Welcome back to another edition of the world’s most recommended newsletter/podcast to my friends’ coworkers.

This week we’re back to normal after we wrapped up Putting the Moron in Moroni last week. I’m really proud of what I put together and I hope you’ll give it a read/listen if you haven’t already—start with episode 1 here.

Also: this newsletter is also a podcast, which you can now listen to on the Substack app/browser, or on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. All 9 episodes of Putting the Moron in Moroni are on there.

Now, celebrate with me as we talk about more important things: banjos, wrasslin’, and transit-focused YouTubers.

Did you know? 100% of all Uffda Times-Picayune subscribers are extremely hot. You don’t want to be ugly, do you?

BOTCHED! GRIPES ABOUT GRAPS

EDDIE KINGSTON’S 2025 REBOOT

“I drink to drown my demons—but they know how to float.”

-Eddie Kingston

On May 11, 2024, around 3,000 people gathered at the Toyota Arena in Ontario, CA for the New Japan Pro Wrestling (NJPW) Resurgence pay-per-view.

The second to last match was NJPW star (and terrifying person) Gabe Kidd vs. the 17-year indie wrestling legend Eddie Kingston.

Eddie is a beloved wrestler among the nerdiest wrestling fans because he never wrestled in WWE. AEW Founder (and head of booking) Tony Khan has tapped decades-old rivalries Eddie Kingston has with other indie veterans, particularly those in Ring of Honor. Eddie’s nickname is “The Mad King,” which was made a pejorative turned term of endearment: “The King of the Bums.” He loves to talk about being from New York, he wears untied, floppy-ass Timbs, and his favorite joke/catchphrase is “Deez Nuts.” Eddie Kingston’s favorite artist is DMX, and his AEW theme song is like a discount DMX song set to music from Castlevania: Symphony of the Night.

Kingston loves to tell his story. He is well-known among wrestling fans for his tenacity on the microphone.

“Promos” make up roughly 20% of a good episode of wrestling TV, and it is shockingly difficult to be good at it. I happen to have a mutual friend who happens to be in an acting class with an active WWE Superstar in Orlando, and a former-WWE star took public speaking classes taught by a friend of mine at UMN. Based on his comments about the student’s performance in the class it’s not shocking to me he was let go by WWE.

Promos can be a lot of things. There are pre-recorded segments and backstage interviews. Many times, the wrestler will come out to the middle of the ring and rail on whatever they need to by hyping up for the next big show or pay-per-view or fight later that night or whatever. In some cases they might be plot-moving segments like MJF and Chris Jericho’s NYT award-winning performance in the Dinner Debonair Wrestling TV Show Broadway Musical Sketch. Promos are all about being good at extemporaneously speaking and improv.

Yes, and? The good promo makes the good show. I covered an amazing Swerve/Hangman promo earlier this year that I still recommend watching. I’m also proud of D.E.N.N.I.S.’ing Joe Goldberg. And the COVID/Second Gilded Age Airbnbs they seem to film at a lot now.

Eddie Kingston, whether because of his tough Yonkers upbringing, his time as a union ironworker, or something else entirely, can fucking go for it on the mic. I’ve linked a 2.5 hour compilation of his best promos on AEW. My favorite is the spring 2022 period where Chris Jericho attempted to seize AEW and make it more like the WWE—the full promo starts at 1:31:00.

Chris Jericho’s faction was called “The Jericho Appreciation Society” (incredible name) and featured wrestlers that used to wrestle at WWE. Their gimmick, was that AEW needed to embrace “sports entertainment,” which is the marketing speak Vince McMahon used to describe what professional wrestling is. Jericho amusingly refers to the AEW fanbase as the “AEW Galaxy,” parodying the absolutely real “WWE Universe.” The JAS even start calling themselves “Superstars,” which is the WWE marketing-speak name for wrestlers. One last WWE marketing-speak (because this one annoys me so much): pay-per-views are now "Premium Live Events (PLE).”

Eddie Kingston is the perfect foil: he never wrestled in WWE, and is perhaps one of the most committed wrestlers to maintaining kayfabe, the carny term for what is canon in the wrestling storyline. Eddie threatens to kill people. Eddie tells stories about his tough childhood, how he had to scrap and fight to stay alive.

“Do you know— SHUT UP, I swear on my mother, shut up. Do you know what a hit means? Do you know that Chris? Look into my eyes. LOOK IN MY EYES, I LIVE BEHIND THEM. When you say ‘a hit’ in my world, you end things…you need to be ready to put a person IN THE GROUND. We’ve done it before and we’ll do it to you—no hesitation.”

