Jingus

Hansen might've been Baba's best opponent. Stan sold Shohei's offense perfectly. And when I say that, I don't just mean "he pinball-bumped around the ring and screamed in pain for even the weakest strikes". I mean he had this way of selling the hell out of it while very much not looking like he was over-selling. Some guys would try too hard to make Baba's offense look good, and it ended up almost looking like a comedy match when they'd fling themselves around for those weak-ass chops and such. Hansen walked a tightrope and made it look like the stuff hurt without insulting your intelligence about it.

Yep. That was around the same time that Hogan commandeered a semi and rammed it into an ambulance carrying a beat-up Rock, and of course Rock came back shortly thereafter looking none the worse. They really got obsessed for a while with guys doing this ridiculous stuntman shit and then promptly no-selling it next week.

Does anyone know if this was the original plan, or if it was a sudden change at the last minute? Cuz it felt like the latter. The "I did it for the Rock" storyline and the "I did it for HHH" storyline seemed contradictory. Like Rikishi wasn't getting over as much as they'd hoped as a dastardly heel, so they just said "eh, fuck it" and turned HHH back into the top heel instead.

Those gigantic insurance figures aren't the fees which the promoter must pay. They're the liability limit on the insurance policy. The million-dollar spectator insurance can pay out up to a million bucks in case of a real disaster; it doesn't actually cost a million bucks, whatever the price is it's much less than that. Same thing with the medical & accidental death insurance, and maybe the surety bond too. The license fee must be paid, I have no idea why some licenses are apparently over five times as expensive as others. As for the doctor, nobody said he actually has to be paid a fair salary, nor that he has to be a specialist in this particular field. They can do what ECW did, and get some podiatrist who happens to be someone's friend or a mark for wrestling and just have him hang out and be the official doc.

It's not just bumping the way Punk does, it's wrestling period. I've never known any professional wrestler who never got injured, ever. It always happens to every wrestler, period. (Real pros, anyway, guys who worked for years and had matches which could be measured at least in the hundreds. Once-a-month wannabes don't count.) At some point (if not many points), you're guaranteed to break something which will require a doctor to fix. Even I got a concussion and a badly sprained ankle and a broken finger and some deep bruises and whatnot, and that's just from various freak accidents in my limited time the ring which didn't even happen during official matches. Guys who wrestle every week will inevitably have a much longer and more serious list of old wounds.

That's just your personal interpretation for those words. For many people, like me, they're direct synonyms and interchangeable. ...what are you even talking about? You're right that a zygote's gender is determined by certain genes only found in the sperm. But practically everything else is a mix between the two parents. It's an interplay of dominant and recessive genes, not sperm versus ovum. If you think it's all down to the sperm, then you need to read up on the subject, because it's infinitely more complicated than that. Just start with Wiki's article on the subject if nothing else. Or to sum it up in anecdotal form: in hair color, skin color, and facial structure, I more strongly resemble my mom a bit more than I resemble my dad. My brother's matriarchal resemblance is even closer. What individual inherited characteristics are displayed by any offspring of any two parents is mostly a roll of the dice.

How exactly is disagreeing with "a woman's contribution to the genetic makeup of her child's DNA is absolutely meaningless" wrong? I can't even tell if you guys are serious or not here. If you're not serious, then I feel like I'm being trolled. If you are serious, then like I said before, I refuse to have this discussion at all.

That's not a very funny joke, man. "Dads are what's important, moms are nothing but worthless baby-factories" is the not-exactly-subtle subtext of what you said. And if you're not joking, then hell, I don't wanna even have this discussion.

Of all the feminist groups you could've chosen for your joke here, that particular one is a strange way to go, considering they're all about pacifism and we're talking about rassling.

The "what's yo daddy" line of eligibility seems rather sexist and patriarchal. Acting like the mother's contribution doesn't matter is certainly not fair.

The thing is, how big a percentage of your ancestry needs to be African in order to be considered truly "black"? Logically, you'd need over 50%, right? Rock doesn't have that. As far as I know, his mother is pureblood Samoan. And looking at his father, Rocky Johnson is light-skinned enough that he obviously has some European heritage in his family tree. So Rock's genetic makeup is less than half black; why the insistence that he's still generally black overall? Same thing with the other people you mentioned. These folks look like they had one black grandparent and three grandparents of other colors, if not going all the way back to great-grandparents. Why does our society have this weird obsession with calling someone like that an "African-American", when obviously the majority of their ancestors aren't from Africa? Personally, I think it goes back to the old "one drop" rule during slavery. That is, any person whom you could tell had so much as one drop of African blood could be legally counted as black, and thus owned as a slave. This was instituted so that offspring of a slave and a white would still be counted as a slave, and their offspring, and their offspring's offspring. It was a pretty evil philosophy which was undertaken solely for financial reasons, yet somehow it's managed to hang on even up til today. Thus, a 90% white fellow like the comedian Sinbad is still somehow deemed "black" by the public. ...

