The day after my visit to Brimfield, I went to the Tampa/St. Pete area.
Exterior shot of Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg, Florida. Tropicana Field is an off-white domed baseball stadium with an angled roof that resembles an orange juicer. Cars are parked in front of the stadium, and trees can be seen just past the cars, off in the distance.
Look! It’s Tropicana Field! Active MLB park #13 for me, and #15 overall (Yankee Stadium II and Shea Stadium are no more).
Interior shot of Tropicana Field, taken from right-center field. Green artificial turf and brown infield dirt can be seen, and blue seating is visible on the other side of the field, as well as an off-white roof.
Interior, from center field! I liked the park a bunch, and think it sucks that people shit all over it like they do. It was a comfortable, fun park.
The roof of Tropicana Field, and the catwalks that run near the top of it.
The catwalks!
Tampa Bay Rays pitcher Brendan McKay warms up in the bullpen of Tropicana Field. Just in front of the bullpen, fans and Rays staff circulate in the picnic area of the ballpark.
Rays pitcher Brendan McKay warming up, taken from our seats. He pitched really well, and is as good as the hype suggests, even if the numbers don’t bear it out yet.
I didn’t get any in-game shots (I use an iPad primarily, which mostly rules that out, and I still don’t travel with a battery pack, so I was screwed by the end of warmups because I’d been out all day), but I saw the Rays beat a Blue Jays team that didn’t seem to have much left in the tank. It was a fun game, regardless, and my friend Dain and I enjoyed it (Dain especially enjoyed the “JI-MAN CHOI!” chants).
I got to hit the Ted Williams Museum and Hitters Hall of Fame while I was at the game, because it’s inside Tropicana Field these days. It was crowded, so it was tough to get pictures of the Ted stuff, but I got a couple pictures from the Hitters Hall of Fame section.
Wade Boggs’ case in the Hitters Hall of Fame section of the Ted Williams Museum, located at Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg, Florida. A Devil Rays jersey, several baseball bats, 2 baseball caps, a glove, a baseball, and several pictures and plaques are visible in the case.
The Wade Boggs display case!
Sadaharu Oh’s case in the Hitters Hall of Fame section of the Ted Williams Museum, located at Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg, Florida. At center, a large picture of Sadaharu Oh batting is visible. Just below it, a signed Sadaharu Oh Yomiuri Giants jersey is visible, as well as a magazine, a plaque, and a baseball bat.
And the Sadaharu Oh display case!
While in town, I also went to the Dali Museum. Here are a few things that I saw there.
Salvador Dali’s “The Hallucinogenic Toreador” painting. The link directly below this image and its caption goes to the Dali Museum’s page on the painting, and gives a detailed description of the painting and its history.
Salvador Dali’s “Portrait of My Dead Brother” painting. The link directly below this image and its caption goes to the Dali Museum’s page on the painting, and gives a detailed description of the painting and its history.
Salvador Dali’s “Galacidalacidesoxiribunucleicacid (Homage to Crick and Watson)” painting. The link directly below this image and its caption goes to the Dali Museum’s page on the painting, and gives a detailed description of the painting and its history.
It’s hard to tell from the photographs themselves, but the paintings themselves are enormous (for instance, “The Hallucinogenic Toreador” is 11′ long and x 13′ tall), and I don’t know that there’s a photograph that’d really do any of them justice.
Salvador Dali’s “Aphrodesiac Telephone” sculpture, which is a sculpture of an ivory-colored rotary telephone with an ivory-colored lobster replacing the phone receiver. The link directly below this image and its caption goes to the Dali Museum’s page on the sculpture, and gives a detailed description of the sculpture and its history.
Photo of Haslam’s Book Store, St. Petersburg, Florida, taken from across Central Avenue South at 21st Street. A beige building with brick red painted letters that say “HASLAM’S” at the top level (obscured by a tree), and “BOOKS” near the top of the ground level in five different spots. Green curtains cover the windows of the building. A number of cars are parked in front of Haslam’s, and the Central Av. S. and 21 St. S. signs are visible across the street.