- Eddie Kingston in a face-to-face confrontation with the Jericho Appreciation Society

There’s so many others—the promo right after that one in the AEW Timelines video is another favorite, where Eddie Kingston calls into an episode of Dynamite and threatens to make Chris Jericho “feel the pain” his wife must feel as she “fears for his life” because he’s just that mad at Chris Jericho. I just really love the idea that a wrestler can just call in and threaten you. I love wrestling.

Anyway, back to NJPW Resurgence (2024). I couldn’t even tell you the storylines—I don’t watch New Japan—but I know that the match ended with a gnarly botch of a table spot that broke Eddie Kingston’s leg, and tore his ACL and his meniscus. He was the AEW Continental Champion, having literally just won the first Continental Classic. In the time since, Kazuchika Okada (the New York Yankees of Japanese wrestling) took his title and it was consolidated into the new AEW Unified Championship.

We got radio silence on Eddie. He is 42 years old, mind you, so there was speculation that he might be out for longer, or even that he might have to hang it up.

Wrestling dirt sheets had rumors throughout summer 2025 that Kingston was nearly cleared to wrestle, but AEW hadn’t said anything. That was until an early-August ’25 promo from Big Bill, the beloved 7 foot-something wrestler most recently aligned with “The Learning Tree” Chris Jericho, but that bit is gone (as is Jericho, probably). His promo was calling out an unnamed wrestler but ended saying it was addressing Eddie Kingston. The next episode of Collision featured a promo-of-few-words when we saw a remote segment of Eddie Kingston accepting Big Bill’s challenge, from his home in New York. We would not see a single promo from The Mad King before his return at All Out in September.

There’s not really a good reason for Big Bill and Eddie beefing. Why not have Eddie join in on the Death Riders storyline? He famously fucking hates Claudio Castagnoli in kayfabe, and one of his greatest rivalries in AEW was Jon Moxley?

We never find out and the Mad King’s entrance is largely unceremonious. He wore an orange t-shirt that says “CLAUDIO SUCKS EGGS,” as well as two rosaries—not much for da big pay-per-view. I think the orange shirt was a sub-textual preview of him entering “Team Taz,” the now-defunct faction of orange-wearing wrestlers associated with Taz and the “outlaw” FTW Championship, which Chris Jericho was the last fighting champion of.

He fights Big Bill and I’m gonna admit, he looks pretty rough. He’s still somewhat nimble but it’s clear this last injury did him real good. I’d compare the performance of his comeback to Jamie Hayter’s—underwhelming and a little scary…please don’t get injured again!

Eddie wins. It’s been a couple months so I don’t remember…really anything from the match, but I do know that after the match, Big Bill and Bryan Keith beat the absolute shit out of Eddie. And then—the signal! It’s HOOK!

Hook’s stupid new song is playing. He had a cool Westside Gunn song that was iconic and now he has this corny-ass “tell the girls I’m back in town” song that I really can’t stand. Hook runs out and saves the day—basically a return for Hook too after he left The Opps, and they’ve been a little tag team faction since.

The match was widely panned and really shouldn’t have been on the card. Dave Meltzer, if you care what he thinks, gave it one star. Ouch.

It’s not hard to see where TK went wrong on this one. Why is the greatest man on the mic not beefing with big enemies? I understand he’s a lone wolf, so it makes sense for him to pair up with Hook, but do we really need another faction? I guess it makes sense so that Eddie is only doing 50% of the wrestling.

I don’t blame Eddie, he’s not in charge of booking. I’m happy to have Eddie back, but he’s not being used to his full potential. We need Eddie promos. Eddie was the missing voice during the egregiously long reign of the Death Riders, and now that he’s back and paired up with one of weakest promo cutters in the locker room, we deserve the Eddie we love. Give Eddie 20 minutes to address his enemies. Do a shoot on Chris Jericho leaving AEW. Use his reverence for Ring of Honor to elevate that show. Beef with MJF for no reason (God where tf is MJF please come back). There’s probably way more lore connecting Eddie with the locker room I bet we’re just scratching the surface.

Eddie is a decent wrestler, but he’s an incredible performer. To Eddie, all of this is real. Eddie is so convincingly earnest, you believe everything he says. I genuinely believe he is trying to fight the other person in the ring. No one has told him anything is choreographed or staged—he’s just out here beating the shit out of people. Tony Khan: let’s get him doing what he does best.

UTP SOUNDWAVES

I’M LEARNING CLAWHAMMER BANJO AND CAN’T TAKE ANY OF THE SONGS SERIOUSLY

I mentioned very briefly in a June edition of this newsletter that I was taking a banjo class. I’m finally ready to talk about it.

I remember “community ed” classes held at my elementary and middle schools as I started staying after for various activities. Grown-ups would show up and go to my classroom to do…whatever it is they were doing.

