General Chat topic

[Loss]

Lost would have been on my list if they didn't set up so much stuff with no intentions of paying it off. I LOVED the show in real time, and since it ended, I think I hate it more when I think about it every year. There was a pact with the viewer that everything would make sense in the end, and so much never did.

[Mad Dog]

The Big Bang Theory? That show sucks -- has sucked for some years now. The first couple of seasons were good, but it went downhill quickly.

 

What sports does everyone follow? I'm a massive football fan -- but a neutral. I'm going on vacation to Italy and Spain at the end of the month -- will be in Rome, Florence, Turin, Milan, Madrid, Seville, Valencia and Barcelona in a 2 week span. I'm visiting a ton of stadiums and museums, so I will hopefully find a club I can identify with to support.

My wife and I are season ticket holders for the Columbus Blue Jackets. We actually did a podcast on the team for a couple of years. Team even invited us to an event as press. I still have my credentials from that event.

[Mrzfn]

For TV shows I'd have to go with...

 

1. Farscape

2. Boston Legal

3. Breaking Bad

4. Adventure Time

5. Venture Bros

6. Cowboy Bebop

7. Rick & Morty

8. House

9. FLCL

10. Game of Thrones

 

Eclectic, I'm sure, but oh well.

 

My music taste is probably a little weird too by most standards but I go heavily in for pop-punk stuff. Blink 182 and it's various offshoots are still in heavy rotation for me. I do sometimes go in for heavier stuff like Metallica or more folksy(?) stuff like Johnny Cash, with plenty of other weird stuff peppered in.

[El-P]

Got more than 2000 references on my iMac (from my 1300 + CD's and now that Bandcamp is a thing, well, I'm fucked)… So, it's all over the place, although you wouldn't find much mainstream shit on it. But I'd say it goes from Darkthrone to Kylie Minogue. The last two years have been all about 70's Turkish music and the current underground scene too. But really, no way to just try to pinpoint a style in particular. Ok, what is called "indie rock" today (and basically in the last 15 years) can go fuck itself, it's boring and derivative as fuck.

 

TV Shows ? Not watched a lot, really, but who needs much when Twin Peaks is in your life ? Loved 24 back in the days, Weeds, True Detective (yeah, *even season 2*), lately GLOW of course, The Deuce… French stuff that know one would now here (Le Bureau des Légendes, awesome stuff)...

 

Don't give a fuck about sports in general (actually don't like it at all). Hates football (fuck the incoming World Cup so much). Except sumo, of course. But it's a work.

[Britwresdvds]

What sports does everyone follow?

 

I'd like to say football, but I'm not sure supporting Nottingham Forest these days really counts.

[PeteF3]

Music:

 

Nerdy indie rock--Modest Mouse and Arcade Fire on down. Was a huge Mountain Goats fan before the wrestling connection really came out. My all-time favorite band is Guided by Voices (just about any incarnation--I must have a weakness for super-prolific indie songwriters. The Magnetic Fields would fall into that category too).

 

Dad-rock, but a lot stuff that falls outside of what plays on classic-rock radio if that makes sense--Warren Zevon being the prime example (there's more to him than "Werewolves of London").

 

Classic folk-rockers like Dylan and Phil Ochs and Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell (which sort of fits into the above--mom-rock, maybe?)

 

African music from all over the continent, generally leaning towards the funkier side. The Indestructible Beat of Soweto is one of my favorite albums ever. Obscure African psychedelic-rock compilations. Fela Kuti, though sometimes a little bit of him goes a long way.

 

Besides Kanye and Public Enemy my hip-hop tastes tend more toward the quirky and off-center as well--Aesop Rock, Atmosphere, Dream Warriors, acts like that.

 

Garage rock from the '60s, anything you'd find on a Nuggets collection. Lots of other '60s stuff, mostly centered around Stax/Volt soul recordings, surf, and the British Invasion (and the folkies from above).

 

Pop-centered classic punk for me too--Husker Du (speaking of bands with wrestling connections), the Clash, the Undertones, Ramones, X--or where punk intersects with new wave (Devo, Joy Division). I do like quite a bit of '80s new wave even though I tend to prefer guitars to synths. I don't know where Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds fall in this category but they're another all-time favorite act--I drove from Columbus to Nashville just because that was the closest stop on a rare U.S. tour, just so I could make sure that I saw them once.