Provide some evidence for your point. Just saying something is common knowledge is meaningless. Humans have believed countless things were common knowledge which turned out to be objectively false. Gimme some statistics. For example, check out the list of causes of death for developed nations versus undeveloped nations. You see a much higher incidence rate of most communicable diseases in poorer nations without Westernized medicine. "But Jingus", you'll say, "the West clearly has higher rates of heart attacks, strokes, and cancer". Which is true. That's because we live long enough to get them. Those largely cause mortality in older people, at ages which most people just never reach in impoverished third-world hellholes. They die of other diseases first, things which aren't nearly as lethal if you've got access to modern medicine. As you can see here and here, life expectancy in in third-world countries is significantly lower than in Western civilization. It may look like America is a tad low on those lists, but that's almost entirely due to just how much we eat. Fattening food is cheaper in the United States than anywhere else in the world, leading to extremely high obesity rates and the inevitable health problems that come with that. It's mostly the quantity, not quality, of stuff we shove into our mouths that makes us die faster.

Yeah, I understand that part, opiates have an unintended side effect which can be used or abused for recreational purposes. Which once again leads us back to the "there is no sXe rulebook" point. Some would argue that recreational drugs are bad because of what they can do to your mind and body if abused, so they just don't want to ever take that chance. I can understand that, even if I don't agree with it. It's the ones that claim that basically all manufactured chemicals are bad because of some bullshit alternative-medicine claims that our bodies are sacred temples which shouldn't be defiled with outside substances, those are the nuts who really irritate me.

Except that we're not seeing increases in most diseases. It's a New Age conspiracy theory that we're supposedly getting sicker and sicker as a population. The documented statistical fact is that modern Western medicine really works. Compare life expectancy and cause-of-death rates from different societies; in undeveloped or third-world countries, you're much more likely to die younger and much more likely to die of a disease which is completely preventable in a more advanced nation. To put it simply: natural =/= good. The anti-medicine types love to throw the word "unnatural" around like it's an insult. Well, deadly nightshade is natural. A simple vitamin pill is unnatural. Which would you rather ingest? Nowhere in particular, because as you say, it's a very loosely affiliated group with no real hierarchy nor Gospel-like list of strict rules. Individual people basically make up their own interpretation of whatever they think sXe should be. Yet they both do essentially the same thing. I don't see the point in separating opiate painkillers and local aesthetics, because they're basically used for the same purposes, to numb the body's feelings of pain.

What would you name for a short list of Barry's all-time best matches?

Booker T, when he was doing the King Booka gimmick. The Rock, if you count a half-Samoan as black. Bobby Lashley, if you count the ECW belt as a "world title".

That's splitting hairs awfully thin. I know you're friends with Punk, and I'm not trying to have a go at him personally here. I've just always been deeply skeptical of Straight-Edge in general. It's not based on much real medical science, it's basically a philosophy with a nearly spiritual bent to it. "Drugs are bad for people in some situations, so I'll never take drugs and ergo I'll be better off than most people." That logic is rather suspect. There's good reasons why we have these manufactured chemicals in the first place, because in many circumstances they can prove to be invaluable. Especially since it seems like nobody in the movement can make up their mind about exactly what a "drug" is. I'd argue that antibiotics are just as much of a foreign chemical as painkillers, but I doubt that anyone in the sXe movement would hesitate a moment before taking antibiotics if they had a nasty bacterial infection. It's an a la carte sort of belief system, where the individual practitioner takes whichever pieces he feels like and then just throws out the rest, making up whatever rules he feels comfortable with. We introduce a wide variety of "unnatural" substances into our body every day, every time we do anything even as simple as taking a sip of water. Drawing an arbitrary line between Good Chemicals and Bad Chemicals has always seemed a bit silly to me.

For all his skills, Tenryu seemed to have a pretty lousy vertical jump. Even his big top-rope move was basically just him collapsing backwards onto the mat and getting zero air. The only thing I've seen him do which was even close to being "high flying" was a simple dive through the ropes. Not knocking the guy's overall working ability, he's probably my favorite worker of the Grumpy Old Stiff Japanese Bastard mode, but leaving his feet was not his strong point. Nobody's perfect.

