BomberPat

1 hour ago, Lion_of_the_Midlands said:

The older generation don't like the wraith like presence of old Nicky W as I am sure no one ever calls him. Wasn't Charles picked up on microphone a few years ago calling him a ghastly man who follows me around asking stupid questions, which has the double delight of been both funny and true. 

True, but I think it's also an accepted part of the job that Witchell or whoever the Royal Correspondent may be is a given, whether you like it or not. I get the impression Charles finds a lot of the actual business of being King quite tedious, but it's what he's been prepared for his entire life and he has to do it. Whereas there's a sea-change with Harry choosing to opt out of "Royal" life, and the relationship between William and the press isn't one of utilising soft power, but the fairly heavy-handed application of super-injunctions - as @Keith Houchen said, I think there's something to the timing of suddenly getting all these press profiles of the Marchioness of Chomondeley, but rather than seeing it as a "soft launch" as a potential new partner, I think it's more the press warning William & Kate of what's waiting for them if they don't play ball. 

Aside from all that, I wouldn't be surprised if William, Kate, or any of the younger Royals have burner accounts and sock puppets on social media through which they are able to navigate the world relatively free from the trappings and conventions of their role. That takes a lot of control and power away from the press.

All of this is me just having a reckon, I neither know nor particularly care about any of this!

it looks to me like Sami getting slotted in here is similar to Daniel Bryan being added to Edge vs. Roman Reigns when that story wasn't going well - WWE thought "well, people love this guy" and saw crowbarring him into the story as a quick fix, but a decent sized chunk of the audience almost turned on him over it because they saw "getting added to Triple Threat matches" as becoming Daniel Bryan's schtick, at the expense of the person they felt "earned it". You can't be the babyface underdog if you're getting handed opportunities.

From WWE's perspective, I'm guessing they saw Chad Gable as a dependable sympathetic babyface to get heat on, for Sami to step up in time for the actual match. It's a shame, because while I think Sami and Gunther will have a phenomenal match, I think the great Wrestlemania visual in that match would have been Chad Gable hitting the Chaos Theory on Gunther. 

13 hours ago, Lion_of_the_Midlands said:

I think there is fuck all to this but what's happening here is that the press haven't had the chance to hound a Princess of Wales to death this century and news directors and their underlings are getting positively tumescent at the thought of all the clicks and retweets they can get if something were to befall Kate. In the information age the statement that she's had an operation and she is resting has really riled them, especially Sky who would prefer to have 24 hour surveillance cameras inside all royal residence. So they are letting slip the dogs of war to see if they can buzz up a nice big juicy story to get their teeth into. 

That's where Kate is. 

I think this isn't far from the truth - the media don't have the access to the Royals that they want/expect, and they're banging the drum about Kate here while it's a non-story to give them a taste of how hard they could go if there's something worth reporting, all in the hope that it forces them to play ball.

It's a younger generation of Royals who don't solely interact with the outside world through press releases and Nicholas Witchell. I doubt there's any real story behind the Kate photo, and some of the ways it has been "Photoshopped" could easily have been an automatic compositing and tidying up of multiple shots, rather than any active manipulation, but making the photo the centrepiece of all of this fuss is a good way for the media to fire a warning shot about not trying to sneak anything past them.

What's funny is that the Twitter detectives and conspiracy sleuths aren't satisfied that the photo has been edited weirdly around one of the kids' wrists, or the obvious little things like that, and are trying to argue that Kate's face has been shopped in from a Vogue cover, and making it a much bigger deal. The longer it goes on, the more deranged the explanations will become, when if they had just released the original, unedited photo when asked, at least some of that would be nipped in the bud.

2 hours ago, Hannibal Scorch said:

@BomberPati can confirm it’s not a voice he’s putting on really, just a bit louder. As for all the Essex-isms he’s only dialed that up a bit (though as an East End boy via Essex knockers isn’t what you’d drop someone on a Tiger Driver 91 but you could a Pedigree).

