PeteF3

Music: Nerdy indie rock--Modest Mouse and Arcade Fire on down. Was a huge Mountain Goats fan before the wrestling connection really came out. My all-time favorite band is Guided by Voices (just about any incarnation--I must have a weakness for super-prolific indie songwriters. The Magnetic Fields would fall into that category too). Dad-rock, but a lot stuff that falls outside of what plays on classic-rock radio if that makes sense--Warren Zevon being the prime example (there's more to him than "Werewolves of London"). Classic folk-rockers like Dylan and Phil Ochs and Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell (which sort of fits into the above--mom-rock, maybe?) African music from all over the continent, generally leaning towards the funkier side. The Indestructible Beat of Soweto is one of my favorite albums ever. Obscure African psychedelic-rock compilations. Fela Kuti, though sometimes a little bit of him goes a long way. Besides Kanye and Public Enemy my hip-hop tastes tend more toward the quirky and off-center as well--Aesop Rock, Atmosphere, Dream Warriors, acts like that. Garage rock from the '60s, anything you'd find on a Nuggets collection. Lots of other '60s stuff, mostly centered around Stax/Volt soul recordings, surf, and the British Invasion (and the folkies from above). Pop-centered classic punk for me too--Husker Du (speaking of bands with wrestling connections), the Clash, the Undertones, Ramones, X--or where punk intersects with new wave (Devo, Joy Division). I do like quite a bit of '80s new wave even though I tend to prefer guitars to synths. I don't know where Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds fall in this category but they're another all-time favorite act--I drove from Columbus to Nashville just because that was the closest stop on a rare U.S. tour, just so I could make sure that I saw them once. Jazz--I'm not going to pretend to be a jazz expert but I like Miles Davis, Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Dave Brubeck, Billie Holiday, and Ornette Coleman. Stuff that Greil Marcus called "the old, weird America." Love the Anthology of American Folk Music and Goodbye, Babylon box sets, the latter of which has some crossover with the AAFM but centered around gospel recordings from the turn of the century to WW2. Country leanings are very old-school and canon-based--Cash and Willie and a little bit else. Modern-day pop-music-with-twangy-guitars-and-lyrics-about-pickups might be my least favorite genre of music ever invented. Don't really care about techno/house or R&B, but as I've become more of a song-collector than an album-collector my collection has gotten very playlist-and-compilation-heavy, so I'll have a smattering of just about everything. --- Sports: Ohio State football (even as I get more queasy about the very idea of football, I'm sort of already down the rabbit-hole with wrestling with everyone else here so I'm probably not stopping until the sport disappears or becomes unrecognizable), Cleveland Indians baseball, Browns football (speaking of getting queasy...), Blue Jackets hockey. Really only pay attention to basketball during the tournament and NBA playoffs--the Cavs wouldn't have been my first choice to bring a major title back to Cleveland by a long shot but I was pretty glad they did and am hoping against hope that the Lebrons can do it again. I hate golf and auto racing but I do enjoy curling both as a spectator sport every 4 years and a participant.

- The Simpsons (let's call it seasons 2-9) - Seinfeld - Frasier - The Twilight Zone - The Office (US, through Carell's departure+finale) - Law & Order (the classic) - Breaking Bad - Arrested Development - Batman: TAS - Mystery Science Theater 3000

She's an agent, I think just for women's matches.

I'm pretty sure JT came to the right conclusion: I distinctly remember most of these early Monday nights and these shows definitely aired head-to-head. For instance, I remember the shock tag title change but I never even knew about the Bluebloods/Eaton fakeout until years later, I think all the way until I watched the '95 Yearbook here, because I happened to be on Raw while that part was going on. I actually have no memory at all of Thursday Raw replays and don't even remember Meltzer going over them in the WON, so I don't think they lasted long.

For the record, the one bump I've seen the Sheik take is in a RWTL match where Billy Robinson gives him a gutwrench suplex. Of course, if Billy told Sheik, "We're doing the gutwrench," then there wasn't a whole lot Sheik could do to stop him.

There's no way on earth I'd ever classify New Japan of any era as an "indy."

What heel stuff did Owen do in the indies? Besides his USWA work, I mean.

I don't think "imitation [x]" qualifies as a great gimmick.

Yeah, it was definitely moreso the latter--a curiosity. No way would they be busting their asses after such a monumental WWF title match. There's also the fact that the WWF never did the "We're out of time!" show-closer, so it stood out more.

Wasn't that a jdw-ism referring to Bob Ryder and 1wrestling.com? He certainly had more of a personal issue with Ryder than Keith did, at least as I recall.

I would say the opposite of odd--for a 2000s era smark fan I'd say his views are downright cliche.

You get a million of these in every wreddit Observer recap--the guy who does them downplays it and the jokes in general, but yeah, they're in the comments, usually multiple times.

Wow--I believe footage of the actual neck-breaking is considered Holy Grail stuff (there's been long-circulating partial footage of the match, but not the botched slam, if I have the story right).

Oh, and I forgot about that stupid triangle choke Kawada does that completely kills the crowd at a really hot point during the match--it may well be the dumbest thing I've ever seen Kawada do. No one in an AJPW crowd was going to buy a submission or even a pass-out-and-ref-stoppage at this point. Yeah, I wouldn't say it's a *bad* match either. But it's about ***. By the standards of 5-star WON matches it isn't good. I forget if Kanemoto-Wagner got 5* or not but that was another one that left me staggeringly underwhelmed. The worst excesses of 2.9-wrestling. Unlike Misawa-Kawada I would actually call it a below-average match, not because of execution or crowd reaction but because I simply didn't buy the story (such as it was) that they were telling.

And none of the head-drops mean a damned thing except in the Randy Savage "reviving elbow" sense where it's a cue for (usually) Misawa to hulk up. Not only is it bad selling and bad psychology but it's a very eerie-in-retrospect signal of where the AJPW style was headed.

"The day the man died" seems like it's exactly the time to be doing it, though I agree that Dave's wording could have been better.

Going to get overshadowed by Bruno, but the Mid-Atlantic Gateway has reported that #1 has died.

Austin actually tried to help Bret win the title on Raw, so he would make their match a title match--it was Undertaker who cost Bret in the cage.

The song was written by Doc Pomus, an all-time legendary songwriter who's responsible for basically half or more of Elvis' catalogue. Even for something as tossed-off as that it may not come cheap to re-up the rights.