BomberPat

what stood out about that rap was that Bowens was clearly meant to snatch the mic away from him before the last word, and cut him off way too late. It was shit, though, and Max Caster is in Ricky Starks territory of looking like he'd rather be anywhere else, and his raps get worse every week.

It really isn't. Every available bit of data shows a decline in most types of crime over the last five years, and that London ranks lower than plenty of other areas in England for antisocial behaviour, crime rates, murder rates, knife crime, and gun crime. Where crime rates have increased, it's been at a much lower rate in London than the national average (the Independent a couple of weeks ago quoted the figures as 18% in London compared to 35% across England and Wales in 2023). The area covered by the Met ranks 31st out of 42 police force areas for violent crime, compared to ranking 3rd in 2016, and the increase in knife crime is also lower than the national average. London has plenty of problems, and throwing taxpayer money at Wrestlemania would be a bad look no matter what. But it's a question of saying "but we've got Rey Mysterio!" instead of paying striking train drivers, not of the conservative fantasy of London being a crime-ridden hell hole. @The Reverend nailed it - some staffer in the Mayor's office looked up what the biggest sporting events are, and Wrestlemania was in the list. This isn't about winning votes from John Cena fans, it's about selling London as a major international city, and Wrestlemania is a footnote in that. The "bid book" for host cities that David Bixenspan found a couple of years ago doesn't appear to exist online any more, but from what I remember of that, the amount of costs they expect to be covered by the host city are so excessive that I don't see London ever forking out for it, nor do I think they have the infrastructure to support Wrestlemania week the way WWE want it presented. If nothing else, they won't consider anything less than a 65,000 seat venue, which narrows the list down to Wembley, Twickenham, and then maybe, depending on configuration, could allow for the Spurs stadium, London Stadium, or the Emirates. But I'd assume AEW have an exclusivity deal with Wembley, and I'd assume football grounds won't be available for Wrestlemania and the amount of prep work that would take during the season. To say nothing of attempting to run an outdoor venue in London in early April. On top of all that, I just don't see London being won over by the usual WWE spiel of "give us a few million quid, and we will add so much more to your local economy, and bring tens of thousands of people to your city". London is already the most visited city in Europe, it doesn't need Triple H lending their tourist industry a hand. There's also an ongoing lawsuit between WWE and the Texas Attorney General around WWE not wanting the records of the bid for the 2023 Royal Rumble to be made public, the results of which could be interesting in terms of how honest their figures are. It won't happen, and I'd put any amount of money on that.

I think for a lot of cases like this, it's an idea that was pitched, probably one among hundreds, and 99% of those ideas never make air. For some reason, people got really invested in this one, when chances are there were a hundred other names thrown around for that role. I assume that if they had run with Daniels as the Higher Power, he'd have been either a manager or ending up as the guy to take the bumps for The Undertaker to protect him, rather than positioning him as an actual challenger for Austin. The reason why I think it was at least pitched is that Vince Russo recycled it in WCW, with Daniels being revealed as Vampiro's Dark Master in a story that got immediately dropped. Russo basically treated Vampiro and Sting's feud as an excuse to recycle all of his ideas for Undertaker and Kane, and that was one of them. The version of the story I heard was that with the downturn in domestic business starting, the choice was between Tito Santana, in an effort to reach out to the Latin market, or Bret Hart to try and make more money in Canada, and it was Bret also being really popular in Europe that helped tip the decision in his favour. So Santana not getting a big push doesn't necessarily prove that he was never planned for one, as by that point they'd opted not to go in that direction at all.

I think it comes down to the vagaries of Fair Use law; by specifically using the version of the footage owned by WWE, they would probably have to pay them to use it, whereas because the show is classed as a documentary, they'll be able to get away with using other footage for a limited period. There's also the weird loophole that Dark Side Of The Ring use, where there's something about how they film a TV screen showing the footage, and that somehow qualifies under a different license or something.

I'm not sure what's more annoying, how badly that scans, or "make it do" instead of "make do".

My tolerance for heat has been way down since Covid, but those extra flamin' hot Wotsits almost did me in. Couldn't get through the whole packet, and I'm going to assume they were a contributing factor in my guts being a right state later than evening.

alexisonfire Is it Alexis On Fire, or Alex Is On Fire? Both shit.

