S.L.L.

Digging into the Segunda Caida archives, one can find TomK talking extensively about the Voodoo Kin Mafia angle, which pretty much summarizes everything TNA does wrong in this regard perfectly.

itt, SLL rehashes old material that is relevant here: Which is to say, I basically agree with you and Jingus, with the caveat that a sufficiently talented performer can overcome the staleness of the formula.

Do you realize what you just said? Yes, I just forgot to add the word "continued" after "WWE's". Well, yeah, but it's still like getting stabbed in the face several dozen times and then complaining that you're in pain when a baby kicks you in the shin. I mean, if loss of credibility and believability in the WWE is a problem for you, I'm not sure how Vickie and Adamle even show up on your radar when you have 25-ish years of high-profile nonsense screaming for your attention. I'm not even sure they crack the top 10 most unbelievable things that happened in the promotion this year. If that's how you feel about them, what's your reaction to any given Undertaker angle? Or Triple H hitting dudes with sledgehammers and somehow not killing them? Or Shawn Michaels still being presented as a credible physical threat to anybody in 2008? Vickie and Adamle might not be the most compelling screen presences, but if we're talking about not being credible or believable, they're small potatoes compared to a lot of stuff.

Do you realize what you just said?

It's hard to say for sure when the guy has only had about five matches to make tape this year, but it's probably Yuki Ishikawa.

Just a thought from somebody who fancies himself a fan of early 90's WCW: Do the words "Adamle Alliance" sound good to anyone else? Seriously, I was digging Adamle as nouveau Jack Tunney, but the fans were never going to get behind him. I suppose they never got behind Tunney, either. But Adamle doing the best he could, realizing that that wasn't enough, turning against his masters, quitting, and deciding he was going to bring down everyone who wronged him on the way out...that's good TV right there.

Well, bully for him.

You never heard of Samoan Joe? Homicide used to take about how much he hated him all the time while he was feuding with Samoa Joe. Really glad to see this is back.

I'm still trying to remember where the notion that it was a mystery promotion came from. Want to say it was one of those Jim Brambilla things where he had not heard about something, and therefore concluded that nobody had heard about it, even when confronted with evidence that Meltzer had been talking about it regularly in the Observer. Or I might be confusing Jim with frankp316(sp?) doing the same, with the addition of his "all of Meltzer's important stuff is put on the website" bit, thus dismissing anything in the Observer proper. In any case, not actually something that was unknown, at least not a few years ago. Outside of the Warrior comeback, haven't heard much on that front lately, so maybe the winners got to write history.

On top of the obvious ridiculousness, it's nice to now that Dave's sad obsession with trying to convince people that "real" professional wrestling exists predates MMA. On a certain level, I'm kinda glad he's got that hang-up now. It'd be really sad to watch him try to pull this with, say, the Kevin Federline stuff or Vince McMahon's limo exploding.

I think the concern was that the one known post you had was a shill. There is a "trading and shills" subforum here. This probably would have been better suited for that. You need a password to get in there, though.

My Disc 3 rankings: 1. Jerry Lawler vs. Nick Bockwinkel (No DQ) (11/8/82) 2. Jerry Lawler vs. Nick Bockwinkel (10/18/82) 3. Ronnie Garvin vs. Randy Savage (Cage Match) (ICW 1982/83) 4. Ronnie Garvin vs. Lanny Poffo (ICW 1982/83) 5. Jerry Lawler vs. Nick Bockwinkel (10/25/82) 6. Bill Dundee & Bobby Fulton vs. Bobby Eaton & Sweet Brown Sugar (11/15/82) 7. Jerry Lawler, Bill Dundee, Dutch Mantell & Terry Taylor vs. Bobby Eaton, Sweet Brown Sugar, Rick McGraw & Sabu (12/4/82) 8. Fabulous Ones vs. The New York Dolls (2/3 Falls) (11/13/82) 9. Bill Dundee & Jerry Lawler vs. Adrian Street & Apocalypse (11/27/82) 10. Jackie Fargo vs. Jimmy Hart (11/8/82) 11. New York Dolls vs. Steve Regal & Spike Huber (10/4/82) 12. Bobby Eaton & Sweet Brown Sugar vs. Jacques Rougeau & Terry Taylor (1/1/83) 13. Bill Dundee vs. Adrian Street, Miss Linda & Jim Cornette (Lumberjack Strap Match) (2/6/83) Loved the Lawler/Bockwinkel feud. The No DQ match is my new working #1. The ICW stuff was pretty great, too. The lumberjack strap match is the first match on the set that I've actively disliked. I'm all for zany and unorthodox, but this never seemed to click for me.

