Jingus

Huh. Guess I should watch Slumdog Millionaire. Anna Pacquin?! She wasn't even the third-best actress on that show, let alone the best actress on any dramatic series anywhere on television. Anyone else seen both The Wrestler and Revolutionary Road? Anyone else struck by the sharp disparity between the performances that won Best Actor and Best Actress? I mean, I adore Kate Winslet and I'm happy she went home with some loot, but this wasn't anywhere near her best work.

Or Ric Flair going all hardcore in 2006, falling off ladders and rolling around in thumbtacks. Or the various New Japan veterans who did exploding barbwire deathmatches with Onita. It's not a common thing for an old star to do today's bloody style, but it does happen sometimes.

I don't think I've seen enough really noteworthy movies this year to even make anything more than a top 5. Past that, it would entirely be various summer blockbusters and Apatow flicks all having a pointless little moshpit to establish relative dominance. 1. Wall-E 2. Let the Right One In 3. The Dark Knight 4. Encounters at the End of the World 5. The Wrestler

Nah, sadly that's the only one. I had about a dozen matches, mostly horrible comedy tag matches and the like; along with about a million different backstage vignettes. But I don't have footage for most of it, a lot of it either was never taped or the footage just got lost. And what I do have is mostly on VHS tapes, and I don't have the setup to transfer VHS to digital.

It's "been", not "be". You see, a year or two before that I'd been a manager in a different fed that ran that building, and somehow I'd had three or four matches there but never got booked to be pinned for whatever reason. And I hadn't actually run him out of the fed, he left for his own reasons right after I'd beaten him in a match, we just used that as a kayfabe excuse for him to be mad at me. It's a longer and more complicated story than that, but yeah, that's mostly accurate. The fat guy's also the one who put in on Youtube. (In a typical rib of his, he doesn't put the actually watchable match we'd had once before, it's this abortion instead.) What do you expect? I was an announcer... with no athletic background... and a mild case of cerebral palsy. Nobody should expect me to be looking like Dean Malenko out there. And my opponent was an untrained manager who was legally blind without his glasses, thus making things even more of a perfect storm. Actually, yeah. Cheap tickets that day, like $5 or thereabouts, since it was a loooong show where we taped a couple months' worth of television footage. You apparently have never attended a little low-budget indy show. Welcome to Southern rassling. There are legions of shows like that across the land, many of them actually much worse than this one was.

It was a running joke how in the Nashville days, Dixie would inevitably be sitting in the front row, beer in hand, loudly screaming for her prettyboy favorites. Maybe she was just trying to help provide a sense of energy for her portion for the live crowd, I dunno, but it always seemed like a rather odd, markish, and improper way for the CEO of the company to behave in public. (Yeah, you can of course counter that with any of a thousand "but remember when Vince did Horrible Tasteless Thing #24601, isn't that worse?", but he's presented as part of the show and the storylines while Dixie just sat in the crowd and got crunk.)

Sure, there are plenty of nerds out there who still buy toys. But more than kids who buy toys? I haven't been in a Toys R Us or Kaybee in many years, but I imagine you'd find TNA's dolls in there, rather than in Tower Records or Hot Topic or whatever. ...if they even have a real merchandise distribution deal at all, come to think of it. Do retailers sell TNA's action figures and other merchandise? (Not counting the dvds and video game, of course.) Are they even available in stores, or do you have to order them from their website or something like that?

While this is hilarious, a key point has been missed. The entire reason she made that dumbass statement was obviously just to say that TNA isn't marketing to children. After all, here you've got a show filled with bloody violence and Russo swearing and sex crap, which is rather at odds with the fact that they're selling toy dolls of the characters. Wrestling has come under fire repeatedly in the past for having kids as part of their target demographics. Dixie's brainfart was just an incredibly clumsy and ill-considered way of claiming that they're not trying to peddle this smut to kids.

Realistically, how else can Israel respond? Peace talks? Pretty much every time they've gone that route, the Palestinian militans have violently broken the truce. Like pbone noted, practically every Muslim group in or around this country has attacked them at some point, some of them over and over again. The civilian deaths are a tragedy, obviously. But it's a nearly inevitable one, considering Hamas's standard tactic of hiding terrorists and criminals inside people's homes. Hamas has flatly stated that their entire gameplan is to kill every Jew they can get their hands on until the nation of Israel is eradicated from the face of the earth, with no quarter or surrender asked or given. How are you supposed to deal with an enemy like that?

I'm pretty sure at one point they did mention that Hurley owned a box company.

Am I the only one who wasn't feeling Pan's Labyrinth? It was marketed as a fantasy adventure about a young girl in some kind of fairyland, but the real movie was actually the story of this asshole army officer being a douchebag for two hours. They tried to sell it as a kids' movie, which made me fairly uncomfortable when we saw shit like him graphically caving in a dude's nose with a bottle. The fantasy segments made up like twenty minutes of the film, if that. Yet I've heard endless praise about how great the sets and the costumes and the effects were. Huh? They had a grand total of about four creatures, in three fantasy sets which looked like every other fantasy set from every other fantasy movie ever. I can't understand why people rate this movie so highly, when something like, say, Mirrormask (which had an exponentially greater amount of actual fantastic content) goes unheeded by the same folks.

