Tag: cashmoney

No, it wasn’t

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

By the graciousness of my nanny, whom I excused from being on time to check at a QT for me, was she able to procure a reprint of the November 3rd commemorative Braves World Series victory edition.  This, was the highlight of my day.

So, I’m happy that I got the one thing that I had really wanted to commemorate the joyous occasion of the Braves reaching the top of the mountain and getting to be World Series champions, a sight and notion that is still hard to digest two days later, but I’m still peeved at just how hard it was to get a small piece of history to remember it by.

I’m pretty sure there’s something in the Constitution that says something along the lines of that news shouldn’t not be available to those who seek it, and it’s a stretch, but the AJC, whether it was deliberate or stupidity, suppressing production of the one and only obviously high-demand edition of their shitty paper, I would interpret as being fucking unconstitutional. 

As relieved as I am to have my own edition, predictably, the well-publicized high demand for these editions has created the dreaded and insufferable secondary market for them, and I’ve seen them on Facebook Marketplace going for at least $10 a pop, and mythical wife, after hearing me bitch and moan about it the night prior, spied some on eBay, going for around $27 a pop.

I’m not going to be a hypocrite about it, because I’ve definitely purchased extras of things before, with the intent of trying to flip them.  But whenever I’ve done that, that makes me an asshole, and what people are doing with these fucking AJCs, are making them assholes too.  I’m just glad that I didn’t have to pay a second-hand price for this, although I would have done so in order to get one.

The irony is that, it’s not even that good of a commemorative edition.  The AJC’s aesthetics and design has always been sixth-rate as far as major market newspapers go, and this commemorative edition doesn’t do the Braves justice.

The newspaper industry took a lot of flack over the last few decades over many publications taking cost-cutting measures and eliminating photographers, and instead tasking reporters to take pictures on iPhones.  I don’t know whether or not the AJC was one of those publications, but based on the shitty photo quality of my collector’s edition, I’m inclined to believe they are.

The photos are out of focus and have been enlarged way past the original resolution, and whatever staffers they have pretending to be graphic artists apply a bunch of high-pass filters to try and sharpen them, but instead make them look all posterized and pixelated.  I’d almost be embarrassed to actually display it after I frame it, but it will eventually become artwork for lack of a better term.

Anyway, I’m just glad I got my copy regardless of all the bullshit and hoops that had to be done in order for it to happen.  I just wish what seemed like a simple thing didn’t have to become such a joy-suppressing ordeal.

Fuck the AJC.

Twenty blets

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Recently, I got an eBay alert on a very specific search query, which doesn’t happen very often, so when I got it, I peeked eagerly to see if this was something that might be attainable.  T’was an official Figures Toy Co. replica of the WCW Television Championship blet that I had mild interest of getting if I could get a decent price for it.  And seeing as how I am whittling away at my short list of remaining blets that I might actually want, it has climbed up the priority.

The best part about the listing is that it was from a Canadian seller, so no matter what the dollar amount was showing on the listing, the CAD next to it meant that I would basically be paying 79¢ to the dollar which meant I was rich, bitch, in comparison.  I low-balled the guy, mostly already deciding that I was going to buy it now no matter what but I had to try, and when they declined the offer, I went ahead and just hit Buy It Now to cut the suspense and not miss out on another Figures Toy Co. original.

So with the acquisition of the WCW TV title, this brings my personal collection of replica blets up to a cool twenty, 22 if you count the two women’s tag blets that I’m holding onto for my daughters until they inevitably decide that they want them for themselves.  Literally ten (12) more blets than I once said that I would get, since ten was a nice round number.

And because I never made a post about it because one, I never had the time to, and two, it is technically a Pakistani bootleg because there are no official replicas made anywhere, I also got a replica of the NWA Television Championship, ironically because I was tired of being unable to get a WCW one, that I went after its predecessor since it was available at a ridiculously low, bootleg price.

Now I have both TV titles, and get to deal with the first world problem of once again having to reconfigure my blet rail, to accommodate the two new additions, knowing that there are still other blets out there that I’d want and acquiring them would require more adjustments then too.

The best part is though?  Of the last five blets that I’ve purchased, they’ve all come from money made by doing surveys.  The NXT United Kingdom blet, two WWE Women’s Tag Team blets, the NWA and WCW Television championships – not a single cent of these came out of my pocket, and came from money earned by doing silly surveys for cents at a time, over the span of the last year.  

And I still have a substantial amount left, enough to purchase even moar blets, as they maybe come to fruition.  After all, there are still more unicorns for me to hunt down, and knowing me, I’ll probably bite on a good deal fallacy when Black Friday rolls around and WWEShop drops a lot of their blet prices to more reasonable numbers.

