As I loaded the dishwasher last night, finishing off my final Natty Light of a Friday evening, I decided to tell my Alexa to play 3 Doors Down's "The Better Life" album. It played, start to finish, as I drank beer, cleaned my kitchen, and eventually just relaxed on a barstool listening to the last few tracks. It was, at fewest, the 100th time I've listened to that album from start to finish since I bought it (via the Columbia Record Club because I was THAT GUY) in high school. I got to thinking about the albums that for whatever reasons - love, nostalgia, etc - I can't help but listen to from beginning to end over and over again. I'm not talking about albums that are new and I'm experiencing start to finish for the first time or even those albums that everyone knows are all time classics, worthy of enjoying and savoring as a whole. These are albums that hold a special little place in my heart. Let me tell you about them, in no particular order... The Bet...
This Sunday night in our own neck of the woods - Philadelphia's Wells Fargo Center - WWE presents one of its three biggest shows of the year, the annual Royal Rumble extravaganza that officially kicks off the "Wrestlemania season." This year's show returns to the scene of one of the event's most dubious nights, when a raucous Philadelphia crowd in 2015 "hijacked" the show in hopes of seeing their cult favorite wrestler, Daniel Bryan, win the match. It was the second in a string of poorly planned and received Rumble events that have in many ways shaped the current WWE and professional wrestling fan landscape. From the eventual rise to the top of Daniel Bryan, to the appearance of similar internet and "Indy" darlings like AJ Styles, Shinsuke Nakamura, and Samoa Joe, to the rise of New Japan Pro Wrestling and NXT as forces in the domestic wrestling landscape. But lets not get too far ahead of ourselves. That infamous night in Philly was just...