Sawyer Paul's Blog, page 189

The Observer is wrong all the time

I've been on a bit of a quest to point out how awful "official" wrestling journalism is. I've been on this quest for years, but only lately have I really stepped it up. From here on, follow the tag "awfulwrestlingjournalism" and you'll see posts about exactly that. All of the posts are currently about the F4W, all titled "Figure Four Weekly is Terrible," and I'll be adding to that. But we'll also be adding "The Observer is Wrong All the Time," "The Torch needs to be put out," and "Let's all write copy like TMZ." I hope you enjoy these new features.

If you're wondering where you've heard "The Observer is wrong all the time," before, it's because I wrote an article titled exactly that four months ago on the un-defunct Footnotes of Wrestling. Here's a snippet, with the Observer's bit double-blocked:

The lesson is that while a surprise is nice, and worrying about a singular rating is kind of silly in a business of 52 weeks a year, but blowing what should have been the best rating through lack of promotion is a lesson about surprises.

This run-on sentence was brought to you by The Observer being angry at itself for not getting the scoop. Also, only The Observer could look at Monday's episode of Raw and think, "If only they hadn't screwed it up so badly."

But how has the Observer been doing lately? Well, let's check up on them. Quotes are from the 6/13 issue of the Observer.

Raw in March 2010 went head-to-head with Impact which appeared to take away about .2 ratings points, which is the entire difference and then some year-to-year

.2 ratings points could be from just about anything. .2 could be the number of people who had something better to do that night.

**Raw went head-to-head on Mondays with Impact which played a large part in being lower last year than this year.

You just said there was a .2 difference. That's hardly a "large part."

The one thing notable about all three months is that Smackdown on Syfy is doing a better rating than it did on MyNetwork. That's with it clearly being the "B" show.

I love it when things do ratings. It's like when people do television, or when athletes do sports. Or when Meltzer does sentence fragments.

The idea that he [The Rock] was back made wrestling cool, and in a sense, once it became clear that he's not around for a while, wrestling fell back to the level it was in January of being overall down in most categories.

If the Rock does anything it's make things cool.

Raw on 6/6 did a 3.21 rating and 4.96 million viewers. The number has to be considered disappointing since there was no NBA game against it, had a stronger than usual lead-in with a higher rated Tough Enough, and Steve Austin and Vince McMahon were both on the show, with Austin refereeing in the main event.

Do the writers of The Observer really believe that in 2011 there is a pocket of people skipping the show unless Steve Austin and Vince McMahon show up?

Following this is approximately 400,000 words explaining who beat who this week but not one explaining why, how, or if any of the matches were worth checking out. Seriously, if you've never seen this, The Observer reports on international shows like it's horse racing:

6/7 Tokyo Differ Ariake (New Japan): Kyosuke Mikami d Hiromu Takahashi, Mascara Dorada b Gedo, Taka Michinoku b Daisuke Sasaki, Fujita Junior Hayato b TJP, Jado b Kenny Omega, Hirooki Goto & Tomoaki Honma b Hiroshi Tanahashi & Hiroyoshi Tenzan, Davey Richards b Koji Kanemoto, Kota Ibushi b Great Sasuke, Prince Devitt b Tiger Mask, Ryusuke Taguchi b Kushida\

Now that's a show you've gotta see!

The Figure Four Weekly is Terrible

With essentially a six-hour UFC event (I attended live), a three-hour TNA PPV, a three-hour Raw, plus all the usual TV, no room for anything except reviews this week.

There's also no time to treat the legitimate sport and the fringe theatre any differently. Let's all just report on it like it's the same thing. In no way could that possible paint one as less important than the other.

in case the time comes that I have to write another book about a company that ran itself out of business due to sheer incompetence.

There's no time in this newsletter to explain why the people who, through "sheer incompetence" are all still employed to this day.

So without further ado, because there is no space of ado, here we go.

There's also no time to copyedit.

[UFC] Big pop for the start of the opening round. Well, among the 1,500 or so fans in the building to start this show.

There's no time to comment on the fact that this UFC PPV seems to have drawn TNA house show numbers.

All on the feet early.

Still no time to copyedit.

[TNA] was literally all down here from this instant.

There's no time to consider whether or not this was true.

And I don't want to hear that this isn't TNA's fault because Foley is finished with the company, because the reason he's finished with the company is 100 percent due to TNA's handling of him.

There's no time to check Mick Foley's blog to see that even he said this wasn't really the case.

Anderson, I should note, the number-one contender for the World Title, had a sucker in his mouth.

There's no time to wonder why. Let's just call it stupid and move on.

Everyone was booing so presumably Anderson is a heel now.

There's no time to point out that Anderson has been playing a selfish villain for three to four months at this point.

They've used this bullshit line for years, and meanwhile I don't remember a single champion ever having any power of any kind.

There's also no time to remember that over the years HHH, Randy Orton, Kurt Angle, or Hulk Hogan, all guys who used the "World Title means power" story to their strategic advantage. There's also no time to appreciate that for once, a good guy is using that idea for supposed good.

Tara & Mickie James vs. Zombie Girl Angelina & Winter. This match. Just everything wrong with it.

There's no time for proper sentence structure.

Shelley tried to superkick Anarchia and accidentally hit Storm, allowing Anarchia to get the pin. Yes, their FIRST MATCH EVER AS A TEAM and Shelley fucked up and they're teasing a break-up.

