BomberPat

I think the question remains as to whether there's mileage in this Nick Wayne act after the Jericho feud; I hope there is, but we still need to see him interacting with other wrestlers on the show.

I was surprised they did both Blood & Guts matches on the same show, I had assumed the women's one would be taped for Collision, but it's the Jericho Cruise live Collision rather than taped this week - I wonder if when they first booked the venue for B&G they hadn't got everything in place to know they could definitely do a live show from the cruise? Just guesswork. I would say the problem isn't so much the lack of pinfalls, it's years of western wrestling teaching audiences that to submit is a cowardly act, combined with wrestlers wanting to get creative but being pretty limited in what they can actually achieve - babyfaces (and some heels) don't want to quit because it shows weakness, so you have this overreliance on big gimmicky reasons for somebody to give up. That's at least the third time, probably more that I'm forgetting, that they've had a wrestler quit to "save" someone else rather than because they were actually forced to submit, and that's a narrative beat that always requires slowing things down and making room for some amateur dramatics rather than just letting the wrestlers fight. The finish worked for the women's match because it was just a war of attrition, until eventually somebody couldn't take any more. I assume in this case it is leading to a Copeland/Ospreay programme, but I don't think that programme needs it - you can get to what I assume is the same "my career was almost ended because of the risks I took, I'm trying to stop the same thing from happening to you" justification from Copeland any number of ways (I'd have Ospreay acknowledge that it's Cope's retirement run, offer him up a title shot, and Cope take exception to being seen as a charity case and get increasingly hostile towards Will), and they did the same "babyface quits to save someone else" finish with Toni and Mina in the women's match last year, so they should be more sparing with it.

Okada becoming a full-blown Memphis style stooge heel while still being one of the best big match wrestlers in the world has been brilliant to watch. The one thing I didn't like about his act was the overreliance on him saying "bitch" - aside from the misogyny of it (and that if it was going to be Okada's catchphrase, they should have stopped everyone else on the show from saying it, apart from Thekla), it was one of those typically wrestling things where somebody does something spontaneous, unexpected, and funny, then it gets hammered into the ground as a routine. Him largely swapping that out for "FAMILY" as his catchphrase has been a massive improvement.

I watched Godzilla Minus Zero at the IMAX last night - first time seeing anything in IMAX, so that was fun. I was the low man of my group, everyone else absolutely loved it. I thought it was good, but obviously not a patch on Minus One - how could it be? - and a bit clunky in places. The plot seemed to revolve entirely around someone saying they had a plan, then not telling you what the plan was, so half the film was characters flying around in planes while someone barked orders over a walkie-talkie to another group of people to do something that hadn't been explained to the audience. The first film did such a good job of threading the needle of Godzilla as a metaphor for the nuclear bomb, and dealing with survivor's guilt, post-war reconstruction, and trauma in general, without ever feeling silly for it, and I don't think this one nailed those themes at all, they just had a lot of characters saying them out loud repeatedly. The human element was so strong in Minus One, and so weak and hackneyed in this one, with some absolutely preposterous acting from Min Tanaka at one point, that it's a good thing that the monster designs were really strong, and that it was visually interesting enough to make up for it. Some fucking dreadful CGI crows, though, it briefly turned into Birdemic for a couple of minutes.

I'd add Shawn into the mix there. The day that Shawn Michaels walked out citing an "unsafe working environment" after his fight with Bret, he was supposed to wrestle Brian Pillman on RAW, and that match never happened - they were never even opposite sides of a tag, never in a battle royal, never shared the ring at all. You've got arguably the defining high-flyer babyfaces of WWF and WCW in the early years of the decade, both turning into generational coked up nutters a few years later - taking that and interweaving it with the history between Bret, Shawn, Pillman, and Austin would have been magic.

