Month: November 2020

Talk about missed opportunities

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Reason #786 why it’s stupid to have a season of any sport in the middle of a pandemic: Denver Broncos lose all eligible quarterbacks due to coronavirus prior to game against the Saints

I’m not just saying this just because the Braves didn’t win the World Series, but because it really is stupid and foolish to have professional sports seasons in the middle of a pandemic that’s claimed over a quarter million American lives.  And this past weekend was just more reminders of just how stupid everything sports really are, and how wholly unnecessary they really are in the grand spectrum of trying to live in ‘Murica.

On Saturday alone, regardless of the fact that I don’t really watch much college football much less television in general, I still am curious to see who’s winning and who’s losing on any given day because I’m fascinated with how a ranking system even happens and Ohio State is somehow ranked #4 in the nation despite playing in like, four games total, because of coronavirus and all the cancelled games.  And then in the top-25 filter alone, I see that five games are cancelled/postponed due to coronavirus issues, and I’m left wondering how there’s any sort of credibility at all this season, when just about every team has played an uneven number of games, so I have no earthly idea how there can be any sort of ranking system that doesn’t have more holes in it than Swiss cheese?

I guess it doesn’t really matter though, because when the day is over, it’s still going to be Alabama and Clemson in the playoffs, along with whatever always-runner-ups like Ohio State and Notre Dame to job to Alabama and Notre Dame, setting up yet another Alabama vs. Clemson National Championship.

But then I see this interesting article (above) about how the Denver Broncos have inexplicably lost all three of their main roster quarterbacks due to coronavirus exposure, and my interest is immediately piqued by the idea of wondering what the fuck an actual NFL team would do in the event there were no available QBs.

Obviously, the team would call up whatever scrub they had taking snaps on the practice squad, but I really do feel like the No Fun League really let the Broncos and all sports fans down by shooting down all other potential ideas that were floated around out there, like letting an assistant coach start the game at QB, or my favorite idea of them all, letting linebacker VON “ELWAY” MILLER start the game as QB.

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Few things are as satisfying as watching shitheads turn on each other

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

More specifically: after losing Georgia to Democrats for the first time since Bill Clinton, the baked potato publicly lashes out at Georgia governor Bubba Kemp for not helping him cheat to win, states he is ashamed to have ever endorsed him

Actually the headline is a little inaccurate, as it’s more accurate to say that the baked potato has turned on Bubba, while Bubba, in typical Bubba fashion has cowered completely to his lord king in chief and has gone completely silent in response, like a scared cat that just saw a cucumber.  Just like he went completely quiet after the baked potato publicly lambasted him after “reopening” Georgia way too soon amidst the pandemic, he’s basically in hiding until the heat dies down.

There’s really not much more to say about this, honestly.  Baked potato is just steaming because he lost Georgia, a state that’s historically almost automatically red, and for the first time since I’ve lived here, I can really say that I’m proud to be a Georgia resident. 

I wrote a few more paragraphs but Word shit the bed on me and lost it all, and I have no desire to re-write any of it because it’s about politics and once is too much as it is, so I’ll just leave it at the fact that I love watching shitheads turn on each other, and it’s great to see them flaming each other instead of respectively griefing the state and the country instead.

Biting on the Sale Price Fallacy

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

When I started my journey of taking online surveys to make money for future blets back in July, as I’ve stated numerous times, the end goal really was to be ready for whenever if and when and mostly if, the WWE Shop would release a replica of the NXT UK Tag Team Championship blet.

Well that still hasn’t happened, and since the belt debuted in 2018, they’ve released countless “tribute” blets, which I put in quotations because almost all of them are entirely existing plates, screwed onto new and gaudy straps, individualized to whichever wrestler they’ve decided to “tribute,” and then charge anywhere from $500-800 for them.

Shawn Michaels, Bret Hart, Eddie Guerrero, Ric Flair, John Cena, Edge, Triple H and even Chyna have had tribute belts made in their honor.  The Rock and Macho Man Randy Savage have had custom belts designed as theirs.  As noted in the past, Xavier Woods’ YouTube channel’s belt has even been made available. 

Hulk Hogan has tribute belts both to his red and yellow persona, as well as his nWo Hollywood Hogan character.

The Undertaker has had two tribute belts made, this year alone. 

