Sports news and wrestling

First, a bit of wrestling talk. It seems Impact was on at 8 pm tonight instead of its usual 9 pm slot. I'm pretty sure this was done because of the NCAA Championship game on tonight at 9 (more on that later). I remember now they talked about this numerous times during last week's episode, but of course I forgot. So I only wound up catching the last half of Impact this week. Too bad. I caught the tail end of what looked to have been a doozy of a ladder match between Kurt Angle and Mr. Anderson.

I'm having a serious issue with the direction the Knockout Division is taking lately. Apparently tonight Tara, Daffney, Velvet Skye, and Angelina Love competed in a feast or fired type of match where each had to grab a case suspended above the ring (I missed this part of the show). At the end of the show, they each opened their cases to see what was inside. Now, in a standard feast or fired match, three of the cases will contain various title shots and one will have a pink slip. This match was slightly different. Tara's Knockout Title went into one case, an open contract to set up any match went into another, Tara's pet spider Poison (which had been stolen by Daffney) went into the third, and the final case contained an order for that woman to go to the ring and perform a strip tease.

Angelina got the case with the belt, making her the new Knockout Champ. Tara got Poison back. Velvet got the open contract, which she immediately used to set up a match between her and Angelina (more on that in a minute), and Daffney was ordered to strip. Okay, so here's my dilemma. I think Daffney's smoking hot. Hell, all the Knockouts are really hot, but Daffney's my second favorite (after Christy Hemme), so the idea of her stripping is appealing to me. However, I've always had huge respect for the Knockout Division because they're mostly all very talented wrestlers. Unlike WWE's Divas, these women can really put on a good show and don't have to rely on/resort to the kind of stuff WWE used to always do, like bra and panty matches or lesbian situations. Skin for the sake of skin, basically. In my opinion, TNA and the Knockout Division are better than that, they're above that, and as much as I wouldn't mind seeing skin on those lovely ladies, I really feel like it would take something away from them to have them go that route.

So Daffney reluctantly goes to the ring, and old cliched stripper music starts playing. She takes off her tiny hat and makes some angry faces at the camera, very obviously not wanting to strip, and starts to slowly pull her shoulder straps down when she's attacked by Lacey Von Erich, who's in a robe and lingerie. Lacey beats down Daffney and proceeds to do a strip tease herself. I guess she just wanted the attention. The situation proceeds to breakdown, of course, and all the Knockouts start fighting for various reasons. This is when Velvet calls out Angelina. Thing is, though, she never actually says anything about their match being for the title, like I assumed she would. She challenges Angelina to something she called a leather and lace match. Now, I don't know exactly what that entails, so I might be way off base here, but it sounds dangerously close to a bra and panties match to me. I just don't want to see the Knockout Division become a t&a side show (no pun intended). They're better than that.

Moving on briefly to the world of actual sports. Like I mentioned earlier, the final game of the NCAA Basketball Tournament was tonight. Duke vs. Butler. I missed some of the beginning (what overlapped with Impact) but watched the rest. It was actually a really good, competitive game. Duke won in the end. I've never been a big fan of Duke, and I was pretty disappointed to see that after all the upsets and buzzer beaters in this tournament, a number one seed still won it all. Oh well.

Also, today was Opening Day for my Cincinnati Reds (I capitalized it because it's basically a city-wide holiday in Cincinnati)! I'm very excited to see baseball back, but the Reds got spanked pretty hard by the hated Cardinals. I guess it could've been worse, though. It could've been the Cubs. Here's to hoping the Reds can have a decent season!

Saints steal the Super Bowl

I want to try and be brief here. I know there are a lot of hardcore fans out there with blogs who can dissect this game a lot better than I can. I only have one big problem with the game. At the start of the second half, the Saints kicked an onside kick! What the hell, Saints? So not cool. They have a coin toss at the beginning of the game for a reason. Each half, one team is supposed to get a chance to start with the ball. The Saints took that chance away from the Colts and started both halves with the ball. This was the first time in Super Bowl history that a team kicked an onside kick before the fourth quarter.

Now, I'm not saying things would have been different otherwise. The Saints played well and proved that they were for real. A part of me is very happy to see them get a championship. But they also proved that they didn't mind using cheap tricks and thuggery to get it done. I lost a lot of respect for the Saints, a team I used to really like, after this week. First came the talk of trying to end Peyton Manning's career, the talk of purposefully taking penalties in order to lay hits on Manning, and now comes the trickery in the Super Bowl.

