Cox

After that baffling Norwegian food comparison outlined above, I think I finally figured Dave out. Any older Observer readers remember the 80's and 90's, when Dave would criticize paranoid wrestlers who thought every sporting event was a work (Kevin Sullivan was one, I think Terry Funk was another)? Dave has become one of those people, only instead of thinking that everything is a work, Dave thinks that everything is pro wrestling.

Ah, I had never seen that. I stand corrected!

There's definitely been times where Paul Heyman has played something of a stereotypical Jewish lawyer type. Also, there was Colt Cabana's brief run on Smackdown as Scotty Goldman, which wasn't long enough for them to get into anything too stereotypical but still.

I think the Raw before the election is going to be where the action is, since that's going to be when they are really pounding their message out full blast. The Raw after the election will be almost a week after the election ended, so unless Linda pulls off a win, I bet it will be quite muted. NXT might be interesting that week, though, as it will be airing right around the time election results are trickling in.

I have a friend who lives in Connecticut and works in the financial industry there. He received the following E-Mail today: "Linda McMahon, the Connecticut Senate Candidate, is coming to the [redacted] office this Friday at 1:30 p.m. Linda is the former CEO of World Wide Wrestling and this is her first run for political office. We will hold this reception in the lunch room next to Direct. You are welcome to bring a spouse or friend. We all represent [redacted]. We will all be polite. This should conclude by 3:00 p.m. In addition, to your own wants and needs from a U.S. Senator, [redacted] is interested in lower taxes, less regulation and a healthy financial services industry. We want to hire more great people, pay more and keep more."

I'm about 90% sure he's talking about Eddie Gilbert.

Are we sure that Dixie knows that wrestling is a work? I'm not ruling out the possibility that nobody in the TNA office has smartened her up yet.

So somehow, Dave remembered enough about Gonzalez that he chokeslammed Fonzie at Wrestlemania IX, but not enough to remember that Fonzie was the referee, not the manager, in that match? If anything, that makes that whole passage look even stranger.

The strangest part wasn't even Alfonzo managing Gonzalez. That's an honest mistake, as Alfonzo basically took care of Gonzalez on the road, and he can probably be forgiven for conflating the two. The weird part was imagining a turn that happened at a Wrestlemania that never happened. I mean, where did that even come from?

It was probably just wrestling talk. Wrestlers all the time claim they'll get a job somewhere or that they'll put a good word in or whatever, and it rarely actually leads to anything.

I didn't say he did it well, just that compared to everything else he does, the TV recaps were the best. Besides, I'm trying to prove Beast wrong here, every once in a while we do have nice things to say about the F4W Empire!

Has anybody read the new style for F4W? The new format of one essay, briefly covering the news, and TV reports is a big improvement, as it focuses on what Bryan does best and gets away from the redundant material between the WON and F4W.

If the guy in question is Larry Sweeney, I'm not putting it past him that he sold the ring and beat himself up to make it look good.

How can they possibly be four months behind when they run like 10 shows a year, if that? That's almost unfathomable.

The thing is, even if Rock didn't know it was coming and Nash did double-cross him, does anybody doubt he would have been smart enough to think on his feet and have a much better comeback than Terry Funk? I mean, poor Terry Funk was over 55 years old when Nash did that, and had suffered a ton of brain damage. Nash picked a pretty easy target there, as opposed to The Rock, pretty much the best promo guy of all time. Rock still would have turned that back around on Nash quick enough to make him look foolish.

Admittedly, this is some nitpicking and pro wrestling nerdery on my part, but it felt really weird to read this week's classic WON from 1993 and see that Dave and the WON fanbase had rated the Flair/Anderson vs Blonds match higher than the Windham/Scorpio match, when the latter has held up far better and is remembered better today.

In wrestling, deaths don't come in threes, they come in sixes.

Seriously, why can't WWE just let these poor folks die without kicking dirt on them? You'd think that Linda would have an army of publicists at her disposal that would tell her that claiming to have only met Lance Cade once does her no favors. I know these people reside in nothing resembling the real world, but you'd think that they would at least endeavor not to piss off so many people that could come back and haunt them in the polls.

I've often felt the same way. The general look of Monday Night Raw has not changed at all since 1997. Giant screen, ramp, ring, all decorated with some combination of red and black. Sure, at one point the screen was shaped like a trapezoid, and other minor aesthetic adjustments, but the overall look and feel of WWE TV has barely changed over the past 13 years. I know that the lack of actual competition has made WWE terribly complacent over the past decade, but you'd still think that somebody in production would want to justify their job somehow by suggesting a new look and feel to WWE TV.

If WWE made a reasonable request (and I think "Don't get sloshed in public" is a pretty reasonable request) then they shouldn't be blamed if they fired somebody for violating said request. Serena was unwilling or unable to comply with her employer's request and was let go as a result. Sucks, because I thought she was good in the role, but clearly she wasn't a good fit for it.

Well, WWE currently has the Raw GM sending stuff over via E-Mail, maybe they could break out the Raw Ouija Board and let dead wrestlers host Raw.

Now that would be interesting. Brock is the biggest draw, and stealing him would make things interesting. But he is just one fighter (2-3 PPVs a year). Strikeforce would need to steal several stars, because we've seen UFC has done quite well even when their heavyweight division blows. In turn, Strikeforce would need to capitalize on having Brock... and I'm not sure that they can. John I think the way UFC contracts work, they have him under contract at least until he loses the title, as the contract would continue to roll over with every title defense (if I'm not misunderstanding what Dave has written in the Observer in the past). Now, of course we've seen Lesnar get out of contracts previously seen as iron-clad before, so I'm not sure if this would necessarily preclude him from going to Strikeforce, but unless the Strikeforce contract was for obscene money, I'm not sure the incentive would be there for him to enter into litigation to get into Strikeforce only because his advisor is working for them.

I'm guessing Strikeforce will make him cut all official ties to Lesnar as part of their agreement to bring him in, though I don't know how that will affect the autobiography the two of them were working on.

Hell, when I went to my first ECW Arena show 15 years ago, my parents were waiting for me in the parking lot to take me home (and got to hear some of the lovely chants from ECW folk, I'm surprised I was ever allowed back). While they were waiting, Foley came up to my dad and apparently asked for directions on how to leave. Mind you, this was in 1995, and Foley had already been working for ECW at least a year, AND I know somebody at the fan convention the month before who had to help Foley get to the ECW Arena. I can understand getting lost once or twice, but frankly the ECW Arena is not THAT hard to find and there are signs all over Oregon Ave on how to get to every major highway in the area.

Foley's third book I think is what turned me against him for good. I've always been a big fan of his, but hearing him basically whine and cry over 300+ pages that his midcard program with Tommy Dreamer and Terry Funk (two guys who weren't even on regular TV at the time) wasn't given more of a build up on Raw every week was pretty nauseating.