BomberPat

airing the backstage footage from Wembley does muddy the waters a little on that front, though, because it makes something off-TV into part of the on-TV storyline, and that highlights some inconsistencies - we had weeks of blokes in devil masks running around beating people up backstage, and even after they revealed their identities, none of them were suspended or fired, nor was anyone else who's been in an on-screen backstage fight. So what was so special about the Jack Perry/CM Punk fight to warrant that response? It's almost moot, though, as they very quickly moved to Jack Perry attacking Tony Khan as the real inciting incident and the core of his alliance with the Elite anyway.

He is, and I'm still convinced that someone just mixed up the names "Lesley Nielsen" and "Liam Neeson" in a pitch meeting and tried to style it out. Cody Rhodes is apparently in it, so maybe he's getting the OJ role.

Dennis Thompson, drummer and last surviving member of the MC5, aged 75. Art Jimmerson, boxer who competed in UFC 1, aged 60.

PS1 demo discs were amazing. Likewise, there are games I still associate more with demos than with the full version - Armoured Core, Bloody Roar (which I think were on the same disc), Overboard!, and then a ton of mad Net Yaroze games. I got back into wrestling because of the Smackdown demo, and the Discworld 2 demo was one of the things to first get me into Terry Pratchett. They've had an outsized influence on my life. I randomly got a Dreamcast about ten years ago, and I'm still not sure why, I just decided one day that I was buying one. A lot of the games have aged really well, and a lot of the ones that haven't still stand out for having some fun and original ideas. It's a great console, deserved better.

I can almost see the logic to Orange Cassidy still fighting back after the Piledriver - we've seen that he's super resilient, and we've seen the piledriver on the ring steps before in AEW, so it doesn't feel like the shocking break from the norm it should be. It's not like he was standing tall and fighting back, he was staggering around, clinging to a chair as his best possible defence. But it was too quick, and nothing had time to sink in. The end of the segment should have been the slingshot into the ring frame - I'm not sure I've ever seen it before, and it's an unusually vicious idea, so if they'd actually given that spot time to breathe, I'd have been much happier with everything going on around it. Cassidy being able to walk out at the end of it all was ridiculous, he should at least have had more people helping him. The Mogul Embassy turn was very clearly telegraphed, but also completely the right thing to do. Swerve still being aligned to three heel henchmen makes no sense. I just hope they don't split up Swerve and Nana. The only real downside was that it feels like every week Swerve is on the other end of a battering on TV. I liked that they did an angle setting up that if Rocky Romero had beaten Jay White it would have earned him and Orange Cassidy a Trios Title shot, only to still have Jay win. Nothing else really jumped out at me. I have zero interest in Adam Copeland going to a "dark place" for the millionth time.

Yeah, I think he's one of very few people of his generation to have seriously reckoned with the culture of the time and his part in it, explained why it was the way it was, but also fully accepting why they were mistaken. And he seemingly never did it out of a need for forgiveness or acceptance, just because he recognised it was the right thing to do. It shouldn't stand out as much as it does, but given so many people of his generation have just doubled down on "no, it's the children who are wrong", it stands out. I found myself being a lot more upset by hearing of Albini's death than I probably would have thought. He had a hand in so much music that I love, and that shaped my tastes, and whether it's playing a bunch of Big Black and Rapeman records when I was working in a record shop, seeing Shellac live and meeting him at merch tables, or going back as far as first hearing In Utero, he was just ever-present. I even recently had a brief exchange with him on Bluesky, when Steve Harley died, discussing how he was so much more than a one hit wonder, and that kind of thing stands out when I think of Albini on social media.

years of being told that there's nothing more important than "getting the Tories out" by a party that just can't stop letting Tories in, fucking state of them.

I may be misremembering, but I think that if you leave any of the KKK meetings long enough without killing everyone, they all end in them accidentally killing themselves through their own stupidity.

it's sounding like your experience of the game was very similar to mine; if I hadn't played it during lockdown, I don't know how long I would have lasted on it, because the first hour or so is a bit of a slog, and then when the world starts to open up it goes the opposite way and just starts to feel huge and daunting. But I completely fell in love with the small details, with dressing Arthur how I wanted him to look, and just exploring the world at my own pace. I don't think any game has done open world better; it takes a long time before random encounters start to feel repetitive, and there's so much out there that's waiting for you to stumble across it that exploring always feels worthwhile. It helps that the landscape is stunning too, so riding around it on a horse is always lovely. Daft stuff like characters having different lines of dialogue if Arthur gets really fat are fun too. I was always told the story was incredible, but I was in love with the game before I got to a point where I realised that; I thought the world was fantastic, and the story snuck up on me, and I think that's probably the best way to experience it.

for the most part I don't really have anything to do with students any more - my role is mostly around finance and governance now, and honestly, I'd take a full month of exam boards over that - but a huge chunk of my job lately seems to be other people expecting me to either do things they can easily do themselves, or to be the bearer of bad news, because they don't want to talk to people themselves. Our expenses/pay claim process is fucked - people submit their claims to my team, we then upload them to the Payroll department's Sharepoint site. There is absolutely no reason for us to be in the middle of this, other than that Payroll don't talk to anyone. So if an expense claim gets rejected for being out of policy, or not filled in correctly, or anything like that, Payroll contact me rather than the person who filled it in, who I then need to forward it on to. Completely pointless.

