BomberPat

3 hours ago, Jazzy G said:

That means the whole original Dad's Army cast has passed away now I think? It's a shame. 

Of the main cast, yes. A few supporting actors are still with us, but even then it's only two or three.

On 2/3/2024 at 10:40 AM, wordsfromlee said:

Death Cab For Cutie is an awful name. 

named after a song by the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band who, as much as I love Vivian Stanshall, are another all-time shit name of the "almost embarrassing to say out loud to someone who hasn't heard of them before".

They're not too bad, but the absolute worst band name of the current crop is Psychedelic Porn Crumpets. Dire.

On 2/3/2024 at 10:19 AM, DavidB6937 said:

TIL that Mr Tumble is Shaun the Sheep.

This is what happens when you have kids and Wikipedia.

On 2/3/2024 at 10:32 AM, CharlesTuckerTheThird said:

TIL that Nicole Oliver, the voice of Princess Celestia in My Little Pony, also did a bunch of voices for Warhammer 40,000 Dawn Of War. Crazy.

Obligatory mention that Richard Ridings, the voice of Daddy Pig in Peppa Pig, is also the voice of the mentor/narrator in Dungeon Keeper (as well as having done a ton of Warhammer voices too). 

I was just in the middle of writing a post in the TIL thread about the Dad's Army cast and their respective ages, and Googled Ian Lavender to see that and had to check. Surreal. 

1 hour ago, air_raid said:

They Lugered Cody hard at Mania 39 and he stayed hot (unlike Lex) so instead of paying it off at Mania 40, they've fucked him.

This is more of a Lugering than 39, and then anything else they've done to a top babyface in years. I didn't think they'd manage to keep Cody hot after Wrestlemania 39, and fair play to them (and to Cody, more than anything) for proving me wrong there - he was still an undeniable top guy after losing, after being made to look like a gullible idiot by thinking Brock Lesnar would want to be his tag team partner, and after a year of WWE booking, and it's impressive for any babyface to come out of all of that not only unscathed, but with people actually thinking that losing last year might have been the right decision to build to a rematch this year.

What I don't think Cody can recover from, and that I think no babyface could recover from, is actively turning down the opportunity for that rematch and handing it over to somebody else, then (presumably) celebrating a win in the lesser match as if it were what he wanted all along. It's disingenuous, it's unconvincing, it's a downgrade, it's Lex Luger being paraded around on the shoulders of the babyface roster after winning by count-out.

Like @Supremo said, it's so utterly unnecessary. Daniel Bryan being forced into the main event was necessary because WWE, for years, had been a heel corporation; they were a company that openly told you on TV that their booking was bad and done to spite their own audience, and it was par for the course that the anointed babyface to be rejected because they were seen as the corporate choice being forced on us at the expense of sentimental favourites. But the AEW vs. WWE tribalism has benefited WWE in that their audience are now more inclined to pretend that everything they do is amazing as a counterpoint to the rival company they hate, and they've cultivated an audience that actually trusts their storytelling and accepts what they're given, and they've found a top babyface that the audience wants to support, and they've utterly fucked it through no one's fault but their own. 

Half Pipe was tough as balls, I don't think I ever got the hang of that - BMX was tough, but at least it had some brutal animations when you fucked up. I don't think I ever managed to do anything but bob serenely along in Surfing, either.

It was all about Foot Sack and Skating for me, I got really good at the former, and got some decent runs in on the latter; it was the most conventionally video game-y of all the games in it, which helped.

I actually played the Master System version more than the Mega Drive, and it was one of the better looking games on that console, and arguably one of the better ports all-round. It also, if I remember correctly, still had Flying Disk. 

El Conde

A Chilean black comedy in which Augusto Pinochet is actually a 250 year old vampire, who faked his death, but now just wants to die, while his family bicker over who gets what inheritance. There's a couple of funny moments, and an absurd twist involving the narrator, but mostly it's an idea for a short sketch stretched out to film length. Liked the concept, but glacial pacing doesn't suit a pretty shallow idea, and it didn't work for me.

