BomberPat

The only one I can remember is Punk's fans (and maybe him, I don't recall) freaking out at a skit where Omega drank "Pepsi" and then said it tasted like shit. When it was actually him doing a Terry Funk bit, where Terry drank some of Mr. Pogo's kerosene and when Pogo tried to tell him what it was, he just kept repeating, "no, I said it tastes like shit". There's a real unpleasant air of "look what you made me do" about it all.

I think a big thing with CM Punk in AEW was that his ego couldn't handle not being the locker room leader and the respected veteran that everybody looked up to, forgetting that an awful lot of people in that locker room were loyal to the friend he'd fucked over, or were people that he'd bullied, belittled and fucked around on his way up through the indies. That, and he had a private dressing room - it's hard to be the leader of a locker room you're not in. The interview obviously isn't going to change anyone's minds. The people who think Punk was in the right will continue to do so, and the people who think he's a miserable hypocritical prick will continue to do so too, and I count myself in the latter camp. Half the interview may as well have been the old Simpsons line, "but when I do it it's cute", the amount he tied himself up in knots trying to justify why "the CM Punk magic" makes it okay for him to do all the things he criticises other people for doing, or trying to argue that choking Jack Perry was somehow more acceptable than punching him, and that not "murdering" Hangman Page somehow made him more professional. I give it five years max before he's just another grumpy old wrestler with a podcast.

It was shortly after this time that they banned the Overhead Belly-to-Belly Suplex, which is a move with a low margin of error in terms of avoiding injury, and which had been one of those moves you see all over the shop. There was also something around them changing how the ring was constructed - they moved away from the infamously rock-solid WWF rings of yore some time after King Of The Ring 1998 and switched to a more spring-loaded ring with a lot more give to it. I don't know how much they changed it again since then, but I remember hearing that a lot of the neck injuries in the early 2000s were at least in part because wrestlers used to bumping on a more solid ring were getting a kind of whiplash effect from the amount of bounce the new model had, which just added up to a lot of wear and tear.

I think Bradley Walsh is fine for it; a bit of light ent polish doesn't go amiss, but he needs a more serious cohost, he's completely unsuited to something like a serious injury update. Barney Walsh is dreadful, though, he needs to spend some time honing his craft and paying his dues on the kids' TV circuit, brother.

Joan Morecambe, widow of Eric, on her 97th birthday. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk/england-lancashire-68686458

From Jersey news this morning:

The main thing this thread is highlighting is that there aren't nearly enough wrestlers today that are just big fat blokes.

I think PWT (which, as I understand it, is still basically the back-end of the AEW official merch store) is part of the reason why their merch at events is so awful. PWT is all print-on-demand, so you can rattle off as many shitty designs as you like without losing your arse on them when they don't sell. But the flipside of that is that it's not a business model that supports having a solid back catalogue of different shirts in a range of sizes, having decent stock management, and so on. It's leaving money on the table, and it makes the live experience worse, but it's the way it is.

Funniest thing about that is the only reason I've seen anything about this place is because I'm seeing friends criticise them for stocking Burzum and other far-right bands' albums!

Even before AEW, this was sort of a thing. When Samoa Joe first signed with WWE, he was one of the first high profile wrestlers since CM Punk to be able to keep his established name (Johnny Gargano and Tomasso Ciampa technically came first), and initially he was actually permitted to still take independent bookings while appearing in NXT - it was heralded as this bold new move and new style of contract, and a sea change in how WWE operated. Within three months, they decided he could only work NXT after all. And then of course NXT UK contracts technically allowed their wrestlers to take outside bookings, but the restrictions and requirements changed by the week. Obviously WWE is a very different landscape now, but I don't see the parent company of UFC taking kindly to the idea of letting their talent take outside bookings even if it is to spite AEW. If anything, the fact that the last few high profile free agents all signed with AEW over WWE suggests that winning over free agents with sweetheart deals isn't part of WWE's strategy at all.

I own a copy of the Citizen Kane Book in there, and it's Kael's biggest missing of the mark ever. It was the main source material for Mank, and basically contrives to deny Orson Welles of any credit at all for writing the script, or for the film's success, in spite of all evidence to the contrary.

I haven't watched it yet, but given the episode is called "Saving Face", I imagine it centres on his parasailing accident.

He did, and they inexplicably thought the best use of him would be a tag team with Ricochet. He's out rehabbing from neck surgery, last I heard. I wouldn't be surprised to see him be a big "RAW after 'Mania" surprise return, if that's still a thing. That run of Roman Reigns was a fascinating example of WWE booking being fundamentally broken through its own mistakes. They realised they couldn't brute force Roman Reigns into the top babyface spot, but also that they couldn't keep up the "you either love him or hate him!" thing that followed John Cena for most of his main event run because Reigns just wasn't good enough yet to really navigate that, so they seemed to look at what audiences do react to and settled on how Daniel Bryan got over, but rather than recognising that him getting over was because fans genuinely connected to and empathised with him and felt he was hard done by, they seem to think, "people get behind our babyfaces when we book them to lose all the time", so booked Reigns on a string of losses at the exact time he shouldn't have been losing at all.