He sounds like he’s been smoking twenty a day since I last spoke to him then, it's the weird gruffness he puts on when he's trying to be serious that stands out as forced.

5 hours ago, LaGoosh said:

I've only seen the first 30 minutes so far. Mone bit was perfectly fine. Wardlow vs Joe was also ok but I think exposed Wardlow's weaknesses a bit. I think the main thing that will forever hold him back as a performer is he just lacks that fire. His strikes look soft, he can't land his offensive moves on opponents who aren't cruiserweights with any real snap. He just doesn't come across as a genuinely dangerous man and if you're gimmick is that you a big war dog warrior (or whatever it is) then you need to be a real killer. Until Wardlow can be a killer he'll be stuck at the level he is. 

I think Wardlow vs. Joe was a perfectly fine TV match for the spot it had on the card, and equally that there's a reason why it was booked in that slot and on this show, and that's because Wardlow just isn't good enough to perform at a main event level yet, when you compare that match to pretty much every other AEW World Title match. I was surprised they had him lose clean, though, because the Undisputed Kingdom's momentum is just absolutely in the toilet now with MJF out, Cole injured, the Bang Bang Scissor Gang feud getting abandoned, no follow-up on Roderick Strong as International Champion, Taven and Bennett being Taven and Bennett, and now going to the all-too familiar well of inter-faction intrigue with Kyle O'Reilly.

I'm still not completely sold on Ospreay as a promo, because I can't help notice the extent to which he's putting on a voice and playing up the bruvs and Essex-isms (claiming that the Tiger Driver '91 dropped Kenny Omega "on his knockers" being a particularly egregious bit of bollocks), but that was the most I've genuinely believed what he's saying in a promo so far.

4 minutes ago, Chest Rockwell said:

I agree with what you're saying but it does feel like the likes of Linehan are using it as a stick to beat trans people with rather than giving a shit about how fair or unfair it is for the women. I think what pat meant was that they wouldn't give a shit about any other injustices in womens' sport that are unrelated to trans issues.

Very much so. You can have legitimate discussions or debates on trans athletes in sport, but I'm not inclined to take it very seriously when you never express any other interest in women's sports that isn't an excuse to further attack trans people, particularly when every other Tweet on your timeline is about attacking trans women too. Similar to how JK Rowling as a supposed champion of "women's rights" never finds the time to publicly express a statement on, for example, abortion rights being under threat in America, but Tweets multiple times a week on transphobia, which makes you think that her priorities are probably more about attacking trans people than they are about defending women in general. If you are setting yourself up as someone who cares about the sanctity of women's sports but have nothing to say about, for example, Gymnasts for Change, the abuse of young women in Indian wrestling by men at the highest levels of government, and never showing any interest in any individual games or matches, but losing your shit every time a trans women comes 138th in a marathon, I'm going to come to the quite reasonable conclusion that it's not about women's sports.

