Author Archives: theusernamewhichismine

Don’t just mindlessly avoid things that are dangerous

This post may be a little weird, but I didn’t know how to title it. I want to talk about hazards in science and how they need to be handled. The key point I want to make is that science by its nature requires us to work with obscure and sometimes dangerous chemicals, but they shouldn’t be feared or avoided rather we should be aware of the dangers and use those chemicals with the proper precautions.

At a previous lab I worked at we had to wear special gloves when handling one of the chemicals we used. This chemical was toxic enough to seep through your skin, into your bones and begin leeching the calcium out of your bones, and because of its formulation it would also seep through normal lab gloves. So we wore special safety gloves when handling it and took special precautions: we always wore two pairs of gloves over each other and if we ever noticed we had spilled any we would immediately remove our gloves and start washing our hands. These precautions were the ones endorsed by the National Science Foundation and pretty much anyone who had ever worked with this chemical, and in all my time working with it we never had anyone harmed by it due to our safety precautions.

At one point a visiting scientist was working in our lab alongside me and his experiment required him to use this toxic chemical. I could tell he was nervous and unsure of himself, he was wearing two sets of gloves but didn’t want to touch the bottle in order to pour the chemical into his reaction vessel. He kept saying that he didn’t understand if he was doing it right and wanted to know if we had any special tool or instrument that would pour the chemical for him. Finally I simple took the bottle containing the chemical and poured it myself, saying to him “you don’t lack understanding, you just lack confidence.”

I think the overcautious approach that the visiting scientist had may have come from them misunderstanding the repeated emphasis on safety that we put out. Yes we work with dangerous chemicals and we have to be safe when using them, but overestimating a danger is as inaccurate as underestimating it, and proper lab safety doesn’t mean avoiding the lab work at all costs. We use these chemicals because we have to, they’re the only ones with the right properties to work in our experiments, and so any scientist needs to have the confidence and capability to use them himself. A healthy amount of precaution is good but if it makes you too scared to pick up a bottle then you’ve gone too far, you have to be able to read the scientific literature on a chemical and understand how dangerous it actually is so you can use it when you need it.

I know this post was a bit rambly, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about.

Why was everyone in the 60s so high on Supersonic air travel?

I get a small sense of morbid schadenfreude reading old books on economics.  Occasionally the authors make some of the most insightful predictions I’ve ever read about the nature and direction of the economy of their future (our past), but more often they miss wildly and I get to feel superior while reading a book on the bus.  I’ve now noticed a pattern though of writers from the 60s: a whole lot of people expected supersonic air travel to be the Next Big Thing.  I’ve already written about how the American Challenge predicted it as one of the most important challenges that Europe needed to invest in.  I’ve now started reading The New Industrial State by John Kenneth Galbraith, in which he singles out supersonic air travel as “an indispensable industry” of the modern economy.  As I’ve noted before, supersonic passenger planes never quite took off as advertised, but it’s a fun little theory to look at why people might have expected them to do better than they did.

At first, supersonic travel seems like no less than the next logical conclusion of human travel.  First we walked, then we invented wheels to carry our stuff, then we built ships then railroads then automobiles then planes.  Each step in the evolution of human transportation seemed to bring an increase in speed and thus a huge economic advantage, so it seemed only natural that supersonic travel would follow this pattern.  But I think the constant increases in speed blinded people to the more important increases in efficiency.  Airplanes are much faster than cars and ships, yet to this day far more international trade is conducted by land and sea than by air.  In order for airplanes to compete as a mode of travel, they not only had to be faster but the gain in speed had to outweigh the increase in cost.  For moving people around this gain is very easy as none of us wants to sit on a boat for 4 weeks to get to our destination.  But for moving cargo that gain is much harder because the cargo doesn’t care as much about its speed and the cargo’s owner only cares how much fuel he has to spend moving it from A to B.  So speed only leads to efficiency in some cases, in others the higher cost of fuel means more speed has less efficiency.

The same dichotomy between speed and efficiency exists for supersonic vs subsonic planes.  The supersonic Concorde could of course do a transatlantic route in just under 3 hours, and this gain in efficiency was appreciated by its many passengers.  But the even greater gain in efficiency came from planes like the Boeing 747 and other “Jumbo Jets” that could take hundreds of passengers across that same route using significantly less fuel per passenger.  That meant a ticket on a 747 could be a small fraction of the price of a Concorde ticket, and there just weren’t enough ultra-high-class passengers to make the Concorde cost-efficient. 