Is there anything in existence more useless than Dugout Mugs?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I mean, if I took the time to research and actually look, I’m sure I could find a countless number of things, but serious question here, is there anything more unnecessarily needed than mugs made out of baseball bats?

This is actually a topic that brewed last year that I never got to, but seeing as how we’re in the thick of the World Series now, advertising for this bullshit has reached fever pitch, and I’m getting targeted ads and seeing auto-playing bullshit videos for this crap all over again, and now I’m bragging about it.

Seriously, when I first saw this shit last year, I’m thinking to myself, “hey, the world is in a fucking pandemic, and I’m thankful my daughter is too young to realize just how fucked up everything is outside our doors.  You know what I need?  A fucking mug made out of a baseball bat.”

Maybe if it were any other year than 2020, I would’ve rolled my eyes and ignored just how much bullshit Dugout Mugs are, but the timing of them being pushed to the moon in the middle of a pandemic, I had a hard time swallowing why anyone would want a fucking bored out baseball bat, instead of like I dunno, some PPE or maybe a fucking vaccine?

It just epitomized the ridiculousness of American capitalism and the existence of all sorts of shit that doesn’t need to exist, and Dugout Mugs just made me mad every time I saw them getting shilled.

Like, I googled them just to see how much they’d cost, and a single fucking pint is $70.  Seventy fucking dollars, for a hollowed-out bat head.  Maybe it’s slightly oil-treated, and has a laser-engraving of my favorite team’s logo on it.  But it’s still a fucking piece of wood, which also means it’s not dishwasher safe, and by the looks of it, cleaning the inside of it will require a brush, since any adult human’s hand would probably not be able to wedge inside the bowl to clean with a sponge.

No fucking thanks, I’d rather drink out of cans or bottles, or the litany of novelty pint glasses that I’ve collected throughout the years from my favorite locals or microbreweries, that I can then throw in the dishwasher and clean and dry it without worrying about it warping or rotting.

I hate these so much that it might do the Braves a solid if I say that I’ll buy an Astros Dugout Mug if the Braves can win the World Series, just so I can tempt fate and control the universe into delivering me a Braves championship, just so I can suffer the punishment of having to plunk down $70 I’d rather spend on anything else, on something I really abhor.

2 Under 2: No time like the present (#068)

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

About a month ago, I wanted to write a post about how I was embarking on my paternity time for the second time, on account of the arrival of #2.  How I was looking forward to not having to worry about work for 12 weeks, and all sorts of ideas of ways I could be productive and get shit done with no work looming over me.

Well it’s been about a month since I’ve started my paternity leave, and unsurprisingly I have not accomplished nearly as much as I hoped I would prior to the start of it.

Who would have guessed that juggling two kids would consume so much of my capacity, even without having to worry about work?  Pff certainly not me.  In all fairness, our Disney trip consumed nearly two weeks of my leave, since it encapsulated a Tuesday through a Wednesday, and trying to accomplish anything before or catch up afterward just weren’t going to happen.

But going into my paternity leave, I made goals of accomplishing several tasks:

  • Refinance my home: rates are crazy low and with a second child in tow, refinancing my mortgage to try and bring down my monthly payment and free up some cash sounded like a tremendously good idea
  • Look for a new job: the cat is out of the bag by now, and most everyone knows I’m quite unhappy with my job, and would like to seek out a new one now
  • Explore the possibility of upgrading to a larger car: my car of two years and less than 15,000 miles is already too small for the size of my rapidly grown family, and I would like to capitalize on the potential of the also-hot used car market, and try to trade in my car for maximum value, so that I may upgrade to a larger vehicle
  • Yard work: there are some shrubs I want to get rid of, and some general cleanup I’d like to do around my driveway and walking paths, as well as reclaim some of the wild land in the field adjacent to my home, while the poison ivy is wilting and the snakes are going into hiding

So nothing too lofty, provided there’s a reasonable amount of time to do them, but therein lies the biggest problem – there’s just simply never any fucking time.

Continue reading “2 Under 2: No time like the present (#068)” →

2 Under 2: The First Disney Trip (#066)

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Going to Disney World with the kids was definitely something that was going to be inevitable, given its place as far as mythical wife and I are concerned.  A wedding in central Florida where the wife was to be one of the bridesmaids accelerated the trip, and no matter how ready or not we were, the time had arrived to take the girls down to Orlando for a lengthy trip that was chock full of memories, lessons, trials and tribulations, as far as I was concerned.

