By "Net.cop" Scott Keith

[Warning: The following rant may be offensive to tight-assed, bribe-taking, hypocritical, out-of-touch, wrinkled, idiotic Canadian politicians. If you fit the above, you may wish to go take a nap instead of reading this.]

Let's go a bit off topic, shall we?

Okay, still sort of wrestling related, but not really.

ECW Hardcore Heaven has come and gone, and much to the surprise of many of the more conservative elements of the world, the Earth still spins the same way and the oceans have not flooded the continents.

Choice is good. Both the United States and Canada were founded on the principles of choice, inherant in democracy. As a rational thinking person of legal age, I have been deemed fit by the legal system of Canada (by default) as being competent enough to decide where I wish to live, what clothes I wish to wear, who I wish to vote for, and what I wish to eat for breakfast.

In a free-market society, if you don't like the supermarket closest to you, you find another one. If you don't find the service at a restaurant to your liking, you find another one. You vote with your wallet.

But here in Canada, the utilities are a monopoly, run by a bunch of whiny, good-old-boy cartels who rake in billions in profits and are completely out of touch with what the public thinks of them.

Ever see "Goodfellas?" There's a great bit in there (among other great bits) where Henry is talking about the local mafioso taking over a restaurant, and every month he has to have his share, whether he deserves it or not. Slow business? Fuck you, pay me. Delayed shipments? Fuck you, pay me. Massive fire gutted the kitchen? Fuck you, pay me. I think you get the idea.

When dealing with the cable and phone companies in particular, they have you fucked up the ass sideways and they know it. Don't like the programming we offer? Fuck you, pay us. Don't like our long-distance rates? Fuck you, pay us. Don't like the fact that we arbitrarily tack two dollars a month onto your bill because our revenues are eaten into by competition in the long-distance field? Fuck you, pay us.

On Sunday, the day of Hardcore Heaven, Viewer's Choice Canada had a power boat race of some sort scheduled. Now, I'm guessing the buyrate on that would be somewhere between "dick all" and "not a hell of a lot" (0.05 - 0.10 in numeric terms), but that's just a rough guess. Keep this in mind later.

Cable companies are in business to make money. Let's not kid ourselves. They lay bullshit three feet deep about "family entertainment" and "serving the community" and "broadcast standards" but when it comes to it, if one guy biting another guy's ear off pulls a 2.0 buyrate, well, they're there, dude.

Which is why I find the stubborn refusal to carry ECW on PPV so perplexing and utterly frustrating.

It's not even that I wanted desperately to see the show. I didn't like the first three-way dance between Grandpa, Whiner and Suicide Boy, and I didn't expect the second to be any better. But I wanted to have the choice of seeing the show. That's very important to me as a wrestling fan. I don't like lucha libre, but I'm grateful to Telemundo for airing it twice a week, because that way I can judge for myself that I don't like it.

ECW is a very polarizing federation. You generally either love it or hate it. I've become pretty indifferent to it overall. There's some terrific matches, and tons of filler and garbage, just like anything else out there. It's different, but the closer they get to the mainstream the more it's going to look like a low-budget WWF/WCW wannabe, which is unfortunate but a necessary part of wrestling.

What the CRTC is doing amounts to thought policing.

For those unfamiliar with the esteemed panel of Canadian TV gurus, basically it's a panel of cocksucking government appointees who don't watch TV and have various objects shoved so far up their already tight ass that it would take a team of world-class proctologists years just to write the case history on them.

The CRTC makes all the decisions on new channels, current content, and (if they had their way) what we eat, where we sleep and who we fuck. No government institution is more of a dinosaur and in need of nuking than these idiots.

When I say they make all the decisions, I mean they make ALL the decisions. You don't broadcast in this country without a license from the CRTC. And they're a bunch of high-society inbred morons, so we get TV that's the broadcast equivalent of lima beans: Packed with goodness, but no one actually cares to try it. Examples of services licensed by these guys: Life TV, Women's TV, Bravo! (arts TV), Discovery (science TV), and History TV.

