|
|
|
|
|
Submitted by Morpheus on Saturday, April 22, 2006 at 5:16 AM EST
 Volume Fifty-One – Ayatollah’s Not Dead!!! 04/22/2006 Morpheus: Welcome, Dreamers, to this very special Fifty-First Edition of Enter The Dream Realm. I am Morpheus, Master of the Dreaming, and I will be your guide through this land of Nightmares and Dreamscapes. YourAyatollah: Hello, all, and welcome once again to AATG… Morpheus: Not this time, Steve. YourAyatollah: Uh, right. Dick. If you're a first timer to my ramblings, simply welcome. Kick off your shoes, get comfortable, all that jazz. It's been a couple weeks… Ok, months, since we did this last, and I hope that our time apart has treated everyone oh so kindly out there in the really real world. As per usual, no complaints from YourAyatollah, other than my internet access having been completely and utterly destroyed by the hurricane action of a few months back. Life just keeps rolling on by, and I'm just sitting here watching it go. Morpheus: Alright, mother fucker. Let’s do this shit. YourAyatollah: I don’t wanna let you go till I see the light.  Ayatollah’s Not Dead!!! Morpheus: Other than the extremely gay opening by my special friend Steve, we’ve got some wrestling and shit to discuss. Well, mostly shit, but there’ll be some wrestling. YourAyatollah: Ok, you’re going to have to tell me the news and we’ll talk about it since I have no net access, otherwise this will all be kayfabe. Morpheus: Kayfabe is cool. YourAyatollah: Cool. Morpheus: I know you’re itching to talk about some Samoa Joe. So the floor is yours. Don’t talk too fast so I can type all this shit out, seeing as how we’re doing this over the phone. Yes, folks. I love him THAT much. YourAyatollah: Awww… Samoa Joe… Essentially I just wonder what the fuck they are trying to accomplish with the guy. I mean, if they’re trying to make him the Jeff Jarrett of the future, I can understand it. But elevating a future Main Event Star at the expense of an entire division is like having JBL get over by squashing a slew of cruiserweights. The X Division is the one thing TNA has always had going for it, and they’re putting it on the back burner for the sake of making Joe a monster, and I just don’t see how that can be a good thing. Morpheus: I can agree on one hand, and disagree on the other. I think they need to make Joe into a monster, kind of like he was in ROH, but on a whole new scale, so in one sense they are doing the right thing. However, I agree they are picking the absolute worst group of people they could be to use as fodder for his monsterhood (new word, bitches). He should be killing people his own size. I mean, Christ, Freddy was the midget so he went after the kids, but Jason was a big mother fucker, so he went after the teens. See the difference? YourAyatollah: Exactly. Still though, what they’re doing is essentially taking the two most successful guys in the company, Christopher Daniels and AJ Styles, and just fed them to the guy. They were the two guys who were the most talented and the most accessible to the fans and Joe just killed them outright. I see what you are saying about putting him up against guys his own size, and they’re starting to do that now with Sabu, however I can also see the point of view where they wouldn’t want to do that immediately because let’s face the facts: TNA does not have a whole lot of main event heavyweight talent. So I can see them not wanting to have him steamroll over their entire heavyweight division right out of the gates. A good place to start still within the X Division would have been with guys like Chris Sabin, Petey Williams, hell, even A1, to build up some steam and show what he can do. Instead they fed him their two top guys in that Division right away, and that’s not cool. I think he could have and should have stayed with some of the upper tier talent in the X Division, as opposed to what Scott Steiner is doing now by killing Shark Boy and Norman Smiley, but they could have gone so many other places first. He starts out fighting Sabin one week, and the next he’s demolishing Daniels. It was too fast. What about guys like Matt Bentley that could put on a hell of a match with him and make both of them look good? Plus, imagine what that would have done for Bentley’s career if he stood up and looked solid against Joe. Morpheus: You need to lay off the caffeine. What did I say about slowing down? YourAyatollah: My bad. Morpheus Yes, it is. Now I agree with you 100%. Essentially what they’ve done is built Joe into an unstoppable midget killing machine. It is incredibly difficult to envision