Barbie

It was fine. It has a few laugh-out-loud moments, and was good fun, but I'm not convinced it deserved the praise it got. It reminded me of Jurassic World (a much worse film, for the record), which had characters making fun of the bad made-up dinosaur name, and cracking jokes about the amount of product placement in the park, but it was doing that in the same film that unironically used that bad name, and relied on all of that product placement. It aims for a kind of detached irony, but actually it's just trying to have your cake and eat it too - you're not showing that your above those things just by drawing attention to them, because this is still a film doing the stuff you're making fun of, and just drawing attention to a cliché isn't the same thing as subverting it. This felt like that concept spread across an entire movie - yes, you've made a film that makes fun of rampant consumerism, sexism, and the part Barbie dolls play in reinforcing negative stereotypes and body image issues, but you've still done it in a movie about Barbie dolls, for Mattel, so what exactly have you achieved?

there was a supermarket I used to shop in, one of the first near me to get self-checkouts, and they weren't weighted yet so you could scan through just about anything and put something else in the bagging area, it just needed to know that something had been put there. I never really took advantage of it - it's not like they had a big ticket items, so I couldn't put through a PS3 as a bag of carrots or anything like that - apart from they had these filled baguettes from a local bakery, and the self checkout never scanned the barcodes on them, so a few times I just paid for everything else and helped myself to them. I always figured that if I got caught I'd plead ignorant and say I scanned it through and hadn't realised that it hadn't registered.

When they brought in the new 50ps in '97, one of the vending machines at school had seemingly not been properly changed over, and it would sometimes accept a 2p as a 50p. I can't remember how much drinks cost in it, so whether you were just getting a can for 2p or actually making a profit on it if it gave you change, I can't remember, but we managed to keep that between just a few of us for months.

Another school one, though less of a crime, was towards the end of secondary school we were all given usernames and passwords to access the internet. It was a Jersey education department network, and had really strict restrictions that were common to every school, and every time you logged in you got a little pop-up window with "Settings" options and a couple of other things. Somehow, I got hold of a class-mate's password, and figured that if I logged in as him then it wouldn't be me that got in trouble if I went on any blocked websites. For some reason, one time I logged in as him, and that pop-up window had a ton more options on it, like it were a staff or admin account. I assume it was just a weird one-off error, but it meant I was able to go in there and edit a bunch of settings, including turning off all restrictions. Within a few weeks, practically everyone in my year was using this poor lad's account to access all manner of filth and other blocked sites every time they got behind a computer, and I got a reputation as being some kind of elite hacker for something I just stumbled into.

As a shitty idiot teenager I did some shoplifting. I grew up around a fair few people who shoplifted, or who had simple scams going (e.g. M&S customer service aren't particularly strict about having a receipt for returns, so find M&S shirts cheap in charity shops and return them to M&S for a profit), as well as a lot of general dodgy dealing and buying things that fell off the back of a van, because everyone was skint and you do what you can to get by and make life worth living. Shamefully, none of that was the case when I started nicking stuff, I was just friends with some little dickheads who thought it was fun. Some of them used to brag about how much they stole from HMV, and would make fun of people who spent money there because they felt it was so easy to nick stuff - I never dared, because I figured it was a big enough shop that I'd get in real trouble if I got caught, that it would have good security (I later worked in their stockroom and realised that they very much didn't), and I didn't want to end up barred from there given it sold pretty much everything I spent my money on. Instead, a bunch of my mates starting stealing Pokémon cards from a little shop, usually by all going in en masse and hoping that one buying something would cause enough of a distraction for everyone else to slip something into their pockets. I can't remember if it was me who eventually got caught, or someone else, but the woman who ran the shop basically made everyone hand over whatever they had - I had a packet of WWF trading cards slipped into my sock - and then got all of our home phone numbers so they could call our parents and tell us what we'd done, which sucked. I felt so shit about it even at the time, because it was a small business, it was for small items that any of us could have afforded to buy, and didn't need in the first place, we were just doing it because it seemed cool - and honestly I don't think I ever thought it was cool in the first place, it was just peer pressure bollocks.