I dunno. Every match I've watched so far has had something really stand out to me on it. Something really cool in every match that jumps out and grabs me, even in the lesser matches. I didn't think this was bad, and pretty sure there was at least one thing in this match I really liked, but honestly can't remember what it was. It felt like the most unremarkable match I'd seen so far. It just didn't click with me.

I just read that John Graziano's lawyer is named George Tragos. Is this irony, a coincidence, or something else entirely?

My disc 2 rankings: 1. Jerry Lawler vs. Dutch Mantell (Barbed Wire Match) (3/29/82) 2. Jerry Lawler vs. Dutch Mantell (No DQ) (3/22/82) 3. Jerry Lawler vs. Ric Flair (8/14/82) 4. Bobby Eaton & Sweet Brown Sugar vs. Dutch Mantell & King Cobra (7/19/82) 5. Bill Dundee vs. Sweet Brown Sugar (2/3 falls, Scaffold Match) (6/21/82) 6. Jerry Lawler vs. Dutch Mantell (Loser Leaves Town) (3/27/82) 7. Jerry Lawler & Bill Dundee vs. Masa Fuchi & Atsushi Onita (8/1/81) 8. Ricky Morton & Eddie Gilbert vs. Masa Fuchi & Atsushi Onita (Tupelo Concession Stand Brawl) (9/4/81) 9. Bill Dundee vs. Bobby Eaton (7/24/82) 10. Masa Fuchi, Atsushi Onita & Tojo Yamamoto vs. Roy Rogers, Rick & Robert Gibson (9/5/81) 11. Bill Dundee, Steve Keirn, Rick & Robert Gibson vs. Dream Machine, Nightmare #1 & Heartbreakers (7/25/81) 12. Stan Lane & Koko Ware vs. Eddie Gilbert & Ricky Morton (No DQ, 2/3 Falls) (10/81) Lane/Ware vs. Morton/Gilbert might be the weakest match on the set so far, but everything else was fantastic. Really strong disc.

My disc one rankings: 1. Jerry Lawler vs. Terry Funk (Empty Arena) (4/6/81) 2. Jerry Lawler vs. Terry Funk (No DQ) (3/23/81) 3. Bill Dundee vs. Wayne Farris & Tojo Yamamoto (3/7/81) 4. Jerry Lawler vs. Crusher Blackwell (5/4/81) 5. Bill Dundee & Dream Machine vs. Kevin Sullivan & Wayne Farris (5/2/81) 6. Bill Dundee vs. Tommy Rich (8/23/80) 7. Bill Dundee vs. Paul Ellering (5/24/80) 8. Bill Dundee vs. Larry Latham (4/19/80) 9. Bill Dundee & Dream Machine vs. Dutch Mantell & Wayne Farris (3/14/81) 10. Dutch Mantell vs. Kevin Sullivan (5/9/81) 11. Ricky Morton vs. Sonny King (4/26/80) 12. Bill Dundee & Tony Boyles vs. Wayne Farris & Larry Latham 13. Jerry Lawler vs. Dory Funk Jr. (3/30/81) 14. Bill Dundee & Tommy Rich vs. Dutch Mantell & Austin Idol (3/12/81) Can't speak for JKeats, but while I liked Morton/King, it felt a bit too much like an exhibition to rank too highly for me. There was a bit of a story there, but they didn't really go anywhere with it. It was still pretty neat, it just doesn't really compare favorably to a lot of the bigger matches here.

Suicide by deliberate motorcycle accident? Fuck, if wrestlers had life insurance, and you had just seen "Death of a Salesman", that might almost make sense, maybe. Or not.

