Tin foil hat theory time

Apparently, a home very close to my home was victim to a drive-by shooting last night.  0.8 mi from my house to be precise, but not in my subdivision.  This is the kind of thing that I would have expected to hear happening in my old neighborhood and most definitely not something where I currently live, where the crime rate is pretty low, and incidents like this occurring are extremely few and far between.

The good news is that despite there being gunfire, nobody appears to have been hurt, and the assailants have been caught by the police.  The article states that the victims of the shooting did not know the attackers, which it’s hard to know what to believe, because otherwise why would a car full of people come to a house in the middle of the night and just unload gunfire on the property if there were no connection whatsoever?

Either way, it’s disheartening to hear of such senseless violence and gunfire occurring in my generally otherwise peaceful community, but this is where the conspiracy theorist in me begins to come out to try and make sense of the incident.

See, unbeknownst to the news article, and what those who don’t live around the area are aware of is the fact that the home that was attacked, is also on the market.  I know this, because I drive past this house on a regular basis, going to and from the office, most of the time when I run errands; I drive past this home regularly and often.  According to Zillow, the attacked home was listed as pending, but I have to imagine that once the police report becomes public and the party who made the offer finds out about this incident, it probably won’t be pending for much longer.

Inevitably, the value of the home will most likely take a substantial hit in price, and the poor family who was probably hoping to capitalize on the still-seller’s market will have their hopes stepped on when they’ll have to drop the price in order to compensate for the fact that the property was just freshly involved in a drive-by shooting incident.

Additionally, across the street from this home, and within the next four lots are two properties also on the market, with one of them being under contract currently.  Granted, one of them is solely a plot of land, but I have to imagine that even land is affected by incidents of crime, since those whom might want to built a home on said land, would still might be unnerved building right across the street of a home that was shot up in the middle of the night.

So what I’m thinking here is that, in this day and age where big, evil, soulless property investors who go around hoovering up property and effectively cockblocking tens of thousands of Americans from becoming homeowners, one of the more nefarious and lacking in any sort of ethical practices investment companies, set all this shit up.  Set up some expendable fall guys to go shoot up an innocent home on the market, drive down its market value, as well as the value of any nearby properties, and then swoop in and pick them all up while they’re all forced to discount on account of fresh crime.

For all I know, the pending offers on the victim and the nearby unit were the same party, and they’ll pull out now that some big and bad albeit orchestrated crime has occurred, but they’ll wait in the wings for the prices to come down and then swoop back into the fray and make some lowball offers and get the homes at a deep discount.

Not very likely, but I also don’t think it’s entirely unrealistic either.  The real answer will be when inevitably when all these available properties eventually flip, if they’re bought up by actual human beings, or if they’re picked up by some ambiguously named entity that is code for asshole investor.

Regardless, this whole situation sucks, hearing of gun violence so close to my home, shattering the façade of peace and tranquility, especially after I left a real warzone to come to where I am now.  And of course, if the victim family really didn’t know the assailants, the fact that they were just picked to be target practice for a car full of psychos, regardless of if this was orchestrated by some shady shitty investors or not.

Why the Mercedes Mone blet collector gimmick isn’t as impressive as it looks

When I saw that Mercedes Mone was scheduled to fight Zeuxis at their Grand Slam Mexico show, I knew right away that Mercedes was going to walk away with yet another blet.  That’s the problem when someone is booked so invincibly over the last two years, that after a little while, no match seems remotely debatable to what the outcome is going to be. 

And I know that the mouth-breathing troglodytes of the internet wrestling community are always debating on whether or not Mercedes has creative control (AKA makes the call on their own wins and losses), and I really don’t care enough to seek out the answer for myself, but it’s also not like those who believe she does have it, doesn’t have reason to believe it.

Typically, I love blet collector gimmicks, and as a collector of wrestling blets myself, I always appreciate seeing it done in actual industry storylines.  I loved when Ultimo Dragon walked out of Japan with ten championship blets at the Super J-cup, I was a big fan of when Lance Storm when on a collecting spree upon arriving in WCW, winning the United States Canadian championship, the Cruiserweight 100 Kilos or Less championship, and the Hardcore Saskatchewan Hardcore Invitational Title in short order.  I loved when The Miz was holding both tag team championships at the same time as holding the United States championship, carting three blets out every show.  Even though he turned out to be a colossal asshole, I liked the journey of Austin Aries amassing a bunch of blets, and I was a big fan of when Matt Cardona became the King of Independent Wrestling, collecting blets like he were Ultimo Dragon.