I worked for three years in a petrol station that's probably the least professional, most shambolic place I've ever worked. It was a real timewarp - run-down old-fashioned place, customers weren't allowed to serve their own fuel, so I had to go out and pump petrol every time someone drove on to the forecourt, and the "office" was just a tiny little freezing cold alcove, no heating and a knackered wooden door with at least an inch of space between the floor and the bottom of the door, and with walls stained yellow because the previous manager had just sat in their all day with a pipe on. The manager was in his 40s, and had worked there since he was a teenager; I knew him from a local heavy metal night, and he only ever hired his mates, so I knew the other couple of blokes who worked there from the same place, and it was easy enough for me to get a job there when I dropped out of uni, without an interview, a CV, nothing. He was looking for someone to replace a guy that was leaving, and I urgently needed work, so I was able to just show up and start work as soon as they'd got me a uniform that fit.
He was a shit manager, and I don't know how much of the mad ways he ran the place were because it was how it had been done when he started, or if they were all weird things he invented. When we cashed up at the end of the day, we had to manually take measurements from all the underground fuel tanks as well, and then calculate the difference between actual cash and what went through the till, and between takings and the amount the tanks had been depleted that day. If there was ever any real difference, he would fuck with the figures to make it look like everything was fine, and dock the money from the wages of whoever had been working that day - bearing in mind were on minimum wage as it is. On top of that, both him and the other guy who worked there were constantly late to work - they both lived within walking distance, I was half an hour or more away on the bus, yet I was always on the 6.30am/7.00am opening shift because I was the only one that could be relied upon to actually show up; if they turned up late, it just meant I had to wait longer for the end of my shift and for them to get there, whereas if I turned up late the place wasn't open and wouldn't make money. And when I say that they were late, I meant consistently, every day, usually at least half an hour, sometimes more than an hour, and usually turning up with takeaway coffee and a bag of shopping in hand. The bosses presumably never found out that the other two were late, because the manager would also doctor the figures for that - he'd try and work it out as "hours owed", and think that if he turned up an hour early one day next week (without any prior notice) that it would make up for turning up late two or three times the week before. It didn't.

Anyway, it was a complete shitshow, and I felt very little guilt about ripping them off once I figured out how. Cash or card payments just went straight through the till, but if a customer had a Shell card, the details had to be entered in a separate machine complete with the amount of fuel served - most of our customers were regulars, and had one of those cards. Then there were customers who had accounts with us, or worked somewhere that entitled them to a 10% discount on any sale over £10, and the agreement there was that for a £10 payment, we'd pump £11.11 worth of fuel, and work the discounts that way. So I'd wait until there was a big payment by cash or card that wasn't eligible for a discount, but wasn't traceable by a Shell card or account number. So someone comes in and gets £70 worth of fuel - well, then I put that through the till as £77.77 minus a 10% discount, and the next time someone comes in and pays £7 cash, that doesn't go through the till and goes straight in my pocket. That way, the amount of fuel sold and the amount that went through the till matches up, and I get to skim a little off the top for my trouble. 

On 2/2/2024 at 7:07 PM, RedRooster said:

Even if he’s part of a package deal with another wrestler, it doesn’t explain why he keeps getting TV time.

He's Bandido's brother, though what that counts for I have no idea. Given the quality of the lucha talent they have, and they've somehow managed to find a way to have AAA title-holders on the same show as top CMLL talent, there's really no excuse for him to make TV, it's not like he’s their one token luchadore.

The only way out of this is for Cody to turn heel, taking the easy way out and challenging an injured champion he already knows he can beat because he's obsessed with winning a World Title, and can't face the prospect of losing at Wrestlemania again - have him disingenuously insist that he has "finished the story" even though everyone knows that isn't what he meant, while babyface Seth has to face the fact that he basically talked Cody into it in the first place.

Excuse the fantasy booking, but he's fucked as a babyface.

I expect it will be Dalton in a mask, but I'm holding out hope for "Smooth Sailing" Ashley Remington.

