air_raid

We have a chap working here called Godknows.

I've had masala fish where the batter is Indian spiced and loved it. I like haddock, I'd give piri piri haddock a whirl.

On 6/1/2024 at 9:26 AM, Merzbow said:

Any Black Country lot have a recommendation for Orange Chips? I hear Majors has gone downhill since the move.

Depending where in the Black Country you're coming from, head to Kings in Kingswinford (unless that's too close to Staffs/far away for you). Park on the Co-Op Car Park (free for the first 2 hours), walk through the gully to Market Street and look left.

On 5/29/2024 at 7:48 PM, air_raid said:

crispy nuts

Jėga

As a follow up, we had the paprika ones on Friday afternoon. In stark contrast to the sour cream, the colour was delightful but at first the taste seemed lacking but the more I ate the better they got. Nice, but I'd say only pick them up if you're not close to a source of KP Flavour Kravers (sic) in the same flavour, or since you're in the Polish shop already, look for the Beskidzkie ones even if they are nearly double the price (7/8 more expensive per nut, to be exact).

"The Sneer Scale" sounds like a satire of Meltzer's scale. Where matches are rated out of 5, between -5 and 7.

1 hour ago, Vegeta said:

The sneer scale sounds like some sort of register.

I'm going to make one final remark in the vein of "how many times have we read how much you used to love a fap to Stephanie" and then leave it. After all, in a world where you can be anything, be kind.

@Elliot Sneer No judgment here. I started healing my first proper heartbreak by spaffing 2K on a trip to the G1 Climax.

Heh. "Vein." "Spaffing."

"....... Climax."

28 minutes ago, Supremo said:

Get the belt on Drew, do the Punk match at Summerslam, and then once Punk is re-injured and likely retired switch LA Knight over to carry the load. I’d be bang up for a six to nine month LA Knight babyface World Title reign on Raw.

If he wins the briefcase, then why not? He's the kind of character I could imagine them doing a cash in with and people not caring that it's a bit heelish.

2 minutes ago, westlondonmist said:

I would put Backlund vs Hart from SS 94 in, may be a discredit to Owen because he's fucking sublime in that match. It's a dull as fuck match with an awesome finish.

It's also got some really weird booking logic. A visible submission by Backlund to the figure-four, which Bret had won precisely zero matches with prior. You can do the exact same spot with the Sharpshooter with Mr Backlund eventually reaching the ropes instead of reversing, and it makes far more sense. But they wanted to save the Sharpshooter for the beginning of the finish, even though it wouldn't play directly into or be the finish.

Not the last time Bob looks weak in that run, of course. His rematch with Diesel on Action Zone ended with a sidewalk slam for the pin instead of the Jacknife.

16 minutes ago, Supremo said:

The best near fall of all time? It’s the absolute worst.

I definitely didn't buy it at the time. There was a far better nearfall the year before, which I did buy, but at no point from the start of the build til the final 3 did I believe Taker would lose the match. My instinct was that if he wanted to lose his "streak" (ugh) to Hunter, they'd have done so the year before. And I didn't think they'd screw him out of it, he'd lose properly. I enjoyed the match in parts but it felt like no stakes, so I didn't really care who won. Though they billed it as "the end of an era," nothing ended. Taker wrestled again, Hunter wrestled again, even special ref Shawn, two years retired at that point, wrestled again. In the same match, even.

Still, year after was worse for no investment. Might as well advertised that as "Cena will obviously get his win back from Rock, Hunter will obviously get his win back from Brock, and the consolation for Punk not being in the main event will be losing to Taker." I considered not watching it, so obvious were those winners.

5 minutes ago, s279 said:

At the risk of being the most pedantic person on here, that Kalvin Phillips one isn't "officially" a Euro 2024 sticker. It's a Panini one for the England players (male and female) designed to make kids want to eat the same food as the players as long as it comes from Marks and Sparks. (It's still obviously timed to cash in on the Euros but Panini don't have the license).

Well, I considered "stickers, promotional materials and tie ins etc" but couldn't be bothered. Adding "official or otherwise conveniently timed to coincide with major tournaments" would have been ever wordier.

Don't worry about "most pedantic" - I usually have that one in the bag.

Real fun - I once had a huge Euro 92 wallchart that a mag gave away that still had Yugoslavia instead of Denmark. Being a child, instead of keeping it as a collectors item, I defaced it with felt tip so it said Denmark instead. Or to be more accurate, "DENMARK!"

