World's Worst Man

Unwelcome back.

I seem to suck and need help identifying another song. It sounded like Nightwish to me, but I went through their discography and didn't hear anything like it. Here's the link with video, since I wasn't able to rip the audio in a format that would play in winamp. It's just 2 megs or so. http://rapidshare.de/files/17165229/song1.avi.html

In Flames - Come Clarity is pretty good. Definitely my favourite album of theirs since Colony (and quite frankly, I didn't like any of their albums from Clayman to Soundtrack To Your Escape at all). Lacuna Coil - Karmacode I did not like. Lacuna Coil has some weird quality to their music and I just can't get into them. Some of their songs are decent, but not enough to where I want to listen to them again. This album is more or less the same way.

Money in the bank was a dime a dozen to me. The only neat thing they did was Benjamin's jump to the ladder, which the cameras missed anyway. Otherwise there was no innovation, a minor amount of build and a lot of long, awful pauses with guys on the ladder. I had it at *1/2. I pretty much agree with your take on JBL-Benoit. It was a TV match, not a "biggest PPV of the year" match. Actually started out nicely with some scrappy ground brawling, but it didn't really continue. By the numbers, average and ultimately disappointing. Had it at **1/4. Foley vs. Edge was money. Match was laid out great, with good heat segments on Foley. Foley was bumping around like a freak, as would be expected. Build was great, especially to the finish. Will probably end up as one of the better WWE matches of 2006. Had it at ***1/2. Trish vs. James was decent. Typically sloppy, but it was structured quite well. If either girl could actually physically wrestle (ie. execution, transitioning, etc) at any sort of high level, this might have reached a high level in my eyes. However, Mickie James does play her role brilliantly, and she was the reason the match was as good as it was. It was the best modern WWE women's match I've seen, and would have been better if not for the horribly botched finish. I had it at **1/2. The rest I didn't watch, because people aren't pimping that stuff, and I don't really care to watch it in that case. Truthfully, what I saw was pretty solid, so if the rest of the stuff was decent overall, it would seem like a successful show. No blow-away matches, but eh, expecting MOTYCs from the WWE at this point is just unreasonable.

Because clearly his story-telling ability had nothing to do with helping him get over with the crowd. Of course not.

No kidding. A show in Toronto = sell out easily.

Liger in a cage match, never thought of that. Bizarre.

According to PWI (via someone at the Impact tapings?), Liger is facing Daniels for the X-Title. http://www.pwinsider.com/ViewArticle.asp?id=17196&p=1

I'd say HBK dragged down great workers if anything, and was better against lesser opponents. Bret on the other hand, was great against anyone. In-ring wrestling probably boils down to Bret or Flair. I like Bret over Flair, because Bret's great matches seemed to be more varied than Flair's great matches, which were more often than not, fairly repetitive. Although one could say Bret had the same problem, I'd say that criticism would only apply to his lower-end work.

Can't say I care much at all. People can say what they will, but Belfour was terrible this year. If Toronto had gotten decent goaltending, they wouldn't be fighting tooth and nail for a playoff spot at this point. Too many games decided by 1 goal where Belfour gave up 1 or 2 stinker goals. They wouldn't be world beaters or anything, but they could at least be 8-10 points better than they are now, and only needing to maintain pace to make the playoffs. Oh well, you live by the sword you die by the sword I guess.

Yea don't worry, I'm not a big enough prick to flame someone for no reason. Actually, the farther away I get from hardcore wrestling/anime/video games discussion, the nicer I get. Maybe it's because I craze in-depth discussions on those subjects but I'm also super competitive.

Chono was a solid worker back in the day, who had a couple truly great matches and a bunch of good-verygood matches. I wouldn't call him "very good", but he wasn't mediocre either. I'm talking about quality in-ring wrestling and nothing else, so maybe that isn't your bag. At this point, much like Ric Flair, he's detoriated physically, but he still kind of knows how to get the crowd going. He's obviously not as physically horrid as Flair, but you get the point. He's also still fairly over and Tenzan is still an upper-card guy despite being booked shittily for years. Tenzan is a guy that shines in big matches, while being fairly inconsistent the rest of the time. Put him in an important match and he'll peform. Put him in some mid-tour 6 man and he'll probably be invisible. He never really came into his own until 2001 or so, anything before then and he wasn't very good at all.

