Author: dannyhong

Dad Brog (#099): The Worst Parenting Product Ever

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Throughout the last two-plus years, mythical wife and I have come across plenty of products that weren’t that useful, and/or drawn frustration from mostly me.  Things like wipe warmers, butt paste applicators, the 78 different types of sippy cups that mythical wife purchases despite my protests that we don’t need any more god damn cups, can fall into the category of being useless.

Our ridiculously expensive double stroller has been a tremendous source of frustration for me throughout the journey of parenthood, because it was ridiculously expensive, but it’s also absurdly cumbersome, heavy, doesn’t fit into my car at the same time as an extra human being, and taking the thing down to Disney is a sure-fire trip-ruiner based on how often I have to break it down to fold because it’s either fold it to ride a shuttle or a Skyliner or fold it to put into the car to drive somewhere with.  But at least in spite of it all, it provides massive utility as the sturdy, smooth-rolling stroller to both my kids, when we need to roll them around.

But this past weekend, I discovered the absolute worst parenting product we’ve ever had the misfortune of being duped into spending our money on: the SlumberPod.

It’s basically a supposedly portable blackout tent that you put over the sleeping peripheral of a child, so that they can sleep in simulated darkness.  It has vents and even a clear plastic compartment to tuck a camera into so that you can monitor your child still.  The sales pitch of this product is that it’s perfect for you to use in hotels or anywhere where you have to shack up with your children in the same room, and you want to be able to sleep in the dark but not have to give up the convenience of lights outside of it.

But for my kids?  Colossal failure.  The SlumberPod seems like a great way to inflict trauma or cultivate claustrophobia to my kids.  We got it for #2 originally, because she typically needs a nice dark, isolated setting to sleep optimally, and sharing a hotel room with her seemed like a daunting task.  When we finally got it set up and put over her pack and play, it lasted all of two seconds before she was screaming bloody murder, and it didn’t even make it ten minutes before we realize that this wasn’t going to work.

Alternatively, we tried it on #1, to see if it would prove useful with her, but not only did she hate it as much as #2 did, she had the capability to fuck around with the camera compartment, reach outside of her crib to monkey around with the sound machine, and was just overall physically capable enough to jostle the entire thing to where we I threw up my hands and declared this the worst parenting product we’ve ever had.

Sure, there is no one-size-fits-all parenting product that is guaranteed to work on every single kid out there.  That’s not entirely why I’m so disenchanted with the SlumberPod.  My primary point of frustration with the SlumberPod, aside from its bullshit $170+ price tag, is the fact that it’s pitched like it’s this easy-to-assemble jesus tent that will help put your kids to sleep, but the reality is that you basically need the surface area of Lambeau Field in order to have adequate space to put it together.  Works kind of counter to the idea of assembling and using these in hotel rooms with limited space.

It’s a Christmas miracle that I didn’t, or my kids didn’t get hurt by one of the bullshit tension rods that requires an unnerving amount of bend in order to assemble, and I was afraid that one wrong move would result in a violent whiplash of a metal rod whipping the shit out of either myself or one of my kids.  It would’ve probably been violent enough to slash out an eye on a human being, and probably rip a massive scar into drywall.

It’s definitely not easy to assemble, and once it is, it’s this giant fucking blob of useless that you don’t want to break down on a daily basis and have to wrestle with it all over again the following day, so you leave it assembled and let it take up a giant chunk of space in your limited hotel room’s real estate.

And when it doesn’t work on top of the aggravation of having to assemble it, it’s a really easy call to make that this is basically the most useless and regrettable parenting product ever purchased.  Basically, my prevailing thought after having to put up with this failure, is that if you don’t want to have to deal with the stress and struggle of having to share space with a child that requires adequate darkness in order to sleep, don’t fucking travel with them.  At least it wouldn’t cost $175 and an entire weekend of sleepless nights because the kids are struggling to sleep in a shared space far from home.  But fuck the SlumberPod, I hope I’ll be able to recoup anything for it, because I sure as shit don’t want to keep this in my house full of kids stuff any longer.

Damn it, I have to side with the conservative chick

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It’s obvious that my brog has kind of devolved into this cesspool of parenting, wrestling and occasional sports posts, and that I don’t really write so much about the variety of topics that I tried to spread out throughout my ability to write.  Parenting has really shrunken my general world into a very small space that I obviously need to focus on more than anything else these days, but every now and then a slice of the world outside my own manages to sneak in through social media, grasp my attention, and trigger an avalanche of thoughts, and ultimately words that I can put down onto a word doc and call it a brog post.

