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Unless I missed something, you were never banned. Pretending to be a different person seems unnecessary. As someone who spent more than a little free time poking RE with a stick over the internet, I think it was smart. "Resident Evil" was a name that carried a lot of baggage with it. Taking on a new identity frees him of that and lets him get a fresh start. He had a Benoit related name before that, and it had baggage as well... so it's not like RE cleaned it up for long, nor will Puma. Kind of pointless since it's the same poster, and he'll eventually go down the same path. The name change doesn't really change anything. John

Wouldn't Resident Evil just dominate the dominatrices and take what services he wanted?

You have to give him credit for going three months and 17 posts without anyone noticing. As far as the 2 laptops + 2 desktops w/flat screens + 1 old PC, I wonder if Dave means for his entire house: i.e. his wife's, his kids, his own laptop, etc. Because Dave isn't exactly a techie who would have/need 5 pc's on his *own* in addition to whatever the rest of the family has. John

His first issue was released in early 1983, with the 1982 awards. He was 23. The earlier 1980 & 1981 awards weren't tied to any newsletter... and have the feel of "retro" awards the came out with the initial issue.

110 hours / 7 days = 15.7 hours a day I think a lot of Dave's life revolves around wrestling and wrestling friends. So talking on the phone to Bruce for 2 hours is "two hours of work", even if it's not exactly working despite them spending most of the call shooting the shit about pro wrestling. Just going on past experience, and this was before Dave got married and had kids. Our calls were looooooooooong. I'm not sure if I'd call much of the time on them "work" for Dave. There would be times when I'd see a match from Japan before he did... but we were basically shooting the shit over it rather than Dave pumping me for a detailed description of the match. So... I'd take the 110 with a grain of salt.

NJPW, and Choshu specifically, balanced things well: The Dome was a spotlight for the Old Guard: Fujinami over Flair, Choshu vs Tiger Jeet G1 was a spotlight for the Young Guard: it built towards Chono-Hash and then Chono-Mutoh, with the Old Guard putting them over Yet... Fujinami still held the belt Choshu won it from him in January Fujinami & Choshu effectively "ran the table" to get their revenge Which set up... Mutoh's title reign Chono's NWA Title reign Hash's title reign Build up the old guard, build up the young guard, rebuild the old guard to make the young guard getting the belt more significant. Problem in there? The choice to make Muta the champ rather than Mutoh. It was a pretty subpar title reign after the expectations of them finally getting the belt. It really took Hash to rebuild things, which he did far beyond what anyone (other than perhaps Choshu) expected. Anyway... the way Choshu laid things out was a pretty logical way to get from 1990 to 1993/94, with one blip on the road (Muta's reign) and possibly a second (Chono's injury). John

Mitsuharu Misawa & Toshiaki Kawada vs Steve Williams & Terry Gordy (AJPW 02/26/91) ***1/4 Stan Hansen & Dan Spivey vs Steve Williams & Terry Gordy (AJPW 04/18/91) ***3/4 Mitsuharu Misawa & Toshiaki Kawada vs Steve Williams & Terry Gordy (AJPW 05/24/91) ***1/4 Mitsuharu Misawa vs Terry Gordy (AJPW 06/01/91) ***1/4 Mitsuharu Misawa & Toshiaki Kawada vs Steve Williams & Terry Gordy (AJPW 12/06/91) ***1/4 Steve Williams & Terry Gordy vs Jumbo Tsuruta & Akira Taue (AJPW 03/04/92) ***1/2 Mitsuharu Misawa vs Terry Gordy (AJPW 04/26/92) ***1/2 Jumbo Tsuruta & Akira Taue vs Steve Williams & Terry Gordy (AJPW 08/22/92) ***1/2 Jumbo Tsuruta & Akira Taue vs Steve Williams & Terry Gordy (AJPW 10/07/92) ****1/4 Mitsuharu Misawa & Toshiaki Kawada vs Steve Williams & Terry Gordy (AJPW 11/30/92) ***3/4 Mitsuharu Misawa & Toshiaki Kawada vs Steve Williams & Terry Gordy (AJPW 01/30/93) ****1/2 Steve Williams vs Terry Gordy (AJPW Championship Carnival 04/12/93) *** Kenta Kobashi vs Terry Gordy (AJPW 05/29/93) **** Toshiaki Kawada & Akira Taue vs Steve Williams & Terry Gordy (AJPW 05/20/93) ***1/4 Yeah... looking at your ratings in the yearbooks, he hasn't been one of your favs. A few matches here and there that you liked, but not really sustained, nor even a specific match up that you liked a lot. There was a Gordy & Doc vs Jumbo & Taue match from either the 1990 or 1991 Tag League where Gordy & Doc were just kicking the crap out of Taue down the stretch, with Taue kicking out of stuff and not rolling over that got the crowd going... that I seem to recall enjoying a fair amount when randomly watching it a couple of years back (as in 5 or so). I don't see either of those matches making the yearbook, with the pairings showing up in 1992. If I wasn't hitting the bong on it, that might make a useful addition to the bonus disks... as much for Taue as for the MVC.

