Yeah I dunno, Barnett doesn't bother me but I can't remember an instance of it making me laugh. I might go something like

1. Vince (not sure if he's the very best minute-for-minute, but it's impressive that they can use him so constantly and have him almost never feel old or overused)
2. Hogan
3. Nash
-big gap-
4. Jesse
5. Austin
6. HBK
7. Bulldog

Speaking of Hogan, I listened to one your favorites eps (pretty sure!) last night. WWIII 1995. I can't get enough of Jack asking Lapsed Hogan to list the commandments and Hogan reaching the end "believe in Hulk Hogan and read the god damn Wrestling Observer, dude!!!".

List is lacking Verne but that's only if you've listened to AWA stuff.

Yeah, confirmed, one of my favorites. “The internet’s got the scoops” will never not be amazing.

I’m definitely going to get to the AWA stuff, but it’s just going to have to be a prequel once I’ve done the chronological listen. Took far too long for me to remember there was pre-1983 stuff.

Listening to the Vader tribute, it never ceases to amaze me just how insane Diana Hart's book is. She writes a ****ing biography like a suspense novel written by a worse E L James.

My favorite part of that book passage was "but he can take care of himself". ok, then why are you bitching about it as if it's a big deal?

I said it before but I will repeat myself because I think it’s that important. If there is anyone who enjoys TLF and has not listened to the AWA stuff for whatever reason, you are doing yourself a disservice. Not only is it highly entertaining, but the atories are just so damn fascinating and educational. At the very least you should listen to the part 1s of each episode.

Lapsed Vader coming down from the mountain in his snowcat isn't getting nearly enough love in this list.

Ah ****, I did miss a big one. I would put Sid at #4.

Icwudt

I've gotten kind of bored of TLF but that's mostly because I've listened to nearly every episode 3+ times. So I branched out to find things. I found the Bryan and Vinny show. This show's still a thing but I found a YT channel that has a bunch of Bryan Alvarez and Vinny just ranting about TNA. It has made for great background noise. Here's the link to all of the 2007 rants that I'm on atm:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMVo...ALWgv9&index=1

This channel has the first half of 2008 and sadly abruptly ends. There are archives of the B+V show on XWT but these include WWE rants which aren't nearly as fun to listen to.

Anyhow, recommended if you just want to hear Russo and his ideas get eviscerated for hours.

If anyone has any good comedic wrestling podcasts that aren't hosted by Conrad, plz to be sharing.

Listening to Tony review ECW's Heatwave 1998. One great thing of his podcast is that he instantly took a liking to ECW when Conrad introduced it to him a few months ago and has now done 3 ECW shows. ECW is my favorite promotion of all time so

In this show there's some talk of Chris Candido. It's a shame he doesn't have a great catalog of matches. The guy could work his ass off, was a decent talker, had Sunny, and had incredible charisma (in ECW at least). A shame he was such a small wrestler because if he was bigger, he'd have been taken seriously in 1995/6...and with a different gimmick.

vince russo podcast on the marks was hilarious. Smart wrestling fan (before wiggly left) was brilliant, I used to listen to that every week. Anyone know where I can download old episodes legitimately?

Having listened to a lot more episodes since this post, I would like to formally disown the bolded caveat. It IS particularly bad, especially when he starts yelling it.

Agreed. I listen in my car alot and for whatever reason I have to turn the sound up to almost max to hear it, I dont know if its a bluetooth thing or what, but for a few pdocasts I have to do this, amd when he screams "ON THAT CAST!" it realy hurts my ears.

I wish I had kept a running count of the times that JP has said, "I'm never offended by anything...but THIS offended me." Dude, by the 20th time, your qualifier is dead and buried. You're highly irreverent, but still entirely offendable.

(That's not to say that I've ever thought him wrong to take offense in any of these instances.)

Some of Jim Cornette's stories are very entertaining. Mostly ramblings about the old days though.

Consistently one of the funniest recurring things on TLF is when they read from mainstream news coverage of wrestling that belittles it. ****ing cracks me up every time.

Yes, that's great. Absolutely loved the reading in the Bruno episode. The Backlash 2004 episode was great as well in that regard.

Something TLF has adopted that is easily my least favorite thing of the show, ever: JP saying "[insert wrestler here] looks like the love child of [actors here]". I hated it once per episode and listening to the TLF that dropped yesterday, he's done it 3 times already.

The Backlash 2004 ep was the one that inspired that post, and was probably the funniest example of it that I've heard yet. The fact that JP was getting legitimately pissed only made it funnier.

My listening tour in the order of the chronological events has hit 2005, and if they're getting the facts of the Puder situation right, I'm glad I listened to it. I had always been under the impression that Puder legitimately went into business for himself in that Angle segment, and thus thought the hazing he took in that 2005 Rumble was totally justified. Sounds like I was misunderstanding the situation in a way that changes the entire context. By the way, all of the random trashing of everyone by Bob Holly was an entertaining subplot in that episode.

Cliffs on the Puder thing? I always thought he went into business for himself also. Had a quick look at his wiki and there is a Melter quote saying he did.

I'd heard the name around before had never really looked into the incident. It's fascinating. I watched the RR incident on the network after listening to TLF and it's something. Coincidentally (or not), it's not on YT. The beginning is though:



Cliffs:
Kurt's doing a gimmick of challenging Tough Enough contestants to real fights.
Puder accepts.
Puder almost has Angle in a full Kimura.
The refs realize that Angle's about to lose and count Puder out on the mat despite his shoulders not really being down.
Two months later, Puder's in the Rumble and is legit beaten down by Eddie, Benoit, Bob Holly via the hardest chops you'll ever see. It's ugly.
Puder's gone afterward.

I definitely recommend checking out TLF's part 1 of that episode for the full story.

Relistening to the TLF Benoit episodes. They say that talent were told they were free to leave right away upon the announcement of the news, but they speculate that there would at least be implicit pressure on the top guys in the company to stick around and tape a tribute, which I agree with.

That leaves me particularly confused that William Regal would have simply chosen to stick around, as he doesn't fit the mold of someone who would be forced to stay and record a tribute, and he basically delivers his like a hostage video that he wanted absolutely no part of.

Maybe it was the type of thing where you're free to leave, but if you actually leave it shows you're weak and not a team player.

It's also possible the info TLF got wasn't true, but my first theory makes sense.

Workaholic Vince says you can leave if you're emotional, so there's the door. Or you can stay and help the company. But it's you're choice...

I get what you mean, but with it being an empty-arena show with no live wrestling, most didn’t appear, nor were they needed. It was basically top people, then Regal, Malenko, and Chavo. The latter two were good friends with Chris and seemed to speak freely and sympathetically. Regal was just an odd outlier.

It’s definitely telling that Cena said during his tribute, in reference to giving tribute, “I honestly think this is the right thing to do.” The rightness of paying tribute could really only be in question if he suspected what ended up being true.