Gone camping

Have a happy Canada Day!

I'll be back next week.

Lolcats bringz da funny

I admit, Lolcats are a guilty pleasure of mine.


more cat pictures

Wacky soccer goal!

Newest Edmonton Eskimos' bloodlines run through WWE

Wrestling-related football story from the Edmonton Sun.

CANOE -- Edmonton Sun: - Newest Edmonton Eskimos' bloodlines run through WWE

Quick WWE Draft thoughts

I'm really tired, so this is going to be very quick.

• Raw just got far more interesting with Hunter off the brand and moving to Smackdown. Unfortunately, at the same time, Raw got far more unwatchable with Michael Cole moving to the announce desk.
• Take the above sentence and reverse it with "Smackdown" "less interesting" "Hunter on the brand," "more watchable" and "Jim Ross." Seriously, Hunter is so stale, and I fear he's going to SD! only to squash Edge. On the other hand, Jim Ross and Mick Foley could become an amazingly good announce team.
• If last night's draft is going to mean anything, it should build for Edge vs. Hunter and Batista vs. Cena for the respective SD! and Raw world titles at Wrestlemania 25.
• Poor Matt Hardy. Poor, poor Matt Hardy.

As for the show-ending angle with Vince being "crushed" by the set ... yawn.

Quick thoughts on The Ultimate Fighter Finale

• I learned my lesson from previous TUF finales. I DVR'd this show, and started watching it about 60 minutes in. By the time the main event was over, I had caught up to the live broadcast. So I watched a 3-hour show in 2 hours. That made it bearable.
• I was happy that Amir won the TUF title, but it looked more like CB's hand slipped onto Amir's leg and not a tap. It was very interesting that during the post-fight interviews, there was not a single mention of the controversial (non)tap despite the fact that CB was obviously upset about it.
• Amir's got a ton of charisma and he's funny as heck. Let's now see what he does against real competition. Remember, he's now just 1-0 in MMA.
• OK, the judge who scored the main event 29-28 in favor of Evan Tanner should never be allowed to judge again. Particularly when the other two judges had Tanner losing one round 10-8.
• All in all, a thumbs in the middle show. Nothing terribly exciting but nothing awful. I'm not sure if I would have felt the same way, though, had I watched it live without being able to fast-forward through all the commercials, interviews, etc.
  

Rest. In. The. Ice. Rink.

This search string led to my site today:

"undertaker at west edmonton mall"

Healing continues following church floor collapse

CanadianChristianity.com has an excellent article catching everyone up on the fallout from the church floor collapse at the April 25 Starfield concert in Abbotsford, B.C.

1956 encyclopedia entry on professional wrestling

In Manitoba last week, I was looking through my grandmother's encyclopedia from 1956 and decided to look up the entry for professional wrestling.

I was very amused by it, mainly because they absolutely nailed pro-wrestling way back in the era when most people still thought it was real.

Click on the photos for the larger versions which are way easier to read.

The UFC's big announcement is ...

... kinda underwhelming.

Ah, well, I await listening to Dave Meltzer and Bryan Alvarez's audio update from earlier this afternoon to explain it all to me.

Is this UFC's big announcement tomorrow?

MMAPayout.com: The Business of MMA: Update on UFC's Major Announcement

MMAPayout.com has learned that Bertelsmann Media, a German based international entertainment company, is rumored to have had advanced discussions about acquiring a controlling interest in Zuffa.

Hmmm ... if this is it, I have decidedly mixed feelings about it. The plus side would be Bertelsmann would likely have way more leverage to get UFC a major TV deal. But as we've seen in pro-wrestling (Hello, Ted Turner's WCW!) just having a big corporate media owner doesn't necessarily guarantee huge success.

Pepsi Blue Hawaii - Only in Japan

Pepsi: Get Your Drink On With Pepsi Blue Hawaii

Click the link for a pretty funny video review of Pepsi Blue Hawaii, which is a pineapple-lemon flavoured Pepsi that is, sadly, only available in Japan.

I say sadly, despite the fact that the reviewers didn't care for it that much, because I like colas, I like lemon-flavoured colas, and I like pineapple, so I figure Pepsi Blue Hawaii would rule!

If Pepsi would like to send me some free samples of Blue Hawaii, I promise to write a much more positive review, despite the fact that, you know, I'm Canadian and my opinion probably wouldn't influence anyone in Japan to drink it anyway.

High-ranking Pepsi executives can contact me via e-mail.

For God so loved ... ET?

Christian Theologians Prepare for Extraterrestrial Life

Here's an interesting article from Wired magazine on how Christianity might react to the arrival of aliens on planet Earth. I think my view on this is best summed up by this quote from the article, "If they're there, they're there. It doesn't change a whole lot."

But your mileage may vary.

The most shocking twist in Ultimate Fighter history!

