Category: Brog

General posting

TIL  that the Hound was also Lurch

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I don’t know why, but for whatever reason, I’m getting a tremendous amount of Game of Thrones clips being fed to me on social feeds.  Perhaps it’s because of the announcement of House of the Dragon’s second season is coming in the summer, I don’t know.  I definitely fall into the category of fans that were largely unimpressed with how the television series came to an end, but seeing a cavalcade of GoT clips from seasons before the ending, did remind of just how brilliant the show was prior to its conclusion.

It almost makes me want to marathon the entire series all over again, but after watching eleven seasons of Shameless in short order, I’m definitely not wanting to commit a ton of television time on something that I’ve already watched before, especially since my queue of things to watch is already about three year’s worth of content long, so I’ve been fairly content to just scroll and imbibe on short clips for the time being.

I would say that throughout the show, I tended to favor a lot of the side characters over the core cast.  I’m basically pegged as House Stark until I die, but really, my interest and enjoyment of the show always revolved around the happenings of characters that weren’t necessarily from one of the great houses, like Bronn, Brienne, and Sandor Clegane.

And speaking of the latter, one of my many favorite scenes from the show would be the part where Sandor and Arya go into a tavern, and come across several shithead Kingsguard soldiers, and the Hound basically goes on a diatribe about eating chickens and it culminates with him, and Arya killing all of the soldiers, with Arya getting her sword, Needle back from the one that captured her and murdered one of her friends.

But it was in this clip that I did notice a comment from another viewer that posted a screen grab of Lurch from Hot Fuzz, and making some remark that made the connection that the Hound was Lurch.  No fucking way was my knee-jerk reaction, but it’s also something that I never thought about before, and staring at the picture of the dim-witted heater of the Sandford Neighborhood Watch, I begin to really see that there’s a possibility.

Of course, next game Googling Rory McCann’s film and television history, and sure as shit, confirmation that Game of Throne’s Sandor Clegane was definitely the same guy who played Lurch from Hot Fuzz.

Color me amused; the same guy who was Lurch, just so happened to be one of the sneakiest, underrated and complexly most developed character in the entire Game of Thrones television series

Yarp indeed.

#TRYHARDSZN2024: At least he picked an Ivy

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Eyeroll: Chicago teenager accepted into six Ivy League schools among others; chooses Harvard

At first, I was about to go ha-ha about how he only got into six of the Ivy League schools, but supposedly this kid only applied to just six of them.  For whatever reason, he did not apply to Brown or Dartmouth, and my thought is that those are the two Ivies that are probably a little too far up north in New England for a black kid from Chicago to feel any comfort at, should he have gone to either of them. 

Still though, going six-for-six on the Ivy League schools he did apply to, yep, that’s still #TRYHARDSZN2024.

Stanford and Morehouse were also named as schools he applied to, and were accepted into, but they do say and more, so we have no definitive number of just how many schools he applied to, and were accepted into, but it’s irrelevant because he still went after 3/4th of the Ivy League and that alone is enough to make any kid a mega tryhard.

The thing is though, in most of these cases, a lot of these mega tryhards do what they do, because they don’t have to pay for application fees, which absolves the most primary of risks of applying to college, and the worst thing that can happen to them is that simply don’t get accepted.  Otherwise, they can sit back and amass acceptance after acceptance, and if the number is impressive enough, they make the internet, and I get to call them mega tryhards, and use them as fodder for the hashtag on a personal brog that nobody reads.

But what I was going to say is that in most of these cases, the kids apply to a thousand schools, get accepted into 50 of them, and ultimately only go to the ones that are actually giving them a free ride.  Sometimes, if the families of these tryhards have some money, they’ll go to one of the more prestigious names they were accepted into, but in most of these cases they’re really phishing for any schools that are willing to give them large scholarships, if not a free ride outright, and ultimately they usually end up going to a lesser-heralded school because free school > student loan entrapment imprisonment debt.

