Tag: owned

Dad Brog (#157): the shittiest morning possible

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Full disclosure, I don’t write this with any sort of anger or festering rage about the morning that I had, but more with astonishment that such a morning could have been had that I have no other option than to write about it, primarily to one day be able to recall this to embarrass the ever-living snot out of my child.

But long story short, one of my kids absolutely pooped all over themselves this morning while sleeping, and naturally it was me who discovered it, me who had to deal with it, and me who had to clean everything up.

For real though, I wasn’t mad about it at all, because something like this happening, the first question was, and should be, is everything okay?  The answer was quickly discovered to be yes, but it was rather a child who was too afraid of monsters in the dark to get out of bed to take care of their bowels, probably compounded on top of being in a state of deep sleep, and instead just soiled their bed and slept in it.

Regardless, given the fact that on any given morning, cleaning up a ton of poop isn’t typically a part of the routine, I had to pivot and quickly resign myself to the fact that the morning was going to be delayed, and that the recovery of my child was priority.  I took them into my walk-in shower to use the flexible showerhead to give them a nice warm cleansing, got them dressed and started with breakfast before I had to go back upstairs to really survey the damage and get to work.

White people, would be quick to declare the sheets and comforter a complete loss at this point, but me, not being white, and knowing that I can rescue these things on account of the fact that I’m not a pussy and afraid to get children’s poop on my hands, took the soiled sheets also into the walk-in shower and gave them some good scrubs, and pretty much salvaged them.  I still need to give them a through spin through the washing machine, but by the day’s end, they should be ready to be back on my kid’s bed as if there was no Armageddon in the first place.

I coached my child that they should never be afraid to call out for me on the monitor in the middle of the night if they have to go potty, and that under no circumstances will I ever be mad at them for waking me up in the middle of the night to take care of business.  Quite the contrary, I would be super stoked and happy, and I mimicked the groggy, but rejoiceful reaction I would give them should they ever take my up on the offer, and hopefully they will in the future to avoid such similar mornings.

But good lord almighty, what a nightmare scenario of a morning to encounter.  I still feel like I can smell it in my brain to this very moment.  Truly a literal, top-3 shittiest mornings of all-time in my parenting career; and honestly I’m hard pressed to even recall two other poop nightmare mornings to round out a top-3, which means this might really have been the shittiest morning of all time, by default.

I look forward to this post circling back eventually on my On This Day plug-in, so I can troll remind them of the bullshit they put me through when they were but literal babies when they’re older, so they can really appreciate the kind of dad that I’m trying to be.

I’m sure this is going to go over well not

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

SFGate: Southwest Airlines unveils new boarding policy, where passengers board in order of window seats first, middle seats, and aisle seats last

At this point, I really should start implementing a tag on my brog for Southwest, because they keep doing things that I keep finding brog-worthy and then I actually write about them, as if I’m chronicling their gradual downward spiral.  They just can’t keep doing questionable things, and I feel like that at the corporate level, there’s some obnoxious visionary who is trying way too hard to put their stamp on the company by making all these questionable choices for really no other reason than the sake of making them, and probably gets off on words like “disrupting” and “aviation space.”

But circling back to this new boarding process, where windows get on first, and aisles get on last, I just feel like this is something that seems destined to fail, on account of people just not adhering to the rule, and the amount of outcry it’s inevitably going to cause because it’s just not working the way SWA corporate envisioned it working.

It doesn’t matter what airline it is, in the hierarchy of passengers, middle seat is supposed to be the very bottom of the pecking order.  Even in old Southwest internal lexicon such a notion was commonplace, where flight attendants would even make tongue-in-cheek jokes about the old boarding process, where Group A stood for Anywhere, as in you can sit anywhere you want, Group B stood for Back of the plane, because that’s where all the remaining good seats are, and Group C stood for Center seat, because that’s all that’s going to be left for you bottom feeders.

Deliberately creating a policy where the positions are forcefully switched is not going to go over well at all, because not only are passengers who prefer aisles not going to handle being considered bottom-tier very well, imagine the people who hate window seats but like getting on the aircrafts as soon as possible having to deal with this new Sophie’s Choice; status vs. preference vs. potential cost differences.  And middle seats still lose, because although their tier might be considered elevated over aisle-seat losers, when the flight takes off, they’re still parked in the middle seat, most likely squished between two fat fucks because Americans are always going to be a bunch of fat fucks.

