Alright, so I already semi-bitched about this one time in the past, but there's this show "Celebrity Poker Showdown" that needs to be viciously mocked one more time.
  

The word "Celebrity" in the title connotes having famous people involved in these Poker Showdowns of which they speak. You know: people who we should all recognize and who have contributed something tangible to pop culture.

In past seasons of the show, I'd get annoyed that there would invariably be a preponderance of b- and c-list celebrities 

It all reached a head (for me, anyway) last night when I actually got roped into watching an entire episode of the newest season of "Celebrity Poker Showdown." The reason why? Because I developed an massive mancrush on the fictional character of "Pam" from "The Office" over the past year, and wanted to see if the same might hold true for the Actual Real Actress behind said fictional character. It turns out it does. Boy, does it ever. "Pam from The Office" is so totally my "Lisa from NewsRadio" for the 21st Century.

Thus (thanks to DVR eliminating 30 minutes of pesky advertising), that's 90 minutes of my life I'll never get back. And I kinda wish I could, cuz seated at the same poker table were three people I'd never heard of. Ever. And this isn't me and my faux ignorance (like how I pretend I can't tell MNM apart just because I think that's a funny way to be dismissive of cookie-cutter-looking douchebags); I honestly had never heard of three of these "celebrities" before in my life. They weren't particularly funny or interesting, either. Bleh.

And the fifth person at the table? It'd be best not to speak of him, because it was Mario Cantone, who I actually *do* recognize. I recognize him as being in dire need of my boot across his throat, producing enough pressure so as to collapse his trachea. I'm a strong supporter of people being able to choose which flavor of genitalia they prefer to nibble on and all while still being entitled to all the same rights and privileges as the rest of us. But it does NOT entitle you to be a loud, obnoxious, flamboyantly-unfunny twit who (based on his mathematics-related displays last night) might be borderline retarded. If you don't know who this assmonkey is, just imagine if Tony Danza and Robin Williams could somehow have a child. Then imagine that child grows to the age of 40, but without ever passing the sixth grade or developing any hobbies or talents. And on top of all that, this hyperactively-Italian Danza/Williams monstrosity is convinced that the most interesting thing about himself is that he likes having sex with men, and it is impossible to shut him up about it (so maybe Tony and Robin somehow got just a touch of the "Gay Jerry Lawler" gene in there, too?). You'd want to crush his throat, too, trust me. And of course: he was the one who took down "Pam" at the very end of the show. Like I said: 90 minutes I wish I get back, but won't.

I'll wrap up the pre-ramble right there, and try to sprint through today's news and analysis.... cuz if the local weather is right, we're about 45 minutes away from some super-cool meteorological nastiness, and for some reason, the block I live on is highly susceptible to power outages the past year or two. Better you get a terse OO update here on Thursday afternoon than have to wait to the wee small hours of Friday morning for me to finally get to posting my more common rambliness. Safe > Sorry, as the saying goes:

• Might as well start with Monday's RAW, and go chronologically forward from there.
   
  Not sure there's much I can add that wasn't in the Recap, but for the record: it might not have been a "good" show (as there were just too many missteps that seemed like they could and should have been easily fixed), but the sheer velocity and crassness of it still made for an infectiously FUN show, the likes of which were common 8-9 years ago.
   
  Signs point to DX not being back for good, so I wouldn't go penciling in a permanent return of "Attitude," either... and that's for the best, as there's a reason why the WWF got even bigger and better *after* Russo left. Ratings-wise, the WWF's "golden age" came in 2000, after they tweaked the "Crash TV" concept to be a bit less frenetic and a bit more focused on incoming/rising talents like Angle, Jericho, the Radicalz, and the like who could actually tell a story within a match if you gave 'em time.
   
  Still, for a one night Nostalgia Run, the revival of 1998's WWF struck me as more entertaining than the prototypical WWE show of 2006, so I'll take it.
   
  The show did a 4.3 cable rating, by the way, which is the same as the week before, and another strong number after a brief decline. A new stat I'm gonna throw at you is RAW's 10-week Moving Average, which I think indicates the overall "health" of the show. That number stands at a 4.1 this week (which means Monday's show out-performed the moving average); also, just for reference, since I only just now added this stat to my spreadsheet, I'll point out that RAW's 10-week Moving Average has been at or above 4.0 for 22 consecutive week, dating back to late January, which is the first such string since the spring of 2002 (which is when the Brand Split happened, and caused RAW's ratings to dive by nearly a full point within a 2-month span). Since WrestleMania, I really do think RAW's been entertaining more weeks than not, so the upswing is not entirely undeserved.
   
