Tag: ‘murica

Finally, a sponsor patch I can get behind

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

See ya next time: Kansas City Royals announce a partnership with QT gas stations, including a sponsorship patch on all team jerseys

Sponsorship patches seemed inevitable in MLB, seeing as how sponsorships on jerseys have been pretty commonplace pretty much in every sport in every other country across the globe.  But America being ‘Murica, it was unsurprising that once they started coming to fruition, all the sponsors were all of these boring, homogenized, multi-million dollar entities that nobody has ever heard of, cared for or generated any sort of emotion other than ambivalence, indifference, or the need to make fun of them.

The New York Mets, of course, were one of the first ones to really mess things up by introducing a hilariously oversized patch that nobody is going to convince me probably didn’t mess up the performance of players, since they had this giant square of weighty fabric hanging off of their left sleeves, that they had to finally swallow their pride, admit my bad, and fix it.

Of course, the Atlanta Braves got into the action as well, seeing as how Braves Corporate™ loves money and will do absolutely literally anything if it meant pleasing shareholders or improving their portfolio.  And despite how amazing it would’ve been if it were something truly iconic to Atlanta like Coca-Cola, Delta, The Home Depot, or my personal favorite thing I would’ve marked out for, Waffle House, nope, had to be a boring-as-fuck bag of concrete Kwikrete instead.

But today, we have news of a partnership that truly makes me smile, from the satisfaction of it being a team I don’t dislike, a company I don’t dislike, and all of the positive associations I get from said company, and knowing two parties that I don’t dislike coming together to make business.  It’s like when you have two friends from separate circles meet, and they gel together well.

But the Kansas City Royals partnering up with QuikTrip is something that does bring me joy.  The Royals are one of those teams I can’t ever bring myself to dislike, and who could forget the 2014 and 2015 seasons when the Royals came close, and then succeeded on their redo.  They’ve always had players that I’ve generally liked* and they so rarely ever cross paths with the Braves, so there’s almost never any chance that I’d ever feel the need to root against them.

*except Melky Cabrera, that fat worthless fuck who went to the Royals after his putrid stint with the Braves, where he played the season at like 304 lbs. before losing a hundo when he joined the Royals and put up an MVP-type season

And then there’s QuikTrip, which actually has a lot of Georgia ties, with their food distribution centers, I have a lot of positive connotation when I think about them.  Often times with the cheap fuel, always open, decent food as far as gas station grub is concerned, and always with expedient and mostly friendly staff.  I often tend to favor a QT when given choices, and when I think of QT, I hold them in a positive regard.

So the Royals joining forces with QT, makes me pleased.  Especially, with them hilariously slapping a giant red and black QT logo onto the Royals jerseys which are a hard blue and white identity, which really begs the question on the importance of branding.   Like, if the name of the game is for the sponsor to really stand out, they couldn’t have picked a better team to partner up with than the Royals.  If they partnered with the Cardinals, Braves, or even the Diamondbacks, which are all markets that have QTs, their logo would blend in with all the other reds that those teams employ.

I don’t travel much anymore these days, and my baseball journeys are long past complete.  But I’d totally be down to go to Kansas City if they ever did a free Royals jersey giveaway night sponsored by QT, where they were giving away jerseys with the QT logo on them, because to my knowledge replica jerseys made by Nike/Fanatics don’t include sponsorships on them, and I sure as fuck wouldn’t want to buy any of the shitty replicas made by them these days anyway.

Either way, Royals + QT, and a bigass sponsorship patch on their blue-ass jerseys definitely piqued my interest, and I look forward to seeing Royals highlights throughout the upcoming season.  This is definitely my favorite sponsorship partnering there is in baseball, without any question.

This is oddly validating

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

We’re #1!  Or #50:  Georgia ranks first (or last) in happiness of employees, according to rando website, then reported by WSB

Considering the fact that I have very specific brog tags for “ohatlanta” and “ohgeorgia” I’ve been critical of my home state since basically, I moved here.  It did not take too long for me to recognize bullshit when I saw it, combined with the age in which I moved here, really growing up into bullshit recognition and as my generation is often liked to be labeled, as woke, there is an odd sense of ironic satisfaction at seeing Georgia win, or tank at employee happiness. 

It validates a lot of criticisms I’ve had and witnessed throughout my life living here, and there’s a part of me that likes to pawn off my own struggles with depression as having reason on account of working.

But back to the data aggregation itself, the rankings were based on criteria such as quit rates, commute times, working hours, injuries, paid time off and state positivity levels.  Considering the fact that Georgia has turned into a battleground state politically, it obviously has a very high rate of contention in general state happiness, as at any given point, nearly half the state is pissed about the color of it.  But if I had to guess what is really anchoring down the state’s general workforce happiness, has got to be the commute times, in which is further anchored down probably by Atlanta itself.

