BomberPat

it's not a question of "who watches live TV" - six million people just watched the first episode of Gladiators - it's streaming services recognising that, actually, they need to compete with linear TV where it counts, and that's with live content. This is a massive seismic shift for both WWE and Netflix, and arguably for the future of streaming in general.

Not just the US - here, Canada and Latin America as well, starting from January.

13 minutes ago, FUM said:

It may be down to the UFL thing but it’s probably also hard to deny a man with his business acumen combined with his history in this specific business is more than qualified to sit on the board of directors really when you drill it down.

it's also given him full ownership of the trademark for "The Rock", which I imagine is a big motivating factor on his part.

7 minutes ago, air_raid said:

Yes. Fabulously random Rumble also including the Headhunters ("Squat Team"), Doug Gilbert, a returning Jake Roberts and Tatanka (after not much break that one admittedly), Vader's debut... and it could have been even wackier. Sabu agreed to work it until Paul E talked him out of it, and they were trying their best to secure Warrior in time.

I'd love to know how much truth there is to the story of Sabu being the original idea for The Sultan gimmick, given the timing of him potentially doing the Rumble, and then Rikishi being given that gimmick in August. A lot of it does seem really plausible - Sabu's already got the mock-Middle Eastern look, so you can see how they look at him and get to genie trousers and Iron Sheik boots, and the whole "he wears a mask and doesn't speak because he had his tongue cut out" thing scans with a guy who at the time never spoke, and had done the Hannibal Lecter mask gimmick early in his ECW run. Sabu's side of the story was always that he turned them down when he found out they were going to put him with The Iron Sheik as his manager, because he refused to work with him out of respect for his uncle.

I've written about it elsewhere, but the '96 Rumble has a really odd place in my wrestling fandom. I must have seen highlights of it when I was a kid, towards the end of my first run of being a wrestling fan, because there's no way I saw the whole show, I'd only ever catch the B-shows and highlight shows on Sky when nobody else was watching the TV. For years I had a really distinct memory of there being a Rumble or Battle Royal where two identical twin Sumo wrestlers entered, and one was walking to the ring as the other was eliminated - they met in the middle, and both turned around and entered the ring, running roughshod on everybody, and the referees couldn't do anything about it because they couldn't tell them apart and didn't know which one was legal. I remembered that vividly for years, until I tried to figure out what the match was, and realised it didn't exist, never happened. The best I can figure is that my childhood brain half-remembered it as Yokozuna and the Squat Team being in the ring at the same time, the bit when both Squat Team members hit the ring, and just mashed it up all in my head, because the Squat Team collectively last all of a couple of minutes in this match, yet it felt like a massive stretch when I remembered it. Memory's a weird thing.

8 minutes ago, air_raid said:

Is this purely because they've got the horn for Roman "passing Hogan's record" even though it's not comparable since (a) not the same title and (b) Hogan was defending the WWF title 10-15 times a month throughout the bulk of his reign?

Not purely, but certainly in part. The worry is that they will always find cause to second-guess themselves, because there's always maybe the prospect of a bigger match later down the line. The Rock has generally been that possibility, but he might not be the only one - and even then, The Rock's not beating Roman, so once that match is out of the way we're only ever going to be back to square one.

I wrote something about it after the last Wrestlemania, that if Cody Rhodes at that show wasn't the right man at the right time, then nobody ever will be. They passed over the opportunity to have a sympathetic babyface Sami Zayn win the belt in his hometown after months of critically beloved build, and rather than give Cody Rhodes the "you're not Daniel Bryan" treatment and turn on him, by and large the audience accepted that Cody was the next logical choice, and that him winning in the main event of Wrestlemania justified Sami's loss. But then that didn't happen either, and Roman Reigns has only defended the title twice on TV or PPV since then. 

My assumption at the time was that they got cold feet and backed down, because there was still the prospect of a match with The Rock, and that if that didn't come to fruition, they could always go back to Cody this year. And, to their credit, they seem to have managed to keep Cody a popular and credible babyface in the intervening year against all odds. But now, you have Cody, you have CM Punk, you have The Rock...are they going to take belt off of Roman for one of those guys, while leaving a title defence against the others on the table? If we assume that they are going with Roman/Rock at Wrestlemania, then Roman's winning that match. Which means we're back to "okay, now who beats Roman and when?". When he's only wrestling three or four times a year, and defending the title even less frequently, and when his title reign has already gone on this long, are they even going to consider ending his reign anywhere but Wrestlemania? So if he beats The Rock this time around, I'd say it's a safe bet we have at least another year of Reigns as champion to go. And then we get to next year's Wrestlemania, and who knows what other matches are on the table - maybe the bloom is off the Cody rose and he's not the guy any more, maybe they have a high profile signing like Okada, or they've talked Steve Austin into doing a match, there will always be something that will make them think "hang on, let's hold off until that match". 

