The Unknown Poster

Statements such as 'the Government is telling you to do it' or "The xxxx lobby is huge" are also problematic. If you're going to dwell on that, you'll never eat or drink anything. Because then the food guide is not legitimate, it's just a document used by governments and special lobby groups to promote their own interests. Let's say you don't trust conventional farming and you think organic farmers are a bunch of con artists. I guess you can have a garden and some chickens in your backyard, or maybe someday you'd find that perfect food source. You can find a study that will prove whatever you want it to prove. If you're against immunization you can find sites that will tell you Bill Gates is using vaccines to depopulate the world. The acid test would be: go back to the era where most people in cities didn't drink milk, or drank very little of it. What were fractures like in that era? What a silly post. You don't need to disregard everything. You don't need to believe everything. You can use common sense. The milk lobby is massive. This isn't in doubt. Milk is not good for You. This isn't on doubt. No animal drinks another animals milk. Use common sense. You also don't need to build a time machine to be sure. Plenty of the world doesn't drink milk. Plenty of the world is lactose intolerant. If you like milk, great. Drink it. But if you feed your kids milk don't be surprised when they have health issues.

The biggest issue with wrestling besides a downturn on popularity is how terribly the local talent treat their industry. Not everyone Ofcourse. But too many guys have the attitude that they'd rather draw no one as long as the competition also draws no one. It's a war of attrition. From 2005-2008 every wrestler in Winnipeg worked for one promotion (mine) and we drew 200 people to weekly shows and 500 people to "name" shows. It was a good time to be a fan and a wrestler. But you know what they say about leading horses to water....

The old "I took a tainted supplement" excuse. Go F yourself loser.

You just made that up.

Wrestling struggles here too. Winnipeg likes its wrestling and fighting but mostly at the high end level.

I also love milk. Any question that begins with "but your daily requirement is..." has an inherent issue. Who says your daily requirement is anything? The government? The same government heavily influenced by lobby? The milk lobby is MASSIVE. I read about a study of a group of people who never ever drank milk. They all lived long lives without brittle bones. In fact, some thought is that the increase in brittle bones as we age is because of all the false calcium we drink as kids and young adults. As we get older, we drink less milk and our body is no longer getting outside sources of calcium and thus taking it from bone, making us brittle. Much of the world is lactose intolerant. Humans arent meant to drink milk beyond infancy (and our own mother's milk ofcourse, not cows). And by the way, tofu (which I do not like) has more calcium than milk.

Poor Sammy. Just doesnt have the stroke he once did.

Yup. Step backwards not having Ron as host. When HNIC leaves CBC for good, does Ron go with it?

I would have been very careful to have a different management "face" and attitude for the Fighting than the wrestling and kept the performers separate aside from "appearances". But I think there is a lot of cross-over (probably moreso then). Most wrestling fans over the age of 12 are likely fight fans on some level. And while most fight fans wont admit it, they are closet wrestling fans now or former. A lot of fighters are wrestling fans too. We even did "boxing exhibitions" during intermission of our wrestling shows and our wrestling fans really enjoyed them. Every couple of years I assist a local fight club in putting on a large event and it always draws very very well with grass-roots level marketing. And yes, Ernie put himself over in one of the falls. If I recall it was best of three falls and Ernie won the second fall of tap out. He took a lot of flak and rightfully so but I understood his reasoning. He said he had brought in guys for his wrestlers but he wanted to one selfish thing for himself, which was bring in a guy who was a hero to him and face him in the ring. I can understand that (I'd never do it myself). 99% of bookers/promoters are like that. Look at local wrestling. How many bookers/promoters have worked the import or been champion of their own promotion? Most, if not all of them.

I have a friend who is quite overweight. She got excited about trying a vegan-style "cleanse" where she'd make fruit and veggie smoothies. She shared this excitement on Facebook. Most of her "friends" discouraged her from eating "babyfood", starving herself of protein etc etc. People just dont get it. I hate to get on the "you're just sheep" bandwagon but far too many people *are* sheep when it comes to what they are told by the media, especially advertising paid for by lobby groups. No mammal but humans drink another mammal's milk. In recent years, we've finally embraced the health benefits of breastfeeding babies but there was a time when we were basically told not to bother breastfeeding, but make sure you pump your kid full of genetically enhanced, steroid enriched cows milk. As I said read The China Study. If you want to be a healthy and active 100 year old, you know how to do it. and its not a western diet.