His matches with Bret in 1992 look like they all pretty much went past 20 minutes, at least ones we have times for. There aren't a lot of times for the Flair-Savage matches. The early ones seem under 20, some of them quite short (for a Flair match). The later times look longer, and there seem to be some 20+. Again, it's a very small % of the number that have times. Beyond those two, Flair wasn't working a lot with guys who would go long in the WWF. Some of the Hogan matches went a good deal longer than standard house show Hogan matches, especially the first time around. Piper didn't really want to work long at the time. Good lord... the Piper-Flair that I saw live at the time is one that, at the end of it, I really didn't want to see another 10 minutes of the two working. Flair went just under 20 against Bret in their first taped match in 1991. The Tito matches went 15+, which is about right given Tito's push at the time.

Bloat was my point. Modern cable forces shows to get tighter, at least in the sense of a Season. Series can still get bloated if they're popular and get stretched. The Sopranos was bloated and stretched long before the specifially stretched 6th season: it's one where you wish going into Season 4 they all agreed to wrap the thing in 13 episodes that year and were forced to tighten up the ship. Season 1 in hindsight is tight, even if it's sprawling and very much took it's time in telling the story. They really could have wrapped things up for Laura's Case in the same amount of time: 423 minutes, 9 episodes of hour long TV. Or go 470 for 10 episodes.

I get that from a "hey... it's called Twin Peaks!" standpoint. But as Season 2 wore on in Live TV (as opposed to folks watching it years after the fact on DVD or netflix), I generally felt: * I'm fucking tired of this case not being solved * I've seen enough of half the cast of kooks in this town * the creepiness of the city isn't fresh anymore I'll admit that isn't the case for your typical run of the mill show. Cheers was In The Bar for a freaking decade. Nearly every other show is like that, and few burn out after a short 1st season and part way through a second season. But Twin Peaks did. Laura's case was getting dragged out, and not in an interesting way. Long term character development isn't exactly one of Lynch's strengths - he can have a tough time pulling it off in two hours, so 423 of the first season was a lot, and expecting another 1000+ the following year was a stretch. That's why I'm saying in hindsight: it would have made for a better concept to have Coop spend two short seasons (i.e. modern cable seasons) solving a crime in a bizzare town, then move onto the next. Get out of the northwest and go to the south. Get out of the south and go to farm country in Iowa or Kansas. Etc. I'd rather see 4 arcs, 8 seasons of 12 episodes of that... then 4x24 stuck in Twin Peaks. I literally forced myself to watch the last 6 or so episodes of that, and it was one of the few times that I cursed myself for getting sober since it would have been far easier to watch that shit stoned. John

We recently had that best match of a guy's career thread a few months ago but I seem to remember something similar to this too. I was on SC in 08-09 but I don't recall a thread like that. Maybe it was a thread on Albums Of The Year. But I seem to recall that was based on a Match of the Year thread... especially because I think it was the first time I saw someone rate the Race-Lawler draw as a MOTY (let alone a MOTYC) when it was... well... far more of a "this is suppose to be good" than "holy shit this actually is good" match. Especially in 1977 where there were some great matches out there on disc.

