Month: March 2021

A great way to start the MLB season

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Impetus: umpire Angel Hernandez loses lawsuit against Major League Baseball, accusing them of racial discrimination

If you’ve watched a season, or at least a regular month of steady baseball, there’s a good chance you’ve heard the name Angel Hernandez.  He’s an MLB umpire, and there’s a very good chance that he’s blown multiple calls for the team you’re rooting for.  In all fairness, he holds no bias against any particular team, as he has been consistent in the sense that he fucks everyone over at some point, regardless for whom they play for.

Also consistent, is that he is widely regarded as the worst umpire in all of Major League Baseball, and it’s not just my opinion; he’s literally been voted as such and for other (dis)honors for years at this point.  A cursory Google search will return not just links to stories about how he’s the worst umpire in MLB, but there are all sorts of video montages, memes and various forms of mediums that frustrated baseball fans have created throughout the years to share their opinions justify the notion that Angel Hernandez is the worst umpire in all of Major League Baseball.

It’s not even that he’s one of those stereotypical blind umpire who misses calls all the time; to me, it’s mostly because most of his decisions seem like reflexes, but the instant he’s challenged, he buckles down and absolutely refuses to change his mind, and the act of challenging his decisions is a personal attack to which he will hold a grudge for the remainder of the game as well have a harshly reduced trigger when it comes to ejecting players and coaches from the game.

This is nothing really out of the ordinary for all umpires in general, it’s just the perception is that Angel Hernandez relishes in it, seems to instigate incidents that have actual impact on the outcomes of games, and as Chipper Jones once opined, he tends to occasionally try and make the game about himself, instead of baseball.

Basically, it’s not hard to find evidence that Angel Hernandez is a pretty detested human being, but as long as he’s physically capable of doing his job, it doesn’t seem likely that he’s going to be going away any time soon, much to the dismay of fans and baseball players and personnel alike.

Anyway, just because he wasn’t content with everyone hating him as an umpire, Angel Hernandez decided to wander a little out of his realm to try and stir up more shit, and decided to sue his employers, Major League Baseball, and accuse them of racial discrimination, specifically towards him, because he is Cuban by birth.  He cited the fact that he was repeatedly overlooked to work World Series assignments as well as be promoted to crew chief status as means for discrimination, not considering the fact that World Series assignments are typically reserved for umpires that don’t suck at their jobs so that umpiring doesn’t impact the most important series of the year, and that MLB umpires literally go until they die, and there are still multiple guys with more seniority ahead of him for crew chief status.

Well, it only took four years because America’s legal system is fucking efficient, but the U.S. District Courts wrapped things up and sided with Major League Baseball, giving baseball fans and probably all sorts of MLB personnel and players a shit-eating grin of a victory against an asshole everyone wanted to stick it to for years but couldn’t, because umpires are given such absolute power on the field.  But frankly Hernandez made a huge mistake taking this battle off of the playing field, where he would be vulnerable and by god did the legal system capitalize on it.

Hernandez’s handful of cherry-picked examples does not reliably establish any systematic effort on MLB’s part to artificially deflate Hernandez’s evaluations, much less an effort to do so in order to cover up discrimination

The use of the phrase “cherry-picked” leads me to believe there’s a hint of vitriol in the judge’s remark, and seeing as how the judge is a man originally from Lexington, might’ve been a Reds fan, whom at one point witnessed a game (or many games) where Angel Hernandez turned the screws to his team, so he had a very easy opportunity to return the favor.  Completely coincidentally, the photo I used just so happened to be Angel Hernandez in action doing just that, to a Reds player.

I think the best part to me is that this wrapped up the day before the regular season was to begin.  There’s something about it that feels like MLB saw an opportunity to get this shit rushed and concluded right before a season was to begin, and give Angel Hernandez a humiliating loss, but at the perfect time where he wouldn’t have time to lament about it, since he has to get right back to fucking work on Opening Day no less, and take the field after being slapped with a defeat where he wasn’t omnipotent.

I can’t commit that I’ll actually watch any real amount of baseball this season, as I am a terrible fan plus I will have two kids by the time the playoffs roll around, so most likely I’ll be one of those guys that’s invisible throughout the entire regular season, and only show up in October when the Braves go back to the usual status quo of getting bounced in the NLDS, if they even make the playoffs at all.

But as far as the start of the season goes, Angel Hernandez getting bitch-slapped and put in his place by Major League Baseball, that’s a great way to start it, no matter how you look at it.