I know, I know, we've been conditioned not to take the German suplex seriously as a finisher for a long time now, but...you know...certain things have happened since then. It's so much that I'm surprised by it, just that it's another reason to shake your head in disappointment at wrestling fandom.

From last night's ROH show.... I know this is usually Bix's job, but I like how a move that was a major contributor to one guy's brain getting so dinged up that he murdered his family, and another guy's brain getting so dinged up that...well...that he became Kurt Angle, is apparently not a convincing finishing maneuver to the smarkiest of all possible smark fans.

I know I should be too cool to care about the result of a fake wrestling match - especially if this was Panther's idea - but.....damn.

Offhand, that was the one part of Todd Martin's review of the book where you really thought to yourself "Oh my God, Todd Martin is more of a professional than this guy". Lifting entire match reviews that you can get for free on his site - including one of the first Hell in the Cell match, which he pegged at ****1/2 stars or thereabouts and called the match of the year, when he included reviews of ***** matches from earlier the same year, and not bothering to go back and change anything before putting them in the book - was just an astounding bit of anti-genius.

Certainly, and most of the ones who aren't still seem to have some kind of horrifying dark side to them. But some people really don't want to hear that. They don't handle the great performer/shitty person disconnect very well, but they've become too attached to the great performer to let go, so they dismiss the reality to maintain the fantasy. Skeith seems to fit this profile quite nicely. Go ahead, but the odds are high he wouldn't give a shit. I remember Todd Martin reviewing one of his earlier books where he took him to task for his sloppy fact checking and he responded like it was no big deal. Also better fact checking wouldn't change his offensive opinions and shallow conclusions which he's had over a year to formulate. In fairness, Martin's review was about as bad as SKeith's book. I would've dismissed it offhand, too. On the other hand, Tim himself got the very same reaction from SKeith for writing him a counterpoint to his review of Eddy/JBL from Judgment Day '04, which Skeith then posted at the beginning of a later review and framed it as something wacky he received from "known loon" Tim Cooke, and then proceeded to show it in full without commenting further on it, presumably because it's ridiculousness spoke for itself. Except, of course, it was a totally well-reasoned piece, and I'm told a number of Scooter's boosters actually ended up agreeing with Cooke. So, if nothing else, sending this to him might trick him into posting a counterpoint to his ramblings that could even get some of his followers to see how out of touch he is, but maybe he'd know better this time around.

While criticizing "slobs," yes. He would also use buzzwords, like calling someone like Adonis "a great big man" while Brody was "a great big athlete" or something like that. Dave is a complicated dude. Earlier this decade, regularly saying that WWF wrestler "X" was better than indy wrestler "Y" because WWF wrestler "X" had "polish", which, best I could tell, came in syringes. Dave is definitely a guy who is not above saying one thing and meaning another, or pushing an idea so long as he's not presented with the alternative which he likes less. Not sure how much any of that has to do with his stand on Hashimoto, but as we've learned from his stances on Jumbo, Backlund, Flair, Michaels, Angle, and others, Dave has a tendency to get locked into certain opinions, and a compulsion to "legitimize" said opinions as something beyond "well, I just don't dig Hashimoto as much as Mutoh for whatever reason", with the results often not exactly jibing with reality.

A positive, but hardly guarantees anything. Which is pretty commonplace in the WWE. Which is being exaggerated. Which is good, but not "oh my God, this guy is going to be a huge star" good. Which is kind of my point. Palumbo debuted in WCW with a comparable skill set to DiBiase, probably had about as much potential, improved considerably throughout his career (you and I have different opinions of his ability, to be fair), and has never even sniffed Starrcade/Mania main eventer status. The arc of Palumbo's career illustrates that a guy with DiBiase's skills at this point in his career does not automatically become a major star. Because it's still really early in his run and we don't have significant evidence to suggest anything one way or the other. That's a matter of some debate. Carlito had a good first year of work in WWE, too. People don't always improve. According to Wikipedia, he's actually a little bit smaller. And if he is bigger, they certainly do a good job of hiding it on TV. Blueprints don't mean much unless something gets built. Time can be a bitch, and while it wouldn't shock me if DiBiase became a 'Mania headliner, it ain't set in stone yet.