It just seems like nobody did their due diligence on a cost-benefits analysis for supersonic transportation, or instead they looked ahead with starry eyed wonder and proclaimed that “technology” would in some way ensure that supersonic travel was made efficient enough to compete.  

Science thought: all of proteomics is based on shape

You are what your proteins are.  That was the maxim of a biochemistry teacher I had, proteins are the molecules performing all your bodily functions, and any genetic trait or variation will normally not affect you unless it in some way can affect your proteins.  But proteins themselves can be difficult to wrap your head around, even for trained biochemists.

I thought about this conundrum while listening to a discussion between my peers.  A collaborator has a theory that a certain protein and a certain antibody will bind to each other, and they have demonstrated this to be true via Western Blot.  On the other hand when we image the samples using electron microscopy, we don’t see them binding.

Binding, like all protein functions, depends on the shape of the protein or more specifically a combination of shape and charge.  You may have seen gifs of a kinesin protein walking along microtubules, that only happens because kinesin has the right shape and the right charges to do so.  If kinesin was shaped more like collagen (long, thick rods) then it wouldn’t be able to move at all, and if collagen was shaped like ribosome proteins (globular and flexible) then it would never be able to be used as structural support.  Each protein can perform its job only because it is shaped in the correct way.

Shape also determines protein interactions.  You may have heard of how antibodies can bind so tightly and so specifically that they can be used to detect even tiny amounts of protein.  An antibody will detect a protein by binding to some 3D shape that makes up part of the protein.  An antibody that detects kinesin might bind to one of its “legs,” an antibody that detects collagen would have to bind to some part of its rod-like structure and so on.  That’s important because proteins can change their shape.  If a protein is boiled or put in detergent, then then its shape will disintegrate and it will become more like a floppy noodle of amino acids.  Now there are some antibodies that can only bind to a protein when its been disintegrated into a floppy noodle, but those same antibodies would not detect the protein when it’s in it’s “native” shape.  Because as can be expected the native shape of kinesin (two feet, able to move) looks nothing like the native shape of a floppy noodle (which kinesin turns into when it’s boiled and put in detergent).

So back to the mystery above: there is an antibody that binds to a certain protein in Western Blot, but we can’t make it bind in electron microscopy.  Well Western Blotting first requires boiling and adding detergent to run a protein through a gel, while electron microscopy keeps the protein in its native shape.  It’s very likely that this person’s antibody only can bind to the floppy noodle form of the protein (what you get after boiling and detergent) but cannot bind to the native form, and that’s why we aren’t seeing it in electron microscopy.  As always, shape is important.

Dear Scientists, publish your damn methods

Dear Scientists,

I’m a scientist myself.  I’ve written papers, I’ve published papers, I know it’s often long and boring work that isn’t as exciting as seeing good data and telling your friends about it.  I’ve sat in a room with 3 other people just to edit a single paragraph, and god it was dull.  So I can understand if writing your actual paper isn’t the rip-roaring adventure that gets you up in the morning.  

At the same time, science is only as good as the literature. One of our fundamental scientific tenants is the principle of uniformity, that is that anyone should be able to do the same experiment and get the same answer.  If you and I get different answers when we do the experiment then something is definitely wrong, and failed replications have taught us a lot about how much bad science there is out there.  On the other hand, any failed replication will fall back on the excuse that the replicator “didn’t do the experiment right.”  They will claim that something done by the replicator was not done exactly as they had done it, and that this is the source of the error.  I would fire back that it is your job as a scientific writer to give all the details necessary for a successful replication.  If there is something very minor that has to be done in a specific way in order to replicate your experiments, then you need to state that clearly in the methods section of your paper.  Anything not stated in your methods is assumed unimportant to the outcome by definition, so if it is important put it in the methods.

Even worse than the above is the scientific papers which publish no methods to begin with!  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been looking for the methods of a paper only to find a note saying “methods performed as previously described,” which links to another paper saying “methods performed as previously described” which links to another paper on and on again until I’m trying to find some paper from 1980 just to know what someone in 2021 did.  I don’t think “as previously described” is sufficient, if the methods are identical then you can just copy and past them in as supplemental material.  It’s the 21st century, memory and bandwidth are very very cheap, there is no need for a restrictive word count regarding your methods.

But the worst of the worst, and the reason I wrote this article, is that I found a paper claiming “methods performed as previously described” which did not link or cite any paper whatsoever.  I have no way of knowing which previously described method this paper is referring to, and in fact no way of knowing whether they are making this all up!  I would go so far as to say this is scientific malpractice, the methods are totally undescribed and thus the experiment is unfalsifiable, because anything I did in an attempt to replicate it might be wrong because I don’t know how it was done in the first place!

