Day: June 20, 2017

Not a day goes by

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I’m still subscribed to my former home’s community on NextDoor.  Partially, because it slipped through the cracks and I neglected to address it after I had moved out, but also in part because it’s turned into this inadvertent source of amusement, fascination and a constant reminder of how glad I am to not live in the community anymore. 

Don’t get me wrong, I loved the shit out of my old house.  The house itself was great, and if it were remotely possible to uproot homes, and plop them down onto other places like Sim City, I totally would.  It’s just that it just happened to exist in a community that went in completely the wrong direction from where I had hoped it would.

Needless to say, based on shit I read on NextDoor on nearly a daily basis, the neighborhood has progressively been getting worse since I moved out.  And after every single I read about disgruntled residents of my old community, and all the neighboring communities dealing with some unfortunate issues on too often of a basis, all I can do is shake my head and take a huge sigh of relief.

Like, the first few weeks of life after the move, I was admittedly in a state of unease at the general change in life.  But as the transition eased, and the NextDoor notifications continued to trickle in, with stories of break-ins, shared security cam recordings of suspicious activity, and oh yeah a shooting incident, all melancholy feelings were gone and completely replaced with pure, unadulterated relief.

Residents airing out their grievances, passively-aggressively shaming behaviors they don’t agree with, and my favorite, the rant featured above, are daily occurrences on NextDoor now, and it’s like a trainwreck that I can enjoy even more, now that I’m but a mere bystander, and not a fellow resident.

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As if there were any reason to like Clayton Kershaw more

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I like Clayton Kershaw.  Dare I’d say, I’m a fan of Clayton Kershaw. He holds a little bit of history for me as a baseball fan; in 2008, when I really embarked on going gung-ho about visiting ballparks, and my friend and I hit up Southern California to hit up the Dodgers, Angels and Padres, the first park on the trip was Dodger Stadium. 

We had little idea of what to really expect, since neither of us were Dodgers or Cardinals fans.  We knew we’d see Albert Pujols, and I knew that I wasn’t going to see the Dodgers iteration of Andruw Jones, because he was already out on the disabled list.  We didn’t even know who was starting for either team, so on my Samsung A920 flip phone, I looked up to see Todd Wellemeyer for the Cards, versus some guy we’d never heard of named Clayton Kershaw.  Who?

Another cursory glance showed this Kershaw kid from the minor leagues who had like a 9.7 strikeouts-per-nine rate (which is extremely good) who was making his Major League debut.  Pretty cool, we thought, getting to see some hotshot prospect’s debut.

And he didn’t disappoint, either, as this Clayton Kershaw guy went six innings and struck out seven.  He didn’t get a decision, but the Dodgers went onto win the game in extra innings.  But we knew we had just seen the start of potentially a really good pitcher’s career.

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Dwyane Wade might have learned his lesson question mark

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Not that I pay much attention to the NBA offseason, a headline caught my eye that revisited a topic I wrote about a long time ago: “Dwyane Wade leaning towards picking up $24 million option.”  This was amusing to me, because I remember writing about, in great detail, the foolishness exhibited by Dwyane Wade a few years ago, when he opted out of two-years, $40 million left on his contract with the Heat, thinking he could make more as a free agent, but then being grossly incorrect, and ending up signing a new deal back with the Heat for three-years, $31 million, thus losing a guaranteed $9 million on a really bad gamble.  Owned.

Anyway, it’s pretty incredible that a dwindling talent like Wade would even get the opportunity to revisit this decision, but for what it’s worth, he has name value and some talent left, and we revisit a familiar crossroads in his career, where he is looking at the choice between a one-year, $24 million option year, or declaring the scary, scary waters of free agency.  And considering the fact that he’s now 35 and his numbers have been on a gradual decline over the years, it seems like a very obvious choice on what he should consider, but then again I thought the same thing back when he took the chance anyway, and gambled away $9 million dollars.  Owned.

So it seems like kind of a no-brainer that Wade is leaning towards accepting the $24 million option year, because there’s no guarantee that he’s going to get a multi-year deal that can exceed that, let alone match it.  Although it’s still speculation, and “he’s leaning,” there’s still no guarantee that he’ll actually accept it, even if were the most ingenious idea in the world for him, but I hope for his sake that he learned his lesson in the past and will actually just take the guaranteed fuckin money and not be so greedy, although it would be the quite the hilarious story if he ended up gambling again and then ended up getting the shaft again, and signing like a two-year deal for like $18 million with like, the Milwaukee Bucks.  Owned.