Jingus

TBS had wrestling. Wrestling that was drawing similar ratings to what Raw got last week. And they actively chose to get rid of it, and sold it off for pennies on the dollar just to do so quickly. Ted Turner himself was the one whose will kept WCW running for so long, the rest of his staff couldn't stand it.

Marvin, have you ever been in a TV studio? Trust me, there's a LOT of incredibly specialized equipment. Hell, you need your own complicated and expensive computer setup just to be able to cut to commercial at the right time. And the WWE doesn't own a satellite, those suckers easily run into the billion-dollar price tag, they just rent satellite time like every other small television business out there. And yes, I said small. WWE wouldn't even be a pimple on the ass of a company like Fox. Plus there's all kinds of new costs that would come along with trying to run a new cable company. USA pays them to be on the air, why would the WWE want to expend all the time, money, and effort it would take to do it themselves? You'd have to buy new equipment, buy new office and production space, hire a shitload of new people, spend an obscene amount of money on satellite time, go get all your commercial sponsors yourself (ones that want to advertise on an all-wrestling channel which would almost certainly draw pathetic ratings, good luck). Plus, Vince has made it very clear that he thinks he's "above" professional wrestling, that his true competition is stuff like American Idol and 24. I seriously, seriously doubt he would ever air Raw or Smackdown on the same channel with other wrestling content.

I just watched the first half of this season online, and noticed something kinda odd. When did Matt & Trey become completely obsessed with suicide?! In damn near every episode they have random characters kill themselves. Usually via the standard gunshot to the head, but there are a variety of methods on display. Kinda weird, yo.

I misread the title as "Our Silent Herpes". I'm not sure whether the actual content of this thread is a disappointment or a relief.

No Marvin, they don't already have the equipment. Producing a TV show and DVDs is completely, entirely different from broadcasting an entire cable channel. It's a whole separate setup.

Also, don't underestimate the sheer number of people in rural areas who can't get cable, period. I live in a well-populated little suburb maybe half an hour's drive from downtown Dallas, and we don't get cable here, it's either sattelite or nothing.

TNA has utterly fucked up every single time they tried to deal with any Japanese company at all. Remember Jarrett vs. Hogan, the different problems with Liger, "Omori no do job to champ!", bringing in Mutoh for absolutely no reason, and oh yeah introducing America to the giant load of suck called Kenzo Suzuki. It certainly doesn't help that they keep speed-dating with different companies over and over again, which must piss off the other Japanese feds seeing TNA hop into bed with anyone who buys them a drink.

IIRC, Kreski quit over just being plain sick of working for the WWE, tired of the brutal schedule and frustrated at having his storylines constantly undermined. Most of the stupidest crap from 2000 just happened to feature one HHH, so you tell me where those ideas originated from. Aside from that? 2000 was The Best Year The WWF/E Has Ever Had, period. Tazz being short certainly didn't help, but supposedly his attitude rubbed people the wrong way backstage too. As for the Sapolsky/ECW argument, c'mon Bix, anything would've been better than what actually happened at December To Dismember. Gabe even talks about how he didn't want it to seem like ECW would be a demotion for Orton, more like he was being punished by being sent to the crazy land of extreme hardcore.

DDP vs. Randy Savage, Halloween Havoc 1997. Also, Benoit vs. Malenko on some episode of Ntiro or Thunder, late 1999.

Wasn't one of the spoiler tagged references a Twilight Zone episode? No, it was a famous old short story which was afaik the first time that particular twist ending was done. I wouldn't be surprised if Twilight Zone did one like it sometime though. So, kinda like that district attorney dude on The Boondocks who turned into a yuppie oreo from fear of being anally raped? We had something similar to the Scared Straight thing in my high school, except it was called Don't Follow Me and was a slightly different setup. They'd gather the whole school in one big assembly and have the cons up onstage, and they'd tell some horror stories about their lives in prison and how they got there. Anyone who was caught talking or misbehaving during the lectures, they'd send a couple of the prisoners to bring them up onstage in a vaguely threatening manner. I guess they weren't allowed to curse or make any sort of threats, because they didn't, but it still creeped some of us out when one of the guys started talking about how pretty all the girls in the audience were... and how some of their cellmates would climb over them in order to get to the boys.

Dude. Actually that's a valid cheap shot. Coey used to post here and got banned after he said he wished we'd all been in the WTC that day. That didn't go over well with the then-owner Dames, especially since he saw the towers fall live in person.

::endless waves of mad, hysterical laughter::

For me, only if a movie is exactly copying something which has been done before. One big example: the movie Stay has a big twist ending which is the EXACT same thing as a couple other twist endings ( ). Otherwise, if it's just kinda similar to something else, I don't care. It's damn near impossible to make a truly original story, practically anything you could think of has already been done. "Simpsons did it!"