So please scientists, publish your damn methods.  Here’s an idea that I’m hoping will catch on, if you don’t have room in the body of your paper and are publishing your methods as a supplement, just copy/paste from whatever document you used to do the experiment.  Most methods are written in the past tense in a paper, but the present tense during an experiment, and furthermore the experimental methods often include extraneous information such as “make sure not to do the next step until X occurs,” this information often being omitted in the published paper.  I would say that this information is not in fact extraneous but should be included, if there is some precise ordering of steps that needs to happen, then that information should be shared with the world.  So whatever protocol you used to do the experiment, with marginal notes and handy tips, just throw the entire protocol into your supplemental information as a “methods” section and stop playing hide the pickle with your experiment by citing ever older papers

The Short Cramer ETF and the paradox of the stock picking

Tuttle Capital made waves last week by bringing out an ETF called SJIM that would let you short the stock picks of TV personality Jim Cramer.  Cramer, the longtime host of “Mad Money” on CNBC, has a prolific history of making bad calls from “Bear Sterns is Fine” to “sell Netflix in 2012” and even “Buy Netflix in 2022.” So it’s entirely unsurprising that “just do the opposite of Cramer” would gain traction as a valid investment strategy.  What’s interesting is that this strategy runs counter to the semi-strong version of the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMF) in a way that some might not expect.  I’ve at times seen people attack Cramer based on the EMF, pointing out that even the best stock pickers rarely perform better than random chance and that therefore Cramer is by definition a waste of time.  Yet many of those same people wouldn’t realize that if Cramer himself is a waste of time, then shorting him is a waste of money.

It comes down to what I sometimes call “the paradox of stock picking”: if you believe it’s impossible to predict the winners in the market, you must also agree it’s impossible to predict the losers.  Many people agree that you can’t know with certainty which company in the stock market will do well in the future, past performance is no guarantee of future success and all that.  What is the best electric vehicle company to invest in today?  Tesla is synonymous with EVs, but then Microsoft was synonymous with tech in 2001, and if you put all your money into Microsoft in 2001 you would have missed out on the massive gains made by Apple, Google, and others.  It’s hard to be certain that Telsa will continue to be the EV leader or even that it’s current growth trajectory is sustainable, and in either of those cases there could be some other company that would make a much better EV investment.  So then let’s flip this question on it’s head: what is the worst EV company to invest in?  Rivian is trading at around 600 times revenue for example (revenue 55 million, market cap 33 billion), can you guarantee that it is a bad investment?  What about Nikola?  They faked an electric truck by rolling one down a hill, are beset by scandal, and are still trading at about 80 times revenue, are they a bad investment?  The EMF states that you cannot beat the market with fundamental analysis, so the investment opportunity of scandal-plagued Nikola and profit-less Rivian are already priced in by the market just as the growth opportunities of Tesla are already priced in.  If you thought you could with 100% certainty pick which EV company was the worst investment, or even just a below average investment, then you could make an EFT made up of every EV company except the definitely-bad one. Then your EFT would beat the EV market as a whole because it would include all the market winners while eliminating one of the market losers.  This would run directly counter to the EMF which says you cannot beat the market.

So getting back to Cramer, is shorting him via an ETF a waste of money?  If you believe the semi-strong or strong versions of the EMF then Cramer’s chance of success as a stock picker is perfectly random, no more no less.  In order for shorting him to be a good investment, then you must believe: 

  • The market is not efficient and it is possible to pick winners and losers
  • Cramer’s analysis is not just so bad that his chances of success are random, but rather he is so bad that chances of success are worse than random.  
  • Cramer’s chances of success are so much worse than random that the gains from shorting him outweigh the expense ratio of the ETF

It’s important to note here that shorting Jim Cramer puts you on the hook for his successful calls as well as his failures.  Failed predictions often generate more buzz than successes since the schadenfreude of seeing some idiot on the TV be proven wrong is a powerful emotional tool for getting people talking.  But if SJIM had come about 15 years ago and you had held it, then you shorted Jim Cramer on his “Bear Sterns is Fine” call but also shorted him on “Buy Apple” in 2010.  Adjusting for stock splits Apple’s price has gone from around 5$ to around 150$ in that time period, is that the kind of short position you want to take?  Only time will tell if SJIM is a good investment I guess.

