Month: April 2017

APORKALYPSE NOW

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Last weekend, I drove past a Hardee’s in South Carolina, and I saw on a fairly nondescript roadside sign saying “APORKALYPSE IS HERE.”  The sign was pointing at a Hardee’s, but the name “aporkalypse” definitely caught my attention.

Was this a rogue franchise making up an item?  Or was this something on a broader-scale release?  It didn’t matter what, I couldn’t stop repeating the word in my head, and I felt that I had to know.

Man, it’s hard to imagine the times in our lives when we all didn’t have smartphones and mobile internet, and couldn’t acquire information at the drop of a hat, wherever we were.  Thankfully being out in the sticks of South Carolina wasn’t enough to choke out mobile data and I was able to Google what aporkalypse was, and now I know what I’m going to have for breakfast over this weekend.

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An ugly, ugly classic

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If there’s ever any reason why college basketball is so often lauded as amongst the most exciting of sports is that it’s seldom that its annual national championship is ever decided in a decisive or completely unanimous manner.  It doesn’t matter if a team goes undefeated throughout the regular season, they will inevitably run into a serious contender be it a team from another conference, or the Cinderella story that’s making a miracle run, or a team that hatched the perfect plan to counter them, or sometimes all of the above.

The 2016-2017 National Championship game seemed kind of lackluster in the sense that it featured two #1 seeds, in Gonzaga University against the oft-present University of North Carolina, especially since the Zags took down Cinderella in the Final Four when they took out South Carolina and UNC dropped Oregon who was having their own surprisingly deep run in the tournament.  But few people ever want to see two #1s going at it for the National Championship, since that’s kind of the expectation, and sports fans typically want to see the unexpected, the Cinderellas, and the underdogs prevail.

But as is often the case with the National Championship, the game was definitely no snoozer, and despite the claims and the accusations that Gonzaga was a paper #1, meaning they didn’t really deserve their rank on account of playing in a weak conference, especially in contrast to their opponents who plays in the ACC against very strong basketball programs like Virginia, Louisville, Syracuse and Duke, they still showed up to play, and gave UNC tremendous resistance in a hard-fought, foul-plagued and ugly slugfest of a basketball game.

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Settling on second best

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I know baseball just started today, and naturally the Braves begin the season with a loss, in spite of a pretty impressive pitching duel being Julio Teheran and Noah Syndergaard, but if there was one sports headline that caught my attention more than anything else, it was the announcement made by Georgetown University, declaring that the next coach of the once-vaunted Hoyas, would be none other than Georgetown alum, and former NBA player, Patrick Ewing.

I know that Patrick Ewing basically carried the Hoyas to their only national championship back in like 1984, so I get why they think that he has the pedigree to lead the school’s basketball program into a renaissance, but I don’t really think that they really thought about what his career amounted to after he left Georgetown. 

I won’t deny that I was a gigantic Knicks fan back in the 90s, and at one point I even had a Patrick Ewing jersey.  But there’s also no denying the sheer amount of failure endured by Patrick Ewing throughout his professional career; losing the 1994 NBA Finals, the missed finger roll in 1995, watching the Knicks flourish in his injury absence in 1999 and making the NBA Finals, only to lose as soon as he was reactivated to play, and about the 766 times he was tormented and owned by Michael Jordan and/or the Chicago Bulls throughout his career.

Make no mistake, there’s pretty much nobody in the history of basketball that symbolizes failure, falling short, dashed expectations and broken dreams more than Patrick Ewing.  I wanted Patrick Ewing to get an NBA ring more than anyone back in those days, as a member of the Knicks.  But year after year, the ring never came, and the window of opportunity opened and shut in the span of my formative years.  I watched MJ crush his hopes, then Hakeem Olajuwon, then Reggie Miller.  And then Tim Duncan showed up and emerged to stamp nails into his Knicks career before he started bouncing around the NBA to teams like Seattle and Orlando.

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The new and unfortunate normal

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A major and historical in the worst kind of way thing happened in Atlanta this past week, when an entire block of I-85, well, broke.  A massive fire started underneath the bridge portion of I-85, and for whatever unfortunate reasons, the joints holding up a chunk of the interstate, basically fell off, leaving a sizable and impassable hole in the bridge, severing the stretch of highway that connects Montgomery, Alabama all the way to Richmond, Virginia, going northbound.

The fallout is fairly substantial, and the repercussions of having an impassable chasm are massive.  Anyone going northbound in, or through Atlanta will now have to reroute on either I-75 or just taking I-285 around the city.  GA-400 isn’t accessible going north anymore, because the hole is quite literally right before the exit to 400 North.

Sure, I’ve made plenty of jokes about how the hole basically reminds me of the bridge jump from Speed, or how the fires were basically when Tyrion Lannister used wildfire to blow shit up, and the internet has once again made a mockery of Atlanta and it’s apparent penchant for stupid shit like this.  Fortunately, nobody was hurt and there were no casualties aside from thousands of pissed off commuters, otherwise such might be in bad taste.  However, the reality of the situation is that this is going to be a massive and inconveniencing situation for all of Atlanta, and those who need to pass through Atlanta.

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Initial thoughts on ScumTrust Park

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Originally, I had no intentions of visiting ScumTrust Park with any urgency.  I’ve made no secret about how much I abhorred the unethical means in which the Braves operated in order to get their brand new park, as well as the poorly veiled financial and racial intentions behind their decision to move.  And then the cherry on top, selling the naming rights to the unethically developed ballpark to one of the companies that I morally detest, giving them right to be the entity to call themselves the home to the Braves that are for lack of a better term, my home team.

It would’ve been easy to say that I would never go to ScumTrust Park, but I’d have been lying if curiosity wasn’t eventually going to get to me, not to mention when inevitably some bobbleheads would entice me to want to go.  But I figured I’d have waited until the hoopla, spectacle and honeymoon of newness passed, and when the Braves were in third or fourth place by June, then I’d keep my eyes peeled for some seats on StubHub at well below face value, and then make my way to ScumTrust Park to see how things were. 

But I got some tickets from mythical gf’s family over the holidays, and suddenly those plans were dashed.  However, the tickets were for an exhibition game intended primarily for season ticket holders, meaning a reduced attendance, because I loathe insane crowds, and ultimately, I didn’t pay for them.  And if anything at all, it would give me the opportunity to knock the park off my eventual list, but with slightly more reasonable conditions.

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