Month: June 2022

Imagine if your existence was to one day become a chip?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I saw this bag of effectively, chicken chips at Sprouts, and I had to stop and examine the bag.  10 grams of protein from chips?  Servings per bag, two?  So I could effectively get 20g’s of protein by crushing this bag of chips made from chickens? 

But then I was like mehhhhhhh because I had no idea what to expect from a taste and consistency standpoint of chips made out of chickens.

But then I had to pass by the display again on the way to the register and they were 2/$7 and next thing I knew, I had bought two bags.  The other one is chili lime.

Honestly, they’re not that bad.  Crunchy like a potato chip, and frankly they taste kind of like Pringles.  And I get 20g’s of protein, which is always important to people who exercise and lift weights.

Really though, what I really thought about, and what served as the impetus for this post, was the sheer thought that a chicken, a living, bleeding bird, was somehow reduced to becoming, a chip.  Not a potato, not corn, not some other vegetable.  A chicken.

And then I got to thinking about what humans would feel like if we were ever overtaken by a more intelligent species that also was higher on the food chain than we were, and decided to one day reduce humans as a food source to not just any food, but chips.  Like I imagine a person getting one of those cheese slicers taken to them to carve out thin, malleable slices of their flesh, and they’re deep fried to become chips for creatures who eat people want to eat.

Fucked up to think about sure, but this is what my mind wandered off to while I was indulging in chips made out of chicken.  Better them than us, I suppose.

There are no winners in the Freddie Freeman saga

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Man, despite the fact that it’s pretty well known that Freddie Freeman is about the most likeable human being to ever play the game of Major League Baseball, I wouldn’t ever have imagined him being the center of one of the more dramatic baseball storylines to have occurred in, well, this generation, so to say.

To quickly summarize, as quickly as a wordy blabbermouth like myself can do: 2021 was the last season of Freddie Freeman’s contract with the Atlanta Braves.  Inexplicably, the Braves win the World Series, everyone is on cloud nine, Freeman is all but expected to re-sign with the team.  Over the winter, baseball actually goes into a labor-centric lockout, where teams are prohibited  from negotiating contracts with players.  Lockout ends, everyone maintains that Freeman is guaranteed to re-sign with the Braves.  Somewhere along the path, negotiations don’t seem to materialize and suddenly news breaks that the Braves have made a trade for Matt Olson, the all-star first baseman from the Oakland A’s, effectively dropping the mic and saying that they are moving on from Freddie Freeman, sending shockwaves throughout Braves Country™.

It was reported that Freddie Freeman and the Braves were unable to come to terms of a deal, citing that Freeman wanted a six-year deal, but the Braves were only willing to offer a five.  It wasn’t long afterward that the Los Angeles Dodgers would sign Freeman for six years, and in terms of business, the saga was complete.

However, in the media, the saga continued as after all the involved teams started buttoning up their rosters, words would emerge from the Braves’ camp, and Freddie Freeman himself, and a very sad and almost tangible sense of hurt feelings from both parties would continue on.  The Braves blathering on about how they’re a business and that no one person is above the team, Freeman insinuating that he felt slighted that the Braves didn’t pursue him hard enough, and all over the place, be it other baseball peers, fans, legends, everyone’s taking sides on who they backed in this surprisingly public beef between the Braves and the former face of the team.

Regardless, the dust would settle fairly quickly because Freddie Freeman is better than everyone else and allowed it to resolve and said all the right things, because he’s just such a good fucking human being, and the 2022 season would begin with the Braves embarking on a life post-Freddie, and Freddie suiting up for the goddamn Dodgers of all other teams out there.

Needless to say, the weekend of June 24th was earmarked heavily by the Braves and their marketing department, because it would mark the one and only visit of the Dodgers to Atlanta on the season, and the first-ever visit of Freddie Freeman as an opponent.  As the date drew nearer, I heard that the team was resorting to standing-room tickets because the demand was so high.  And as the team had been doing all through the year, which is something that I thought was pretty cool, was doing individualized ring ceremonies for any contributors from the 2021 squad who had moved on to other teams.

So the weekend came and went, with the Dodgers taking the series 2-1, in three fairly heavily contested games.  As expected, Freddie Freeman’s return was an emotional event for pretty much everyone, as he was given a hero’s welcome and all the respect in the world, numerous standing ovations and cheers no matter that he was a Dodger.  Freeman cried at least 57 times throughout the weekend, basically every time he was behind a microphone while he was presented his World Series ring, and any time he had a moment with a former teammate.