My favorite part about this whole announcement was this quote:

If queuing isn’t good, boarding isn’t good,” Lisa Hingson, managing director of innovation, told the Wall Street Journal. “So we spent a lot of time studying queuing.”

Studying queueing, lmao.  There’s nothing to study when it comes to queueing, because a study doesn’t account for the infinite variable that is there are a few billion asshole airline passengers in the world, and there’s no finite way to factor for some flights having none of them on any given flight, or some having many of them.

Sure, there are plenty of people that will be willing to adhere and give the system a chance, but then there are always, always going to be just a few of them that have zero intention of sticking to the plan, and nothing short of the gate agent enforcing the queue and stopping any and all violators from boarding too early, this is going to fail 100% of the time.  Those gate agents probably don’t get paid enough nor do they give enough fucks to even try to stop asshole passengers from jumping in whenever they want and ruining the process for the entire flight, and departure times and delays are inevitably going to get wrecked by this, and in the grand spectrum calculus of airline operations, it’s only a matter of time before this shitty idea is quietly scrapped and they return to more traditional, fall-in-line boarding process.

Somewhere else in this whole thing, I have to be curious on how this is going to impact the whole, large passenger policy that Southwest used to be applauded for in having, where large passengers had the possibility of getting a free adjacent seat if the flight had availability.  If there are going to be price tiers in accordance to boarding priority, surely there will be new ways for people to try and game the system in order to save a few bucks, and I have to wonder if SWA people thought this through enough to merge with existing policies in place, unless said policies were on the chopping block for restructure in order to not lose money on these new potential pricing tiers.

Either way, I can’t imagine that this is going to end well.  I like to imagine that when this shit rolls out, it won’t take more than the first flight, before passengers, by virtue of being selfish dicks or just plain ignorance, queues up out of order, isn’t stopped at the gate, and boards when they shouldn’t have.  They sit down in an aisle, take up overhead space with their carry-on, and later on in the boarding, someone who’s a middle seat passenger is denied overhead space, and/or is jilted over having to wait for the prior aisle-seat dick to get out of the way so they can board, and already the flight experience is stained.

Before we know it, a fight breaks out, and 12 people record it on their phones from differing angles, and Southwest is back in the news again for another passenger fight, and absolutely nothing has changed at all.

gg Southwest, look forward to the next bonehead disruptor idea y’all come up with next.

The James Gunn Superman: Not bad, DCU

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Perhaps it was the sporadic clips of the film I’d catch occasionally on theFacebook algorithm, but I finally broke down and decided to actually watch the James Gunn variant of Superman.  And I have to say that the general takeaway from the experience was that it wasn’t a DC comics flim that left me wondering why DC even bothers trying to compete in the comic book film space in the first place.

Considering how low the bar is for DCU films, I do have to admit that JG Superman was pretty decent.  For starters, they jump right into the film without any sort of lore-building for Superman, because at this point in existence, it’s a safe bet that anyone who is taking the time to watch this film more than likely already knows the general nuts and bolts about the character without needing to expend 30 minutes of build-up.

That being said, that’s one of the endearing things about the film, is the fact that they don’t really treat the viewer like they’re idiots.  That, and occasionally injecting some moments of levity and humor, like the MCU had been doing over the last few decades was a good touch to help give brief reprieves and passive reminders that this was still a comic movie and comics are supposed to be entertaining and sometimes humorous.

Mr. Terrific was probably my favorite character in the film, and I’ll be honest I have no idea who he was prior to this, but after watching the film, I’m more inclined to Google him and learn more about him, and potentially be excited to see him again if he ever pops up in a future DCU production in the future.

But I think what made the film better than most other Superman films in the past, is the fact that this was a very vulnerable and generally nerfed edition of Superman.  As the comics have demonstrated throughout history, when Superman is too overpowered, he gets old, really, really quickly.  Like it’s no fun at all if every adversary is a finger flick away from defeat, and there are all sorts of plot holes that can emerge from an over-reliance on Kryptonite in order to create any modicum of adversity to ‘ol Kal-el.

However, JG Superman starts off the flick by getting his ass beat, and throughout the duration of the film, without giving too much away, Supes definitely gets his ass beat up quite a few times, and actually faces hardship and difficulty throughout the film, and although we the viewers all know he’ll prevail in the end, at least we might actually feel like he’s earning it, instead of just spamming his god-like power minutely and winning decisively.

