Matt D

To extrapolate a bit, when I spent my year in London ten years ago, I spent a lot of time at the British Museum. I was getting a Masters at the London School of Economics and while we had a brand new, spiffy, award winning Norman Foster designed library there, it was a pain in the ass to study at. The elevator was always crowded. The stairs were designed in a way that you were always going up with the same foot, annoyingly so, and there was no real private study space like I was used to. Moreover, it was too far away. I lived in the heart of the city, in a dorm, but it was a fifteen minute walk, at least. A five minute walk, on the other hand, was the British Museum, and within the British Museum was the Reading Room, just opened to the public a few years earlier, with hundred and fifty year old chairs and tables that Oscar Wilde and Karl Marx had studied a century before. I did most of my studying there that year, so I spent a lot of time in the Museum. During that time, they opened the Enlightenment gallery, which so far as exhibits go, isn't nearly as interesting as some of those of less modern design. It falls along the cultural history lines in a lot of ways, which means it's a little of a lot instead of a lot of a little, but it does really give you a sense of categorization and organization being the first step in our history of scientific understanding. Budding amateur scientists would collect bugs or birds or skeletons or mammals and add them to their personal collections, finding the commonalities and the differences and document everything and search for patterns and theory why the exist or why they don't exist, and everything sort of tumbled from that. Sometimes I feel like that's what we do. As for a kindle book, I don't know, there's such a mentality of outsiders not knowing anything in wrestling and there's so much variation in terms and meaning and etymology (and the carny roots that make up the etymology of wrestling are fascinating, not just about things like heat and marks and what not, but something like Full Nelson or pronouncing su-plex vs su-play, etc), it seems like it'd be a lot of work. Fun work, but still. Maybe someday. I am going to be breaking down a couple of Dustin's comeback matches for a friend's magazine in the next month or two as part of a broader article, and I might try to see if I can do so in some way that's deeply analytical. Or I might totally fail to finish the thing. If someone wanted to walk me through the nuts and bolts of how writing a book for kindle worked, I'd probably listen.

Some of this is tricky, because a sprint can be a match but it also can be a section of a match with a lot of rope-running. Heat can be the section of a match where the heel is on top and the babyface is garnering sympathy, but that can also be face in peril. Generally, a face-in-peril only works in a tag match, building to a hot tag but a heat segment can be in any match. At the same time, the heat can be the actual emotion of the crowd itself, angered at the heel. Or it can be a legitimate dislike between two wrestlers, or that one wrestler has with the locker room/crowd. Base, I personally use most to describe a hold or series of holds targetting a specific bodypart or telling a specific story that wrestlers go back to in structuring a match. A lot of times you can have a match where a lot of the meat of it is based around working in and out of a headlock, or in WWF matches, a chinlock. USUALLY it's found in the first part of the match, because if in the middle, that'd really be more likely to be a heat segment. So again, tricky. And yeah, a base could also be a wrestler who a second, flying wrestler can work against and that can catch all of his moves and make his logically low impact flippy stuff look good. I love classification. Deconstructing matches is so underdeveloped as a field that it's like the Enlightenment whenever we try, in that a lot of what we can do is try to classify, qualify, and quantify common elements between matches.

How do they feel about HHH?

Per WON, in May, 1994: I'm trying to decide if the person reporting this was confused, outright lying or if Flair actually did cut a promo at the disney tapings mentioning Mr. Perfect for the Clash.

I still don't love the scenario where he's defending against Hunter at Mania. I think it means more if he either wins the belt at Mania or at least wins a shot. It matters more for a babyface to win something than to retain it.

Frankly, this is all speculation across the board. Something is different. Or it isn't. The demographic change may matter. Or it may not. To me, the people who stick around week in and week out are the ones who are the loyal fans, the base that they can't alienate no matter what. My gut says that there are a number in that group who are kids and a number who are really casual and just watch it every Monday because it's part of their routine but that a huge chunk of the people Vince simply can't run off are tuned in enough to know this. I haven't the slightest idea though. I think we need to find some casual fans and poll them. Anyone know any? I sure don't. Frankly, there's not really anyone in my life that I interact with that isn't a hardcore fan of SOMETHING.

There are a lot of factors there (including being on smackdown with the taped nature of the show and certain things inherent with DX and nostalgia). Frankly, though. I don't know. I missed a lot of the first half of that and frankly don't remember a ton of the back half. That such things are happening now make me think that we have a demographic change in general, maybe even one that WWE has created with their push for social media? If they want to create a more active, tuned in audience base, then they might end up with a more informed and harder to control one as well? All these are just thoughts. I'd love if someone like Chris was able to find more demographic data somehow and map some of this stuff out.