However, this particular kid, has chosen to actually redeem his acceptance into Harvard, of all schools.  This isn’t to say that he wasn’t worthy of some sort of scholarship, but usually in a lot of these mega tryhard stories, the underlying truth is that they were simply accepted, and not necessarily given any sort of incentive.  Such details are not disclosed in this specific story, but what is explained is that he will be playing basketball for Harvard, so there’s always the possibility that he’s getting some degree of scholarship from one of the most prestigious institutions in the world, because he’s decent at hoops.

To which I actually do give this kid some credit for actually cashing in his #TRYHARDSZN2024 ticket to go to one of the most prestigious schools on the planet, and not just doing it for the cheap attention as a publicity stunt.  Go forth, young man, and hopefully you will dominate the lesser-tier competition of Ivy League athletics, instead of getting boiled alive at a school with a real athletic program like the ACC’s Stanford (lol), while gaining one of the most invaluable reputable proofs of education in the world.

But you’re still a mega tryhard.

Year four of forever

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

And just like that, #1 is four years old.

Throughout my own parenting journey, one of the most heard things I’ve been told is to not blink or take any time for granted, because it’ll all be over in the blink of an eye and the kids will be grown and be pains in my ass before I know it, and I’ll wonder where the time went when they were still in diapers and couldn’t do anything for themselves.

Honestly, I think I’ve done a pretty good job of not taking my time for granted, and I’m so often reflecting on the past and I think in this age where everyone has phones and cameras on their phones and it’s fairly possible to chronicle our lives through photographs, that it makes it easier to have a visual reference to reflect with as we can simply just open up our photos app and scroll through time.  That, and the fact that I’ve also been a prodigious brogger for more than half my life at this point, and I’ve always got the means to not only look back in time and reflect, but to also read my very own words to recall specifically where I was throughout the journey of life.

I’ll often times just stop and watch my kids doing the things they do, and marvel at the state they’re in now, as opposed to when they were babies or infants or toddlers, because it’s just incredible watching someone else’s journey through life, through the eyes of a spectator, and of course being their father, I’ve literally seen just about every single day of their lives.

I think it’s safe to say that I’m the first face they see in the morning, about 99% of their lives, I make the vast majority of their meals, and I put a tremendous amount of physical and time effort into my kids regularly.  There are times in which it feels like a lot of work, but I don’t regret any bit of it, and I take a tremendous amount of pride in trying to be the best dad I possibly can be.  There’s nothing I won’t do for my children, and the only thing I really care about at all is being a good dad.

But #1 being four years old, that’s still mind-blowing to process, even though I know the day is coming.  It’s just so hard to fathom that it’s literally been four years since she came into existence five weeks early, right at the on-set of COVID and the (majority) of the entire (intelligent) world shutting themselves into isolation.  Being born so early, she was whisked away into the NICU and stayed there for two weeks, while mythical wife and I had no idea what was really going on with her health, the world, coronavirus and everything else because so much was going on concurrently right then.

Looking at her now, it’s hard to believe she was ever considered an at-risk baby that had to be connected to a heart monitor for the first four months of her life, because within six months, we stopped referring to her as “adjusted age” and never looked back.  She’s a strong, healthy four-year-old that’s ridiculously smart, thoughtful, and brings joy to my life on a daily basis.

She’s fully potty-trained, never has any accidents, knows all her numbers and letters, has demonstrated some rudimentary reading ability, and I have a feeling math will come fairly natural to her, as she’s apparently understanding the processes of basic arithmetic, even if she doesn’t know what the words addition or subtraction mean yet.

She remembers damn near everything, and is so quick to remind me of when she thinks I’ve screwed something up, and seems to be able to recall things from the past now, which shows her budding brain being able to store and recollect memories, and even going to sleep, she always remembers to remind me of what she wanted for breakfast the night before.

Not a day goes by where she and/or her sister isn’t the brightest light of my entire day, whether it’s by making me laugh, something sweet they do or say, or just the happy peace I feel when I watch them doing kid things.  So I’m happy to do whatever it takes to bring happiness to their lives… like taking a cake decorating class, so that I could make my child a triple-layered chocolate cake with buttercream and a dark chocolate drip ganache.  But even if it’s basically pure trash food, it’s also a symbol of growth for my child in that her original severe intolerance to eggs has dissipated over time, and she can at least handle having it in baked goods or cooked into things.