AEW has dipped into this well a few times already, with Kenny Omega holding three world championships concurrently (AEW, AAA, TNA), as well as when FTR had their greatest year ever, holding the ROH, AAA and IWGP tag team championships, and I did enjoy those as well, in spite of my oft-criticism of AEW as a whole.

Which brings us to the present, where Mercedes Mone has been hoovering up blets like Thanos collecting Infinity Stones, currently carting around six straps: AEW TBS championship, RevPro Women’s championship, Queen of Southside blet, the AEW Owen Hart Memorial women’s blet, the EWA Women’s championship, and the freshly won CMLL Women’s championship.

Ordinarily, six blets does sound impressive, but my issue is that several of these blets are mostly useless, and (are trying to) make her look more impressive than she really is.  In my opinion, the TBS, RevPro and CMLL straps are the only ones with any actual value, but the other three blets are basically decorations and aren’t real championships:

  • Owen Hart Memorial Championship – this is strap that is awarded to a tournament winner, and isn’t actually defended. Britt Baker carried it around for two weeks tops after winning it the first year, as was the case with Mariah May a year ago, before dethroning Toni Storm for the actual AEW women’s championship.  While Mercedes is still lugging the women’s strap around to boost her blet count, the men’s winner Hangman Adam Page held the men’s strap for two seconds to acknowledge and pay respect to the late Owen Hart and then gave it immediately back.
  • Queen of Southside championship – I don’t follow the British scene much, but a little research shows that the Queen of Southside championship was deactivated in 2019, with its actual value being merged into the RevPro women’s championship. Not sure why the physical blet was still being hauled around six years later, but because it’s been kept around that long, means Mercedes is more than happy to do the same, again to make her look more impressive than she is.
  • EWA women’s championship – I’d never even heard of EWA in my life prior to Mercedes winning their women’s championship, but I suppose that is the point. Based out of Vienna, Austria, they’re an indy promotion more than happy to utilize Mercedes’ name to boost their exposure, and she’s more than happy to carry their championship in order to boost her collector status, even if this is basically the equivalent of Norman Smiley invading a backyard wrestling group and absconding with their tin foil championship blet

In all fairness, the three that do have value, are still respectable championships, and put her on a similar tier of collector as Kenny Omega and FTR, but I just don’t like the fact that she’s hauling around three blets that are mostly useless with the intention of making her look more impressive than she actually is.

Frankly, AEW/ROH missed the boat on really boosting Mercedes’ odyssey by not having her go after Athena’s ROH women’s championship, after their actual banger of a match a few months ago in the Owen Hart tournament, but considering Athena has been champion for over 800 days, it’s evident that they didn’t want to job her out just for Mercedes’ burgeoning ego trip, nor did they really want to cannibalize within their own ecosystem, at least not yet.

Instead, they’re going to feed their crown jewel to Mercedes, when Timeless Toni Storm, not long removed from winning back the AEW Women’s championship, will effectively become a transitional champion when she has to drop her blet to Mercedes, capping off the insane run of blet collecting.

Frankly, the real interesting story is going to be, when inevitably all the partner companies start wanting their blets back, what is going to happen with Mercedes.  Her whole career can mostly be defined by her massive resistance when it comes to taking L’s, which is undoubtedly the biggest reason why Sasha Banks left the WWE, and since she became Mercedes Mone, has almost never lost, and in fact has taken a fall just two times in the last three years, with one of them being on account of an improvised finish due to legitimate injury.

So it’s going to be a real telling story when RevPro, CMLL want their championships back, and it’s going to be an even more telling one when minor leagues like EWA wants theirs back, and Mercedes is going to be expected to not win a match in some backyard fed in Wien.  The Owen Hart strap will just magically disappear in the mass exodus, but ultimately all that’s really going to matter is the AEW women’s championship, which will undoubtedly be the last blet standing.