I know it’s a big deal that 2020 marks 30 years in the WWE for the Undertaker, but you know who’s probably the most sick of all this Undertaker tribute-ing?  The Undertaker.  Mean Mark’s made little secret of his generally low-key secluded life when not actively being the business, so I have to imagine a guy like him is put off by all this attention, but does it because of all the paychecks he’s going to continue to get for the rest of his life, by unwavering loyalty to Vince McMahon, but even still, that’s a whole lot of fuckin’ Undertaker to absorb throughout a year.

Anyway, because it’s painfully evident that the WWE Shop is in no rush to ever, if at all, release the NXT UK Tag Team Championship replica, I’ve long past the theoretical full MSRP of a brand-new release blet, and just been continuing to earn more money on the surveys that I do, because why the fuck not?  It’s an easy way to make a little bit of side scratch, and hopefully eventually one day, the blet I really want will actually be made available.

But in the meantime, because of the time of year it is, I noticed that the WWE Shop decided to drop some Black Friday deals of their own, including on blets, and despite the fact that they didn’t have the one blet that I really really wanted, I still felt some excitement and almost a need to capitalize on the fact that they were deeply discounting so many of their inventory.

This is obviously the sale price fallacy, where I simply wanted to buy something solely on the fact that it was on sale.  And despite the lack of NXT UK Tag, I still had in the back of my mind some choices that I’d be willing to pull the trigger on, if they were on deep discount, and seeing as how they all were, I winced and realized that I was about to make an impulse purchase on one of them.

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Man, What A Stupid Commercial #017

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Plot: family jonesing for some small business ice cream is sad to discover shop is still closed, inspires small business to pivot business model to a delivery system.  Small business owners allegedly uses solely Adobe products to rebrand and expedite their customer-facing identity

Yes, I have dusted off this old series from the days prior to the brog going down for several years, as there will never be an end to commercials that are capable of triggering my ire and unleashing the snark.  It’s not that I ever abandoned this series as much as a combination of brog downtime, the improved avoidance of commercials by virtue of streaming television, plus the baby I now am responsible over which further takes me away from television watching, that has collectively reduced my exposure to commercials outright, but it’s always been a thing I’ve enjoyed blabbing about, because most everyone can agree that commercials suck, and I can typically keep these posts shorter and sweeter than a lot of the other drivel I tend to go on about.

The funny thing is that in spite of all the reasons why I don’t get exposed to many commercials, on Thanksgiving, my father-in-law turned on the actual television to watch some football, and at the time the only game on was Redskins Washington Football Team vs. Cowboys, and it took all of five minutes for the game to go into a commercial break and expose me to a commercial that immediately caught my attention as something needing to be blistered on the brog.

Make no mistake, I am all about supporting small business and ice cream, and the general narrative of the commercial itself is sweet and pleasant.  It’s just the fact that it’s a commercial for Adobe that I find both objectionable and unbelievable that inspires me to write about how much bullshit it turns the entire commercial subsequently.

There’s no fucking way a business can rebrand and change all of their UX/UI through Acrobat and Sign.  Why they advertise it as such is completely beyond me, and in order for this much action to occur, undoubtedly the entire Creative Suite would be necessary to utilize.

But most importantly, what the commercial fails to convey is the sheer unreliability and instability of Adobe products these days, and sure they can eke out a 60 second spot to look all happy and cheerful, but off-camera there’s probably numerous hours lost to Adobe software crashing over and over again in the process of altering the brand of Mila’s ice cream shop, and scenes where Mila herself is ready to throw her computer(s) onto the ground when the constant software crashing has her questioning why she’s even trying to pivot her business in the first place.  Feeling resentment at the little girl who taped a picture to her door and making her feel sad in the first place.  Cursing the monopoly Adobe has on the entire graphic design industry, justifying their position to release subpar software at egregious prices.

Furthermore, without question, after the camera stops rolling, the drone stops responding and crashes back down to earth, and when Mila’s truck turns around to investigate, it too stops responding, and crashes into someone’s house, because that’s what Adobe products do: stop responding and then crashes.

This commercial is false advertising.  Happy Thanksgiving!

Why are people still inspired by Anthony Bourdain?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Every now and then while scrolling through theFacebook, I occasionally get a glimpse of someone posting some picture of Anthony Bourdain with some evocative quote he said at some point during his living life, probably from one of the television shows he hosted throughout his career.  Don’t get me wrong, a lot of the things he was paid to say on television were pretty good things and sounded pretty inspirational, but when the day is over, what perplexes me is why people hold him in such high regard still – last time I checked, the guy committed suicide; I’m not entirely sure that I’d want to take any sort of influence from him anymore.