Was inspired by a random Twitter poll to think about a match that I thought was rubbish, and lots of people thought was great. What hugely lauded "great" match do you actually think was rubbish?

For me, it's HBK vs Ric Flair from Mania 24. Disregarding the terrible melodrama at the end which you either loved or hated (and has retrospectively earned some real hatred over the years), I just didn't think it was good. The premise didn't give me any suspension of disbelief that this wasn't, in fact, Flair's swansong or that Shawn wouldn't be beating him. Plus, the match just wasn't that good. I think both aspects came into play for most of Flair's WWE run - his credibility was completely knackered through a series of TV jobs, once he loses to Rico on TV he's got no business being presented as a realistic thread to any major player, he's clearly done. His matches tended to be stale retreads of "the Flair formula" or just him bleeding for effect if the stip needed it. The only time I felt like he was out of his comfort zone was that match with Angle on Raw where he and Kurt kept finding ways of trying to prove who was better at cheating, that was a different dynamic, but otherwise Ric was a spent force. The match felt a waste of "Mr WrestleMania" on the big stage and I just didn't think it was any good either in execution or for pulling an emotional reaction out of me. But plenty of people seemed to love it?

What about you? The only caveat I'd add - don't bother with the Iron Man match from Mania 12, PLENTY of people think it was overhyped and boring and anyone saying it was brilliant has never watched it and are just pretending because it was Bret vs Shawn.

Balor knows his Spurs stuff. I went to a meet and greet once and I was quite late in the day so assuming he was fed up of talking to fans about wrestling all lunchtime, I asked him if Bale was staying or not. He seemed very happy to keep on chatting about the state of the club in general and I think if I hadn't moved myself on because there were four or five people still waiting, we'd have been chatting for longer.

The Hall of Fame for "Stickers Produced Before The Squad Was Announced" is proud to announce Kalvin Phillips as their latest inductee ;

Not pictured - Jermain Defoe, 2006. For me, the grief is still too near.

OK, so Gerrard was announced before his injury. But... well, you know.

On 5/31/2024 at 9:28 PM, SuperBacon said:

Our local Evri woman is brilliant. Her name is Ruth, she knows not to knock on the doors because of the dogs (I'll be honest if I'm home I can hear her coming as she's always booming out Smooth FM or similar) and knows we're family 10 seconds apart so tends to just deliver my exes stuff to me.

Sorry.

On 5/31/2024 at 9:55 PM, deathrey said:

Our Evri woman - well couple actually, it's a man and a women who do the delivery together - looks like she is a crack head but always delivers everything on time and leaves it in a safe place if we aren't in so I have no complaints, she's great.

On 6/1/2024 at 1:15 PM, Rossman said:

That sounds like DPD. When their drivers fail to collect our customers parcels. I've spoken to our local depot, their response is that stock answer.

On 6/1/2024 at 9:26 PM, Tamura said:

DPD were the idiots who couldn't find the doorbell, since I forgot to include exactly what the driver failed to find, leading to some discussion about intercoms. While some intercoms might actually be tricky to get to work, I like to think that if someone is capable of driving a van and using a smartphone and/or tablet that they are capable of pressing a single button to ring a doorbell. DHL were the second set of idiots. 

Varies massively from depot to depot. DPD Local ("blue" DPD, formerly Interlink) are who my employers use and throughout the country on average they're pretty good, but my best customer has had drivers leave the box on his office doorstep, ring the bell and walk off (I've seen the footage), park behind his property and send the "Sorry we missed you" notification when people were there, and even mark cons as "could not find address" when the GPS location for where they were parked when they entered that, the business logo is clearly visible on the office from across the street and 90% of the time has a van with the company logo parked in the  driveway.

Conversely with Hermes/Evri, my last address our driver herself was brilliant, but its the network that lets her down. Numerous online purchases simply vanished into thin air without ever getting to our delivery depot and ended up being refunded by the merchants. Choosing "deliver to store" wherever its available has become the norm for the raidette and me.

On 6/1/2024 at 9:26 PM, Tamura said:

The Whistl/Evri couriers are generally quite good since they are generally local people with a reasonable grasp of local geography.

