S.L.L.

Yeah, it's not worth getting worked up over, but the randomness of it all sure is confusing. Even accepting that the list is going to be heavily influenced by who is and isn't in the good graces of the company, kayfabe accomplishments, promoting active guys who can make money for the company now, and what fits the WWE version of wrestling history, it still seems like they didn't know what they wanted this list to be. I am kinda amused at HHH falling out of the top ten. I wonder if someone gets fired over that, or at least if he gets to squash Rey when he comes back.

So, at the cost of breaking Godwinn's Law, Hitler was a heel? I mean, a lot of people who didn't know him thought he was an asshole. I certainly do. If that's all it means...damn. It would be an interesting social experiment to see Dave give a lecture at the Holocaust Memorial Museum about how Hitler was a great heel "like The Sheik or Roddy Piper!". And by "interesting social experiment", I mean it would be a great opportunity to see someone throw a brick at his head and maybe rescramble his brain to the proper alignment.

What's doubly weird is that "ballyhoo" is a wrestling term that dates back to ye olden days when the papers used to describe promos. I assumed it had just been phased out, but I guess it hung on in some capacity.

Correct. The other question may be more worthwhile, but as no question about wrestling is truly worthwhile other than maybe "why are they all dying so young?" and "how do we stop it?", I think it's fair to let me ask my little trivia question without it being dismissed as less important than a slightly bigger trivia question. Also, for the purpose of my question, it's not "who is the oldest living World Title claimant", but "who is the earliest living World Title claimant". As in, "of the guys who are still alive, who claimed a World Title first?". In poking around wrestling-titles.com, I've found the answer is, as I initially suspected, Verne Gagne.

LOLtasic Freudian slip typo aside, nothing says "moral victory" like your husband shitting on your opponent's banner.

And the winner is....

He actually was billed as being from "Belfast, Northern Ireland". Actually, for much (if not all) of his WWE run, they said "Belfast, Ireland." Was he really? I could have sworn otherwise. FWIW, this was the statement released on WWE.com prior to their debut: Make of that what you will.

It would help if his sense of humour wasn't so weird and juvenile. It would also help if it was funny or if it showed any clear difference from the way Vince normally carries himself. Vince McMahon doing a self-parody is indistinguishable from the real thing.

Who's the earliest living former World Title claimant now that Carpentier is gone? Gagne?

On top of that, while it is technically part of Great Britain, and people from Belfast are technically British, do not ever tell them that. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Troubles I always said that the best thing about the Finlay/Regal matches in WCW was that they were pretty much wrestled the way you would logically expect an English dude and an Irish dude (Northern or otherwise) to wrestle each other - by just borderline beating each other to death. Unless Finlay is/was a loyalist, I'd think portraying him as an Irish guy who acts Irish despite being Northern Irish isn't super far-fetched. He actually was billed as being from "Belfast, Northern Ireland".

I'm not seeing it. Where does the slippery slope lead to in this case? Even more formal dress codes at polling stations? Suit-and-tie requirements? Does Men's Warehouse have a powerful lobby in Washington? Is there any real reason to get worked up about this other than to help Vince create his government boogeyman after Linda loses?

When labor becomes too powerful, they tend to find ways to do as little work as possible while maintaining their high profile positions. When management becomes too powerful, they tend to find ways to exploit labor unreasonably while reaping profits at their expense. You have to be able to strike a balance, just like any other business. Wrestling promotions tend to not be very good at that.

The problem with Hamilton's idea is that he doesn't know shit about hot air ballooning. Goal of most hot air balloonists isn't to just rise in altitude until you run out of gas and die. It's to have a controlled flight, and then to land safely to fly again another day. Once a pilot reaches the desired altitude, they'll only turn the burners on again occasionally to maintain that altitude, and will only do so for a few seconds at a time. Even if you had infinite gas, you'd still have to deal with heavy winds that would make your flight uncontrollable at higher altitudes, severe changes in pressure in the upper atmosphere, and, of course, the vacuum of space. How is explosive decompression good for business? An accurate "hot air ballooning-to-wrestling" booking model would be to have the heels get hot by dominating the faces until they get as over as they can without the fans getting sick of it (dangerously high winds at excessive altitudes), letting the faces start to get their licks in (leveling off so you can actually control the flight), let the fight go back and forth with both sides getting their licks in (maintaining the desired altitude), and then letting the faces get the edge and ultimately win, albeit still giving the heels enough so that it's not just a total squash (achieving a smooth landing, controlling the speed of descent instead of just free falling).

Man, let's wait until ResidentEvil's inevitable return before we go back to taking potshots at his shitty wrestling aesthetic. Let's instead nominate Bryan Alvarez for the Journalist's Wing of the PWO Hall. Alright. Can I ironically nominate Mark Henry since there is no way anyone could seriously think he's good? Don't forget Dustin Rhodes!

Man, let's wait until ResidentEvil's inevitable return before we go back to taking potshots at his shitty wrestling aesthetic. Let's instead nominate Bryan Alvarez for the Journalist's Wing of the PWO Hall.