You would think we would've had one before now, don't you? Hundreds of regular members, after all. A look at standardized mortality rates would suggest that it should've happened. Probably already has, with some obscure non-established person who just never came back.

Well, he does actually seem to do a job every now and then when he's a face. As a heel, he's apparently allergic to such.

It's borderline invasion of privacy, considering it's a text message he sent to a friend, obviously this wasn't supposed to be some kind of public statement.

The fact that he thinks that Tennessee would prefer to join up with the yankees of New England rather than split off with the rest of the South indicates: no, he doesn't.

Yeah. The disease had more or less eaten her entire body up over the past few years. She has/had tumors in her pancreas, brain, pharynx, and bone marrow.

We don't know if she's gone yet or not. Basically we're waiting on DrTom to get word of the specific situation. But in short, even if she is still alive, she doesn't have long. The mod staff recently went on a pruning spree with inactive accounts, deleting anyone who had 0 posts. If you want back in, just register again and post something after it's approved.

I've heard that argument before, and never quite agreed with it. There are plenty of examples of Andre working long programs in one territory, and I've never seen any proof that the houses supposedly died off once he stayed in one place for too long. Of course the sideshow novelty aspect of his appeal meant that he was an unique guarantee to draw big crowds in places he'd never been before, but he was easily a smart enough worker to maintain the momentum once he was already there. I've just never understood why Bruno was so popular. I understand that apparently Italians in NYC from the 50s to the 80s were so oddly proud of their heritage that they'd show up by the thousands just to cheer a guy who happened to have the same racial background as them. I personally think it's fucking stupid and lowest-common-denominator pandering, but I understand it. But watching Bruno's matches (and I've seen a LOT of his matches), I just don't get it. His entire schtick was the same every time: his heel opponent (always a different racial background, often a foreigner) would kick the shit out of Sammartino for ten minutes, Sammartino would get up and do his fiery arm-waving comeback, and it would all go to a DQ or some other kind of non-decisive finish. It was the exact same routine over and over again, and I suppose he found a formula that worked and stuck with it, but I've never understood why it was so popular. Especially when you see other top performers of the same eras (Thesz, Rocca, Stevens, Rogers, both Funks, Race, etc) who either had much more charismatic gimmicks or much more dynamic wrestling styles, if not both. I guess it'll always be one of those Hulk Hogan mysteries: there's no real way to articulate why he was so beloved, he just was.

We can debate over why Bruno never left his territory. But one thing you can't debate is that he never did leave that territory, besides a few cameos for in Japan for Baba and such which were mostly inconsequential. If having a stranglehold on one particular geographic area is considered being great, then Jerry Lawler must be the greatest of all time. He consistently drew houses in Memphis which were proportionately bigger than the ones Bruno had in New York when you compare the relative populations available to draw fans from, and did it over a longer period of time too. Also, the "why leave the Northeast?" argument falters somewhat when you consider Andre. His home base was definitely the WW(W)F, but he was constantly taking trips all over the world to work everywhere, and apparently made more money doing it that way. Sammartino didn't have the level of international superstar recognition to do that. He might've if he really applied himself and tried hard, but his simplistic wrestling style and his appeal-limiting racial gimmick would not have helped him.

In other words, it was a loose thread which got completely forgotten about. Which tends to happen a lot on this show. Get used to it. Anyone explained what the hell the deal was with that gargantuan statue foot which had four toes? Or what the deal is with the numbers? Or several million other questions? Let's face it, Lost has so many unsolved mysteries that there's no possible way that most of them will ever be explained.

That crappy apocalypse flick? That came out just a couple years after I wrote a screenplay with a similar premise, back in high school. And I still maintain that my script, while not terribly good, was still better than Last Night.

I know Palin had handlers who told her what to do, but here she seems to be implying that she had no control whatsoever over her own media appearances. Which I find to be disingenous at best. Off-topic, but Jerk, that pic in your sig is from Metropolis IL, right? Heh, I once worked a wrestling show where we literally set the ring up in the middle of the street, just a block down from that bigass Superman statue.

God yes, and it was terrible. The whole Young/Roode/Traci Stalker thing went on for-fecking-ever and never made the tiniest bit of sense. Rather like the Lethal/Dutt/Val thing, come to think of it. Or the Angle/Styles/Karen storyline. TNA always seems like it has some damn love triangle epic saga going on which they stretch out for agonizing endless months on end, without ever giving it a proper resolution.

A fair question, but if I had to imagine it probably went something like this: Marines: Hey, you ten pirates waving machine guns at us! Throw down your weapons and surrender! Somalis: Hell no, we won't go! ::BANG BANG BANG:: Marines: Hey, you eight pirates waving machine guns at us...