Jingus

True, but it's still dirty pool.

One factor that often gets overlooked in TNA's current profitable status is their gouging of indy wrestling companies. Every single time any TNA "independent contractor" gets booked by any indy show, TNA takes a cool 25% of their salary as a "booking fee". And since basically everyone in the company (except the biggest main eventers) frequently take outside bookings, it provides a pretty steady revenue stream. Which I personally think is a fucking scumbag maneuver which only hurts both the small companies and the wrestlers. But yeah, that's one way they're making money.

Reading that, I could imagine that worthless motherfucker saying it all out loud, and once again I wished to throttle Mark Madden about the juglar until he wheezed no more. But then, like always, my natural fear of having my hands be swallowed up and vanish into the fat rolls around his throat pressed itself upon my conciousness and left me shivering in eldritch terror and existential despair.

It kinda did, didn't it, sadly enough. There's some interesting stuff on there, "What's He Building In There?" being my personal fave, but a lot of the eighteen songs on this friggin' endless album just felt like filler.

Well yeah, of course rich kids have massive advantages over poor ones. They start out with an infinitely better lifestyle and superior education and all that stuff, so naturally they have a much better chance at doing something special than some kid from the ghetto. That's why I sigh at the rightist "pull yourself up by your bootstraps!" rhetoric, since it ignores this. I do think it's important to have social welfare programs, as long as the inevitable abuse of said programs can be kept to a minimum. That miniscule section of society isn't even affected by income tax, though. An inheritence doesn't count as salary, it falls under an entirely different set of rules.

Beautiful Maladies was the first album I had of his, and it's not a bad choice since it offers a varied sampling of work he did over a period of several years. Admittedly I've been sadly lax at keeping up with his work like I should, but Small Change was probably my favorite out of the ones I've heard.

So, we lowered taxes on rich people... and the economy consistently got better? It's a big overgeneralization, I know, but it still happened. Since Obama is probably going to be elected and we're also possibly having a democrat supermajority in Congress, well, we'll see if the new system works or not. Starting off with the lousiest economy in recent history isn't going to do them any favors, obviously. I actually do agree with the left on a lot of the domestic policy, but just always felt that taxing people at different rates wasn't fair. Now is the time where we officially find out if Tax Teh Rich actually works. For the country's sake, I hope it does. Getting some of that bailout money back would be nice.

But you follow that line of thinking, and you get to where you're essentially punishing people who succeed. Which is exactly how the current tax code got the way it is. Rich people are taxed at higher rates, they didn't take kindly to it, they lobbied to have changes made to tax laws in order to keep more of their money. Like I said, plenty of rich folks are paying less right now than poor ones; check out Warren Buffet's comments on the matter. Or look up some of the insane stories about how corporate accountants can twist the books to minimize taxable income; Hollywood is the most infamous for it (they tried to claim that frigging Lord of the Rings didn't turn a profit), but plenty of industries do it. And it's all legal! The only fair tax would be a flat tax which charges everyone at the same uniform rate with no exemptions.

Which is a great theory, except under our current tax code there are so many loopholes and back doors for a sharp accountant to exploit that usually the truly rich portion of the population don't pay what they're supposed to anyway. A flat tax would end all that noise. And how would a flat tax be unfair? Let's say, arbitrarily, it's 10% of all income. Someone who makes $20,000 per year pays $2,000. Someone who makes $20,000,000 per year pays $2,000,000. Hey, lookit that, the rich person is paying more dollars than the poor one.

I'm of the same mind, but maybe even moreso. I've never, ever watched Lost for the plot. Always felt like a bunch of rather arbitrary teases and swerves in the X-Files mode, something designed more to keep the marks wondering what's going to happen next week than actually providing a storyline which was satisfying now. What I watch it for is a great cast playing a bunch of fine characters. I watch it just for seeing Locke, Sawyer, Hurley, Ben, and everyone else just interact with each other. (Which has the added side effect of often pissing me off when they kill a long-running character I liked watching.) That's the entire reason I tune in, to see these fun people. So I could not give the tiniest shit about trying to predict or fantasy book what comes next on a show where it often seems like they're just making up the Island plot twists as they go along.

Apparently Saturn was a real badass mofo, to the point where I've heard stories about him bitching out New Jack and Jack just sitting there with his head down and taking it.

The irony here being that Freddy vs Jason was easily one of the best entries in the series, if not the best period. Now if that one had never happened and the franchise was restarting after the triple threat of Jason Takes Manhattan, Jason Goes To Hell, and Jason X, then yeah, it would fit.

When has a series ever been brought to closure before being rebooted? Batman, James Bond, Michael Myers, Godzilla, none of their franchises ended properly before being restarted. The closest one I can think of is the original Star Trek, but considering how long they dragged out the special guest appearances of the old characters into the new franchises I don't think even that one counts. Anyway, how would you bring closure to F13? Kill Jason? He's already looked really dead at the end of four of these damn movies. It would be pretty hard to smear the good name of Friday the 13th and muddle the series continuity more than the old films already did.