According to GPS, I’m barely six miles from my office, but I still need to give myself an entire half hour in order to traverse home to work, and I don’t actually have to touch a highway either.  I’m usually below the median commute time of 28.7 minutes according to this study, but barely, and any little divot such as a fender bender or some rando school bus being late easily pushes me past it.

And to think there were varying times in my life where I had commutes of 70+ minutes and 55 miles each way, and I was living my life then, I couldn’t imagine going back to such hellacious commuting conditions ever again.

But again, I’m just going to assume most of Georgia’s ranking is weighted heavily by Atlanta since lets face it, outside of pockets of civilization in Augusta, Macon and Savannah, there ain’t shit else in Georgia that could muddy up the picture of the state, and even those pockets are merely blips of population compared to the five million-plus that live in the Metro Atlanta area.  And most are innately aware of the escalating cost of living in the Metro Atlanta area, with obviously the wages not rising commensurate to meet them, which would of course lead to a lot of unhappiness.  I’m sure this is nothing different than lots of other major cities across the nation, but based on this study, it’s very apparent in Georgia, more so than everywhere else. 

Honestly though, when I came across this article, I thought I’d have way more to say about it than I apparently do, but continuing this post any further would just be parroting things already said.  Georgia is apparently full of a bunch of unhappy people in the workforce, and although I don’t necessarily think I’m one of them, I’m definitely not really in the happy camp on a daily basis, but I don’t think a lot of these correlating conditions really help either.  I know my general sense of happiness wouldn’t mind some extra wage to help alleviate a lot of my anxieties and issues.

Welp, I guess all of ‘Murica is just one giant FOOD SWAMP

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I remembered when I first heard of the phrase “food desert” it entertained me a great deal because whomever coined the phrase really tried to compare blighted, impoverished areas to like, the Mojave or Sahara deserts, gigantic wastelands of sand and heat.  And it immediately brought to my mind a desert in an early Final Fantasy title and of course I made a post about it back then, complete with the corresponding Final Fantasy screen grab.

But basically, food deserts were communities that were statistically past a certain distance threshold to the nearest grocery store or market where fresh produce and other perishable goods could be purchased, as well as just food in general.  And being so far from such then makes them the equivalent to floundering in the desert without edible resources.

In other words, it was basically used to describe rural areas or ghettos, where grocery stores don’t want to build in, because there’s not nearly as much money to be made there, regardless of the demographics of those areas that are conveniently zeroed in on as reasons for such invention of terminology.

Anyway, just today I learned that a new term was invented at some point: food swamp.

Kind of along the same base as a food desert, but except that in spite of the difficulty in being able to procure fresh produce and perishable goods, they have an abundance of options when it comes to fast food, prepackaged garbage food and other unhealthy options.

The irony is that food swamps can be used to describe, basically the same conditions that make a food desert a food desert: remote areas and/or ghettos that have the access issues when it comes to being able to get fresh, healthy foods, but in a lot of cases, they’re areas where there’s also an abundance of shitty fast food options.

So despite the fact that new terminology has been invented, the places that they describe seem to have a tremendous overlap.  Funny how things work out like that.

But more importantly, it allows me to once again use old school Final Fantasy screen caps, to best describe the words being used, and like the subject of the post says, given the criteria of what makes a food swamp a food swamp, I guess it really could be said that pretty much most of ‘Murica, is just one giant fucking food swamp after all.

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Everybody loses: YouTube prankster fucks with the wrong guy, gets shot; prankster in ICU, shooter in police custody

What caught my attention about this story is that it happened up in Northern Virginia, and at a mall that I’ve been to a few times before.  Dulles Town Center, at least when I was still living up there, wasn’t the bougiest mall or wasn’t a Tysons, but was still well shopped as it was way the fuck far away from the blight-spreading that had overtaken Springfield and Landmark malls and was on its way towards Tysons with the expansion of Metro.

But it was still an unfortunate story where a shithead who tries to cultivate internet popularity by performing pranks on usually unwilling participants, tries to pull a prank on the wrong guy, and ends up getting shot in the gut.  The wrong guy, who was just trying to mind his own business and pick up food for a DoorDash delivery, gets pushed into whipping out his piece, is now under arrest, and as said above, everybody loses.

I floated this story to a group chat of close friends, and the general consensus is that the shooter crossed the line by reacting with deadly force, but at the same time, I absolutely don’t think that the prankster is absolved of any fault at all.  Sure, I agree that deadly force should rarely be the answer to anything short of one’s life being threatened in the first place, but I can’t say I entirely agree that the prankster wasn’t asking for it either.