That’s really all this post is about, the JG Superman was a DCU film that didn’t suck.  I don’t feel compelled to blurt out hater-iffic bullshit like, stick to animation, why does DCU even try, and things that thousands of other nerds on the internet have probably already said before.  Sure, it is mostly on account of it following a lot of MCU tropes, but if something works and you’re not utilizing it, that’s on you.

It will be interesting to see if the DCU can actually parlay this variant of Superman into an actually decent overarching DCU universe, much like Marvel did, and if they can built up a streak of positive equity, or if it will crash and burn like a lot of their previous attempts to world-build.

The Dodgers are inevitable

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Here’s the thing about writing about baseball playoffs: if you don’t write for a living and are financially obligated to have the time necessary to write about baseball at a moment’s notice, you’re probably not going to do so until you have available time to do so.  Which then makes you me, where I never have any time to write about things on a moment’s notice no matter how much I might think I have something that will read remotely readable, so you get to it when you can get to it.

However, the baseball playoffs go at such a rapid pace, if it takes me about 5-7 days to get to something, literally two rounds of the playoffs could have ended by then, which is sort of what did happen to me in this case.

At first, I wanted to write about Balakey Snell, and add onto how he clearly saves all of his effort for second half of the year, after he absolutely shut down the Reds in the Wild Card round.  The man has made a career of dodging work in the first halves of the seasons, with the two exceptions being the two years where he played with his balls on fire in order to win Cy Young Awards, which coincidentally aligned up with upcoming arbitration and free agent payday, to which once he got a contract, he’d loaf the first half of every year, faking injuries and suppressing his talent, and then going gangbusters the second halves of every year like clockwork.

But then the Dodgers won two games immediately to advance out of the Wild Card round, and onto the Phillies, where I wanted to write about the joys of watching two teams I dislike having to duke it out amongst each other, and when push came to shove, I’d have to support the Phillies over the Dodgers because frankly I don’t give a shit who wins the World Series – as long as it’s not the Dodgers.

Unfortunately, the Dodgers breezed through the first two games of the series, and put the Phillies on the brink of elimination, and mythical wife put game 4 on television as background noise, leading me to passively watch as I witnessed players on both teams flailing away pitifully as if it were me playing a video game, racking up strikeout after strikeout, and I actually found the game to be almost unwatchable, at how place discipline has clearly eroded tremendously over the last decade in which I’d gradually reduced how much baseball I watched.

I got triggered over how the TBS broadcasters, one of which turned out to be former Brave Jeff Francoeur, whom I’d had a contentious opinion of over the years, but the two of them just could not stop fellating themselves over Japanese rookie, Roki Sasaki, whom the Dodgers had decided to stash away entirely, unleashing him as their tentative playoff closer, which was working to great effect.

To Roki’s credit, he did pitch masterfully, pitching three perfect innings in relief, but at the same time the Phillies would have swung at kickballs being rolled on the ground by virtue of their complete lack of plate discipline, but it was obnoxious as fuck listening to the commentary of two dorks with the same gigantic weeb fetishes that MLB really loves  to push.

But then the Phillies were eliminated and it was onto the NLCS, in the blink of an eye.  In the first game, Balakey Snell pitched another gem, going eight, near-perfect innings, adding to the ridiculous talent suppression narrative, but before I could write about that, game 2 happened the following night where Yoshinobu Yamamoto pitches a complete game, the Dodgers win, and the sports world is jizzing all over the place at A Glorious Nippon baseball player demonstrating such brilliant mastery in the playoffs, much to my annoyance.

Meanwhile, golden boy Shohei Ohtani has been completely invisible for the second October in row, going 1-for his last like 20 or so at-bats, but nobody wants to dare hear ill about their demi-god.

I had a great analogy for a writing topic about how MLB feels like the League of Legends LCS scene where every team in every region came to the collective conclusion that they need to import as many Korean players onto their teams as they could, leading to a few years of hilarity where teams all over North America, Europe, China and even teams in Brazil, all had two Korean players on their rosters. 

And how MLB feels like it’s headed in that direction where teams are going to be scrambling to gobble up Japanese players because they’ll all buy into the notion that they need them in order to compete, and that the Dodgers are just one of the earliest teams to really exploit the system, much like teams like Fnatic, LMQ and G2 were early adopters of hoarding Koreans in LCS, before all teams eventually picked up on it and began poaching Koreans left and right.

But that brings us to the present, where the Dodgers won game 3 of the NLCS, where they now have a near-lock to make the World Series because no team except 2004 Boston Red Sox had ever come back from an 0-3 series deficit to win four in a row, and everything I wanted to make dedicated posts about are already in the past and not worth dedicating entire posts about anymore.