But still, Mercedes will be expected to do the business back to all the partners who have been helping boost her, and as history as shown us in the past, we can’t be too sure on if that’s going to work for her – brother.

Baseball players’ lives are clearly so excruciatingly hard

The Athletic (paywall’d): MLB players complain about how hard their lives are because they have to work all summers

Honestly, I didn’t intend on actually reading the article, because the quotes in a teaser post were all I really needed to get all hot and triggered and ready to lay blast onto a bunch of overpaid professional athlete man-babies.  But I clicked the link in order to get the URL to link to, and must’ve gotten lucky or something because the paywall didn’t come up before I could copy the whole article, paste it into a document and actually read it after all because fuck paywalls.

But the TL;DR of the whole thing was apparently an anonymous (of course) poll went out to all MLB players and apparently the query of what the biggest misconception about the lifestyles of baseball players was a hot button topic, because it spawned this entire snowball rolling downhill to where it became an article, and snarky broggers like me use it as fodder to air out my own grievances with the wealthy complaining about first-world problems.

More than 130 anonymous (of course) players basically were quoted with some absolutely asinine and tone-deaf lines about how hard their lives are, despite the fact that the league minimum this season is $760K.  And almost every one of these quotes is easily rebuttable and can chalk up to the fact that some privileged millionaire is complaining about things that most anyone that wasn’t a professional athlete would gladly switch places with in order to just get a taste of.

And for the sake of my own amusement, I’m going to take guesses and switch in names of all these anonymous baseball players, because frankly it’s probably not that difficult or too far off to identify who’s been saying some of these idiotic quotes.

Our life is awesome, but it’s not as easy as people think it is,” one National League pitcher Zack Wheeler of the Phillies said. “I don’t know if fans realize that when we say we spend more time with our teammates than our families, we’re not exaggerating. It’s not even close. That’s why I say if you want to be a good dad, a good husband, it’s not easy.”

As both a husband and a dad, I’ll admit there are times in which I’ve felt the want for some general freedom from any sort of attachments.  From what I’ve gathered from all sorts of professional athlete autobiographies I’ve read in my life, I’m sure a lot of pro athletes on the daily probably aren’t complaining about the general nature of getting to be alone and unattached when they’re on the road for 3-4 months of a season. 

Frankly, I bet the underlying message between Wheeler’s remarks is the fact that it’s hard for him to be a husband and dad when he’s home, because he’s all used to being among bros and the team and struggles to turn it off when he’s actually home.  And if that’s the case, that’s more a matter of his maturity and priorities than it is baseball being hard

Continue reading “Baseball players’ lives are clearly so excruciatingly hard”

WTF is AEW doing #412

In short: AEW unveils the Unified Championship to be awarded to the winner of Kenny Omega vs. Kazuchika Okada, thus “unifying” the AEW All-Atlantic International championship and the AEW Continental Championship

Man, there’s a lot to unpack for me upon this topic coming up.  I know that I have a fairly unhealthy collection of replica wrestling blets, but I’m fairly certain that Tony Khan is worse than I am.  Almost to the point where I begin to have doubts on whether or not I want to continue my collection, because TK is running so many blets out there that it risks them all becoming meaningless, and ultimately uncool.

I mean, AEW has Mercedes Mone running around carrying five blets currently, with only two of them being remotely meaningful with the TBS championship and the RevPro Women’s championship.  But she’s carting around the Queen of Southside title which frankly nobody outside of England has ever heard of, recently went to Austria to win some backyard federation’s championship, but my favorite is that she’s carting around the Women’s Owen Hart tournament blet, which really was meant to be a blet to be shown like three weeks of the year, for the winner and maybe 1-2 weeks afterward.

Hangman Adam Page basically held the men’s title up once, and then immediately gave it back, while Mercedes is still slinging the honorary degree around like it actually means something, and it’s a shame that she’s inevitably going to overthrow Toni Storm for the AEW Women’s championship, and as much as I like Blet Collector gimmicks, Mercedes’ is just really kind of off-putting, given her station within the industry.

But this post isn’t meant to be about Mercedes Mone, but I was able to barf out these thoughts without having to dedicate an entire post to it in the process, but rather the fact that AEW has unveiled yet another new blet on television, and all I can really do is laugh and shake my head about it, even if it’s ultimately meant to kind of alleviate the excessive number of titles within the TK-verse.