TNT and TBS won't accept a wrestling show, period. Time-Warner-AOL made that very clear when they canned WCW after the merger. I forget the name of the specific executive who pulled the plug, but he came right out and said that wrestling wasn't conducive to the type of image they wanted to build for their networks. They sold WCW, its trademarks, its contracts, and its entire massive tape library for a measely three million dollars; obviously they just wanted it off their hands at any cost. And what have some of you been smoking, saying that if WWE somehow left USA that they could go to the SciFi Nework?! They're both owned by the same people, doofus, one wouldn't offer a better deal than the other. If Vince did the dumb thing and walked away from USA again, he'd have a tough time finding a decent new home. TNT, TBS, and Spike all won't take himl; most of the other networks are either niche products that offer a specific type of programming which doesn't include wrestling, or are too small to give Vince anything close to the kind of money and ratings he wants. F/X is just about the only network I can think of which is a possibility, but if they really wanted pro wrestling on their channel, they've had plenty of opprotunities in the past. Also, it doesn't help that Vince almost always demands deals that are WAY out of proportion to normal television contracts. McMahon is legendary in media circles for his awesome greed and amazing ego, acting like the WWE deserves better treatment than any other product out there.

I was Teddy's driver for about a month. Take my word for it, nobody here cares.

OMG standardized ID, it's the Mark of the Beast I tell ya, everyone into the bomb shelter, 1984 is coming!1!

I think Bret was being petty by refusing to do the job, but it was his legal right to, he did have the creative control clause in his contract. It was Vince who insisted that Bret HAD to do lose the belt, in his home country, to the man he hated most. For that matter, why did Vince keep the belt on Bret knowing that his days in the company were numbered? Why were they so afraid Bret was going to randomly show up on Nitro? Didn't they know exactly when his contract expired? The only way Bret could appear on a WCW program would be for his current contract to run out, otherwise Vince could've sued the shit out of them and ended up owning his competition a few years sooner. They could've had him do the job at a different time, or to a different person. The Montreal scandal was entirely Vince's fault, as there were a hundred things he could've done to stop it from getting to that point.

That is and always has been a blatant lie. Real simple answer to that: don't let Bret take the belt home with him. Let the company carry it from town to town. Hey presto, him throwing it in the trash on WCW is no longer possible. Vince is way too smart not to have thought of that.

It's like Vince's childish "You don't like it? Well FUCK YOU, it's never gonna end!" type booking. I don't understand why anyone would think that doing a concussion angle is a good idea right now, especially when it's involving one guy who really did have a concussion and came back too fast.

Is megaupload not working for anyone else? I haven't gotten anything from that site to load in the past couple days.

Yep. (I guess even people as different as you and me have something they can agree on. We're smoking our way to utopia!)

Well then, what's causing the ridiculously high premiums? Yeah, they vary by location, but it's not feasible to require a rookie doctor, probably with massive debt from school, to immediately start shelling out $200K+ just in order to start practicing. From the article: And that represents a lower rate than previous years. Why do the premiums raise so much faster than inflation? A 40% raise in ten years. Obviously something ain't right here. This made me think of something else: do all these numbers include out-of-court settlements, or just court-awarded damages? If it doesn't include settlements (after all, they're supposed to be confidential) then we're missing a huge chunk of the information necessary to fully understand this issue. Of course a payment cap of $250K for victims is bullshit, since it's way too low an upper limit in cases where blatant incompetence caused permanent mutilation or death. But these cases where a jury gives someone an eight-figure award, really, is that much necessary? And we've all heard stories about plaintiffs who won and got money they really shouldn't have, but that's more an issue for general tort reform, not just this specific subculture of lawsuits.

Ah okay, yeah that particular part was stupid, and deserved to be struck down. As for the rest? Tough judgement call. There certainly have been problems with universal healthcare plans in the past; one big offender in my hometown state was Tenncare, which had a ridiculous number of problems, including lots of people people getting on it who could afford their own insurance and didn't need it.

Whoops, missed that part. Where then did the 83K number come from? Also, I think that simply using household income as the sole eligibility decider is too simplistic. One person making $39K might have a job that offsets its low salary with a great benefits package that provides excellent medical coverage; the teachers in my part of Texas have a deal like that. On the other hand, some other guy might be making $41,000 but have zero benefits whatsoever. Yet the first person is eligible for SCHIP, while the second wouldn't be. It's just an awfully complicated issue to do just one line that decides You Must Be This Tall To Ride. But in general I do think that the healthcare situation is horribly fucked up. I just think that this is treating the symptom instead of the disease. One REAL important place to start should be litigation reform, as the ridiculous upward spiral in the cost of malpractice insurance is one of the biggest causes of medical cost inflation.

Bullshit. Why? $80K per year isn't just way, way above the poverty line, it's above the average income level of Americans period. Why does someone making that much need to ask for a handout? Jesus Christ. "Do you support punishing cancer to help children?" Just a little loaded there.