There's also no time to notice that since it was their first match, maybe they weren't that good as a team, and that they were not in fact hinting a breakup. There's no time to apologize for this comment when things worked out fine on PPV.

[About Jarrett] Hell of a promo.

There's no time to go back three paragraphs and remove that "was literally all down here from this instant" line.

[Raw] Out came Truth to spoil the no fun.

There's no time for no fun.

Riley fired up, landed shot after shot, then Piper school-boy'd him and Riley counted the pin. Place went nuts. It's almost too bad they're almost certain to beat Riley on Sunday, because he's going to get over if they keep booking him like this. God knows we can't have that.

There's no time to check that there's only one person likely to beat Riley (making the "they're" incorrect), or that perhaps they are actually trying to turn Riley into something, or that Alex Riley hasn't had a meaningful match in his entire career and going fifteen minutes and losing to The Miz on Sunday doesn't mean that they don't believe in him.

A million girls vs. a million girls. Like every heel on both rosters vs. every babyface on both rosters.

There's no time to remember the names of girls because girls are all the same, but we have to waste time remembering every UFC guy on a forgettable show even though they look way, way more alike than any of these women.

I love how CM Punk can pin Cena but there is just about no chance in hell that Truth is ever going to. And Truth is the one challenging for the title.

There's still no time to write proper sentences, no time to point out that Punk has only pinned Cena in non-title matches, and no time to suppose that Truth has just a good a shot against Cena as any other guy who's faced Cena on PPV (Ask Edge, Sheamus, Wade Barrett, The Big Show, and any number of guys who have beaten him when bad writers on the internet insisted otherwise).

Fair to Flair Show No. 5: The First Quarterly

Fair to Flair Show No. 5: The First Quarterly:

The fifth episode of the Fair to Flair podcast is all about the first issue of the Quarterly.

It's me and Mitch gushing over how great the issue turned out, because it did. 

nevver:HuffPo

nevver:

HuffPo

From NY Mag:While Canuck fans were expressing their...

From NY Mag:

While Canuck fans were expressing their disappointment about losing the Stanley Cup last night via the burning of cars and smashing of windows, one couple decided it was also the perfect time and place for a spontaneous expression of love.

It might not have been real, but I don't care. Amazing photo.

Security.

Security.

laughingsquid:If You Want To Achieve Greatness, Stop Asking...

laughingsquid:

If You Want To Achieve Greatness, Stop Asking For Permission

Hitting the Mark: Is anyone better than CM Punk?

Hitting the Mark: Is anyone better than CM Punk?:

Austin may be to Punk what Hart was to Austin.

Aggressive Reading #4

Once a week, I'm going to list a few good reads that fit within the realm of what I'm trying to do here. If you've got Instapaper, follow me (ksawyerpaul) and you'll get a lot of these early, along with a bunch of others, because Instapaper is the thing I use most on the internet (shocking).

I Want It All To Be Kind of Shitty: An Interview with Johannes Göransson (interview)

 I'm infatuated with the way Art and the Body interact, and the role of violence in that interaction. I think again that came from The Widow Party. I first wrote that play while recovering from a car crash. Everything was a little hazy, a little achy, a little jammed up. I watched a documentary about the 1960s (the widows are the black one and the white one from the assassinations of this era). And reading about our wars and so on. So the body was deeply involved with art and violence from the start: in my own body, hammered, watching acts done to other bodies. And then seeing this piece actually performed was so thrilling and unnerving; the way these violent motions and actions were brought into/onto the bodies of the actors, of the audience.

Each Reader is an Author, A Maker of Meaning by Maria Bustillos (argument)

Here's my question: didn't Barthes prefigure all this back in 1968, when he explained that "it is really critical readers who decide and thus determine what a piece of writing means" (to borrow Wallace's decoction)? Barthes wrote The Death of the Author not in an attempt to stop anybody from writing books, but in order to improve our understanding of the real workings of literature. My observations regarding the Expert have the same intentions.

Press X for Beer Bottle: On L.A. Noire by Tim Bissell (review essay)

(At an early point in the game, Phelps visits an old movie studio and sees a row of huge, gorgeous, discarded matte paintings lined up against a wall. It is as though L.A. Noire's creators are saying, "You had a good run, movies. It's over. Now stand aside.") A work of literature, by contrast, builds its worlds more stingily, via an active collaboration with the reader. Open-world video games present us with what might be the most emphatically four-walled storytelling medium human beings have yet devised. In an open-world game, everything has to be modeled, named, and built — every gun shop and police station and park and landmark and apartment building and sidewalk and street and hydrant and garbage can and hill and shrub.

Mind Control & The Internet by Sue Halpern (journalism)

Early this April, when researchers at Washington University in St. Louis reported that a woman with a host of electrodes temporarily positioned over the speech center of her brain was able to move a computer cursor on a screen simply by thinking but not pronouncing certain sounds, it seemed like the Singularity—the long-standing science fiction dream of melding man and machine to create a better species—might have arrived. 

"Dance like you're stamping on a human face forever, love like you've been in a serious car crash..."

"Dance like you're stamping on a human face forever, love like you've been in a serious car crash that minced the front of your brain, stab like no one can arrest you, and live like there's no such thing as God."

- Warren Ellis (via @katiewest)