On top of that, there was a Canadian meta-study last year looking at data from between 2011 and 2021 that showed that either trans athletes on average have no biomedical advantage over cisgender athletes, or that the data isn't conclusive enough to show that they do, that many of the justifications for excluding trans athletes are unscientific and inconsistent, and that trans athletes are sufficiently under-represented in the higher echelons of sport that the idea that people are "pretending" to transition just in order to win at women's sports is a complete fallacy. One of the big talking points from people opposed to trans women in sport was Laurel Hubbard, the weightlifter who competed in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics - she finished last in her category, with 13 (presumably) cisgender women outscoring her, but she's still held up as a scare story robbing a spot from other women. She's not used as an example because she's winning, but because as a weightlifter she has a physique and look that can be easily shared on social media as "mannish" and "unfeminine" and get people riled up about "men in women's sports" - the victims of that aren't just trans women, but any woman who doesn't fit a narrow category of what a woman "should" look like, and long predates the present moral panic about trans women in sports; Caster Semenya and Dutee Chand most recently for how intersex athletes have been caught up in all this, but there were female sprinters in the 1936 Olympics accused of being secretly men, and jokes about young female Soviet gymnasts actually being older men were everywhere in the '80s and '90s, to a far greater degree than anyone expressing concerns over those gymnasts being subjected to physical and sexual abuse. We're wrestling fans, we all saw how much Chyna was ridiculed as a "man" when she debuted in the WWF, or how Joey Styles called a low blow on Nicole Bass as being hit "in the balls". If a female athlete reaches any prominence at all, while not looking like a narrow, stereotypical ideal of what a female athlete should look like, or if they achieve at a higher level than their male counterparts are comfortable with, they're attacked as men, and there's a long and horrible history of them being subject to invasive and insulting tests to "prove" that they're women, and being abused and insulted in the press too. Outside of sports, it's the bathroom policing thing - I know of at least two cis women who have mentioned to me that a woman in the bathroom had complimented them on how well they were "passing", because they were over six feet tall, so had been read as a trans woman. But they weren't trans, and being over six feet tall might be unusual for a woman but still falls well within normal cis female biology, so it was just a judgement based on policing what a woman is supposed to look like - and it's just a matter of luck that, having been read as trans, that interaction was a positive one and not something worse. 

It's the flip side of the coin to policing trans women based on unclear data, prejudice and incomplete and inconclusive ideals of what constitutes a biomedical signifier of "sex" - to use one simple example, the primary method of deciding in which gender category someone should compete at the Olympics is checking testosterone levels, but that's not a cut and dry deciding factor - there's not insignificant crossover between a woman with high testosterone and a man with low testosterone, yet high testosterone doesn't make that woman a man any more than low testosterone makes that man a woman; especially when you would expect a peak athlete to have different levels of testosterone than an average woman. And, of course, men are never tested for their testosterone levels as a matter of interrogating gender, and there's no restrictions on allowing trans men to compete as men in the Olympics, it's only trans women who are policed on those grounds. So apparently the integrity of sex-based competition only matters in one direction, and that direction just happens to be in correlation with the direction that most anti-trans policy in all other walks of life is pointing. 

I'm also just generally uncomfortable with the idea of policing this vague category of "biological" or "genetic" advantages in sport. If a male athlete naturally produces more testosterone than his opponents, we're not policing that, but by the logic used against trans athletes, is that not a biological advantage? If a basketball player stands over 7' tall, should they be restricted from playing the sport because their height is a "biological advantage" that might give them an advantage over shorter players? There are athletes like Michael Phelps, whose body produces less lactic acid than the average person, which is by definition a biological advantage, yet no one tried to police him out of the sport for it. Almost every peak athlete has a "biological advantage" of some kind or another, because that's how you end up being a peak athlete, yet it's a phrase we only use when wanting to restrict trans women's access to sports. The real disadvantages women face in sports are economic, social and cultural, not biological, yet I don't recall seeing JK Rowling or any of her followers express concern over the comparative lack of funding received by women's sports, lack of coverage in women's sports in the media, socio-cultural barriers to entry, nor about any of the abuse that happens to girls and young women in sports at the hands of cisgender men and women, which can't be blamed on those dastardly transes.

there is definitely something uniquely rotten about transphobia, isn't there? Outside of your full-blown C18 nutters, most racists and homophobes and bigots of other stripes seem to at least have other interests, whereas TERFs just do nothing but Tweet about trans people and pretend that they care about women's sports while never expressing a single opinion about them when there isn't a trans woman involved, and just get involved in these little mutual appreciation societies where they reinforce each other's bullshit until they fall increasingly down far-right rabbit holes while still being utterly convinced that they represent the views of the majority of people, and that they're the rational, sensible ones.

That's Linehan and Rowling that have both allowed transphobia to lead them into Holocaust denial. Full-on "are we the baddies?" behaviour.

I do at times find the extent to which some choose to paint trans people as "the first victims" of the Nazis because of the Hirschfield Institute a little problematic; not because trans people didn't suffer, but it's become a kind of shibboleth, I've seen it suggested that we would be decades ahead in understanding trans issues and trans identities if that work hadn't been destroyed, and I'm not sure I agree with that.