similar bus complaint from me; my bus to work has been awful this week, as train strikes mean traffic is appalling, the bus is always late, and always packed when it gets there. Luckily there's a stop not long after mine where it usually empties out, and I managed to get a seat. There were three completely empty seats by then, yet at the next stop, someone decides to sit next to me instead of taking one of the empties. Why?!

the only good Q&A I've seen was with Garth Marenghi, and I was dreading it because I assumed (not entirely incorrectly) that it would be full of people trying to play along with the joke but being fucking terrible at it. The reason it was good is that someone started by saying, "Hi Garth, big fan", and he just replied, "Yes".

Very few. Adrian's are spectacular, though, far beyond the usual self-aggrandising bollocks, across something like seven volumes, but they're hard not to love, kind of like the man himself. His first book, long before the multi-volume versions you can buy on Amazon now, was printed exclusively on bright pink paper. Great gimmick, but the quality was awful and it just fell apart. I don't know if there are any that I would consider genuinely reliable, but it comes down to taking what you want/need from each one. At one end of the spectrum you have stuff like Mick Foley's first book where he comes across as reasonably honest and not interested in excessive self-promotion, and at the other end you have Hogan's, and Atholl Oakeley's book, in which he claims to have wrestled a nine foot tall man, to have discovered Maurice Tillett on the side of the road, and to have wrestled in front of a live audience of one million people.

Oh good, a reliable source! 🤣 I'll have a look what I can find, thanks for pointing me in the right direction

I went to the first live Underconsoletation, and it was fun because they did live challenges and involved the audience with things. But, again, that's all about making it work in the room, whereas I'm not sure how that would have come across listening to the recording. The other podcasts I've seen live, that I can think of, were Three Bean Salad, Off Menu, and How Did This Get Made. There's probably another one I'm forgetting. But they worked because, as you say, at least some of the hosts of each of them are stand-ups and already accustomed to working a room. A live show when it's just two people chatting with limited or no experience of working in front of a crowd I can imagine being a very different thing. But, again, that's me watching them live, I've never had any desire to go back and listen to them again, and live episodes tend to be among my least favourite otherwise. And, I can't reiterate this enough, audience Q&As are the worst.

I actually haven't encountered him yet - do you of any (ideally work-safe!) places I can find out more about him? I'm trying to avoid spending too much time on the Krays and gangland stuff, though it becomes inevitable. I don't want to be the kind of wanker that treats violent criminals as glamorous celebrities, so I'm trying to reduce their part in all this to background colour, but it's a big meandering mess of a story already, so who knows how it'll end up.

even when it was for Bray Wyatt, I'm not sure it added anything. It teased that he was coming back, sure, but it's not like it fed into what he ended up doing on-screen or anything. All a waste of time to keep a particular flavour of nerd convinced that something deeper was going on than spooky cosplay. I get Bo Dallas wanting to keep Bray's thing going, but I'm dreading it. I can't imagine it being anything but a constant uncomfortable reminder of who isn't there and why. It smacks of Lance Von Erich.

already disastrously unmotivated for work, amid yet another restructure that's costing several of my friends and colleagues their jobs and will do untold damage, and it just seems that every brand of idiot have all come out at once today. I generally don't think there's a more frustrating complaint that saying that something "doesn't work". Especially when it's a system that I can log into and see exactly how much time you've spent on it, and what you did, and exactly how and when you just didn't do what you were instructed to do, fucked it, and gave up. But actually there is one more irritating thing, and that's somebody else receiving the "it doesn't work" complaint, and passing it on without checking it. I got an email from an academic this morning (despite being the wrong department for this sort of thing, so another black mark there) panicking that a student had told her that they weren't able to upload their assignment to the submission link, and asking if we could check that the link was working. Again, wrong department, so I can't check that - but assuming it's her module's assignment, she can. And maybe look at how many other students have managed to submit their work perfectly fine, and think about how that might suggest that it's working absolutely fine and that it's just user error. I don't know how many students you have, but given that their deadline is at 12pm today, I imagine you might have heard from more than one person if the upload link "didn't work".

you can't really coast on being the anti-authority guy who speaks truth to power when everybody's queuing up to tell the authority how amazing they are and what a great job they're doing.