Because I don’t want to give anyone acknowledgment to the shithead prankster and his dumbass YouTube channel I won’t use names or give any links and anyone really curious about this story can probably find it easily on their own, but the guy doing the pranks is a pretty big dude, and I feel like he takes for granted that his stature and the fact that he seems to target less-threatening individuals, probably prevents a lot of people retaliating on him for trying to get a rise out of them.  So when he pressed his luck on a guy who reportedly gave him fair warning as well as tried to swat his phone away from him, I can’t say I feel any modicum of sympathy for him when he got a gun pulled on him. 

Of course the shooter didn’t have to shoot, but we live in a world where there are more unhinged people than ever out there, and the prankster got unlucky to have found one of them with an itchy trigger finger that did the deed.

What’s obnoxious about this story other than the obvious shithead prankster, is that the guy’s dad and grandfather are coming out and trying to defend him for “just trying to have some fun” and other diluted rhetoric that coddles and justifies their shithead son’s bad behavior.  Like if I were the guy’s dad, I’d probably go on record that I don’t condone my son’s behavior, but I wish he’d just got decked instead of shot.

I actually feel sympathy for the shooter, because I’d wager he didn’t wake up in the morning thinking there was any possibility that he was going to end up in jail at some point.  Much less for an altercation that he didn’t initiate.  He was just trying to mind his own business, logged into DoorDash and wanted to make some money, and some shithead bro starts fucking with him, and won’t let up.  Obviously pulling a gun and shooting the guy was extreme, but at some point, people can only get pushed before they are forced to react.

Either way, it’s an unfortunate story where everyone comes out a loser, and I post about it because these are the types of stories that draw my attention when I don’t feel like writing so much and I need to inspire myself to in order to keep up with the habit and practice continuing doing it.

The 2023 World Baseball Classic Post

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Typically I don’t like to consolidate topics too much, but in the interest of never having the time I’d like to have in order to write, as the kids say today, LFG.

So, by the time I got to stealing finding the time to write something, Korea has already been eliminated.  Again.  This is the third straight WBC in which Korea has crashed out in the opening round, after making it into the final four in 2006 and played in the championship game in 2009.

I’m part of a KBO group on Facebook, which has been interesting throughout the years, because after years of following MLB and being a part of baseball communities on the internet, it’s kind of like going back in time following the KBO, because there are a lot of complain-y fans there that most MLB fans usually work the kinks out of themselves before not taking everything so seriously.

But all the same, it’s been kind of refreshing to see the fanbase and fandom of baseball in Korea, and the KBO is definitely fun in its own right, and over the last few months, it’s been exciting witnessing the preparation of Team Korea as they embarked on another World Baseball Classic.

However, as much excitement there was in the build-up, the execution was completely lackluster.  In a tournament as small as the WBC, losing the first game is basically the kiss of death in the round robin tournament, and that’s precisely what Korea did, by losing to Australia of all countries.  Frankly, Korea should’ve been the #2 team in their group, considering they were in with the likes of Japan, China, the Czech Republic as well as Australia. 

Unsurprisingly, Japan mopped the floor with Korea in the second game, because Japan takes baseball more seriously than any country on the planet and it shows, and after immediately starting the tournament 0-2, Korea’s chances were pretty much over.  They took care of business by beating the Czechs, but after Australia beat them days later, Korea was mathematically eliminated.

Even this morning’s 22-run bukkake-ing of China doesn’t change the fact that Korean baseball just isn’t what it used to be in comparison to 15-20 years ago, and I feel like I’m seeing a pattern of Korean sports over the last decade or so, where they seem to save their best for when it doesn’t really matter anymore, or just fall short

  • 2017 WBC: Korea defeats Taiwan after they’re eliminated
  • 2018 World Cup: Korea defeats Germany after they’re eliminated
  • 2020 Olympic baseball: Korea goes 3-1, loses three straight to not medal
  • 2022 World Cup: Korea eliminated after getting blown out by Brazil, 5-1

Regardless, with Korea getting bounced already, that kind of frees me from having to care much more about the WBC beyond this post.  But here are some other quick takes on the WBC before I proceed to go on and try to live my life without feeling obligated to care:

Continue reading “The 2023 World Baseball Classic Post” →

I’ve never been more unafraid of an armed individual in my life

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Over the weekend, we sent the kids to grandma’s house so that we could get some major organization done at home.  Frankly even with the help of our au pair, there would’ve been a lot of going in and out of the girls’ rooms well into the evenings that made it optimal to just have them not be present in order to maximize productivity.  That being said, it also afforded all of us in the house, to be adults for two days, and on the second evening, we collectively decided to get out of the house.