That's not to say that trans people, and work on transgender issues, weren't targeted by the Nazis, and weren't being worked on at Hirschfield, I am just wary of anything that involves projecting modern sex, orientation, and gender categories on to people in the past who would not necessarily have used those terms themselves. A lot of the work on sexuality at the time still saw homosexuality as akin to a third sex, and in Hirschfield's case as a matter of "sexual intermediacy", where a gay man was gay because they had a "female" sex drive.

While Hirschfield did pioneering work with transvestites, as he called them, which absolutely shouldn't be overlooked, to be trans was largely seen as an extension of a "female" energy in a male, and as an extension of one's homosexuality. The Nazis' focus on attacking him and his institute was largely anti-gay and anti-sexual liberation more than explicitly anti-trans, and I think focusing on the attacks and book burnings as being a predecessor for trans hate today does risk exaggerating or distorting the truth.

These are matters of academic disagreement, and the argument is one of differences by degree or by motivation, though, and that's not what Rowling is doing - she is essentially engaging in a form of Holocaust revisionism. If I had to guess, it's because it's almost entirely rooted in the TERF insistence that nobody ever knew anything about trans people until about 2006.

1 hour ago, air_raid said:

I'll never forget going into Mania 21 I asked my buddy if there was an outside chance Shelton might take that step up and win Money In The Bank and he told me not to be stupid, and that black men didn't get to win at Mania. I replied that in Butch Reed vs Junkyard Dog at Mania 3 we were guaranteed at least one black winner and sharp as anything he replied "That's even more racist! Brother vs brother for the white man's amusement!" Farooq would have been proud of that particular outburst.

I must have told this story a million times, but I was at college with a guy who's brother is now a wrestler. The three of somehow got onto the topic of whether or not wrestling was racist, with the guy's brother being adamant that it was. I brought up that the WWF had a voodoo witchdoctor, a pimp, and a black nationalist, and they were all the same guy as a mark in the "bit racist, innit?" column. The wrestler paused for a moment, and replied, "yeah, but they made Booker T a King".

1 minute ago, SuperBacon said:

Could that not be "found out and wanted nothing more to do with him/company etc" though?

Not defending Stephanie, as only she knows what she does or doesn't know, but doesn't the time line of all this add up to that being a possibility?

There would still be the matter of explaining why, after the events described in the lawsuit, and after the initial hush money scandal, Stephanie went out on TV and led a "Thank You Vince" chant in-between his stints with the company, though. It seems a lot easier to frame the situation as Stephanie trying to get out and put some distance between herself and the company (and her father) than as a principled stance against him. 

I have more sympathy for Stephanie McMahon (and to a lesser extent Triple H) than I do for other executives and whoever else has been either directly involved or complicit in all of this, because God knows how you process all of this happening within your immediate family, particularly when that family is also directly connected to the only job you've ever done and the only world you've ever known, and God knows what growing up in the household of Vince McMahon looked like in terms of establishing baselines of what acceptable behaviour even looks like.

I started playing Snufkin: Melody Of Moominvalley on the Switch last night.
 

It's a licensed Moomins game, so could easily have been rubbish, and was always going to be incredibly twee. Luckily, it's great - very straightforward so far, but it looks gorgeous, and has had some genuine laugh out loud moments, and the soundtrack is by Sigur Ros, so those are all ticks in the positive column.

The premise is that Snufkin - a kind of wandering minstrel character, if you don't know the source material - is returning to Moominvalley in the Spring, expecting to see Moomintroll and everything to be back to normal, but instead everything has gone wrong, the river has dried up, Moomin is nowhere to be found, and there are fences and signs and hedges and well kept parks everywhere.