I think the Oilers have enough forward talent that could land a big time D. But they dont want to trade any forwards. So they have a really exciting team that sucks.

if I had the will power, I'd love to be Vegan. Humans should not be meat eaters. Read The China Study. Very eye opening. I love being in a group and someone brings up not eating meat or *gasp* being Vegan. The people who know something about eating meat and NOT eating meat are always shouted down by the meat eaters who know nothing about either. Its like the people who are incredulous when you say kinds shouldnt drink milk (no one should) because they see ads that say "Milk does a body good". I dont go out of my way to eat organic but I do try to choose the organic version if its convenient.

We definitely would have had issues. Here's the story: At the end of 2001, myself and a partner formed a Pro Wrestling company (eventually called Premier Championship Wrestling). We pitched it to a local businessman who agreed to finance us for a certain amount of money. This businessman, John, liked wrestling to a degree (two of his employees were wrestlers) but was much more a fan of UFC. To the extent that one of our competitors brought Dan Severn in for a wrestling show and John was angry at us for not bringing him in even though Dan was not a big draw as a wrestler. Our "debut" show was March 3 2002 and drew 1700+ fans to the IGAC at the UofM, so it was a big success. However, our weekly shows were struggling to carve out an audience. We began planning our next "big show" with the intent to return to IGAC. We had budgeted what we knew ICGA cost us to rent but one of the people who worked in the office for John's main business, Hank, approached us with the idea to run CanWest (now SHAW) Park. Between March and probably May-ish, John began losing interest in the wrestling company. This was a good news/bad news scenario. Good in that he left us alone to do whatever we wanted. He provided us space at this Pembina HWY offices and full use of his IT services (web development, graphic design etc). He would really only come around when his wife would do the books for his businesses and wonder what we were spending money on (in most cases, we weren't spending any money - but money would "go missing" from the account that was set up for our use). Anyway, since he was losing interest, John tapped his employee Hank to "keep an eye" on us. Hank was an older guy, nice guy and smart but slow moving in what was a fast moving industry. But somehow Hank knew Sam Katz and told us he believed he could get the Ballpark for the same price as IGAC. Long story short on that front - Hank met with Sam several times, frustrating us "Boys, this is how business is done. You meet three or four times before you even talk business." It finally came down to Hank assuring us we could use the ballpark for FREE. Unfortunately, the end result was the ballpark people hosed us and charged us twice what we budgeted for IGAC. We nearly ended up in court after I told Sammy to shove his settlement "offer". But...in the meantime, we began planning the show, scheduled for July. Originally, we planned for a main event of Eddie Guerrero vs Rey Misterio at Eddie's suggestion following our March event. However, both Eddie and Rey signed with WWE soon thereafter. We decided to go with the Road Warriors as headliners. John then sat us down and told us not to confirm anything until he thought about whether he wanted to proceed. Then an opportunity to feature Bret Hart & Roddy Piper on the show arose and that intrigued John. We had the City interested in presenting Piper with the Key to the City etc. Another Hank contact was a guy involved with a Bartering service who was close with Joe Derkson. They had been trying to set up an MMA Exhibition show and were having trouble putting it all together. I believe they had issues with the Boxing Commission and having enough quality fighters. Their idea was to have Joe fight in an "exhibition" on our show, thus end-running around the commission and sort of dipping their toes into the idea of fight shows. Some people on our side were concerned about featuring a "real fight" on a "fake fight" show but we understood that it had cross-over appeal (one of our top wrestlers was heavily into MMA training) and we would draw a larger crowd. We needed the larger crowd because we were running a 7500 seat facility and were ooking to bring in two expensive headliners (Hart & Piper). The barter service was also going to provide us with a bunch of services. I honestly cant remember why it all fell apart, but something happened to eliminate the Joe fight from the show. And ofcourse, Bret had his stroke and Piper backed out. We circled back around to the Road Warriors with Buff Bagwell as the secondary import. We drew about 1200 people but the show had become so large, convoluted and unwieldy that we lost a ton of money. John completely pulled out. But before he could, I came up with the idea of branching out into MMA shows. I wasnt a *huge* UFC fan but I had the strong feeling it was going to be big. I knew that UFC shows were popular in Winnipeg (to a shocking degree). My plan was to start a sister promotion called Premier Fighting Championship. I explained that we'd be on the cutting edge of the sport, getting in before everyone else. We had a relationship with Joe Derkson and we had people involved in our wrestling who were knowledgable enough to join the management team of PFC and organize shows. We had the infrastructure (offices, IT services etc) that werent going to cost us anything and we could cross-promote wrestling and MMA. And I knew John loved UFC and was souring on wrestling. I thought a locally produced show using local (and near-by talent) with special guests like Dan Severn, Ken Shamrock etc appearing to sign autographs and generate publicity could get us off the ground. I had pitched the idea to my partner prior to our wrestling show flopping and he was not a UFC fan at the time and more or less blew me off saying, lets concentrate on the show. So after the show when we knew John was ready to walk away, we were trying to come up with ways to keep him "in" and I again came back to the PFC idea. But I was basically shouted down by others on our team and never did pitch the idea to John (who had the money, resources and interest to make it work if he had wanted to). Who knows what might have happened but Im sure if we had gone down that road, I'd be in the MMA business right now and not the wrestling business. As an aside, Sammy and his people were a pain in the ass to deal with and we never again attempted a show of that size (though my former partner did). I eventually settled into smaller "big" shows using TNA and ROH headline talent.