I understand that they did nothing against the rules, but it just came off dirty to me. Very much disrespectful towards their opponents.

So now I guess I just get to wait for baseball season to start. I don't follow the NBA or NHL closely enough to care about what happens with them, though I will try to follow their respective finals. March Madness will be fun to watch, as always, but baseball is what I'm really waiting for. I just hope my Reds can give me a good season.

Colts, you'll get your shot again next year. Just remember, Colts management, that you threw away all those streaks earlier this season in hopes of winning it all. And Bengals, you better be practicing for next season, too! I want another division title!

Sorry if this post rambled a little, I'm just pretty miffed about this game.

My history: The web, sports, and anime

Since these last three sections are all smaller than the others, I've decided to combine them into one post and get it all out of the way at once.

The web: My dad bought our first PC in the early-mid '90s. At that time, there was no home internet service, at least not where we lived. My time "online" was spent connecting to local BBSes, or Bulletin Board Systems. For those of you who don't remember or are too young, these were basically like websites, except you hosted them on your own computer and each individual visitor had to dial in to you to access them. This meant most BBSes could only have one user at a time. But while there you could exchange files with the owner (called a SysOp, or Systems Operator), post on the message board, play text or ANSI graphics based games, or chat on bigger BBSes that had more than one dial in line. I used to really love those old text based games. Especially one called Legend of the Red Dragon. A lot of different people played it together, though usually only one person could play at a time, and you fought monsters and gained experience and such, and fought each other too. It was an MMORPG way before such a thing even existed.

Eventually we signed up for the CompuServe online service, which was basically one gigantic, nationwide BBS, but with graphics and images. It, like its main competitor America Online, was the precursor to the modern internet in the home. I used to do a lot of chatting there. It was good times. I still think of some of my old chat buddies from those days. I haven't heard from any of them in more than ten years. I know one of them died. Very sad, he was a good dude. RIP, The X Guy.

Of course, online services eventually went the way of the dinosaur, and straight up internet service became commonplace in the home. The days of ICQ and Napster had arrived, followed by YouTube and blogging, and here we are now.

Sports: I hated most sports growing up. Baseball I loved. Everyone in Cincinnati loves baseball. You have to. It's in your blood if you grew up here. No one from Cincinnati could possibly complain about listening to Marty Brennaman call Reds games on the radio. But I used to hate football. Mainly because when I was very young, I didn't have a TV of my own, and when football was on I couldn't play any video games. This meant every Sunday, all Sunday, all winter long. But I eventually came to love football. The Bengals making the Superbowl in the '88-'89 season probably helped a lot.

I've since come to enjoy watching most sports, though I only actively follow sports that I have a home team in. That means just MLB, NFL, and NCAA basketball (I would follow college football too, but I think the BCS is absolutely stupid). Living in Indiana as I do now, I sometimes try to follow the NBA, but my transplant home team the Pacers just don't mean as much to me as a Cincinnati team would.

Aside from mainstream team sports, I also like to watch the occasional MMA fight, as well as the Olympics and action sports events like the X Games.

Anime: I had seen some anime shows growing up without actually realizing that they were anything different from normal, American cartoons. I'm talking about Voltron and Dragon Ball. I got my first real taste of anime while at a Star Trek convention. At one of the vendor booths, some guy had a TV set up and was playing Record of Lodoss War. I remember seeing it and thinking it looked like Final Fantasy come to life, and being severely impressed by the animation and art style. I started trying to track down whatever anime I could, which in those days was not easy. The only luck I got came from the occasional anime movie on the Sci-fi Channel (which was rare) and a weekly anime broadcast on a low-power local TV station. This station wasn't on our cable, so I had to watch it over the air, and I only barely picked it up. But every Saturday night I tuned in and put up with the static to get my anime fix.

Of course, you probably know what happened next. Cartoon Network started playing Dragon Ball Z, and it blew up. They capitalized on its popularity by airing more and more anime shows (some of which, like Tenchi Muyo, became some of my very favorite anime shows ever). Anime became readily available, if still a bit expensive. And then American cartoon makers started using anime-influenced art styles in their shows, and hundreds of anime lookalike kids shows started popping up, and anime became a huge trend. And all of us who had worked our tails off in the '90s to find anime to watch became kind of disenfranchised by the whole thing. Don't get me wrong, I still love anime, but I'm never happy when something I really love becomes so mainstream.