The AEW Unified Championship is a hilarious name for a title, considering the titles in which they are unifying are for lack of a better term, mid-card titles.  In all other combat sports, boxing, MMA, and even the WWE, the term of unifying titles is typically reserved for unifying top prizes.  Boxing especially has had all sorts of unified world champions throughout its history, due to federations and promotions merging and separating and merging and requiring consolidation.  Even the WWE has had unified champions in its history, but always reserved for World championships, most notably Roman Reigns unifying the World and the Universal titles and then holding it for 1,000+ days.

But AEW is basically unifying two mid-tier titles, into a single one, but then best of all, calling it the Unified Championship.  It will have an A-tier name, but still have stemmed from B-tier titles, and inevitably, if they don’t swap the name of it at some point like they did All-Atlantic to International, the Unified champion will run into the AEW World champion, and what are they going to do, unify the Unified championship into the World?  Call it World Unified championship?

Honestly, I don’t really know what TK thinks, beyond when he’s going to get his next bump, but I dunno, you have the International championship, and you have the Continental championship, seems natural if it were to become the… Inter-Continental championship or something.

I mean, it’s no secret that AEW has absolutely refused to adopt that name, seeing as how the WWE Intercontinental championship is one of the most coveted prizes among those in the industry, but it’s not like they own the word or anything.  NJPW for the longest time had their own Intercontinental championship, and they built that title into something equally as coveted within the company, thanks to guys like Shinsuke Nakamura and Tetsuya Naito.

And perhaps NJPW has been spending too much time with TK, because they dropped the name when they unified it with their World title, and in an attempt to re-create a mid-card title, have only produced the woefully uninspiring IWGP Global Championship, but designed it to look precariously similar to the old, white-strapped IWGP Intercontinental blet.

Back to AEW though, it’s funny that the Unified Championship is just a merger of two mid-card titles, because within the company and all adjacent companies, there are still a whole litany of other B-tier prizes, and C-tier prizes within the TK ecosystem.  The TNT Championship, the ROH World and Television championships, and the revolving door of straps from other promotions that their talents drag onto AEW television, like the NEVER Openweight, the IWGP Strong championship and the RevPro World championship.

Would the Unified champion be like a Borg and just go after other champions to unify their championships into the Unified?  Or what if a Unified champion takes an L to another champion, does that keep the titles separate, or does the winner take the Unified and unify their titles? 

So many question marks!

Of course, the true motivation behind all this hullaballoo most likely stems from the fact that the two titles being unified in question are currently held by Kenny Omega and Kazuchika Okada, two of the biggest stars within the company.  And TK seems to have this belief that the importance of them coming together for a match actually needs the incentive of both guys carting championship straps around, and decided that two guys with blets need to be fighting over a new blet, despite the fact that they have had some of the greatest matches within the last decade, whilst in NJPW.

If I had to put money on it, I’m guessing Okada is going to be winning, and becoming the FIRST-EVER AEW Unified championship, because Omega is banged up and doesn’t need to be taking on a champion’s workload and frankly, Okada needs the professional rub more than Omega does.

But I would also wager that, even though it won’t be for long afterward, despite the fact that the Unified championship was introduced to remove two blets from play, I would bet that Okada will show up at least once, carrying all three blets on television, like when Eddie Kingston was carting around a ton of blets at one point, because Tony Khan appears to have a bigger hard-on for championship blets than I do.

Hate to see it, but it’s not like it isn’t deserved

NBC: Fewer international tourists are visiting the United States; economic losses estimated to be ‘staggering’

Like the subject says, this is one of those things that most Americans probably wouldn’t like to see or know of, but at the same time, it’s not like it isn’t deserved, and I can only hope that there are more businesses whose owners and managers that voted for the dumbass orange turd in Washington are being affected by this over those who didn’t.

Like, America was no saint of a destination before dumbass orange turd took office again, but now that he is, I can’t imagine why anyone outside of the United States would have any real inkling of desire to visit it, save for experiences like, Disney World or Las Vegas.  But frankly, even those probably have better alternate options, like the numerous other Disney properties in Europe or Japan, and casinos in Macau or Italy.