I thought the women's match was far better than the men's; it felt more of a brawl, grittier, and more organic, while the men's had too many pauses for everyone to stare dramatically at each other, too much of everybody having to get their shit in. I suspect there might be an Adam Copeland grumpy veteran run coming - if not a full-blown heel turn, then at least working more heelish against Ospreay and maybe Darby. Ospreay was definitely selling frustration at him costing their team the match, and Cope's promo at the top of the show about how he was the only one looking out for the wellbeing of the younger wrestlers made me think that this might be leading to him doing something like the anti-hardcore Cactus Jack thing, of being angry at guys like Ospreay and Darby for not having learned the lessons from his career. Foley being involved in that segment, and Cope wearing the gear from their Street Fight, all plays into it too.

Blackmore's Night are absolute dogshit, in fairness, and I say that as someone who was into them as a weird teenager. The last couple of years I've got really back into folk music in a big way - collectively the Carthy/Waterson family probably make up half of my most listened to artists of the last two years - but I do tend to shy away from the more fiddle-dee-dee hey-nonny-nonny side of it all, and lean more towards old workers' songs and protest music.

I can't imagine how it could be anything else, surely? They're not having Grayson Waller pin Punk, and I can't see them putting the NXT belt on Punk either - all that does is push the problem down the line of how they book anyone in NXT to beat him for it. It's going to be a Kevin Owens run-in for a DQ finish, I'd have thought.

I never played Spiders, but I have a lot of affection for it as my baseline for what a rock/alternative club was, and for many daft nights out there every time I went back to Hull. And, obviously, for being able to get a pint for under two quid. My older brother went there as a teenager some 30+ years ago, and the prices must have barely crept up in all that time.

Years ago, one of my best mates started seeing my ex - no hard feelings, it was Jersey, it's a small social circle, you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who hadn't dated around their social circle, particularly once you got into the music scene and "alternative" types. It's a wonder if it ever happened, though, because the first night he went back to hers he passed out drunk, then got up in the middle of the night, opened her wardrobe and started pissing in it. She woke up, caught him in the act and asked him what he was doing, and apparently he mumbled, "it's alright, Pat said it's okay" as he stopped and stumbled back to bed.

A 36 year old vs a 48 year old for the developmental belt, really showcasing the future of the business there.

For work experience, I was in the stockroom at HMV. It was quite a small shop, and part of a larger department store. The main stockroom was upstairs, with boxes of stuff to get prepped and ready to put out on the shop floor, and then there was a larger storeroom downstairs, with overstock, and weirder stuff that wasn't selling - it was a bit of a labyrinth to get there, involving two separate lifts, or physically leaving the building, walking to the end of the block, and accessing it via the back of the whole department store. I was sent down there to get a couple of palettes of stuff, all loaded up on this rickety trolley, coming up to my shoulders. I navigate it around all the corners and corridors to get to the lift...and then don't realise that the knackered old lift doesn't stop flush with the floor. Wheel the trolley forwards, it catches on the fractionally higher bit of the lift, and everything just tips forward into the lift, scattering CDs and DVDs everywhere. As I move the trolley out of the way to try and get into the lift and start trying to fix it, the lift door closes, because someone upstairs in the poshest bit of the department store has pressed the call button.

lest anyone think it's an exclusively male-dominated field, my ex briefly lived in a house share with an actress who has done proper big films and telly, who was once caught pissing in the kitchen sink.

