One of the interesting little sidebars to the holidays is getting to go spend a few nights at my mom's house... and then, once everybody's in bed and I can't quite get to sleep yet because I have nocturnal tendencies, I get to spend a few nights poking around a bunch of my old stuff in my bedroom.
  

This year, I uncovered a cache of old wrestling newsletters from my freshman year of college, when I discovered the internet and then jumped into the "smart fan" underground with both feet. Newsletters, tape trading, you name it: for probably about a year, I was doing it all, because I honestly thought

Needless to say, I started growing out of that phase pretty quickly, en route to being the sane, level-headed, smart-but-not-obsessed chap you know and love today. But in that year or so period, I sure did accumulate a lot of newsletters. Strangely enough: even back then, though, I don't think I ever gave Wade Keller the time of day. HA!

But reams of Wrestling Observer Newsletters were found in a box in my old room. And I was struck by two things: even back then, the average "smart" fan must have been enthralled with the most ridiculous minutiae, because each Observer was 10 or 12 pages, and contained maybe 1 full page of useful, pertinent information. And then 4 pages of obscure house show results that nobody could POSSIBLY care about (unless wrestling was real, and win/loss records somehow really counted for anything), 3 pages of Letters From Readers (the ultimate in lazy-man filler material), and 2 pages of sometimes-comically-reported minor news items (in leafing through some of the old newsletters, it cracked me up that Triple H's debut in the wrestling business got a one-sentence blurb -- "Terra Ryzing, who I believe is a Killer Kowalski student, was brought in for a try-out match, and looked good enough that WCW gave him a TV debut later that night" -- whereas other newcomers -- Ron "Yeti" Reis comes to mind -- got significantly bigger write-ups/intros when they get signed).

Speaking of the Letters From Readers, though... something else I noticed is a bunch of familiar names showing up there. Jim Cornette made at least one appearance in the Observer Mail Bag, as did then-NWA Champ Dan Severn. And in the debut issue of "The Wrestling Lariat Newsletter," I did a double take when I saw the name of Dave Lagana (SD! Head Writer who has recently been re-assigned to internet stuff) at the bottom of a letter professing much man-love for the guy who organized the first ECW Internet Convention (which, ironically enough, I also attended; and which is also the main reason why I've never been in any rush to organize some sort of OO Convention; with all due respects to CRZ and Dave Scherer -- and maybe a couple other good ones I'm forgetting -- let's just say the main lesson of that experience is that some people really are better left as disembodied spirits at the other ends of a 9600 baud dial-up connection; and yes, kids, 11 years ago 9600 baud was fast, and 28.8K connections were practically science fiction). Anyway: associating with Internet Fans? I sure hope for his sake Steph never finds out about that skeleton in Dave's closet....

And I figure that's about enough rambling for now. But if I didn't get those little anRickdotes off my chest now, I'd probably forget them. And come next Christmas, I'll probably decide it's time to rifle through my old Star Trek comics or something else, and forget all about unearthing more old Wrestling Stuff. So it had to be done.

Here's some Present Day, non-Meltzerized, high-quality wrestling talk for you:

• Monday's RAW remains, in my opinion, a decidedly mixed bag of good, bad, and confusing. If I didn't know better, I'd say that something must have gotten shaken up pretty good in the last 10 days or so, and what we saw on Monday represents the Kick-Off to some brand-spanking-new creative plan heading into WM22.
   
  Things that were promised going back over a week did not materialize (namely, Angle's "major announcement," which instead turned out to be a fairly flaccid re-statement of his previous comments), and storylines that were clicking along with great promise were suddenly dropped in favor of new directions (namely, Michaels feud with Shelton Benjamin was never addressed despite having Much Upside, and instead, Michaels was shoehorned into a baffling angle with Vince McMahon). I begin to wonder if Monday's show was the show that the creative team was envisioning 2 weeks ago after the conclusion of the previous live RAW.
   