The new IWGP blet makes me go IWTF

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Despite my general admiration for New Japan Pro Wrestling, I don’t really follow them beyond the snippets of news that pass through my Apple News feed, or whenever a wrestling fan bigger than me brings it up on social media.  But if there is always one thing that is relevant to my interests, it’s whenever blets are brought up, regardless of what fed or promotion they might be for.

So one of the more prevalent storylines throughout NJPW over the last few months has been double champion Kota Ibushi striving to unify the IWGP World and IWGP Intercontinental championships.  I actually give NJPW some credit for taking this and making it into a storyline, instead of just merging them, as it created yet another solid matchup between Ibushi and Tetsuya Naito, with Naito trying to “rescue” the Intercontinental championship from unification, only to fall short in his efforts to strip it away from Ibushi.

With Naito vanquished, the path to unification was clear, and the above blet is the ensuing result.

I’ve definitely seen worse blet designs in my life, but my first impression when I saw the new, unified IWGP World Championship blet, was definitely, a WTF face.   The center plate basically looks like a Phoenix emblem from X-Men comics, and as a belt, it just looks really imbalanced.  I’d hate to feel what wearing that blet would be like, since the top part of the plate juts out at angles, and any sort of abdominal contracting would have them digging into your ribs.  But I guess if you’ve got the action figure-physique that someone like Kota Ibushi has, he can probably just no sell it all the same.

Aside from the design, I’ve heard that the decision to unify the blets has been mostly unpopular, due to the general history that the IWGP Intercontinental championship has carried throughout the years.  Even in the shorter time that I’ve followed NJPW, guys like Shinsuke Nakamura, El Sombra (Andrade), Tetsuya Naito and Chris Jericho were notable carriers of the belt, and much like the WWE’s IC blet, it’s one very much given to workhorse types.

But the reality is that at this current juncture in time, with coronavirus having rampaged the world much less rosters of all professional wrestling promotions, NJPW just has too many blets for as diminished of a roster that they have.  Aside from their unified title which encapsulates two blets now, they’ve still got the NEVER championship, the IWGP US championship, heavyweight and a jr. heavyweight sets of tag team championships, and a jr. heavyweight championship. 

Frankly, they practically have enough blets for most everyone on their entire roster to have one at this point, so shelving the intercontinental championship isn’t a bad idea, because most anyone with a brain should know that the blet will be back in the future when the pandemic is behind us, the rosters start expanding, and then they’ll have the perfect opportunity to do what NJPW does best, which is have some massive tournament, where a brand new IWGP Intercontinental champion will be crowned.

Back to the main point though, I’m not impressed with the new design of the IWGP championship.  Bootlegs as they may be, I’m glad that I have replicas of the former World and Intercontinental championships, and I most definitely wouldn’t plunk down $2,400 for a replica of this new blet.

Maybe in the future, when the IWGP Intercontinental championship comes back, it’ll have a design worth paying for a Pakistani bootleg, but until that day comes, RIP IWGP Intercontinental championship.

**EDIT: it figures Kota Ibushi loses the championship in his first substantial defense after getting the new blet.  Given the fact that it changed hands to gaijin Will Ospreay, I wouldn’t have put it past New Japan to have make it some microaggression, symbolically made sure the old, prestigious blet wouldn’t be held by someone not Japanese or some weeb lifer like Kenny Omega or Scott Norton.

This is where the ‘You Sold Out’ chants would start

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment


The funny thing is most people weren’t aware how close Greg Valentine and JYD were in real life, in spite of this horrifically racist promo from 1985

That is, if the WWE actually had live crowds anymore.  The inspiration of this post comes from news that NBC’s Peacock streaming service, which acquired the entire WWE Network library and has formally liquidated it as of a few days ago, has begun going through their archives and scrubbing all sorts of perceived racist content.

I’ll be the first to admit that professional wrestling has a long history of having done some racist shit during its existence; but that can be said about absolutely everything that’s been around as long as the business has.  If Dr. Seuss, the freaking godfather of children’s literature was found out to have made some racist illustrations way back in the day, it should be no surprise when Triple H had a feud with Booker T with some severely racist undertones not so way back in the day.

Racist shit is all pretty bad stuff, but it happened, will always happen, and in spite of all the rah-rah rhetoric that’s thrown around left and right these days, I unfortunately wouldn’t wager a single penny that it’s ever going to go away any time soon.  It’s sad to admit that, but would you rather I lie about how I feel?