This outrages Snufkin, so you have to spend the game getting rid of the parks to allow nature to return in its place. There are policemen and park wardens you have to avoid, so it's a bit of a stealth game, and you beat each park by removing all of the signs - with no signs telling them the rules, the policemen assume there's no rules to enforce and wander off. It's simple, but lovely stuff.

I also recently finished Rollerdrome's super-hard New Game+ mode, and am very happy with it, and wish there was more content. I could go back and complete some of the challenges, but I find it hard to get motivated for that when it doesn't unlock me anything, I'm not a trophy-hunter. It's been one of my favourite new games I've played in a while, so I really hope there's a sequel, but it doesn't seem likely.

Also slowly working my way through Secret of Mana, but, as good as it is, finding it hard to get motivated to go back and play more. Once I've finished that, it's either on to Legend of Mana, or finally biting the bullet and buying myself a PS5 for the new Final Fantasy 7.

Alan Moore's a big fan of Moorcock, and Black Dossier is, even by his own standards, a self-indulgent chance to show off all of his influences, so that's not too surprising! I like a lot of the Elric stuff - very simple and straightforward fantasy, and there's a point in his most recent book where he bemoans that it gets a bit criticised now for just being a collection of "dark fantasy" tropes, by (not entirely incorrectly) saying that they weren't tropes yet when he was writing them. There's some decent graphic novel adaptations too - the story's simple enough and visual enough that it just works for that medium without really losing anything in translation.

I haven't read Nomad Of Time, but that sounds great. The problem with him having so much is that a lot of it sounds interesting, but the idea of jumping into it is a nightmare. I've mentioned before that my local second-hand bookshop ended up with hundreds if not over a thousand old pulp sci-fi and fantasy paperbacks that they don't know what to do with, so I've ended up buying one or two every time I'm in, and there's usually a Moorcock or a Philip Jose Farmer in there, and as they're both absurdly prolific authors who are adjacent to a lot of stuff I like (mostly Alan Moore again, in fairness) I feel like I should be reading more of it.

One of my best mates grew up in the '70s, and became a massive Michael Moorcock fan as a teenager, but then realised by the time he was in his mid-to-late 20s that he'd basically read nothing else. And he's still nowhere near having read all of it!

As for current reading, I'm just finishing up a collection of Jeffrey Bernard's "Low Life" columns from The Spectator, after having seen Robert Bathurst play him in "Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell" recently. I first read an earlier edition when I was 18 or 19 or so, and a lot more easily taken in by the idea of being a career piss artist being somehow glamorous or noble. Re-reading it, it's still funny, though often pretty objectionable politically, but what stands out is how miserable it all seems. Still, it provided the catalyst to get me writing something that I've been bouncing around inside my head for a while, so that's something.

I had assumed that Ospreay would be winning the World Title at All In, but timing-wise that's going to be pretty tight now - the next confirmed PPV is Dynasty in April, then Forbidden Door probably happens in June, and All In in August.

If Swerve wins in April, that gives him maybe a four month reign before dropping it to Ospreay at All In, and that doesn't feel long enough for Swerve's first reign given everything building to it - and that's assuming the win comes then, and not later. Aside from the mess of changes between Moxley and Punk in 2022, it would be putting Swerve and Joe firmly at the low end of title reign length - I think Joe is more than established enough to survive that, but they don't want to look like they've dropped the ball with Swerve.

There's also the weirdness that, in London, Swerve vs. Ospreay would be a face-vs-face match. AEW aren't particularly held back by the heel/face dynamic, but Swerve is a relatively recent face, and I don't think that should be someone you put up against a hometown hero. Ospreay would be better served against a top heel.

Ospreay's signed for multiple years, so I think they can get away with not doing it this year. Last year's All In was a showcase match for him, next year could be a World Title win. What he needs this year is just a big match with some story behind it - if Anarchy In The Arena becomes a Wembley tradition, I can see Ospreay leaving the Don Callis Family to team with some other babyfaces against them and some hired guns, just let him be the centrepiece of the kind of big chaotic clusterfuck match that AEW do so well. Otherwise, there's the chance to do Ospreay vs. Okada on UK soil for the first time since 2015. In the unlikely event that Omega is back by then, they can do Ospreay/Omega for the first time in the UK, or have them team together for the first time ever. There could be all kinds of "dream matches" they manage to put together between now and then for him, it doesn't need to be a title match.

