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Yeah, I never heard there was any impact.

Chris' latest piece hits both Network numbers and TV Deal, so I thought I'd toss it here. http://whatculture.com/wwe/wwe-network-tv-rights-waiting-game.php

It is amazing to look back and see that was five years ago. I think of Wade & Cory & Bowie, and more recently Charles & Doug & William... Good lord has the world changed in those five years in ways that move me a great deal when I think about it. Pretty awesome.

Wade and Cory have been together since 2000. Bowie isn't adopted: he's their son through a surrogate. http://prowrestlingonly.com/index.php?/topic/4999-the-wade-keller-appreciation-thread/?p=5438416

http://www.citypages.com/2014-04-02/news/wade-keller-the-man-holding-up-the-pro-wrestling-torch/full

On the earlier question, it appears to have been the plan, as Backlund came back in November which Kevin eventually got to: http://prowrestlingonly.com/index.php?/topic/18853-nobuhiko-takada-vs-bob-backlund-uwfi-moving-on-110791 Less sure on *why* they chose to be goofy here.

Somewhere buried in the depths of a tOA archive disk are several long, really well written pieces by Frank on what we gleaned from ECW's BK documents. The threads were pretty good as well as we had Chad pipping in, and he'd done a decent amount of BK work over the years... and I think a few other folks as well who had good insight into what some of the more obscure items listed likely related to. Sure, we had a lot of fun with "Tommy's Truck", but there was a good chunk of info there.

The company and Heyman as an individual both went BK. It was always a hand-to-mouth thing, also with Heyman bilking several investors, banks, vendors/companies and his folks. On some level, it was almost a Ponzi scheme. Was every month a net negative? Unlikely. They were probably months where he took in more than went out. But that also was a false profit: things like getting an upfront fee/advance on a deal that would come out of later revenue the vendor made, and not factoring in the debt load he was carrying. I suspect that if a real accountant had all the real information across the whole history, it would have been bleak the whole time. John

That is pretty much what we covered when talking about it last time: Dave is stretching the definition of "work". Thinking about pro wrestling while on the bike or at the beach... that really isn't "work". Calling up a friend and talking on the phone for 2-3 hours, even if a lot of the conversation is about pro wrestling, isn't really "work". John

This was the piece that Simmons did that reference Snuka-Backlund (for the most recent time): http://grantland.com/features/the-action-hero-championship-belt It's an example of one of the things Simmons doesn't do well. He's had this Championship Belt concept for years, and applied it to various things like Best QB or Best Comedy Guy. The concept is kinda-sorta cute when applied to Action Heroes, but he creates some rules to apply to himself then ignores them, going from early long reigns to bouncing the title all over the place to running out of steam in the 00s. The problem is that it likely encourages people like Barnwell to do stuff like that as well. Which is too bad because Barnwell did a good job of covering with 8 pieces in 14 days before blowing up with no transactional piece in the past two weeks despite players still being signed and talent still out there... but I digress. John

What was great about Fred heeling it up until the end was that the Babyfaces got one last chance to prove the they really were the faces in the feud all along: Sometimes you just need a Super Heel like Fred to help people get who the Faces are. John

We talked about the 120 hours a week several years back in one of the threads (possibly this one) and tended to point out that Dave is stretching the definition of "work" to get to 17 hours on average every single day. Especially considering his (at least in the past) love for the Gym and the Beach.

That thread is a fucking riot on re-read. Yeah, I'd strongly recommend it to people who wonder about the need for buffer matches. John

Yeah, both of those are great 70s hair. Of course I'm only 5-6 years younger than Dave, so I'm biased to 70s hair.

More seriously... buffer matches are needed by either: 1. dumb bookers 2. dumb workers 3. dumb fans 4. two or all of the above That doesn't mean ordering of cards isn't important. We've all seen cards where the choice of which match goes on last, or how they are pieced together, is poorly done. But... We've also all seen great/heated matches that could follow great/heated matches. John

I think the best buffer matches of all time where the matches on: 11/01/90 between the Liger-Pegasus and Mutoh & Chono vs Hase & Sasaki and Choshu-Hashimoto matches 02/28/93 between the Hansen-Kawada and Misawa-Taue matches 07/29/93 between the Hansen-Kobashi and Misawa-Kawada matches Those were five really cool buffer matches breaking those up.