And all I really have to say at this point is the subject of this post – the Dodgers are inevitable.  They didn’t just buy themselves a loaded roster, they bought themselves a loaded roster, intelligently.  That’s the one major separator from them and every other team in baseball history that has thrown cash around like they were at a strip club, but resulted in no positive results.  Sure, some of them were victimized by the hot team, but this era of Dodgers has appeared to be hot team-proof.  No hot team or higher seed really makes a difference when they get loaded up into a short series with a team that has this much pitching depth, amassed effective relievers from other teams, and has this many available bats on their roster, all of which seem to be drunk enough on the Kool-Aid to not be letting any toxic egos into the equation.

I doubt I’m the only one who came into the playoffs with this sense of dread at seeing the Dodgers in, because most anyone who follows the game knows that they’re the team to beat, no matter where they were seeded going into it.  And sure enough, the Dodgers did what they were built to do, which is that they decimated the Reds and the Phillies, and have decimated the Brewers and by the time this day is over, could very well be en route to the World Series, yet again.

Like I said, I really don’t care who ultimately wins the World Series, but I really hope it’s not the Dodgers.  The fact that I would have preferred the Phillies over the Dodgers speaks volumes for those who know me.  If I had a preference, it’s the Seattle Mariners I’d rather see become champions for the first time in their franchise history, but I have no beef with the Blue Jays either.

But regardless of who comes out of the AL, I don’t like either of their chances against the amount of ammunition the Dodgers have, and they’re currently playing in a dominant manner that’s giving me some serious 2005 White Sox vibe, where their starters are just on another planet right now, delivering dominating performance one right after the other after another.  Even if they got completely bodied by the Angels all year.

This is most definitely one of those cases where I’d love to be wrong, and being right about an inevitable fucking Dodgers victory, will bring no joy whatsoever.

Seems kind of ironic to me

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I was driving home one day, and I decided to take an alternate route, because it might be a little longer as far as street distance goes, but there are fewer lights, and I was in one of those moods where I was over all the red lights that I seemed to be hitting.  There’s a point on this route where there’s this farm, that I’ve come to know as being owned by some obvious hard-right-wing nutjobs, as indicative by all the hard-right-wing signs that they plaster all over their property.

MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN
PRAY FOR AMERICA
LET’S GO BRANDON
KEEP AMERICA GREAT
AMERICA FIRST

And the list goes on and on and on.  There’s pretty much no matter, no election or no opportunity missed by the people who live on this farm to spout their views or automatic support for whomever is repping the right.  In one hand, I kind of respect and wish that the not-left had such devout, obsessed and dedicated to voting and supporting their cause, and perhaps every single political arena wouldn’t be so fucking one-sided.  But in the other hand, fuck these shitheads and their support of just about everything I disagree in.

Anyway, as I was passing by today, there was a sign in their primary viewing sign space, that said: WE ARE CHARLIE.

I scrunched my brow at this one, and at the next red light I stopped at, I whipped out my phone to google it because I was curious.  Of course it had to do with the fairly recent assassination of some right-wing nutjob who had the same name, and I felt a microsecond of embarrassment at not realizing that sooner but on that same note I actively avoid politics as if discussing them will give me COVID.

Unsurprising, his death made him into a martyr to the right, and I guess saying WE ARE CHARLIE is some sort of defiant solidarity, and basically the white people version of everyone else saying that they are George Floyd, Sandra Bland, or any person that dare ever stood on the other side of the fence.

However, I couldn’t help but feel that there was some severe irony in the phrasing of WE ARE CHARLIE, because the very first thing that came to my mind is that “Charlie” was the nickname/slang/slur that US soldiers used to describe the opposing Vietcong forces during the Vietnam War.

Every skirmish was, against Charlie.  Charlie ambushing US forces.  Fuckin’ Charlie all over the place.  Spraying Agent Orange in the jungle to weed out Charlie.  Etcetera, etcetera.

Charlie is a term that has some hard negative connotation, especially for those who served, come from military backgrounds, or were impacted or affected by Vietnam in some way, shape or form.

And now we have white folks all over the American landscape who are now defiantly and proudly proclaiming to be, Charlie.  Okay

The ironic thing is that the Vietnam War more or less ended in 1975, which is just 50 years ago.  Across America and the rest of the world, there are still living people who fought in it; there are people who have killed, are widows and fatherless children from the conflict,  in the name of war, still alive today.  I can’t imagine that a lot of these people are all too thrilled to be seeing the word Charlie being used in such pro hard-right-wing propaganda, especially those who have and still suffer the effects of loss, death and PTSD.

