Thursday, July 11, 2019

Twitter Request Line, Vol. 267

The Board Man got paid AND recruited help to his new team
Photo via @TheUndefeated
It's Twitter Request Line time, everyone! I take to Twitter to get questions about issues in wrestling, past and present, and answer them on here because 280 characters can't restrain me, fool! If you don't know already, follow me @tholzerman, and wait for the call on Wednesday to ask your questions. Hash-tag your questions #TweetBag, and look for the bag to drop Thursday afternoon (most of the time). Without further ado, here are your questions and my answers:

Maybe it wasn't a signing, although I fully expected Kawhi Leonard to sign with the Lakers, but when Leonard got the Clippers to trade for Paul George, that took me the most by surprise. I thought that as situated, the Clips would be a good fit for Leonard, but adding George makes them the favorites to win the whole thing. Someone said that team has a Michael Jordan-Bulls feel to it, and I'd be hard-pressed to disagree. That being said, I thought the Thunder were going to try to run it back. I had no idea George was on the trading block until he went to the Clippers.

I'd say "stop paying attention to him," but you and I could block him on Twitter and Instagram and term-mute "nZo," but as long as you have chuds who claim he got a raw deal because the "rape charges were dropped" or copy/paste sites who hang on his words when he pops up from time to time, the general public is not going to escape his scrawny ass. It also bears mentioning that Joey Janela admitted that he was going clout-chasing by picking a fight with nZo, which I'd be mad at if I didn't think that nZo deserved to get his ass kicked. However, even if Janela never encountered nZo at that concert, you'd still be subjected to the inanity the next time he popped up. So the best way to make nZo go away is probably to lock him in a steamer chest and shoot him into Jupiter's Great Red Spot, which is to say as long as he keeps running his mouth and the lesser wrestling sites treat his shitty, homophobic tweets like press releases, that won't happen.

Because if I don't, who will?

In all seriousness, the TweetBag is a great exercise in that I answer questions I didn't think I needed to answer. It gets the brain juices flowing. For that, I'm alright with it.

Max contracts are easy. No, there shouldn't be max contracts; the scumbag owners should have to pay market value for the best players. I could argue Kevin Durant, even sitting a year out with an injury, is worth more than what he was allowed to get, way more than Mikhail Prokhorov or Joseph Tsai deserve to make off that franchise. Ideally, the NBA should be a player-owned collective where everyone makes roughly equal amounts, give or take some elevators for performance I suppose, but until then, fuck your Basketball Revenue splits and give the players their loot.

On the draft, I'm more conflicted. On one hand, players theoretically should have the freedom to move to whatever franchise they want right out of the gate. It's against all leftist principles to make someone go to a place they don't want to and work for a company they don't want to in the name of a parity the league will never achieve. Seriously, of the four big sports leagues, the NBA is the most allergic to parity, even moreso than baseball.

However, are NBA franchises separate companies, or are they branch offices of a larger company, the NBA? And just because the league will never reach parity, does that mean it's a good idea to stop trying? Personally, I don't want a league where all the best young players decide they want to play in New York, Los Angeles, Florida, Texas, or possibly Chicago over every other team. Sure, not every great prospect will be able to get contracts with those teams, but at the same time, enough of them would which would make having teams in, say, Minnesota or Detroit virtually worthless. The NBA is a winter league, and having New York and possibly Chicago as the only cold-weather cities that get to enjoy the winter sport would be terrible. So I'd begrudgingly keep the draft. Both scenarios are problematic, but I'll keep the one that will allow a team like the Jazz or the Cavaliers to have a chance rather than seeing every prime prospect sign with the Lakers or Nets.

The REAL question is would I eat that Pokémon in one sitting or would I eat the Gigantamax version over an entire week? The answer, of course, is yes.

Well, if the rider was I HAD to use it for wrestling, then my three would be going back and giving Vincent J. McMahon a condom the night Vincent K. McMahon was conceived, buying a ticket for the Antonio Inoki/Muhammad Ali "shootfight," and then going back to witness Pro Wrestling Guerrilla's Enchantment Under the Sea, the site of the infamous Bryan Danielson/Claudio Castagnoli headlock match.