But one consistent opinion I have is that I am absolutely not a fan of any sort of revising of history, no matter what it is that’s trying to be canceled, censored, hidden or deleted from the past.  It doesn’t matter if it’s confederate statues or episodes of Community, I abhor the idea of anything that’s been created being deleted because they’re perceived as offensive.

Personally, it’s not so much it’s because I’m callous and fucked up and want racist shit to exist in plain sight of everyone, as much as I firmly believe that creators of these things need to own that this shit has happened, but most importantly, that they’ve (hopefully) learned something over the passage of time, and that such opinions and thoughts might not be their actual beliefs today.

The mistakes of the past are lessons for the present, of things that should be avoided, should be corrected, and should be worked towards improving upon, and not buried in the closet, stashed in a plastic Publix bag and hidden inside of an Amazon Prime cardboard box behind a larger box that was never unpacked from the last time you moved homes.

NBC going through the WWE video library and trying to scrub out racist content is no exception to these opinions of mine, and I wince and look at NBC with disgust at their cowardly attempt to hide the past instead of trying to learn from it.  When this stuff was all on the WWE Network, the WWE just slapped a disclaimer on all old content, succinctly explaining the content of these programs reflect their original air date’s time and ideals, and that not everything is applicable to modern times.  But NBC being so lily white homogenized, just would rather delete it from existence, to where, as Winston Churchill once said,

Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it

Imagine one or more of Triple H and Stephanie McMahon’s kids; if the WWE Network still existed when they’re old enough to watch some of the old content, they’d eventually come across the aforementioned HHH vs. Booker T feud.  Daddy could easily get in front of the topic, and explain to his kids the implications of the storyline, that they were wrong, that he was just acting, but to not replicate that sort of behavior or thinking.  It could be an actual teachable moment.

But in the Peacock world we’re living in now, his kids will never see that daddy portrayed an arrogant racist in a storyline, and one day, someone will find a clip on YouTube of daddy saying “you people” to a black man, and Hunter’s kids will come to their own conclusions and realize that daddy is racist.

He’s also into necrophilia when he was feuding with Kane, but for some reason, NBC seems to think that racist content is just a little bit more offensive, and his kids would be able to see that regardless of the platform but anyway.

The point is, I really dislike that NBC is doing what they’re doing, but frankly I’m disappointed that the WWE liquidated their fantastic network in the first place to sell to NBC.  I know coronavirus really put the hurt on the industry, due to the complete tanking of live events and all the revenue that comes with that, but this shit will pass, but what’s done is done, and WWE sold their shit out. 

I don’t know if they ever knew just how influential they were to the world we’re in now, where damn near every media company has an app now, and as much as none of them really would want to admit it, almost everyone’s eyes were on the WWE Network when they launched, and it was through them, most realized that they could survive and thrive on that model too.

But now they’re a tiny cog in a larger machine, that’s also going through their hallowed libraries and censoring all of their old shit that they think might hurt someone’s feelings.

You-Sold-Out!  You-Sold-Out!

My 600 Lb. Diet – fin

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

After seven days, I decided to throw in the towel on the Dr. Nowzaradan 1,200 calorie diet.

It’s not so much that I couldn’t handle the diet, as much as it was that I had actually started doing some research on what was and what wasn’t healthy numbers of calories to ingest, and what it really boiled down to was that 1,200 calories a day for someone as active and capable as I am on a daily basis, just was not a good thing.

I actually began to have doubts as soon as day 2, but I compromised with myself and gave myself the rest of the week to make sure that I wasn’t just going through knee-jerk doubt, and to stick it out just one week, to see if it might get easier or if it really was something that was capable of defeating my willpower.

As I said, it’s definitely something that I know I’d be capable of doing for an month, but not without its own series of inconveniences, outside of just hunger and radical energy spikes.  What helped justify the decision to call it after a week was that I was also running out of the healthy food that I had bought to embark on this test, and the thought of having to go to Costco again, just for a whole bunch more meat was about as appealing as the idea of sprinting through a forest naked.  Apathy and laziness trumped Dr. Now in this regard.

Speaking of apathy and laziness, 1,200 calories, in spite of being way below normal for just about anyone, much less an active and capable person, works for rapidly reducing weight for people who inherently live sedentary lifestyles and are already morbidly obese, but for all others, it’s just simply not enough calories to operate without there being some parts of the day in which your body feels sluggish from having no energy to burn, and occasional hangriness, even though we know it’s a thing.