  Back to focusing on just Monday's show, though, you can get all the results and details you want in my OO RAW Recap. Apparently, it's another good one, if you fine readers are to be believed. If nothing else, two of you wrote in to say that you thought "Sorry 'bout yer damned luck, Major Dad" was one of the funniest things you've read in a while, which makes me both proud (because I like being funny) and sad (because it was a stupid, off-the-cuff non sequitur, really, and I put more effort into things like rants about how Randy Orton is the "TAG Brand Bodyspray of Pro Wrestling"). Anyway: just read the recap. Even in weeks when RAW's good the OO RAW Recap is still gonna be better. Or your money back!
   
  
• And that takes us to Tuesday night, when I think ECW on Sci-Fi delivered a pretty amusing hour of TV. It's still not "ECW," in any reasonable sense, yet.... but it'll actually end up being better than SD! this week, I bet.
   
  Couple thoughts from the show....
   
  The last third of the hour was very WWE-centric, and that's something that really needs to change starting next week. I don't care if the muckity mucks want to credit John Cena with ECW's ratings or think that RAW cross-overs shouldn't totally go away, but if you can't start making ECW -- at its core -- feel like a different viewing experience than the same old RAW/SD!-style matches that have resulted in almost two straight years of me being unable to pick my top three matches of the year without hurting my brain or having to go back and re-read my own recaps. Seriously: doesn't anybody else remember fondly the days (as recently as 2003) when you'd see a match and instantly know "Whoa, that one's gonna be on the short list at the end of the year"? Instead of the past two years, when I have to go back, re-watch and re-read, and end up giving "Match of the Year" to a match that I thought was very good the first time around, but which didn't inspire me to pre-ordain it as a MotY candidate.
   
  To me, ECW's the best chance to get that Instant MotY Candidate Vibe back... you'll have quality stories, you'll have no hand-cuffs in the ring (once you void yourself of loads like Orton working on your show), and you'll still have a few WWE-caliber guys around to give you the Big Event Atmosphere you need. If this doesn't materialize, though? If in two months time, "ECW" is still serving up "WWE Style Main Events"? I really will start to get worried....
   
  But for this week, I don't mind so much. There *is*, afterall, a WWE PPV on Sunday that needs hyping, and which features a card made up of roughly half WWE vs. ECW match-ups. So for ECW to have a bit of WWE flavor on a night like that makes perfect sense. I'll cope. For now.
   
  Other stuff:
   
  The Tarot Card Babe at the start of the show was Shelley from OVW. I'm not exactly sure what the point is of a fortune teller who can only re-hash the past (and sort of see into the present), but whatever. Giving Shelley and over-the-top gimmick is for the best, since her idea of "acting" involves being pretty spastic, loud, and psycho (in a way that always struck me as more annoying than funny or scary). We'll see what they do with her.... and, ummmm, just take my word for it: you didn't get to see her best side.
   
  Sabu/Mamaluke was the kind of "squash match" I can get behind. Like I said about that one Samoa Joe squash a month or so back, if you do this right, they aren't "squash" matches, they are "showcase" matches. Fun and entertaining, even if the outcome is not in any doubt.
   
  Dreamer and Big Show? Hmmmm.... the part of me that likes Tommy wants to go all "jackoff" on you with how it sucks that he's being jobbed out to a "WWE Guy." But the more sensible part of me thinks that Tommy's gimmick has always been one that thrives on having the piss beaten out of him. More than one reader wrote in saying that they would have liked the segment better if Tommy had actually gotten a mic at the end and said "Thank you sir, may I have another?" (as he did to Sandman in the angle that essentially "made" him). Can't say I disagree, but I think they still sort of conveyed the idea by having Tommy smiling at the end of his beatdown. Perhaps a "slow burn" to Tommy doing an angle where he makes it his personal mission to get Big Show over with ECW fans as a hardcore wrestler, the same way as Funk and Foley did for him back in the day? Also: Show's Cobra Clutch Back Breaker is sweet, and will be a billion different kinds of over before too long.
   
