I always knew that pro wrestling was fiction. I did not think it was Science fiction.

A long time ago few pro wrestlers were athletes. Now they are athletes, but they are not really wrestlers.

ECW is owned by WWF which has a contract with USA which is owned by NBC which owns the SciFi channel.

Thus the appearance of ECW on SciFi.

Samuel Beckett used to drive Andre the Giant to school when the Giant was... smaller. He was too big to fit on the bus.

I hear he's got a posse now.

THIS... is a proper wrestler.
http://www.britishwrestling.cwc.net/haystac1.jpg
Giant Haystacks (http://www.britishwrestling.cwc.net/haystack.htm)




THIS... is also a proper wrestler.
http://caldernet.org.uk/images/stories/famouspeople/bigd.gif
Big Daddy (http://caldernet.org.uk/calderdale_in_general/famous_people/big_daddy_1930-1997_.html)


Two big fat bastards eating 80 meat pies for dinner then bouncing off each other's bellies. That's what wrestling's all about. But you Americans had to come along with your baby-oil-covered pansies of dubious sexual orientation and ruin everything. As usual.

Not one of your preening narcissists would last 3 minutes with either of these men. And they've both been dead 10 years.

Does anyone remember the "promise" of subscription television? Closed-circuit TV was already in use in courtrooms and universities forty years ago. A huge network of coaxial cable was envisioned that would bring it into our very homes.

How exciting! No more one-size-fits-all TV with a mere 12 VHF channels and a few UHF channels for areas without a lot of hills. We would no longer all have to be slaves to the tastes of the masses. We would no longer all have to be slaves to the advertising industry.

We would pay a subscription fee and order the type of programming we wanted. It would have no commercials, no pledge drives. By paying for it, we would ensure that it was supported in advance. Programming could be planned so that an entire season or even an entire series of a program that a couple of million people loved would be produced and aired.

After all (in today's dollars), even a slickly produced show with location shots and special effects only costs about a million dollars per episode. Fifty cents per viewer per episode, even for a program with a highly specialized market of two million devoted viewers like "Star Trek: Enterprise." A slightly more popular niche-market show like "Vengeance Unlimited," "Pasadena" or "Joan of Arcadia" would cost 10 or 25 cents a week and run for years.

Think of it! At last, all the sports junkies could have their own TV stations that broadcast nothing but baseball, basketball, hockey and all that other macho stuff all day every day. My favorite show would never be pre-empted by the "World Series" of a sport in which all the teams are from the USA and Canada. All the news junkies could have their own TV stations that broadcast nothing but war, crime, politics and the other tragedies of life all day every day. My favorite show would never be pre-empted for a speech by a president with a 3000-word vocabulary.

There'd be a Shakespeare channel, an opera channel and a symphony channel for the highbrows. Imagine being able to watch a ballet in your living room for a dollar. Or a sci-fi series, cartoon, travelogue, nature documentary, do-it-yourself project, recipe, historical analysis... We didn't even foresee videotape, much less TiVo, so that we could watch that ballet whenever we wanted and not have to plan ahead for it. We certainly didn't foresee satellite TV with literally hundreds of channels from all over the world.

What a glorious world that would be! We could watch the popular shows for free and put up with the commercials, and pay two or three dollars to spend the rest of the evening watching stuff of more limited appeal. For fifty dollars a month the TV set would become the cornerstone of a whole new style of popular culture, in which no one was constrained by everyone else's preferences.

Well, I now pay about fifty dollars a month for cable TV. And what am I getting?"Stargate SG-1," "God, the Devil and Bob" and dozens of other shows are cancelled due to insufficient advertising revenue because they only have a couple of million fans--many in mid-plot, leaving me screaming about unresolved cliffhangers. "Dark Angel" and "That's My Bush" are cancelled because only a couple of million people want to watch them after 9/11. There are indeed a dozen channels of sports, yet an entire week of entertainment programming is pre-empted by the league playoffs and "World Series" of a game in which all the teams are from the USA and Canada. There are indeed a dozen channels of news, yet every time the Religious Redneck Retard in the White House (or the Hippie Rhodes Scholar Whose Fly Was Stuck Open before him) opens his mouth, six channels interrupt their programming and for the rest of the night everything starts half an hour late and ruins my VCR programming. Six channels cancel everything to show car chases, kidnappings and developments in Iraq, so six hours later when this is old news I play my soap opera tape and it's not there. I happen to be one of the ten or twenty million Americans who can read so I get this stuff from my newspaper anyway. There actually are programs that you can pay for individually. Movies, concerts, sports events. They cost as much as twenty dollars each! Two million of us pay twenty bucks each to watch a 60-minute excerpt from something like the Lilith Fair. That's forty million dollars in gross receipts, a bloody fortune, an order of magnitude more money than the event brought in when it occurred live! And there is professional "wrestling" on the SciFi Channel.What went wrong?

Probably unprofitable as Hell?

What went wrong?

Nothing.

Capitalism isn't about making your life better although sometimes it does because it achieves it's real goal at the same time.

Isn't it infuriating? SciFi Channel goes redneck wrestling, The Learning Channel is Midget TV and bleeping Trading Spaces, Discovery Channel is Biker TrashTv and Tattoo TV, National Geo Channel has become the Dog Behaviorial Channel and the Jesus Station.
EVERYTHING is dumbed down to the lowest common denominator; To appeal to the least educated.
God Bless Capitalism:rolleyes:

One thing that severely pisses me off is when a TV show comes out with the same name as one before it.