If you’re in the St. Pete area and looking to shop a bit, I highly recommend going to Haslam’s Book Store. It’s a great old book store that smells like old books and has a ton of stuff.
Mannequins stand outside ARTpool Gallery, St. Petersburg, Florida, in various poses. At front left, two mannequins in brightly colored clothing stand up against a tree.
I also recommend ARTpool Gallery in St. Petersburg (which, as you may be able to tell from this picture, is right across the street from Haslam’s, and both are not far at all from Tropicana Field) is awesome, too. They sell vintage clothing, music, comics, and all sorts of other things, and the staff are super friendly.
The cover to Dalbello’s “whomanfoursays” album. On the cover is a close-up of Lisa Dalbello’s face, in yellow, red, blue, black and white tribal warpaint. the name “Dalbello” appears in black faux Cyrillic lettering at the top of the cover, and “whomanfoursays” appears in the bottom left in white scrawled lettering.
By popular demand, here’s a picture of the best purchase I made at ARTpool, a vinyl copy of Dalbello’s “whomanfoursays”, one of the more adventurous pop records of the ’80s. Have a listen, if you like…
Back to the trip on the whole: we could have a discussion about how I was in an area with a ton of natural beauty (for instance, I saw an amazing Gulf Coast sunset on the beach right before I had dinner at Frenchy’s Rockaway Grill in Clearwater, which was also amazing…), but didn’t post any pictures of that natural beauty here. However, 1. we covered this recently, and 2. when I got home, I was also kind of struck by how I really didn’t take many pictures of scenery. Some of that definitely had to do with my aforementioned constant battle to manage battery power (before my next serious trip, I really need to get an external battery pack), but some of it had to do with my desire, in the moment, to just appreciate what I’m seeing, rather than worrying so much about documenting it all. Sometimes, you just gotta look at stuff and take it in.
Yeah, to keep things from getting any more overwhelming, I needed to break September into parts (it looks like it’s going to be four parts, in fact). I don’t think I’ll need to do this with other months, but we’ll see. Without further ado…
Only made it out there once this year, and this was a good trip, so let’s make it count.
Women In Old Paintings Have Had It With Your Shit, Part I:
A painting of a woman with black hair and white skin, wearing a black dress with a white collar, and holding a small bouquet of flowers while sitting at a brown table with her left hand resting on it, in front of a brown background. The woman is staring straight ahead, and looks really annoyed.Two small, older McDonald’s playground rocking horse-ish rides sit on green grass, with a patch of brown dirt and gravel in front of it at Brimfield Antiques Market, with other antiques in the background. At left, a red white and yellow boat with a McDonald’s logo on the mast, silver handles, and a teal simulated sliver of ocean water at the bottom. At right, a similar ride, but the ride is an anthropomorphic Filet-O-Fish sandwich (a brown roll, brown fish filet, white tartar sauce to simulate the appearance of a tongue, wide white eyes with black pupils, and teal fins) instead of a boat.
Sadly, these were pretty expensive. I think the Filet-O-Fish was about $300.
A 1970s Mattel Godzilla toy (a green action figure-type toy standing about 18″ high with yellow claws, teeth and eyes, and a red strip of fire in its mouth that resembles a tongue) stands on a table, with a blue and green glass Tiffany lamp to its left, and a Mattel Shogun Warriors Dragun toy (also a large action figure, but a blue, red and black robot) to its right. More tables of antiques are visible in the background.
This absolute unit (complete with still-working shooting fist) was $175, which I know because, even though I was extremely careful finding out that the fist still worked, the person whose table this was bellowed the number at me right after I tested it. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t usually make a practice of testing moving parts on antiques, because a lot can go wrong, but it’d been almost 40 years since I’d had a chance there, since, while I still have my Godzilla, he’s been missing his fist for a very long time.
A 1970s Mattel Shogun Warriors Dragun toy ( a red, blue, black and silver robot action figure toy standing about 18″ high) stands on a table, with a wooden box to its left, and a Mattel Godzilla toy to its right. More tables of antiques are visible in the background.
