, and I never understand the point. This was especially prevalent back in the NES days (think Friday the 13th, Fester's Quest, and so on) but still pops up all the way to today, like when various first-person shooters suddenly switch from bigass battles to a confusing Wolfenstein 3D-esque maze setup. If I want to painstakingly map out my progress through a labyrinth, there are plenty of dungeon-crawling RPGs out there, don't make me blunder through something like that in a game where the object is to blow shit up.

Why? (Although it does seem like "both men down" draws tend to happen more often in LMS than in other kinds of matches.) I thought that one was great. Austin just plain didn't feel like he could beat Rock this time around, so he accepted Vince's help and beat Rocky halfway to death with a chair for the win. The crappy part was the timing. Doing Austin's heel turn in Texas was just plain dump. Plus, with Rock leaving to shoot The Scorpion King, Austin didn't have a great babyface opponent for his initial heel run; he had lackluster Austin/Taker Feud #37, and then while the Benoit/Jericho run had some great matches, it didn't help the ratings which kept slowly sinking downward throughout the year. Yeah, that still pisses me off to this day. Plus, you could make a convincing case that Backlash's big numbers were caused by the much-hyped Austin return. I know, but it was still weird. Either the elbow off the ladder should've been the finish, or Cactus should've given him one last finishing move (double arm ddt, whatever), because as it was it just didn't make sense.