Tag: cashmoney

A show about deathbed confessions would be straight $$$

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

This is a concept that I’ve thought in my head many times as being something that would be absolutely fascinating to watch, but it came back into the forefront again upon seeing the president of the United States basically turn his back on the United States while kowtowing to the president of the Russian federation.  Because this is one of those stories in which we the people will never hear the truth about until the people directly involved in it are on their deathbeds, and are more willing to disclose truths because they’re on their way out anyway.

And if this were a television show, I have no doubt in my mind that it would probably be the most compelling and fascinating show in history, hearing notable people throughout history spilling the beans on all sorts of undisclosed information, with no concerns for consequence or repercussions because they’ll be dead soon anyway.

From politicians to actors, athletes and other prominent figures, don’t tell me that people aren’t curious about the things that have happened in the lives of some of these people that they wouldn’t be interested in hearing about.

Why is Donald Trump so deferent to Vladimir Putin? Did Kobe Bryant actually rape that girl in Colorado? Did OJ Simpson do it? What did Bill Murray whisper to Scarlett Johansson in Lost in Translation? Did Bill Cosby really drug and sexually assault all those women?

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It’s a work

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

TL;DR: Daniel Cormier wins  UFC heavyweight championship, immediately provokes Brock Lesnar afterward, inviting him into the Octagon from the audience

When in doubt, it’s probably a work (read: premeditated).  As the line continues to blur between the UFC and WWE, with stars jumping from one promotion to the other, there’s one thing that has always been crystal clear: the pursuit of money.  Both are businesses, with the goal of making as much money as humanly possible, and despite the fact that one is more legitimately a sport than the other, the objective remains the same.

UFC promoting a Daniel Cormier vs. Brock Lesnar fight will draw millions of viewers, as there’s a legitimate correlation between gigantic numbers and Brock Lesnar fights.  Which equates to a whole lot of money.

WWE having Brock Lesnar as its champion will create a cross-pollination of viewership, drawing interest from UFC fans who want to see Lesnar perform in the fake sport, whether it’s out of curiosity, or to see if any of his three matches he’ll have this year might give away any sort of intel to strengths or weakness for betting purposes.

And in the end, regardless of who wins in the Octagon, both parties and all involved participants stand to make a gigantic payday out of this affair. 

Not that it really matters, but it’s still all probably a work, if you look into the details of the scenario.

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Baseball players can be such greedy bitches sometimes

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I love outside-the-box unorthodox strategizing.  In every form of competition.  I love wildcats and flea flickers in football, I love the point forward in basketball.  I enjoy running tank Lulu, tank Karma and other weird builds in League of Legends.  And no other form of competition is open to the notion of unorthodox strategizing than baseball, where the pace of the game and the individual events of every single pitcher versus batter matchup completely creates the perfect environment for some unique strategies to be born.  The DeVanzo Shift, four-man outfields.  Moneyball, moneyball, moneyball.

The Tampa Bay Rays did something that I’ve always talked about would be an interesting concept to try, but nobody in baseball ever did; until now.  I’ve bounced the idea around before, suggesting teams should start a relief pitcher occasionally; primarily on the notion that there are a number of pitchers who for reasons completely unknown, have rough first innings, or there are some matchups that they should avoid for a first time through an order.  Once, I thought the New York Yankees should have employed this, when Mariano Rivera was on his farewell tour, and there would be no more appropriate way for him to go out than to start a game at Yankee Stadium, cutter the top of the first inning to death, and then get removed from the game to the bonkers raucous crowd reaction he rightfully deserved.

But nah, the notion of starting a guy with the intention of going one inning never seemed like it was going to happen until now.  The Rays, facing the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim in Orange County off of Interstate 5 South, started not just a game, but two straight games, with relief pitcher Sergio Romo.  In those two games, he pitched 2.1 innings, faced nine batters, walked two but struck out six.  In one game, he was lifted for an actual starting pitcher, Ryan Yarbrough, who proceeded to pitch the next 6.1 innings and get the win for the Rays, and in the other, he was relieved by a series of other relief pitchers who lost the game.