6 minutes ago, Chris B said:

This was most of his run in AEW for me. Constantly trying to figure out if CM Punk is sewing seeds for being a heel or just a really weird and obnoxious face.

funnily enough, you could say the same about most of Cody's AEW run too.

a friend of mine played Taz-Mania on a Twitch stream a while back, and for a game I played a ton as a kid, I was astonished by just how awful it was. If you pick up too much speed you can just disappear completely off the screen, the collision detection is appalling, and for some reason it can't handle two sounds happening at once, so every time you do something that triggers a sound effect the music cuts out.

I'm amazed that I don't think I've ever played or even seen the Animaniacs game, considering it's exactly the sort of thing I used to shovel up (see, playing way too much Taz-Mania), and based on a cartoon I love. I think the fact that cartoons were big in the '90s, and that most of them got at least a half-decent tie-in game, and the best of them were gorgeous, is part of the reason that I've always found high-end gaming's constant drive towards photorealistic graphics to really misguided. I always hoped, and to some extent assumed, that the end goal of video game graphics was to look like a playable cartoon.

17 hours ago, SuperBacon said:

100% the best instant coffee. 

wanky name aside, I go for the Azera Perky Blenders collab and it's bloody lovely. As good an instant coffee as you can get, and better than some "proper coffee" I've had.

I'd love to see Shamrock in the Rumble, and given that he's started working with them on merch, it's the most likely it's been in forever. I'm not convinced that WWE medical would ever clear him, though, and think he's probably back in the mix for a Hall of Fame induction if anything.

I expect we see Naomi/Trinity in the Women's Rumble, and maybe Matt Cardona in the men's. I also think there might be a completely out of left-field entrant (think Takao Omori in 1996) just for the new regime to put their stamp on it not being the Vince McMahon show any more.

Roman vs. Rock absolutely doesn't need the title, the whole point of the "Head Of The Table"/"Tribal Chief" stuff is that it gives them a bragging rights claim to fight over without the belt being involved. But they've booked themselves into a corner in that, in order to get there, they would need to get the belt off Reigns in a way that isn't seen as underwhelming. 

I'm not convinced Reigns is losing until next year anyway, but as I've been saying since the last Wrestlemania, everything in the last year would make more sense if Reigns had lost then.

the best part of their WCW appearance is Jim Ross tying himself up on knots on commentary when he tries to put them over as the first genuinely Russian team to compete in the US, but realises that he can't say that without burying countless kayfabe Soviets, so ends up mumbling about them being a "different breed" of Russian wrestler.

12 minutes ago, air_raid said:

TIL that Zack Sabre Jr still has the best move names in the sport. From the man that brought you the Tesco Meal Deal, I learn today that one of his finishes is called the Clarky Cat. If you know, you know.

He also has the Orienteering With Napalm Death, Barry From Eastenders, Hypernormalisation, and the South Mimms Service.

my Dad retired early, and always planned to. He did really well for himself in his last few years of work - he'd worked in retail for years (and in factories before that), but when I was about 8 or 9 he went to university part-time, and then did his teacher training and worked as a Business Studies lecturer, and that's the job that took the family to Jersey. By the time he retired, he'd been interim principal at the college he worked at, so was making good money, and being able to retire on good money in Jersey meant being able to live very comfortably back in Yorkshire when they moved back there.

He does some exam invigilating and other odd jobs at a local agricultural college now, so he still works a couple of days a week, but he mostly has a bunch of other weird money-making schemes going on - he's signed up as a mystery shopper for two or three different organisations, he has some thing going on where he has to trial a bunch of products and complete surveys on them in return for Amazon vouchers, and he's signed up to some casting agencies as an extra; he's apparently in a flashback scene in the latest series of The Crown, because whenever anybody wants to film something set in London during the war, they film it in present-day Hull (insert punchline here). He's tried to rope the rest of the family into the extras gig too - my aunt ended up playing the Queen in the background of an advert for a Canadian bank, and when someone put out a casting call for twins, he sent it to me and my brother, and I pointed out that they probably mean identical twins, and aren't after two blokes of different heights and different hair colours, who might sort of look alike if you squint.
 