A couple of years back, there was a programme on ch4 (uk) called Lost. It was a gameshow, where two couples were dropped off in some strange part of the world, blindfolded and not knowing where they were. They were given a limited amount of local currency (gold, cash, diamonds, etc) and their challenge was to get back to the UK first. They couldn't use their credit cards and relied on hitching, favours and tickets in return for publicity for a company.

Then, the absolute fucking bastards brought out the new Lost. The one that everybody in the world watches. And when I google 'lost', ask people about it or generally think about it, the new and filthy lost pisses on the remains of my beloved lost. The real lost. The only lost that I care about.

TV in the UK is a joke. The 5 standard channels (of which the BBC have 2, which requires a yearly payment of £130) are total and utter junk. Occasionally the BBC find it in themselves to make a decent, factual series, but very seldom. Instead they put things like "Celebrity Strictly Come Dancing" on. I couldn't give a flying fuck which celebrity can dance the best and I have absolutely no interest in texting in to tell them.

I'm disgusted that the majority of the UK find the kind of shows that are on appealing. It just goes to show what a state it's in. Mainstream TV caters to complete fucking morons these days and I can't stand to watch it. Most comedy shows aren't even funny - they're predictable and they use the same joke over and over. Catherine sodding Tate for instance. Yes, it's mildly amusing once, but they use the same sketches every time it's on.

What happened to intelligent tv. Jokes that were a little bit more complex. Informative documentaries, instead of following a bunch of kids with Tourettes (alright, I like mockumentaries, I have to admit).

It's upsetting and I'm going to vent now.

One thing that severely pisses me off is when a TV show comes out with the same name as one before it.

A couple of years back, there was a programme on ch4 (uk) called Lost. It was a gameshow, where two couples were dropped off in some strange part of the world, blindfolded and not knowing where they were. They were given a limited amount of local currency (gold, cash, diamonds, etc) and their challenge was to get back to the UK first. They couldn't use their credit cards and relied on hitching, favours and tickets in return for publicity for a company.

Then, the absolute fucking bastards brought out the new Lost. The one that everybody in the world watches. And when I google 'lost', ask people about it or generally think about it, the new and filthy lost pisses on the remains of my beloved lost. The real lost. The only lost that I care about.

TV in the UK is a joke. The 5 standard channels (of which the BBC have 2, which requires a yearly payment of £130) are total and utter junk. Occasionally the BBC find it in themselves to make a decent, factual series, but very seldom. Instead they put things like "Celebrity Strictly Come Dancing" on. I couldn't give a flying fuck which celebrity can dance the best and I have absolutely no interest in texting in to tell them.

I'm disgusted that the majority of the UK find the kind of shows that are on appealing. It just goes to show what a state it's in. Mainstream TV caters to complete fucking morons these days and I can't stand to watch it. Most comedy shows aren't even funny - they're predictable and they use the same joke over and over. Catherine sodding Tate for instance. Yes, it's mildly amusing once, but they use the same sketches every time it's on.

What happened to intelligent tv. Jokes that were a little bit more complex. Informative documentaries, instead of following a bunch of kids with Tourettes (alright, I like mockumentaries, I have to admit).

It's upsetting and I'm going to vent now.The Lost show you mention you like the best, the original, sounds great! I love shows like that. We have Amazing Race (CBS) that sounds somewhat similar.
I think we in the US have more free channels. About 8. But everyone here has cable tv so for about $40 a month you have 79 channels. I'm on the tier above with a dvr and digital cable. I have about 220 stations for $80 per month.

What makes you think Scifi will have wrestling?
Scifi is a science fiction channel.

What makes you think Scifi will have wrestling?
Scifi is a science fiction channel.Since when does that mean it will be a sci-fi channel? Discovery, a Science channel now shows trashy bikers building motorcycles, sluts and others getting tattoos. Capitalist media aims at the bottom of the barrel. It's all about profits.

Isn't it infuriating? SciFi Channel goes redneck wrestling, The Learning Channel is Midget TV and bleeping Trading Spaces, Discovery Channel is Biker TrashTv and Tattoo TV, National Geo Channel has become the Dog Behaviorial Channel and the Jesus Station.
EVERYTHING is dumbed down to the lowest common denominator; To appeal to the least educated.
God Bless Capitalism:rolleyes:

What does any of that have to do with capitalism? It's the greed of the individual networks.

Scifi is just playing to its largest demographic -- the modern day Fantasy crowd: Under 18, public schooled, teacher unionized assembly line intellectual retards.

Henceforth, be much more careful what you ask for.

What does any of that have to do with capitalism? It's the greed of the individual networks.
:rolleyes:

Scifi is just playing to its largest demographic -- the modern day Fantasy crowd: Under 18, public schooled, teacher unionized assembly line intellectual retards.

Henceforth, be much more careful what you ask for.To the contrary. Bikers, tattoo shows and pro-wrestling are Left loved shows?? HA! The dumbing down of America is for homeschooled redneck racists that can't conjugate without moving their mouths, they are the Limbaugh dittoheads with no ability to think, thus the plunge to the bottom of the barrel to attract Red State viewers.