Yeah Buff is so good at D they moved him to forward, come on. Young defencemen isn't what the Oilers needed either, they have plenty of those of their own. They need quality veteran players and the cost of doing business for those kinds of players is very high because every team wants more quality veteran defencemen. Like I said, it's easy to say "should have traded players for a defenceman" much harder to actually come up with a deal that makes sense for both teams. You're right. Trouba would certainly not have befitted the Oilers. If they Oilers are 'too young' and need veterans, thats no ones fault but their own. Its not like they were surprised to have so many young players on their team. Enstrom isnt a "young" d-man and would instantly have been Edmonton's best. Bogo is young and would also be the Oiler's best D man. Buff would have been a lot more valuable to Edmonton as a D than he was to us. And yes I am aware he was moved to forward, which is why I would have tried to soak Edmonton for him 1.5 years ago.

Kurt was working. Puder wasn't. There's a big difference. Kurt is also a freak who would have let Puder rip his arm off and beat him with it before he would have tapped out.

Theres a reason Kimbo was put on Ultimate Fighter - made him earn it and generated some ratings. If they had any inkling that he'd amount to anything, they'd have protected him, which they didnt. Out on episode one. Dana's more open to the freak show signings but a Brock Lesnar is very, very rare. Dana would have signed Kurt Angle a few years ago if he had been serious (he wasn't, though he likely would have had some success in MMA had it existed in this form when he won his Gold Medal).

Individual HD feeds by region so we end up with local blackouts? I like watching every Bombers game on TV. now. It will annoy me if they are blacked out though it might make me go to more games.

The talent the Oilers have could have got them a D man. I dont have time to look into who was available. But certainly Buff was a valuable puck moving D man at the time. Bogo is someone the Oilers could have been interested in. Enstrom would have been the Oilers best D man if they had made a trade. And the Jets needed help up front. Im not sure the Jets/Oilers would do business but there was talent to be had. I believe the Pens have a couple of young D men they were willing to part with also.

No. i would have packed one of my young forwards or top draft pick for a bonafide top D man. The jets, in two drafts managed to get a top line centre and a top pairing D man that plays 25 minutes. I think Edmonton got caught up in this idea they could re-build the 80's with these offensive powerhouses and that a mediocre D would be okay if you were scoring 6 goals a game.

God forbid they make a trade to help out D.

Kessler has value. Not moreso than a player of Kane's talent, age, contract.

It would have been wonderful to buy up all of Point Douglas and demolish it and build a high end development featuring a stadium over looking the river. Got a few billion dollars? That was PR plan, plain and simple. Manitoba is cheap. The province and city wanted a few bucks from the feds so we got the U of M plan. The fact it required people to take public transit was looked upon as a positive because thats what the lefty tree huggers want. Just look at that idiotic Pembina HWY development where they spent all that money moving Pembina over six feet to place cyclists right in harms way as they play real-life Frogger dodging cars along the route. A much smarter plan would have been choosing a side (east or west) and turning the existing sidewalk into a n active transport pathway, much like they did along Pembina south of Bison.

Uh oh does this mean the end of no local blackouts?

It would be very helpful to Edmonton if they had drafted some D prospects rather than hanging their hats on the flashy forward every year. Sort of bit them in the behind with Nail. I think the only reason we didnt relocate the Yotes here was because of the disaster that was the Thrashers. The NHL was *this close* to moving PHX here but needed to hedge their bets because ownership in Atlanta basically said "find us a buyer or we walk away and lock the doors".

I think i pitched an idea of Kane for Horvat and Kessler and got boo'ed out of here. I think i'd make that deal if I was Vancouver.