I don't think they'd let him work the indies, or at least nowhere besides ROH. The WWE in the past few years has become increasingly distrustful of outside bookings, becoming much more strict on their guys' extracurricular activities. The days where they'd let a guy take indy matches or loan a wrestler out to another company are mostly long gone. The only reason that Danielson was allowed to do that final indy tour was because he'd made those bookings before getting signed back to the Fed, and Vince apparently thought that Bryan's insistence on fulfilling his commitments was a sign of guts and loyalty or someshit like that. I've heard those comments. But there's pain, and then there's pain. Punk's clearly a healthy fellow with a strong constitution and a high pain tolerance, but he's hardly invulnerable and seemingly just hasn't run into many situations involving truly hideous suffering. Pain is a legitimate physical phenomena, not something that just "all in your head" like some macho blowhards claim. Apply enough of it to anyone, and it can actually induce unconsciousness. A wrestler may think that they're tough because they manage to get out of bed in the morning on bum knees and with a bad back, but that's not even close to the same level of agony that is undergone by, say, a serious burn victim. As his own use of Novocaine shows, there's some situations which require the use of painkillers merely to sustain the patient's current level of health.

Probably he means that attitude that old wrestlers have towards smarks as a group. There's still plenty of grumpy old veterans who dismiss "those internet marks" as being some kind of Borg-like hivemind collective, where everyone has identical homogeneous personalities and opinions. "The internet marks all think that..." and such. And the guys a few posts up were right about the current crop of younger semi-informed internet fans vs the hardcores like us. The casual fan is much more likely now to know a little bit more about backstage stuff than they ever were before. But I dunno if the percentage of seriously devoted "scholars", if you will, has risen from previous eras. Actually, there would be one easy way to measure it. Does Meltzer ever release the number of subscribers he has, and has had in the past? That would be a handy estimation to use for the size of the hardcore smark audience.

Don't forget that it was immediately followed by the fans allegedly voting for an Arm-Wrestling contest, as opposed to an actual match. By that point, I was practically certain that the WWE was just rigging the vote and stealing everyone's text money in a case of blatant fraud. Following that with the fans not voting for "ban Vickie from ringside", and it looked more and more likely. This new info about the voting being fucked up actually makes more sense than anything else I saw on Monday night.

It's all in the motion of the swing. A slap is when you swing your arm almost like you're throwing a hook punch. You come in from the side with your hand outstretched, and whack them in the side of the face. With a palm strike, you're striking straight forward and somewhat upward directly into their nose, so it's kind of like half an uppercut. With a slap, you hand itself is generally the only part of your body putting real momentum into the energy released. The palm strike has the power of your arm and shoulders behind it, if you're doing it right. Also, with the hand striking from the side in a slap, more energy is expended when your hand bounces off their face because you're using your arm in a multi-jointed fashion. The move fancy movement you put into a strike, generally speaking, the less it hurts. A good palm strike locks up your arm like a battering ram, so you're putting real weight into the blow. That's the shoot version, anyway. In practice, I have seen Liger be lazy with it on occasion. It's a hard move to get right as a work.

I really do hate the one-finisher style. It simply makes no logical sense, in a rather aggressively incoherent fashion. Why bother trying any move but your finisher? Or even worse, why bother making a pinfall attempt after any non-finishing move, and then acting surprised when the other guy kicks out? That's one thing I've never understood, when they do something like a simple bodyslam and then immediately go for a cover, when even a kindergartner could tell you that wouldn't be enough. I know, but he was trying to say that basically nobody besides JBL used a clothesline for a finisher in America, and that's simply not true. Hansen did plenty enough work in the States over the decades, and probably wrestled more matches in America than in Japan, we just don't have much footage of a lot of his earlier stateside stuff.

He doesn't have to take it to any specific destination. The important part is simply that he's taking the belt and leaving, regardless of where he ends up. He could be mounting it above his fireplace, it doesn't matter.

You're forgetting Hansen's earlier stuff. He worked in almost every territory at one point or another: WWWF, Memphis, Georgia, Texas, AWA, etcetera. Hell, he even showed up in early ECW a couple of times. So it's not like he was a Japanese exclusive. I'm pretty sure that Hogan was using the clothesline during his earlier run with Vince Sr. There was the one match in the Spectrum where he took out Andre by lariating him with a loaded elbow pad, for example. But the point is, there's been several top guys who've used it enough that it's a relatively established finisher. This isn't like, say, a drop toe hold or something like that which hasn't beaten anyone since 1953.