  Macho Libre? Oh dear sweet christ, I didn't know whether to laugh or cry when I saw that. Because (1) it was a really, really fucking funny idea, but (2) I had it back on Friday night and feel as though I have been ripped off. I probably can't produce any proof of my Macho Libre riffing (at best, I could produce late 80's audio tapes of me and my brother's parody wrestling federation, which will prove that for over 15 years, some nascent part of my brain always thinks of Randy Savage as "The Nacho Man," which *should* convince you of how quickly and easily I'd come up with "Macho Libre" as the inverse parody)..... but take my word for it: Macho Libre was MINE before he was YOURS. Except my version was more me doing Randy Savage sayings in the Jack Black/Nacho voice, and it's entirely possible that Tony DeVito's version on Tuesday was actually funnier to a wrestling audience who know Savage more than they know Jack Black.
   
  So, Kelly the Exhibitionist spells her name with a "Y," afterall... oh well. I gotta admit: Heyman may almost have fallen ass backwards into creating a character I can't help but like. His casting here is so far off base that it becomes fetching in a round-about way. Kelly is so totally NOT a stripper type, no matter how she's glossed up, and you can tell. Kimona Wanalaia dancing atop the ECW Arena, she is not. Her gyrations aren't, like, awkward or anything, but they are sort of half-assed, and instead of making fake-sexy-faces, she's smiling and giggling 9/10ths of the time, as if to indicate "Christ, this is ridiculous, isn't it?".... and somehow, that's the sexiest thing of all. Then again, this comes from a man who honestly has no idea what the allure of strip clubs is (where you don't get any real personality or self-awareness-of-how-silly-this-is, just non-stop fake-sexy-faces), so it's entirely possible that your mileage may vary.
   
  And then, unless I'm forgetting something, the show went to the WWE-tastic closing 20 minutes. So I think I hit everything. Hey: it's only a one hour show. You can get all the details in the ECW Recap. This week, it's penned by former SD! Recapper Big Danny T. Next week, it'll be former SD! Recapper Jeff Snider. The week after, it might be me. I might have a new guy to throw into the mix (or might just save him back as my new Designated RAW Pinch-Hitter once a month or so, and keep this as a three-man rotation). Who knows? I figure as long as WWE hasn't decided yet what precise shape ECW is gonna take, I don't have to be in any rush to determine precisely which shape ECW Recappening will take around here.....
   
  
• The rating for ECW on Tuesday was a 2.3, which is down about a half-point from the week before. Even under optimal conditions, that's almost exactly what I would have expected. But Tuesday's conditions were less-than-optimal, as the decisive Game 6 of the NBA Finals did huge ratings for ABC.
   
  Two weeks back, the NBA Finals resulted in a lost of about 15% of viewers for UFC/TNA on Spike.... and percentage-wise, ECW's drop of 0.5 is roughly identical. Which *could* mean that ECW's ratings are gonna stabilize at a point higher than I guess last week (when I said I thought ECW would settle into the 1.8-2.3 range full time once the RAW cross-overs were scaled back).
   
  About the NBA Finals: good for Miami, I guess. Partly cuz it's fun anytime Phenomenal BungMonkey Mark Cuban is made to feel miserable.... but mostly because I *love* seeing Dwayne Wade getting all this love. Wade's a genuinely good guy (who got his full 4-year degree from a fine Jesuit Institute of Higher Learning) and a great ball player. And best of all: he is the University of Dayton's bitch! Wade had 1 win and 2 losses in his collegiate career against the Mighty Flyers of Dayton, including one memorable ESPN game when Marquette was in the top 10 in the nation, and Wade (an All American Senior by this point of his career) was completely shut down at the University of Dayton Arena en route to a thrilling overtime upset win by the Flyers. Wade's amazing performances and success can only mean one thing: the UD Flyers are, via the Dick Vitale Transitive Theory of Basketball, the reigning NBA Champions! God bless you, Dwayne Wade!
   
  
• For whatever it's worth: Randy Orton was *not* seriously injured on Tuesday night's show, no matter what it looked like as he half-assed his way through the last 3 minutes of the match. He didn't even go to the hospital, just got it quickly checked out by trainers backstage, and was told he'd be fine, so quit being such a drama queen, Sally.
   
  Should have been pretty obvious when he managed to muster up the strength to use his injured right arm to hit a better RKO on Angle than the shitty one he hit on Snitsky the night before.... for sake of being a purebred asshole, though, I would like to start a campaign to get "Orton Fears Lilian" signs on TV, given the way he pussed his way through the last few minutes of that match with what the trainers later determined was "not an injury." While Lilian got chucked off the ring by Charlie Haas, and sustained an actual injury, but was back on the job at the earliest possible juncture.
   