The real kicker though for me was when I looked up general calorie calculators, on how many calories someone like me should be consuming in a day (photo above), and seeing how if I wanted to lose weight at a normal pace, two times of 1,200 is what I’d be allotted to have each day, a little bit less than that, but still significantly more than 1,200, if I wanted to “lose quickly.”

And anyone who’s ever taken any sort of interest in nutrition knows that when your body goes into a deficit, the first place that it goes into is typically muscle, and seeing as how I’ve already shriveled and likely lost a bunch of mass from the last year of pandemic and no-gym, losing even more was the last thing in the world I wanted to happen.

I could have adjusted the diet, and stayed low-carb/high-protein and just consumed 1,800 calories a day, but then it wouldn’t have been the Dr. Nowzaradan 1,200 diet; and that was the point I was trying to make, being able to do.  So after the seventh day, I went to bed knowing that the following morning would be back to normal for me, where I could have cereal, I could have creamer in my coffee, and the world of food options was once again my oyster to where I could eat whatever I wanted. 

Final Number after 7 Days:

Initial weight: 189.4 lbs
Final weight: 185.8 lbs (3.6 lbs lost)
8,310 calories consumed
951.5 grams of protein
$67.56 worth of food for 21 meals and 18 snacks

My 600 Lb. Diet – Day 7

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Today marks one full week of eating as if I were a featured patient on My 600 Lb. Life, wanting to get weight-loss surgery from Dr. Nowzaradan [Bariatric Surgeon].

Honestly, it hasn’t been so much difficult adhering to a 1,200 calorie diet, so much as it just sucks having these weird energy spikes from being hungry to eating and feeling normal for a little bit before your stamina bar depletes down and then it’s kind of a slog until the times when more food enters your system.  And in spite of my claims to be able to eat the same things over and over again on end, I guess it should be modified to be more along the lines of being able to eat the same trash over and over again on end, because there’s a difference between eating Willy’s for 240 days out of a year versus if I had to eat the same canned chicken and spinach salad every day for lunch for the same amount of time.

However, in some ironic sense, today’s menu was kind of altered, on account of the fact that I’m running out of the first week’s supply of food.  The package of Kirkland turkey and the Kirkland-branded canned chicken have been depleted after six days, and basically my only source of protein left are the one flank of salmon I have left, and a whole shitload of chicken breakfast sausages – so I’ve been eating a shitload of chicken breakfast sausages today.  Which is actually fine, because those are among the things I liked the most during this week.

Also, I picked up a bottle of hot sauce, because the stuff has zero calories and adds a ton of flavor to just about anything.  Much like the tagline for Frank’s goes, you really can put that shit on anything.

Regardless, today has been somewhat of a challenge, mostly unrelated to food however.  The guinea pig we had to take to the emergency vet last night, somehow required being there for 5.5 hrs in the end, which doesn’t change my perception that they prioritized every dog and cat that was brought in over my little pig, regardless of how much sooner I came in, and I didn’t get to bed until around 3 am, knowing that I only had three hours to sleep before it was time to start my child’s day.

But as is the norm in my life, I endure, I solder and I keep on moving along, regardless of the myriad of stress, frustration and general disdain I might feel.  Always forward.

Breakfast – Same as Day 3

Snack

  • 1 link Amylu chicken sausage (43 cal, 4g pro)
  • 1/2 slice Martin’s whole grain bread (55 cal, 2.5g pro)
  • 1/4 cup Daisy low-fat cottage cheese (45 cal, 6.5g pro)

143 calories, 13 grams of protein. Total cost: 70¢

Lunch (pictured above)

  • 5 links of Amylu chicken sausage (215 cal, 20g pro)
  • 2 cups of spinach (20 cal, 1g pro)
  • 1 slice cheddar cheese (80 cal, 5g pro)

415 calories, 26 grams of protein. Total cost: $1.99

Snack (same as earlier)

  • 1 link Amylu chicken sausage (43 cal, 4g pro)
  • 1/2 slice Martin’s whole grain bread (55 cal, 2.5g pro)
  • 1/4 cup Daisy low-fat cottage cheese (45 cal, 6.5g pro)

143 calories, 13 grams of protein. Total cost: 70¢

Dinner – Same as Day 1

Exercise

  • 50 sit-ups (50)
  • 120 push-ups (25, 25, 40, 30)