anyone who can just come along and take that title from him and have it stick. He has come into TNA like a tornado and has basically leveled the X Division, leaving little of its former skyscrapers intact. While I think it’s not too late to recover from it, if the Joe Train continues running through X Territory too much longer, I don’t see a recovery effort bearing much fruit. YourAyatollah: Right. That’s pretty much right, because they’ve already sacrificed so much credibility with this. That really leads into something else that I’ve been thinking about Joe, and that’s that I really don’t see him beating a guy like Abyss. Simply from a believability standpoint, I can’t imagine Joe taking him out. I see a Black Hole Slam putting Joe straight through the fucking mat. And even if they do go the route that “Oh, Samoa Joe is a submission machine! He just choked out Abyss!” And then have him go on a rampage choking out all these bigger guys, then all they’ve done is made a fuckin’ Taz 2.0. At that point, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I am a huge Taz mark, I love Taz. With one Z. And that’s not to say that I hate Joe, because I like the guy. But even if he does go through and choke these big guys out, he’s still not going to be Taz, and it’s going to open the door for more comparison, and that a battle that Joe’s just not going to win. Morpheus: Again, I agree. If they are going to make Joe a bona fide monster and their star of the future, they have a fine line to walk in that sense. A lot of people began comparing Joe to Taz back in his ROH days, and that comparison can only get stronger as his exposure grows. The best thing they can do for him, or that he can do for himself, is to change things up a bit and go in a new direction, separating himself from the shadow of Taz and standing on his own merit, which should not be too hard for the guy. He is genuinely one of the best damn workers out there now, with a wide skill set to draw from. Let’s see him use it. YourAyatollah: I would have to mildly disagree with that statement. Not strongly, but mildly. I agree that he’s a talented guy, but I haven’t seen too much of anything out of him as far as his ability to sell is concerned. I mean, sure, there have been a couple of times where it looked like Styles or Daniels could have beaten Samoa Joe, but not for anything they did to him; it was because he fell out of the ring on his fuckin’ head. Right now, to me, it seems like Joe is a whole lot of bark, with not a whole lot of bite. I also understand, however, that that statement is probably rendered incompetent by the fact that I have not seen his ROH work. But on the other hand, that makes that statement even more valid, because how many OTHER people have actually seen his ROH work? Morpheus: Very solid point. I have seen a fair deal of Joe’s work in ROH, and he has held his own against some serious stiff competition, coming back from some solid ass kickings to keep that damn title he held for almost two years. Still though, I have to agree with you that the number of people who have seen his ROH work compared to the number of people seeing his TNA work now is like comparing ass size between Maria Kanellis (sooo hot) and Yokozuna. YourAyatollah: Not so hot. Morpheus: Agreed. YourAyatollah: And mad props to Rodney. Morpheus: What the hell are you talking about? YourAyatollah: That was Yokozuna’s name! Morpheus: Oh yeah! I’m putting this whole little exchange in the column. YourAyatollah: Nice. Morpheus: Ok, so does that kill the Joe topic for you, or do you have more you want to say on that front? YourAyatollah: Hmmm… That’s pretty much it. I like the direction they’re taking him in on the whole, I suppose. I like that they’re developing it sort of slowly instead of rushing it, but I really think they could have approached it differently. Morpheus: For the sake of the X Division. YourAyatollah: Yes. Exactly. But while we’re on the topic of big Samoan guys… Who the fuck went crazy on Jamal’s face with a sharpie? Morpheus: Hacksaw. Next question. YourAyatollah: Heh. I mean, do they honestly expect us to not know it’s fuckin’ Jamal? I mean, it’s only been a couple of fuckin’ years. And do we really need a Kamala part 2 anyway? I thought we got the job pretty well done with the solo Kamala. Morpheus: Yeah, and let’s face it. Armando Alejandro Estrada is no Kimchee. YourAyatollah: Exactly. Or Harvey Wippleman for that matter. Morpheus: Or Bertha Faye. YourAyatollah: Did you have to go there? Morpheus: I feel dirty. YourAyatollah: Good. Morpheus: Moving along to something mildly