I get the joke you're making, but he couldn't have run his promotion as he described it with countless hardcore matches under these rules. Probably just picked it out because it was one of the strictest ones out there. Lots of people don't know about all the crazy rules that some athletic commissions still have. Hell, I think the piledriver is still banned in Louisiana. Seriously, literally banned, the promotion gets fined if anyone uses that move. For a while Pennsylvania had a rule that if anyone in a match got busted open, they automatically stopped the match, period, instantly, no debate possible. Georgia tried last year to institute a laundry list of absolutely fucking ridiculous rules even more excessive than the ones mentioned here, right down to a uniform dress code for the workers, which was narrowly avoided. Don't kid yourself, athletic commissions are still a major thorn in the side of wrestling companies everywhere. The WWE doesn't care since the fines are just a drop in the bucket for them, but independent companies can easily be put right out of business by some of these restrictions.

Wait a minute, why should it be mandatory to publicly release anyone's private medical records? There's reasons why that stuff is legally considered to be confidential.

Just avoid the Leprechaun in Space one. SciFi Channel Original Movies beat up that flick on the playground and steal its lunch money. Yeah, when has Fincher ever sucked? Okay, Alien 3 was fucked from the start and The Game was overrated as hell and Panic Room was forgettable, but he's never made an out-and-out terrible movie, there's always something interesting about his work. Although I do wonder about that plot. Guy ages backwards? Didn't Francis Ford Coppola just do that in Youth Without Youth? Ah well, no matter, the mere fact that this movie combines Cate Blanchett and Tilda Swinton onto the same screen at the same time guarantees that I'll be watching it.

I like the "Dexter's new BFF" angle. Different from what they've done so far on the show. I'm just glad that they've come along since that awful soap opera crap from the first season and are now doing something much more unique and interesting. And yeah, the Deb storyline is insanely repetitive. Why hasn't she told anyone else that IA is nosing around? Even if she didn't mention it to the suspect himself, you'd think she would've told someone, Deb's not exactly great at keeping her mouth shut.

Aw christ, that hellhole. That place was like a mix between the worst tendencies of old DVDVR and any given Youtube comments page. Made this place look downright disciplined and intellectual by comparison. I was modding here during the "invasion" (which was fairly short and not terribly memorable), and some bitchy mod from over there demanded that I ban people here at TSM for what they did over at DDT. Let's just say that I declined. And oh yeah, that also produced the man who was like the herpes, The Brain. Goddamn was that like a perfect storm nightmare of a troll. He acted like a wronged man on a righteous quest of vengeance, he just would not go the fuck away. And he was simultaneously smart enough to temporarily fool people and enough of an asshole to legit piss them off once he decided to go on the offensive. And he threatened to fite-me-u-poser with me and at least one other guy.

Starts in January, I believe.

Some tickets do that. Certain types of paper turn black if exposed to heat. I found this out the hard way working in a restaurant, when n00bs would always stick the wrong receipt up next to the heat lamps and destroy them. I don't know why the Ticketmaster tickets would be made out of such paper, but I imagine it's some sort of anti-counterfeit measure.

There are drugs which can cause seizures when overdosed. (Note that there are many different levels of overdose, experiencing an OD doesn't necessarily lead to being found dead in a hotel room.) One that comes to mind is a muscle relaxant called Soma, which is pretty popular with many wrestlers and, when taken in too large a dose, causes seizure-like conditions: loss of conciousness, uncontrollable muscle spasms, and so on.

Morel Orel >>>>>>> Tim and Eric. And I'm not even that big a fan of Orel. I just stare in open-mouthed shock any time I've actually felt brave enough to watch some T&E, in utter disbelief that anything this amateurish would actually be allowed to air on a major television network. (Especially since it's, y'know, NOT A CARTOON. I know it's not the only such show they've got on there, but it's the only one they've kept running for multiple seasons.)

One drunken night me and my brother came up with that idea too. We were just drunk enough that we shouldn't have been driving, but not drunk enough to call it a night. Thought we were geniuses at the time. Then one of us envisioned the inevitable problem with our delivered drinks ending up in underaged hands and the inevitable lawsuits which would accompany that, and the idea was abandoned pretty quickly. Weird thing: for all the jokes about the South being such a backward trashy place, they have much stronger laws on alcohol. In Tennessee, only standard 5% beer is allowed to be sold anywhere regular. Everything else, even wine, is only legal from an official liquor store. And in Georgia, law forces stores to stop selling alcohol crazy early, like 11:00 or 12:00 at night. There are still plenty of "dry counties" where either hard liquor or all alcohol period are banned, though naturally that's waning with the times. When I was a kid, it was illegal to sell any hard drinks on Sunday.

I can see it from both sides. On one hand, blading really is a relatively minor thing in the big picture; god knows why the Guns are apparently just fine with risking life and limb doing high-flying bumps onto concrete, but are apparently all outraged and terrified of poking themselves with a glorified pinprick. On the other, TNA as usual displays all the booking skills of an senile manatee by demanding that these guys bleed in a "street fight" taking place after a no-rope barbed wire match. That's pretty much the definition of "we can't follow that!" right there.

I did. And I don't even get Showtime. Come on, people. Interesting way they're going with this. At first it seemed a bit derivative of last season, but it seems like they're taking it in new directions. And Jimmy Smits is the fucking man, yo. "Whore. Cunt. Hey you." "Yeah?"