  I don't want to say I wish the news had been worse for Young Randall, but seeing as how I don't believe in God or Karma or Coincidences or anything else, I kinda have to put my faith in Dumb Luck to sort out cosmic injustices.... and if Dumb Luck had put Orton back on the shelf for another 4 months to learn the lesson that his not-quite-60-day suspension was supposed to teach him (but didn't), I swear to you that I wouldn't even have been able to fake being upset about it. And after about one week of feigning politeness, I'd just start coming out and saying how great it is to not have Orton befouling my TV screen anymore, too.
   
  Alas, Orton's mostly-fine, and will be at 95% when he steps into the ring against Angle on Sunday to chinlock his way through a WWE-style *** semi-main event match. Nee haw?
   
  
• In a policy flip from the week before, ECW aired LIVE at 10pm in the eastern time-zone. After the conclusion of the SD! tapings, they reset the arena and did the live telecast, which means that ECW headlined the SD! TV tapings. Heh. It's only fair, since ECW had more viewers than SD! last week...
   
  Anyway, if Sci-Fi's willing to let this happen every week, it creates a unique opportunity to get a more ECW-focused crowd for each show.... you probably noticed that they killed the house lights for ECW on Tuesday night. Some are wetting themselves because the "look" of the show was back to old ECW (and back to old, pre-1987 WWF, for that matter), where the arena is dark and the ring is spotlit. But the real purpose of doing that is the mask the fact that some percentage of fans (especially families with kids) are probably gonna get the hell out of dodge once SD! is over, leaving (a) only diehard ECW fans, and (b) a lot of empty seats. Why keep the arena lights up if all you're gonna see is the fact that one-third of the audience decided to go home and get to bed?
   
  The end result should be an audience more enthusiastic about the ECW product than if you hold the entire SD! crowd hostage by taping ECW *before* SD!.... marketed/handled correctly, this could solve more than a few problems. Just make the announcement during the 15 minute change-over that fans can now feel free to move down to better seats (make it a de facto General Admission thing to fill up the seats closest to the ring/cameras), and you'll get a more intimate/intense ECW-style atmosphere.
   
  It still won't be as good as my idea of the ECW-fan-only "student section," but it'll help. [By the way, to those who wrote in to say "I love your Student Section idea, but WWE would never do it, because those ECW fans would shit all over and ruin the SD! tapings," I respond that I don't think it would really be that bad, since ECW fans would be saving their energy for the ECW tapings and not getting all worked up over the petty act of "ruining" SD!. Plus, whatever things they *did* crap on might just motivate SD!'s creative crew to make things better.]
   
  
• The new guy who came in and interrupted Kelly's strip-tease was a guy named Mike Knox, who is currently training down in Georgia's DSW and... well, let's just say he wouldn't have been *my* first call-up, but what do I know? He doesn't suck or anything, but hasn't struck me as having even an ounce of "it" in any tapes I've seen....
   
  
• Hoh boy have people flown off the handle with regards to the announcement that Test is coming to ECW.... jackoff sentiment seems to indicate that this is the Worst Thing Ever, and it proves that ECW isn't really ECW, it's just WWE Lite.
   
  Well, I'd like to refer you to your favorite interweb archive. Go find my columns from 1999 or so, and then into 2000.... because the Test most people remember is a Test who got massively dicked by the WWF and never got a fair shake. But the Test I remember was a promising big man with enough in-ring ability and personality to be a star.... and then what should have been his break-out feud (when Stephanie left him to marry HHH in storylines) turned into Vince McMahon swooping in and playing the role that SHOULD have been Test's. His career never really recovered after that. The fact that he got unmotivated to do anything but get a few licks in on Stacy Keibler didn't help his cause in later years.
   
  Now, does Test scream "ECW" to me? Of course not.... but the guy's got more going for him than a lot of fans might think, especially if they're relatively new fans who started watching in 2000 or later. He's as good a candidate for a Heyman Make-Over as anyone.
   
  We've already got Kevin "Mordecai" Fertig coming in to get one of those, and I'm happy about that given what I saw of him in OVW (before WWE completely screwed him with that shitty gimmick).... now all we need to do is get Matt Morgan back under contract, cuz that guy was 320 pounds of nothing but potential, and between Heyman doing the creative work and a chance to eventually do a money feud with ECW's Version of Big Show, Morgan might get "made" by a run through ECW.
   