If it’s something I haven’t said before, I personally don’t really have a lot of respect or sympathy for those who kill themselves; sure, every case is different, any maybe some people have such miserable lives that suicide is somewhat of a mercy, but in the cases like celebrities like Anthony Bourdain, who had celebrity, had money, influence, access and basically the easy life, all I can really do is shake my head and tilt my head like a confused dog at notion that their lives were so difficult and nobody understood them that they somehow rationalize that the only logical thing for them to do next is to kill themselves.

That being said, I’m often wondering why people still hold him, or at least the shit he’s said to such reverence as it’s done to this day?  Not that I had a tremendous amount of respect for some celebrity whose shows I never watched, but I didn’t really have any opinions against the guy, until I heard that he hung himself.  All I really wanted to ask was if his life were really that tormented and baseless that the only possible next step was to leave it?

It then got me thinking about the finale to The Good Place.  And as much respect and admiration I have for Mike Schur for having created Parks & Recreation, I did enjoy The Good Place, but the ending really got me thinking about the metaphorical implications of the finale, especially in comparison to the topic before.  Requisite spoiler warning ahead:

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I need to just not leave my house anymore

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Today, mythical wife and I went out so she could find some holiday decorations for the house.  As it is our child’s first holiday season, she felt it was important that we make the house somewhat festive and relevant to the seasons, and I’m okay with that idea.

While we were driving to our destination, you’d think there was no pandemic still going on, based on just how slam-packed the shopping centers and surrounding streets were.  Parking lots getting backed up, because the access roads were being congested by the volume of cars getting stuck at lights, causing this colossal domino effect of typical traffic that I’m appalled but not surprised is going on given the whole pandemic thing that’s supposed to be encouraging people to be staying home when necessary, but we are in the midst of the holiday shopping season, and coronavirus or no, people are absolutely out and about.

When we got to the store, naturally my daughter shit her pants in the car, as is the usual routine, and it seems apparent that for the first years of her life while she’s still in diapers, that I’ll have to build in an extra ten minutes to any car ride at all, to account for the inevitable deuce that happens like clockwork whenever we go anywhere.

But anyway, when we got to the store, it took all of five seconds of being inside of it, did I spot the first no-maskers milling about, acting like nothing at all was wrong with ‘Murica and the air they breathed was as clean and pure as it probably is at the highest altitudes of the Appalachian trail.  Not long afterward, their shithead sons joined them, also wearing no masks, and the feeling of disgust immediately began bubbling up within me.

And while we were there, this one family was hardly the only cluster of people not wearing masks, and I saw several other individuals and families also shopping sans masks.  The ones that bothered me more than the no-maskers were the people who were wearing masks; around their necks as not on their fucking faces, obviously having said “I wore my mask to avoid scrutiny coming in, but now that I am inside, off with it until I’m reprimanded.”

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How easy it can be to forget

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

During lunch, I ran out to run a few errands.  It was a beautiful fall afternoon, and cool enough to where it was appropriate to wear one of the numerous hoodies that I own because I like hoodies.  I drove out of my neighborhood, admiring the beauty of fall leaves and colors everywhere, and the gratification in knowing that my own property no longer needed to be raked anymore, due to my hard work.

I parked my car, and popped the hatch and grabbed the garbage bag full of baby clothes that I was going to drop off at Goodwill.  I was two steps walking towards the building when it hit me that I wasn’t wearing my mask yet.  Annoyed at the brain fart, I set the bag down and quickly retrieved my mask from the driver’s seat console and put it on.

Eight months into the global pandemic, and here I am forgetting to put the mask that all people with a modicum of intelligence and/or courtesy make mandatory of themselves.  It’s like, the day felt so pleasantly ordinary for 30 seconds that I forgot that we’re still in the middle of the aforementioned global pandemic, and the dreadful reality that there’s literally still no end in sight.

Scary how the world can look and feel so ordinary, so back-to-how-life-used-to-be, but still be the arena where an easily-preventable but still devastating disease is always wafting around all over the place, indiscriminately waiting on some idiot with no sense or too much freedom to latch themselves onto, and keep the cycle of spreading alive for yet another victim.

Such a reality check was enough to reel me back from feeling pleased with the weather to feeling the need to be weary about the people around who may or may not be as CDC-compliant as I try to be with myself, and that the world is still a scary fucking place.  It’s scary just how easy it is to forget it sometimes.