Toronto beats Carolina 3-2. There's still hope yet. The two games vs. Montreal this week are going to be insane, playoff-level matches. Good stuff.

Lesnar supposedly had some wrist problems and couldn't do the F5. There was also word going around that the DDT wasn't the planned finish, and that the match ended early due to Akebono gassing out.

Among critics, it seems Bret Hart's legacy is fine. His matches generally hold up to heavy analysis because he was fundamentally sound. The problem of him being repetitive isn't really a big deal in his better matches, so I don't believe that's a mark against him either. He might be a mark for himself (and well, yea), but he's probably a hell of a lot closer to the mark than some other guys who like to claim they were/are "the best in-ring worker ever". It appears that the non-critic fans think highly of him too, just based on what I see online, and the crowds who seem to yearn for a return by him. Obviously he's not as popular as an Austin or Rock or Hogan, but I think he definitely fits in with the next tier of stars.

In Flames - Come Clarity. I don't know, I'm digging the new In Flames. And I didn't like their last two efforts either.

Attractive girls watch wrestling, play poker and play video games? That makes me feel somewhat better about things. I like being tall. In fact, I wish I was taller than I am. Not freakishly tall, just enough to be somewhat impressive and have a naturally stronger golf swing (Yea, I'm a geek or something). I suppose I shouldn't complain though.

That's going to be a big problem me thinks. Clipped matches = suck. TFN should somehow pace their commercial breaks in order to show full matches, but I guess they aren't doing that.

Saw the show today. It was actually pretty solid. The opening 6 man was wrestled like it was 1979 for a bit, but it ended up being passable. Akiyama vs. KENTA was simply "good", but it was tremendously entertaining. The final 6 man was kind of just a throw away. I like Inoue/Izumida COMEDY~!, so it was kind of amusing, but I'd imagine anyone not familiar with NOAH would not be into it. Not a good match at all though. Commentary was kind of bleh. A lot of moves being mixed up (although they did make a few good calls), some stuttering during fast paced moments. It wasn't awful like the FMW Tokyo Pop commentary, and I could live with it, but it was by no stretch of the imagination any good. The commercial breaks are going to hurt the shows though. When they show Kobashi-Akiyama, it'll probably be broken up with 3 or 4 breaks, considering it was a 35 minute match. They have to do something about that.

Black Tiger on team Japan isn't Japanese and Ultimo Dragon on team Mexico isn't Mexican Irrelevantly funny. Those teams look stacked. This is gonna be an awesome tournament.

Canadian digital cable channel.

The 2 best promotions in the world back to back? Good night of wrestling says I Who knows what the hell they're showing though. All I could see was "Navigation With Breeze", which is their May/June tour, but it's kind of useless without a year.

Angle's injuries are quite irrelevant, as his shortcomings really have nothing to do with his physical shape. Poor selling, laughable spot setup and lack of logical build stems from him either not knowing or not wanting to work that way, and those kinds of things are the flaws people bring up. Going by the truest sense of the word, his "workrate" (number of spots used) has never been the question, although going just by "workrate" (which I don't really care much about, since random indy spot monkies technically have better "workrate" than many of the best workers ever), there's probably about 100 guys better.

I've gotten away from the "mark, smark or smart" labelling. Now, I kind of just differentiate with "workrate fan" (someone who cares and knows about match quality), "fan" (someone who doesn't care about match quality, but can intelligently discuss other areas of wrestling) and "fanboy" (those who are in love with certain promotions or wrestlers, and can't intelligently discuss wrestling). In this case, the "good" fans are the workrate fans/fans, while the bad fans would be the fanboys. And really, I only seperate the good fans because if someone's not interested in discussing match quality, there's no point in trying to discuss it with them

Keiji Muto says hi. I'll admit, I am really interested in seeing Christian in ROH, just to see how he does. Can't wait.