I don’t know why, but I always stigmatized it in my mind. I actually really don’t know why. If I had to guess, I bet I was staying after with a teacher and we were booted from their classroom for the community ed class.

This summer, I finally got over my bizarre stigmatization of community education classes and signed up for a beginner’s clawhammer banjo class.

I didn’t always want to play the banjo. I took guitar lessons in elementary school and only in my adulthood did I ever take serious time to practice and improve. Years of concert band and drum corps kept me away from the guitar—why would I practice guitar when I have the new ballad to memorize?

In August 2020, the pivotal moment came. Emily and I, along with a group of friends, stayed at what I can only describe as a mountain-side estate in Warm Springs, VA, nestled in the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains. It was deep-ish in the woods, but the greatest feature of this luxurious Airbnb was the view from the upstairs porch, which overlooked a valley, and fuck if I didn’t wish I had a banjo.

I also got into bluegrass during COVID starting with Billy Strings’ “bluegrass Pantera” like “Turmoil and Tinfoil.” The whole week at Warm Springs I just wished I’d had a damn banjo. From then on, any opportunity I had I mentioned how badly I wanted one. I was blessed that Christmas when my grandfather gifted me his banjo, a gorgeous Fender that’s frankly nicer than any other instrument I own. He had said he never really learned and that he wanted me to have it if I was going to actually learn it. I panicked about getting it from MSP to DC, but it worked.

And then I never learned the banjo.

If you aren’t familiar, there are two kinds of playing styles. You are probably familiar with three-finger picking, “Scruggs”-style that most iconic banjo performances are. I tried to learn it from a book when I got the banjo but I hated it. Clawhammer, or “old time” banjo is more percussive and relies on a “bum-ditty” plucking/strumming pattern that is totally foreign to my guitar-playing self. Clawhammer banjos are open-backed and based on everyone in the class, typically one-off/handmade by banjo luthiers—I have a regular banjo and it’s…substantially louder than everyone else’s.

When I signed up for classes, I was put on the waitlist for the three-finger and clawhammer classes. A spot opened up for clawhammer so, I guess this is what I’m learning.

This was my first organized group musical experience since 2017 and my god was it refreshing to be playing music with other people, even if we were playing the banjo equivalents of “Hot Cross Buns.”

The class was incredibly frustrating at first. I understand (for the most part) how to play the guitar; where the notes line up, the patterns/positions for scales, etc. But banjo features one fewer string and the tuning is completely different. Instead of a low string, the fifth string is a high-pitched drone that is plucked as part of the “-itty” of the “bum-ditty” in clawhammer style.

I compare it most to when I learned to drive stick shift. I knew how to drive, but when my dad tried to teach me manual (in the stick shift car I had literally purchased minutes beforehand) it was as if I forgot everything. My wrong notes, constant frustration, and frequent crash-outs were evocative of the herky-jerky movement of the car, grinding of the clutch, and excessive use of profanities as I had to learn to drive again.

I wasn’t dissuaded, though, and stuck through it. I was pleased to see that for the first time the district was offering a second level, so I took that for this fall, and my god I’m having so much fun. The instructor is the sweetest woman, Julie, who played in an all-women’s punk band, the Pseudonymphs, in the late-80s and early-90s that wore lingerie on-stage and toured at least three times, and even played the infamous CBGB. Here’s an archived interview with the band from 1991. She’s also an accomplished visual artist.

Maybe my understanding of bluegrass culture is limited (it is), but I’m really amazed at how clawhammer manages to attract a diverse set of players, especially queer musicians. Compared to three-finger, clawhammer is far more anarchistic and functions closer to the percussive playing style of a mandolin than the twangy “Dueling Banjos” playing you probably know. The type of banjo is different, too. Keeping time is more important than hitting the exact notes—the fiddle player is gonna play the cooler part anyway.

The other funny part is that there aren’t like…pop songs with clawhammer? Like one of the only go-tos I’ve seen is “Country Roads, Take Me Home” by John Denver, and even that is basically just “here are the chords.” Because of this, if you go to a bluegrass jam, or take this banjo class, you’re gonna learn “old time” banjo songs. Songs like “Hog in the Woods” or “Old Tom Sutton,” all have these Americana-flavored esotericism that begs the question: hasn’t anyone written any new songs?

I was immersed in a whole banjo-themed world I had no idea existed. What the fuck is Banjo Hangout? Do you know how confused I was when I was asked if I’ve “been to Banjo Hangout?” People trade Patreon recommendations like they’re local coffeeshops. There’s a whole collection of bluegrass musicians making music across Minnesota.

