HEY YOU, YEAH YOU. I STRONGLY RECOMMEND YOU LISTEN TO THE VOICEOVER COMPANION/PODCAST BY READING THIS IN THE SUBSTACK APP OR ON YOUR LAPTOP OR WHATEVER, JUST NOT IN AN EMAIL.

I PUT A LOT OF WORK INTO IT AND I HAPPEN TO THINK IT’S PRETTY FUNNY TOO.

KTHXBAI xD

A NOTE FROM THE EDITOR

Hello dear friend. I hope you are well. I am pleased to share the first newsletter in a little while. I took a break in September because writing wasn’t fun. Now it is again. Huzzah!

This week is a normal newsletter, a real return to form. I’m reviewing a wrestling show from a month plus ago, ranting about Microsoft Teams, and, in and Uffda Times-Picayune first, a work of fiction! Stick with this one to the very end, because, for fun, I wrote a very short screenplay inspired by my first visit to one of St. Paul’s first licensed dispensaries as a kind of creative writing exercise. Let me know what you think unless you don’t like it then please don’t tell me.

Thanks so much for reading, it really means a lot to me. It also doesn’t mean much to me if you don’t, because I write for myself because it’s fun and I like cracking jokes. Can’t we learn to laugh again?

Celebrate UTP’s triumphant return with a celebratory subscription. Go ahead, use a burner, I don’t care.

I’M NOT FUCKING KIDDING PUT YOUR DAMN AIRPODS IN AND LISTEN TO THIS ARTICLE EVEN IF YOU READ ALONG, AND LET ME KNOW WHAT YOU THINK. THIS IS YOUR LAST WARNING.

I WON’T ASK AGAIN!

RINGSIDE WITH UTP

BRAWL AT THE MALL: LOCAL WRESTLING AT MALL OF AMERICA REVIEWED

September 4, 1995 started like any other day at the Mall of America. Minnesotans and tourists alike shopped ‘til they dropped. I’m sure the line for the Pepsi Ripsaw was longer than anyone would reasonably expect. We still called it Camp Snoopy, damnit.

That night, like many others, a crowd gathered in the Rotunda. This event space is rented for one-off spectacles or other carny-adjacent presentations. I’d argue the Rotunda’s most prominent tenant in recent years has been that waterskiing squirrel(s) that show up once every six months.

It’s 1995, and there’s not a squirrel in sight. Instead, hundreds of wrestling fans lined the ledges of the four levels of the megamall. It was the home of the taping of the first episode of Ted Turner’s WWF rival World Championship Wrestling’s (WCW) Monday Nitro, the first strike in the so-called “Monday Night Wars,” where Turner’s TNT aired WCW wrestling at the same time as WWF’s Monday Night Raw. This was the first viable competitor to Vince McMahon’s WWF, and at one point surpassed him in popularity. All Elite Wrestling (AEW), my beloved weekly wrestling show, is the spiritual successor, airing on the once-Turner-owned TBS and TNT, just like Nitro. AEW even calls their flagship show, which premiered on TNT Dynamite, a clear nod to Nitro.

That episode is legendary—the vibes in the Rotunda are palpable, and the show is well-known for the match between Ric Flair and Sting, two of the biggest stars in wrestling at the time. You can still watch this episode on Peacock if you have it. I did not.

30 years later, my partner and a friend joined hundreds of wrestling fans gathered in the Rotunda yet again. This wasn’t on TV, but was local wrestling promotion F1RST Wrestling’s Saturday Night Nitro, a spiritual successor that captures the same crazy energy only a public event in a giant megamall could do. The combination of paying marks like us with random tourists getting ushered away for standing around too long made for an extremely high-energy crowd, at least most of the time.

We were on the third floor, which IMO was the best spot to be for the money. We paid $30 for our tickets and we stood right on the railing for the whole show. We had a great view of the ring, the walkout tunnel, and opportunities to people watch mallgoers.

We got there pretty early and were lucky enough to see a match between fan-favorite Big O. Possum and Heavy Metal Lore during the pre-show. Big O. Possum is exactly what he sounds like: a big opossum. He has a pouch, as North America’s only native marsupial, and it holds Joey, a small opossum joey he occasionally throws at foes and he “bites” them. It’s a really funny bit.