Before all you nerds panic that I’m not gonna show his friend from the Shogun Warriors, here. Here’s a pic of his friend from the Shogun Warriors. Yes, his friend is named Dragun. Yes, I actually did have to look that up, because I’m not nerdy in the Shogun Warriors way, personally, though I think I do have a 3 3/4″ plastic and die-cast figure of him somewhere in the house.
An ornate tower rotary phone standing about 30″ tall, with a gold-brass finish, white inset for the rotary dial, a fleur-de-lis in the center of the rotary dial, and a silver and bronze finish receiver with an ivory-colored handle, speaker, microphone and cord stands on green grass among various other miscellaneous antiques.
This was the best phone in the entire goddamn market, and is in the running for best phone ever.
Two statues, one of a gold leopard with black spots, with golden jeweled eyes, and another of the Virgin Mary, a woman with white skin wearing blue and white robes, stand on the grass with some antique chairs off in the background.
Right after this picture was taken, Mary’s head fell off. I didn’t do it. The dealer did.
A framed picture of professional wrestler Bill Goldberg, a man with white skin, no hair and a greying brown beard, photographed from the shoulders up. The photo is set against a black background with gold trim. Above his head is a facsimile of the tribal tattoo Goldberg has on his bicep, and below his shoulders, “GOLDBERG” is written in large black letters with gold trim.
I had a REALLY hard time not bringing this home, and I have regrets about not doing it. I also kinda wanted the phone, but that wasn’t cheap (I think it was in the $175-275 range), and I don’t have a land line in my house. This Goldberg picture, I would have an actual use for!
A box for a GE AM Miniature Radio with Carry Case from the late 1960s. On it, there are silhouettes of a man and woman dancing, and the body of an electric guitar, both inset on a background that’s purple on the left side and orange on the right. The parts of the man and woman that show up against the backgrounds instead of the guitar are the opposite color of the main background (orange for left, purple for right).
The official AM radio of people who want to simultaneously be Jarvis Cocker from the band Pulp and a secret agent (assuming he’s actually not one, as I don’t think we’ve ever confirmed or denied that).
Glass back panel for a 1979 Gorgar pinball machine by Williams. A red devil stands behind a scantily-clad male barbarian with white skin, wearing a blue helmet, who is trying to rescue a scantily clad woman with white skin and brown hair from a bloody altar. “GORGAR” is written in teal lettering with silver trim at the top right.
Any picture of Gorgar is a good picture of Gorgar.
A painting of a woman lounging against a wall, right hand resting on a pan, with white skin and black hair, in a burgundy Greco-Romanesque overdress pulled down on the left side to reveal a white shift, hanging off the woman’s shoulder. A white rope belt is around the woman’s waist. The woman appears to look at the viewer with equal parts exhaustion and contempt.
And, finally, Women In Old Paintings Have Had It With Your Shit, Part II.
Strangely, I didn’t take any pictures of what I actually bought (a bunch of Fun Foods Baseball Pins to near-finish my set, and a couple of comic books, if memory serves), but I figure these pictures are more than enough to keep everyone busy.
I’ve been trying to figure this out FOREVER, basically since I opened this site in 2016, and I think I’ve finally got it. This will be a rare case of me mentioning my other website, and, since I’m in the process of moving people there from other social media (I deleted my Facebook account a week ago), it will likely be an extremely rare case of me cross-posting some of the information from this post on both of my websites.
If you’re wondering why I don’t talk more about the other site, or perhaps didn’t know I had it, I created this site just under four years ago, because I wanted some more separation between my personal life and discussion of my hobbies. At that point in time, I only had one website, and worse, one Twitter account, so people who were going to either would see me ranting about politics and mental health, then talking about what cards Bo and I had traded in the next breath. It was disorienting and uncomfortable for me, so it was probably also a pretty rough experience for my readers, as well.
Without further adieu, this was what I came up with:
Action Figures and Other Toys
Books
Comic Books
Compact Discs/Records/Tapes/Etc.
Movies and Television (4K Blu-Rays/Blu-Rays/DVDs/VHS/Etc.)
Musical Equipment (Synthesizers, etc.)
