PhilTLL

Sadly(?) I'm one of those people who isn't secure enough about wrestling to wear wrestling shirts. Which is weird because I'm tremendously unfashionable, being unafraid to wear dozens of random baseball shir-seys and concert tees from obscure bands that people are sorry about inquiring into ("Uh, Gov't Mule is a Southern hard rock band led by W...where are you going?"). But I have thought about getting or making the "I BROKE WAHOO'S LEG" or "DAMN I AM GOOD" type of thing.

RO-man REIGNS-sucks, clap clap clap-clap-clap. Okay, one more complaint about modern chants--95% of them use that SAMEdamnRHYthm.

That's it in a nutshell--the sheer number of chants and "we are the show" moments that leave them ironically out of touch with the match going on. Some of the specific chants annoy me but that's not the real problem. My standard for a good NXT match now is whether they're able to turn the crowd from a bunch of inattentive, chant-filled jackoffs back into a good wrestling crowd that responds to the match. Thanks for the tips, I'll probably give it a whirl despite my misgivings. Depends on the card.

If I'm one of those people who finds the crowd to be my major impediment to NXT enjoyment, is a house show likely to be more pleasant than TV? Do you think the city matters? I'm thinking about going here in Oklahoma City. No idea exactly what our indy-type crowds are like--I didn't make it to ROH when they came.

Sad, and sweet, and touching. And by the by, he uses "politically incorrect" in a really great and incisive way--to mean doing right by the "wrong" person, no matter the risk to your job or who in power it irritates.

So sad.TNA is on a channel that people with normal cable/satellite packages actually get here America. El Rey is extra. To be exact, Wikipedia says as of about a year ago, Pop is in 75M versus Rey's 40.

Don't think you even need to make that distinction anymore. He hasn't really been over with the general wrestling population either since his face run with the punt. King of "entrance pop, silence, finisher pop."

I'll not be going on, but I think I've been very careful to impugn *arguments*, not motives. It's important to think about whether the arguments you make on topics like this advance the points you think they do, and that you actually hold. If I've seen a point that *unwittingly* seems to excuse murder and muddies the role of mental illness, I've tried to explain why I felt that. Toodles.

That is not at all a reasonable thing to say given what we actually know versus what we presume, not as much likely as that he was at the intersection of abusive and ill/brain-damaged. "He did a worse thing, so he had a worse brain" is the sort of excuse-seeming, misrepresenting mental illness vs criminality statement that makes me queasy.

WingedEagle and Thread Killer have succinctly presented pretty much all points I could. To wave the flag of mental health awareness and even make it the core of your argument on this topic is...let's say unappealing. As is claiming higher knowledge of mental health and illness for doing so.

I genuinely don't believe they are, I think they're just being rejected. We know that Benoit was probably very fucked in the head, but that's not criminally insane. Very fucked in the head commits straight-up murder all the time. The law and the study of the mind both have a wide gulf between fucked in the head, hit in the head, plain old crazy angry, drunk, high, cheated on, betrayed etc and non-culpable insane. The way he committed the crimes and behaved during that time shows he was at least rational enough to have known what he was doing and chosen not to do it.

Apparently I have "reached my positive quota of votes for the day"? Damn.

There's really no point in me going on about this, because I'm not going to change your mind, but driving to your doctor's office and taking pictures, and calling in sick with a complicated explanation for the murder victims are not the sort of behaviors that get one put in the lifetime hospital. Given the known facts of his and Nancy's life together and their final weekend, I think calling him anything more nuanced than murderer is an attempt to excuse something truly horrible. And I think the effort fits right into a sickening and familiar framework where we try to excuse criminals of a certain type, or of whom or whose work we were really fond. Violent guy with violent history in a growing mental fog commits killings he feels guilty about and then suicide does not equal criminally insane and not a straight-up murderer. If longtime abuser Chris Benoit felt like he was turning stranger or more violent, he should have gotten out of the business and separated from his family and gotten help, not murdered them. Which, I reiterate, is what he chose to do. But yeah, these are old arguments, and I didn't even vote in GWE. For the record, I could understand both voting and not voting for Chris Benoit, for reasons ranging from "this project is irrelevant in the scheme of life" (that applies to both sides, really!) to "this project is a document of workers, not a moral judgment" to "I do/don't like and can/can't watch Chris Benoit." Watching the guy's matches now does not make you bad, not watching them does not make you good. I just can't let that one argument go after all these years.

