Episode 015: Trying Out The Ask Me Anything Segment

On this week's episode, Frank pilots the segment Ask Me Anything that he has been dying to do.  He answers questions on professional wrestling, women's golf and the LPGA, 2023 Texas Tech Football, and what he thinks Priscilla Barnes is doing now especially in light of the writers' and actors' strikes in Hollywood.  He emphasizes that being a fan gives him a right to an opinion, which sometimes means criticism.  He extends this same right to his fans too and looks forward to hearing from you!

The theme song is called Retro Funk by SoulProdMusic and can be found at pixabay.com.

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Twitter: @frankwebertx
Web:  frankwebertx.com
Email:  frankoweber@hotmail.com

Transcript

Frank: 0:00

Well, in this episode, I'm going to be doing something a little different, something that I've been wanting to do for a while. I'm going to be doing a pilot of sorts for the Ask Me Anything segment that I'd like to incorporate into the show. And we're going to be doing that right after this. Well, hello once again to Frank Weber's party. This is your host, Frank Weber. So glad that you came back again this week to be with me and discuss some topics and have a good time. Today I'm going to do a segment that I've been wanting to do for a long time called Ask Me Anything. And admittedly, I was the one who crafted all these questions. I would really like to hear from you though in the future on this Ask Me Anything segment. It fits really well with my niche of talking about topics and subtopics that are somewhat obscure or don't get talked about, very much, if at all. So it fits with that and it also fits with one of the objectives that I have in my, Original podcast description that's still up, on the websites, uh, through all the distributors of the podcast, referencing this particular segment. I tried to select some topics that were fun and amusing and light hearted and hopefully you'll... I agree that they are, I definitely believe they are things that I'm interested in. I decided against doing some heavier topics, for that interest. I'll also tell you one other thing. A lot of these topics involve sports and entertainment. So I would say I'm a fan of all these things or people. I just want you to realize though too as a fan I also believe I'm entitled to an opinion which could sometimes be a criticism as well So without further ado, let's go ahead and get to the first question What do you think of professional wrestling in general? especially today and the slew of changes recently with the WWE merger with Endeavor, which is the parent corporation of UFC. Well, I have to give you a little background first about my fandom here. I've been watching professional wrestling off and on for, I guess, 35 years, maybe. I can't say that I'm a real diehard about it. like I said, I've been off and on and I haven't really kept up with everything inclusive all the way through. But I enjoy it. I know that it is an athletic performance is really what it is with a script and some sort of a storyline. Some people would call that fake. Or just plain dumb or stupid or whatever. My dad told my brother and I that all the time when we were watching it as kids. And it's amazing how passionate people get when they tell you that it's dumb and stupid and fake. And why is an intelligent person like myself watching that and all that. And it gets really funny. Uh, just a lot of passion to, to try to put you down with that stuff. And I don't know, it's really crazy. It is entertainment though. It's not an actual competition because everything is planned, but it is entertainment and it may even be a lowbrow form of art. Uh, and I watch it as such. It's also been described as a soap opera for men because these storylines can take place, over variable amounts of time. Some of them can go on for quite a while. So, I enjoy watching it. It has changed a lot over the years. there's actually been several different eras over the last 35 to 40 years, especially since Vince McMahon, the younger took over WWE, I think in 82 or something like that. we had, uh, a cartoonish era where the wrestlers were larger than life. That was the one that I grew up in and then they had an attitude era. And now I'm not really sure what the current era is called. It's definitely different. There's a lot of what some people would call rinse and repeat matches. Or cut and paste matches. the stars have to, they have to perform their feuds. Oftentimes in matches, they don't go up against the jobbers. whose only job was to lose to the stars, which is the way it was back in the eighties and nineties. They go up against each other quite frequently now. And so you see them fight each other or variations of the fight a lot. I think that kind of takes away a lot from. today's wrestling, quite frankly, um, WWE merger was a little bit of a surprise, but Vince was wanting to sell or join with somebody else. I guess he's been wanting to do that for a while. the news in the last 10 days or so is that a lot of the front office staff, not all, not necessarily a lot of them, but people were fired from the front office and a number of mid to lower level wrestlers were also released. I found it to be kind of weird. Vince had a lot of favorites that he would put into storylines and they would wrestle all the time and they were the company essentially. But he had a lot of other people who would just be on sometimes and then they'd be off for a while and it may have had nothing to do with injuries or taking vacations or anything and now with the merger and new owners, those people have been released. Kind of not fair, one of the ones, you may not know his name, he wasn't really as popular lately. named Dolph Ziggler, and apparently he was a huge worker, the worker means that they basically worked toward believability of their athletic ability as well as the storyline. He was great at that, but has now been released and that's kind of sad. but I guess that's just the way it goes in that business. I'm