  Or maybe I'm just over-thinking and making excuses for the creative team... because the alternate explanation is that this is exactly what's been planned all along, and that sense of chaotic, disjointed, lack of continuity merely represents their honest-to-god best effort.
   
  Let me put it this way: Monday's show should have been, in most major ways, the official start of the Road to WrestleMania. Each brand had its one week holiday break, and now its full-speed ahead... the company should not only know exactly what they want to do at WM22, but they should know exactly what steps they're going to take along the way to get there. There should be no seat-of-the-pants, week-to-week booking. Somewhere, there should be a folder containing a rough sketch of what'll need to happen on RAW the week of February 19 in order to make WM the biggest show of the year. And if we accept that this is where WWE should be, then the only things I took away from Monday's RAW is that I need to be very afraid that Shawn Michaels vs. Vince McMahon and Triple H vs. Charles Barkley are going to be two of the top matches at WM22.
   
  And let's just say that a show that suddenly causes those kinds of thoughts to materialize isn't exactly doing what it should be doing as we approach what is traditionally the most exciting part of the wrestling year. On the contrary, when Michaels/Shelton was one of RAW genuine bright spots and most promising stories, seeing Michaels plucked out of that for lord-only-knows what kind of silliness with Vince, it actually frustrates me a bit as a fan.
   
  Like I said yesterday in the recap, the only mildly-defensible direction you can go with Michaels/Vince is that this is somehow the start of a Michaels heel turn. And then "Corporate Shawn Michaels" would be the WM22 opponent for John Cena. Only problem is that this amounts to more of WWE's "Addition by Subtraction"; I'm not even sure you could really pull it off, but to get any significant part of the audience booing Shawn Michaels against Cena will require some level of "character assassination" just like happened/is-happening with Kurt Angle. It shapes up as another deal where WWE is willing to reduce the usefulness of one talented performer in order to TRY to get Cena to look better by comparison. I don't really like that practice, but if turning Michaels heel is where we're going, I suspect we're in for more of it. Because in WWE Think, it's easier to take Cena's opponents down a few pegs of credibility than it is to try to nudge Cena himself UP a few pegs.
   
  But who really knows if that's the direction we're going at all... my whole point is that after Monday's RAW, I have no compass at all for what's going on. And I loves me the ambiguity and unpredictability. But that only works when it's DIRECTED ambiguity and unpredictability. You have to know where you're going so that you can string an audience along and have them possessing a vested interest in the outcomes so you can swerve them and tease them. But if you don't know where you're going, then it comes across in the TV product, and the fans are just left feeling "well, I didn't see that coming, but I also don't really care."
   
  As I've joked before, it's the difference between actually being, you know?, intelligent, creative, and talented writers possessing a clear vision and the ability to plan ahead and see the big picture. And being the kind of lazy imbecile who put some kind of prehistoric monkey on a desert island for no discernable reason and then ordered his staff of other imbeciles to retroactively figure out a reason for it being there half-a-season later.
   
  Then again, given the viewing habits of 20 million people a week, maybe WWE thinks they can defend their own version of an unexplained prehistoric monkey that they'll just figure out later? In some ways, I'm the weird one, here, always wanting to be able to piece together storylines based on taut, well-woven events devoid of logic and continuity errors. When it seems other people are willing to tolerate randomness and laziness so long as they get 2 hours of bells and whistles every week. 
   
  I recognize this about myself (me and my stupid having-high-standards)... but my comeback is simple: just because you can get away with a half-assed creative effort that placates a mediocrity-loving mainstream audience doesn't mean you can't ALSO put forth the extra effort to also make things GOOD. My whole enterprise here is pointing out that there are ways to fix the WWE product that wouldn't alienate even one single existing fan of the current product, but which WOULD win back countless other prodigal fans who've decided to put wrestling on the back-burner. I recognize that there's "popular" and that is what it is; and there's also "good," which has nothing to do with the other; but if you combine pop elements with actual goodness? Then and only then is when you'll see wrestling boom again.
   