 

Jazz--I'm not going to pretend to be a jazz expert but I like Miles Davis, Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Dave Brubeck, Billie Holiday, and Ornette Coleman.

 

Stuff that Greil Marcus called "the old, weird America." Love the Anthology of American Folk Music and Goodbye, Babylon box sets, the latter of which has some crossover with the AAFM but centered around gospel recordings from the turn of the century to WW2.

 

Country leanings are very old-school and canon-based--Cash and Willie and a little bit else. Modern-day pop-music-with-twangy-guitars-and-lyrics-about-pickups might be my least favorite genre of music ever invented. Don't really care about techno/house or R&B, but as I've become more of a song-collector than an album-collector my collection has gotten very playlist-and-compilation-heavy, so I'll have a smattering of just about everything.

 

---

 

Sports: Ohio State football (even as I get more queasy about the very idea of football, I'm sort of already down the rabbit-hole with wrestling with everyone else here so I'm probably not stopping until the sport disappears or becomes unrecognizable), Cleveland Indians baseball, Browns football (speaking of getting queasy...), Blue Jackets hockey. Really only pay attention to basketball during the tournament and NBA playoffs--the Cavs wouldn't have been my first choice to bring a major title back to Cleveland by a long shot but I was pretty glad they did and am hoping against hope that the Lebrons can do it again. I hate golf and auto racing but I do enjoy curling both as a spectator sport every 4 years and a participant.

[Boss Rock]

Music:

 

Pretty much hard rock and heavy metal all the time when it comes to music. Judas Priest is probably my favorite. My favorite album by them is either Painkiller, Defenders of the Faith, or British SteeI. I also really dig progressive/symphonic/power metal a lot, particularly European bands like Gamma Ray, Helloween, Sonata Arctica, and Stratovarius. Favorite thrash band is Megadeth, favorite alternative band is Alice in Chains

 

Not a huge hip hop fan but there's some artists/albums I absolutely love. Most of Lupe Fiasco's, Kanye West's, and Eminem's stuff is my favorite. It's Dark and Hell is Hot by DMX also ranks up there.

 

Sports:

 

Not really a sports fan except when it comes to MMA, and even then I've sort of been on the outs with it.

[Mad Dog]

Pete, do you go to any of the Blue Jackets games?

[PeteF3]

I try to hit one Jackets and one Indians game a year.

[Mad Dog]

I'm big into retro gaming. I have an old tube TV set up in the basement with an Atari 7800, NES, Famicom, Master System, SNES, Genesis, N64 and Dreamcast. I also have a couple of different Gameboys, Game Gear and Neo Geo Pocket Color.

[Mad Dog]

I try to hit one Jackets and one Indians game a year.

Awesome. It's nice for us because we both work downtown so we have free parking for Blue Jackets games.

[Edwin]

I'd like to say football, but I'm not sure supporting Nottingham Forest these days really counts.

I hate the EPL/LaLiga comparisons.

 

Isn't Notts the club that gave Juve their black and white stripes?

 

My music taste is probably a little weird too by most standards but I go heavily in for pop-punk stuff. Blink 182 and it's various offshoots are still in heavy rotation for me.

My taste in my music changed the older I got. I used to be a scene kid and saw thousands of bands live -- Terror, Hatebreed, Billy Club Sandwich, Sworn Enemy, It Dies Today, Walls of Jericho, Soulfly, etc., but now I listen to all types of stuff -- blink-182, Chris Tomlin, Hillsong, Dashboard Confessional, Green Day, etc. It just depends on the day and my mood.

 

Hates football (fuck the incoming World Cup so much).

How are you French and not a PSG fan?

 

I'm going to be in Barcelona for Spain's World Cup opener against Portugal. I hope the Catalans get together to watch the game on a large screen TV or something so I can go watch with the locals given their independence political situation...

[Robert S]

I am an absolute maniac for classical music. I own well over 500 classical CDs and have hundreds and hundreds of classical music files on my hard drive.

 

Handel, Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Dvorak, Tchaikovsky, Chopin, Prokofiev, Ives, and Janacek are among my favourite composers.

