Links

With Leather On NFL.Com - Sure, there are links all OVER the page, but we’re right there in the middle. Never thought I’d get quoted for talking about John Cena in a Tim Tebow paragraph on NFL.com, but here we are. The coolest. [NFL.com]

The 10 Must-See Christmas Specials This Month - Is nowhere playing ‘A Garfield Christmas’ this month? Because I don’t want to live in a world where I “must see” ‘Prep and Landing 2: Naughty vs. Nice’. [Warming Glow]

The South Park RPG Sounds Hella Cool - I thought Lufia & The Fortress Of Doom was already a South Park RPG. Oh well, I’ll buy the hell out of this, because you can’t play that crappy Twisted Metal South Park game for your entire life. [Gamma Squad]

5 Depressing Facts About Birdman And Mack Maine’s Billionaire Minds Mixtape - Depressing fact #6: this is neither basketball Birdman nor Hanna-Barbera Birdman. [Smoking Section]

Fox News: The Muppets Is A Liberal Plot! - Man, I’m glad The Goonies wasn’t released when Fox News was around. “Those kids should just accept that their parents are leaving the Goondocks and obey them! Nyeah!” [Film Drunk]

50 Cats Straight Chillin’ With Piles Of Cash - I don’t know, but it involves cats. [UPROXX]

The Best Of Fat #Jonah Hill - This should just be the Walk Hard scene where he talks about how hard it is to masturbate with a ghost hand in its entirety and the Orson Welles reference from Superbad and then nothing else. [UPROXX]

46 Cultural Moments That Defined 2011 - Buzzfeed hates December and doesn’t want it included in any of these lists. [Buzzfeed]

Famous Album Cover Locations As Seen In Google Street View - Pretty awesome. Anybody know where they took the pic for the cover of ‘Cracked Rear View’? [FARK]

Angelina Jolie Graces the Cover of Newsweek, Gives America Lethal Dose of the Heebie-Jeebies - The hell is going on with this? I’m gonna go look at my DVD of Hackers for a while. [Pajiba]

Pretty Damn Cool Animated Comic Book Covers - All they need is an antiquated Stan Lee voice-over about “shpidah man!” I want 10,000 more of these. [Unreality]

Pre-show notes:

- As a prerequisite for this column, make sure you’ve read The Best And Worst Of WWE Survivor Series ’11. It’ll explain a lot of the obvious stuff from last night (CM Punk is champion? Big Show came off the top rope?) without me having to cobble together a video editor and post a bunch of JVC Kaboom Box Kabooms Of The Night.

- Don’t forget, we’re trying to get a regular Smackdown live-blog going, too, so smark that on your calendar for Friday and go back and read the first one.

- Also, be sure to check out my appearance on The Masked Man’s first wrestling podcast for Grantland. I’m pretty honored to show up on the first ever episode, even if I spent most of it talking about D’Lo Brown buying feminine hygiene products.

- If you like pro wrestling, you’ll LOVE Twitter: Follow us on Twitter @withleather, follow me personally @MrBrandonStroud and like us on Facebook. It’s the best and easiest way to know when these columns go up, and it helps me sell you on the rest of the site (hopefully).

- If you read the column or watched the show and have some thoughts to share, don’t hesitate to leave a comment. I’m especially interested in hearing what you thought of every segment of the show in the order they occured, relating in no way to anything I’ve typed. But no, if you’re a regular reader I want you to be a part of this every week. Don’t make me start a mailbag.

- For further Raw reading, be sure to check out UGO’s WWE Raw: The Good The Bad And The Ugly and John Canton’s Raw Deal (when it goes up).

- Neither A.J. nor Kaitlyn appeared on this week’s show (Kelly Kelly barely even showed up), so I’m including the picture to the right to guarantee my first 18 comments are “oh my god that picture of a.j. are you serious”.

The Best And Worst Of WWE Raw for November 11 is after the jump. There are some pretty good wrestling matches in here, so pay attention.

Read the rest of this entry »

Pre-show notes:

- If you love The Rock and think he’s the best wrestler of all time, be sure to leave us a comment. That should cover my commenting hype-beg for the week and entitle every living human who isn’t me or Billy Jack Haynes to post something.