Toni's go-home promo on Collision, which they played snippets of during the hype package for her vs. Rosa, was the best thing she's ever done - "you might be a fighter, but I'm a star". The best distillation of the Timeless character into actually building to a match, rather than just goofiness and gimmicks for their own sake. You don't get that if she's not champion, and there's no one in AEW as it currently stands who would be doing a better job as champion; I've seen criticisms that her matches can be over-reliant on schtick and gimmickry and interference, but that's been true of women's matches in AEW for a while, with or without Toni Storm involved. Bryan Danielson vs. Will Ospreay was fantastic, and still might not be the best Bryan Danielson match I've seen this month. What a run he's on. Over Wrestlemania weekend, while Bryan was in CMLL to face Blue Panther, there were idiots on Twitter talking about how he probably wished he were still with WWE and wrestling real big names, as if he's not having the run of his life, wrestling all his dream matches. Imagine what a "Daniel Bryan's final year as a full-time wrestler" story would look like in WWE compared to what he's been allowed to do in AEW. Probably whatever the 2024 equivalent is of wrestling Baron Corbin in your retirement match. And there's still the prospect of a match with Nigel McGuinness, he's still not had a triumphant return to Ring of Honor, and he's still not had my personal AEW dream match against Jeff Jarrett.

1. Eddie Guerrero vs. Brock Lesnar - No Way Out 2003 I was in my first flush of "smart fan", holier than thou, knowing everything that went on and above being worked. Fuck all that off, by the time this match ended I was literally jumping off the sofa and cheering, and I don't think wrestling had ever got me that invested before. It completely undercut all my teenage know-it-all smugness and had me reacting the way you should. 2. Terry Funk vs. Sabu - ECW Born To Be Wired 1997 I was a Terry Funk and Sabu fan before I ever saw them wrestle, because I first became aware of them through a combination of Have A Nice Day and photos in magazines, and was fascinated by them just by reputation. Foley's book has a lot to answer for, as it was the first real indication to me that wrestling was a bigger world than just WCW and WWF with ECW nipping at their heels, that there was mad deathmatch stuff in Japan, indie wrestling in America, and that ECW sounded a lot more interesting than how it had previously appeared to me. Before I knew about tape trading, before I found the IWA: Japan Deathmatch tournament on video, I had to rely on downloading the grainiest of Realplayer video files of single spots from deathmatches, and hoping that my local HMV would get in ECW videos/DVDs this week. One time, they had this - the Barbed Wire match, which by then I had heard all about, but still wasn't prepared for. It was an eye opener, and one of a handful of shows that made me a complete ECW mark for years. 3. Bret Hart vs. Roddy Piper - Wrestlemania VIII Limiting myself to one Bret Hart match, it has to be this or the 'Mania match with Steve Austin, and I go with this one because it's a finish I've personally ripped off when putting matches together at least three times. It's a little hokey, but it's solid wrestling storytelling that will always stick with me. 4. "Cyanide" Sid Cooper vs. Sammy Lee - World of Sport When I first started getting into World of Sport, it was the usual technical wizard suspects that hooked me - the Johnny Saints and Jim Breakses. Now, I see this as just about a perfect wrestling match, the way Cooper, as all good World of Sport heels could, switches from clown to vicious bully in an instant, how he stooges for Sammy's offence, and does everything to make the new youngster look like a megastar. It's a perfect heel and a perfect babyface, and a near enough perfect match for my tastes. 5. Meiko Satomura vs. Emi Sakura - EVE She-1 2017 This was around the time I started going to EVE every month; I had gone for the first time earlier in the year because they'd booked Meiko Satomura and, having missed out when they booked Manami Toyota prior to that, I figured I would drop everything to go. They also had Emi Sakura on that card, who I was a big fan of when I watched Ice Ribbon years earlier, but I hadn't seen her since. I didn't know that I would end up seeing both wrestlers so many times that I lost count, and wind up on conversational terms with them both, they, Meiko especially, may as well have been mythical beings at this point. This was from the first She-1 tournament, four shows across two days, and both women also had great matches with Viper over the course of that, but this was the one I'd been waiting for. I never want to go back and watch this again, because in the room it was phenomenal, the energy was incredible, they were both busting their arses to put on a genuinely great match, and both wrestling like the other wrestler owed them money. It's probably no longer the best match I've seen from either woman, but at the time it was as good as any match I had ever seen, and the crowd made it even better, so much so that I had to go outside to get some fresh air afterwards.

They're pretty much completely unafraid of people; evolutionarily speaking, they used to follow wild boar and pigs around because they knew that they would dredge up a bunch of worms and insects as they moved through soil and undergrowth, and once that behaviour had been figured out it took biologists a while to get their heads around how robins had been able to flourish so well when the species that basically created that niche for them had mostly died out. The answer is that they replaced boar and pigs with humans, and human gardeners in particular - they're so tame and unafraid of us because they have spent thousands of years following us around because they associate us with an increased likelihood of food.