Normally, when I hear that an alleged victim is of a conservative variety, I expect to get ready to roll my eyes and imagine at what nonsense a white person is going to be bitching about next.  But in this particular story that someone found its way to me, about a girl who is enraged with American Airlines, because she was on a flight where she was the unfortunate middle seat in between two, morbidly obese siblings, for a three hour flight, I kind of get it.

I think it’s a safe bet to say that I’ve flown more than the average traveler.  And in my travels, I have sat in more than my fair share of middle seats, especially considering all the standby traveling I did where middle seats were really my only option versus not making it out at all.  And let me tell you, in the age of seats getting smaller and smaller so that more seats can be crammed onto aircrafts, I have definitely been this girl more times than I can count, where I’ve been victimized by people whose girth far exceeds the confines of a standard airline seat.

Of course, I am no small individual by any means.  I’m probably like 20-30 lbs. away from an ideal mass ratio, but for the most part, I fit adequately into the boundaries of an airline seat.  Sometimes my shoulders exceed the boundaries, not necessarily because I’m swole or anything, but because everyone’s shoulders usually exceed the boundaries of a seat, and most of the time it’s a domino effect of everyone in a row gradually leaning to one side in order to try and get some physical reprieve.

Except in the case of this poor girl, there was no reprieve, because she was literally sandwiched in between two mammoth masses of humanity.  The fact that they were spread out with a gap seat in the middle indicates that they knew they were both blobs and needed the space of a seat in between them, but the fact that they didn’t just outright purchase that seat meant that there was always the chance of some poor unfortunate soul getting booked in it, which is exactly what happened in this case.

And normally I tend to not feel much empathy for those who proudly identify as conservatives, but as a fellow human being who has traveled on his share of airplanes, I completely feel for this girl.  It is absolutely the worst feeling in the world being stuck next to a blob of a person who is oozing into your personal space, and you’re stuck touching these usually less than hygienic My 600 Lb. Life patients for more than two hours otherwise you might’ve driven in the first place.

I have loathed every time this has happened to me, and in my case it’s usually been from one side, but it has happened where I’ve been the schmuck stuck between the Natural Disasters and it is the absolute worst.

The ironically funniest thing about this story is that after the initial, fairly nonchalant response from American Airlines to this girl, is the secondary follow-up response where AA basically sided with her, low-key admit our bad, and gave her a voucher for the horrendous atrocity of having to endure a flight being a literal Jill sandwich.  It’s like after the initial shot was fired, some case worker actually analyzed the scenario and realized how miserable she was and had the empathy to reach back out and offer a peace offering.

It reminded me of my own experience, where the above photo was a picture that I took on an AirTran flight coming back from Las Vegas.  We were surrounded by a family or three where everyone was massive, and fortunately they weren’t in my row, but they definitely were all around me, and because of their girth, they were obviously uncomfortable in their seats, resulting in them constantly getting up and meandering all around me, to where at one point, they just gathered in the back, right next to me, just so that they wouldn’t have to be seated in tight quarters on account of their blobbiness.

I contacted AirTran about the incident, and they actually sided with me with no resistance, and gave me a credit.  It’s like they too know how much of a pain in the ass huge motherfuckers are to the airline travel experience as much as everyone else does, but because so many Americans are so fucking fat, it’s just something that happens on the regular, and they just hope people don’t reach out to complain about it.

Anyway, this chick obviously got blasted by the internet for being so callous as to fat shame, but the funny thing is that there was also a notable amount of sympathy for her situation, because at the root of it, just about everyone who’s ever had to deal with it themselves knows just how much it sucks flying next to a bunch of fat fucks who ooze all over the place.

Nothing says celebration like destruction of property

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Sauce: University of Tennessee solicits for donations to repair their football field’s goalposts after they were ripped out of the ground and dumped into the Tennessee River in celebration of upsetting Alabama

I think I already know the answer to this, but I have to wonder if anywhere outside of ‘Murica, people celebrate sports victories by destroying property?  Sure, if I had to wager, places like parts of the United Kingdom probably get rowdy after a win, but by and large I’m not sure if I’ve ever heard of like Japan, Korea, Germany, France or Brazil ever go biblical on their own property, after winning a World Cup or a gold medal or some other monumental victory.

Obviously this is very commonplace in ‘Murica where Philadelphia had been set on fire no less than three times in celebration, and most of Auburn and Tuscaloosa in Alabama have been torched and had trees poisoned as a result of college football games, which come to mind the quickest, with many other examples out there for inquiring minds.