I haven't been able to bring myself to listen to Jarrett's podcast on Vince yet, because I can't think of anyone less suited to discuss an issue like that than Conrad "gee what a story" Thompson with the world's least sincere voice talking about coercion and abuse in-between ad reads for Blue Chew. How has the Conradverse been on this, does anyone know?

for me something like this has to be in relation to the level they're presented at; Gravity has had some shockers, but none of them have mattered. Kota Ibushi has been really shockingly bad compared to his previous form, but I'd be more inclined to consider that a candidate for Biggest Letdown than Worst Wrestler.

For me it has to be Austin Theory. Someone I forget exists the moment I'm not watching him, and who actively annoys me when I am, because he seems to possess every negative quality in modern wrestling, he's pushed well above his station, and because of his shitty little forward roll through the ropes into a move that I hate more than even the Panama Sunrise.

10 minutes ago, Loki said:

Hand on heart though, without looking it up could you say on which brand each of those wrestlers was performing when they had their dream matches?

in fairness, for most of them I probably could - Shawn and Triple H were always RAW guys, while Rey and Angle always felt like Smackdown guys. Everything else is a bit up in the air, though.

I don't think AEW need a brand split, but a bit more concerted effort towards each show having a separate identity - Collision has always felt a bit more old-school, while Rampage is a bit more of a "throw-shit-at-the-wall" show, and Dynamite is the flagship show for story progression and bigger matches. I think that could be more pronounced - with FTR being on Collision mostly, and having a number of high profile tag matches there, I wouldn't object to Collision becoming more focused on tag wrestling, while Rampage is the show that's a bit more open-door; the indie guys and guest stars, the lucha showcases, that sort of thing. 

At the height of WWE's brand split, it was the sense of each brand having different identities that made it work far more than the separating of individual stars - in the "Smackdown Six" era, Smackdown was generally seen as the workrate brand and RAW the "sports entertainment" brand, even though Smackdown also had the Hogan/McMahon feud going on. RAW had the Hardcore Title and Smackdown had the Cruiserweight Title, and if WWE had been better at booking specialist divisions, that could have stood as a mark of separation between the two shows for a lot longer than it did. If AEW could cut down on the number of title belts, and do more to differentiate the titles they do have, that would go a long way to fixing some of their problems.

28 minutes ago, DavidB6937 said:

Oh I'd much rather he wasn't. but the whole reinvention and stuff like that over the years was to try and keep his spot at the top. 

I think there's an element of that, in that the longer he stuck around the WWE the more likely he was to end up in midcard feuds, so by taking those leaves of absence and coming back "reinvented" there was more chance of him getting at least a cup of coffee in the main event picture again.

But I think his capacity for reinvention was somewhat overstated, and actually what kept him fresh was that - before the days of part-timers being the biggest stars in WWE - he was the only person who took extended periods of time off, so there was always a sense of absence making the heart grow fonder, and of not burning through every available match. Now, he seems to have given up on his ambitions to be an actor or broader pop culture figure, and AEW having a much less intensive touring schedule and generally allowing their wrestlers more freedom around outside bookings means that touring with Fozzy, doing the Jericho Cruise, popping up in DDT or PWG, none of that stuff is preventing him from also being a TV regular, so he's not needed to take the time off. 

What's odd is that, regardless of the reasons, he always seemed like he recognised the value of those periods of time off, yet he's not really taken any in AEW, and is absolutely stinking up the show. He can't be completely oblivious to that, surely?

I wasn't responsible for this one, but there was a tremendous bit of workplace pranking and shithousing at the same call centre - I think I've told this story before on here, but here goes.

There were two managers - Kelvin and Andrea - and one supervisor - Bob - involved. Andrea had some problem with her back that meant there was a few months were she only worked a couple of hours a day, and she started getting annoyed that stationery went missing from her desk during the time she wasn't in, and printed out labels with her name on it and putting it on her stapler and so on. Kelvin pointed out that she was being a bit petty and ridiculous, and I've never been sure whether her response was out of more pettiness or turning it into a joke, but she just ended up labelling practically everything on her desk.