The actual show was electric. I won’t review all of the matches but a few of the highlights.

We opened with Ryan Cruz taking on F1RST Wrestling Grand Champion Devon Monroe. The title used to be called the Wrestlepalooza Championship, after the semi-annual wrestling show they hold at First Avenue, typically in January and a special pride month-themed edition in June. Well now they can’t use it because those snakes at WWE decided AEW having a pay-per-view needed to have WWE counter-programming and sloppily announced they were reviving the WrestlePalooza branding for the first time since 2000. Thankfully the PPV was a total flop.

Ryan Cruz is a lot of fun; he’s a great wrestler, but the highlight of his matches are always his walkout, which he does as he leads a group sing-along of Creed’s hit “Higher.” Devon Monroe exudes what he calls “Black Sexellence,” and is known as the Twin City Twister. He’s a high flyer who has been a mainstay for wrestling promotions across the Midwest. Unfortunately, he didn’t hold out and Cruz became champion.

The women’s fatal-four-way featured three former WWE and TNA stars alongside F1RST mainstay and fan-favorite (particularly among my friends) Free Range Kara, the only wrestler certified by the USDA. She didn’t pull it off but the match was nuts.

Another fatal four-way featured national indie wrestling darling Danhausen, who has been described as “Conan O’Brien possessed by a demon,” juuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuust Jordan (I saw him at the state fair but didn’t say hi lmao), Houston-based women’s star and now former Uptown VFW champion Hyan, and perhaps the F1RST fan favorite Brandon Gore, whose gimmick is that he is a conspiracy theorist who wears a tinfoil hat. A F1RST staff member handed out tinfoil hats for everyone to wear. I wore mine the entire time. Big Wrestling is watching!

Jordan won, but not before such shocking moments as Danhausen dumping his signature jar of teeth on Hyan and Danhausen’s hexing powers being disabled by Brandon Gore’s tinfoil hat.

There was a definite low point, 58-year-old Ultimo Dragon was booked to wrestle Shane Black, whose gimmick is that he’s a lifeguard from the sandy shores of Edina (there are no bodies of water in Edina). Ultimo is a long-time favorite and staple of Japanese wrestling. He is in shape but God watching him wrestle was rough. He cut a promo after the fight, likely because the crowd was not popping for anything during that match. Even Shane’s loud whistles and sunblock-covered nose couldn’t save it. The promo was…not great, but I guess I’m glad to say I saw Ultimo wrestle.

Local hero Matt Honey was helped by Swoggle, known in WWE as Hornswoggle. Together they took down Heavy Metal Lore, a massive man.

My personal favorite wrestler is Mr. Williams, whose gimmick is that he’s a teacher. He is a teacher in real life, but his character is a heel, yelling at kids in the crowd, writing detention slips, and using his lanyard as a weapon. He comes out to Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)” and is an absolute riot. My favorite thing to yell at him is that “I bet you supervise unpopular extracurriculars!”

Mr. Williams took on local rapper Nur-D, who made his wrestling debut. It was a good showing, and he’s since been billed at another show, so his skills will only improve. I just think like 40% more people need to know who Nur-D is so that his pops will be huge. Nur-D won.

The final match was incredible. Two high flyers (they’re brothers) were part of a four-way with perennial national indie wrestling circuit mainstay Gringo Loco (he is a fat, middle-aged, white luchador and he is fucking incredible at wrestling), and a wrestler I wasn’t aware of, Kody Lane, whose gimmick is being a flamboyant cowboy, complete with black tasselled chaps witih pink accents, including flamingos and a matching jacket. Despite being like…7’ tall, Kody could do swanton bombs like you wouldn’t fucking believe. There were a lot of gnarly bumps too—the most memorable being when Gringo did an aerial move onto the other three, who were waiting on the floor (no mat or anything, just good old MOA tile floors) and my God I thought we watched someone’s career end. But JK! I got worked.

Great show as always. If you wanna tag along to a show, F1RST does them year-round and, in my opinion, they’re the least-carny promotion in the Twin Cities. If I’m available, I’m down to go.

…AND ANOTHER THING

WHY DOES MICROSOFT TEAMS NOT KNOW HOW TO OPEN FILES

I know it’s been a while, and this may seem like a trivial complaint in today’s tragedy-laden world, but my God, what is going on at Microsoft and why do they keep fucking with their GOAT-ed Office Suite.