My Mum was the one I never thought would handle retirement well at all. From the moment she was able to go back to work, she was working multiple jobs, one summer was bouncing between three different part-time jobs so that she actually ended up working considerably more than full-time hours, and didn't have a day off for about eight weeks. Her last job was working in a wool shop, which she ended up owning when the original owner retired. She also did a bunch of volunteering around all of that - she ran our local youth club for years, and in Jersey volunteered at the Zoo, and in a charity shop. These days she spends most of her time knitting, and then selling her wares at craft fares and whatnot.

my Dad was absolutely adamant that he was going to get into model trains in his retirement. There's an old box room in their place that my Mum used to keep her knitting and crafts stuff, and she had a load of cleared out, put a big table in there, and bought him a load of train stuff for Christmas a year or two ago. He has since barely touched the thing, and is now adamant that he was never that bothered about trains, but that he enjoys making the model buildings and trees and things. After declaring this, my tiny 5' nothing 70 year old Mum snapped, "just make a sodding model village, then!". 

That, and an argument over whether one of the artificial plants in the new fish tank has been directly responsible for multiple guppy deaths now, has been the height of drama in the Bomber household this weekend.

I would cut out beer before I cut out coffee, in a heartbeat, and cutting out beer isn't a decision I take lightly.

Last year I went a couple of months off the booze because I was on a lot of new medication, and undergoing a lot of tests on my heart. It was probably the longest I've been without drinking since I was 16, and, as with every time I've tried to seriously keep off the stuff, I just found myself resentful that I was still waking up feeling like shit in the morning anyway.

With coffee, though, I went the first couple of weeks of lockdown without it. I hardly ever drank it at home, because I'd go through a few mugs at work, and then my best mate ran a coffee shop, so I'd spend most of my free time at weekends there, and pop in a couple of evenings after work, so never really had the need to drink it much at home. As lockdown went on, though, I realised I was getting splitting headaches and generally feeling awful, and realised it was caffeine withdrawal. Never again.

For a while I tried to limit myself to 2-3 cups of coffee a day, though I'm probably up to around 4-5, especially if I'm in the office, where getting up to make a coffee is as good an excuse to get away from desk/tedious office conversations as anything else.

Sandman consistently worked drunk, and famously worked a match while high on LSD. To people not as schooled on wrestling as most of us, "this guy's whole schtick was that he was drunk and bleeding before he got in the ring, and he did an angle where his opponent stole his wife and kid" is probably more than enough content for a "look at how scuzzy wrestling can be" episode, with the right choice of stories and talking heads involved. 

Chris Adams is likely the "highlight" for lack of a better term, but most of how entertaining any given episode is will come down to what stories they've uncovered, and who they've managed to convince to talk to them.

that, again, is part of my problem with Triple H's "remember NXT in 2015?" approach to booking - everything is looking backward rather than forward. Fair enough, get rid of the name Butch and turn him back to Pete Dunne, but use that as a step toward reinvention and evolving the character rather than just pushing it back - same for Tyler Bate, it's his major TV debut, use it as an opportunity to freshen him up and change him up a bit, rather than asking him to still be the same character he was playing when he was 18. 

He eventually just became a generic cartoon villain heel boss, but initially it was a stroke of genius to realise that the one thing people hate more than their boss is the ineffectual middle manager who sucks up to them.

3 hours ago, Carbomb said:

Not quite as lovely, but still nice, and it deserves a mention as the first ever cinema in the UK - the Regent Street Cinema was refurbished and reopened as a cinema a few years ago, after a couple of decades as a lecture theatre. They did a nice job with it:

 

I went here for the first time over Halloween, for a friend's horror podcast doing screenings of some classic silent horror - I went to Haxan and the Phantom Of The Opera. The cinema has an original pipe organ, so they were both screened with full organ accompaniment as they would have had on original release, which is a fantastic experience. Superb cinema. 

I'm eyeing it up as one of my options to go and see The Iron Claw next month.