Now keep in mind that they do surveys of the general, TV watching public all the time. EVERYBODY, for the past 6 or 7 YEARS, has been requesting a Sci-Fi channel, a cartoon channel, and a comedy channel. Loudly. Over and over again. And yet we get artsy-fartsy crap shoved down our throats in the name of "preserving our national identity" which doesn't actually exist. Happily, they finally relented this year and the Big Three will come into existance in the fall, but of course we have to pay more now. It should also be noted the Women's TV network is one of the consistently lowest rating channels in Canada, in every province. Just bitterness on my part, perhaps.

The CRTC also regulates pay-per-view services. Because of the stupid fucking hysteria about violence on TV, the CRTC has basically decided no one in Canada should ever watch violence again. You can show two men engaged in graphic homosexual acts on free TV as long as it's late enough (Showcase has done so on various occasions, and I'm not talking about just kissing, I'm talking about actual scenes of gay intercourse) but you can't show UFCs or ECW anytime, even if it's pay TV. Special interest groups say VIOLENCE IS BAD loud and often enough that the government feels it has no choice but to police our brain matter, even if it means cutting into the profits of the cable companies who already have a monopoly anyway.

Well, I say fuck this shit.

I think it's time we wrestling fans started whining to the government, too. As a male, aged 23, with no children, I could give a flying fuck about violence and the effect it has on young minds. That's someone else's problem, not mine. Go lay your parental responsiblity crap on someone with kids. If I want to watch two guys batter each other with a barbed wire baseball bat, I should have the right to do so.

It's time for us to get militant. As males aged 18-24, wrestling fans as a whole are the kind of special interest group that government and big business fall all over themselves trying to suck up to. If enough of us start bombarding the government with letters complaining about the lack of freedom of choice here in Canada, they *will* listen. Feminazi special interest groups much smaller than the population of RSPW have influenced major decisions in the past, and if we take a stand on this garbage we can do the same, I feel.

* * * * * *

On a lighter note, I think I've figured out WCW's ratings success. "Seinfeld", a show about nothing, is the #1 rated sitcom. So WCW becomes a federation about nothing.

It's been a year now since Fall Brawl where Sting decided to start hanging around in the rafters, and he's still hanging around in the rafters. Hulk Hogan is still World champion and still ducking people. nWo will once again be fighting WCW in a Wargames match, and I'm betting dollars to donuts the teams will be almost exactly the same as last year.

It's all very meaningless. Pick a PPV, any one. Now what was the main event? Couldn't think of it right away, could you?

Now what was the main event for Wrestlemania III? Hogan v. Andre. Everyone knows that. WCW is duplicating the "big event" feel of the 80s WWF shows, but they're not hitting the important part: The main event.

The undercard should not eclipse what the people paid to see. Having luchadores put on a ***** match and then throwing Rodman in there for the main event is counter productive.

Ricky Steamboat v. Randy Savage was that much better as a blowoff match not just because it was a great feud, but because it was a great match to end the feud. Luger v. Hogan was memorable for sure, but just go back and try and to watch it more than once. Ugh.

One of these days I'll do an "If Eric Bischoff wrote 'Seinfeld'" bit, but not now.

* * * * *

On the vindication front, I'd just like to point out a couple of things.

- I spent the entire last wrant complaining about how the Outsiders-Steiners finish was horribly booked and completely against what should have happened. Well, apparently, WCW agrees with me. It turns out Hall and Nash decided to veto jobbing to the Steiners mere minutes before the match. And in fact the Steiners were supposed to win the belts and go into a feud with Harlem Heat, but that's out the window until the Mega-Egos decide to allow themselves to lose the titles. Another reason to hate the nWo...

- As I've been telling anyone who would listen for weeks now, Nitro will be on TSN starting in October, and it was finally confirmed on the TSN website as being true. I'm finally an inside source, baby! ;) Now if only that permanent live RAW rumor would come true, too...

Wrant over. I'm going to bed...