Is there an older thread like this? Or was that something that was on SmackChoice that got blown up?

Season 1 was exceptional. Season 2 slowly became a mess. It's hard to know what would have worked since it's Lynch, and he does thing in his own quirky way that make sense to him. But... one kind of wishes that the "Twin Peaks" concept came to him in the 00s when: * it could have been an HBO/Showtime (or other cable) series * set into a 10-12 episode seasonal arc * found a way to break out of Twin Peaks the city I know we all fall in love with the settings and cast of characters in a series. There are lots of series that can pull it off: Deadwood didn't feel dried up as the local of the series in its final season. But with Twin Peaks, the goofy/quirkiness of the city wore off... as did the chase of The Big Bad Guy, and frankly the case of Laura as it dragged on. On some level, we needed to break Coop free from those three things (Twin Peaks, Laura's case and the annoying BOB~!) and move him to the next freaky, quirk case. So... perhaps 2 seasons Arcs/Cases, forcing Lynch & Frost to tighten up the narrative (as if 20-24 hours over two seasons aren't enough to tell it Case and solve it), then move Coop onto the next case for the following season with a new cast of freaks. I know that's a hard break to make, but he's an FBI Guy handling goofy murders. Send him on his way. In that way, perhaps each season becomes tight, with a cliffhanger at the middle of each Arc to bridge the two seasons that share an Arc. In turn, get some true closure to each case. John

He actually linked to quality matches, rather than just random matches that popped up on a youtube search. So it's highly likely that his post is in response to a specific thread that mentioned (or linked to) specific matches that he then went and found. Or he actually loves Dandy and was expressing it. John

I made this point before on his candidacy, and I think from that third sentence it's what Dylan is getting at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wrest...anding_Wrestler 2006 Bryan Danielson 2007 Bryan Danielson 2008 Bryan Danielson 2009 Bryan Danielson 2010 Daniel Bryan Multiple time winners: 5 Danielson 3 Flair 3 Liger 3 Angle 2 Kobashi 2 Misawa 2 Benoit Granted, the list is incomplete because the award didn't exisit from 1980-85 when Flair would have won it most of those years (if not all). So give Flair another 5 of them to have 8... you still have Danielson winning 5 straight of an award that no one else has won more than 3 times. We know that "work" means a crapload in the HOF voting, and that if someone's work is seen as so top notch that they're going in regardless of the balance of their candidacy. Bryan was the dominant work for the second half of the last decade. One that's going to be very light in producing candidates. He will go in fairly easy. John

By putting him with someone the fans don't want to see him with? Unless the point is (yet again) to get have angles with Trip get heat on Brock. Which we've seen haven't worked so well... John

Good question. I don't know. But what I do know is Dave saying a number of times that they spent, in total, $100 million of the $300 million. AFAIK, WWE's cash reserve is now somewhere in the $150 million, unless I got confused, and it was $300 million before. My guess is that Dave means they've spent $100M of the $300M they've gotten from dividends. $300M would be pretty close to accurate. On the other hand, I'd have to go back to look at the IPO to see how much went into their pockets. We'd also have to ponder how much Vince & Linda might have made off their investments over the years. $50M + $50M might have just been the poker equiv of Bankroll: money they had set aside to play with. John

Okay... so no point in being lazy, and might as well add a couple more columns to the sheet... They went under $200M in Cash, Cash Equiv & STI back in 2008. They popped briefly above it in 2009, but have been under ever since. They've been in the $150M - $165M range the past three years. Once suspects the current quarter dip is more cyclical than anything else, and when Mania Money flows in that the next quarter will be back up in that range. One gets the sense that at the tail end of the period where they had $250M+ in cash, cash equiv & STI (2001-2007) that they determined they were carrying too much and moved to draw it down. That ties in with the increase in dividend amounts being paid out in 2007-2010, before being eased back down the last two years. There is one thing we can say about Vince that he's better at than any other wrestling promoter in the modern era: when hit with business slow downs, he reacts fast to cutting costs / expenses. He's done this time and again over the years. So the WWE would have to go in a massive tailspin before his moves to cut costs wouldn't be enough. Now that may change if Vince drops dead and Trip & Steph run the show. On the other hand... one gets the sense that Trip is a little more cut throat than most would be. Especially with no true rival for talent to go to. John