First off, tag your damn porn. Second, I don't have a Culver's near me, which is a shame given how good that goddamn cone looks. Just poking around the site, there are too many good looking flavors on there, so I'll throw a dart and say Snickers Swirl.

Depending on the recipe, any fruit can go on a pizza. Like, a suckling pig pizza with roasted apple slices sounds really good. Or perhaps you want a brie, pear, and caramelized onion pizza. I know South Africans put banana on pizza, which actually sounds really good. Have you ever had a fried banana? It's good. Basically, I'm a pizza leftist; put whatever you want on it, unless it's mayonnaise. Mayonnaise doesn't go on anything.

I think there are definitely criticisms of Bernie Sanders that are valid. Sanders, though the leftmost candidate running this year who isn't planning on dropping out after the debates or is controlled by several rowdy teens, Weekend at Bernie's-style, leaves a lot of room to his left if that makes any sense. The problem is that most of the "progressives" attacking him that aren't socialists are to Sanders' right, so either they attack him from their right-wing tendencies, or in the cases of many an ex-Hillary Clinton staffer, because they see him as the reason their Slay Kween lost to Donald Trump, not the rampant voter suppression that they turned a blind eye or non-resistance to, or the fact that Clinton decided "running up the score" in states she knew she'd win was more important than spending any campaign capital on Rust Belt states that she lost on razor thin margins. So basically, what you get is critiques of Sanders that are insane to think about. Like when this week he tweeted that Jeffrey Epstein will more than likely get off of his heinous charges while "[people] of color and working class [people]" get railroaded for less. He's not wrong! Yet people like Zerlina Maxwell and Melissa McEwan and Imani Gandy LAMBASTED him because... his tweet wasn't intersectional enough? He thinks POC can't be working class? I'm unclear here.

The problem is that all this agita being caused by a "Radical Center" that thinks racism and sexism can be wished away in the oppressive structure of capitalism, at least the vocal anti-Bernie people on Twitter, don't mean much when so many voters are ripe to be radicalized by Sanders' message. People like me end up getting heartburn over stuff that doesn't matter. But the root of the issue is that while Sanders is going to be an improvement over even Barack Obama, he's still shown he has poor foreign policy instincts (although he's WAY better than everyone else) and his rhetoric on guns is a bit iffy, among other things. However, no one will attack him on those issues because by and large, they agree with him. Most of the people who are in a position to critique Sanders are too radical for American public office, or they're working with him on other things in Congress if they are elected. Ilhan Omar, for example, is probably the most leftward leaning member of Congress. She's not going to go in on Sanders because she can work with him to get shit done. It's a strategy the right has employed for years, and it's gotten this country where it is now. Maybe it's time for the left chambers of this country to start listening to the voices further to the extreme, because really, left extremes tend to enrich everyone, whereas right extremes only enrich those who already have power.

I used to be on Team Air Conditioning, and it's still one of the best ways to beat the heat. You don't know what you've got until it's gone, and going from my old house with a nice new unit with good ductwork to my current house with a shitty old unit and arcane ducting, well, it makes me appreciate my car's AC unit. However, I feel like taking a dip in the pool surpasses it now. My family and I go to the swim club, and I am almost in the pool as much as the kids are. Even if the water isn't freezing cold, it provides refreshment that lasts long after you get out. So put me down for swimming.

You're right on Yamper, but while the Duraludon/Tyranitar Mechagodzilla/Godzilla parallel is intriguing, I'm going with Corviknight. Who doesn't like a black raven with arcane features. Wait, Steelers fans don't? Ah, I'm from the right part of the state. Anyway, the designs on the new Pokémon outside of the starters has been really good so far, so I hope Grookey, Scorbunny, and Sobble have cool evolutions.

It's because of sexism and the deep-rooted feeling that women are inferior to men in any strenuous endeavor. It's wrong, mainly because women CAN develop the way men do to be suited for athletics. It's just society seems to want women only to push out babies, which, uh, hey, the Earth has enough women willing and able to procreate and propagate the species. Y'all don't need EVERY woman/AFAB person to be able to pop out a baby. I guess the other reason, which is related to the first one, is that sponsors pay less money for women's sports than men's, which again, feeds off misogyny. Either way, it's a wrong that should be righted, regardless of whether the women's team is better than the men's. Equal pay for equal work.
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