Regardless, Sergio Romo did his job and pitched efficiently in two straight starts.  And because it worked once, it definitely has opened some eyes as a viable strategy; except that the Angels, namely infielder Zack Cozart has been immediately vocal about how it’s not a good thing for the entire sport, and then he’s basically backed by the MLB Players Association, stating that such a strategy is going to be financially detrimental to players who are designated starting pitchers.

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MARTA pls

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Atlanta Magazine recently interviewed the new CEO of MARTA, and a couple of things caught my attention.  Primarily:

Most recently, (Jeffrey) Parker was vice president at infrastructure and design firm HNTB Corp.’s Atlanta office, where he ran the company’s Georgia practice. His base salary with MARTA is $350,000.

$350,000??  For running MARTA?  AKA installing some wi-fi hotspots on trains, putting up some signage to report bad behavior, but otherwise doing jack shit towards the grander spectrum of, y’know, expanding, or growing the network?

I don’t discount the grandiose accomplishments of former CEO Keith Parker, as it must have been true yeoman’s work getting MARTA’s books into the black.  But as far as Jeffrey Parker is concerned, a massive undertaking has already been taken off of his plate.  He’s not going to have to start in the red, because Keith had already brought the entire agency out of it already.  But at the same time, that means the microscope will be even more magnified, because Jeffrey won’t have the cushion of “well, I need to stabilize financially” to fall back onto when he inevitably does absolutely nothing, for years, and banks $350,000 per, along the way.

This bothers me more than the story of Kasim Reed blowing $500,000+ of taxpayer funds on his way out the door on crony bonuses (including five figure prizes for an ugly sweater karaoke contest).  I mean, most everyone already knew Reed was incompetent and a stooge of a mayor in the first place, so flagrantly blowing taxpayer money isn’t really that big of a surprise.  For the matter, most everyone already knows MARTA is a joke of a transit authority, but at least I didn’t, know that the CEO was making fucking $350,000 a year.

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Greatest Royal Rumble my ass

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It took two sittings to watch it, because a five hour show is asking too much for anyone, much less anyone actually in attendance, but I just made it through watching the WWE’s Greatest Royal Rumble special out of Saudi Arabia.

Mercifully.

It goes without saying that I did not have high hopes for this special, therefore it was of zero shock and surprise that it turned out to be the mediocre, glorified house show that I figured it would be.  The events of Greatest are for the most part non-canon to current storylines, but the performers still have to put forth the effort and the work to next to zero story advancement to the rest of the events that are happening in current WWE programming, which is about as zero-sum as it gets, considering the sheer amount of time, resources and physical effort necessary to hold what’s basically an unnecessary show.

The matches were almost all terrible, the performers were clearly jet-lagged, a step or more slow, and completely uninspired performing in front of a mostly confused and/or apathetic crowd.  Predictably, zero titles changed hands, and the only notable thing that occurred in the entire show was the crowning of Matt Hardy and Bray Wyatt as winners of the vacant RAW Tag Team Championships.  The rest of the card was underwhelming and underperformed, and the 50-man Rumble match itself was loaded with jobbers, no-names and C-listers who would otherwise have no chance of performing regularly on the average North American tour rotation.

Not to mention the fact that due to the antiquated misogynistic Saudi culture, none of the WWE’s women were permitted to perform, much less any women really be present in King Abdullah Stadium without the supervision of a man, which is a little bit of egg on the company’s part, as they could have really made a global statement by refusing the show in the first place because of their cultural restrictions but whatever, that’s Saudi Arabia for you.

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I think I’m a Trevor Bauer fan

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I don’t think I hide the fact that when it comes to baseball, as much as I like the broad stroke enjoyment of the game such as visiting new ballparks, seeing a power hitter clobber a home run, and seeing a walk off victory, I take a tremendous enjoyment in the smallest things as well.  Things that seem too small and insignificant that they hardly can be said to have occurred at all, but when you know what to look for and see it happen and know what might or might not happen as a result, it’s no less enjoyable.