  Monday's RAW instilled no faith in me that this upcoming WrestleMania Season is the one that will launch a new boom phase for the industry. Instead, it seemed like a confused and flustered creative team randomly shifted gears from one mostly-underwhelming direction to another. Which resulted in a few entertaining and surprising moments along the way. And which also resulted in a few other mind-numbing continuity errors. But which mostly resulted in a bit of confusion, but NOT the kind that makes your mouth water at the prospects of finding out what happens next week.
   
  An odd bird was this RAW. You can get the full results and analysis -- the show featured a LOT more than just the strange Michaels/Vince stuff, including six Beat the Clock matches and a solid HHH/Big Show angle -- in yesterday's OO RAW Recap.
   
  
• A couple possible corrections from said recap....
   
  A few people wrote in to say they caught (and laughed at) the snarky comment made by an announcer after Chris F. Masters mangled his punchline to his promo... but they said they thought it was Lawler's voice, not Joey's. Could be. It was close to 4am on Monday night by the time I got done watching the show, so if my attention to detail and memory were a bit lacking, I wouldn't be surprised.
   
  Also: a slightly larger number of people think that I whiffed on the Conan O'Brien-inspired Edge/Flair thing, and that it was Matt Striker who provided Ric Flair's lips. I honestly have no idea, and that's not a fact that I even bothered to check up on in discussions the past few days. All I can tell you is that in a few spots, it sounded almost exactly like Edge's voice, and the unfunny stilted-ness of it made me think that it was that way only because the Lip Portions had to be pre-taped, and that didn't allow for them to have any real quick back-and-forth exchanges or be spontaneous or anything. And those are the things that make the gag so funny when Conan and Smeigel do it.
   
  If it was Striker (or some other non-Edge entity), my apologies for probably over-thinking things to come up with my (incorrect) thesis.
   
  
• While I'm on the issue of addressing e-mail corrections, I also want to vehemently NOT apologize to any single person who wrote in last week when the front page headline was "Money For Nothing" which I round-aboutly related to Sting.
   
  For one, even in the teaser paragraph, I explained that I knew I was stretching for the pun and correctly identified the Other Sting's contributions to the Dire Straits hit. And yet, within six hours of the headline being published, I had collected dozens of e-mails of varying politeness informing me that "Sting wasn't in Dire Straits, dummy." Morons.
   
  So then, when I got home that night, I put a caption below the photo of Sting further clarifying my correctness on the issue and inviting everybody to kindly quit exposing themselves as idiots by e-mailing me to tell me I wasn't correct. I figured that'd be the end of it. But no. To brighten my holiday mood, 7-8 Super Morons STILL e-mailed in AFTER I put up the disclaimer to chide me about my lack of music/80's band knowledge. 
   
  And look: I'm a bit too young to really know for sure what the specific details are, for 'twas slightly before my time of being allowed to watch MTV or being even remotely interested in all the news and machinations of the music industry. But I knew the song from the radio, and I know Sting sang on it. And in later years, my general intellectual curiosity and reading (and ownership of the Weird Al record where he parodies "Money For Nothing") resulted in me finding out that Sting has a co-writer credit on the song, too. I'll graciously admit errors and defeat when it's justified, but I ain't backing down off this one.
   
  Go ahead and try me, if there be any Super Super Morons out there!
   
  
• Back to some real news...
   
  Booker T has been injured. Badly enough that the scheduled Match 5 against Chris Benoit was pulled from this week's SmackDown!. I try to avoid spoilers as much as I can while still getting important news from TV tapings, but I believe I can say (without it being a huge breach of our Spoiler Trust) that what WWE did was allow Booker to select a replacement, and the result of the match will count towards the Best of Seven Series.
   
  And that works for one night. But the official word from WWE is that Booker has a severely strained groin, and the trainer says Booker should rest and rehab it for 4-6 weeks... the situation only becomes murkier when you consider that Chris Benoit's contract status is still unknown at this time, and WWE might still be counting on Booker to pull this series out if Benoit decides to depart.
   