Back to Tennessee, I get it, the celebration part; beating Alabama is a big deal, because it has not happened a lot over the last 13 years.  Any school that can steal a win over Alabama is truly a massive deal, and worth a good field storming afterward.

But then the uprooting of the goal posts and then throwing them into the river?  That’s just dumb, but honestly I wouldn’t expect anything less from a hick school like Tennessee which is barely relevant in anything outside of women’s hoops.  It’s the epitome of no one of us is as dumb as all of us, and you know that the vast majority of the people who ended up doing it probably don’t even care about football so much as it’s part of the scene out in Volunteer country.

The best (read: fucking insane) part of this is that not only is the school claiming that replacing  two sets of some metal bars is roughly $150,000, is that they’re soliciting people for donations to help pay for it.

Like, both schools are probably getting upwards of at least $1 million dollars each for the television rights to the game, not to mention all sorts of sponsorship monies from all the commercials.  And they have the audacity to cry poor and ask people to pay for the installation of new goalposts?  That’s fucking insanity.

Yeah sure it’s not right for people to celebrate the win by destroying property, and there should be some accountability from the violating parties. But it’s also the greatest moment in the program’s history since Peyton Manning, and some insanity should have been expected.  Not to mention the school is already loaded as fuck and in the grand spectrum of what the UT athletic department generates, $150k is a drop in the bucket.

The irony is also the fact that $150k is probably obviously some grossly inflated estimate so that a bunch of it can be pocketed, but there’s no doubt that at least $150k will be successfully raised.  And that’s the type of money that even the most tenured of educators in the faculty probably wouldn’t see, for trying to teach and develop young minds, while some yellow pieces of metal will have it raised for their sake in the span of a week.

And people wonder why college sports are resented so much, sometimes.  Sure I’m aware of the reality of the chicken and egg dynamic where the education doesn’t grow without the athletics, but when fucking goalposts raises the money that could probably pay two people’s salaries, it does sound pretty fucking ridiculous.

And that’s the kind of shit can of worms opened after a win.  Sociologically, and economically, it probably would’ve been better had Tennessee lost.

But that’s why we play the games, right??

Now this is actually just like old times

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

A little while ago, after I wrote about the amazing finish to the regular season, where the Braves caught the Mets on the final weekend of the season and literally stole the NL East crown right from underneath them, I had this sneaking suspicion that I was tempting fate by doing such, and that once the playoffs began, the Braves would be ripe for a good old fashioned, first round NLDS* collapse, like they had done countless times in the past.  Baby luck was no longer in play, and by acknowledging in text that the Braves were anything other than a garbage organization not worth two pennies rubbed together, I was clearly pressing the boundaries of the universe that my feelings of high on the Braves were doomed to come crashing down once the playoffs actually began.

*can’t call it first round anymore thanks to the new wild card round

The fact that the Braves did in fact, get bounced from the NLDS doesn’t bother me; after all it’s something I’ve seen happen so many times that it’s more of an aberration when it doesn’t happen.  What actually does suck is that it came at the hands of the Phillies, which is a team that I’ve never liked at any point in history, so that part does give me some sour grapes.  If it had happened against the Cardinals, I would’ve been salty but unsurprised because it seemed like the Pujols and Yadi farewell tour would’ve been very appropriate to have had run over the Braves along the way, but when they failed to close out the Phillies in the first game of the wild card series, it was pretty much all downhill from there.

More than any other sport, baseball playoffs has and will always be a game for the team that gets hot at the right time.  Because games are played so closely together, momentum can really hang and maintain in baseball, and throughout the history of the playoffs since the inception of the wild card, so often times is the World Series winner the team that just catches fire and stays on fire for a month.  Aided by the magic baby luck brought on by #2’s birth, the Braves were that team that got hot, and stayed hot, and won it all last year, no matter how unworthy of the playoffs the 88-win team really was.

The Phillies appear to be that team that’s caught fire at the right time, and amazingly they did it in the midst of a game, where they looked all but defeated against the Cardinals, but the switch flipped, they came back on the Cardinals, put them out to pasture, rolled into Atlanta, and put the Braves out of their misery too.

As much as I dislike seeing the Phillies succeed, especially at the expense of the Braves, there’s a sadistic part of me that really wants to see the Padres advance on the Dodgers, so that we have an NLCS between the #5 and #6 seeds, with hopefully the Padres going to the World Series to play against the Seattle Mariners,** in a barn burner of a World Series nobody in the world wants to see.