Raw Reports 7: Vince McMahon was an amazing heel

There’s a great line from a Raw in 1998: Vince McMahon had just stolen Steve Austin’s championship belt and says “the only place this belt belongs is above my mantle in one of my homes.” That single hilariously brilliant line perfectly encapsulated the evil rich bastard character that was heel Vince McMahon. And yet in early 1999 the unthinkable was happening and Vince McMahon was transitioning from heel (bad guy) to face (good guy).

Now I will admit this turn was expertly done. It was impossible for anyone to empathize with McMahon himself (a spoiled rich asshole who had victimized ever face in the WWF), so instead he garnered sympathy by proxy by having his innocent daughter Stephanie get attacked by the Undertaker. This led to him seeking help from Steve Austin and while the crowd still hated him his contrition and humility made him at least somewhat understandable if not likable. Next, his son Shane started attacking him and victimizing face wrestlers, overtly taking the spot that Vince had once occupied as the spoiled rich asshole of the WWF. This implicitly moved Vince away from being a heel as he was no longer doing the victimizing and was in fact being victimized himself. Finally, after Undertaker and Shane announced they had been working together the whole time, Vince came out and attacked Shane for the benefit of Steve Austin during a match Austin had with the Undertaker. By siding with the WWF’s biggest face, and attacking its two biggest heels, Vince had now fully turned from heel to face.

And yet… it was kind of crap. Making Undertaker be a “Greater Evil” over an above Vince was definitely cool, but trying to make Vince sympathetic on his own merits was just kind of boring. There was a novelty to having two sworn enemies (Austin and McMahon) have to work together, but the novelty wore off quickly when Vince came out and tried to cut a face promo saying how he knew he had been an asshole and would try to change as a human being. And you could tell the crowd wasn’t having it, they continued to chant “asshole” at him no matter what he said. Now, knowing as I do the future of the WWF, I know exactly where this storyline is going: Vince eventually reveals that he was secretly behind everything and was working with Undertaker the whole time as a heel. But I have to wonder why they ever tried to portray him as a face in the first place. Was it all for the unexpected twist that he was working with the Undertaker? Shocking though it was, it was also really really stupid to have him sobbing about the victimization of his daughter only to a few weeks later be revealed as the architect of that same victimization. Had they actually wanted him to be a face? I can’t imagine anyone thought that was a good idea, the crowd still hated him for everything he had done and a spoiled rich company owner just doesn’t make for a natural “good guy” character in any way shape or form. Maybe Vince personally wanted to be portrayed as a good guy just for his ego, but then someone should have told him it just wasn’t going to happen.

Despite a few moments of humor during Vince’s aborted face run, like giving a terrible Stone Cold Stunner to his son Shane, the whole thing kind of felt boring and subpar as I was watching it. I would have preferred Vince to have still explicitly been a bad guy throughout, just a bad guy who loved his own daughter. Then he could have had humorous promos demeaning the crowd and complaining about his situation, instead of boring promos where he tried to act sympathetic while complaining about his situation. But regardless, face Vince McMahon doesn’t detract from the stellar performance that Raw has done after Wrestlemania 1999.

Raw Reports 6: Post-script to Royal Rumble 1999

This post is about Rock vs Mankind for the WWF title at the 1999 Royal Rumble. As I’ve been doing this past week, I’m still watching WWF Raws from the 1990s through Peacock. I wanted to make this it’s own post because it didn’t really “fit” with the other feelings I had about the 1999 Royal Rumble

So I finally watched this match (or I watched all of it except for the chairshots to the head).  Mankind aka Mick Foley was apparently planning this match for a month, telling people it was going to be his magnum opus, and in a way it was but not for the reasons he may have intended.

So this Mankind vs the Rock feud was incredibly hot. Mankind, the deformed now good guy with a heart of gold was against the Rock, the self-proclaimed “people’s champion” that the people loved to hate. The WWF title was on the line with the stipulation was that either Mankind or the Rock had to say “I quit” for the match to end.  No pinfalls, no passing out due to blood loss, the match will not stop until someone verbally submits.  I’ve seen versions of this match type that kind of sucked (Roddy Piper murdered the Bret Hart vs Backlund version of this match), but Rock and Mankind did a very smart job in putting together this one.  There’s a microphone in the match at all times because they have to say “I quit” into the microphone, and Rock and Mankind would frequently grab the mic to taunt each other, which worked really well because they are both great talkers and storytellers. 

I also noticed that although Mankind took a lot of the punishment, Rock didn’t get away scot free.  At the beginning of the match Rock wouldn’t quit so Mankind beat him over the head with the microphone and kept asking him after each beating.  It was especially vicious because you could hear the impact of the microphone hitting Rock’s head from the microphone’s audio, and I’m sure it hurt Rock to take those shots. 

