Month: February 2015

February 28, 2015 /

Friends, I have discovered a subliminal message on Smackdown this week. Remember the email Rusev received from Vladimir Putin? I took a look at the Russian for my own nerdy purposes and compared it to Lana’s translation. Her translation of the email was more or less accurate except for one small phrase. And what a phrase it is! Here is the sentence in Russian: Как президент великой державы, Матери-России, я с гордостью хочу выразить вам…

February 28, 2015 /

I’ve taken a look at the analytics. When people hear Rusev udrya Rusev machka they hear udrya as mudria, kidrya, pudrya, and budrya. An impressive number of hits to my earlier writings suggest that the search engine gods have deemed me an internet expert on this topic. I couldn’t be more proud. In a month and a half my original Rusev post has more than 200 hits. For some nerd’s literary wrestling blog that’s less…

February 25, 2015 /

I deleted a post from earlier today about Sting that didn’t make sense. I still think I have a point to make about how his whole gimmick is stupid, but I can’t seem to make things grok. I tried to write it again, but I ended up sucked down into a weird childhood memory vortex and had to abort the mission. I did, however, write a lovely paragraph right in the middle of that mayhem:…

February 25, 2015 /

Oh, how pleased I am to have new material for Quoth Bray Wyatt! Months have passed since he has said anything worth writing down, but this one is sublime in its simplicity. Here’s what he said at Fastlane when he entered in a coffin to Undertaker’s music, and soon I’ll transcribe for the annals his promo from RAW. In the past his monologues have smacked of Shakespeare and Tennessee Williams — what does this one…

February 24, 2015 /

True kayfabe is a rare bird at this stage of history on wrestling’s timeline. The fact that it is a scripted performance is now firmly a “no duh”. Or maybe a “yeah, and?” We all think about the meta in wrestling now, considering it in terms of storyline, product, and character development. We are completely aware that we cheer and boo for quality of performance, intensity of presence, and for surprises we weren’t expecting. It’s…

February 19, 2015 /

I’m seriously working on push ups; I want to master this as a yoga pose. But DDP challenges his yogis to do them in a most difficult sequence: set up in plank pose, then take the push up down on a three count, then hold for three hovering just off the floor — and here’s the hard part — then back up on a three count! I can almost never pull this off. I can…

February 15, 2015 /

I seem to have become a go-to internet source for the thing Rusev says at the beginning of his entrance music, and the posts I’ve written about Lana’s general linguistic curiosities get a fair number of hits as well. But it turns out I have neglected to translate for you, not-so-gentle readers, the thing Lana always says in Russian as she begins her promos. I was perusing the google search terms that have brought people…

February 11, 2015 /

After I tweeted my last post On Heels That Should Be Faces and Faces That Should Be Heels, Twitter user @StigsVegCousin asked me to explain how I would book a Cena/Rusev double turn — Cena to heel and Rusev to face — which I alluded to in my post. I appreciated the challenge because really I’m just a chick who shoots my mouth off over here, throwing out my literary ideas about wrestling to see…

February 10, 2015 /

Is anybody doing analytics on the number of cell phone lighter apps people are putting up for Bray Wyatt? Some nights it’s stunning. Doesn’t this count for something? Bray Wyatt is amazing. Can we set him up on some kind of sensible narrative trajectory? Couldn’t he aim toward a Jake the Snake-style babyface run? I remember the Jake the Snake of my junior high years was the same exact crazy dark madman as babyface or…

February 4, 2015 /

We call Mizdow a stunt double, but in fact isn’t how he achieves his character more like that of a silent film leading man? Think of Mizdow’s exaggerated gestures, facial expressions, and voiceless speaking as you watch Charley Chase in Mighty Like a Moose from 1926: If you can’t hang in there the entire 22 minutes, drop in around 15:00 and follow the build-up to the scene where he pretends he’s two of himself, one…