I always go back to this particular story of how I came back from an international trip, and had a layover in JFK, and had to clear customs there before catching my next flight back to Atlanta.  I remember seeing these foreign tourists struggling immensely to get through customs because they spoke little-to-no English, and the customs agents were all salty New Yorkers who spoke nothing other than English and basically the faces of these tourists were miserable and scared, and I felt bad that this was basically how their trip was starting in the United States.

Meanwhile, mythical then-gf and I had gotten back from Germany or Korea or wherever we were, and the customs agents in all these places spoke English, weren’t miserable New Yorkers, and were by and not entirely unpleasant experiences getting past them to our destinations.  I remember when we got out of the airport in Munich, and there were already holiday booths and vendors and it was airy and pleasant, and compare that to walking out the door of JFK or any American airport, which is usually just a lot of unhinged drivers trying to pick people up, power-tripping security blowing whistles and screaming at people, and just a whole lot of ugliness, and I always wonder why anyone with a brain would actually want to visit the United States.

Furthermore, like the above photo shows, there’s a meme out there of all sorts of countries around the world, where people say they’re going to visit, when they’re really referring to small sections of each respective country; like all the weebs who say they’re going to Japan are really referring to Tokyo or Osaka, all Koreebs are really visiting Seoul when they say Korea, Paris to France, London to England, and frankly most Americans aren’t aware that Amsterdam is but a city in Holland and not the country itself.  The same applies to the United States, where most anyone from outside of it, when they say they’re coming to visit America, really is saying they’re visiting places like New York City, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Washington DC, or Disney World (obviously not Orlando).  Everywhere else is pretty much not America as far as the eyes of the average tourist goes.

All the same, as much as I hope nobody I know is affected by the financial windfall of dwindling tourism, it’s one of those scenarios where it’s smirk-worthy with that I told you so kind of vibe, that this was inevitable to happen with the current political regime that basically has told everyone else outside the country to fuck off, and them being surprised that nobody wants to come visit anymore.

It’s like if people are getting hurt by this development on account of shitty leadership, a lot of people have nobody to blame but themselves for voting for a leader who’s so racist and xenophobic and is the chief reason why tourism dollars are evaporating and that nobody wants to come visit America.  But at the same time, it’s not like this should be anything of a surprise, once our glorious leader kept flapping his gums about America’s so-called superiority, so I guess all I can really say at this point is, owned.

Love Death + Robots Vol. 4: Maybe it’s time to hang it up

I had an evening where I was surprisingly free to sit down and watch television with no specific show in mind.  I had recently finished several shows that was on my never ending list of things that I want to consider watching, and I didn’t want to delve into any of the series that I’d know would be gigantic commitments, so I sat down with an objective to comb through different platforms and do somewhat of an audit of things that things that I would watch eventually.

When I got to Netflix, Love Death + Robots had the little red label on it indicating new episodes, and my plan to merely refresh the list went out the window and I was diving into the first episode.  I’ve been a fan of the series as a whole in general, even though I think the initial momentum had slowed down in ensuing seasons, but considering the one-off nature of all the episodes, redemption is always the next story away.

Unfortunately, after I finished, quickly, all ten of the episodes of season Vol. 4, I was just left with this unsatisfied feeling of ehhhh that’s it?  To me, there weren’t any particular standout episodes like there had been in prior volumes, and my general vibe was that the collection as a whole seemed to be pretty devoid of love, way low on the robots, but still had plenty of death.  I felt as if, kind of like Black Mirror, the series had gained some notoriety, and it became a property that niche celebrities wanted to associate with, and the series was more than willing to accommodate, even if it came at the expense of the quality that put it on the map in earlier collections.

David Fincher, Tim Miller and even fucking MrBeast were notable contributors to this collection, with Netflix making the conceited effort to let people know about the latter’s appearance in Screaming of the Tyrannosaur.  But it seemed to me that this collection banked on people recognizing some of the more notable contributors and watching just for that, but in the end, none of the episodes were really that standout great.