They also knew that Mankind had a reputation for taking devastating punishment and they worked that reputation into the match in a *safe* way prior to the chairshots.  They were fighting on scaffolding and Rock threw Mankind off of the scaffolding and onto some wiring, and when Mankind landed a bunch of sparks were lit up and the announcers said Mankind had been electrocuted.  Now in reality this was probably an easy, safe spot where Mankind jumped into some non-electrical wires and padding that broke his fall. The sparks were just pyrotechnics, and so a little smoke and mirrors made something safe look like something dangerous, and it worked in really well for the match.

But then of course the ending, which I just couldn’t watch it so I skipped it.  Rock handcuffs Mankind and then hits him multiple times in the head with a chair.  Now as everyone knows wrestling is scripted and the two performers work together to put on a good match and the backstage story is that Mankind was supposed to tell Rock when to stop hitting and end the match. Because of this, Mankind was supposed to be in total control over how many chair shots to the head he took, but of course chair shots to the head concussed his brain and it seems he forgot or didn’t tell Rock the right time to stop. After many many many chair shots to the head, the ending finally happens with Mankind lying unconscious on the mat (looking back you pray he wasn’t unconscious for real) and the Rock plays an audio recording of Mankind saying “I quit” in order to get the illegal victory. This ending was I guess the only way they could end the match, but it is another amazing example of the writers not all being on the same page because prior to the match several announcers had claimed Mankind was refusing to ever say the words “I quit” so as not to jinx himself in the match or allow Rock to pull this kind of shenanigan. Then right before the PPV Mankind screams “I quit” into the TV a bunch of times on the pre-show, so I guess everything the announcers told us was a lie.  The match ended with the Rock winning, and due to the concussion Mick Foley suffered so much that he doesn’t even remember that Dwayne Johnson (Rock out of character) spoke to him after the match and apologized for going over board with the chair shots. In his book he claims that the Rock never spoke to him after the match, but backstage video (including the documentary “Behind the Mat” shows that not to be the case).

The match will live on in infamy as many many Mick Foley matches do.  He was a brilliant wrestler and many people said he had the greatest mind for putting together matches out of anyone in history.  I hope he still has a mind at all after all these years.

Raw Reports 5: Royal Rumble 1999

I just finished watching Royal Rumble 1999 and I can’t get it out of my mind.

So in wrestling there’s this thing called “heat”, which is when someone doesn’t like someone else. Heels (bad guys) are SUPPOSED to have heat with the crowd, the crowd is supposed to hate them and want them to lose. A good heel knows how to build heat, they know how to say and do things that make the crowd hate them and most importantly MAKE THE CROWD WANT THEM TO LOSE A WRESTLING MATCH. That part is important, wrestling is about fake fighting in a ring, so If you don’t make the fans want to see you wrestle and lose then your heat is worthless.

Different from heat is fire. A Babyface (good guy) has “fire” when the crowd loves them, wants them to win, and lives vicariously through them. Fire is important because without fire the crowd doesn’t care about you, and why should they cheer you if you’re just some guy? Babyface fire makes sure the whole crowd is cheering and chanting for the babyface even when they’re getting their ass kicked. This is fake fighting remember, it’s not a test of skill, so crowd involvement is paramount and crowd disinterest is death.

So heels have heat and babyfaces have fire and that’s the fundamental dynamic to wrestling. Heels will do and say things to make themselves hated and faces will do and say things to make themselves loved. The important thing is that these qualities wear off after a while. If the heel always loses then he can lose his heat because the audience won’t be invested in his matches, “everyone knows that guy always loses”. The Babyface can lose their fire in the same way, but there is a twist: people love an underdog. Sometimes losing a few matches can make a Babyface even more beloved especially if they are cheated out of their rightful victories

So how basically every wrestling storyline goes is that a Babyface and heel will have a confrontation. The crowd will side with the Babyface and the feud will begin. In the first match or two the heel may cheat his ass off to defeat the Babyface, but eventually good triumphs over evil and the Babyface will win a massive victory. The audience goes home happy and everyone buys tickets to the next wrestling show.

I can only assume this is what they wanted to do when McMahon won the royal rumble. McMahon and Austin were feuding and to his credit McMahon had a lot of heat on him: as the evil corporate owner he had screwed over Austin at every turn, taking his title shots, trying to fire him, trying to do everything in his power to make Austin’s life miserable and therefore rob the fans of their favorite hero. He had now declared that Austin would NEVER fight for the WWF title again, and this obviously made the fans mad. But WWF has its own lineage of arcane rules and working that lineage into the plot makes everything much more sensible and dare I say it “real,” so there was a ready-made storyline for how Austin could still pull one over on McMahon and get a big win that would make the whole audience happy.