(...)

I am not an expert or fanatic for classical music, but I have been to the opera a couple of times and watched some more on TV. Mozart is a guy whose music is sometimes really hard for me to get into. I can see loving his concertos or symphonies and bits of his operas, but whole operas, which is what he is best known for, are for me a torture to get through. I think I would rather sit through a 7 hour Wrestlemania than through a 3+ hours Mozart opera. I was watching Le Nozze di Figaro (live) in school (which almost killed me) and a couple of years ago I tried to watch Die Zauberflöte a couple of years ago on TV (I had to resign half an hour in).

Schubert is an interesting case to me. He is best known for his songs, especially his song cycles go into a direction that is not what you would usually think of by the term "classical music".

[El-P]

How are you French and not a PSG fan?

 

My opinion on them is : fuck those grossly overpaid tools.

 

I hope the french team will be eliminated quickly from the World Cup, which is always a fucking pain in the ass for people like me who don't give a shit about this circus. Usually, things cool down once the home team is gone, so it's actually possible to have a beer or cofee without being bothered by multicolored painted douchebags screaming like complete idiots.

[Robert S]

What sports does everyone follow? I'm a massive football fan -- but a neutral. I'm going on vacation to Italy and Spain at the end of the month -- will be in Rome, Florence, Turin, Milan, Madrid, Seville, Valencia and Barcelona in a 2 week span. I'm visiting a ton of stadiums and museums, so I will hopefully find a club I can identify with to support.

I still follow football, though to a much lesser degree than I did in the past. I mostly follow regional Austrian leagues, though I have not attended a match in 2 years or so. In the past I was attending matches of the highest or second Austrian league at least 10 times a year. The big leagues and Champions League don't interest me at all. I am usually not that guy, but this stuff has become to commercialized for me. Though I usually watch a bunch of matches of the World Cup and the European Championships on TV.

Living in Austria you cannot help but follow a bunch of winter sports. Most popular on TV are alpine skiing, biathlon and skijumping. The only thing I have seen live of these is skijumping. (living in Austria I do alpine skiing personally as well, though only for leisure)

For some other sports (for example handball, cycling and athletics) I read results and maybe watch a bit on TV, but I would not say that I follow them closely.

[BigBadMick]

I'd love it if someone could explain the appeal of curb your enthusiasm. I just see a self absorbed incredibly wealthy man getting into very trivial arguments..

[Mad Dog]

I like Curb but I can only watch so much of it. It's funny but it's too uncomfortable to watch in large doses.

[Edwin]

I'd love it if someone could explain the appeal of curb your enthusiasm. I just see a self absorbed incredibly wealthy man getting into very trivial arguments..

Its a follow to the real life George Costanza -- Larry David playing a fictional version of himself.

 

I like Curb but I can only watch so much of it. It's funny but it's too uncomfortable to watch in large doses.

My wife feels the same way due to the high cringe levels of the situations Larry finds himself involved in.

[SPS]

I'll join in,

 

TV Shows(No Order)

1. King of The Hill

2. The Sopranos

3. The Simpsons

4. The Twilight Zone

5. Band of Brothers

6. It's Always Sunny In Philidelphia

7. All in The Family

8. South Park

9. Roots

10. Black Mirror

 

Music

 

I am not a big music collector but enjoy any songs that I hear and think sounds good of any genre. My favorite band is Barenaked Ladies(original line up) and I like bands like Weezer,TLC and Beastie Boys and random artists like Jim Croce,Alanis Morissette,Notorious B.I.G and Alan Jackson. Whatever I get interested in at various times or by the people I'm around. Right now my big kick is Die Antwoord after my cousin watched the movie Chappie and got me into them.

 

Sports

 

As for sports if it's not a combat sport like MMA,Submission Grappling,Kickboxing and casually Boxing then I don't watch them as I just don't get excited because I don't have the knowledge. I enjoy playing most of them for fun though like baseball and the like.

 

Glad this topic has started as it's neat to learn more about other members outside of just wrestling.

[Mad Dog]

I was heavy my entire life. It was actually surprisingly easy for me as all I did was track my calories daily. It's kind of amazing the quality of life I was allowing myself to deal with. There were just so many aches and pains that I accepted that are just gone now. My arthritis got a lot better as well.