Being an abusive shithead is first and foremost a defect of character, not a mental illness. Certainly not of the type that gets one absolved for violent behavior, like schizophrenia. Abusiveness can be part of things like borderline personality disorder and other mental illnesses, but those are explanations, not excuses for violence. I have a non-psychotic mental illness and I've never abused anyone. There's a tendency these days to say that doing anything highly criminal means you were crazy in some way, which is kind of true--healthy people in healthy circumstances don't typically resort to crime. But doing something that is obviously fucked up in the eyes of peaceful, non-criminal people like you and me is not necessarily the same thing as being psychotic and not culpable. Needless to say the evidence is not on the side of non-culpable psychotic insanity for Chris Benoit. Having increasingly bad mental symptoms due to CTE does not preclude or excuse premeditated, multi-day murder, especially not for a longtime abuser.

Pre mediated by someone severely ill yes. Premeditated by a guy who had a long history of abusing his wife to the point that she had gone from threatening divorce (2003) to predicting her own murder. The best you can say about Chris Benoit is that he chose the exact wrong industry for someone with latent violent tendencies and a predilection for poly drug use. That *maybe* all those chairshots and pills turned an average shithead abuser into a freakish family annihilator. Not a lot of cases in the rapidly expanding CTE literature about that. CTE and mental illness are not absolution here and it's logically and ethically misguided to use them as such.

Terrific match. On previous viewings I thought Barry was eating up Scorp a bit too much but I didn't see it this time for whatever reason. One of my favorite things about viewing this match in the present, when people complain about move-move-move being the dominant style, is that it's a bombfest *for storyline reasons*. Barry throws bombs because he can do so at will and doesn't have to work patiently to dominate, and Scorpio throws bombs because it's his only chance to win the match.

The Henny Youngman act is tremendous.

The missteps and botches start to pile up after the halfway point--witness the awful front superplex "reversal" where Vader clearly leaps off with no assistance and the Vader top rope splash where he has to sell "hitting his head on DBS's sternum" because DBS forgot to pick his knees up. These are also both good examples of Vader's career-long inability to adjust his layout on the fly. However both guys do a decent job drawing whatever heat is available from this beleaguered, exhausted crowd. Watts came close with Havoc, but was never able to put on a show this godawful *boring* during his run.

If that was the intent, they missed the mark badly. Even the live audience seemed to be treating it like a fart in church. Maybe some sort of leathery mask would have helped, maybe over the face, call me crazy. Regardless it still felt like something from a shitty Rob Zombie-type haunted house.

That entrance last weekend did him no favors in my eyes. It was like something out of a bad haunted house in the '90s. Oooh, he's waving a chainsaw!

In general I watch Worldwide after the WCW/SN for that week.

Don't follow this exactly. Did you pay $10 for tix? Stubhub is open less than an hour before a show? Stubhub is open that late I think, but the low prices there made me go downtown to look for scalpers, where I paid $10.

I didn't think to check the Springsteen show prices tonight on Stubhub until 45 minutes before the show. I made my peace with often missing that sort of arena show due to budgetary reasons many years ago. Long story short, $10 for $150 face tickets on the street. God bless the oil crash. I'm outta here, Mania-keteers!

That was definitely a multi man ladder match.

The action in Joe/Balor was intense and exciting, but the drama and heat were hurt by the lack of a real structure and selling. Plus the crowd clearly favored Joe, which prevented a real face/face match, but they basically worked 50/50 slugfest anyway. So in the end the medical stoppages got far more heat than most of the actual work, especially Balor's the further the match went. His motioning for comeback heat and not getting much was a bit sad.