Or perhaps I’m being presumptuous and giving too much credit to right-wing supporters to have the morals that would put something like this into question, and even they have no problem dropping their stigmas over the word Charlie and are more than happy to take it back if it supports their idiot beliefs.

Given the nature of modern politics, it’s probably the latter, unfortunately.

Because like I said, I saw this sign on a farm.  Farms are usually family joints passed down generations, and I’m going to go out on a limb and take a guess that if the owner of this farm didn’t fight in Vietnam, they’re probably descendants of someone who did, and because politics are unfortunately often times practically genetic at the success rate of offspring buying into their parents’ beliefs, I’d wager that through the 80s, 90s, 00s to up until a month ago, the name Charlie was probably something that was probably spit out, with some resentment, as opposed to being a phrase of solidarity and left-wing defiance.

One thing that I thought about though, that would be ironically funny, but not that funny because the loss of life isn’t really a laughing matter in most cases, but piggybacking onto the recent termination of AOL dial-up service, I’m imagining a scenario where the elderly final users of the service, now without any real internet service to brainwash them any further, have no idea about the whole Charlie situation, and have no clue that being Charlie is considered a good thing among their right-wing brethren.

And then ‘ol Hershel is going down the road in his 1957 Chevy pickup, and he drives past a house with a big ass WE ARE CHARLIE sign in their yard, triggering his PTSD.  Naturally he is packing, and he parks his truck, grabs his double barrel shotgun that’s on a mantle behind the driver’s seat, and storms into the house, and blows the fuck away out of some right-wing family.  Took care of that fuckin’ Charlie.

Right-on-right crime, just like the actual Charlie incident, from what I’ve heard.

Like I said, the loss of life in any case isn’t really that funny under most circumstances, but I’m just being honest here, if I were ever to catch wind that a scenario like this actually happened, I have to admit that I’d be kind of amused.

Wow, I didn’t think they’d actually do it (AKA Oh, Georgia #560)

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

ANF: Georgia to build a professional cricket stadium, in LaGrange

It’s been a while since I had an old-fashioned diatribe about a sports stadium, yeah?  I mean the Braves had pretty much run out of stadiums to build and fleece the local taxpayers over, Atlanta United already got their stadium, their training ground, as well as USA Soccer down in Fayetteville.  The purported temu-Battery in Forsyth/Dawsonville designed to attract an NHL expansion team still seems like there’s lots of room for failure to occur or for people to open their eyes and realize that they’re being swindled.

So it actually seemed like Georgia had hit somewhat of a saturation point as far as the necessity to build any more unnecessary sporting venues, and it actually has been a little quiet over majority of the last decade.

It was actually back in July of 2017 in which I first caught wind of there being interest in a cricket stadium in Georgia, and considering it didn’t happen immediately, I guess I let my guard down at thinking that perhaps, the state finally found their breaking point as far as not dropping what they’re doing in order to build some wholly unnecessary project in order for some rich white people to smokescreen a town into usurping public funds to line their coffers with.

But never say never, and never underestimate the tenacity of the greedy in order to pursue schemes in order to make a lot of money, but it seems that a decade later, Georgia will be getting its own fucking cricket stadium too because that’s totally what this state needs instead of improved infrastructure, mass transit, affordable housing, or even more chicken tender or bougie donut joints.

In one hand, I want to say that in all fairness, there are a shitload of Indian people in the Metro Atlanta area, specifically Smyrna/Vinings, where it literally feels like residential zones from India were plucked out of the ground like Sim City and dropped there, and at least in my observations, nobody loves cricket more than that specific demographic, so there stands to be belief that there could be a demand. 

However, that would be somewhere remotely near Smyrna/Vinings and not way the fuck out in LaGrange, where contrary to ANF’s reporting’s claims, is very much not a part of Metro Atlanta.  Without traffic, it’s like 75 miles southwest of Smyrna/Vinings and maybe 90 minutes, but given the fact that there’s never not traffic in the actual Metro Atlanta area, it’s probably more of a three-hour trek to get down to LaGrange, which is closer to the Alabama state line than it is to Atlanta, much less Newnan, the first bastion of civilization heading east from there.

