My Hands Are Tied

Pop Quiz: Tell me the difference between these three moves.

If you said "A Kiss from a Rose on the Gray," congratulations!  You're international singing sensation Seal!  But you really need to stop relying on that song to conquer life's challenges.

The correct answer is "the way the hands intersect."  Johnny Ace loosely grabs the back of the neck, Randy Orton drags down the head with one arm,  and Diamond Dallas Page uses a "cravate."

To quote this Croatian History site, "the term cravate, for headlock wrestling move, is used in French, English, Italian, Turkish, Croatian, Polish, and probably in many other languages."  It's a way to intersect hands so that they're harder to break.

Now some of you may doubt the obvious practical applications of a good necklock.  If you're one of those folks, know this: If I hadn't been exposed to Mike Tenay ranting about the effectiveness of DDP's cravate during Monday Night Nitro, I never would have taken the time to learn that the word also refers to a type of necktie.

Not the greatest lesson to learn, but a bit of valuable refinement I surely needed.  Now if only I could figure out how to tie one...

Wit and Silence

Shakespeare once said, "Brevity is the soul of wit."  He probably should have just said "Be brief," but his point still stands: sometimes saying very little is more effective than saying more.

One of the better examples in history is when, at a dinner party, Federalist Andrew Jackson toasted that "Our Federal Union, It must be preserved," while segregationist John C. Calhoun retorted with a 35-word response that no one remembers.

Pro wrestling has an even better example than that:

Eddie Guerrero taught me that you don't even have to use words to get your point across.  Sometimes the soul of wit...is silence.