For that last bit, I want to make a plug for the Clean Water Land and Legacy Amendment, a unique constitutional amendment in Minnesota that sets aside state sales and usage tax dollars to fund cultural organizations across the state, in addition to four other high-impact programs. Minnesota Brass, which I was a member for five years, is a recipient of these funds, and it’s not an exaggeration to say hundreds of performing arts organizations, like the Minnesota Bluegrass & Old Time Music Association, rely on these funds and would cease operation if not for the generous voters of Minnesota. It’s great to live somewhere where the arts are truly patronized and this amendment and the subsequent programs are among the best in the country. Good for us, Minnesota.

Try a community ed class and don’t give up on art if you haven’t played your instrument, or made any pottery, or done any drawings since high school—these classes are a great opportunity for a low-stress and no-judgement way to ease back into it.

WHAT’S ON THE IDIOT BOX

YOUTUBER SPOTLIGHT: MILES IN TRANSIT

Emily was out of town for a work trip this past week, and while I had a bunch of time, I watched a lot of YouTube. Shockingly, it was all good!

There was no one I watched more than Miles in Transit.

When I was still on Twitter, I followed him, and I’ve been an avid YouTube viewer for a while. He basically lives my dream: he gets paid to ride goofy-ass transit. I loved “The Trolleybus Video,” where Miles and his friend Jackson ride every single trolleybus route in America. There’s so much to love.

I had tried to watch his much older videos contemporaneously, but could not get past his, uh, personality. He was much younger and much more annoying. Now’s not the case. I love the foamer excitement these dorks get from things I also get excited about. They rode the same trolleybus route in Queen Anne in Seattle that Emily and I used almost exclusively to get around when we visited after our train trip in April, and it was like I was frozen into the Leo meme from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

Miles has some fun companions. His partner, Alena, suffers alongside him for many of the trips, but usually it’s one-to-three people from a cast of characters who will join him in their respective cities, or travel alongside. The two most prevalent are Jackson and Jeremy. Jeremy is a train nerd I remember from Twitter, too, and his unabashed joy over all things public transit is just absolutely infectious. Only Jeremy Zorek can get so excited by something so asinine, like the inlays on a trolley pole attached to an old building or trolleybus poles in the middle of nowhere.

Jackson is his main partner, and he is, like Jeremy, infectiously joyful while doing experiential activities and learning things. I particularly love the passion and encyclopedic knowledge he has about the history of factory-manufactured diner cars, a level of obsession I had no idea was a thing. In a three-and-a-half-hour video (linked above) they use transit to go to every single diner in the city of Boston; in another two-hour video they visit all of the diners in Philadelphia, once again only traveling by transit.

The videos carry an almost Amazing Race feeling. If you are the kind of person who enjoys riding transit in new cities (my favorite way to get to know a new place), these videos are a treat. He’s been to pretty much every major city in the US and Canada, and made videos about them, highlighting the good and the bad.

I also love his videos because they show what real-world problems the American transportation system has for those who don’t drive. I am particularly fond of anytime he tries to use so-called “microtransit,” which is usually marketed as a door-to-door transit option, almost always emphasizing an app. The app is basically just Via, the Lyft/Uber competitor that exclusively does shared rides—most agencies partner with Via or a similar company.

The flaws of microtransit are laid bare when Miles and his friends are unable to book trips in the app, informed there’s only one bus on the whole service so the wait is hours, and are occasionally treated like a pariah for daring to use something totally underutilized.

They also endure long microtransit rides when the service is busy. In some cases, Miles compares microtransit to whatever suburban bus route it replaced, which will show how much unnecessary waiting and nonsensical extra stops they have to make now, with what is typically marketed as being “easier” to ride than regular transit. He demonstrates, on multiple occasions, the difficulty in scaling microtransit systems without having way more buses and operators than what is feasible—it effectively has to have no riders for it to be a better service. Why do you think Uber and Lyft make you own the car? The company assumes none of the mechanical/maintenance risk, making it easier to have a million cars available, as opposed to a finite number of buses and drivers.

I don’t think microtransit as an idea needs to be scrapped totally, but as Miles shows in many videos, transit riders are pretty much guaranteed to have unpredictable travel times.

So watch Miles do his goofy trips: he’s pretty funny, gives the most practical advice of any travel YouTuber I’ve ever seen, and if you are at all interested in transit, trains, or the transportation system, you’re in for a treat.

*Eddie Kingston Yonkers Accent* Hey. Listen— Shut up, I’m talking— Listen. There’s something we do here for those who don’t pay it forward. I had to fight tooth and nail because no one ever fought for me! And you. Everything handed to you, Mr. Sports Entertainah. Now it’s your turn. Share the article or else it’s your ass on the line at Full Gear! TEXAS DEATHMATCH!

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