Wrestlemania 24 DVD aspect ratio weirdness

Here's a strange one:

I bought the Wrestlemania 24 DVD. It's in 16x9 widescreen. When I play it on my 17-inch widescreen computer monitor, it plays in 16x9 widescreen. When I play it on my portable widescreen DVD player, it plays in 16x9 widescreen.

But when I put it in either one of the DVD players I have hooked up to our 4x3 resolution televisions, it does NOT play in 16x9 widescreen. Instead, it plays in perfectly cropped 4x3 standard TV aspect ratio.

Now, I have a lot of widescreen movies in my DVD collection. All of them play in 16x9 widescreen format with the black bars on my regular 4x3 TVs.

But not Wrestlemania 24. And I've fiddled with the TV/DVD settings on the DVD players to get it to play in 16x9, and it won't.

It's almost like the DVD auto-senses what the aspect ratio of the screen is and adjusts the DVD accordingly.

Is anyone else having this problem?

Big wrestling news!

The big news in wrestling today is that Bryan Alvarez's Figure Four Online website (affectionately known as The Empire~!) has merged with Dave Meltzer's Wrestling Observer website.

The immediate upside of this merger is that the Observer newsletter is now finally available as an online subscription product. And that means no more waiting for Canada Post to deliver my Observer a week late. Between that and the new Wrestling Observer Radio show Bryan and Dave will be doing three times a week, it's gonna be awesome!

Sorry, no witty Star Wars related headline

But go figure ...

Trivia: George Lucas’s Daughter is an MMA Fighter | /Film

Worst Office Freak Out Ever

And we're back!

The 2,400-km roundtrip from Edmonton to Stonewall (MB), via Saskatoon, Regina and Brandon is now complete. Dean and Nicole's wedding was a blast (my wife uploaded some pictures on Facebook). It was supposed to be an outdoor wedding, but it rained and rained and rained and rained and rained ... we're talking Noah's Ark here, folks ... and so the wedding was moved inside a big tent, which was still fine. The custom-made M&Ms with their names and wedding date was a nice touch.

Dave Meltzer and Mike Tenay mark out!

This screen-cap picture has been floating around the Internet for a few weeks. It's TNA Wrestling announcer Mike Tenay and Wrestling Observer writer Dave Meltzer marking out at an AWA show back in the 1980s.

Ewww ...

Next On The Airline Chopping Block: Lavatory Sinks?

It's funny (OK, it's not but you know what I mean) ... we don't do a lot of flying, but already my wife and I have been rethinking some major future travel plans because of the disintegration of the airline industry in North America. Stories like this only confirm why we drive pretty much everywhere we can.

Downhere free album download

The Christian band Downhere has offered up their 2006 album, Wide Eyed and Mystified, for a completely free download here. I believe the offer is only good until the end of June.

In my opinion, it's a fine album and well worth downloading. Hey, it's free! If you don't like it, delete it.

Mini vacation

By the time this is posted (using the very handy "scheduled posts" feature), we'll be on our way to Winnipeg for a family wedding. Very exciting.

I've got post or two already scheduled in the queue for the next few days, so the blog won't be going completely dark.

I'll try to post some road stories and pictures after we've returned.

Great moments in spelling bee history

One more thought on Elite XC's debut last night

Did no one at CBS or Elite XC have a run-time sheet for the event?

It was scheduled for a two hour block. It went 2 hours and 50 minutes. That's a BIG overtime run.

There were, what, five fights on the show?

One was a title fight - so it had the potential to go 25 minutes, plus at least 10 minutes ancillary time for interviews, intros, round breaks, etc. Let's be extra generous and say 40 minutes for the title fight in total.

There were 3 other matches that had the potential to go 15 minutes each. That's another 45 minutes, plus a minimum of 15 minutes of ancillary time.

Already, we're up to ONE HOUR AND FORTY MINUTES OF A TWO HOUR SHOW!

And THEN there's the women's fight: a maximum of 9 minutes, plus minimum 5 minutes ancillary time for ring intros, etc., so that's FOURTEEN MINUTES.

In other words, if every fight went the distance and Elite XC did NO backstage interviews, NO introduction of new fans to MMA, no highlight packages, personality profiles or ANYTHING ELSE, last night's card could have featured ONE HOUR AND FIFTY FOUR MINUTES of fight time with intros and round breaks - NOT COUNTING COMMERCIALS!

I ask again: DID ANYONE AT CBS OR ELITE XC PUT THE CARD TO A RUN-TIME? Or did they DELIBERATELY schedule the show for 2 hours knowing full well it was going to go 3?

Sure, this was the debut of Mixed Martial Arts in network primetime. But in this regard, CBS and Elite XC showed just how not-ready-for-primetime they were.

EDIT, 6:37 p.m.: Mauro Ranallo (one of the announcers on last night's show) just said on Wrestling Observer Live that the show went so long that his DVR cut out before the Kimbo Slice main event. So, yeah, really lousy time management on the part of Elite XC and CBS.

This just screams "pro-wrestling angle"

Kimbo Slice and Brett Rogers in altercation at EliteXC press conference | MMAjunkie.com