Accidental Partridge aside, this reminds me of that meme going round for ages - "Ordering a pizza before GPS was wild. Here's my name and a random street name. You have 30 minutes to deliver me a pizza. Good luck."

My petty annoyance.... found out the other day that the same girl in our office who leaves the microwave at "1:17" or whatever rather than letting the cycle finish or resetting it for the next user, thinks nothing of going beverage-coffee jar-beverage-sugar with the spoon while making a tray of drinks for the team, which is why the sugar ends up with lumps of stained sugar and coffee grounds in it. She's one of them. God, I hate people.

Never dreamed a lad from Stourbridge would win the Champions League.

Many years later, we’d compare achievements over Curry Club and a pitcher of Woo Woo in The Chequers, and while it was noted that while he’d reached the pinnacle of his career just as I had mine - a dead heat, there can be NO denying that - Jude would be the first to concede that I had the edge in having been accepted to and excelled while attending Stourbridge’s educational Goliath, King Edward VI College, colloquially known as “King Eds” to yam yams, and he hadn’t been admitted, having not applied. We sportingly agreed on a gentlemen’s draw, but I could see in the Judester’s eyes that he knew, gentle reader, as we all do, that while the jungle of gateways to tertiary education in the Dudley metropolitan area is survival of the fittest to avoid the literal bloodbath known as “clearing”, and that t-shirt sales is a high octane pressure cooker on crystal meth worse than any bear pit on Wall Street - I once slid into Jordan Belforts DMs on the Instagrams and trust me, he agrees - frankly anyone, absolutely anyone, can play football to the highest level if they choose to.

Needless to say, I had the last laugh.

4 hours ago, Snitsky's back acne said:

However, in response your post I remember the most obvious one being Halloween Havoc 95. Sting and Flair v Pillman and Anderson. I'm sure I remember fans cheering when Flair lamped him because everybody could see from a mile off that Ric was going to turn on him. 

The build up was excruciating. Even Sting knew it was coming and fell for it anyway.

While never my first choice, I’ve gone to shows alone when I couldn’t rope in casuals, if the journey was excessive for my usual sidekicks/plans changed/money was tight etc. Everything from Noah to Dragon Gate UK to RevPro to Progress and too many more BritWres shows to name the length and breadth of this here island, plus NXT house shows and NXT UK tapings. From venues as diverse as the M&S Bank (formerly Echo) Arena in Liverpool and York Hall, to nightclubs, conference halls and leisure centres everywhere from Preston to Wolverhampton to Reading.

Some of my quirkiest shows attended on my tod were during my trips to Japan when I went to Ice Ribbon, Wave and DDT at Shin Kiba 1st Ring and Ayako Hamadas 15th anniversary show at Shinjuku Face all without my host and sometime keffer tsve, because he didn’t fancy it, was having a beer with mates or was on a promise. One of said mates being occasional wrestler out there Mike Atkinson, whose “gentleman” gimmick name i forget, who was our introduction to sponsors son Tsukasa and Hailey Hatred, Mia Yim and Luscious Latasha. Which lead to many beers, tickets to shows “sold out” to the public, freebies to All Japans biggest Korakuen show of the summer, and the gleaning of such knowledge that Minoru Suzuki is the nicest bloke you’ll ever meet, Fergal Devitt/Finn Balor is a complete lightweight, and some of the sexual preferences of some of the wrestlers both native and gaijin.

Found out within the hour, tsve has beaten me to MSG. Though he’s gone for the darts. You know what that is, Michael, it’s saaaaad. Although Littler came out to Kingdom so that’s something.

32 minutes ago, Hannibal Scorch said:

What’s the impact though? The proponent drives his knee into the mat, the opponent has a weak swinging neckbreaker. It also looks piss weak 95% of the time. 

I dunno, I just watched a little compilation of them and I guess YMMV. When its done well, I'd put it up there with the Lightning Spiral/PaigeTurner at least. I think plenty of the family of "just a slam" finishers with less torque got over. The Olympic Slam for instance, I thought was pretty lame for a finish in 1999. Within a year I bought it as lethal. The ZigZag was just a back bump without any spinning (and well know spinning makes a move better). As I say... YMMV.

........ I like Paydirt too. That's even MORE divisive.

Would have been great if Johnson could have gone from a covid party to a grand old party. No rules will stop him.

50 minutes ago, Max Power said:

He meant Stripy String not socks.

