Sawyer Paul's Blog, page 195

Bryan tells me we have all a provider and such. He's diving head first into this while I'm just hoping our enthusiasm lasts for at least 3 shows. He also says he wants to wait until we have a few shows done before putting it up on iTunes. I've been thinkin

Yeah, would love to have you on the show. Send me an email and we'll organize an interview. 

Bryan tells me we have all a provider and such. He's diving head first into this while I'm just hoping our enthusiasm lasts for at least 3 shows. He also says he wants to wait until we have a few shows done before putting it up on iTunes. I've been thinkin

Yeah, would love to have you on the show. Send me an email and we'll organize an interview. 

Bryan tells me we have all a provider and such. He's diving head first into this while I'm just hoping our enthusiasm lasts for at least 3 shows. He also says he wants to wait until we have a few shows done before putting it up on iTunes. I've been thinkin

Yeah, would love to have you on the show. Send me an email and we'll organize an interview. 

Bryan tells me we have all a provider and such. He's diving head first into this while I'm just hoping our enthusiasm lasts for at least 3 shows. He also says he wants to wait until we have a few shows done before putting it up on iTunes. I've been thinkin

Yeah, would love to have you on the show. Send me an email and we'll organize an interview. 

Bryan tells me we have all a provider and such. He's diving head first into this while I'm just hoping our enthusiasm lasts for at least 3 shows. He also says he wants to wait until we have a few shows done before putting it up on iTunes. I've been thinkin

Yeah, would love to have you on the show. Send me an email and we'll organize an interview. 

Bryan tells me we have all a provider and such. He's diving head first into this while I'm just hoping our enthusiasm lasts for at least 3 shows. He also says he wants to wait until we have a few shows done before putting it up on iTunes. I've been thinkin

Yeah, would love to have you on the show. Send me an email and we'll organize an interview. 

Pictured above is the Fair to Flair Master Feed. What...

Pictured above is the Fair to Flair Master Feed. What we've got here is a catch 22 of podcast design. 

General wisdom is that a regular podcast feed shouldn't have the title of the podcast at the beginning of every episode. This creates a list of titles like "Aggressive Art - 22 - Randy Savage." This can be difficult for a potential subscriber on, say, the iTunes store or the iPhone, which only gives so many characters for the title. So most podcasters are like myself, where the title of each individual podcast begins with the number and title of the episode (or just the episode). This is also "cleaner," in the eyes of many. 

The problem arises when several podcasts who abide by this general wisdom hook up and do a Master feed, like ours. Jason, Thomas, and myself don't put the podcast title in our episode title. Razor does. In the list, Razor's podcasts are the only ones you can identify right away. 

On the flip side, you wouldn't necessarily want to change it just for the Master feed, because the people subscribed to the individual feeds are likely happy the way they are. You'd also lose that small real estate in iTunes summaries (The Zune software, pictured above, does not have this problem, but the Zune itself has it just as bad). 

Of course, if you're subscribed to the Master feed and want to get everything, this likely doesn't bother you too much. But if it does bother you, let me know. We're always trying to make things better. 

Should Randy Savage be put in the WWE Hall of Fame next...

Should Randy Savage be put in the WWE Hall of Fame next year?

"Yes, but only of Rock is not because he shouldn't play second fiddle."

Wrestling Journalism at its finest.

The Figure Four Weekly is awful, May 17

New thing I'm doing. All quotes are pulled from the weekly newsletter of Figure Four Weekly, by Bryan Alvarez. I'd link to it, but then you'd have to give the man money.

Every year there is a TVN study of sports fans over the age of 12, basically asking what people's favorite sports are, their age, education level, family income and the like. Pro wrestling did pretty horribly, Dave Meltzer noted.

I'm shocked that pro wrestling did horribly in a survey about sports.

the thing that stuck out to me most, even more than the overall decline in interest, was the massive change in interest level in terms of economic and educational status. As compared to last year, avid fans who were high school dropouts increased 9.1 percent.

I'm shocked idiots think wrestling is a sport.

Despite the pervasive use of derogatory terms like "marks" and the constant desire to work people, the fact of the matter is that for most of pro-wrestling's history, up until probably ten years ago, the workers actually gave the so-called marks significantly more credit than they do today.

I'm shocked that wrestlers used to try harder to pretend to be real back when they were tricking people into thinking it was real.

The last ten years, at least on a major league level between TNA and WWE, have been a progressively-expanding logical disaster, and unfortunately, when your average person thinks of pro-wrestling in 2011, they think of those two companies, not ROH or DGUSA or Chikara or mid-'00s Ohio Valley Wrestling where the bookers still did their best to have their storylines make some sort of sense.

I'm shocked that the popular wrestling brands in America are the ones with national television deals. I'm also shocked that those are the two wrestling brands that successfully promote serial storytelling over pretending that everything is real. I'm super shocked that people generally prefer that.

I use the term "storyline" all the time, but that term is preposterous nowadays when used in reference to pro-wrestling. Unless a guy like Shawn Michaels or Chris Jericho is put in charge of creating their own storylines, storylines don't really exist anymore.

I'm shocked Bryan Alverez has never heard of CM Punk, The Miz, or Jerry Lawler.

A true storyline has a beginning, a middle and an end. I literally cannot think of a single storyline in TNA in the last ten years that really had a beginning, a middle and an end.

I'm shocked Alverez hasn't considered the fact that TNA is operating under a different set of rules than other wrestling companies.

Ironically, the anti-intellectualism that we see with WWE today is probably tied to Vince McMahon's growing anti-wrestling stance. He got rid of wrestling bookers, people who had great minds for wrestling, and brought in writers.

I'm shocked that a wrestling fan thinks writers are bad people.

Being a hardcore wrestling fan was actually a DETRIMENT to you if you were trying to get hired to work for WWE, a concept that would be mind-boggling to your average person.

I would be shocked if an average person actually thought this.

WWE is never going to be Cirque du Soleil. But you know what Cirque du Soleil is? It's a glorified circus with super high production values. Nobody looks at Cirque as an anti-intellectual endeavor attended only by the dregs of society. It's a pretty fucking big deal, especially in Vegas, they travel all over the world touring, men and women of all ages love it, and it's THE CIRCUS.

I'm shocked at the lack of irony in this paragraph.

You will never be this happy.

You will never be this happy.