#originally i was just thinking about how owen is at the start of the skit

[in-my-loki-feels]

I can't stop thinking about pairing this guy:

with this guy:

Just something about the absolute goofball energy of the first, running into the megalomaniac energy of the second. I feel like President Loki would be all "I am here to rule and nothing's going to stop me!" and the Mobius variant would be confused but on board and also distracted by a dish on another table: "Oh yeah? Cool, cool, tell me more. Hey, are you going to eat that?"

ETA: I ended up writing a short thing for this idea. Adding a link here in case the one in the reblogs isn't obvious.

There is now a 4+1 expanded version up on AO3!

[wrestlingisfake]

On May 23, 1999, I was not watching WWF Over the Edge on pay-per-view.  But I was on the internet checking for the results, because I couldn’t wait for Owen Hart to win the WWF intercontinental championship.

This was 20 years ago.  I was on dial-up.  There was no liveblogging the show as we know it today.  (Apparently the word “blog” had just recently been invented.)  Instead you would go to a wrestling news site that would post an article about the event and manually update the page now and then.  There were no push notifications; you had to manually reload the page yourself, and if nothing happened right away, you’d wonder if you needed to clear your browser cache.  I’d done this many times, and I was fine with it.  On this occasion, though, I was in a chatroom where one or two people were watching the show.  I probably asked about everything that happened, but I was primarily interested in one match: The Godfather vs. The Blue Blazer.

Owen Hart had been in a tag team with Jeff Jarrett, along with Jarrett’s manager Debra.  Somewhere in that run, the WWF hit upon the idea of having Owen romantically pursue Debra to cause tension with Jarrett.  Owen refused to go for it, so he didn’t feel comfortable rejecting the creative team’s second idea, to bring back his old masked character, The Blue Blazer.  There were actually two separate runs with this idea.  The first time, Owen “quit” the WWF and denied involvement when "someone” in the Blazer outfit ambushed his enemies.  Later, Owen suddenly brought the outfit back acting like he believed he was a superhero.  I don’t know if refusing to do the Debra angle prompted the first Blazer storyline or the second.  I didn’t know anything about it at the time.  I just thought Owen was hilarious wearing a mask and a cape and pretending that you couldn’t tell he was Owen Hart.

Initially the Blue Blazer was just a “clever” disguise to create plausible deniability, but by this point they’d decided to use it to parody white-meat, cartoony, superhero babyface wrestlers.  The Blazer talked about taking vitamins like Hulk Hogan.  I’m sure there were some Adam West Batman references.  Sooner or later he would spoof the gimmick of rappelling to the ring from the rafters like Sting.  Every time Sting did it in WCW, it always seemed to take forever for him to unfasten himself from his harness when he reached the ground, killing the momentum of live TV.  I used to wonder why they didn’t have some quicker way to get him out of that rig.  I used to think the WWF wouldn’t put up with that delay, because they had slicker production that WCW.

It was inevitable that the Blazer would try to go after the babyface characters who were technically awful role models.  The Godfather was a wrestling pimp, and had improbably won the intercontinental title, which would normally be above his level.  I could see where this was going--the Blazer would be offended by Godfather’s licentiousness, and wrestle him, and end up with the title.  If the Blue Blazer had been fun before, he’d be even better with a championship.  Moreover, it would reverse the downward trend in Owen’s career, after some big highlights in 1997 petered out in 1998.

So I got on this chatroom and and asked about Owen.  Somebody told me the match had been about to start earlier in the show, but there’d been some kind of accident in Owen’s entrance.  I didn’t get enough specifics right away.  In my head I imagined the Blue Blazer doing some sort of wacky Super Dave Osborne stunt, where they’d make it look like he was hurt to set up a twist in the story later in the night.  I may have even wondered if the Blazer would be “hospitalized” so Owen could “take his place” in the title match.  The point is, nothing I’d been told suggested this wasn’t a comedy skit, because I wasn’t watching the show.

A little later, my source quoted Jim Ross’s update in the chatroom.  I’ll never forget it.  They wrote it in all caps for some reason: OWEN HART HAS DIED

It sounded like some overwrought story element.  I wanted to believe it was part of the act, that the “Blazer” was in critical condition at the “hospital,” and things had taken a turn for the worse so Owen could play mindgames with the Godfather.  I wanted to believe anything that would make it okay.  But I knew.  If they had come up with some sick story like I’d imagined, they wouldn’t have used the wrestling pimp as the victim of the scam.  If it was an angle, they would have announced the Blue Blazer had died, not Owen Hart.