Still not going to give her a straight up omelet or scrambled eggs, but considering I still can’t eat those things without considerable punishment, who knows if she’ll ever fully grow out of it, or be as limited as I am.  Only time will tell, and hopefully there will be many more decades of years to bear witness to what happens next.

Happy trails, Virgil

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Lonely no more: Mike Jones, better known as former WWE wrestler, Virgil, passes away at the age of 61

I know it seems like every single wrestler from yesteryear that passes away was a favorite of mine in some way shape or fashion, and after twenty years of brogging, there’s no shortage of wrestler eulogies that I’ve written in my own way, at this point.

But Virgil, this guy, was truly a guy that I can’t say was necessarily a favorite of mine, but he was something of an icon in his own way, that I was fixated with, pretty much from the time I learned of his existence until the day he passed.

When I first got into wrestling, a lot of it had to do with the fact that I actually got into a WWF video game first, the arcade version of WWF Superstars, before I actually parlayed it into indulging in the real life variant of the game on television, into the life-long fandom that still maintain today. 

In the game, the final bosses were the tag team of “Million Dollar Man” Ted DiBiase and Andre the Giant; but before you actually started playing against them, there’s like a 12-second cutscene prior to the match where you see “Mean Gene” Okerlund interviewing both DiBiase and Andre, but also standing with them was a jacked black guy in a shiny tuxedo counting money.

When I started watching wrestling, and the first time I laid eyes on the real-life Million Dollar Man, sure enough, there was the same jacked black guy accompanying him, holding the money, and that was when I first learned of the existence of the real-life Virgil.

Little did I know that he was named Virgil, as a personal attack from Vince McMahon to rival promoter/booker/wrestler Dusty Rhodes, whose real name was actually Virgil, and in only a manner that could come from Vince McMahon, he slapped basically a slave persona onto a black man and called him Virgil.

But throughout the years, it became quickly apparent that despite Virgil’s imposing stature and menacing scowl, he was tantamount to the WWF’s punching bag to the stars, and in just a few short years of getting into wrestling, I’d seen Virgil get his ass beat by Hulk Hogan, the Ultimate Warrior, Macho Man Randy Savage, and Hacksaw Jim Duggan among others.  He was a jobber before I even knew what a jobber was, a term I wouldn’t learn until like 12 years later.

Continue reading “Happy trails, Virgil” →

Wendy’s surging real hard to alienate customers

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Scorched earth: starting in 2025, Wendy’s to explore surge pricing, where food costs dynamically change based on varying conditions; time, weather, demand

The knee-jerk reactions of the collective internet are probably exactly what anyone with a sensible brain would expect; full of bile, resentment, disdain, and a whole lot of declarations of never going to Wendy’s again, among other hard statements most feel comfortable spouting off on the internet without.  And absolutely nothing positive or with any hint of praise because nobody is in the 1% of greedy fucks who make these kinds of choices.

And who can really blame anyone for being disappointed and furious over this kind of announcement?  Fast food exists because it’s supposed to be cheap, predictable, reliable to exist, and not something where anyone rolling up to a Wendy’s has to think about not knowing what prices they’re going to see on the menu.

It goes without saying that this is a 100% cash grab, because everyone knows consumers aren’t going to be seeing “the low end” of the pricing model beyond perhaps those weird 30-minute windows in between breakfast and lunch time and lunch time and dinner, and that’s only if the weather conditions aren’t remotely hazardous.  Store personnel probably won’t be seeing any sort of monetary benefit to financial fluctuation, and in fact when some locations actually start losing business due to this reckless idea, their jobs will be where the difference in earnings will be made up from.

Unsurprisingly, most everyone knows it, and those who do, all hate it.  It’s flagrant greed and complete disregard for consumers, whose stress levels are already ratcheted up to the moon due to the completely imbalanced escalations of inflation versus wages.