I lol'd. Soooooo close to making that joke, but I couldn't remember offhand if he got arrested for murder or if he got radiation poisoning.

PWHF is definitely getting better over the years. It's early growing pains do hurt it, though. Thesz/Tragos was all about "legitimacy" and Lou protecting his version of wrestling history. That's been sloooooooooooooooooowly starting to let up since Lou's death, but it's definitely the least of the three halls. The PWO Hall of Fame might be kinda interesting. If nothing else, we'd be rather stringent in who we let in, what with us being the most negative message board about anything in the entire internet.

It's the closest thing wrestling has to a real HOF, but after 2003 (when Dave really started crowing about the Hall being great because there are so many workers who have the vote) and 2004 (when the really silly inductees like Angle, Ultimo, and Sakuraba started going in), it's definitely no longer close enough. It's a neat curiosity at this point, but nothing more, and basically needs to be scrapped and started from scratch by some other party, as Dave and his followers are clearly too far gone by this point to handle it themselves.

I pretty much watch all WWE programming on DVR. It's become almost Pavlovian in that I'll reach for the remote to fast-forward through the commercials when a guy is thrown to the floor. It's usually a sure thing, but if Michael Cole is announcing, I'd at least wait until he notes that the guy in the ring is in control, and asks if he can "keep it rolling when we come back".

While the larger point about TNA stands, I'd argue just the opposite about this. They brought Trump in and immediately paired him with one of the biggest stars in the company - Mr. McMahon, with Austin coming back to get involved as things went on. The execution wasn't as perfect as the Tyson stuff, largely due to the fact that Trump seems to have very little interest in working with wrestling for a guy who's worked with wrestling as much as he has, but at the end of the day, they built to quite likely the biggest money drawing match ever in wrestling, largely on the strength of the Trump/McMahon rivalry. On the other side, as much as I loved Show vs. Mayweather, the build to that was all kinds of botched, as WWE didn't seem to understand what made Mayweather a star personality-wise. Even when they seemingly did the double turn to correct the obvious mistake of booking Money Mayweather as a face, everyone else in the company seemed to ignore it, only now the motivations were totally screwed up. Again, the match itself was phenomenal, and worked exactly the way it should have been, but the road there was a mess. Besides, everyone knows the real best utilized celebrity in recent WWE history is Bob Barker. I haven't. Did they say anything stupid?

Does this mean he's going to start reviewing Korean movies now?

Well, it's like I've said before, there's that flip side to TNA drawing a big number. Yeah, it means a lot of people saw their show, but it also means that a lot of people saw how much their show sucks, and won't be tuning in again.

I think pulling that off requires nuance far beyond what WWE Creative is capable of. Cena has to give a performance that suggests he's likely becoming complacent/pussing out, but is actually ambiguous enough that when it's later revealed he wasn't doing those things, it's believable. That's a pretty complex acting task for a wrestler. If you can trick the fans into thinking he's turning heel, then show he was face all along when he breaks from Nexus, but then have him turn heel because the fans had thought he had turned heel before....honestly, just writing that makes me think it's too complex for it's own good. Maybe if you bring back Darren Young in whiteface as "Nexus Cena" to trick people into thinking Cena's becoming more of a heel...nah.

FWIW, Bret vs. Lawler won the WON Feud of the Year Award for 1993 (second year in a row Lawler was in the winning feud, actually), so it's not like this is some off the wall "anti-smark" opinion, either.

On one hand.... This. I love me some Eric Embry, but boy, did I ever hate him losing the loser leaves town match to Gary Young, lashing out at everyone around him, and expecting me to side with the sore loser as he and Percy Pringle bullied Frank Dusek into reinstating him. Johnny is right. Cena isn't Austin. Austin was Clint Eastwood. Cena is Roy Rogers. You don't book Rogers to start acting like The Man with No Name out of nowhere. On the other hand.... If having Cena under his thumb helps further establish Barrett as a main event heel, I guess that counts for something, but there were probably better ways to do it. If you have Barrett take the title from Orton, only for Cena to escape from Nexus and challenge him, I think that would make a meaningful difference, but there still would have been better ways to get there, and I don't even know if that's really a good idea in the first place. If they turn Cena heel, it creates a whole new set of problems, the first of which is that I don't see how this angle logically transitions to a Cena heel turn. OK, so he's forced to do the bidding of heels now. Is he going to develop Stockholm syndrome? Do they do a double turn with an entire stable? How does this set up a heel turn? And if he does turn, what happens next? Is his drawing power fading that much that they are willing to gamble on the precisely zero other draws they have on the RAW roster to carry the brand? The Orton thing isn't exactly working as planned. Is HHH really going to do better in that role? Are we ready to push Daniel Bryan to the moon? Have you had a look at the RAW roster page at WWE.com lately? It's kinda heel heavy. You turn Cena, the biggest drawing face on their active roster might be Jerry Lawler. And while I'm all for building up new drawing cards, you might want to get that done before you toss the one you have. This isn't about who is and isn't a wimp. This is about WWE Creative writing themselves into a corner that they are not talented enough to get out of.