Wrestling

WWE Royal Rumble 2012 Meta-Preview

Tomorrow morning, 9AM Manila time, is WWE Royal Rumble—the most unpredictable night of the wrestling calendar, and the beginning of the road to WrestleMania 28.

WWE has been promoting it as the “25th Anniversary” of the Royal Rumble, but since it’s the 25th annual, it’s only the 24th anniversary. They made the same mistake with WrestleMania 25 three years ago. Didn’t anyone have the cojones to tell Vince and company that they were wrong about it? Weirdos.

Grantland’s previewed the Royal Rumble, and it’s a must-read, as per usual from “The Masked Man” David Shoemaker.

The Rumble is also an annual high point of fan interaction. The anticipation of each new entrant — contrived though it may be — is often exhilarating, with the audience counting down the seconds to every reveal. Moments like that are rare in wrestling — a near-perfect meeting of the crowd’s pure, almost Pavlovian reaction and WWE machers’ careful manipulation.

K Sawyer Paul (of Fair to Flair fame) provided some counterpoints to the Masked Man’s preview, as he is wont to do. It’s useful as an addendum, but also as a preview for the Rumble in and of itself.

A wrestling show will often swing between favouring “characters” and “real people”, often within the same match. Punk’s character is that of a real person with real issues. Jericho and Clay, meanwhile, are 100% characters right now. It’s interesting to watch the audience swing between preferring one over the other, too.

The guys at Droptoehold made their predictions for the Rumble, but threw in some WWE ‘12 commentary as well.

I expect that the WWE will continue to pull storylines from WWE ‘12 in order to validate the game’s weird roster. In the next week or so, there will be a DLC Pack that coincidentally features three people who I think might make an appearance tonight at the Rumble.

And finally, WWE.com’s Royal Rumble page has in-depth, well-written previews of each match, but they also have a fantastic feature on the “Top 25 Stunning Royal Rumble Statistics”. I won’t tell you what number one is, but I will tell you it’s almost a guaranteed mark-out moment. Good stuff.

Food

Cheapest head I’ve ever had

Last night, we had dinner in Japanese restaurant Tatami, in Serendra, Fort Bonifacio. I chose to eat there for one reason and one reason only—their menu said they had the all-too-rare Grilled Hamachi (Yellowfin Tuna) Head for only Php450.

That’s just USD10.

Normally, Japanese restaurants would charge anything from Php900-Php1300 for a serving of half a Hamachi Head. But Tataki had it for 450 Philippine smackers. And they had all the usual accoutrements with it too—shaved radishes, slices of lemon, and teriyaki sauce.

So I ordered it, wondering in the back of mind if there were going to be any trade-offs when it came to freshness or cooking quality.

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There was none.

The meat was perfectly grilled, the bones were almost milky with Hamachi oil, and the cartilage, brains, and eyeballs were to die for.

As you can imagine, my dinner table was a mess afterwards. My girlfriend took a video of me licking and sucking what remained of the fish to utter delight. I’d post it on here, but I want to keep this site PG.

It blew my mind that such a rare, high-quality dish only cost 450 pesos. And if you’re anything like me (a foodie an eatie that loves eating well, but loves it more on the cheap), chances are it’d blow your mind too.

Tatami is located in Serendra, at Fort Bonifacio, Taguig City. You can reach them at +63 (2) 901-1870

Food

Ribs, part 1

A few days ago, while having lunch at T.G.I. Friday’s (don’t judge me), my girlfriend made a startling observation: I have not tried a single recipe of ribs that I liked.

I had been complaining about how their “Best Ribs Ever” were not very good, and had the same flaws as all the (bad) ribs recipes I have ever tried–the meat was dry and stringy, and it was overwhelmed with sauce, which would have been a good thing had it not been disgustingly sweet. It’s the same everywhere–in cheap cafeterias, high end specialty bistros, american food family restaurants, and event catering. The same dull meat in the same terribly sweet barbecue sauce.

The thing is, though, according to my girlfriend, I keep trying ribs in every new place I go. Maybe it’s good here, I think to myself, before I order my regret-in-fifteen-minutes plate of sweet, crappy ribs.

So after a bad lunch of the “Best Ribs Ever”, she says, Maybe it’s not the ribs, it’s you.

Me? But… but… I love ribs! I love the tender, falls-off-the-bone meat! I love the sauce dripping down my arms and the sides of my mouth! I love the sheer joy of leaning back, seeing a plateful of clean bones before me.

I love it… but she made me realize that it never actually happened.

What was going on? Were those visions part of a sweet dream from days of yore? Were they memory implants, like Wolverine had in the Weapon X program? Were they merely my subconscious, repeating what I’ve seen from old restaurant commercials or celebrity chef TV shows?

I needed to know the truth. I needed to figure out this desire. And, most significantly, I needed to finally find damn good ribs.

“Hello world!” indeed.

Too many times, people start new blogs with blog posts declaring that they just started a blog. Too many times, people promise to remain faithful to blogging, unlike in their fifteen previous attempts. Too many times, people ~~vomit~~ write blog posts a mile a minute for the first month, and then slowly fizzle out as the weeks go by.

Not me. I’m a man of my word. So I declare, this very moment, that I…

…I will (continue to) do whatever I feel like doing, and if that happens to be writing for Hurry up the Cakes, then so be it.

(I really really want to promise, though. But I can’t. So I won’t.)

I don’t want to wish for this site to be life-changing, inspiring, or even mildly entertaining. If there’s anything I wish for this site to be, it’s that it be regularly updated. Considering the author, though, I’m not sure that’s very likely.

But let’s hope so, anyway. He has been able to surprise me here and there.