10 hours ago, RIDDUM_N_STYLE said:

Wait a sec, so Trips wasn’t Corp 1 after all?

No - everyone jumped to that conclusion, and argued that the description could only fit either Triple H or Nick Khan, and nobody really entertained the idea that it could be Khan, for some reason. One of the tenuous links was that it said about Corporate Officer 1 having an office on the fourth floor, and people were posting screenshots of Triple H next to a sign for the fourth floor to "prove" it was him - but that's just where the executive suite is, it doesn't narrow it down to an individual at all.

I always assumed that if Triple H were heavily implicated, it would have been a lot clearer - I don't think, in painting a picture of the company as an unprofessional hellscape of institutionalised abuse, that, if one of the people involved in that was Vince McMahon's son-in-law and a prominent wrestler and on-screen performer, that you'd overlook all of those details and the pressure that someone in Triple H's position would be able to exert. 

That's not to say he's blameless or innocent - with Stephanie McMahon being named now as seemingly complicit in covering everything up, either Triple H had to know, or they're even more divorced than we think. If there weren't traumatised victims at the heart of all this, there would be something hilarious about the idea of Triple H being utterly oblivious to all of this going on around him.

The Wrestling is good fun live, but it does not translate well to watching recorded at all, and fares a lot better in smaller venues - that show was at the O2, and had a much bigger budget, and I think probably suffered for it.

It's also not a Taskmaster thing, that's just some clickbait on the headline, I guess - it's been going on at the Fringe since 2011. 

Taskmaster is great, though. Few things better on telly in recent years than Bob Mortimer or Mike Wozniak's contributions to that show.

26 minutes ago, Loki said:

I've read a ton of Moorcock's earlier works and loved them, but I think his extraordinary imagination is what drives them, more than a great storytelling ability.  So when he's not completely on it, his stuff can drag.

Also, he may just have written TOO MANY books in his long career.  There's only so many ways to tell a fantasy story!  @BomberPat did you read Mother London?

I did read Mother London, and remember really enjoying it, though I couldn't tell you a thing about it now.

Definitely agree that it's imagination and creativity more than storytelling that pushes it forward, which is understandable when he was churning out a 180 page book in two weeks to keep the bills paid, but it makes things a slog when it's a hefty book that still sometimes falls back on the shortcuts and tropes of that style. 

I attended a Q&A he did a few years ago, and he was talking about how a lot of the early books he'd write in under a month (the first three Corum books all came out in 1971, and all six of them between 1971 and 1974, and weren't even the only books he released those years). When it got to the questions, someone asked if, now he's able to spend as long as he likes on his books, he ever looks back at what he wrote earlier and thinks how much better they could have been with that much time available to him, and he said, "there's a couple I think could have done with another week". 

to add to the Kendo Nagasaki discussion, he may have just (at the age of 82) cut his first ever promo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdkLTogVoWI

10 minutes ago, Carbomb said:

If you were to set a film in the 2010s onwards, how would that be presented? It's a significant effect of the internet's cultural "democratisation" (a term I both agree with and use with caution) that there is probably no identifiable trend or pattern to the current day, as culture is no longer defined in the larger part by things like geography, employment, even wealth and social strata (again, the same caution). I don't generally like using the term "postmodernity", but in this case, it sort of is, in its capacity as a rejection of the modern, or perhaps even evolution beyond it via mass production/mass communication.

End of History, innit.