less vomit-inducing, I informed your netblind ass the other night about Randy Orton’s indefinite suspension for Asshole-like conduct. What say you on this subject matter, my friend? YourAyatollah: I don’t even know what to think about the Legend Killer anymore. Aside from all the backstage stuff, because I really don’t know much about that, the guy just hasn’t seemed to have the same spark in the ring for quite some time now. He still puts on a good show, and his matches are still well placed near the top of the card, but he’s not leaping out and stealing the show the way he was back when we all loved to hate him so much. Morpheus: I would begrudgingly have to agree. I have always been a big fan of Randy Orton, simply because I know how much potential the guy has to really be a huge star in the industry, but lately it seems in a lot of ways like he’s been phoning it in. YourAyatollah: I chalk it up to complacency. Morpheus: Care to explain? YourAyatollah: Well, just like I said back when it actually occurred, that World Title reign just happened entirely too fast. Not necessarily from the point of view of his career, because it’s unquestionable that a World Title reign, no matter how short lived, can definitely help a guy get over, but I think it was more of a mistake on a personal level giving him all but a pretty much iron-clad guarantee that he was the future of the business. When all you’re hearing is that you’re hot shit and you’re going to be the savior of the next era of the business, it’s going to get in your head a little bit and tend to make your perceived self-value just shoot through the roof. I think it goes without saying that once someone feels indispensable, you’re getting into sketchy waters, especially when coupled with that is an obviously massive ego that has been there since the beginning, when we first saw the mother fucker. Morpheus: You took the words right out of my mouth, Big Stevie Cool. I have to say that I agree with every word you just said there. The guy is clearly a little on the out of control side when it comes to curbing his own ego and attitude, and it’s definitely come back to bite him in the ass now. Care to speculate on the straw that broke the camel’s back? YourAyatollah: I’m not even sure I want to know. All I do know at this point in my wrestling lifetime is that it takes one hell of a big offense to get in Vince McMahon’s dog house, especially when you’ve already been branded the future. Morpheus: I can agree with that. Personally, I think Randy must have shit in Vince’s bag or something. YourAyatollah: Ah, the old Sable. Morpheus: How does one respond to that? YourAyatollah: One doesn’t. Shit in a bag speaks for itself. Morpheus: I just smile and nod, and move along. Any thoughts on God working Backlash? YourAyatollah: Well, knowing the big guy, he’ll probably just send his kid to do his dirty work again. Morpheus: Holy shit. YourAyatollah: Yeah, you’re gonna get letters for that one. Morpheus: Tell me about it. What are your thoughts on McMahonism then, you dirty heathen? YourAyatollah: I am a McMahonite. I would have to say that I, you, and anyone else out there reading this has been a follower of McMahonism for longer than they care to realize. Morpheus: True that. Any closing thoughts before we get to the Album Pick? YourAyatollah: I don’t know what’s sadder, the fact that Maven’s on a show with C.C. DeVille, or that C.C. DeVille is on a show with Maven… Morpheus: That says it all folks. You know what time it is. Let’s do this.  Album Pick Of The 4 Months: The Darkness: One Way Ticket To Hell… And Back YourAyatollah: Well, what can I say about The Darkness… That hasn’t already been said about Led Zeppelin. That’s not a bad intro. Morpheus: A couple of months ago, I would have punched you for saying that on principle just for liking The Darkness. Now, I would punch you for comparing them to Led Zeppelin because I actually like The Darkness. I find it hard to believe that you convinced me to buy that fucking CD, and I find it harder to believe that I actually like it as much as I do. Hell, I fucking love that god damn disc! YourAyatollah: And you are not alone. One Way Ticket has traveled with me everywhere, ever since I got it for Christmas. I can understand your apprehension, and the apprehension that a lot of people had after having seen the “I Believe In A Thing Called Love” video. But I just don’t think it’s warranted, pretty simply. I don’t think it’s warranted at all. Morpheus: I would have to agree. You told me to pick up that disc and listen to the track Bald, and I would