Um . . . YES.

This is an interesting development: The WWE is creating its own channel–but not on cable. Instead of going with an NFL Network style cable channel, they’ve decided to do an over-the-top web channel, which will be streamed to Roku/Playstation/Android/Apple/etc. The service launches next week. A few points:

1) The Variety story seems contradictory in saying that subscriptions are $9.95 a month and will include PPV access, but that the WWE expects $600 in revenue per year from each subscription. Maybe the PPVs will be in-app purchases? It’s a little unclear.

2) The most interesting aspect of this is to what extent the WWE network will cannibalize existing revenue from TV deals and PPV. My sense–and this is just a guess–is that the company wouldn’t be making such a bold move if they thought there was lots of growth left in those areas. Instead, this seems like a hedge to protect declining revenues by cutting out middlemen.

3) Variety points to the influence of MLB, but it seems to me that the much more consequential influence in Glenn Beck’s Blaze, which continues to be almost criminally underreported as a business story. (For instance, in this otherwise good piece about conservative new-new media, note how little attention is given to it.)

4) This move is actually consistent with what HHH told Grantland in August when asked about a WWE network:

The question you probably always get after the Hall of Fame is the WWE television channel.

If I had to say what is one priority we think about on a daily basis, that is one of them. But it’s not so easy to put together. It’s not the NFL Network. You have to think about how our business is different. Don’t look at us as a Mayweather or De La Hoya fight, look at it asRocky. Rocky is a movie that just happens to be about boxing. It’s really about characters and story lines and relationships and all those things, and the backdrop is boxing. You can go back and watch the final fight in Rocky a thousand times. If you dig that movie, if you like the characters, you’ll watch the whole movie over and over.

But that’s a very limited number of people that go back and watch boxing matches, unless it’s like the Thrilla in Manila. But to go back and just watch a regular boxing match, or a Super Bowl, what’s the implications of that now? It doesn’t mean anything. Our stuff is different.

The Veronica Mars movie looks pretty great, actually:

And courtesy of Galley Friend A.W. comes what might be the greatest bit of wrestling nostalgia ever: Roddy Piper, Macho Man, Jake the Snake, Undertaker, Ric Flair, Hulk Hogan–and more–all in the ring at the same time, in a stakes match. There’s full video. And this awesome promo poster:

In (yet another) piece about white privilege, someone at Salon writes:

We ended 2013, the 150thanniversary of the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation — a year in which one of the most popular movies, “12 Years a Slave,” chronicled the horrors of slavery in Louisiana . . .

I have no doubt that 12 Years a Slave was the most popular movie of the year (decade?) at the offices of Salon.

Out in the wider world? Here’s the 2013 box office list, which is a pretty objective measure of a movie’s popularity. 12 Years a Slave clocks in at . . .

#75

Let’s play a little game where I name a movie from 2013 and you tell me if it was less popular than 12 Years a Slave. And I promise right off the bat that this won’t be one of those trick quizes where there are no right answers:

* 42–Which was also about race in America!

* The Smurfs 2–I’ll cheat on this and just tell you: it made twice as much money as 12 Years.

* Jurassic Park 3D–This was just a 3D-ified re-lease of a 20-year-old movie.

* A Haunted House–Also a movie about race in America. Kind of. (It’s a Wayans Bros. joint.)

Okay, I lied. All of those movies made more money than 12 Years a Slave. But don’t worry, it was way, waaayyy more popular than Kick Ass 2.

George Effin’ Will.

On Twitter.

One of the things I’ve always marveled about concerning Will is his ability on television to speak in full, coherent paragraphs–in total contradiction to the imperatives of the medium. I’m not optimistic about his ability to subvert Twitter in the same way.

On the other hand, maybe this is a spoof account. A boy can dream.

A missive from Galley Friend X:

For reasons I won’t share, I was poking around Andrew Sullivan’s site this week and stumbled across the following: apparently, there’s a “porn gap.” In “high-income cities” the top five search terms on porn-video websites are “1. Gay 2. Ebony 3. Teen 4. Lesbian and 5. MILF  while in low-income cities they are 1. Teen 2. Lesbian 3. MILF 4. Ebony 5. Gay.”

The first thing to cross my mind, obviously, was What would Charles Murray have to say about this?

But then, that question turns out to be easier to answer than you might think.

A weekend Wall Street Journal essay–“Charles Murray on the porn class divide”–practically writes itself. He would look back on the good old days, when both the upper and lower classes had to watch the same pornography, so that no matter how much money your family had, at least you’d have some shared social experience. And there’d be a quiz, so that the rich could realize how little they understand about blue-collar porn.

But the best part is that Murray could even recycle his last title: Coming Apart.

	Matt Yglesias (@mattyglesias)
11/27/13, 6:47 PM Wait there’s a special Vatican Embassy separate from the Italian Embassy in Rome? Why?

	Matt Yglesias (@mattyglesias)
11/27/13, 6:50 PM The US Embassy in Switzerland also handles Liechtenstein. Clearly no reason for a separate embassy for the Vatican.

This is so perfectly illustrative. It’s not the conflation of Liechtenstein with the Holy See in terms of geopolitical importance. It’s the pronouncement that there is “clearly” “no reason” for a separate embassy for the Vatican.

Mind you, he’s not saying that there’s “insufficient reason” for a separate embassy. Or that, on balance, prudence suggests that a separate embassy is wasteful, or risky, or mostly redundant. There’s simply “no reason” for it at all.

Because anything Matt Yglesias doesn’t understand must not exist.

Update: Over at the Federalist, C.J. Ciaramella discusses Yglesias’s writerly shortcomings. It leaves a mark. As does this other Federalist piece by Sean Davis. This may come as a shock, but Yglesias doesn’t know what he’s talking about with regards to banking in America, either.

Galley Friend A.W. sends along this link to the ten best backstage wrestling fights of all time. To my mind, the best nugget is that the brawl between Arn Andersen and Sid Vicious started because Vicious was bagging on Ric Flair and the Enforcer stood up to defend the Nature Boy’s honor.

As Jimmy Garvin once say, that’s kayfabe. (Do yourself a favor: Click on the link, print that story out, and savor it.)

In a related note, I reviewed David Shoemaker’s excellent book The Squared Circle in the WSJ over the weekend.