Exactly. I think if we go back through this board when we talk about network match, getting into 80M basic households would have been a dream for the WWE. Say they got into them at $0.20 per household. That's $192M per year. Okay... say that it's not 80M, but that they launched with 40M. That's $96M. Yeah, the WWE would have taken that money and ran. They frankly would have done it for $0.10 per basic household if they could have gotten on 80M homes ($92M). We went round in circles here about getting on Basic and even a low end carriage fee. The WWE ran into issues of potentially being forced onto a Tier rather than Basic, and other nonsense like buying an existing channel and the WWE's seeming unwillingness to joint venture on a channel.

I didn't say he was a Tea Party guy. I said he was a goof who keeps rebranding himself over the decades when he finds his prior branding uncomfortable. *That* regular rebranding of himself is not dissimilar to how a large chunk of Tea Party folks are little more than rebranded from parties (and mostly from one specific party) because they don't care for their prior branding. John

I doubt any of the other big players thinks WGN/Tribune is major player. Tribune is a trainwreck at the moment. They talk about splitting up into the horrid newspaper business on one end and the broadcasting on the other side. It hasn't happened yet. This is something where the other big players would read it as a bluff, and dare Vince to call that bluff and go to a network and company in shaky ground and uncertain future ownership. On the flip side, Vince isn't going to run that bluff to the point of it being called and turning up an empty hand.

"Libertarianism" in a modern sense is largely about re-branding. One of the reasons I tend to view Rockwell as a goof is that he's spent so much of his life regularly re-branding himself because he didn't like how the prior re-branding came to be seen. The Ledbetter piece by Kane is one I have memory reading at the time when someone pointed me to what a crackpot Kane was. I'm sure that Kane thinks he's being deeply philosophical in his writing because he's citing stuff he pulled from someone else who had previously written on the topic. But... eh. :/

One of the things the WWE is running up against in terms of timing: http://www.sportsbusinessdaily.com/Journal/Issues/2014/03/17/Media/NBA-media.aspx The key one in there, which is a direction I've thought the NBA might head for a few years, is that they might carve out a 3rd Package in addition to the current 2. We all know the rights are going to go through the roof, but the NBA may be pulling in massive commitment from 3 networks rather than just 2.

Kane is more a Tea Party "libertarian" rather than a deeply philosophical libertarian. Not dissimilar to where a lot of people who were typically GOP ran to during/after the Bush years and "Republican" made some of them a bit uneasy. This isn't really true. Jacobs is a believer in Austrian economics, very familiar with Mises, Rothbard, et. It is true that he is somewhat wedded to the Ron/Rand Paul political strategy, but I know for a fact he is more deeply philosophical than a lot of people who are actually in the LP Yeah, dude has writings up on Lew Rockwell's website. He's pretty close to as philosophically into it as it gets. Which is pretty much what I mean. Rockwell is a classic Paulian version of Libertarian: on the econ side where/when they care for it, and slide over to social conservatism when they care for it, and end up with a melting pot mish-mash. The Gov is evil... except when we want the Gov to quash out what we don't like. Granted, you'll get the same mish mash over on the other side.

Kane is more a Tea Party "libertarian" rather than a deeply philosophical libertarian. Not dissimilar to where a lot of people who were typically GOP ran to during/after the Bush years and "Republican" made some of them a bit uneasy. This isn't really true. Jacobs is a believer in Austrian economics, very familiar with Mises, Rothbard, et. It is true that he is somewhat wedded to the Ron/Rand Paul political strategy, but I know for a fact he is more deeply philosophical than a lot of people who are actually in the LP Oh, I know his stuff about Austrian economics. But having read his framing of it relative to Keynes, it tends to come across much more as Tea Party / Paulian view of Austrian econ than truly deep philosophical and thinking.

Also - you're using the TWC logo rather than Time Warner's (TBS/TNT). http://www.timewarner.com