I think there's a lot to be said for how much TV and film is set in the '80s and '90s - there's always an element of backward-looking, because the people who control cultural capital are pulling from their own youth and their own influences; you get pastiches of late '50s music and fashion coming into vogue in the early '80s, '60s and '70s nostalgia in the '90s, and '80s revivals in the '00s, because people who lived through it are now the ones writing the books, directing the movies, controlling the TV channels, running the record labels, and so on. But there doesn't seem to have been the equivalent changeover in personnel in more recent years, with social mobility having ground to a halt, and previous generations clinging to power, so everything kind of atrophies in one frame of reference.

In film and TV, I think there's also a very specific thing that pushes people working within certain genres to stick to setting things in the past, though, and that's mobile phones. Too many tropes in too many genres fall apart once you have to factor them in; it's why so many horror movies have to have a throwaway line about a character's battery being dead, or not having any signal, because otherwise viewers would just be wondering why they don't just call for help or text someone to say where they are. There's equivalent issues in romantic comedy, farce, and really anything that relies on characters having no means of talking to one another or external agencies when they're not face-to-face.

On 3/9/2024 at 3:48 PM, Statto said:

one of the performers (who was an older gentleman) introduced a song as "originally by The Who, but this is closer to the version Limp Bizkit put out a couple of years ago". 

I imagine he has been playing it, with that exact intro, for twenty years.

Covers bands are a really interesting one for this for me. There used to be a bar in Jersey that had live music almost every night, but only covers acts. With very few exceptions, you'd get basically the same songs every time, regardless of what band was playing, and it was a smattering of "classics" and then almost everything else was early '00s radio-friendly indie rock. Dakota by Stereophonics, Dreaming Of You by The Coral, Mr. Brightside by The Killers, Sex Is On Fire by Kings of Leon, and so on in that vein. You realise after a while that you've been watching this band for ten or fifteen years and what was once a contemporary setlist hasn't changed at all - but then I suppose for the most part the audience hasn't either!

It's the same thing with rock/metal DJs. The standard playlist has barely moved on from whatever was on Kerrang! in 2002. 

I have a couple of theories about it - one, as it pertains to DJs and covers bands in particular - is all economic; Gen Z don't really drink, so probably just aren't going to these gigs, so there's no reason to freshen up setlists because they're just aging at the same rate as the audience, and there's probably fewer young kids ending up in covers bands because they're usually either something you end up doing out of music college, or as a side-hustle to a proper band, and if there's less money and fewer opportunities, that's just not happening any more.

The other, better thought out theory, is that the cut-off point of the mid-00s represents the last time that there was really a shared experience of popular music. Digital downloads were included in the charts from 2005, and streaming from 2014. Spotify launched in the UK in 2010. Top Of The Pops ended in 2006. While there has been the odd act, or the odd massive hit, that has managed to break containment since then, for the most part people have just been listening to music curated for them by algorithm, so any effort to present something to a mass audience necessarily has to be backward looking. 

The flipside of that is popular music isn't tied in our memory to cultural events or specific times as much as it used to be, so it's difficult to associate it with the passage of time any more. 

a friend of mine concocted a drink with the following recipe that helped at least clear up the sinuses a little when I had a bastard of a cold recently:

1/2 chopped lemon
3 cloves roughly chopped garlic
At least 8 dried birds eye chillis
Squeeze of honey
Teaspoon of Turmeric
Large helping of fresh ginger
Fill with boiled water.

If nothing else, you certainly know you're drinking it.

• First WrestleMania watched?
  
  Wrestlemania 17. I've talked about my journey into wrestling fandom before, but the short version is that I was into it as a kid in the early/mid-90s, fell off around '96/'97, and got back into it in 2000. In that first bit of fandom, I watched it pretty much solely through C-shows and recaps, I can't have watched a single PPV and probably not one WWF A-show or even B-show during that time, as my parents hated wrestling and wouldn't have put up with it. 
  
  So my first PPV that I watched in its entirety was probably Summerslam 2000, and 17 my first Wrestlemania. At some point in-between, though, mates started lending me videos and I was buying up every wrestling VHS or DVD that any of the local shops got in, so there's every possibility I saw an older 'Mania before the first one I saw as it happened.
   