Continue reading “2 Under 2: The First Disney Trip (#066)” →

lol Alpharetta white people

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

SMH: racists sue city of Alpharetta because they can’t display the Confederate battle flag at a Veterans Day parade, get shot down in court; however, due to the attention, the city opts to cancel the parade outright

My reaction to reading this story was the following line, said in the mocking southern white supremacist impression I’ve found myself doing an awful lot more than I used to since 2016: 

if I cain’t be racist at the parade, I don’t want there to be a parade at all.

That’s kind of the takeaway of this whole story.  Supposedly, the parade still happened, whether or not it was sanctioned by the city in the first place, I don’t have the care to dig and find out, but supposedly the Sons of Confederate Veterans did not participate or fly any Confederate battle flags during it.

Either way, Alpharetta is a super white suburb north of Atlanta, and I’m actually more surprised that the courts ruled in favor of outlawing the Confederate battle flag, given their demographics.  But Alpharetta is also pretty flush with new money which tends to lean towards the left, and if there’s one thing we’ve learned throughout history, money speaks louder than racism and political correctness, and by product of it, sometimes the right calls are occasionally made.

2 Under 2: Untitled dad ramblings (#065)

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I may have accepted that life might be on hold, but it doesn’t mean that there aren’t occasional bad days.

#2 is getting better in terms of us managing the colic and learning her tendencies, but one thing that hasn’t really changed is her sheer unwillingness to take naps and give us a break from time to time, and the fact that she still exists in three states: sleeping (overnight), eating, or screaming her head off, with the caveat being that the screaming is usually only remedied by having someone holding her 24/7 until she can be brought into another state, eventually

I’m on dad duty for so long that I have no time to do anything else.  And when I say anything else, I mean do more work that I’d be able to do without having to have a baby in my arms, because I’m not fucking Goro from Mortal Kombat and have another pair of arms to be productive with.  My house is a fucking disaster zone full of piles of things that adds to my general stress and anxiety because I’m typically a pretty tidy person and I prefer my home be such as well.

I hardly have time to upkeep personal hygiene and pretty much every shower that I’ve had in the last two months have typically been after midnight, where I’m sacrificing rest time in order to not feel completely unraveled.

I don’t have time to be a good dog owner, and since my dog is 16 and elderly, I have to keep him crated for the vast majority of the day solely because he will pee on everything under the sun if he’s left free to his own devices.  I get mad when if and when he soils his dog beds, but it’s primarily frustration at the fact that I don’t even have time to even be able to take care of a dog’s base needs adequately enough.

I seldom have time to eat, and eat well, and everyone knows cooking at home is typically the key to improved eating habits, but who the fuck has time to cook much less eat it, without having to be hands-on with #2, so mythical wife and I subsist on an unhealthy amount of fast food because it’s all we can tolerate to indulge on when we’re already parked on E and need to eat while we can breathe.

Throughout the last few months, I’ve actually lost weight, I’m below my license weight which was fabricated to make me feel like not a fat fuck, but I’m actually below it now.  However, I know that’s solely based on the fact that I literally haven’t lifted any weights since mid-March of 2020, and I’ve pretty much lost all muscle-mass that I’d cultivated in the decades before coronavirus, and I’m pissed at ‘Murica for not being able to do what it takes to eradicate the pandemic and how it will never end and short of me turning my garage into a gym, there’s no way I’m ever going to reclaim any muscle mass that I’ve lost at this rate, not to mention where the time would be, being a dad of 2 under 2 and all.

Let’s not even talk about hobbies and personal indulgences, and the sheer time I don’t have to be able to do any of those.  One more thing I’d add to the list of unsolicited advice for new dads, would be to think of all the things you hope to accomplish in a day, and then count at day’s end just how many of them you didn’t get to.  Hobbies, are probably at the top of the list, followed probably by anything you wanted to do that utilized arms not handcuffed to an infant.  I’ve watched a lot of television over the last weeks, which isn’t the worst thing in the world and is something that I ordinarily would like to do, but the thing is I do it because it’s something I can do while holding an infant but when the day is over I’d rather be writing because that’s my passion hobby that I always want to be doing if I were ever to have free time where I wasn’t joined at the hip to my infant.

It’s not lost on me that the time I’m taking to write this could’ve been spent writing about anything else at all instead of another frustrated rambling of an overwhelmed dad, but as I often say, I want to remember everything, including the negative, about fatherhood, because it’s always important to be able to look back and learn from the past, even if they’re not always the most positive of things.

And unlike a lot of things where I have to write from memory and retroactively try to mentally get back to places, this is something that’s written fairly live and current, and I think it’s important to chronicle these emotions and frustrations and not let them simply evaporate until they bubble back up in the near future, and the words come out completely differently. 

Weekends suck because I don’t have the free time that I have to pay for in order to do absolutely anything other than being a hands-on dad.  Funny how that works out: free time, costing a fuck ton of money.