T-Shirts
Trading Cards
Note that what I write about these here will only cover the collection and acquisition of the above. In the future, at least after I finish “My Year in Hobbies 2019”, which has some review content and is already in progress, all reviews of anything like recorded or live music, movies, television and books will be on my other website.
Spectator Sports:
Baseball
Hockey
Professional Wrestling
Travel:
Visits to Sellers of Artifacts
Sports Travel (Sporting Events, Museums, etc.)
Personal Thoughts
Thoughts About What’s Happening in the Wider World
Archival Stuff from Older Websites/Social Media/etc. Except Anything from the Old Trading Card Website
Physical Artifact Collecting Hobbies:
Concert Set Lists and Ticket Stubs
Other Creative Things:
My Own Recorded Music
General Photography
Reviews:
Books
Movies
Music (Recorded and Live)
Television
Travel:
Scenic Travel (Not Including Visits to Sellers of Artifacts, or the Sports Parts of Sports Travel)
For instance, in this case, if I traveled to Tokyo (and I hope to at some point in my life, and went to a New Japan Pro-Wrestling event, a NPB game, a video game store, and then actually saw a whole lot of Tokyo outside of my hobbies, the hobby stuff would be here, and the rest would be there.
You may also notice “Concert Set Lists and Ticket Stubs” on the list for the other site. The ticket stubs currently reside there, in a fairly large gallery. That gallery, despite being a gallery of physical artifacts, will most likely be staying put on the other site, and getting an update, as well. I thought about moving it, but that thought gave me a headache, so it’s out. To date, I’ve been posting physical set lists, when I get them, over here, but I think those will be moving to where the ticket stubs are. I’ve already changed my mind on this once, though, so stay tuned for more indecision.
I think this covers things, but we’ll consider this an evolving document, and if I need to adjust it over time, I will. Thanks for bearing with me as I sort things out!
A picture of a boxed Dungeons of Daggorath cartridge for Radio Shack’s TRS-80 Color Computer. a blue-gray gargoyle points a sword at the camera in a maze with a yellow floor and bluew walls, with yellow and black Dungeons of Daggorath logo floating above him. Picture is framed by red trim. Box of cartridge is grey, with black trim and lettering around the outside, and white inner window trim near the window the cartridge is displayed in.
Not gonna lie, even though I’ve never owned a TRS-80 in my life (one of the few commercially-available American home computers of the early ’80s that I haven’t owned), I was REALLY tempted to get this, just because I have such fond memories of Bogarting TRS-80 time at my local Radio Shack as a kid to play it.
A Topps Now card of Cincinnati Reds outfield Aristides Aquino (pictured; a man with brown skin in a white uniform with red trim, wearing a red batting helmet, and swinging a black baseball bat in front of a crowd at a stadium). The card reads “Topps Now” in the top left corner, “10 Aug” in the top right corner, “Call-Up 2019” with the Cincinnati Reds “C” logo in the bottom right corner, and across the bottom, in 2 lines, it reads “Aristides Aquino” and “3-HR GAME, 7 HRs THROUGH FIRST 10 GAMES”.
This cat had a pretty good couple of months. Yeah, I got in on his first Topps Now, albeit not out of the gate. He’s on my keeper league fantasy team now, too. We’ll see how that goes.
I hit a new-to-me bookstore in August, The Montague Bookmill in Montague, MA. Billed as “Books You Don’t Need In A Place You Can’t Find”, it’s a great store filled with solid inventory, built from a converted old mill building alongside the Sawmill River. Gorgeous location, comfortable shopping and browsing experience, highly recommended if you’re in the area or traveling through it. I picked up two books by downtown New York guys with similar hair…
Covers of Eric Bogosian’s “Sex Drugs Rock & Roll” and Lou Reed’s “Between Thought and Expression: Selected Lyrics of Lou Reed” books. Bogosian book has a white cover with a picture of Eric Bogosian, inset in black and red, inside the words “BOGOSIAN SEX DRUGS ROCK & ROLL”, with an embarrassing-in-hindsight Frank Rich caption written underneath. Reed book has a bronze tone to the cover, with the book’s title written in black and bronze blocks above a black and white profile picture of Lou Reed, a man with dark hair and a black shirt on.
