– Monday Night Raw 2/8/2010, ALL JAPAN B-Banquet #247 12/13/2009

RAAAAAAW. Raw has finally driven me to watching it after the fact so I can FF it as fast as possible without fear of running into LIVE and there was a time (when I finally regot cable after 8 years) and (when I got an HD tv) that I made myself absolutely watch RAW because it was WRESTLING and it was MONDAY NIGHT like the OLD DAYS but seriously I swear it’s like Vince books his shows only to make me not want to watch them. I sit down and I’m told by my partner that the show opened with a “boring Bret Hart video” before she starting watching Divine by Design or some house show about a condo in San Francisco (see, my ROH on HDNET taping overruns by a couple minutes so she is left with nothing to watch but rasslin for about two minutes on Monday Night on our Dual DVR from 8:00 PM till 8:02 PM) and….she was right. A boring Bret Hart video. I love how Vince took an angle that I would have bet my life on would make WrestleMania but ends up absolutely sucking because it feels like you’re swimming through a pool of peanut butter while on three doses of Tylenol PM. I also love how it seems like they don’t really care there is a PPV in February. WHAT DO I REMEMBER? A three way match with DX, Straight Edge Society, and ShowMiz and after listening to Dave Meltzer explains the pinfalls in this match, it really makes a lot of sense that Shawn took out big time CM PUNK because he got pinned by ceilin’ bustin Miz and the whole Shawn going crazy thing continues as he superkicks Teddy Long who will always be the manager of Doom to me and then he walks off into the sunset like John Wayne except I don’t really know if John Wayne ever really walked off into the sunset just seems like something he’d do being a cowboy and all. This may have been before or after the superkick but goofy as heck promo with the team now known as ShowMiz!@@@@@ And Poor Big Show just keeps getting tossed around between mid-card programs but who really wants him in the main event? Not me!!!!! and Legacy continues to be the worst faction ever with their long stares and goofy lack of knee pads and maybe I’d cared about this team if they’d actually all worked together as a team at some point in their history? This really sums up the biggest problem with the US pro wrestling scene: there is very rarely any emotional reason to care about wrestlers and their stories. I have no reason to care about these three guys having tension. I don’t want to see them beat up. I don’t want to see them make up. I just don’t care. And we have John Cena choking out Ted DiBiase. K. BUSINESS PICKS UP! Sorta. I start listening to John Cena talk and then I figure out he’s going to say the same hyper-pseudo-i-love-the-biz promo so I fast forward until I ff too much and see a chubby dude charge Vince…rewind…oh, Bret Hart! Then we all get to watch Brett hart “try” “to” “break” “things” which really only turned out to be him tripping over himself and nearly electrocuting himself with the video production equipment. Then today lunchtime entertainment was ALL JAPAN B-BANQUET #247 which I stumble upon in mysterious places and while I’ve been semi-keeping up on Dragon Gate and NOAH, All Japan has not been on the rasslin radar but for whatever reason a show with the word Banquet in the title caught my eye and there we are with my sweet potato and chickpea curry watching a goofy Kikutaro and his funny funny mask taking bumps with his butt against Funaki who’s supposedly some big MMA dude and then a F4 OFFER MATCH. No idea. See, here’s what I love about watch puro. I often have no idea what is going on because of the language barrier. But this befuddlement can range from “I don’t understand the standard commentary of this scientific wrestling match” to “I do not understand this culture what the hell is going on.” The latter happened several times on this show. I am not even going to describe the breakdown in the middle of the Keijo Muto match because it included chop sticks and I was really, really scared.