The first cinema I ever went to was the Picture Playhouse in Beverley; at the time it used to annoy me, because it only got the big films in months and months after they'd been on at bigger cinemas, but my Dad would never be bothered to drive us to the Odeon in Hull, so it was all we had. I look back at it now, and it was such a gorgeous old building (a former Corn Exchange, now a shit department store after a few months as a music venue), I wish I'd appreciated it more at the time.

On 1/17/2024 at 9:49 AM, FelatioLips said:

S2 is suffering from people thinking they know how to be game players but actually they don’t and the faithfuls were lucky Ash is the worst traitor in the world because they won’t have gotten anyone if she wasn’t so bad.

Honestly, I think people thinking they're playing the game well, but all being terrible at it, is part of what's giving this series an edge that I really enjoy. It's something that could, in time, sink the show if it gets too meta, which is why I hope they come up with new twists in subsequent series to counteract the "game players" thinking they've got it all sussed out, but seeing the Faithfuls just cannibalise each other because they're overthinking everything has been half the fun of this series. 

The whole poisoning bit was great, because it was the biggest bone yet to be thrown to the Faithfuls as a clue, and they were immediately just following all the wrong leads and getting more and more paranoid. Fantastic stuff.

2 hours ago, FelatioLips said:

I think Paul was buggered either way. If he was Faithful he would have been murdered in the first few days. As a Traitor he’s so busy playing up to the cameras and putting an act on about how smart he is he can’t see Harry is completely fucking him.

This “bring in a Traitor to take the fall for us” idea is a really bad one though because whoever comes in will see that both Ash and Miles got backstabbed and they’ll figure it out straight away.

 I was really hoping that Miles' performance at the roundtable was going to do Paul in, it was so good, and would have been exactly what he deserved. That he kept clinging to this "Diane told me it was Miles" routine, with barely anyone questioning, "well, hang on, why are we just taking him at his word?" was infuriating. Paul thinking that he's this evil mastermind that's outsmarting absolutely everyone, while Harry just seems to have the complete trust of the Faithful and no suspicions coming his way, and is also playing Paul like a fiddle, is phenomenal telly. 

it's all meaningless because he and his supporters don't want consistent logic to their beliefs, they just want to be able to act with impunity and punish those they dislike - the old adage that Conservatism is the belief that there is an in-group that the law should protect but not bind, and out-groups that the law should bind but not protect - but you'd think someone would point out that, if what he's saying were true, there would never have been a peaceful transfer of power between every previous President, just a series of indictments and counter-indictments, yet for some reason it's only him that's being affected by this. Or, indeed, they could point out that if what he wants to be true were true, it would prevent him doing anything to punish or censure Joe Biden should Trump take office again, despite his followers banging the "Biden Crime Family" drum for the last few years.

2 hours ago, Devon Malcolm said:

They just remind me so much of Jack Evans. Tiny, scrawny, spot monkeys who never change anything whether they're heel or babyfaces

this is a disappointing take for me, because I love Jack Evans, and think that he's a much better heel than a babyface, and one of the most fun heels of the last few years for me.

What the Young Bucks do well, arguably better than anyone, is timing and escalation. Their matches are full of near-falls, to increasingly elaborate sequences, and they know exactly when to cut it off so that the crowd rise with each one rather than taking it too far and it getting burned out, and they're perfect at upping the pace of their matches - throw them in with a team like Omega and Hangman, who are both equally good at positioning and timing, and you get magic, but throw them in against a lesser team and you effectively get the Young Bucks working their formula around someone else. Which is fine, it's how wrestling works, but because it's a formula so dependent on a string of complicated double teams, it does start to wear thin quicker than most.

When I first saw them work heel, they were a revelation, as I'd only seen them as a Hardys-lite smiley babyface act, and Matt in particular was suddenly this obnoxious, deceptively strong bully, while Nick flopped around like Shawn Michaels against Hogan for every bump, and filled every match with slapstick pratfalls and miscommunication spots, and they were a delight. The problem for me is that I don't think they've meaningfully changed up their act since joining Bullet Club, and you could argue that they haven't particularly needed to, but now they really do for this new act to work.