not a real big expert on that particular business, but I am a fan. I enjoy watching it. there's still several promotions. I think that WWE has the best production overall. AEW is okay. That's the one that's, on another cable channel on other nights. and then there's some lower level ones, on even other cable channels. Usually most everything's either on cable or pay per view nowadays. I know that they were talking about changing that up though with this new merger. I do want to give a shout out though, in case you weren't aware, there is a young lady. She's probably in her early thirties, practicing dentist outside of Orlando who Is on the AEW roster, primarily on Wednesday nights, named Britt Baker, her wrestling character and handle is Dr. Britt Baker, DMD, and her gimmick is to put on rubber gloves when she's about to take care of her opponent, she's a potential guest on this show, I say potential guest, I would love to have her on sometime, I think it would be a great conversation with all that we have in common, I will say that, instead of having one job that's gonna eventually harm her body, she actually has two. before I go on, I should mention that wrestling is a good place for slapstick and farcical kind of lowbrow comedy as well. if you can see the humor in that, which I do, and it just works out with my sense of humor. The fact that something that looks like a sport, but really isn't that amuses me as well. What did you think of the recently concluded Solheim Cup? Who is your favorite women's golfer? And what do you think about today's LPGA tour? All right. So the Solheim Cup is essentially women's golf's version of the Ryder Cup. They just had it this past weekend. I'm recording the Monday morning after. It involves a team match between the USA and Europe, and for three days they go through different formats. And essentially score via match play to determine a winner. This year Solheim cup ended in a tie 14 to 14, which seemed a little odd to me. They don't do this tournament except every other year. So it's going to be 2025 until they have it again and ending in a tie gives it back to the team that won it the last time, which was Europe. So Europe wound up retaining the cup. I saw parts of it. I watched, particularly because. My favorite golfer, Lexi Thompson was on team USA. She had a pretty good tournament overall, played her heart out. did some great things. It wasn't perfect, but she exceeded expectations. There was a lot of people who weren't sure that she should have been on the team because she's been struggling on the tour so much lately. But she really did a great job, and I was very, very proud of her. Um, I don't understand why they didn't a tiebreaker, though. That's bizarre to me, considering that every regular tournament on the tour usually has a sudden death playoff. So I was perplexed by that, but I guess that's the way they want to do it. Suzanne Patterson. She's a retired golfer and The captains of the teams are retired golfers and she gave a speech at the end. I think she's from, I can't remember where she's from exactly, somewhere in Scandinavia. She said something kind of funny like, This is the place where talent is forced. Like talent is forced upon you or something like that. I think she meant to say talent is forged. I thought that was amusing. I don't want to make fun of her accent or anything, it sounded like it was a good tournament. I hear the men's writer cup is this weekend, Lexi is my favorite golfer. she's cute. a very good golfer just has struggled a lot lately. And, When you think about her and today's LPGA tour, I enjoy women's golf. I enjoy men's golf, if you can score consistently under par and do that on a regular basis and even win some tournaments, you have my respect. Golf is a very difficult game and I don't care who you are. If you can do that, you are in a Really a pretty small minority in the entire world. I don't know if people really kind of understand that. I don't think the number is 200. I think it may be a little bit higher than that. because there's golf pros everywhere. You know, most courses anyway. The problem with today's LPGA, if you want to look at it, I don't know if it's a marketing issue or a perceived image issue. I think they do have some problems there. I've never been to a golf match, whether professional or amateur, so I don't really know what it's like. There's a stereotype out there that says people don't watch women's golf as much as men's golf because women don't hit it as far off the tee, which is biologically accurate. But then you have my favorite golfer, Lexi Thompson, who is known for her booming drives. So I don't know how she compares to some of the men in that regard. But she's an outlier The LPGA wants to have higher TV ratings. They want to be on par with the men on the TV ratings. I think they deserve that, most certainly. But one thing you have to realize is that the old adage of watching golf on TV is still at play there. You can turn on golf and take a nap regardless of who's playing. unfortunately that, like I said, that's still in play in a big way So you have to do some other things to kind of spice it up. I don't know that you can ask the men on the other tours to necessarily support you because most of the time they have got a tournament the same weekend and they probably want people to tune in to watch them instead. I will tell you one thing that. Annoys me about some of the golfers on the American tour. The LPGA is basically North America, and then they do a swing through, I think the far east, they may even have something in Hawaii at some point, which I guess is basically North America. But one thing that. What has annoyed me since they redid the dress code a few years ago is the long sleeve white undershirts that a lot of them are wearing. Not Lexi. Lexi doesn't do that. Lexi, she knows she's pretty, and she's gotten modeling contracts for it, so she does like the attention. But a lot of the women, and granted when you play golf, you have to dress for the conditions as well as your