Now I like Wendy’s food, there’s a reason why they’re one of the few burger joints that still manages to thrive, at least in the Atlanta area.  Burger Kings a few and far between locations, McDonalds is widely regarded as somehow unhealthier than Wendy’s, and there just aren’t enough Dairy Queens to compete against Wendy’s it seems.  Five Guys are already branded being egregiously priced, but at least they don’t (yet) flex their prices based on time and weather conditions.

But the thing is, I go to Wendy’s as frequently as I go to McDonald’s, which is to say practically never.  At least where I am, all the Wendy’s are completely staffed with the dregs of the dregs of society, and they’re completely unreliable, drive-thru lines wrapped around the building, that is if they didn’t decide to close up shop at 8:30 pm when they’re supposed to be Open Late.™  And the last few times I’ve actually eaten their food, as tasty as it is, my body definitely regretted it when I’m waking up at 2-3 am because my digestive system is revolting.

So I’m not concerned with my conviction at being able to further avoid Wendy’s if and when this bullshit surging comes to my area, because I don’t like late night toilet runs that aren’t on my own terms, but I still understand all the salt and all the rage and all the resentment towards the company all the same upon this news coming to light.

Aside from the obvious cash grab that this is, it’s also an obvious phishing expedition; Wendy’s looking for markets where they can hike up costs, based on the markets whose numbers don’t seem to be affected in customer order numbers regardless of price surging.  So probably big cities full of people with deep pockets, where people already spend like they’re out of touch with the classes in a position lower than their own, will inevitably have their general costs raised permanently, because make no mistake, surge pricing will inevitably come to an end, once Wendy’s realizes the maximum price points every region could sustain while not losing too many customers.

So as much as I’d love to see this become the beginning of the end for the company as a whole, and we’ll see some Wendy’s burn to the ground as if there were a Black Lives Matter demonstration going tits up outside them, it’s unfortunately going to end up with a shitty fast food company getting all the information they need in order to jack up their costs and ultimately make even moar money, while the Americans that have no choice but to sustain themselves on fast food, suffer even more.

#TRYHARDSZN2024

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Feels like it’s starting earlier than usual: two South Fulton teenagers accepted into 63 and 50 colleges respectively, trying really hard to not humble brag about it

It’s apparently already started, that time of year, in which throughout the country there are overachieving high school seniors who begin announcing, as loudly as they can on social media, just how many colleges they have been accepted to.  Some aim for the stars and only go for the cream of the crop like just the Ivy Leagues, and usually upper echelon schools like MIT, Johns Hopkins and Stanford, and then there are others who just apply for every school under the sun, as if there were no such thing as application fees.

And once the acceptances start rolling in, if the number is impressive enough, then onto the internets they go, boasting-not-boasting and humble bragging about how many schools they’ve been accepted into, with the hopes that some media outlet catches wind of it and puts any sort of spotlight onto them at all.

Of course, it can’t be ignored the dollar amounts of all these scholarships love to be extrapolated and added together, so that there can be somewhat of a tangible number to implement a degree of success and value of their accomplishments as a whole, and regardless of if and when they inevitably choose to go to whichever school is giving a full ride, no matter how lesser-heralded it may be, doesn’t change the fact that they put themselves into a position where they could brag about how many schools, simply said yes, you may attend our prestigious institution of higher education if you are willing to pay our egregious costs for credit hours, books, boarding and other bullshit expenditures.

But let’s get #TRYHARDSZN2024 off with a bang, with these two teens in my old stomping grounds of South Fulton county, which is the area’s PC way of lumping together the hood sections of the Southwestern region of the Metro Atlanta area.  But despite the fact that when watching the video in the article, there appears to be a whole legion of tryhards that have been accepted into 10-15+ colleges, these two particular teens who have hit 63 and 50 acceptances get the spotlight as being the biggest tryhards of the tryhards.

Sure, most of the schools that I was able to catch in the article are mostly smaller school, HBCUs, and schools nobody has really ever heard of, there were some notable Power-5 schools that have shown interest in them like Michigan State, Iowa, Kansas, Oregon and Mississippi State to name a few. 

Continue reading “#TRYHARDSZN2024” →

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.