Death From Above

I don't think Belcher had any history of concussions that I'm aware of.

Who would be the top answer in Japan? Choshu? Maeda? I doubt any of them worked enough big shows to come close to Flair. Just curious as a side question really.

Biggest mistake Vince ever made was winning, buying all the brands... then putting them all on TV as if he still was competing for ratings hotshots with all that TV every week. Whole point in having multiple "brands" within WWE should be creating a little sub-region you can go hide guys who need gimmick re-tooling, are burned out with the audience from being seen every single week on TV, or just plain suck and need time to learn. Something out of the national spotlight like a AAA team that airs on regional TV in Florida (and on web tv for the overestimated numbers that might watch that), or whatever. Something more RoH-sized, I suppose, where you can keep guys employed, put your green workers, whatever. I still think it's completely insane they don't have this in place.

DVDVR is back up and alive.

I actually thought you guys had a catastrophic server failure victimize you with the weird errors that last 4 (?) days or so, but today it is spitting out ye olde IPS Driver errors again, which, in a sense, is actually promising. It probably means the whole forum didn't get eaten and the whole thing lost. Which would suck.

Not sure why people would expect the show to be stopped for a non-fatal injury/incident, even a serious one. I mean... I watch football. And I've come to terms with the fact that a couple times a year I'm going to watch a guy roll off the field on a stretcher. Then the game starts again. I've never heard anyone suggest "that running back has a neck injury, cancel the game". As for the King, I agree in a way he's incredibly fortunate to have been at a show that had a quality medical staff on site. There was some hockey player in the Russian KHL a couple years ago who died of a heart attack at the rink, (partially) because of a faulty defibrillator on site. That's obviously the other extreme end of the example, but as people have pointed out Lawler was out of the country recently at shows with likely less stellar services available, so all credit to the medical personnel on site who likely saved his life. And all the best to the King on his recovery.

Apter continues to be, by far, the most interesting discussion point for me. It's been neat seeing the different opinions roll out on him since he came up. The Edge/Luger comparison above feels quite spot on for me personally too.

Hopefully that's what it is. The longer it is down the more it looks like someone pushed the big red button marked DO NOT PRESS. But it is a pretty big forum and I have no idea how long that kind of a transfer would take.

There's also that anyone that admits to the deadly sin of enjoying a Brody match has been ridiculed repeatedly by the beehive to the point they are probably smart enough not to bother participating in threads on him at this point. Is there anyone that still argues Hogan was universally terrible (before he was a million years old) that is taken seriously?

Not to the casual fan degree Bret Hart was, but that was a different era. Would still say yes.

The answer to the above Yokozuna query is Yokozuna, Akebono, and Dick Togo as your little dude. Team Oriental Beef.

See if you can spot the guy in that thread that thought 50 Shades of Misogynist Nonsense was a good book. Y'all only get three guesses.

I wouldn't have gone within six feet of The Boogie Woogie Man without a biohazard suit. Ian Rotten really had the whole package too, of course a lot of that is helped by the endless stories. But he really looks like a survivalist trucker out of a zombie movie that eats people "for the hell of it" sometimes.

Barking like Rick Steiner to throw your opponent off is really underused in amateur, IMO.

It's interesting watching rulings roll in from around the world on downloading rights. There's been a couple semi-recent rulings based around downloading material off of YouTube that have gone the other way, basically stating that if it's posted in the public and it's been allowed to remain there, copying that clip to your computer using third party software is no different than using a VCR, DVD-R, or PVR to tape a show off of TV (or recording a concert off the radio), so long as you're only using it for your own personal use. A company/performer has the right to ask for their material to be taken down from the site, but it puts that responsibility onto YouTube not onto the user of the site to make that determination. That's a position that makes a lot of sense as far as that particular format goes, and it's one that would both allow users to use, and also allow a company like YouTube to contine to do healthy business going forward. And it's a similar model to how radio and television law has operated forever. You're not allowed to tape the Superbowl off TV and distribute copies of it to 1000 people, but absolutely nobody cares if you tape it for your own personal archive of Superbowls. Nor should they. Torrents are really something different legally though, I assume. It's not really the same thing as a large company in the public eye that happens to have video and music from all corners of creation on open display. I'm actually in favor of torrents getting smoked, and moving more into a model that looks more like the tv/radio model where various "internet channels" like YouTube absorb more responsibility and leave people free to do what people do with their personal, non-distributive use. Yes, it will mean more hassles for the user because you have to deal with Big Corporations. But it also seems legally that it will be a lot... cleaner. And at least to my way of thinking it seems like a logical progression with the technology that is in line with how this sort of thing has operated for a long time now.