 

I quickly realized that I coped with stress by eating. That was and is really tough to deal with some days. But that's also why I'm glad I did it myself and didn't do surgery or anything. I faced those demons and learned about my poor relationship with food and I've taught myself how to be healthy and how to maintain.

 

People would always ask me while I was hardcore on the diet about what food I missed the most and they were always surprised when I said toast. 2 weekends ago was the first time I had eaten a bagel in about 2 years.

 

Just stick with it, the best feeling is when you have to go and buy a new pair of pants because your old ones got too big.

[DR Ackermann]

 

 

I'd love it if someone could explain the appeal of curb your enthusiasm. I just see a self absorbed incredibly wealthy man getting into very trivial arguments..

Its a follow to the real life George Costanza -- Larry David playing a fictional version of himself.

I like Curb but I can only watch so much of it. It's funny but it's too uncomfortable to watch in large doses.

My wife feels the same way due to the high cringe levels of the situations Larry finds himself involved in.

Admittedly the show does get old by the 4th-5th season. It starts to feel more and more forced and almost obnoxious at times with how ridiculous and self-absorbed Larry David gets, but there's still some good stuff there.

[TheDuke]

Me too. I'm such a stress eater, and I work at a call center so I am stressed a lot. Over 300 lbs. Not sure the exact weight because my bathroom scale doesn't go up that high and my Wii Fit tells me I am too heavy to use it.

 

I don't like sports. I am also not really into much TV or music. For TV my favorites in the past have been Lost, Star Trek TNG & DS9, Downton Abbey (nobody here has some Abbey love?), and for the rest you could insert a bunch of Anime. I really enjoyed Fawlty Towers and Whose Line is it Anyway. Currently the only shows I really like are Star Trek Discovery, and recently started watching Comedians in Cars getting Coffee, which is a really enjoyable interview show. Music I really haven't bought much in years and when I did it wasn't a lot, but I used to really like Less Than Jake, Dashboard Confessional, and Five Iron Frenzy.

 

Anybody want to talk about Novels and authors?

I really like:

 

George RR Martin's Game of Thrones (not a fan of the show)

Robert Jordan Wheel of Time

Tad Williams Otherland

Anything by Bernard Cornwell (author of the Last Kingdom)

Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan novels

Lee Child's Jack Reacher novels are amazing.

James Patterson's Alex Cross novels are not on the same level exactly but are fun quick page turners.

 

For Stephen King, I felt the first 3 Dark Tower novels were transcendent, but thought the rest of them seemed like junk that was thrown together and none of his other work sounds that appealing to me except possibly for the Stand.

 

Michael Crichton's later stuff, like after Jurassic Park I find a lot more interesting than his earlier books.

Edited May 10, 2018 by TheDuke

[Mad Dog]

The Stand is really good. I think the Shining is also a really strong book from him if you can divorce it from the movie.

[gordi]

 

I am an absolute maniac for classical music. I own well over 500 classical CDs and have hundreds and hundreds of classical music files on my hard drive.

 

Handel, Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Dvorak, Tchaikovsky, Chopin, Prokofiev, Ives, and Janacek are among my favourite composers.

(...)

I am not an expert or fanatic for classical music, but I have been to the opera a couple of times and watched some more on TV. Mozart is a guy whose music is sometimes really hard for me to get into. I can see loving his concertos or symphonies and bits of his operas, but whole operas, which is what he is best known for, are for me a torture to get through. I think I would rather sit through a 7 hour Wrestlemania than through a 3+ hours Mozart opera. I was watching Le Nozze di Figaro (live) in school (which almost killed me) and a couple of years ago I tried to watch Die Zauberflöte a couple of years ago on TV (I had to resign half an hour in).

Schubert is an interesting case to me. He is best known for his songs, especially his song cycles go into a direction that is not what you would usually think of by the term "classical music".

 

 

Yeah, to be honest I'm not an opera guy at all. I think of opera as kind of a whole different category. I believe it's meant to be enjoyed live, where there is so much going on with the performances and the costumes and the sets and the music and the singing... with very few exceptions I don't think you can get the same experience just by listening to opera.