  For whatever it's worth, the injury took place during a match against Matt Hardy on a Monday night house show. The spot preceding the injury looked like an innocuous hip toss according to OO Reader John-Eric A., who was sitting at ringside and didn't notice anything immediately amiss until Hardy and the ref started acting flustered. The eventual decision was to just count Booker down with a 10-count and give the match to Hardy, and then immediately trainers and officials hit the ring.
   
  Booker was assisted out of the ring, and I know he was on crutches last night at the TV tapings. Here's wishing Booker a full and speedy recovery.... SD! can't afford to lose another one of its few bankable performers.
   
  
• Something else (fairly minor, but interesting) from the SD! tapings. You might want to check out Velocity this week... after months of being back-burnered and mishandled, Paul Burchill might be being positioned for a higher-profile role. If nothing else, WWE gave him back his old finisher, which is a super-impressive thing that is probably best described as a "back-flip Rock Bottom."
   
  You can check my archives, cuz I talked about the move the week he debuted on SD!; I've seen a bit of tape on Burchill, and the guy is genuinely impressive, no matter what WWE's done with him so far. I honestly don't know why he and Regal haven't been given more to do as a tag team (between Regal's talking/personality and Burchill's ringwork, they're a perfect duo, and a great way to break Burchill in slowly), but maybe this is part of a Phase Two for the guy, if he's finally gonna be allowed to show more of his moveset. 
   
  
• From the "This is so dumb, it almost has to be true, because you'd have to be one twisted freak to make it up" file...
   
  There are rumors that Chuck Palumbo will be returning to WWE, and he'll be feuding with Kurt Angle. The reasoning? Chuck Palumbo's brother -- who is stationed in Afghanistan -- got a shout-out during the "Christmas in Kabul" special, and thus he'd make a perfect foil for Kurt, given Kurt's recent ridiculous ranting.
   
  Christ... Angle could be making the company money by working in any number of top-level storylines, and instead, this might be the crap awaiting him? Again, I almost tend to believe these rumors, just because they're too stupid for somebody to have made them up. But we'll see...
   
  
• Speaking of WWE returns, Tatanka made his last night at a RAW brand house show. He was in much better shape than he was during a RAW cameo 9 months ago, and is expected to do a few more house shows before coming back on TV in early 2006.
   
  Tatanka was, by early 90's WWF standards (when he was at his peak), a pretty decent worker. Certainly not spectacular, but in a day and age of Papa Shangos and Crushes, he'd have decent enough matches. Then as the industry moved in a new, faster-paced direction in the mid-90s, Tatanka kind of got left behind and was (I guess) disposable. Considering how WWE has brought things back down several notches, action-wise, I honestly think that Tatanka can fit right in and deliver the types of matches we're now so used to seeing.
   
  That means whether he succeeds or not will be largely based on his character/personality and whether or not he can connect with the fans so that they get into those matches. Like Carlito does. And the opposite of what Chris F. Masters does. That's where WWE's at today: forget in-ring excellence, all that matters is basic in-ring competence. And beyond that, it's up to you to make the fans care about ** matches.
   
  And sorry if that's a bit of a digression from "Tatanka is coming back," but in starting to think through my Year End Awards, this is easily the first year since I've contemplated the issue (even going back to my days of thinking the PWI Awards meant something) when I've been at such a total loss for matches to consider as Match of the Year. And that's definitely a marriage of the toned-down in-ring style of WWE and the inability of the creative team to create any historic/big-match atmospheres. To the point where at least one entry on my list this year will (sigh) be a TNA match.
   
  
• Speaking of TNA, their show this weekend was a pretty good one. Second best Impact ever, I might say. I only got around to seeing the Monday replay, due to the vagaries of holiday travel and my DVR being needed for other things while I was away, but was amply surprised with what I saw.
   
  Actually, right out of the gates, I think that the best 15 minutes of Impact ever were the opening 15 minutes this weekend. 
   