  
• Anybody who's waiting for WWE/ECW to solve the problem with the Sandman's entrance music? Well, stop.... it ain't getting solved. It might get fixed with a different song or an "Enter Sandman" knock-off, but there's no Metallica coming any time soon. 
   
  The reason why is that it would cost WWE roughly one million dollars per month to license the track for arena/TV use (and it's unclear if that even includes the right to include the song on DVD/home video releases). Which would mean that Metallica would be making more money in one month than 98% of WWE's employees (and "independent contractors") make in one year. Can't exactly fault WWE for making that decision....
   
  I really wish that this was a case where I could re-inforce my fantasy of Lars and James sitting around in a room trying to figure out ways to be even bigger self-important dickheads when it comes to "protecting their music," but I really doubt that WWE's negotiations involved anybody other than Metallica representatives three-degrees-of-separation away from the actual band. Still, it's fun to pretend, and if you ask me, it should be a no-brainer that Heyman/ECW turn this into an angle where Sandman admits that he lost his entrance music due to a financial dispute with the band, and you turn Metallica into "heels" and in so doing, you trick the fans into knee-jerk-liking whatever new crap-ass theme song Sandman picks.
   
  Trust me: between the fact that Metallica hasn't done anything all that cool since I was in junior high (the Black Album) and the fact that ECW fans tend towards the assholish (you know, the type of people who probably laughed and laughed at the South Park episode that essentially did the same thing of making Lars and James look like twits), this would almost certainly work like a charm.
   
  
• Continuing with what should be my final ECW Bullet Point of the column.... the planned ECW TV Taping at the ECW Arena on July 4 has been moved to the Wachovia Center (which is what they're calling the biggest arena in the city these days). RAW/SD! are doing a supertaping at the same building the day before.
   
  Huh.
   
  I would have thought it'd be a no-brainer to return to the old ECW Arena to give that show a bit of a special feel, and also because it's silly to think you'll fill up a 20,000 seat arena on the Fourth of July. Especially one day after you've just run the building. Maybe Sci-Fi is scared than an ECW Arena crowd might be too foul-mouthed? Honestly, I can't wait until ECW on Sci-Fi is taped in front of a real ECW crowd, and Sci-Fi Network gets booed/chanted-against like it's the biggest heel on the show..... and then they have to just sit back and take it, because ECW is also giving them double the ratings of anything else on their schedule. It's the exact opposite of how ECW had to mind its manners with TNN back in the day, since they were a fringe product delivering pretty average ratings, and had to be more subversive (the "Cyrus" character) in terms of how they voiced their displeasure with the Network.
   
  Anyway, the chance to recap the ECW TV show from ECW Arena was something I'd been looking forward to, but now this announcement makes me wonder if I won't pass on the job, afterall. We'll see what Fourth of July brings, I guess.
   
  
• John Cena was on Conan last night.... and I'd have to call it a Gigantic Miss from a wrestling perspective (there was but one half-assed mention of Sunday's PPV, and the one opportunity Cena had to talk about his match/opponent, he dismissed Sabu by referring to him as "The Genie" so that he could move on to telling some story about his affinity for strip clubs).
   
  From an overall entertainment perspective, I wouldn't call it a hit, either. More like a foul-ball with two strikes, at best. This is the second time I've seen Cena on a talk show (the other one was with Kimmel, I think), and I just can't shake the notion that the guy's trying too hard. There's not a natural bone in the body of the version of Cena that shows up on my TV, it seems, be it for WWE or for late night talk shows.
   
  Then again, the Rock's early TV appearances were like that, too, and then he finally settled down and started to be funny (Rock's appearance on Conan 18 months ago still rates as one of the funniest things I've ever seen, late-night-interview-wise). So maybe it's possible that even the cockiest of "superstars" still get cases of the nerves when they break out of their comfort zone?
   
  Cuz it's either that or the "real" John Cena is just an obnoxious yutz.
   
  
• TNA's title situation will be addressed tonight on Impact. I, sadly, know what they decided to do, so mostly I'm just hoping that Kevin Nash gets to beat up some more midgets, or something. Lord knows that since the Reds played this afternoon (taking yet another "L"), I'll probably end up with nothing better to do than watch the show, so I want them to give me something I can sink my teeth into!
   
  And on that note, I do need to be wrapping this up. Full, multi-trOOp Vengeance PPV Recap is coming at you tomorrow, so stop on back for that, folks. See you then!