Gutted it wasn't Stripy Sting.

44 minutes ago, Supremo said:

Anyway, seeing them occupy the same space here, I’m reminded we haven’t had Danielson vs. Darby or Danielson vs Jack Perry in singles matches yet, have we? I suspect both would rule. Obviously the Double J match is the priority, but then those two are right below it.

Apropos to the sentiment if not the specific examples, this is why AEW is great. There's not been a really good buffet table for random wrestlers with different backgrounds at different stages of their careers to get paired up, since prime TNA more than ten years ago. I was reminded of this the other day on "formerly know as" Twitter when I saw clips of a match I didn't know had happened - RVD, between WWE runs and slightly past his peak but still awesome, vs Samoa Joe, post TNA Champion but pre WWE. A brilliant example of when you think "And what would that look like?" and at least in 2 minute highlight form, the answer looked to be "very fucking good indeed." Coupled with a WCW feeling of "something for everyone" when their TV is at its best... it's been excellent for keeping mainstream US wrestling more interesting through variety.

12 minutes ago, Supremo said:

Contrast it with The Overdrive. The no brainer. The banker. The one that couldn’t fail. The one that’s never failed. Hundreds of episodes of Velocity out there. It connected every time.

Why exactly do people rag on the Overdrive? I've never seen an issue with it. Sometimes I've seen the impact look pretty devastating. Is it just because it screams "lower midcard"?

2 hours ago, Snitsky's back acne said:

Trump will pardon him when he gets back in. 

You mean when he gets out?

Just kidding, we all know the Donald won't do time. But are convicted felons allowed to run for office?

16 hours ago, Supremo said:

Mercedes Mone’s finisher. What is the crack with that, lads? Is it supposed to end with her catching her opponent with a DDT? Or has she abandoned that part of the move completely and now they both just fall down at the same time? I assumed it was a convoluted spinning DDT but I honestly think I’ve only ever seen her hit it correctly like that once.

16 hours ago, The King Of Swing said:

Didn't she botch it on Kairi, the first time she even attempted it? 

One of those moves that probably seems cool in your head but is shit in execution. Bin it. 

I got into my head that the success rate was about 50/50 but considering she only had about 5 matches between WWE and injury, I might be wrong, considering how many I've seen whiffed,

If there really was only once where the DDT actually came off.... at least it was in winning the belt.

9 minutes ago, Jazzy G said:

I also attended the first Raw and Smackdown tapings in the UK, and at the Smackdown taping we got a dark match of Undertaker Vs Heidenreich. The one Raw house show we attended had Shawn Vs HHH before the interval. 

Ah, dark matches. I'll never forget how I didnt go to the SmackDown that had Styles win the belt, but I did go to the one the year after where the star-studded dark main of Styles & Bryan vs Miz & Orton (the only match of the night for any of them) consisted of a short match where AJ & Bryan barely broke a sweat double teaming Miz into defeat while Randy walked around ringside completely nonplussed - he didn't even take his vest off.

For crossing Orton off the "bucket list" - Omega vs Y2J at WK, it wasn't.

2 hours ago, Jazzy G said:

First WWE show I went to was a Smackdown house show in Sheffield in I think 2003? Rey Mysterio wrestled Sean O'Haire, and the main event was Los Guerreros and Rikishi Vs the FBI. The people sat in front of us spent the whole match chanting for Johnny The Bull. 

Apparently these are the matches you had for those two according to the usual sites and some in person reports ;

May 11, 2003
Sean O’Haire pinned Tajiri
Shelton Benjamin & Charlie Haas defeated Rey Mysterio Jr & Rhyno

... easy to conflate. I can't believe I didn't know this already but you also got to see Brock Lesnar vs John Cena for the belt. Although obviously a different animal in 2003 to what it would become.

I mean, I shouldn't be jealous considering I've seen Bret vs Owen for the WWF title, numerous other belters for many of the top titles, and Okada vs Naito... but I'm still a little jealous.

5 hours ago, SpykeDudlei1 said:

Thanks a lot, I’ve now got that funky little guitar-driven soundtrack they used on some of those Silver Vision tape promos in my head like a musical ear worm. 🤦🏻‍♂️😂 

Sad day when it stopped being used in favour of just the little “Coliseum Video” bumper for the early 93 roster. But not as sad as the loss of the characteristic blue spine.