  The opening segment was holiday themed, as a guy I shall dub Bentley Claus hit the ring, and was promptly ignored by everyone because his little helper was Traci. I shall award her Third Best Wrestling Babe Holiday Outfit of the season; minus a few points because stockings/pantyhose are just not hot and are a major peeve of mine, but she gets them right back because she wouldn't stop putting a licking on her candy cane, and I am a weak, weak man. Then Christian interrupted, but it was a preplanned interruption...
   
  Because as it turns out, all the gifts in Santa's sack were for Christian, who claimed he'd been ever so nice this year, so all he wanted for Christmas was to look more like a World Champion. White jeans? Check. Blond mop-top wig? Check. Silver ukulele? Check. And the topper: a circa-1999 "Don't Piss Me Off" t-shirt. With visible WWF scratch logo on the back. Hop to it, World Wildlife Fund! That's a violation of your intellectual property! And I really want to be witness to the spectacle of Panda Molesters suing Panda Energy in a court of law!
   
  Not liking the homage to his own Trademark Personal Style, Jarrett hit the ring with Monty Brown. But Christian was able to elude them, and the lengthy segment had a happy ending. I say this without exaggeration or hyperbole: in this one segment, TNA out-entertained me versus any single segment that took place on RAW. Which is saying something considering that's generally TNA's biggest short-coming, despite the quality of their in-ring product. 
   
  Then there was also a very sweet Chris Daniels promo, talking about his X Title match against Samoa Joe, that rounded out the first 15 minutes of the show.
   
  Of course, then things sort of ramped down a bit to the TNA standards: a bunch of squashes (one of them, sadly, ignominiously sacrificing Chris Sabin to Abyss), 4 Like Kru crap that just sands the hell out of my vagina because Konnan and Billy Gunn are pretty much walking, talking fast-forward buttons as far as I'm concerned, and a few video packages of varying quality (including one mind-blowingly pointless, WWE-caliber self-promotional video of overseas stuff that simply has no place when you only get one hour a week in which to present your best foot forward).
   
  Then it picked up a bit at the end, with a very good Christian vs. Chris Harris match. This time, when Jarrett and Monty ran-in (after Christian had scored the win), there isn't a happy ending, though, and they get the better of Christian. Nice little book-ends on the show, which I definitely enjoyed again this week. Second best one of the SpikeTV Era, I think.
   
  Get the full rundown and results of the stuff I glossed over in Jason Longshore's Impact Recap.
   
  
• I don't know how this can be, but word is that Impact scored its highest rating to date on Christmas Eve, doing a 0.9. It's only a minor fluctuation from the series average, and one-week fluctuations of one-tenth of a point are not really even statistically significant if you look into the sketchiness of the Nielsen methodology...
   
  But just from a common-sense perspective, being able to not just retain your audience on Christmas Eve, but POSSIBLY even add a few more eyeballs? That's a great story for TNA.
   
  It could just be another deal where my perception is skewed because *I* am the weird one, but for my family, Christmas Eve is every bit as big (hell, BIGGER) than Christmas Day, and the absolute last thing on my mind at 11pm would have been wrestling. Not when there was still left over shrimp cocktail to munch on, booze to drink, and still more presents to unwrap.
  
  Then again, watching wrestling's probably just about the last thing on my mind at 11pm on the vast majority of Saturdays, too, and that's not stopping TNA from regularly drawing a 0.8. Perhaps it's best if I just don't sprain my brain trying to figure this one out...
   
  
• TNA will probably have a tougher time this week, on New Year's Eve. Their one hour show is displaced to 8pm on Saturday night, which will be early enough that it's before most people really get their party shoes on for the night, but which will also be an easily-forgotten timeslot change to all but the most loyal of fans. Best case scenario, TNA could hope those two things cancel each other out, and they retain most of their audience... but it could also easily end up as TNA's worst rated hour yet on Spike.
   