I really can’t imagine that all the Indians and/or cricket fans that will undoubtedly spawn because there’s nothing whiter than glomping onto the new thing to pretend like you’ve been a fan all along, will still be willing to travel all the way to LaGrange in order to watch cricket matches, because the traffic will suck where I-85 chokes down from three lanes to two at Newnan, and if there’s any modicum of demand, then the shitty small town infrastructure will get their asses beat while they try to figure things out.

Not that I’m going to care enough in 2027 to keep my ear to the ground at the results, but I’d be interested if they were fed to me.

But in the other hand, Georgia just doesn’t need yet another fucking sporting venue, especially for such an L-tier sport like cricket.  Even if the construction of it will boost the local economy with probably a few hundred minimum wage paying job opportunities, studies have shown that in lieu of massive multi-million dollar projects like sporting venues, there’s more money to be had at building spaces that accommodate conventions and conferences, and keeping low-maintenance events churning on a regular basis actually feeds economies better than sporting venues do.

Whatever though, I thought I’d have a little bit more venom to spit in regards to this, but I don’t.  Perhaps because it’s being built in LaGrange, Alabama and remotely nowhere near the actual Metro Atlanta area, and doesn’t stand to impact my taxes whatsoever that takes a lot of heat out of my desire to be on offense.  But I still think it’s really foolish and unnecessary all the same, and if Georgia is gung-ho about building joints for shit like cricket, I guess it’s only a matter of time before they begin to start having talks about building sporting venues for shit like Ultimate Frisbee or professional Quiddich.

Justin Verlander is basically MLB’s Tom Brady

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

USA Today: Justin Verlander, 42, reportedly desires to keep playing despite having absolutely nothing left to prove, and having supermodel wife Kate Upton waiting at home

I saw this story about Justin Verlander wanting to keep playing past this season, and my mind was like wtf, why?  For the record, man has already accomplished:

  • Two-time World Series champion
  • Three no-hitters
  • 3x AL Cy Young Award winner
  • 1x AL MVP
  • AL Rookie of the Year
  • 9x All-Star

Surely it’s not money, because Verlander has already cleared over $400M in career earnings, and at that tier, it would take a Herculean effort of being a shithead to blow through it.  And it’s not like his wife is some financial leech, because he’s married to supermodel Kate Upton, whom Google claims has a net worth of $20M in her own right.

And speaking of Upton, it’s hilarious that he wants to keep staying on the road of living the life of a baseball player, instead of enjoying retirement with his bombshell of a wife and his two kids.  A cursory reaction is that in spite of the massive advantages he’s earned in his life, it seems like the life of being a husband and father is something that he’s not ready to commit to full-time, and the only thing preventing that from having to be a reality is, continuing to keep playing.

Frankly the only thing that seems remotely attainable and is a justifiable excuse to keep on trucking, is the pursuit of 300 career wins, which is something of a holy grail for pitchers and among the true milestones that separate the GOATs from the really goods.  However, he’s 35 wins away from that, and at the rate he’s going, he would need at least three more seasons, and get a ton of run support in order to have a chance at hitting 300, and by then he’ll be pushing 45, and most teams will probably be ready to take him out to the back of the pasture at that rate, especially if they’re going to be close to his 2025.

Getting back to the title of this post, Justin Verlander is basically MLB’s version of Tom Brady, the ageless star who has achieved just about everything there is to achieve, but continues to insist on playing, despite riches, achievements and a supermodel wife.

I guess us pleebs won’t ever be able to comprehend this innate desire to stay away from home and not settle down, or perhaps the adage of, every gorgeous woman is still someone’s colossal pain in the ass, rings true here and supermodels like Gisele and Kate Upton are as much head cases as they are attractive.

All the same, if I’m being honest, I feel like the Braves would be all in on being a match for Verlander, and I think the union could possibly work, at least for 2026.  The Braves are notorious for favoring aged stars on one-year deals, and the cheapskate org could possibly succeed at signing him for like 1-year, and maybe $13-14M.

The Braves would feel that they could extract the absolute last skill out of Verlander, and provided the team manages to bounce back from this abysmal 2025 campaign, they could be an ideal club to score a lot of runs again, with ol’ Justin to possibly be the beneficiary to them en route to 13 wins or so.

If the reports are true and he wants to keep going, I actually would expect the Braves to be in on Verlander for 2026.  His desire to not go home and be a family man could benefit the Braves, and lord knows they need all the help they can get for the future.

I sure as shit wouldn’t complain if he pulls a Tom Brady and jumps ship to a random team like the Braves and help them rip off a successful season en route to some World Series pay dirt.