There is some Nigel Bicklesworth presence, I think. I just don't think universities work as well as hospitals for this kind of game; there's (at least early on) less variety, and some of the gameplay mechanics feel a bit crowbarred in (having janitors upgrade a lectern, or Research and Training Rooms having big machines in them just to keep with that upgrade mechanic), and whereas the Hospital game allows for a lot of control and urgency around things like queue times, how long a patient is waiting around for, and literal life or death scenarios, you can effectively just leave Campus running and a lot of the basics take care of themselves. It probably doesn't help that Hospital was building on the framework of, and nostalgia for, Theme Hospital, whereas this was a newer concept.

I finished Snufkin: Melody of Moominvalley for the Switch over the weekend; perfect little low energy cosy game, and I'm a big Moomins nerd so loved how well it was made as a reflection of that world. None of the puzzles or anything are particularly taxing, but it's fun, it's genuinely hilarious in places, looks gorgeous, and the general themes are great. Would recommend. Having finished Secret of Mana, I started playing Legend of Mana, which was another PS+ freebie. I mistakenly thought it would be Seiken Densetsu 3, the next game in the franchise, but apparently that is now known as "Trials of Mana". Legend is one I don't think I even knew existed, originally for PS1. It's a weird one, to say the least. It's visually gorgeous, with the backdrops looking stylistically somewhere between the Monkey Island remasters and the second Discworld game, and the characters are big detailed sprites that probably would have felt dated on the PS1 when everyone else was pushing for 3D, but I love them. One of the things that makes it weird, though, is that there doesn't really appear to be a story - every location has its own single quest, and that's it; you finish it, move on to the next one. Maybe they become more connected later in the game, but so far everything is self-contained. That's not the only odd thing, though - when you start, you choose your character and starting weapon, and then choose a place on the map to start from. For the rest of the game, every time you complete a quest you get an "artefact", and you can place that anywhere you like on the map, which then creates the next location you can go to. There doesn't seem to be any relevance as to where or in what order you place things in relation to each other. I started playing it because I wanted a story-heavy game to play alongside what else I'm playing, but actually it's been nice to know that I can just pick it up for 15-20 minutes and finish a story in that time. The other game I'm playing is Two Point Campus. A shop near me had the deluxe edition with DLC and whatnot for PS4 going cheap, and I loved Two Point Hospital, so I picked it up even though when I played it previously I struggled to get on with it - I think that was a Steam free weekend. I've got to the same point in the game now that I managed that time around, and I'm enjoying it more but still running into some of the same issues. It lacks the kind of urgency that Two Point Hospital had, because just by virtue of the setting the stakes aren't as high; I'm four levels in and haven't had a single failing student, it's really easy to get marks up to A+ and so on, and gaming the loans system means it's tough to run out of money. There's quite a bit of focus on scheduling events, and I find that quite tedious, but I'll stick with it.

NewLegacyInc did a playthrough of the Women's Title story as Vince McMahon - I'm pretty sure it's all versions of the game that allow that for some reason. On the Stevie Richards thing, I assume he was already in the game and when Big Show was removed, Stevie was indexed in that spot on the roster, so every bit of the story mode that would have pulled from that just picked up Stevie instead of Show? Rather than him being added in specifically to replace Big Show? The other possibility is that, with Richards doing the RTC gimmick, maybe they thought gamers would see him as a sufficient enough villain to justify an in-game big push

I never grew up with the stories about robins representing lost loved ones - I grew up around farms, and we owned a lot of animals, so it was almost a point of principle from my parents and older brother not to anthropomorphise them or lean into myth or folklore or anything like that. But last year I was with my partner walking through some woodland around the Forest of Dean, and my family had just recently lost one of their dogs, Alfie, who was a real favourite of mine. As we were walking across some stepping stones, a robin came and landed on the one right in front of me, and my girlfriend said that it was Alfie come to make sure I was okay. I got really teary-eyed and still do when thinking about it. Then in January we were visiting my parents, and a robin came and landed outside the window right by me as soon as I got sat in my usual chair in their living room, and again, my girlfriend just turned to me and said, "there's Alfie". It's a bit of folk belief I'm perfectly happy to have adopted.

the Chris Adams interview didn't have much I didn't already know, though having Booray and his all-timer of a terrible haircut there to tell the story added some depth to it, as did having Neil Adams involved; I'm honestly not sure I even knew Neil was Chris' brother! The Chris Colt episode was fantastic, though - I only really knew the absolute basics about his story, mostly the Dupree Brothers, but that's the kind of thing I want to see more of from DSOTR, digging up characters and stories that are new to most of the audience and shine a light on a bit of wrestling history that hasn't been done to death.