He's really just Jericho at WM18 at this point, isn't he? The least important person in his match, even though he's the World Champion. In his own title match he's taking a back seat to an injured CM Punk, and to everyone being impressed by Drew McIntyre being allowed to do fairly rote heel work because it's been so long since WWE could actually book heels properly that it now looks fresh and interesting - same thing goes for the big Rock/Cody angle, it's as by-the-numbers as wrestling booking gets but it felt dynamic and interesting because it wasn't the usual micro-managed WWE fare and actually had some heat behind it; just goes to show that wrestling is at its best when kept simple and logical. I hadn't given it any thought before, but why not Jey Uso in the big tag match? He'd still stick out like a sore thumb in terms of star power, but at least he fits the story. He has his history with the Bloodline, obviously, but he was also teaming with Cody Rhodes for a while and they have some in-built history, rather than suddenly shifting to long-term rivals Cody and Seth being bezzy mates, and crowbarring Rollins into a spot that has nothing to do with him. They at least briefly tried to bring up Rollins and Reigns' history with Rollins promising to be Cody's "Shield", but they fucked it in classic WWE historical revisionism by having Rollins cut a promo all about how the Shield were some iconoclastic group looking to fight against authority when they debuted, when for their first few months they were basically the lackeys of a heel CM Punk (maybe lean into that bit of your history for the other feud, Seth?) and then of the Authority - that would be fine if they were teasing Rollins turning on Cody the way he turned on the Shield, and showing that he needs to really work to earn Cody's trust, to add another dynamic to the match, but they're not, it was just filling time while he's Babyface Best Mate, the Beefcake to Cody's Hulk. There's also the obvious issue that every time they bring up the Shield, you can't help but ask, "yeah, but where's the other one?".

Apologies for this being an utterly tedious pedantic fact, but Roy Orbison's version was recorded first, even though it wasn't released until a couple of years after Cyndi's.

The lads with Martel are his nephew and grand-nephew, who have been working as a tag team in Quebec.

My favourite email sign-off was when I was a PA for a bloke who had been director of a lot of big companies, and we would have to draft all his emails for him from stuff he'd handwritten and then print them for him to annotate and approve, a really torturous process. When emailing a business partner called Jon, he signed off "as they say in Nigeria, Goodluck Jonathan".

my Dad used to work in the Netherlands a lot, and one of his colleagues in Rotterdam told him that he didn't need to bother learning Dutch, just learn the word "belachelijk" - it means "ridiculous", and he just said that if anyone starts trying to speak to you in Dutch, you just say that and walk off.

Dutch is just an incredibly unserious language. Two of my favourites are this announcement from last year: And this book title, which sounds like someone drunkenly and increasingly aggressively quizzing you on Wally's whereabouts:

I went into the match thinking "I hope they end on a cliffhanger to bridge between Dynamite and Rampage, would be a missed opportunity otherwise". I wasn't expecting it to just abruptly end without even giving the announcers time to tell you to stay tuned. If ever an opportunity arose for a Tony Schiavone "WE'RE OUT OF TIME!"

just came out of possibly the worst all staff meeting I've ever experienced, and there have been some doozies. The meeting invite was sent out maybe 24 hours earlier, scheduled during a time that a significant number of academic staff had teaching commitments. 500+ people, so understandably mics and cameras were turned off, but there's so little trust or goodwill towards senior management that a lot of people in the Teams chat were seeing that as them being purposefully silenced. They styled the meeting as a "consultation", but it was barely a meeting. Management took no questions, and just read off slides with no additional information or insight, so there was absolutely no reason for it to be a meeting other than being able to tick a box about comms. The last time they did this they said they would respond to all questions that had been raised in the Teams Q&A after the meeting, but they didn't, they just produced a generic FAQ document afterwards. This is all against the backdrop of a disastrous and damaging restructure that is on track to see at least 130 people lose their jobs, so you'd think there would be some attempt made to try and keep people on-side, but apparently not.

Last night was The Motive and The Cue at the Noel Coward Theatre. It's about the 1964 New York production of Hamlet, with Richard Burton as Hamlet, directed by John Gielgud, and how they clashed during rehearsals. Mark Gatiss as Gielgud, Johnny Flynn as Burton. I was expecting a smaller cast with the focus being solely on those two, but there's a strong supporting cast with it too. I thought it was slow getting started, and it took me a while to get into Flynn being Burton rather than just feeling like he was doing an impression of him, but by the end he was absolutely nailing it - I can only imagine how daunting it must be to get cast as either of the lead roles in this, "oh yeah, you're going to be playing one of the greatest actors of all time playing Hamlet, go for it". Gatiss was weaker as Gielgud - it bounced from feeling like Gatiss doing an impression to Gatiss playing smarmy older gentlemen the same way he's been doing it since League Of Gentlemen, but actually I think that's because he's always done a bit of Gielgud in those roles in the first place. By the end I was buying into him, though, as the character got a lot more to work with in the second half. It's pretentious and indulgent - when my friend's Mum saw Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen do Waiting For Godot, she said it was just "luvvies being luvvies", and you don't get much more luvvies being luvvies than actors playing actors in a play about acting in a play that is itself also in part about acting, with everyone getting a chance to do a bit of Shakespeare. Luckily, I bloody love actors acting about acting and luvvies being luvvies, so I thought it was fantastic.

there's a British journalist called Roger Boyes. That's good for a titter, but a friend of mine mentioned him being a customer at their work once, and seeing on their database that he was married, which meant at some point he stood in front of a crowd of people while someone asked them the question, "Do you, Roger Boyes..."

The Beekeeper Absolute fucking nonsense. A decent revenge film, that I don't regret watching, while also being a load of barely sketched out bollocks that aims way too high with the plot in the third act. Best part is when a character says to Jason Statham's character, "do I detect a hint of British Isles in your accent?", which had to have been written in late into shooting by a director exasperated at Statham not being able to keep up an American accent for more than two words at a time. Two or three other actors in it with Randomly Occurring Accent Syndrome too, and not one character who can keep their bee metaphors straight - who are the bees, what is the hive, and who is the hornet? Completely changes scene-to-scene. A ridiculous mess, would recommend.