Weekend Affirmation!
Sometimes I think that I’m crazy. Sometimes I think that I’m down and out and that I’ll never really truly be happy. Sometimes I think that my life is a big weekday crawl of work, toil and file notes and weekends where I sleep in too much and spend too much time driving. Sometimes I drink so much that I ruin the next day and sometimes I spend the next day wishing that I had had a few more drinks the night before. But then I have weekends like this past one and everything is fine.
Without going into even more detail about my personal and family life, I talked to Jessie in the spring and made a vow that I would do more with my nephews and niece this summer to help them have a great time. I want to find that perfect balance between letting them experience the things that I never had the opportunity to try when I was their ages (13, 9, and 7) and making sure that they are entitled little brats because of these experiences. I don’t know how I’ll know if I’ve done the right thing, but Friday night I think that I was definitely one of the good guys.
My nephews are at a peculiar age. They aren’t little kids, but they aren’t teens. Sometimes they turn into these rather complicated older kids in front of me, and other times they are just silly little boys. It’s hard to tell what they like and what they don’t from week to week. But when I heard that the WWE was coming to town, I had to take them. I mean, I knew I’d have a good time there, so why wouldn’t they?
WWE NXT Week 4 Recap
Yeah I know, wrestling. Not even obscure Japanese wrestling featuring Japanese guys hitting each other with Honda engine blocks, either. But American professional wrestling- “ewwww” is what I’d probably hear most of you say if I were talking about this in person versus writing about it on the internet. Big deal, it’s my blog. I’ve enjoyed wrestling for longer than I’ve known most of you. It’s something that makes me happy and satisfies my need for heroes and villains. I mean, it could be worse: I could be watching something totally rigged and appealing to the lowest common denominator like American Idol or The Bachelor.)
Have I mentioned how much I love WWE NXT? It’s great stuff. The show is smartly booked and even non fans can follow the storylines, while older fans (such as myself) can feel a tinge of nostalgia about the wrestling from their youth (if their youth was the mid-to-late 1980s and they grew up in an NWA hotbed). I love this show like a dog loves fleas or women love Sandra Bullock.
I hate to sound like a broken record, but I know that most of the people who read this blog don’t dig faux fisties as much as I do, but seriously, GIVE THIS SHOW A TRY. It’s wonderful and fun. Maybe not for everyone, but for people of a certain disposition who find popular culture passing them by and are revolted at the idea of the movie “Date Night” looking moderately appealing it is nice.
So now that I’ve apologized to the complete strangers who read my blog for enjoying something, I’ll get on with the review now.
WWE NXT week three
Yeah I know, wrestling. Not even obscure Japanese wrestling featuring Japanese guys hitting each other with Honda engine blocks, either. But American professional wrestling- “ewwww” is what I’d probably hear most of you say if I were talking about this in person versus writing about it on the internet. Big deal, it’s my blog. I’ve enjoyed wrestling for longer than I’ve known most of you. It’s something that makes me happy and satisfies my need for heroes and villains. I mean, it could be worse: I could be watching something totally rigged and appealing to the lowest common denominator like American Idol or The Bachelor.)
Last week’s entry on this show was so popular that it garnered a staggering zero comments on my blog, but I’m still in love with this show and I hope that my cheerleading of it will get one of you hipster doofuses to watch it. So because it’s Tuesday, it’s 10:00, it’s wrestling time and nobody demanded it it’s my ode to the terminally out of step and completely dumb world of professional wresting. So here goes my wrap up of WWE NXT.
WWE NXT (week two) Wrap Up
(Yeah I know, wrestling. Not even obscure Japanese wrestling featuring Japanese guys hitting each other with Honda engine blocks, either. But American professional wrestling- “ewwww” is what I’d probably hear most of you say if I were talking about this in person versus writing about it on the internet. Big deal, it’s my blog. I’ve enjoyed wrestling for longer than I’ve known most of you. It’s something that makes me happy and satisfies my need for heroes and villains. I mean, it could be worse: I could be watching something totally rigged and appealing to the lowest common denominator like American Idol or The Bachelor.)
For the past year and a half Tuesday night has been wrestling night for me. I know Monday is the typical professional wrestling night for most fans, but WWE’s ECW television show was a nice little callback to all of those glorious professional wrestling shows of my childhood: an hour long show featuring three or four matches highlighting stars that don’t typically see time on the big shows. Sure, Ric Flair and Dusty Rhodes were big stars, but you had to pay to see them wrestle. Instead, you got Manny Fernandez and the Rock n’ Roll Express wrestling. Those were the days.
On ECW, great workers like Dustin Rhodes (Dusty’s son wrestling under the name Goldust), William Regal, Christian and Zack Ryder (a great young star working a Long Island guido gimmick) were all heavily featured in matches that were always fun, told great stories and self contained: they didn’t build to the inevitable monthly pay per view show, because ECW was rarely featured on the big shows. Instead, these shows were just a weekly tribute to everything that I loved (and still love) about pro wrestling.
Much like everything else that I love, ECW had to be taken away from me. To the common fan (which in the WWE these days is a male around 12 years old), the show was a collection of unknown wrestlers having boring wrestling matches. So three weeks ago ECW was forever retired.
In the show’s place, the WWE launched WWE NXT. The show took upon ECW’s trademarks: an emphasis on week-to-week shows that don’t build to a pay per view matches, but instead of a lose collection of up-and-comers and also-rans, the show pairs the rookies with established WWE wrestlers for built in storylines and a degree of star power.
The first week’s show was great television. It focused on rookie Daniel Bryan (who for the last few years has been known as the best North American wrestler not working for a promotion with a national television show) and the WWE star The Miz. I watched the show and was immediately hooked. It also showcased a fresh announce team (ECW alum Josh Matthews and Raw lead announcer Michael Cole), fresh camera angles that made the matches resemble the WWE’s video games, and neat little vignettes that did a great job of introducing wrestlers.
So now that I’m hooked, I figured I’d try my hand at jotting down what I thought of the show each week, so here goes nothing. (more…)
The Nature Boy!
Want to know about Ric Flair? You can read all about it in my latest article in the Mountain Xpress.