Total
1,186 calories, 105.5 grams of protein.
Total cost: $7.96

My 600 Lb. Diet – Day 6

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I’m finding that the biggest opponent of staving off hunger is staying awake longer than is necessary.  Actually, I knew that, because back in like 2006 when I was actively dieting pretty well, I had some pretty regimented hours because my life wasn’t in a particularly good place, and I slept a lot to deal with a lot of the depression I was dealing with, so I went to bed at pretty predictable hours and had a pretty routine schedule as far as eating went.  It was probably close to intermittent fasting before intermittent fasting was coined.

Dealing with a possible emergency situation with one of the house’s pets and went to an emergency clinic for the first time ever.  Now I’ve heard lots of things, mostly negative about emergency vets, but almost all of them involve lots of waiting.  Which is kind of fair, because you’re going with no appointments, the on-call doctors there have to react and diagnose quickly, and things can go tits up with one bad decision.

Regardless, I sat in the parking lot for two hours after being told 30 minutes to an hour, watched several cars that came after me leave before I did, so I called to find out what was up, only to find out that my pet hadn’t been seen yet, and “was next” in about 30-45 minutes.  I told them I didn’t live far, and they finished the statement for me by telling me to go home.  So instead of doing the critical schoolwork I had planned on doing this evening, in the indeterminable window of time it will take for my pet to be seen, I’m catching up on writing this diatribe as well as summarizing my Dr. Nowzaradan diet’s day, as I have been doing over the last week.

But yeah, I’m typically in bed by now, and the hunger I’m feeling isn’t registering while I’m asleep.  But because I’m not asleep, the hunger is real, and I know I’m not eating again until like 7:30 am.  Combined with anxiousness over the wellbeing of my pet, this is not a particularly good way to start a very well-needed weekend.

Breakfast – Same as Day 3
Snack – Same as Day 1
Lunch – Same as Day 1
Snack – Same as Day 1 + 0.7oz extra turkey (end of package, 30 cal, 5g pro)
Dinner – Same as Day 1

Exercise
• 50 sit-ups (50)
• 125 push-ups (25, 70, 30)

Total
1,225 calories, 129.5 grams of protein.
Total cost: $9.35

Moar AEW observations

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

As my schoolwork has begun loosening up a little bit, I began trying to play catchup on all of the wrestling that I’d missed throughout the last month.  Naturally, this would include TNAEWCW, and I got many a great chuckle out of the unimpressive fireworks display they constituted as an exploding ring at their last pay-per-view event that also makes me wonder how their PPV buyrates are in a day where so many people are now used to basically getting PPVs for free through the WWE Network.

Anyway that said, I blew through four episodes of Dynamite just because I wanted to see how a couple of things that I’d heard happened, happened, and as much as I clown on AEW for being TNAEWCW, I still like some of the things that they’re doing, and always do hope that things will eventually get better . . . someday.

A couple of things really stood out when watching a whole bunch of TNAEWCW at one time, and I will disclaim that I fast forward through a whole bunch of the matches themselves, because for a smark like me, the matches themselves don’t always matter so much as I like to see how storylines progress, guys cutting promos, and general flow of segments.

First: AEW really does operate like two separate promotions under the same umbrella.  You have one chunk of the roster all in this weird sub-promotion within AEW that revolves around the TNT Championship, and then you have another chunk of the roster that’s entirely focused around Kenny Omega, the Young Bucks, the Elite, and any and all remnants of any sort of Bullet Club/New Japan talents, even if they are Impact guys like Carl Anderson and Luke Gallows, and whomever they’re feuding with at the time, which appears to be Jon Moxley, Christian and for some reason, Eddie Kingston. 

There practically no crossover between the two sub-promotions, and the show might as well swap out ropes and mats between segments, they’re so diametrically different from each other.  The nepotism that AEW fought in year one is clearly no longer being held back, and now that the inmates run the asylum, they’re letting all their fantasy ideas come to fruition, even if it means lots of actual AEW talents are getting their TV time usurped by guys from other promotions.

Second: Rey Fenix and Britt Baker are the MVPs of AEW, hands down.  I’ve been high on both of these talents pretty early on, because it was pretty prevalent that the two of them, regardless of their actual win-loss records or active storylines, are the top male and female talents on the roster, in terms of consistency, workrate and screen impact.

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