Well, hello. Welcome to this week’s edition of The Live Wire, that is amazingly fine, having attempted to drain Glasgow’s finest hostelries of copious amounts of alcohol over the weekend, thanks to the Smash Night Out Version 3.0.

Highlights included an aborted “E-C-WWW!” yell in a rock pub, and nearly being killed by a Mark Henry sized 118-118 lookalike (UK peeps will know what I mean) in another bar. Quality.

But drunken hijinks aside, what’s the gig this week? What’s the Hampden? Hold the bus! I know! It’s (applause) A RANDOM THOUGHTS COLUMN!!! Whooo!!! And this week, the soundtrack is provided by the awesomely good Uncle Kracker record, ‘No Stranger To Shame’. Boogie-tastic!

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Speaking of music - and it’s a very tenuous link, believe me -  Randy Savage has a new record out too. If you haven’t heard it... it’s a must. If you’re talking about a classic example of one man finally going over the edge, then this is it. Seriously folks, you can file this one under the “so bad that it heads back round to good” category.

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I saw Paul London debut on Smackdown this week. Not exactly the greatest of starts for him, but what do you expect? If he’d gone in against the WWE Champion and nearly beaten him, what would that have achieved. London can go away, lick his wounds and tag up with Spanky now. It gives the two of them a reason to stick together and form a team - and the tag division needs a bit of spicing up.

The World Championship on Raw has just gone through 8 months of a strengthening exercise, the last thing the WWE Title on Smackdown needs is someone coming in for his debut and nearly winning it - doing that just makes Brock look weak, and the title suffers as a result. Sensible booking from the WWE in my opinion.

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If Rodney Mack is injured... will Teddy Long still get to talk and do his dance? If not, this could be the worst injury in AGES!!!

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Nice to see that Triple H is staying off Raw. Lovely how he can manage to stick his nose on Raw with his little video excerpts every week. What’s the point? At least when Randy Orton had his RNN updates, it strengthened the character he was trying to build.

While Trips is onscreen bragging about the $100,000 bounty, all he’s doing is keeping himself in the public eye, not letting the focus go on the bounty – or indeed the champion himself.

The reward is a good idea though - it gives almost every midcard jobber an excuse to go after Goldberg, and gives him an excuse to squash them and cultivate the killer image he had in WCW. Maybe even an excuse for a few mini-heel turns or even jaunts over from Smackdown... or even a return to the Crash Holly days of attacks in airports and amusement arcades.

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Ric Flair... he’s still The Man. His put-down to Maven (“Son, I’ve had more World Championships than you’ve had women!”) was a classic. Nobody does it better than Flair, so why not let him speak more and wrestle less? Whooo!

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So the Hogan-Jarrett war has started in earnest. I hope TNA know what they’re doing. Seems a lot of expense and hype is being put into Hogan... and the likes of Dusty Rhodes, Roddy Piper, and Sting, when he has the time. Wasn’t the point of TNA that they would be building on the next generation like Low Ki, Christopher Daniels, AJ Styles, Amazing Red, The SAT and the fast, exciting X-Division? Can’t see Hogan and Dusty getting involved in any ladder matches anytime soon, can you?

Sure, get them involved at some level to draw the veteran fans - but does AJ Styles facing Dusty Rhodes really do a lot for him or the NWA title? Does Jarrett really need to be put into a program with Hogan? Or is it that Jarrett is the only man in TNA that has the stroke (pardon the pun) to stand up to Hogan and match his creative control?

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Did you see Kane’s demise last week? What is it with the WWE and wasting money on stupid things like this? We have Triple H dropped from a crane in a limo a few years back; Austin blew up a DX bus as well; now we have Shane writing off a perfectly good limo, all for the sake of advancing an angle that seems to have been treading water for weeks.

The WWE aren’t losing money, not by a long shot - but surely stunts like this that achieve nothing but waste expensive vehicles. It’s just madness! Would anyone else get to blow up a limo right now, other than Shane McMahon?

And speaking of Shane, will he attract any heat for the injury that Test suffered at a house show? At a time when overhead belly-to-belly suplexes are under semi-suspension, is it wise to let a barely trained part-time wrestler hit some of your top talent (and Test) with a risky move like the Van Terminator?

But here’s a question for you peeps out there  - had Rob Van Dam done the same thing... do you think he’d have been told he was too dangerous and told to calm down?

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OK, I admit - I’m loving Lance Storm’s cheesy dancing gimmick right now. It beats the hell out of people chanting boring at him... and the thing is, he looks like he’s enjoying it too. So that makes it alright... right? Right!

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So there we go... that’s enough randomness for now. If you’re looking for more general nuttiness and all out random babbling about nothing, check out the SmashWrestling.com forums! Apart from that... I’ll see you at the weekend for No Mercy Predictamania.

Until next week, fave fun go mad,

Tony Cottam

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