Just to make it clear, here are the approximate numbers for the quarter that just closed. FY2013 1st Qtr (Jan 1 - Mar 31 2013) 29,252,010 Class A Shares Issued & Outstanding 45,500,830 Class B Shares Issued & Outstanding Dividend = $0.12 per share = $8,970,340.80 This ties in fairly close with the "$8,977" listed in the 10-Q, which is in thousands and would mean a rounded "$8,977,000". Vince & Linda 39,272,641 Class B Shares * $0.12 = $4,712,716.92 566,670 Class B Shares * $0.12 = $68,000.40 100 Class A Shares * $0.12 = $12.00 Total: $4,780,729.32 The last two are in "Linda's Name", but we all know that what is Vince's is her's anyway so I would treat all of these as Vince & Linda's shares. So 53.3% of the dividend is going to Vince & Linda. Steph has 3,764,071 shares (most in two trusts of Class B and one small batch of Class A) while Shane has 1,541,204 (most in one trust of Class B and one small batch of Class A). Side bar: I'd have to go back and track what happened to Shane's shares, as his 2008 trust is slightly smaller than Steph's and his 2004 equiv of her's doesn't exist... though last decade when I looked at this they looked pretty close to equal. My guess is that Shane must of unloaded some of his Family Business Shares. Anyway... 3,764,071 shares for Steph * $0.12 per share = $451,688.52 1,541,204 share for Shane * $0.12 per share = $184,944.48 Total McMahon dividend payout = $5,417,362.32 (60.4%) That's just one quarter. The dividend payout now looks to be aimed at $35.9M for the year, which is the same as last year... down from the $81M-$83M per year that was being shelled out in 2008-10, which at 60% a pop going to the McMahons would have been a total of $148M in those three years out of the $247M paid out in dividends. The McMahons could have kept the money in the company by simply paying out Class A dividends... in other words, just on the shares that are publically traded (the Class B owned by the McMahons aren't). As far as Cash, the company is currently sitting on: $46.28M Cash and cash equivalents $85.98M Short-term investments, net That's down $20M from the start of the quarter (specifically in Cash). I haven't really tracked their cash flow and balance sheets over the years, being much more interested in the Income Statements (specifically Revenue side)... so I don't have a handy sheet with the cash data over the years... and really don't want to sift through close to 20 years of filings on the SEC's website to find it. But... I wouldn't worry too much about that. $130M in cash and short term investments (especially the way the market is going) isn't a problem for a company with a shade under $500M in annual revenue and pretty reasonable credit facilities available to it. John

WWE's Profit / Cash has been paid out in dividends totaling $540M over the past 10 years. Dividends are paid to shareholders. The Vince & Linda are the largest shareholders. In a very true sense, the WWE funded Linda's insane runs for the Senate because Vince & Linda have been extracting money from the WWE via dividends. A boatload of money. John

I must have missed All Japan fans selling the 1991 Hansen-Kobashi as "pro-wrestling at its purest". In fact, it's not been a match that's been sold much at all by AJ fans over the years. Are you think of a different Hansen-Kobashi? Or is there a secret coven of online AJ fans that I need to read?

They probably should have put it up for grabs no later than at the Tag League (10/5 - 10/17). Scott got hurt back on 6/14. On the other hand, it's possible that Scott at some point let them think he'd be back for this show. He did return to WCW later in November... perhaps coming back later than expected. Anyway, sometimes there ends up being a long time between defenses. Misawa went from 10/93 to El Clasico on 06/03/94 without defending the TC. They probably could have slipped a defense against Taue or Kobashi into the New Years series.

One can only guess that WWE Creative, and Trip, are deaf and were unable to hear the lack of heat at Mania for Brock-Trip... i.e. no one wants to see issues between Brock and Trip continue. John