I wasn't really thinking of the Speed Title! I was thinking of the High Speed Title in NEO and STARDOM, which is a belt with a 10-minute time limit, two out of three falls, and a 10 count on the outside rather than the usual Japanese 20 count. It's something I've thought that, if I were to ever book a full-time wrestling promotion, I would probably introduce a version of, because I think once you get beyond one or two singles belts, anything that follows should have a distinct identity beyond it being just another title. I don't think I ever watched any matches for WWE's version, but I suspect that they were just short matches wrestled exactly the same as any other WWE TV match, when the point of any stipulation should be to show how it changes the psychology of the match, and forces people to wrestle differently. I think AEW would do a much better job with something like that than WWE could - I'm not suggesting AEW necessarily should introduce this title (and certainly not in addition to the belts they already have), just that it's worth thinking of ways championships could serve distinct purposes in ways that AEW's titles currently don't. Similarly, something like CHIKARA's Young Lion's Cup, for wrestlers under 25. Titles with restrictions or qualifiers to make them something unique. Incidentally, I completely agree with everything @Carbomb said about the X-Division - it's very kayfabe-breaking to say "it's about no limits", but then have a clear idea of what constitutes an "X-Division wrestler"; it's coming within a breadth of saying "It's for the flippy boys" without actually saying it. I always think about this every time I see bad faith arguments about AEW having too many titles. AEW has five men's singles titles, the tag and trios, and then two women's singles titles and the tag. Yes, you sometimes see ROH, NJPW or CMLL titles showing up as well, but I think that's increasingly rare - Bandido hasn't been carrying the ROH belt around him with him during his current Trios programme at all. In WWE, you've got four main roster men's singles titles, two sets of men's tag titles, four women's singles titles and the women's tag titles. So the only category in which AEW have more belts than WWE is men's singles belts, and I'd say WWE having two separate World Championships makes that one pretty equal. There's then an additional two men's and women's singles titles and a tag title in NXT (for comparison's sake, let's contrast that to three men's belts, three women's belts, a tag and a trios for ROH), a men's and women's title in EVOLVE, and a men's and women's WWE ID Championship, and then the AAA Mega Title has been featured on RAW, La Catalina wrestled on RAW as AAA Reina de Reinas champion, Rey Fenix is regular defending the AAA Cruiserweight Title on WWE TV, The War Raiders were defending the AAA Tag Titles on Smackdown. Weird that WWE don't seem to get the same criticisms as AEW over that.

It's absolutely about delineation. I don't know what distinguishes the National, TNT, and International Title, or why, in kayfabe, any wrestler would choose to challenge for one of those belts over the others. That's a bigger problem than there just being too many belts in general. I also, as I make clear most weeks (as AEW tends to give me reason to), hate a champion challenging for a different title. I think it devalues a title belt if, the moment you win it, you start going after another title rather than defending the one you have. That issue would come up less if there were more distinctions between the titles. It also devalues someone like Kenny Omega or Mercedes Moné doing a belt collector gimmick if they're not the only champion on the show who's carrying multiple titles. I think titles from other promotions can be additive, but too often are just too much window dressing. Around Forbidden Door, absolutely we should see the other promotions' title belts. But if it's a random midcard match where someone with minimal standing in AEW happens to have a title from CMLL, I don't think it does either company any favours to draw attention to that. I'd just like to see title belts given more identity. The TNT Title is often, unofficially, an "open challenge" belt - challengers aren't having to win eliminators or number one contenders matches to get a shot, and the champion tends to defend against all-comers on TV most weeks, and treating it like a de facto TV Title in that respect helps create some separation, particularly with it being named after a TV network in the first place. The Continental Title has its own set of rules, so at least that's something. Rather than introducing belts like a National Title that's indistinguishable from the International Title, I think titles that guarantee a certain type of match would perhaps be more beneficial. ROH still has the Pure Title, and given the choice I would swap one of the AEW singles titles for the Pure belt or something like it; a specific set of rules that favours technical wrestling, I would maybe even go stricter than the Pure belt and introduce rounds as well. It means you know you're getting a different pace of wrestling to the rest of the card, and it's a place to showcase wrestlers and styles that might otherwise go under-appreciated. Similarly, a "High Speed" belt (but with a better name) that's for a matches with a 10 minute time limit (or even less). Introduce it with a series of matches that are really fast and frantic, between high flyers and luchadores, almost early X-Division style of "video game wrestling" - just constant move after move after move, escalating until someone eventually wins - but then once it's established, start to change it up; have a big bruiser like Mark Davis challenge for it, and start winning just by flattening people in record time. Have a cowardly heel win it and just keep stalling and trying to run down the clock.