  Then there's a half-hour tag that'll air right after midnight, which I don't know what to expect, ratings-wise. On one hand, most of us will be otherwise occupied at midnight on New Years Eve. But on the other, there is definitely a large TV audience that night (be it families or people at low-key gatherings or whatever), otherwise you wouldn't see dozens of networks falling all over themselves to do TV specials on New Year's. Spike has themed programming all night long, and will have a built-in audience, possibly even of some people who wouldn't normally be exposed to TNA, but might check it out if they forget to flip the channel right after midnight.
   
  It'll be interesting to see how that works out.
   
  
• WWE has another lawsuit on their hands, and it's yet another one that -- in the Court of Common Sense -- seems pretty open and shut. At least to me, who would greatly love to be Emperor of Earth so that I can make such grand proclamations and have frivolous litigants shot directly into the sun for wasting my time.
   
  Tod Gordon, who co-founded ECW and was a key financial backer for the company for several years, is suing to prevent WWE from using the Eastern Championship Wrestling tape library, which he claims he still owns.
   
  The basic gist of things is that shortly after Eastern Championship Wrestling changed its name to Extreme Championship Wrestling in 1994, the company re-incorporated under another name, and Tod's claim is that it was a separate legal entity. So when Paul Heyman eventually bought out ECW, he was only buying out that second legal entity, not the first, and thus, had no right to the assets of the original corporation.
   
  All of which makes some level of sense.... but at another level, I don't know if you want to call it "fair use" or "common sense" or what, but I have a hard time being sympathetic to Gordon here. If he thought he owned the Eastern Championship Wrestling tape library, the time to act on that would have been in 1994 or 1995. But instead, since that time, ECW continued to exist and continued to exploit it's pre-name-change tape library for profit until it went out of business in 2001. Since that time, a bankruptcy court presided over the sale of all ECW assets (including the FULL tape library) to WWF/E. Since that time, WWE has put a lot of effort into utilizing the ECW tape library.
   
  And yet, it's only now that Gordon's stepping up and saying "Me Wanty." Probably because WWE has shown him that the tape library CAN be used to make money.
   
  It's probably no big deal no matter how this case ends up; at WWE's end, they still have the lion's share of ECW's library. At Gordon's end, he'd end up with 18 months or so worth of very-shittily produced videotapes that (in a best case scenario) could be chopped up and turned into $8 bargain DVDs with titles like "Sabu: the Early Years." But that still doesn't mean that I approve.
   
  Then again, maybe there would be something mildly ironic and poetically just about Paul Heyman's lack of attention to detail and legalities biting WWE on the ass. The only reason WWE owns the Dudley Boyz names is because of Heyman's addle-mindedness, and I think they're pretty much in the wrong in that case. But here, but another case of Heyman not paying attention to the words in a contract might cause WWE to have to forfeit the rights to something they actually SHOULD own.
   
  We shall have to wait and see how it plays out. 
   
  
• Last thing for today...
   
  John Cena's album has made at least one year-end list. He's made the Onion's list of Least Essential albums of 2005. Tee hee!
   
  Granted, some of the list is dressed up as the self-important ramblings of coffee-house-loitering, micro-brew-advocating, indie-newspaper-writing intellectual douchebags (who I hate as much as I hate just as much as America's increasingly large NASCAR-loving, Pabst-drinking, reality-TV-watching retard demographic), but there's something very appropriate about the "least essential" label.
   
  Maybe it wasn't totally awful (or maybe it was; I've only heard three tracks from it, and one's OK, one's not-so-much, and one is comically bad). But ask yourself: did it need to exist? Would your life be tangibly any better or worse if it hadn't?
   
  So if the shoe fits....
   
  
• That's all folks. Year-end stuff should get underway here soon, now that we've pretty much seen everything that there is to see for 2005... and if I can figure out some way to untangle the mess that this week's RAW made to my vision for a Fantasy Universe WrestleMania 22, I might be moved to start that up either Friday or Monday. 
   
  Time will tell, so keep on coming back to OO to see what's going on.