Andrea then went home for the day, leaving Kelvin and Bob in charge. They removed all of the labels on her stuff, and replaced it with labels reading "ADNREA", to make it look like she had spelled her own name wrong on all of them. When she came in the next day, she was genuinely fuming about it. Their foolproof strategy for denying responsibility was that if Andrea asked them if they did it, Bob would answer "I never printed those labels", and Kelvin would say "I never stuck any labels on anything" - both technically true, because Kelvin did the printing and Bob did the labelling. But Kelvin played a blinder, because right before the end of Andrea's shift, while Bob was on lunch, he pulled out a stapler from his desk drawer, on which he had stuck a label saying "MELVIN", and loudly protested, "oh no, look, he got me as well!".

With Bob thoroughly thrown under the bus, on a Friday afternoon, Bob was made to painstakingly remove every label before Andrea's next shift on Monday.

Fast-forward to Saturday morning, when those of us unlucky enough to work weekends turn up, Bob shows up with his keys and lets us in to start the day. On entering the office, we find that someone has let themselves in either late Friday evening after the office had closed, or very early Saturday morning, because everything in the office is now labelled - not with anyone's name, just with the name of the object. Every stapler, hole puncher, keyboard, monitor, mouse, mug, plantpot, everything is labelled. Two years and an office move later, with Kelvin having been out of the company for a year, I was still finding things with those labels on them, and they cracked me up every time.

By Monday, Andrea told both of them that they had been ridiculously immature, and while it had been funny, it set a bad example and they should stop messing around with this stuff. I popped into their office for something that afternoon after Andrea had gone home, and found them supergluing her mug to her desk and her jar of Bovril to a shelf, and working out how feasible it would be to glue all of her paperclips together end-to-end and then put them back in their jar.

when I worked in a call centre, for a while my desk was next to the boss' son's. He was an alright lad, and sometimes a good laugh, but he knew he could get away with things that us lowly temps couldn't, which sometimes was fun when it was stuff like him introducing himself with different made-up names to customers, or playing the game of trying to crowbar different words into each call, but was frustrating when it was more him slacking off during busy times. 

My usual way of getting my own back on him was that every time he left his desk, he never locked his computer, so I would take a screenshot of whatever was on his screen, minimise every window, and then set that screenshot as his desktop wallpaper. 

18 hours ago, Mr_Danger said:

Jon Ronson’s Things Fell Apart podcast is fantastic. I started listening to the second series today which is a branching web of stories connected through the Covid times but told in a brilliantly impartial way. Nice and short too at about 35 minutes a pop. He’s unmatched in his ability to present facts but also give the content an entertaining narrative.

18 hours ago, Keith Houchen said:

Oh yeah I’m forgot about this, despite finding out about it the other week!  The first series was fantastic so thanks for the reminder. Have you listened to “The Coming Storm” by Gabriel Gatehouse? It’s very similar but about the January 6th insurrection. Actually it may have been your good self who recommended it!

I blitzed through series one of Things Fell Apart when I got the second series recommended to me, absolutely loved it, insofar as something that deals with often frustrating topics can be loved. Looking forward to starting on the new series soon.

The Coming Storm was superb in laying out the background of a lot of pervasive American conspiracy theories - the stuff about William Rees-Mogg's Sovereign Individual in particular was fascinating. 

On a completely different note, my favourite new listen is Bigfeets. It's by Robert Brockway, Seanbaby and Jason Pargin, who all used to write for Cracked.com when it was still good, and it's an episode-by-episode recap of Mountain Monsters, an absolutely insane "reality" show about a bunch of aging hillbillies hunting cryptids in West Virginia. I've never seen a single episode of the show, but the podcast is hilarious.

20 hours ago, Lion_of_the_Midlands said:

You are not wrong, but it's the same with every news story. The news was that the case had been filed and then it was Vince had resigned. Realistically there isn't any more news on the story. The next big news hit will be if/when it goes to trial. I wouldn't expect a lot of coverage until then as other news will happen, and let's face it for the general public there is plenty of news and then some happening. The wider public only has so many fucks to give and right now outside a small section of a small section of wrestling fans this was never going to be on the radar for long. 