be hooked. I would be lying if I said you weren’t right on. I listened to that track on repeat about 6 times, then listened to the disc straight through from start to finish. It didn’t leave my car for about a month. My car with its new stereo system complete with sub-woofer, courtesy of a thousand dollar jaunt to Best Buy. You haven’t lived till you’ve blared this album in a thumping system driving 75 down the highway. YourAyatollah: Right on. And you just hit the nail on the head with that. This is quite simply feel good rock and roll. In an era of Staind and Nickelback and Disturbed and all these other, quite frankly, depressing bands that are out there right now, it’s good to hear a band that is actually enjoying themselves on an album. I would venture to guess that you would agree that the feel goodiness is contagious. Morpheus: Damn straight. That’s one of the reasons that I love The Darkness so much. It’s rare to hear anything fun anymore. Bands like The Darkness and Edguy are good for bringing a smile to my face, which is a good thing while living in these dark times. That’s right, kids, if you’re contemplating suicide, put on some Darkness. It’s just not possible to slit your wrists with a big dumb smile on your face. YourAyatollah: Hell yes. There are some tracks on this disc that deserve some specific shoutouts as well. Knockers is definitely worth mentioning. I think that song is the best example of what The Darkness does better than anybody else, and that is completely rock ass with tongue planted firmly in cheek. Morpheus: No doubt. How many other bands out there have you heard singing songs about their ex-girlfriend’s massive rack? I would venture to guess very few. I feel the same way about Bald. Singing about being afraid of losing your hair is a topic near and dear to my heart, and they do it with such eloquent style and hard rock grace it’s hard not to sing along, even if you can’t hit the notes. YourAyatollah: The great thing about this record is that it’s not just the notes that would make David Lee Roth weep, but the masterful double entendres. Morpheus: Care to define to that for some of our slower readers? (Hi Random!) YourAyatollah: That’s fitting, isn’t it? Mother fucker’s a teacher. If he don’t have a dictionary, then fuck him. You know what, wait a minute. Fuck him anyway. Morpheus: I’d say it’s out of love, but let’s face it. That’s a hate fuck if I ever saw one. YourAyatollah: Nah, it’s love. Sort of. Anyways, Random would never listen to a band like this because of the fear that someone might accidentally call him gay and reawaken those damn urges again. But I recommend that he, and anyone else that is wary, should give this album a shot, because they just might find themselves surprised. Pleasantly surprised. Morpheus: Agreed. I know I was. And before we close down the shop, I have but one more thing to say. YourAyatollah: What, more? Morpheus: Steve, I really like what you’ve done with your hair. YourAyatollah: Which is funny because I actually have done something different with my hair. It’s sweet of you to notice. I see you’re also looking a bit less… Meat Loafy… Morpheus: I wish I could quit you. YourAyatollah: No you don’t. Morpheus: You’re right. YourAyatollah: Now go buy this fuckin’ CD. YourAyatollah… Morpheus: …and The Dream Master… YourAyatollah: …Commands it! Morpheus: This brings to a close this Fifty-First Edition of Enter The Dream Realm. Any feedback you have, as always, would certainly be greatly appreciated and can be sent to me via email at morpheuslop@gmail.com. If you want me to pass something along to Steve, send it and I’ll tell him the next time I call his ass. Wanna say goodbye to these fucks, Steve-O? YourAyatollah: Yeah, I guess. Until we get together to do this all again, you guys take care of yourselves out there in the really real world. Much love, kids. Later. Morpheus: And with that, we’re out, before one of our phones dies. Until the next time we do this, sleep well, and I’ll see you in your Dreams! Contact Me! Email: morpheuslop@gmail.com AIM: MorpheusLOP MSN: morpheusreturns@optonline.net Yahoo: MorpheusLOP Hit me up on MySpace! All the cool kids are doing it! PLUGS!  Click here to visit pt2’s Wrestling Fan’s Hall Of Fame!!! LOP Forums LOP Columns Forum Psychotic Wrestling Alliance - LOP’s very own E-Fed, and hands down the best out there. Viva La Movie Bar! The Bar Forums Steve asked me not to plug the Project this time, stating “Fuck Random”. I have complied. Fuck Random indeed. *NEW GALLERY* She's Still XTREME! Hot New Pix of Former WWE Diva BROOKE ADAMS!!!
|
|