personal comfort. I totally get that, but I just don't get the long sleeve white undershirts. They say, well, it's UV production and it keeps dirt and sticky stuff off you as you play 18 holes. I don't know. And then they also say it's like wearing nothing at all. Well then don't wear it at all. I've seen the amateurs and the ladies European tour. It doesn't seem to be as common. They're not wearing those things seems to boost a little bit in terms of viewership. I would say maybe a small amount. I'm not trying to be a male chauvinist pig or anything, but that may be one way to boost ratings is to not have those long sleeveless undershirts. so in summation, I think those got more popular after the dress code fiasco in like 2017 or something like that. But my point is, dress for your comfort, dress for the conditions. That's what's you're supposed to do in golf. So don't necessarily listen to me. you don't have to dress necessarily like page sporadic, who I love and adore along with Lexi Thompson. I would love to have both of them on this show at some point. Uh, that's crazy. We're talking about dress code and women's golf so anything is possible on this show, if you have any questions about that, please feel free to email me. And also I don't buy the long drive controversy thing either. you can't tell on TV and. Like I said, Lexi's an exception in that long driving distance. What is going on right now with Texas Tech football and can you apply it to where non fans of Tech Might be able to learn something about their schools and teams a very loaded question to say the least The Red Raiders are now as of September 25th The record is one win and three losses and conference play has begun zero wins and one loss this was after a summer of a lot of hype and excitement, a lot of people buying tickets. we have several sold out games that have either already happened or are going to take place. And what's happened so far really against, what is known as the bowl series competition. We had the one win that I mentioned, against an FCS team, which is a little bit lower competition. They've been in all those games. I think they fight hard and they try, but they've made a lot of mistakes, including penalties. That falls on the coaching staff. But the biggest thing is that the offense has not been nearly as productive this year. Certainly not compared to last year. they can move the ball, but they're really not scoring as many points. Play calling is questionable. had a chance again to tie it at the end of the game the other day. Fresh set of downs on the 11 yard line. About half a minute left to timeouts. Never use the timeouts. Just forced four passes to the end zone. None of them were caught. I love our head coach Joey McGuire. He seems like a really good guy has brought a lot of excitement to us. I hope he figures this thing out and turns it around when he was hired almost two years ago. We have people in our they used to call them good old boys and they tend to be either donors or administrators. So they bring somebody in like Joey McGuire, who's a highly touted, recommended head coach for our program. And I don't know if they say this as a condition of employment or not. But they say, coach, we really want to bring you on, but we want you to run this kind of offense and bring in this particular offensive coordinator. We'll just call it the O. C. And so there's a lot of people at tech who have a nostalgia for some highfalutin hurry up, run and gun. No, I will not run and gun more of like the old air raid offense that Mike Leach ran here. they want to bring something back for nostalgia sake. But that offense has evolved and college football has evolved since then. And so they forced coach to hire an O. C. He didn't get the first choice because The first choice moved on to another head coaching job. The second choice had already coached here before, I think, with Kingsbury and possibly Wells, a couple of former coaches. Um, and so, this guy, his name is Zach Kitley. He's a tech alum. I think he may have played here and... he's the son of a hall of fame national championship track coach that we still have here named Wes Kittley. there is some concern if McGuire can actually go in and make a change with him either to get Kittley to call plays better or if push comes to shove, if there's any way to actually relieve him, but that's a problem because of the good old boys and the nepotism of hiring, this championship track coach who just won a national championship, another national championship this past spring to go out and fire his son potentially. And so that makes me wonder if coach McGuire is in a rock and a hard place on that. I don't know what he's thinking right now, but. He probably knows that the whole fan base is very upset with Kittly and that something needs to happen one and three at this point After having such high hopes and talking about some sort of national run or a conference championship or whatever It's still September with one more game to play in September and we're basically playing for our season So what I'm trying to say there is that the good old boys They may not know it, but they're kind of in hamstringing the coach potentially and I don't know the entire story They're kind of setting him up for failure instead of setting them up for success And those kinds of things do I have heard happen at a lot of other universities, especially the very large ones all over the country everybody kind of wants to get their hand in the pot when they just Need to let the coaches coach and in particular the head coach. Like I said, I wonder what Joey's thinking. I wonder what he's gonna do Try to salvage this season and continue to build this program up. He's a hell of a recruiter. There's a lot of good talent coming in. I would love to think that, it's nowhere but up I think we need to develop a championship attitude and everything athletically. you have to act like you are a big time program, that manifests itself in small ways sometimes, through such things as scheduling. I think North Texas