The important rule here is that whoever wins the Royal Rumble gets a WWF title shot at WrestleMania, so although McMahon hates Austin and want to prevent him from ever winning the WWF title, he can’t actually deny Austin a title shot if Austin wins the rumble. And so the story began, McMahon would do everything in his power to deny Austin his victory at the Royal Rumble, while Austin would do everything in his power to win and spite McMahon which would make the audience happy. McMahon first forced Austin to enter the Royal Rumble at number 1 (the hardest position to start from) and then added that McMahon himself would also enter the Rumble at number 30 (the easiest position to start from) as a final effort to deny Austin victory.

Obviously for McMahon, forcing Austin into number 1 is a good idea, but the entering the Ruble himself even at number 30 is a very stupid idea . In kayfabe and reality Austin is a trained and fit wrestler whereas McMahon is an untrained dad on steroids, McMahon should be no match for Austin if they ever step into the ring together. But this ploy was to show just how much McMahon hates Austin and so it gets McMahon a lot of heat and that’s all well and good. Here’s the thing though, I don’t wanna see McMahon in a match. He is not a good wrestler, his wrestling looks terrible and fake, and for as hateable as he is him being in a match looks dumb and stupid. Austin on the other hand has fire, he is ON FIRE, and he’s the most popular wrestler that ever was and possible every will be so much so that I still see people on the street wearing a Stone Cold Steve Austin t-shirts 25 years later. Austin winning and getting his title shot at the rumble is the perfect story for McMahon to lose (making the audience happy) and Austin to win (making the audience even more happy). Just don’t let McMahon actually try to wrestle (which he is very bad at) and everyone can go home happy with how things played out in the Royal Rumble.

But, heat. McMahon seems to have decided that he needed more heat and so he had to win the Rumble himself even though he is a terrible wrestler and Austin is super duper popular. I guess he thought that if Austin wins too much then he’ll become a boring invincible super hero and no one will buy wrestling tickets anymore, and to some extent Austin was on a downslope at this point with a lot of the brilliance and fire that characterized his run last year having wanted. But still it would have been awesome to have Austin win and I feel Austin SHOULD have won, the whole storyline would have made perfect sense in that McMahon had done literally everything in his power to remove Austin’s title shot but through sheer badassery and determination Austin still won the whole damn thing. But no, McMahon wins the Rumble and the crowd goes home deflated.

Even then, the worst part is that McMahon winning didn’t even change anything.  If Austin wins then Austin gets a title shot at Wrestemania.  If McMahon wins then Austin gets no title shot, instead McMahon does.  Well at the very next Raw after the Royal Rumble, even though McMahon won, the storyline gave Austin the title shot at Wrestlemania and removed it from McMahon, so the Rumble was completely pointless to the long-term storyline. What a waste of what could have been an amazing Rumble. Honestly most of the joy of 1997/1998 WWF is just watching Steven Austin himself, and much of the remaining card isn’t up to his level so Austin losing actually makes me feel worse about the entire show even though it was actually super cool in many respects. But I can’t change the past, so whatever.

Raw Reports 4: the moment when Rocky Maivia became The Rock

Continuing my series where I go back and watch WWF from the 1990s, I assume most of my readers have heard of The Rock?  Dwayne Johnson?  Most paid actor in Hollywood?  Yeah I just saw the moment he began to be something in WWF.

He started as “Rocky Maivia” a very boring good guy who said he would “try his best” to win.  On August 11th 1997, out of nowhere, he runs into the ring and illegally helps Faarooq (Nation of Domination, the black power guys) win his match against Chainz (Disciples of Apocalypse, the bikers).  I guess this is the point where he joins the nation and transitions from “Rocky” to “The Rock.”  It’s so out of nowhere too, and I’d love to know the background on why it happened.  Ahmed Johnson had just been exiled from the Nation, either because he was injured or maybe they wanted him to be a good guy again, and so I guess they wanted The Rock to join as someone with more prestige/skill.  But yeah this is a moment in history for WWE and The Rock.