Now I was all over the news sites.  Owen was supposed to do a rappelling entrance like Sting.  Something went wrong and he fell from the top of the Kemper Arena.  This part of the story’s been covered thoroughly, and you don’t need the details from me.  I couldn’t believe it.  The story wasn’t supposed to end this way. 

I didn’t know what to do.

I stayed online and followed coverage of the rest of the show. 

Maybe I was just in shock.  Maybe I wanted some sort of update.  Maybe I hoped against hope that it was all just an angle.  Maybe I just wanted to know if the Undertaker was going to win the world title.  I don’t know.  But I’ve never been able to be too hard on the WWF for continuing with the show, because I can imagine what it’s like to not know how to proceed except to follow the format sheet.

I got wall-to-wall coverage of Owen for at least the next 24 hours.  The mainstream news acted like The Blue Blazer was his wrestling name and Owen Hart was his real name, like they were talking about Rey Mysterio and Oscar Gutierrez.  The WWF set up an Owen tribute site, with little OH graphics based on the design he wore when he wasn’t the Blazer--a design that had originally been used for Jarrett’s gear, and adapted for their tag team.   Bret Hart was supposed to wrestle Kevin Nash on the Tonight Show on May 24, which obviously didn’t happen.  People talked like Owen did the rappelling thing all the time, or he was feuding with Sting, or all sorts of simplifications of why the hell he was even up there.  I thought, nobody’s going to understand any of this, nobody’s going to remember the nuances of these little details, because none of it matters anymore.  But I remember.

Every time the anniversary of Owen’s death comes around, I remember how much I wanted him to play the Blue Blazer, how much I wanted him to wrestle that match, and how lame I thought it was that Sting couldn’t get out of his safety harness.  And I think about how he apparently didn’t want to play the Blazer, and how he certainly didn’t want to be up in the rafters, and I just know why properly securing him to the cable wasn’t a priority.  And I blame myself.

[gmafbcm]

Merry New Year!

I listen to a fucking ton of podcasts. Here are a few I don’t miss. Grouped but not ranked. Tried to include a favorite or representative episode for each. I don’t know what platform you listen to things on so I went with firm specific or top google results for each.

Finance: the bulk of my listening goes to my favorite topic

RopesTalk: Ropes and Gray does a great job of providing concise insight on legal issues primarily in finance and IP.  Quick hit on CDS

Conversations with Tyler: I didn’t know where to put this one but Tyler Cowen is a great economist and has surprisingly good questions no matter the topic. Matt Levine is good one to start with 

HBR Idea Cast: Long running pod from the Harvard Business Review. Here is this year’s econ Nobel winner Esther Duflo

Invest Like the Best: Patrick O'Shaughnessy of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management talks to investors of all stripes. Here is a great ep with @modestproposal

Macro Musings: David Beckworth of Mercatus Center at George Mason University talks econ and markets in depth. A good one with Chris Crowe from Capula

Macro Voices: the host Erik Townsend is not particularly impressive but he gets some fine guests. Chris Cole the CIO of Artemis has done two strong episodes both linked within

Exchanges at Goldman Sachs: amazing guest and interviewers across the board. Can’t go wrong with this one.  The parting spot from Gary Cohn is very good

Morgan Stanley Ideas: discussions from the research team at MS. My favorite is when they examine “cypto currencies” through the lens of other pretend money like western Massachusetts’s BerkShares

Quantcast: from Risk.net if you really want to get into the weeds there are few better. Mats Kjaer, one of the most talented risk quants out there, formerly of Barclays now at Bloomberg shares his latest on capital valuation adjustment   

Reorg: a go to for distressed, BK, liquidations, and debt litigation. A good example of what to expect is their latest on new issuance covenant trends

Top Traders Unplugged: a back and forth with more quant focused, CTA, and trend following traders. Not sure how they swung this one but they bagged the founders of a visionary shop AHL. Michael Adam, David Harding, founder and CEO of Winton Group, and Martin Lueck, co-founder and president of Aspect Capital

Debtwire: broad based coverage on levered finance throughout that side of the capital stack. Proskauer Rose’s private credit restructuring group is a good one

Blackstone: crab claws, you know the drill. Former partner and GSO founder Dwight Scott is a standout 

Activist Insight: a look at all that happens in the primarily domestic side of activist investing. One to get you caught up is The top 10 wildest campaigns of 2019  

Alpha Exchange: New but shows promise. The first episode hooked me Louis-Vincent Gave, CEO and Founding Partner, Gavekal  

JP Morgan Eye on the Market: Michael Cemblast is razor sharp. It is rather topical and quick, just subscribe.