I've been to some fun live podcast recordings, but they're never episodes I'd enjoy listening to outside of the live setting, it just doesn't really translate, and an audience Q&A is the worst part of any live event ever. I went to see Three Bean Salad at the London Podcast Festival a couple of times, and they were great. It's only a "festival" in that it's a couple of days of live podcasts, but they're all individual events, you're not buying a ticket for a whole weekend and doing nothing but watching podcasts get recorded the whole time

Oh for sure. I don't know how organised it is, but there have been luchadores caught up and murdered in cartel violence, shows cancelled due to threats by gangsters, and I'm sure there's a lot of protection rackets going on there. There's at least a couple of very high profile luchadores rumoured to have serious connections, and cartel members moonlighting as luchadores, and Vampiro has claimed to have been kidnapped and been caught up in all kinds of gang warfare - take that with all the caveats that "Vampiro has claimed" usually requires, though he was the leader of the Mexico City branch of the Guardian Angels, so I wouldn't be surprised if he has seen some shit.

following on from my earlier post: A lot of old wrestlers were recruited by gangsters for odd jobs in London, much as boxers had been over the years. The slumlord Peter Rachman used Bert Assirati, Norbert Rondel (who wrestled as The Polish Eagle Vladimir Waldberg, and Peter Rann, as debt collectors and for protection rackets and intimidation. Royston Smith, who wrestled as Fuzzyball Kaye, was a dwarf wrestler who definitely had some gangland connections, but they've probably been massively exaggerated - he claimed to have been an intimate associate of the Kray Twins, working as heavy for them among various other bits of criminal activity, but Charlie Kray claimed that he only ever met him once and that his claims were bollocks. Tony Scarlo claimed that he used to run wrestling shows on behalf of Reggie Kray, and that Royston Smith was their go-between and eventually fucked things up by trying to screw people out of money. Whether that's true, Scarlo bullshitting, or Smith getting one over on Scarlo by claiming Kray involvement, who knows. There's a bit of old wrestling bollocks that the Kray Twins wanted to be wrestlers before they became boxers, as they idolised the Borg Twins. I think that's absolute bullshit, typical self-aggrandising wrestling lore to try and make wrestling seem important. If nothing else, the Borgs started wrestling a good ten years or more after the Krays started boxing. Reggie Kray does seem to have promoted a couple of shows at York Hall, though - the only claim I can find for this is in the book "The Profession of Violence", and is more or less word-for-word what appears on the Wrestling Heritage website, though which came first I don't know; this also repeats the story of Royston Smith and Tony Scarlo's involvement, though gets Smith's name wrong, which isn't a great sign. The two shows likely happened, though one seems to be a charity event headlined by a Boxer vs. Wrestler match and was probably more of a boxing show than a wrestling show, and the other has a full card listed, but whether it's genuinely a Kray Twins deal I don't know. In the United States, I wrote in my book about the Mabray Gang - they were a group that fixed sporting events all over the country, and a fair few big name wrestlers and promoters of the 1900s were involved. Beyond that, I actually doubt there would have been much involvement from major organised crime groups in American wrestling by the second half of the twentieth century. Groups like the Mafia may have owned a share of some of the venues or picking up concessions elsewhere, but mostly crime interests in sport were around securing gambling money, and that disappeared from wrestling around the 1920s. That said, I can't imagine Vince McMahon Sr. got as powerful as he did in New York without a back-hander here or there. And then obviously in Japan, Rikidozan was murdered by a Yakuza thug.

I am writing something at the moment about wrestling connections to Soho, and there's a few wrestlers that were involved in protection rackets, and some that claimed closer connections to the Krays, but how much of that is genuine and how much is typical old London bullshitters doing the, "you knew where you stood with their lot, they were proper villains" routine is unclear.

that comes down to smart booking again, though - it doesn't need to be a seven match card, a tag team match can make way for a singles, and so on. Talent fees are the least of your worries when it comes to overheads, and the easiest place to make savings, even without being completely mercenary about it.

Possibly, but "unlikely to be in use by anyone else" isn't really a selling point for venue managers any more - if the venue is open for wrestling in the afternoon, then they're covering costs on staff, cleaning, electricity, sundries, and so on, all these overheads that aren't a concern if they're not open. When the venue's usually used for gigs, getting a wrestling ring in there cuts capacity down considerably, and then on top of that wrestling audiences aren't big spenders at the bar - I see fans try and dispute this a lot, but it's true; if for no other reason than most people won't get up to go to the bar during a match, so the window to make money is pre-show, post-show and interval, whereas at gigs you'll have a fairly steady turnover. It sucks, and it's a symptom of a wider problem, but for a lot of places it can be more cost-effective to let the building stay empty and unused than to host a wrestling show. The latter point on being able to clear out before an evening gig is a winner, though - I know companies that went from mid-week dates to Fridays and Saturdays by being able to prove they could run to time and have everything cleared out in time for the next act, and so there might be an arrangement that they've come to there. We actually have more data than we've ever had before on how much wrestlers are making, as Equity did a pay survey last year: Obviously this skews toward those who responded, and my gut feeling is that the 9% figure of people making a full-time living should be a little higher. I know a few people who do it full-time at the moment; some manage it because they're in high demand, most because they either have regular income through running a training school on top of their wrestling bookings, or that they make a killing on merch sales. It also seems like that there's a lot more British talent getting bookings all over mainland Europe in places that weren't that big on imports in the past, so for some wrestlers it's those international dates that have allowed them to go full-time, almost back to how things worked in the World of Sport days, where very few people were actually making money wrestling in this country, but it gave them the experience and the connections to do a few big money foreign tours a year.