His most recent babyface run? The fans sure as hell didn't want to give him the standing ovation after the Brock match that it was obvious he was supposed to get.

If a random fan in the crowd that wants to be heard and I see Trips and Steph do the yes chants, I'm probably more likely to chant CM Punk, maybe?

I think WWE is a little more niche than that. I also think that the younger fans are more tuned in by nature. Almost every person I know under the age of 35 that's into sports connect to it differently than the people I know over 50 who are into sports.

At least 27.3%. It's 2014. Teenagers/college kids who follow wrestling do so on the internet/twitter too. That's one side effect of all the social media stuff. I refuse to believe that all those people who are tweeting enough to make WWE trend or whatever else don't know about the reputation. This isn't 1999 with just a bunch of nerds like us using the internet and reading scoops and 1wrestling or whatever. Enough people were talking about Matt Hardy on facebook a few days ago that it was trending. Matt Hardy, not The Rock or someone. This is a totally different world.

I thought Dave's indication was that they actively moved the venue to Seattle from wherever it initially was, or at the least that they planned for it to be there long term. So the push came first and Seattle was the means, after the reaction he got there last time. It wasn't just that they happened to be in Seattle for the PPV already?

Wouldn't it be more the case that the plans weren't there to alter in the first place?

Yeah, injuries. There were reports that Mark Henry was selling an injury on house shows over the weekend and I have no idea if it was legit or him selling the Brock stuff or what. WWE doesn't usually show that attention to detail but Henry himself is a guy who seems to care about it.

How prevalent were roids among top talent in Japan? It never seemed as big an issue as in the states, or perhaps just wasn't covered as much. Nor did you have a bunch of Warlords running around drawing your attention to it. But it must've had some kind of presence. Not sure if this helps, but here's something Meltzer said in a March 1992 Observer when everything was coming to a head in the US.

One of the maddening things about following pro wrestling is that whenever there is something real that happens, it eventually gets made into a work.

Raw is going to be weird between the Bryan hijacking, the potential for CM Punk chants, One-Eyed Cena and NAO in a Tag Team Cage match in 2014. I wonder if the Shield promo about Punk was a dry run for Raw. I'm going to be automatically disappointed since nothing, in my head, can live up to Cory Graves as Fake Diesel CM Punk, and for some strange reason, I don't think they're going to do that. Midget Punk would be pretty good too though.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DOCegPA8Pw Hogan could totally do a neck wringer on someone at Mania. Forget this hosting crap. It's right there. Neck Wringer.

I was trying to think of something and really couldn't. I guess sometime in Dec/Jan of 1990-1991, Perfect had just reclaimed the IC belt and he was wrestling Piper on the house shows and I saw a local promo where he said he'd take the IC belt from Perfect and I didn't want that to happen because I wanted Kerry to get it back. I really thought that Piper might get it on a house show because his promo was good. Even by that point, maybe ten, I realized that nothing would ever happen on house shows since there were no cameras. But I always felt like the dates on that were right before Summerslam, but that makes no sense, so it really had to be in December/Jan.

Probably a mild understatement to say he's lucky to have you.

I think that's more about "small white workrate indy guys" the only other Japanese wrestler they have that I know is Yoshi Tatsu who is pretty much a non-entity for them. Wouldn't hurt to have him for when they do their rare Japan tours. I don't know. if I was doing a Crusierweight only show, I'd probably want to sign Richards for it, if he was right there, and I can't stand him as a wrestler.

1.) Best I can tell, there's been nothing new since last summer. It's mainly KENTA speculation, but if that was the case then the arguments about them not signing Richards/Edwards because they had too many guys like them already would be a little contradictory.

Neither here nor there, but we'll have to make some call about double posting. Do we keep using the microscope threads as central repositories? Do we use the new EVERYTHING threads? Do we double post things?

Neither here nor there, but we'll have to make some call about double posting. Do we keep using the microscope threads as central repositories? Do we use the new EVERYTHING threads? Do we double post things?

I get it, and you guys did a good job at what you set out to do, absolutely. I just came in expecting something else and was a little disappointed accordingly. It fit the Wrestling With the Past format that you guys used for the Bret and IC/TV title shows much better than what I have wanted would have.