 

Oddly enough, the opera I have gotten the most pleasure from is The Magic Flute, which tapped you out in only half an hour. Different strokes, I guess... I particularly love Ingmar Bergman's joyful movie version of the opera (though I think a lot of purists hate it). The Queen of the Night Aria and the Papageno Papagena duet are two of the very few opera excerpts that I enjoy listening to so much that I have them on my mp3 player.

 

But with Mozart, his "pure" music is enough, in my opinion, for a lifetime of study and enjoyment.

 

Even if you just take the obvious masterpieces, there is just so much greatness: Symphonies # 25, 29, 35, and 38 through 41, Piano Concertos # 9 and 19 through 27, Violin Concertos # 3 and 5, Horn Concerto #3, The Flute and Harp Concerto, The String Quintets, The Quintet for Piano and Winds, The Clarinet Quintet, The Quartets dedicated to Haydn, The A major Piano Sonata...

 

And, like with (for example) Kawada or Bryan Danielson, in addition to all the obviously great work even "minor" Mozart is absolutely worth listening to.

 

And even if we just look at the Piano Concertos, there are so many truly great performances to choose from: Casadesus/Szell, Uchida/ECO, Perahia/ECO, Moravec/Marriner, Moravec/Vlach, Bilson/Gardiner, Kempff, Curzon... each of which can teach you something new and help you to hear the work in new ways.

 

So, like I say, a lifetime of study and enjoyment without even getting into the operas.

 

Similarly with Schubert: I agree that the songs are regarded as his great legacy, but most days I'd rather listen to one of my many recordings of the gorgeous Trout Quintet, or the Piano Trios or Symphony #5 or The Unfinished Symphony or The Great C Major Symphony, or the late Piano Sonatas or the late String Quartets, the Arpeggione Sonata, The Octet, The String Quintet... About two years ago, there was a three-month period where basically all I listened to was Schubert's Chamber Music, and I loved every minute of it.

 

There are still pieces and performances by my favourite composers and musicians that I haven't heard yet (just like there are Jumbo and Tenryu matches that I still haven't seen).

 

In wrestling as in classical music: There's too much stuff out there that I absolutely enjoy, so it's hard to find time for slogging through the stuff that is not my cup of tea.

[The Thread Killer]

Thanks for adding this, Loss. Really glad to see this thread and I hope it leads eventually to a movie/TV specific thread, a music thread, etc. I had to read three pages to catch up on what everybody was talking about.

I am late to the party, unfortunately. At my job, we work something called "The DuPont Schedule" which is 12 hour shifts...but they cram as many as they can within a three week period and then you get every fourth week off. So the good news is that you get an entire week off every month, the bad news is that they almost kill you to get to it. I am about to embark on my final 12 hour Day Shift and tomorrow starts my week off. But by the end of this stretch I am so fried. I barely have time to check my email or drop by PWO. I get up, walk my dogs, eat, go to work, come home, walk my dogs, make my lunch, go to bed...repeat. Ugh.

I have a ton of TV shows saved on my DVR to watch this week, at least. I am going to contribute to this thread (post about my favorite shows, music etc.) when my week off starts. Right now it is 4:30 am and I have to get ready for work soon, unfortunately. Ugh.

 

Also, it didn't fit anywhere here but I am coming up on my weight loss anniversary next week. I got diagnosed with diabetes in 2016 so I dropped from 285 lbs. to 185 lbs. Next week is my 1 year anniversary for hitting my goal and keeping the weight off. I also don't have diabetes anymore because of the weight loss.

 

That's amazing. That takes a ton of self discipline and you are to be commended. Congratulations. I am probably going to have to do something myself, and soon. I have always been a bigger guy, but my weight has really ballooned over the past year or so, to the point where it is endangering my health. I actually had a cardiac episode a month or so ago and ended up in the hospital. I have to see a Cardiologist later this month, but I know he's going to tell me I need to lose weight. I am tipping the scales at well over 300 pounds now, and I'm around 5'11 so that isn't good. I know part of the problem is endocrinological, I've had serious issues with my glands and hormone levels ever since ending my cancer treatments years ago - but my crappy diet and sedentary lifestyle ain't helping either.