Don West is leaving. Also, official press release: Nothing I can write here can likely top that. EDIT: Sorry for the copy/paste changing all the "" marks into gibberish.

Watching Kobashi just totally break down was one of the most depressing things about Japanese wrestling before I tapped out as a full time watcher in about 2004. And honestly I thought he was immensely messed up at that point. He was muscular as hell but couldn't even move anymore, and the frustrating thing was he was still often the most entertaining guy on the show anyway. I don't even want to look and see what it's like 8 years later.

Only praise I have for the cell match was, oddly enough, the cell basically being redundant. I was worried they'd do something really fucking stupid (more in the vein of worked stage collapses BY GAWD HES BROKEN IN HALF callbacks than actually breaking anyone in half) but instead they settled for public masturbation, which was the best of the bad options. Very dull show. I can't stand modern long "epic" wrestling.

Does the KISS Demon in WCW count? I don't think the wrestling people ever really had big plans for the character but I seem to remember the character getting some sort of "guaranteed main event" thing in the contract which led to a couple of "SPECIAL MAIN EVENT" billed matches on the undercards of PPV's so they could fulfill the terms of the sponsorship and bury him.

NFL (at least) once tried to copyright the phrase "The Big Game" to prevent companies using it as a workaround for promoting Superbowl contests without using the word Superbowl, even though it isn't an NFL invention and predates them by several decades. Maybe I should add that to the NFL = pro wrestling thread. ;-)

I had two breaking points I guess. The first was only partial. It was one of Russo's WWF angles, the one where Terri Runnels had some fall that was supposed to produce a miscarriage. Russo wrote a lot of weird/shocking/intentionally offensive shit, and for whatever reason... that really pushed the biggest of wrong buttons for me and was my "last straw". Can't remember what a lot of the other stuff that was putting me off specifically at the time was, but I remember that basically being a tipping point where I'd seen enough, I didn't like where the product was at in general in the States, and I started really tuning out a fair amount. But I didn't quit watching wrestling, just weekly TV stuff. I instead just went hard into Japanese wrestling that I loved, and I'd still see WWF/WCW PPV's on video sometimes. But truth be told I've never resumed watching weekly TV regularly since. Second was the death of Misawa. I honestly have watched very, very little wrestling since then. He was pretty close to my all time favourite and I think it got pretty similar to me as it did for Loss when he says "because I couldn't watch anything without noticing how many people were dead/in prison/wrecked their lives when watching old stuff" and I had that going on too. It became a bit... morbid isn't quite the right word, but it wasn't fun. Part of it was probably also burnout from years of watching so much, but that death hit me really hard and I sort of flipped a switch then. I don't know if I'll ever really get back into it again. If I had a circle I could watch wrestling live with and riff on matches and such, I would consider it because that's really good fun, and I think I've been "away" long enough I'd enjoy it again. But I have tried just getting into it on my own a couple times and it doesn't really happen anymore. Those yearbook sets are more than halfway tempting, though.

Loved the team with Kroffat. Sad to hear this.

I hope that's not true. Loved Furnas and Kroffat, great entertaining team.

Who are you kidding, Brody kicking the piss out of HHH and refusing to cooperate with his bullshit would be goddamn awesome.