At one point, we went into a 2nd and Charles to kill a little bit of time; at one point in my life, this place would’ve been my heaven, since I like comic books, video games, books and all sorts of the nerdy crap that they sell and buy there, but at this point in my life, I just want to look and don’t want to actually bring any more shit into my house that I feel is already full of a lot of unneeded crap.

While we were there though, I was looking through comic trade hardcovers, and not far to my left, I could hear some guy doing some serious mansplaining about the differences between the Infinity War in comics versus the MCU.  A smirk emerged on my face at hearing him blather on, because he was perpetuating all sorts of stereotypes of comic book geeks inside the bookstore.

As I passed by him, I couldn’t help but notice that beneath his vest that I have to imagine was put on completely non-ironically, was a holster equipped with what I’m pretty sure was a Glock of minimal size, I’m no expert on the granular details, especially when I could only see the handle.  The point is, the guy was carrying openly, which is completely legal in the state of Georgia.

But as the title of this post states, I don’t think I’ve ever been more unafraid of an armed individual in my life until I saw this guy.  Think about it, the guy is carrying a firearm, presumably loaded, completely in public, at a place of business that probably had upwards of 80-100 people inside of it at the time I saw him.  We live in the age where mass shootings happen at almost a weekly basis in similar conditions, and not only did I feel zero concern for my life, all I could feel were jokes formulating in my brain instead.

Like, this guy got dressed with the express intention of leaving the house, and going to 2nd and Charles of all the places in the Metro Atlanta area, and as he’s mentally inventorying all the things he needs prior to walking out the door, and oh yeah my gun is one of the things on his checklist.

“Honey, we have to get to 2nd and Charles before they close at 8, have you seen my gun?”
“Yeah baby, it’s right next to my Loungefly”

On action television and in film, there are occasionally montages of heroes getting ready to go into battle, and they’re equipping themselves with a gun before they go into the fights of their lives.  And then we have Firearm Fred over here consciously strapping on his holster to go into the nerd store, as if he might have to flex it on someone trying to get the last pack of Yu-Gi-Oh booster packs ahead of him.

Seriously, I was giggling to myself for the rest of the night at the thought of Sidepiece Samuel actually feeling like he had to be carrying a firearm inside of a fucking 2nd and Charles.  I’ve never felt so opposite of concerned or intimidated by another human being’s presence in my entire life.  I felt like even if he were a mass shooter ready to pounce, I could probably take him without there being any loss of life; I know it’s not really a laughing matter, but that’s how seriously felt looking at this guy.

Regardless, my au pair got a kick out of seeing such a sight with her own eyes.  And after we took her to a Hooters for dinner, I told her that she basically had the most American night of her life, having seen an armed individual out in public, followed by the aforementioned Hooters for dinner.  Welcome to America!

Year’s End: Was 2022 a bad year?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

My fantastic mother-in-law signed me up for some virtual races that give medals for Christmas, but among them was a run called F*CK 2022.  The medal of the run is a middle finger which of course I’m cool with, but what got my brain churning was the idea that there being a race with this theme, there has to be some overwhelming sentiment that 2022 was anything but a good year.

Which brings us to the question in the subject of this post, was 2022 a bad year?

Honest question, because I’ve been living in a pretty small bubble since 2022, and my exposure to the news and happenings of the world outside of it are more limited than ever, and I’ve become one of those grownups who lets theFacebook feed me curated news and really only hear of things from that, Apple News and the shit that my friends talk about in a group chat. 

I don’t watch any television beyond the specific things I want to watch, which most certainly does not include any form of television news and I don’t venture out on the internet to all the news websites and Atlanta-centric sites I used to, so I’m going blind to even local things.

In the past, I felt it was important to be well informed and knowledgeable of news and current events, because if anything at all, that could make me better at conversation, but I really just like being in the know of things.  But after the rise of COVID and having kids and having kids in the age of COVID, it’s just not as important, and far behind the priority of making sure my kids are safe and fed every day.

Needless to say, my bubble has shrunken to where I have to ask other people if they think a year was bad or not, because I don’t really think my opinion holds any weight.  Because within my bubble exists pretty much just my kids, mythical wife, sports, wrestling and working for the sake of making money in order to live, and just about everything else exists outside of it.

Throughout the last few years, I’ve created living documents for every year, where I’ve literally narrated a tiny blurb to summarize every single day, of notable things and happenings, because I’m of the mindset that something important happens every single day, be it as small as one of my kids successfully eating something new, or as momentous as Russia invading the Ukraine and daring the rest of the world into another World War.

Some years have been really sad to look back through, because there’s a mass shooting every single month, or the deaths of notable people in the world, but as far as my interests and explorations of the world via the internet go, combined with the happenings of my daily life, I don’t think I’m wrong in thinking that something important does happen, every single day.

Continue reading “Year’s End: Was 2022 a bad year?” →