Capital Allocators: Ted Seides formerly one of the more influential names in early stage fund of funds talks with some of the biggest names in alternatives and more. Whitebox Advisors’s Andy Redleaf is amazing

Inside the Ice House: from ICE / NYSE very broad but worth a listen. John Arnold is the best one I have heard 

Odd Lots: as often as I question some choices of guests Tracy Alloway is fantastic. Bill Janeway on the unicorn bubble 

CFTC Talks: a bit dry but they bring in some hitters and do not mind deep diving at all. A good idea of what to expect is George Saravelos Deutsche Bank, Global Co-head FX Research 

Barstool: not for everyone but I am a Stoolie since year one, a bunch of my friends work there, and they put out some of the funniest stuff on the internet.  I had brutal year and couldn’t have handled it without their levity.

Pardon My Take: Number one podcast for a reason.  Football guys guys. Produced by Scituate’s finest Handsome Hank. If you are one of the few not listening the best of 2019 is a fine dropping off point

Spittin Chiclets: hockey from the standpoint of both fans and former pros. Hosted by my summer neighbor and the originator of gassin’ beers and chuckin’ knucks Ryan Whitney.  Doing another best of cop out

Fore Play: I don’t even play golf (rage and lack of patience) but this pod is so funny and they treat the game with an irreverence that is exactly what it needs. Jake Owens’s story about Phil Mickelson is perfection

Micks Tape: basketball focused but plenty of discussion of sports at large, stand-up comedy, and the only place I find out about new rap.  It is a weird episode but I fell off a treadmill laughing to ‘All Star Draft and Wild Hypotheticals With YP’

Light Camera: where I go for movie reviews and some of the goofiest skits I have ever heard.  I found their second interview with Jesse Eisenberg fascinating

The Corp: a look at entrepreneurs from Alex Rodriguez and Big Cat. Pulls some of the biggest names out there.  Martha Stewart is a personal favorite 

Gambling: it is derivative market making but for sports 

Bet the Process: Rufus Peabody is one of the best football and golf handicappers on the planet. Jeff Ma former captain of the MIT blackjack team is as good at cross discipline analytics as it gets.  Former head of market making at Pinnacle Ted Knutson bridges the finance / gambling bridge well

Pinnacle: gambling through the lens of the most quantitatively advanced sports book out there. In this ep Joe Peta discusses his overlapping careers in hedge funds and gambling

Gamble On: this pod from US Bets focuses on offshore and online gaming. Not a ton of shelf life on these so the latest on Draft Kings going public is worth a listen 

Gaming Today: more of an old school discussion from the standpoint of Vegas bookmakers.  They remind me of floor traders. Listen to the latest and try to find some edge 

Misc.

Daves of Thunder: Feeney and Shek are two tremendously talented comedy writers and they make me laugh ever episode.  I would start pre-hiatus from the top because the jokes get very inside baseball 

Hodinkee: if you have any interest in vintage watches this is really the only place to go.  Ben Clymer’s backstory is what watch collecting is all about

David Chang: insights on the food industry and running a business from a real pro in both regards. Joe Beef is one of my favorite places on earth so that is a good one to check 

Brattlecast: books old and or rare. Ken Gloss owns my favorite shop in Boston and has decades of stories about it.  Finds of a Lifetime is the goal 

Bon Appétit: recipes and trends from the food world in a relaxed and approachable format. Just a delight. They made a perfect Thanksgiving, I stole two recipes and I barely cook

Beyond Yacht Rock: I have learned more about music from this show than in my years of formal training and symphony involvement.  I would take it from the top  but if you need a good cry, JD’s songs from his late wife is a touching tribute

Comedy Bang Bang: if you are in need of a good laugh instead this inside look at comedy is second to none.  I relisten to Paul F. Tompkins as Werner Herzog and every time it kills me

All the Smoke: the newest addition gives a player perspective on the NBA from Stephen Jackson and Matty Barnes.  It made me like Dwayne Wade which as a Celtics fan is tough

If there is anything you think I might enjoy based on these I would be pleased as punch to hear from you.