• Favourite WrestleMania?
  
  Probably a toss-up between 17 and 19. 17 gets all the plaudits, but there's some phenomenal stuff on 19 that's as good as anything WWE have ever done. Less psychosexual and pervy weirdness on 19, too.
   
• Have you ever been to WrestleMania?
  
  Never. Never been to a WWE show at all, and never been particularly tempted to. I think even if I had the option now, I would rather be in town for 'Mania weekend just to watch all of the other stuff going on, all the big indie shows and so on, rather than the event itself.
   
• Best/Worst WrestleMania matches.
  
  Bret Hart vs. Steve Austin is by far my favourite 'Mania match. Runner ups/honourable mentions for Bret vs. Owen, Hogan vs. Vince, TLC 2, Warrior vs. Savage.
  
  Worst Wrestlemania match is probably Jerry Lawler vs. Michael Cole. The easiest thing in the world would have been just to replicate Lawler/Kaufman, but instead it dragged and dragged with them letting Cole get heat on King, because they just booked it as a conventional WWE match structure. 
   
• Best/Worst WrestleMania moments.
  
  Best - Hornswoggle getting wolloped with a bin
  Worst - I'm sure there's some dreadful celebrity or pop culture crossover stuff that's worse, but Hogan vs. Yoko at Wrestlemania IX.
   
• Favourite WrestleMania theme and/or intro?
  
  Hard not to say "My Way", but I'm going with the time they used Peter Gabriel's "Big Time", just because it was a refreshing change from the musical sludge that WWE normally rely on.
   
• Favourite WrestleMania announcer call? ("The boyhood dream has come true" etc etc)
  
  "What a man! ....And what a woman!" - Gorilla Monsoon at WM7.

EDIT:
Someone mentioned the Wrestlemania 18 souvenir magazine - I had that for 18 and 17, and for a kid just getting obsessed with wrestling, but not having really learned much about it yet, those things were incredible.

My brother stopped watching wrestling around 2002, but for WM17 we were both fully invested, and he's a big stats and data nerd, and he decided that it would be a good idea to keep a tally of every wrestler who we saw wrestle on TV. I think it was born of the rosters on the video games being so out of date, that he figured this was the best way to get a clearer picture of who actually worked for the WWF, so he had these two sheets on A4 paper that he just wrote every wrestler's name on when they "first" wrestled on TV, and then kept a tally every show we watched. We didn't understand that half of the talent on Heat and Metal would be unsigned, so names like JR Ryder, Scoot Andrews, and Low-Ki ended up on there.

And then we end up with this magazine that just has everyone's photo on it, and some of them are wrestlers we've never seen, some are developmental talent that haven't debuted yet, plus a ton of backstage staff and producers and so on that we've never heard of, so we start fixating on who those guys are too. Absolute catnip for the precise sort of nerds we were at that age.

https://metalinjection.net/this-is-just-a-tribute/pig-destroyers-blake-harrison-has-died

Blake Harrison of Pig Destroyer, and Hatebeak, the world's only death metal band fronted by a parrot.

That might be part of it, but I think it was also about giving him a chance to get over on his own in Memphis, rather than being seen as Lawler's son and being held to that standard from the beginning of his career, especially as he was usually a heel while King was a babyface.

During the ECW "invasion" of the WWF in the mid-90s, there was a much more involved invasion/interpromotional feud going on between ECW and the USWA, and towards the end of that Heyman "exposes" Brian Christopher as Lawler's son, and there's an angle around Lawler trying to deny it while Brian wants to come clean.

So they were playing with it for storyline purposes before Brian ever made it to the WWF, and once there JR would drop enough in-jokes about it to make it obvious.

Kendo has done a lot of appearances since he released his autobiography, doing "audience with" shows and Q&As after years of not speaking. I've not really followed what he's doing with LDN, most of what I've seen has been just repeating clips from last time he was there, it seems mad to think he's going back there. 

oh yeah, I cried my eyes out from about three minutes in.