In other words, there’s a tremendous amount of nerdy shit that I love about baseball that aren’t the flashy, most attractive things about the game like home runs, strikeouts and throwing 100 miles per hour.  That said, every now and then on the internet, there will be stories and articles about baseball that aren’t talking about the Boston Red Sox’s hot start, the home run potential of the New York Yankees, or the Los Angeles Angels of Orange County, Anaheim via Interstate 5 South’s Shohei Ohtani, but something more intricate and harder to comprehend for the casual baseball fan, and these are the ones that tend to pique my interest, or at least be reliable for a good 10-minute read.  Stories about like overlooked statistics and baseball skills, the intangible evidence of clubhouse chemistry, and some other real Moneyball Doctor Manhattan kind of shit.

Throughout the last few years, among the more interesting stories that have come and gone within the game of baseball, there’s been a name that I’d been seeing popping up sporadically: Trevor Bauer, a starting pitcher for the Cleveland Indians.  I’m pretty sure it started when he was in a game where he passively mimicked the batting stances of several of his teammates in a game, which was noteworthy solely for the fact that he is an American League pitcher having some fun with his at-bats during Interleague playing in a National League ballpark.  Baseball sometimes tends to take itself too seriously sometimes, so I could appreciate a guy like Bauer who manages to find some way to have some fun and bring some laughs into the glorified kids’ game.

Then there was this story about how a baseball player helped a baseball fan with her math homework over Twitter, and lo and behold, it was Trevor Bauer.  It was here did I learn that Bauer went to UCLA and was pretty much a pretty smart nerd, and if there were ever a type of player that I tend to favor, it’s the brainy types that embrace knowledge and learning as opposed to just believing that god and their natural talent can carry their careers.  And the fact that Bauer took the time to do something so simple and meaningful to a young fan, it’s endearing in my opinion.

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I didn’t know they lasted this long

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Fun fact: my first ever job, as in real W-2 actual paycheck with taxes deducted from it job, was at a Bertucci’s, as a bus boy.  I had just gotten my license, so I was told to get a job immediately, and considering that I wanted money, I was more than willing to comply.  I applied just about everywhere, and Bertucci’s was the place that pretty much hired me first, so it was there did I get my feet wet in the official working world.

I learned about Friday dinner rushes, shitty management, asshole servers who lied about their tip reporting in order to short the tip out to the bussers, that dishwashing paid better than bussing and kept you away from the customers, and that in the food service industry it’s everyone versus management amid the patrons.

It was similar to Waiting… the film, long before the film ever came to fruition.  Despite the fact that I knew how often they lied on their tip declarations, thus screwing me out of my share of tips, I had a decent relationship with several of the servers, one of whom died while I was working there from a hard-living life of alcohol and obesity while not at work (he fell down some stairs to his death).  But we all hated the managers, Larry (the Fairy (he wasn’t gay (I think)), just kind of fruity) and the asshole assistant manager named Enio who blatantly tried to short peoples’ pay, probably stole tips, and was just generally a piece of shit, and it was through this unity that made work not suck all the time.

Either way, I worked there for three months, saving up money for Anime Expo 1998, and then the Sunday before I left for California, I got a frantic phone call from Larry the Fairy, demanding that I come in to work, despite not being on the schedule.  At the time, I was sharing a car with my sister, and she had it and was out, not to mention that I didn’t want to fucking work on a day I wasn’t scheduled for, so I explained that I had no car, and thus could not come in.  Larry the Fairy yelled that I needed to come in regardless and hung up on me, and I shrugged and sat back down at my computer and didn’t go in to work.

Two weeks later, I rolled into Bertucci’s for my Saturday shift, and didn’t see my name on the calendar, or any other future dates.  I asked Larry the Fairy what was up, and he brusquely told me that my no-showing my unscheduled demand to come to work was interpreted as my resignation from employment.  I kind of scrunched my brow, but remembered that working at Bertucci’s absolutely blew and just said “okay,” went into the office to get my last paycheck, and walked out without any shits left to give.

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