- An important thing to remember while reading this report is that I had a weekend literally full of awesome wrestling. I spent Friday night and Saturday and Sunday mornings at Wizard World Austin loitering around Darin Childs’ table in the 1600 aisle, commissioning professional art from my favorite wrestler in the world. Saturday night I went to Anarchy Championship Wrestling’s Lone Star Classic, which featured Portia Perez winning their heavyweight title only to lose it an hour later. ACH ended up with it, which was the second happiest thing that could happen. Also, the Nasty Boys were there. Sunday was CHIKARA’s High Noon iPPV. I was too worn out by then to cover it effectively, but it was one of the best shows of the year and Peck/Cabana II was simultaneously the best and worst match in history. So then Monday night comes along, and it’s three hours of Raw getting Rocked. My brain may not be processing this correctly.

- Oh, and before I forget, after the jump you can see four of my five (or six) favorite WWE Superstars appearing in one segment together on Friday’s Smackdown. Why am I not Besting and Worsting this show instead?

Read the rest of this entry »

With Moneyball set to hit theaters tomorrow, Sony Pictures has the PR and marketing armada in full force, with the exclamation point being Brad Pitt on the cover of Sports Illustrated this week. “Moneyball,” of course, is an excellent book by Michael Lewis that tells the true story of Oakland Athletics GM Billy Beane and his (sort of) revolutionary sabermetrics system. Moneyball the movie, though, is a fictitious take on the book that stars Pitt as Beane and Jonah Hill as a character based on former A’s assistant GM Paul DePodesta, who didn’t want his name in the movie.

I share similar opinions about this film with our comrade at WWTDD, but baseball movies are still like sex with a pizza to me – it’s never bad. Either way, I was pretty disappointed with the cast of Moneyball, in that there are no current or former MLB players playing themselves. But then one listing caught my attention:

Royce Clayton as Miguel Tejada

That’s right, former MLB shortstop for 11 teams, Royce Clayton is making his acting debut as Miguel Tejada. I pray that he just has one line and he walks into the clubhouse and in a terrible accent asks if anyone has seen his vitamins. Runner-up for best casting choice goes to actor Gary “G. Thang” Johnson as Jermaine Dye. I’m strongly considering changing my nickname to B. Thang.

Also making the rounds for Moneyball is Hill, who was in Oakland yesterday to throw out the first pitch for the Athletics against the Detroit Tigers. Hill is on a first pitch parade, having tossed out the opener at the Chicago White Sox game last Wednesday as well. But Hill’s first effort came more than a year ago, when he threw out the first pitch at a Boston Red Sox game. I thought we might take a look at how his game has progressed.

Read the rest of this entry »

At long last, here is your full, high-definition theatrical trailer for Moneyball, the Aaron Sorkin adaptation of the book by Michael M. Lewis (not Billy Beane). You’d think more people would know Michael Lewis wrote the book, considering that his name is in huge red letters and bigger than the title and subtitle. In case you need to be caught up, here’s a succinct-ish synopsis from ComingSoon.net.

Based on a true story, Moneyball is a movie for anybody who has ever dreamed of taking on the system. Brad Pitt stars as Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland A’s and the guy who assembles the team, who has an epiphany: all of baseball’s conventional wisdom is wrong. Forced to reinvent his team on a tight budget, Beane will have to outsmart the richer clubs. The onetime jock teams with Ivy League grad Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) in an unlikely partnership, recruiting bargain players that the scouts call flawed, but all of whom have an ability to get on base, score runs, and win games. It’s more than baseball, it’s a revolution – one that challenges old school traditions and puts Beane in the crosshairs of those who say he’s tearing out the heart and soul of the game.

The cast of “Major League” accomplished this exact same movie without any math or stats by using self-esteem and a communal hatred of women. You can tell this is Hollywood because then-Network Associates Coliseum is PITCH BLACK. When they show that clip of the outfielders missing a ball, I didn’t think “these guys aren’t good at baseball”, I thought “how is Eric Byrnes supposed to catch a pop fly on the deck of the f**king Starship Enterprise?” All it needed was lens flares. That shadowy Social Network filter is just as bad as the urine glaze they use for horror remakes.

Hopefully I can get my Juiced: Wild Times, Rampant ‘Roids, Smash Hits, and How Baseball Got Big adaptation greenlit (shortened Hollywood title: How Baseball). It’s just two hours and forty minutes of Karl Urban as Jose Canseco contemplating steroids in a hallway closet.

[sauce]