For the remainder of 1997, The Rock would go on to more fully morph into the character that became known and loved, but it’s quite something to see it all come together in real time. It started when Steve Austin (in another amazing Austin character moment) had to hand over the Intercontinental Title because he was still injured from the Summerslam piledriver. He gifts it to the Rock to become the new champion, which kind of makes the Rock look like a chump because he only became the champ through a gift and not through his own skill and abilities. But after that the Rock starts parading around like he’s actual a cool guy, and claims that he is the greatest so that people will start hating him. The Rock at this point is a “heel” (aka bad guy) so the audience hating him is exactly what the WWF wants. He calls himself “the People’s Champ” and “the Great One,” elements that would eventually morph into part of his repertoire of one-liners, and would continue to make quips whenever it suited him. When he found a quip that worked well he would keep using it again and again; he got a strong reaction with calling his opponents “jabronie” and eventually it morphed into his “Jabronie Drive” quip. Other times he’d use a land that wouldn’t land and he’d never use it again. In the same way it’s interesting to see the rise of the New Age Outlaws and their sing-along catch phrases, the very first time they introduced themselves they said “your ass better page somebody” (kids, ask your parents what a “pager” was). But this quip worked well enough that it morphed into “Oh you didn’t know? Your ass better call somebody” which the crowd would chant along with them every time they walked out.

These sing-along chants eventually start getting a bit exhausting in 1998, as the wrestlers stop adding new material and just fall back on the same old quips they’ve used for a year, but for 1997 the buildup of what are today well-known catchphrases was cool to watch.

Other than that, I’m noticing a few quirks of 90s wrestling I never had before.  Some people do moves simply because they need to get countered for a “spot” to happen.  The Sleeper Hold was a move in the 80s that was very popular, but by the 90s it was considered lame/old fashioned.  However Steve Austin had a move that he could only do by countering a Sleeper Hold.  Naturally, whenever Austin was wrestling, his opponent had to perform a Sleeper so Austin could do his counter-move, even though Sleepers were all but extinct otherwise. There are also a lot more production hiccups on the television side of things than what I would expect.  The show isn’t as tightly scripted as it is today, a lot of times a wrestler will talk to the audience and say how they’re about to fight in a title match, then Vince McMahon (on commentary) will butt in to say it’s a NON-title match.  Just seems the wrestlers and script writers aren’t on the same page.

Still, 1997 is a good year for WWF, if you have Peacock you should check this stuff out.

Raw Reports 3: Austin nearly died and gang warfare takes over

I’m continuing this week to watch the WWF Attitude Era starting in 1996 and going through to (at this moment) 1997. Actually to let you in on some inside baseball, I’ve been watching 1996 and 1997 for most of the past year, writing down notes to myself, and it’s only now that I’m posting them, but here’s my notes from Summerslam 1997.

Summerslam 1997 was a pretty good show all things considered, but it includes one of the scariest incidents captured on PPV in the WWF/E. 

First the background (which was a joy to watch).  Bret Hart is doing a gimmick where he and his family are “good guys” in Canada but “bad guys” in the USA.  He’s doing a classic anti-American gimmick but since WWF tours in Canada, he gets to be a hero in his home country.  Anyway this gimmick led to a series of matches at Summerslam pitting the Bret Hart and friends against American WWF wrestlers.

Bryan Pillman faced Goldust in a match where if Pillman lost he’d wear a dress picked by Marlene (Goldust’s wife).  British Bulldog faced Ken Shamrock (real life former champion in UFC) in a “loser eats dog food” match.  That match was actually pretty good because towards the end, Bulldog taunts Shamrock with the dog food, causing Shamrock to absolutely snap.  Shamrock destroys Bulldog (getting DQ’d) then starts attacking the officials.  Shamrock showed a lot of in-ring charisma and got a HUGE crowd reaction, but it’s unfortunate that WWF booking has turned him into “just another guy” because I think at this point in his career he had the makings of a genuine star, not just a good wrestler.

Then Owen Hart faced Steve Austin, if Austin didn’t win he would kiss Owen Hart’s ass.  The match was absolutely on fire, and Austin was over huge. Owen is a great wrestler, Austin was a great wrestler, but unfortunately they do a spot with a piledriver.  A piledriver is a move where Owen holds Austin upside-down and then slams Austin’s head into the mat.  Normally this move is done safely so that the head of the guy being slammed never actually makes contact, and Owen’s legs would have been the only thing really slamming the mat.  But Owen held Austin too low this time (it was a complex spot they were doing) and Austin’s head truly did hit the mat. This drove the force of the blow up through Austin’s spine, temporarily paralyzing him.  Austin laid there motionless for a minute while Owen stalled, Owen was smart enough to start a “Ca-na-da” chant against the crowd, which was chanting “U-S-A” but I could tell Owen didn’t really know how to stall well.  Eventually Austin weakly trips up Owen for a pin before being helped to the back by officials, but if you were watching in 1997 you probably thought you had just witnessed Steve Austin die because it was such a scary and dangerous spot.  In interviews Austin has said that immediately after the piledriver, he couldn’t feel his legs and thought he was permanently paralyzed, and there’s a cruel irony too because 5 years early Austin had nearly paralyzed a Japanese wrestler with a botched piledriver.  Either way Austin (who already had severe neck issues) lost years of his wrestling career to this and other neck injuries, and it’s long been a huge “what if” question about how long and awesome his career would have been had he not had these neck issues, he retired just 5 years later but also was out 2 of those years due to injury. That injury mares what was until that point an incredible match between two of the best in the WWF.