I had a cassette copy of the cast recording of the Bogosian play back in the ’80s, and I want to see how the material holds up. In Lou’s case, Lou’s Lou. He was an imperfect dude, to put it mildly, but for a generation and change, he was one of our imperfect dudes. I had kind of a Lou year in 2019, which we’ll revisit later…
In August, I also made it to my first live wrestling card in 17 years (the last time I went was the first MLW show in June of ’02), a collaborative show between Blitzkrieg Pro and Big Time Wrestling celebrating BP’s anniversary.
Here’s Bret “The Hitman” Hart and Ax (Bill Eadie) and Smash (Barry Darsow) of Demolition waving to the crowd after addressing them (all 3 were at the card signing stuff).
Demolition Ax (Bill Eadie, left, a man with black hair and white skin wearing a grey t-shirt, shorts and blue sneakers), Bret “The Hitman” Hart (center, a man with grey hair and white skin, wearing a black t-shirt and black jeans) and and Demolition Smash (Barry Darsow, right, a bald man with white skin, wearing a black t-shirt, black jeans and white sneakers) stand in a wrestling ring and wave to the crowd at a Blitzkrieg Pro/Big Time Wrestling event at CREC Civic Leadership High School in Enfield, CT on August 24th, 2019.
The author (left, a man with brown hair and white skin, wearing a black Black Sabbath Volume IV t-shirt) and pro wrestler Orange Cassidy (right, a man with reddish blonde hair and white skin, wearing aviator sunglasses, a blue jean jacket, and a white t-shirt) give very mild thumbs ups to the camera at a Blitzkrieg Pro/Big Time Wrestling event, August 24th, 2019. Photo Credit: Bryce Remsburg
The Freshly Squeezed one ran into some serious trouble that night, as he was facing The Boogeyman, and while OC is usually pretty chill about things, he was, understandably, very afraid.
Orange Cassidy (left, a shirtless man in blue jeans with reddish blonde hair and white skin) faces The Boogeyman (right, a shirtless man with brown skin, head painted red, wearing black pants) as the crowd looks on at a Blitzkrieg Pro/Big Time Wrestling event, August 24th, 2019.
So afraid, in fact, that after The Boogeyman spat worms at him (yes, really), he tried to run away. When he ran up into the stands, I actually tried to get him to hide behind me (yes, I, a 45 year old man with a history of head injuries, tried to intervene in a professional wrestling match; way to go there, Icarus…), so The Boogeyman wouldn’t see him, but he apparently didn’t feel like this was an effective enough strategy, so he kept running, but not before I got this “Blair Witch Project”-esque shot of him…
Orange Cassidy (front left, a shirtless man with reddish blonde hair and white skin) runs away from The Boogeyman at a Blitzkrieg Pro/Big Time Wrestling event on August 24th, 2019.
Eventually, not long after that, it ended poorly.
Professional wrestler Orange Cassidy (center, a shirtless man with white skin, wearing blue jeans and white sneakers with black soles) lies motionless in a wrestling ring as a crowd looks on at a Blitzkrieg Pro/Big Time Wrestling event, August 24th, 2019.
Orange Cassidy has since recovered, and landed on his feet in All Elite Wrestling, so he’s OK, I guess. I’m not sure what The Boogeyman’s been up to lately.
This entire exchange, including the part where I try to help Orange Cassidy hide from The Boogeyman, was captured on video from not one, but two different camera angles, so one of the more ridiculous things I’ve ever done in my life has been preserved for future generations (or however long YouTube lasts) to enjoy.
I show up around 3:43 on this one….
…and 4:26 on this one.
First-run movies watched in August 2019 (1): Hobbs & Shaw (it was the Snakes on a Plane of movies featuring both Hobbs & Shaw!)