**at the time I’m writing this, the Mariners have just blinked first in the 18th inning of their elimination game and are on the cusp of getting eliminated  🙁

But as for the Braves, it’s back to being the Barves all over again, getting bounced in the NLDS.  Yes, it’s something that does suck, but honestly?  The good thing about a fairly fresh World Series victory, or any championship for a favored team, is that it always creates a cushion of absorbing the disappointment of future defeats.  I can still say I got to see the Braves win a World Series in my lifetime as a Braves fan and as an Atlanta resident, and because it happened pretty recently, this year’s fuckup doesn’t really irk me at all.  Being a Braves fan, it’s mostly just kind of business as usual, losing in the NLDS.

All the same though, woof, what a shitty day to have been a sports fan.  This really was kind of like a bloody Saturday as far as my casual fandoms go.  The Braves get bounced from the playoffs by the Phillies, Virginia Tech takes the L against an equally unimpressive Miami squad.  Normally Alabama getting upset is always kind of amazing, but the fact that it happened against Tennessee is irksome enough, but then realizing that their quarterback is Hendon Hooker, who used to be Virginia Tech’s QB before he transferred out and has developed into this Alabama-beating Jesus motherfucker, leaves a little bit of bitter in my mouth.

Also, I learned that Dikembe Mutombo has a brain tumor and is undergoing treatment, which hopefully is successful.  Those who know me well enough, know of my fandom of Mutombo, so this isn’t just sad because he’s kind of a meme, it’s sad because I genuinely have always been a fan of the guy.

And the cherry on top?  #25 JMU, my very literal hometown school in Harrisonburg, nationally ranked in probably like the first time ever, immediately loses to Georgia Southern, and undoubtedly that ranking.  Heavy is the team that wears a ranking, and even the Dukes couldn’t salvage this turrible day to be a sports fan.

Also, the Mariners just lost and are bounced, so there goes the hopes for a Padres/Mariners World Series. 😭

Someone pinch me

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

No freaking way: Wawa convenience stores to begin opening stores in Georgia starting by 2024

Man, if anyone were to tell me that in the mid-2020s, Georgia would have Buc-ee’s, Tim Hortons and Wawas, I’d tell them that they were out of their minds.  Buc-ee’s is Texas’s thing, Tim Hortons is all of Canada’s thing, and Wawas were like this VA/MD/PA and central FL thing, and there was absolutely no reason to believe that any one of those companies would have any business coming to fucking Georgia, in the southeastern United States of ‘Murica.

And yet, here we stand where by 2024, the humble state of Georgia, run by Yosemite Sam, and on the cusp of having a braindead former football player be an actual senator of the state, will be home to some of the most dominant brands in convenient road food in the western hemisphere.

Like seriously, is there anywhere else more fortunate than Georgia is going to be once Wawa gets here, when it comes to being a place to be able to get beaver nuggets, iced capps and gobbler hoagies?  Florida has Buc-ee’s and Wawa.  Pretty sure Tim Hortons left PA, which means all they have are Wawa.  But for Georgia to be privy to all three of these cult-status brands?  Pretty incredible.

It’s like every time I get slammed in traffic, and I curse the state and ask why I live here?  I’ll have to hope I live somewhat reasonably distanced to all three of these businesses to where I’ll have my immediate answer to why I still live here.  Hopefully closer than Buc-ee’s is, and it’ll be a jump ball if both Wawa and Timmy’s are nearby.  When the day is over, the iced capps will probably be my most frequent purchase, but I’ll be damned if Wawa doesn’t become an immediate routine meal option if there’s one within remote convenient distance.

All streaks come to an end eventually

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

The last time I was in any sort of car collision, it was like in 2002.  Completely my own fault and fortunately didn’t involve anyone else, just me being a dumbass with a new-ish car, thinking I was invincible.  But over the last two decades, I’ve been fortunate to not have gotten any incidents by my own fault, as well as fortunate to not have been victim to someone else’s shitty driving capabilities.

Welp, two decades worth of incident avoidance came to an end the other day, when some dumbass managed to tap my rear fender and cause damage to my six-month old car.

TL;DR nobody was hurt and honestly, my car is actually in almost an unblemished state.  Just my rear passenger rim has a few scuffs that looks more like I scraped a curb parallel parking rather than getting hit on the highway.  The other guy’s shit Camry on the other hand looks like they’ve been in a collision because their car is light colored, plus they’re the ones who hit me, contrary to the driver’s immediate accusation when we pulled over to assess the situation.