I mean, the final episode that was presented to me, Can’t Stop was literally just a glorified music video; I like the Red Hot Chili Peppers, but this was literally just a fucking puppet show on top of Can’t Stop.  The song is good, and the video was chill and fun, but in the grand spectrum of things, I watch shit to be told stories and be entertained, not be fed regurgitated content with puppets replacing the actual people.

There’s really not much else to add.  The volume as a whole was a holistic letdown in my opinion, but thankfully it wasn’t a tremendous time commitment, so it’s not a situation where I’m upset about the sunk cost of time wasted.  If this is the direction that the franchise is headed, I’m under the impression that perhaps they should consider stop where they finished.  I know the order of the series isn’t anything concrete, but if they ended with Can’t Stop, they can at least say they closed the book on the series with David Fincher.

Anyway, here’s how I’d rank the episodes; not that it’s really indicative of actual quality, it’s more like ranking the turds in the bowl that are the least to most stinky:

  1. How Zeke Got Religion (Ep. 8)
  2. For He Can Creep (Ep. 10)
  3. The Other Large Thing (Ep. 5)
  4. 400 Boys (Ep. 4)
  5. Golgotha (Ep 6)
  6. Spider Rose (Ep. 3)
  7. Can’t Stop (Ep. 1)
  8. Smart Appliances, Stupid Owners (Ep. 9)
  9. The Screaming of the Tyrannosaur (Ep. 7)
  10. Close Encounters of the Mini Kind (Ep. 2)

I feel like this was probably one big misinterpretation

DFP: Bomb threat on a Spirit Airlines flight in Detroit forces evacuation

I just want to start off with, I understand that bomb threats are no laughing matter, and good on all airline, airport, local and county personnel and authorities for doing the right thing and evacuating everyone and ensuring that all was green.

But I just feel like given the combination of circumstances, location, time, and nature of people who are flying Spirit Airlines, there’s probably some critical context missing from this story that probably leads to everything being one gigantic misunderstanding.

First of all, this happened in Detroit, which is one of the saddest and most depressing places in the country that I’d ever been to.  It’s a blue-collar place with a feeling of defiance of defeat in the actual city itself, and much like airports like Atlanta, Dulles, the airport is located way the fuck far away from the actual city proper and are the only things that stretch the city zone maps to retain the name.

Did you also know that Detroit has the highest concentration of Middle Eastern immigrants in the country?  This was news to me when I first was told this factoid, but then when I was on the prowl for as many Tim Horton’s locations as I could find, I found one inside of a Middle Eastern grocery store, and I realized such factoid was probably right.  Somewhere in this paragraph is the unfortunate stereotypical parallel between painting those of Middle Eastern descent or appearance with bomb threats on airplanes, and my mind assumes that this could’ve been one of those Harold and Kumar moments where someone might have seen a brown-skinned person on the plane and lost their shit, leading to this whole debacle.

Second, most everyone knows the jokes, memes and stereotypes that go along with Spirit Airlines.  I’ve flown with them more than I care to admit, because it’s hard to ignore a $97 RT versus a $397 RT on Southwest or Delta for a 90 minute flight, so I’m quite well aware of them myself on a first-hand experience.  Unruly, loud, hostile, and other pejoratives to describe the people who fly on Spirit Airlines, it wouldn’t be a far stretch to imagine the word “bomb” being muttered by any of these folks, regardless of the context, but as the FAA and TSA and whatever government agencies have conditioned us, bomb is bomb, and when the tragic word is whispered, shouted, muttered, uttered or screamed, all systems come to a halt, and the authorities are sent in.

Third, check the time of when the incident was reported – 7 am.  Which means that this flight was boarding at like 6:15 am, which means people have been at the airport since like 5 am or earlier, and I don’t care who you are, when you’re on that crack ass of dawn flight, there’s a way higher chance than normal that you’re not going to be in a good mood.  Now multiply that being in Detroit, and flying with Spirit Airlines, and you’ve got an entire aircraft full of extra ornery motherfuckers who are well past beyond edge, and somewhere along all these circumstances the word bomb popped out, and then all shit hit the fan.

Again, kudos to all those involved in security and operations for following protocol and ensuring the safety of everyone on the flight and in the airport.  But given all the moving parts and variables in this situation, I can’t help but feel like there probably is a whole lot of things that were taken out of context and lead to a wholly excessively unnecessary scenario.