Television seasons binge-watched in August 2019 (5): GLOW Season 2 (dark, and there are choice I wouldn’t have made, but I was still entertained), Kobra Kai Season 2 (better than it has any right to be, even if you don’t have the nostalgic familiarity with the characters that I do), The Strain Seasons 2-4 (I loved the first 2-hour episode, one of my best ever TV viewing experiences…and then they did 3+ more seasons of it…I really wish it had lived up to the promise of that first pilot).
Comic books cancelled or ending in August 2019 (1): Rolled & Told (Lion Forge). It’s sort of cheating, calling this one a comic book, as it’s really an all-ages, modern version of a Dragon Magazine-esque magazine covering Dungeons & Dragons, with a complete short adventure in each issue and, oh yeah, a comic within the magazine that serves as a lead-in to each adventure. I still have to go back and read a bunch of the 12 issue run they did before they went on hiatus (the series is supposedly coming back in Fall of 2020), because each issue is packed with articles and information. There’s a hardcover compilation of the run available now, if you can’t find single issues. If you play D&D on the regular, and/or want to, but have friends who are having trouble committing to a lengthy campaign, I highly recommend Rolled & Told.
September was a big month (and July/August weren’t exactly small), so bear with me, it may take a bit.
An animated GIF of actor Joe Keery, a young man with white skin and brown hair, portraying character Steve Harrington from the television series “Stranger Things”, in his red, white and blue Scoops Ahoy sailor-ish work uniform, saying “Ahoy” on a loop, with the word “Ahoy” written below him in white lettering.Logo for New Japan Pro-Wrestling’s G1 Climax 29 wrestling tournament, sponsored by Heiwa, whose logo floats above the G1 Climax 29 logo. G1 Climax 29 logo is grey stone texture, black and white lettering, and gold trim, with a gold starburst in the center, and New Japan’s logo (small) at the top of the G1 Climax 29 logo.
We’ll get back to Mr. Harrington in a bit.
New Japan Pro-Wrestling?
Professional wrestling?
OK, a detour that has little to do with 2019, but everything to do with why I used a lot of my time the way I did in 2019.
I’ve watched on and off since I was 10 years old, when Cyndi Lauper was a gateway drug to it pre-Wrestlemania I, though there’s been a lot of “off”. My mom took me to a closed-circuit live screening of Wrestlemania II at Convention Hall in Asbury Park (Thanks, mom!), I got a bunch of action figures (Really wish I still had all of the Remco AWA figures I had initially, and the wrestling ring, rather than just some and no ring), I read a bunch of the Apter mags, and I ended up watching, through the magic of cable competition, wrestling from WWF, pre-WCW Jim Crockett Promotions (when they were calling it the National Wrestling Alliance, before Eazy-E and crew made those initials stand for something else), AWA, World Class Championship Wrestling, and even Championship Wrestling from Florida when my local cable access station picked it up for a bit (though I did not get to see the Bruiser Brody/Lex Luger cage match until many years later).
I’m not sure why I stopped watching initially, in ’87, not too long after Wrestlemania III, but it may have been a combo of my inability to afford pay-per-views, and my annoyance as still-basically-a-kid at the Andre/DiBiase/Hebner brothers screwjob on Hogan, not even so much because I was a huge Hogan fan, more that screwjob endings never made anyone happy except a promoter.
A video game (WCW/nWo World Tour for Nintendo 64) got me back into it in late ’97, and had me watching and caring about WCW, WWF (eventually WWE), the little bit of ECW I was able to see, a tiny bit of Impact (which used to be TNA back then), and here and there, thanks to the Internet and weird grey-at-best-market sources, I saw some stuff from Japan for the first time during this stretch, which included me being blown away by the Tiger Mask vs. Dynamite Kid series from ’82-’83, and having my idea of what pro wrestling should look like changed forever. I made it to a few live wrestling cards around this time, all independent promotions, but saw people like Gangrel, Steve Corino, and Christopher Daniels when they were still relatively new to the sport (and yes, it is definitely a sport, even if success isn’t quite measured in conventional wins and losses), and hadn’t gotten much, if any national attention yet. (Daniels was already being acknowledged as probably the best independent wrestler in the world when I saw him in ’02, but was still relatively new. He’s still working 17 years later in AEW.)