Exactly this - if it's slipped from the news agenda, it's only because there's no more news to report; the story was less than a week ago, we got the headlines of the allegations, they circulated through the press, and then the story of his resignation, then the story of Triple H doing a bad job of addressing it at the press conference. There's no developments beyond that, so other than the odd think-piece, or it getting brought up on something like (I know I referenced this already) Richard Osman & Marina Hyde's podcast, there's not really anything else to report until the next development, or until some journalists do some really digging and fact-finding - and it's on that latter point that "but it's just wrestling" could hold things back, as major newspapers probably aren't inclined to put much money behind that. Though you never know - a friend, ally and major fundraiser of Donald Trump being caught up in a sex trafficking and sexual assault lawsuit isn't something to sniff at.

But to put things in perspective, I just did a quick search on McMahon's name on Google news - in the last 4 days this story has been reported on by: Sky News, BBC, ITV, the Guardian, the Independent, Al Jazeera, The Daily Mail, Forbes, the Telegraph, the New York Times, LBC, the Mirror, Time Magazine, Sports Illustrated, NBC, The Sun, Rolling Stones and CNN. Some of those are aggregated reports from Reuters, but a who's who of the mainstream media still thought it worth publishing. Some, like CNN, have gone beyond just relaying the report and published think-pieces on how Vince was allowed to get away with it considering everything that was already known about him. 

The Daily Mail/Mail Online - which, yes, fucking awful, but once upon a time was (and maybe still is) the second-most read UK online news source after the BBC - didn't just report on the story, but ran multiple follow-ups; they reported on Vince's resignation, on Ronda Rousey's Tweet, on Triple H at the press conference, on Vince's rebuttal, on Vince's merch being pulled from the WWE shop, on the Bella Twins making a statement, on Brock Lesnar being pulled from the Rumble, and even a story about Punk's injury made sure to refer to him as "a vocal critic of Vince McMahon" in the headline. They know it's going to get clicks and that's their business, but the point is that the story isn't going anywhere just yet, if only because it's scandalous and salacious enough to keep shocking people with more horrible revelations. 

ironically, his current injury is one really common in steroid users.

I went to see Operation Mincemeat a week or so ago, it's absolutely brilliant. I'm not normally into musicals, but the songs are catchy and great, serve the plot really well, everyone in it is brilliant, and it's hilarious, with some really touching moments too. A very odd story to decide to make into a musical, and they've really made it work. 

Choosing between RJ, Taz and Nana is tough! All three are phenomenal, and all three have cracked me up plenty of times, but I'll give the nod to RJ, because Hey EW is appointment viewing. 

had to go with Swerve/Hangman. The Omega/Ospreay matches and Gunther/Sheamus/Drew felt like extensions of matches we'd seen before, so there was less that stuck in the memory, while Hangman/Swerve felt like something utterly unlike anything else I saw on a mainstream wrestling show this year. Possibly the best deathmatch ever by a major US promotion.

I went for Swerve Strickland, but this is probably the toughest this question's been in a while - Danielson missed a good chunk of the year, so even while so much that he did was fantastic, I couldn't bring myself to vote for him.

I don't watch enough WWE to speak for Cody or Gunther, though both seem to have had great years. Mox, Cassidy and to a lesser extent Joe suffer from a bit of almost over-exposure; they've been consistently great, but consistently great in the same way that they have been for the last couple of years, so it's hard to think of them as 2023 stand-outs, they've just been doing what they've been doing. 

In the end I went with Swerve. He's the only one on the list who I feel really tapped into another level last year, and elevated not just himself but most of the people he worked with, and was always compelling to watch.

It wasn't just that he said he hadn't read it, it's that he said that in the same interview where he claimed that they were doing "everything possible". Reading the thing seems like it might fall under "everything possible"!

To be honest, I'd even have some sympathy on Triple H not reading it - it's full of horrific details about his father-in-law's sex crimes, I can't imagine getting into the right headspace to read something like that. But you don't just say that you haven't read it, say your legal team is reading it