I really enjoyed their promo, and thought it built fantastically on them showing up with a smarmy new look last week. It's an old heel trope, but insisting that they be called by their full names of Matthew and Nicholas, when nobody has ever called them that before, just works brilliantly. Forgive me if I'm wrong, but I'm not sure anyone said the name "Young Bucks" during the whole interview - I think Renee just introduced them as "Nick and Matt Jackson", which struck me as odd at the time.
I think the central conceit of the turn, that they're the EVPs and have chips on their shoulders about not being treated with respect for it, and they feel that they built the company and everyone owes them their livelihood, is a really good starting point, has enough truth to it for people to believe it, and channels a lot of real-life criticisms into their on-screen work. Talking about throwing tantrums and the company devoting too much time to "backstage cancers" and older wrestlers can easily be explained in kayfabe as referring to them freaking out after losing their last few matches, and then the arguments they were having with Kenny over Chris Jericho, but obviously people are going to read between the lines and think it's them talking about CM Punk and Brawl Out, and I actually think that works fine; it's bringing in a sense of believability, it's telling the people who want to hate them for Brawl Out that they're properly allowed to now, but it's falling short of being counter-productive worked shoot bollocks.
The only thing that doesn't really work for me is that their motivation to retire Sting because he represents the last of the old guard doesn't really work when it's already been announced as Sting's last match - he's going to retire whether they beat him or not. 

no chance Jade is winning - I expect she'll be in the Rumble, but I'm not even convinced it will be a full-time debut so much as a "remember we signed her?" cameo, for a full-blown "debut" after 'Mania.

1 hour ago, Keith Houchen said:

A mate of mine killed himself and had “Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life” at his funeral, which was a nice touch.

I've read somewhere (now acutely aware that I'm doing the Stephen Fry Countdown theme thing) that it's one of the most requested song for British funerals, and I can definitely see it.

My friend's Mum's funeral was all very traditional and sombre, though no hymns, up until the coffin was carried out, at which point they played "Spirit In The Sky", and all the pallbearers did a little knee-bobbing dance step with the coffin. Big laughs all round.

The last funeral I went to was for a friend who took his own life a few years back. Proper Hulkamania sell-out numbers in the church, standing room only at the back, absolutely packed, so much so that more than a few people at the wake were saying they wish they could have grabbed him and said, "look how many people love you, you fucking idiot". The actual service was the weirdest one I've been to, though - very obviously all planned out by his Mum, with no input from his partner or brother or anyone else, as it was all very traditional Catholic fare, while he was an angry atheist heavy metal bloke. None of the service or eulogy seemed to be talking about him, or at least any version of him any of us recognised, to the point that when it mentioned his partner, a few people mouthed "who?", as they used her full name, which none of us had ever heard before! He was a Southampton supporter, and the only nod to anything personal to him was that they played "When The Saints Go Marching In" at the end of the service. 

I don't suppose he'd have cared - I expect his approach would have been "well, I'm not going to see it, do whatever you like" - and I suppose funerals are for those left behind, and if going ultra-religious for the service made it easier for his Mum, then whatever helps her get through it, but it was all very odd.

At my Gran's funeral, I was sat with my cousin - she's 10 years younger than me, I'd have been maybe 21 or 22 at the time, so she's 11 or 12. Her Mum, my aunt, used to have a real complex about people thinking she was old, as she tries to stay active, has always traveled a lot, and is a bit of a bohemian type - she wouldn't let me call her aunt or auntie when I was a kid, because she thought it made her sound old, and she would never tell her kid how old she really was. So I'm sat with my cousin while the vicar talks through our Gran's life story, and she says in what year my Gran's first child, my aunt, was born. I glance down at my cousin, and after a quick calculation on her fingers, she's sat there, in the middle of a eulogy, grinning from ear to ear.

On 12/28/2023 at 2:36 PM, Carbomb said:

Only reason why I ever got any clue was back when I saw Gordon Ramsay's Hot Ones interview. He'd brought this sports bag with him, and as the episode went on, he first took out Pepto Bismol and drank it, then started slicing limes and sucking on them.

He still crashed and burned, but I think that's more down to him having a chef's sensitive palate than his countermeasures being ineffectual.

My old local used to sell homemade chilli vodka, it was fucking lethal stuff - apparently up to 1.5 million scovilles; the only thing I've seen bar staff routinely refuse to serve people, because 90% of the time the people ordering it were rugby wankers trying to impress their mates. It had a health warning, and was always handed over by bar staff saying, "if you're going to puke, don't do it in the toilets, go outside". You could always tell the scale of people's awareness/preparedness when ordering it - from just drinking it straight, to asking for a glass of water, to having a glass of milk with it, while the seasoned vets would order a glass of pineapple juice with a slice of lime or lemon.