In short, the above exit is where the incident occurred.  I was in the left exit lane to I-285, and the other person was right where the truck is in this screen grab from Google street view.  I’m passing them and then suddenly I feel the bump, and it actually took me a second to register that I’d just been hit.  For a brief second, I thought about continuing because it wasn’t a big hit by any stretch of imagination, but rational thinking prevailed and we both pulled over immediately, lest anyone get accused of a hit and run.

As mentioned, my car barely had any damage.  Their car on the other hand, although just as superficial of a wound that didn’t impact their ability to drive, by virtue of having a light-colored car, is more noticeable.  I immediately snapped pictures of the impact point of both cars and their license plate, and asked if they were alright.  Naturally, they were as it wasn’t more than a small tap, but the normal world isn’t a video game, and small taps in moving vehicles still need to be examined for rational people.

The driver of the other car, and his mail-order 90 day fiancé looking girlfriend didn’t waste any time in accusing me of hitting him, claiming I was trying to cut them off, and I calmly disagreed since I had my own exit lane, there was no reason for me to cut them off if I wanted to pass them.  I explained that I wasn’t going to play the blame game, and that we would most likely tell our insurance companies our respective stories and we’ll let them deal with the situation.

I mean seriously?  The laws of physics would say I would have had to have done some pretty intricate driving to have hit them in the point of impact and amount of damage, but from his driver’s seat, a sneeze, a jerk, or maybe he was getting a road beej from his mail-order side piece, was more than easy enough for him to have jerked his wheel to the left for a nano-second enough to have tapped me while I was passing.

Here’s fuel to the perfect storm of failure though; I’m in the midst of switching phones, so the phone I had on my person had no network signal.  Yes, I’m reminded after the fact that any phone regardless of network connectivity still has the capability of dialing 911, but I wasn’t thinking about it at the moment of incident, so I didn’t call the cops.  The other guy wasn’t calling the cops, either because he knew he caused the incident, or maybe because he was a black male and I get why he’d not want to bring a cop out.  Maybe both, who knows.  Either way, no police report occurred, which means that no matter the actual fault, most likely nothing is going to happen, and it’s a push both legally and with insurance.

So it’s extra fortunate that my car basically had no damage because I’d hate to have to pay a deductible to get superficial scuffs removed or a new rim, and have an accident reported on my VIN, because it’s most likely nothing can happen given the end result.

But all the same, I was involved in a collision, the first in two fucking decades, and naturally it’s because some dumb shithead was a bad driver, and not because I caused it.  In the grand spectrum of things, it’s fortunate that my car had no actionable damage and nobody was hurt, but I’m still full of piss and vinegar because it wasn’t my fault, and it completely derailed my entire day and makes me feel like my feeling of confidence and superiority in driving ability is wounded because I still fell victim to someone else’s recklessness.

Any team that wants to move a metric ton of merch needs to sign Steeve Ho You Fat

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Today o’clock I learned that there is actually a guy on the planet Earth named “Steeve Ho You Fat.”  Normally, I’d criticize the fact that there appeared to be an extra E in “Steve,” but when your family name is somehow, “Ho You Fat,” his first name could’ve been spelled “Steeeeeevuh” and nobody would probably have noticed.

Like, I have no earthly idea how this is even possible.  The first line of defense is that “he’s French,” but obviously a name like Ho You Fat even raises eyebrows in the land of the frogs.  Digging a little deeper, it should seem obvious that French colonization probably had something to do with it, but from what I can glaze over, he’s of mixed descent and somehow has the name Ho You Fat as a family name.

Either way, the fact that he’s a 14-year veteran playing in the NBA G-League, it doesn’t seem likely that he’s ever going to get the call up to the big leagues any time soon. But honestly the fact that this guy’s name is a literal golden ticket to move a metric fuckton of merch in jerseys and shirseys should get this guy onto a roster for any team that wants to bank on his incredibly profitable name.

Seriously, he could easily be the 13th man on any NBA roster, the guy that’s always listed as being on injured reserve, or better yet, be the mascot player that only gets onto the court when the team is either up by 20 or down by 20 in the fourth quarter.  No matter if they’re at home or on the road, the crowd would undoubtedly erupt at the sight of Ho You Fat taking the court, and people in the crowd left and right would be whipping out their phones to check on the legitimacy of his name, and if they haven’t already, they’re purchasing merch with his name on it, or running to the clubhouse store and grabbing Ho You Fat gear off the shelves.

Considering most teams’ seasons are decidedly over by December, there’s absolutely no harm for any of these teams to take a flyer on Ho You Fat and just make a mission of making as much profit through merchandise sales as possible.  If you can’t win on the court, might as well try to win in the bank instead.