has returned to our schedule next year and a lot of big schools, you know, you could name UT or OU or A& M, whoever, they would normally set up North Texas to come to their place for one game or maybe a second game a little bit later on some years down the road. We go out and decide that we're going to do a home and home with them because there may be some good old boy out there who still thinks that we have to have a game in the Dallas area for some reason recruiting or whatever and I don't think it really works like that to be honest. North Texas should be coming here. only, and we should never have to go to their place. The other thing is, we also have a game this year, November 2nd, which is a Thursday night game hosting TCU. I know TV is king in the college football world. I would have thought though, even with all of its influence, that the powers that be at tech can negotiate with them and say, can we please move this to Saturday because we have a lot of alumni and other folks who come from a long distance to go to the games. They're not all from Lubbock or where the Amarillo area like me or Or even the Permian Basin isn't too far away. a lot of them come from DFW, but we've heard of people from Austin and Houston and San Antonio. And, they could have negotiated that to Saturday, but they didn't because there are other schools in this conference like Texas and OU and some former members as well, A& M, Nebraska, you name it, who have never played a non Thanksgiving Thursday night home game. it's just not something that the big boys do, and I guess I've gone on a lot about that with my soapbox here. then the only other thing is, I think McGuire's raise last year, looking back on it now, his raise in extension may have been a little bit premature. I wonder if we coddle. Our coaches, we pay them a great deal and they live like Kings in Lubbock, Texas, and that's wonderful. You got to pay and retain people. And I know why they did that because they don't want people to steal away coach McGuire, but at the same time they're getting paid a lot and some people are saying, expectations are just to make a bowl game and to stay relevant and stay in a relevant conference. But I'm the kind of guy who wants a lot more. I refuse to believe that we can't. Bring ourselves up to a higher level and be a better. overall football program and more consistent football program. The last thing that I will say, and this is just a real teaser here. if you're looking for a bad omen for this season, it wasn't really the Wyoming game that we flubbed away there in Laramie at the beginning of September. I think it was actually commissioner 12 coming to our. kickoff luncheon there in August, he said some things that some deemed to be controversial, especially UT fans. His comments, I interpreted them differently than the UT fans did But I don't have really time to go into that right now. finally, we don't have a review of hers today, but what do you think Priscilla Barnes is up to these days and how is the strike affecting her? Well, I know for a fact that she and her husband are, doing an Airbnb there in Glendale, as far as the strike and all that crazy bullshit craziness, you know, there's writers on strike. There's actors on strike. I imagine that she is not working with anything that is unionized at this particular point, but she may be doing some independent work. She and Ted seem to be pretty creative people, so I'm not really sure what they're up to in regards to acting or writing right now. would love to have her on the show, but if she hypothetically were to come on now, she wouldn't, I don't believe, be able to talk about, any of the things that she's ever been in, including Three's Company. I could be wrong about that, but the, the union members seem to have a gag order that has no statute of limitations. So they can't talk about something from even 40 years ago. it's a mess out there. Some people think it'll end in October sometime, but I don't really know for sure. this is September 25th as I record this episode and this is not Priscilla related, but, I really got into the, new night court show that they started airing in January and they had a half a season on. I thought it was a very good effort based on the old show. It may not take quite the same risks. That the old show does, that may be my biggest criticism, but otherwise it's very true to it. And because of that strike, we haven't been able to start the new TV season yet. And I have no idea when they will ever get around to that. if this thing stops in October, you know, do we even get anything? In November or before Christmas, you know, I'm not, not really sure, but, hope Priscilla and Ted are doing great out there. I would love to have her on the show. We'd love to have Ted on the show, I think that's about it for today. I hope you like this little bit different show. I don't really plan on making the entire episodes, like that with a full ask me anything type thing. But I hope you enjoyed that and found it entertaining and maybe even a little educational. would love to hear your comments and questions and suggestions for the show. And there's places where you can contact me, on the show notes. So I look forward to that. And please, as always, tell your family and friends, coworkers. about my show and hit the subscribe button. I should also point out a Patreon that you can donate to. The minimum through Buzzsprout is 3 a month, but if you only want to do 3 one time, that would be great too. anything that we can get to help improve the show and bring better content, possibly better editing. I have some big visions for the show like I was talking about these last couple of weeks about video and social media, marketing, that sort of thing, anything that you feel led to do would be great, but anyway, I think that's about it. this is Frank Weber signing off from Frank Weber's party. Look forward to seeing you next week and have a great week and we'll see you then. The theme song is called retro funk by soul prod music and it's available at pixabay. com.