What got me to tune out again? In a name, Randy Orton. I REALLY didn’t like Randy Orton, and, as he was being pushed to the moon by Vince McMahon on some of the only viable television left after Vince bought WCW and ECW, he pretty much single-handedly caused me to lose interest for many years.
What got me to tune back in? Sort of unfortunately, it was a Vince McMahon product (albeit one run by his son-in-law), NXT. I’d first heard from a friend that the stuff happening in NXT was actually very good, and I was told about a woman wrestling there called Blue Pants, which I of course thought was a great name, and then I saw her and saw that she could actually really work, as could whoever I saw her wrestle against (this was at least 4 years ago now, probably closer to 5, and it’s been kind of hectic in my life lately, so while I wish I remember which one of Leva’s matches I saw and who her opponent was, I don’t). Not too long after that, I heard something, probably on Deadspin, about a Shinsuke Nakamura vs. Sami Zayn match (NXT Takeover Dallas 01/04/16, just under 4 years ago) that was off the charts, and I did, in fact, enjoy the hell out of it when I saw it.
That sort of opened the door, but then, about a year later, the door got blown the hell open a year later when I saw Kazuchika Okada fight Kenny Omega for the first time. And the second. And then the third. And finally, the fourth. At that point, I knew that the best wrestling in the world was in Japan, but it was just starting to try to inch its way across the ocean, and I had a bunch of other stuff going on, so I didn’t get to it right away.
In the meantime, I dealt with as much WWE as I could until the WWE in Saudi Arabia deal happened and made it completely unpalatable to do any kind of business with the McMahons once and for all (it was always bad, but that was next-level disgusting), and also found out about a bunch of different indie wrestlers who were doing great work and entertaining people a bunch like Keith Lee (now with WWE, alas), Marko Stunt and Orange Cassidy, so they kept me busy until I could clear time on the schedule. It took me until this July, after a bunch of urging from a friend because the G1 Climax was about to start, to order NJPW World, New Japan’s streaming service.
So, that brings us here. What is the G1 Climax? It is a month long pro wrestling tournament in New Japan Pro-Wrestling, where (at present) 20 of the world’s best wrestlers fight each other to see who the best one is. If that doesn’t set you on fire, or you don’t quite grasp the drama of all of that from 1 sentence, you can watch these English-language instructional videos on it, hosted by Kevin Kelly (at present, he’s the best play-by-play guy in wrestling), which go over the history (and pre-history) of the tournament!
And, as 54 hours of pro wrestling is a LOT to catch up on, if you’d like to be brought up to speed on how things went in this year’s G1 Climax (or “G1 Climax…TWENTY-NINE!”, as their lead announcer, Baron Yamazaki, so dramatically enunciated it this year), the video below is an hour-long recap of the tournament, complete with English subtitles.
G1 Climax 29 is widely considered to be the best edition of the tournament in history, even without Kenny Omega participating (he left to help form AEW in January), and watching it live at odd hours of the morning (as it was held near-entirely in Japan, and there’s some time zone differences there) was one of the most rewarding experiences of not just my time watching wrestling or sports in general, but my time watching television. It was incredible, and everything that’s followed since has been incredible.
Television seasons binge-watched in July 2019 (1): Stranger Things Season 3 (Oh, and Stranger Things was pretty good, too. Nah, it was my second favorite season so far, the “Hero’s Journey” of Steve Harrington is amazing, and then there’s that bit with the song toward the end…)
Comic books cancelled or ending in July 2019 (2): Assassination Nation (Image Comics) and Shuri (Marvel Comics). Assassination Nation was, I believe, Erica Henderson’s first book post-The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, and while it was decidedly NOT as all-ages as Squirrel Girl, it was a lot of fun. I thought it was supposed to be an ongoing series, and that might’ve been the plan initially, but they dialed it back to one story arc. Shuri was also a lot of fun (I especially enjoyed the amount of shade thrown between characters), and Nnedi Okorafor is a writer to watch, both in comics and sci-fi/fantasy novels, if those are your thing. (My spouse has been reading Nnedi’s books for a while, and loves them.)