I don’t know what it is about the AI bubble, but it’s made Microsoft forget that first and foremost, their main customer are businesses, governments, you know, people trying to get shit done. But hey, from the company that gave us Windows 8 and rapidly sunset Windows 10, causing countless numbers of perfectly good PCs to instantly become e-waste, what can you expect.

My specific gripe comes from the fact that Microsoft’s inability to figure out what the fuck the cloud is. At work, you usually have the following places you can store files:

* Your local PC, the easiest, internet-free way to save your stuff. It’s also discouraged because no one else can work on those files when not in use.

* Shared network drive, which in the olden days was used to share files on your work’s network, now you can usually access it with a VPN

Great—this is standard stuff for most office work environments. But on top of these two options, Microsoft has provided new ways to fuck up your workflow:

* Microsoft Teams, which brings you all of the worst parts of Slack with a watered-down version of Skype (God, remember Skype?), but also has a cloud file sharing environment that is redundant with the existing network drive system

* The “teams” in Microsoft Teams are horrible too, no main “Team” dashboard, accessing settings is a nightmare, and it seems like the organizational structure in the app is a total afterthought, just smash a little bit of every part of the Office Suite into one horrific application

* OneDrive, which works like a network drive but only for your Microsoft 365 account. It’s only accessible if you use a web browser or if you have the application open

Also, OneDrive and Teams don’t talk to each other.

So naturally, I am navigating to a variety of file types stored in a place I don’t usually use, which is where my frustrations boiled over.

Want to use a spreadsheet? Well you’d think it would make sense to simply…open in Excel, but that’s where you’re wrong. Does it open in Teams too? Nope. For some fucking reason spreadsheets only open in an Edge browser. If you are lucky enough to get the “open on Desktop” to work correctly, I always run into weird errors and doing things like saving and sharing doesn’t quite work right.

You see, collaboration in Excel is built around OneDrive, but saving to Teams is different than OneDrive. So Excel the application doesn’t talk to Teams and instead of Making Excel Better, we instead get a web-based Google Docs clone that is, FWIW, a much better user experience, but like what is the deal with the unnecessary redundancy?

Why the fuck do PDFs open in Teams? It’s clear it’s like a mini Edge environment, so why not just open it in Edge? Or my default PDF program? And why can’t I copy and paste text from a PDF in Teams? Surely Copilot could grab that for me, the AI companies already make you use it whether you like it or not, especially Google.

Obviously, much of this is customizable and I’m sure there are settings somewhere, but as an avid PC user for many years, settings and options are being taken away in Windows and the Microsoft Office suite as part of the further enshittification of, well, everything, especially the internet.

I will concede—that I did find use in the Edge “Workspaces” feature paired with the Excel web pages to quickly organize and bookmark multiple forms or to compare data without having a kabillion windows, and be able to quickly come back to it, but it’s also just a glorified bookmark bar.

Anyway, if Excel files are going to open in Edge, the PDFs should too, and frankly, I hate to say it, I like Edge.

THE UFFDA TIMES-PICAYUNE FILM JOURNAL

DANKRUPT ‘TIL DYNAMITE: A SHORT RADIO DRAMA

Now for something a bit different on my triumphant return to newslettering and a mini break from Mormons. You’re welcome.

The following is inspired by true events. Did you know that Lunds and Byerlys and Bakers Square do not, and have never had apostrophes? I think I’m going to be sick.

INT: HOME OFFICE IN MINNEAPOLIS. THE OFFICE IS CLUTTERED, WITH ECLECTIC DECORATIONS LIKE GUITARS AND AN 80'S BONA FIDE KITCHEN CRT TV ADORNED WITH WOOD GRAIN. IT'S A MESS, NOT ONE MEANT TO BE SEEN BY FRIENDS OR NEWSLETTER SUBSCRIBERS, AND EVEN WORSE IF YOU'RE BOTH. THERE IS NO DOUBT, HOWEVER, THAT THIS IS THE OFFICE OF A HOT PERSON.

Hey, that was pretty funny. Send it to your friends so they know what it’s like buying legal cannabis right when everyone gets off work.