Final notes, WWF was still losing the economic war against WCW, so they seemed to try to basically copy an element of WCW’s hottest angle.  The NWO in WCW were cool wrestlers who also got popular by engaging in a little gang-violence style shenanigans (wearing gang colors, attacking people before/during/after matches, tagging everything, working bits of gang culture into their heel work).  The WWF decided that faction warfare was what the viewers wanted.  One of their factions therefor was the Nation of Domination, a pseudo-black power group but with prominent white (Crush) and latino (Savio Vega) members.  Faarooq retooled the Nation by firing the white and latino guys (some unfortunately racist one-liners used by Faarooq, telling Savio Vega to “go back to picking jalapenos”) and absorbing more black WWF wrestlers.  The nation was now 100% black. 

Meanwhile the fired white guy and the fired latino guy brought in their own gang members, the white guy (Crush) became a biker with a biker gang called “Disciples of Apocalypse”.  DOA was super popular in Canada and the northern cities of America, probably in part because they rode motorcycles and motorcycles are cool.  Savio Vega got some luchadors and created “Los Boricuas” a Puerto Rican gang.  Los Boricuas and the Nation were more popular in southern and Eastern cities probably in part because those cities had more black and Puerto Rican fans.  Summerslam had a fight between DOA and Los Boricuas due to Los Boricuas destroying a DOA motorbike.  It got surprisingly large cheers from the crowd and Crush (who’s been with the WWF for over a decade by this point) seems to actually be the best wrestler he’s ever been.  He’s still nothing more than a mid-carder but he’s definitely improved over the decade.  But the Nation came out to make it an all-out race war and I think that’s basically how WWF is going to have this angle go throughout 1997 as a faction feud based on race.  I know that eventually Rocky Maivia will join the Nation and transform into The Rock, but who knows when that will be.

Either way, beside Canada vs America, this white bikers vs black power vs Puerto Rico race war is the storyline WWF was pushing the hardest, and it really is the kind of thing you’ll likely never see on TV wrestling today. Now remember, they would say that they were just copying the gang warfare from WCW, but to my memory the WCW gangs never had nearly so much of a racial angle as this. WCW’s gangs were usually company-based rather than race (for the most part).  The NWO (new world order) was a bunch of ex-WWF stars whose stated goal was to take over WCW.  They added a few WCW guys into (to be shocking and unpredictable) but mainly any ex-WWF guy got tossed in there.  It was fairly multi-racial as far as WCW was concerned.  The NWO was so popular they made a huge number of split-offs.  The most important was probably the Wolfpac.  Wolfpac was supposed to be a “cool, good guy” group of NWO members, so it included for instance Konnan (often called the Hulk Hogan of Mexico).

There was also the LWO (Latino World Order) that was made as a vehicle for Eddie Guerrero.  Eddie was unhappy with his position in WCW, and had arguments with Eric Bishoff.  They turned this real-life animosity into a storyline of Eddie getting all the ex-AAA guys (AAA is a Mexican wrestling company) to unite because Eric Bishoff was “taking advantage of the situation back home and paying us peanuts.”  In real life the Mexican economy was in free fall and many Mexican wrestlers were working very cheap contracts in America because they were desperate for money.  But also in reality Eddie was a native of Texas, so it was a bit weird for him to talk about “back home” as being Mexico, especially since his previous gimmick had been an anti-Mexican pro-USA gimmick when he was working a tag team for AAA.

When WCW wrestlers worked in Japan there was also NWO Japan which was made up of any wrestler who had a connection to America, including I think some Japanese wrestlers who’d done shows there.

Still, it was seen as distasteful by 90s standards when the NWO wrestlers deliberately incorporated gang culture into their heel work.  One of their most iconic moments was when they “tagged” the WCW belt with spray paint to write “NWO”