It’s clear that there was and always will be a tremendous amount of mutual love between the Braves and the city of Atlanta and Freddie Freeman, and the games themselves were kind of an afterthought compared to the giant lovefest of Freeman’s return.

But then just a day later, news broke that seemingly out of nowhere, Freddie Freeman had fired his agent, Casey Close of Excel Sports Management.  The timing of it happening right after the visit to Atlanta raised eyebrows everywhere and next thing we know, the book of the Freddie Freeman saga is being reopened.

Continue reading “There are no winners in the Freddie Freeman saga” →

Dad Brog (#090): 27 Months

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Let the record show that it is month 27 in the life of #1, my eldest child, and we have embarked on a journey where the roles have reversed with my kids.  #2 is now the low-maintenance chill kid, easy-going, amicable and easy to please throughout the day.  Which means #1 has transformed into an emotionally volatile goblin, incapable of knowing what it is they want with life from second to second, resulting in more often than not, nuclear meltdowns.

Not just whining, but full-on tears and dribbling snot, shrieking, sometimes going down to the ground to throw tantrums kind of meltdowns.  Things that placate on Monday are ineffective on Tuesday, and things they liked at 11 am are declarations of war by 4 pm.  Almost every suggestion of activity, food or book is responded with a shrill NO [noun] and then ensuing whining.

Despite the fact that mythical wife doesn’t want to believe in them, I think these are what we might have to classify as an introduction into, the terrible twos.

We’re trying our best to keep our cool, and I think we genuinely are doing well at not caving into her outbursts, but it is most definitely tiring and more exhausting than younger times dealing with a perpetually irate toddler.  Admittedly, I meet a lot of her tantrums with laughter, because it really is kind of hilarious to see how she’s evolved, and mixing all of her accumulated learned intelligence with the vocabulary she’s amassed. 

Like we’ve read to her several books about dealing with emotions and how when one gets mad, they should take a deep breath.  Sometimes we the parents get agitated from so much of her bullshit, and if she sniffs out our frustration, she’ll immediately tell us to take a deep breath, like really??

Obviously we know that this is a phase and it shall eventually pass, but whooowee, is it testing of our patience.  Suddenly gone is the sweet and agreeable daughter of mine whom I could read pretty much any book I wanted to before bed time without any argument, but in her place now is a psychotic little goblin the demands the same two Sesame Street stories, except she goes ballistic when I start them and insists on being the one who turns the pages but then loses her shit when I can’t keep up with how fast she’s turning them.

And of course, the possibility of by the time she works through this phase, #2 could very well be on her heels and embarking on the emotional path of destrucity herself, leading to mythical wife and I to ponder just how much time is left before they’re old enough to be independent.

Oh, Atlanta #577

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these but obviously, it’s the same old song and dance that I just don’t have the time.  Honestly I feel like if I ever wanted to do one of these every day, I’m sure I could find a story absurd enough to warrant a post.  But there are days like today where the story came to me for a change of pace, and upon seeing it, I knew it was inevitable that I had to write about it:

Deadly shooting occurs at a Subway; over too much mayonnaise being put on a sandwich.  I really can’t make this shit up, even if I tried.  But to expound on the unfortunate situation, basically a Subway employee put too much mayo on a customer’s sandwich, they became irate, and then words began being exchanged, and the next thing you know, they’re opening fire into the restaurant and killing the employee.  The manager on duty promptly returns fire because of course they’re packing too, and the whole thing ends with the shooter arrested, an employee dead, with the employee’s sister who also worked there, also shot and in critical condition.

Also, the 5-year old kid of one of the women struck was there and watched their mom get shot.

Typically, these kinds of posts are dripping in sarcasm and are more of a you’ve got to be kidding me in an ironically judgmental funny way, and I’ll be honest that this is how I felt when I started writing about it.  But honestly, it’s nothing really funny about it is as much as it’s just fucked up and sad that there are people out there that genuinely felt that the best course of action to resolve the dissatisfaction at getting too much mayo on their fucking Subway sandwich is to pull out a gun and start shooting like Yosemite Sam.

I know this particular Subway, and where it is, and it is very much not in a particularly good part of town.  It’s riding a line where everything east of it is touched by the magic gentrification fairy, and are in a period of where there are people hoping to cash in on rising property values and get paid, but on the west side of the thoroughfare is basically still the Jurassic Park of ghettos.  So it’s not really any surprise that this kind of incident happened at this part of town, but it’s still tragic and fucked up that there’s literally a person dead over mayonnaise on a sandwich.

Guess all that’s really left for me to say is that I’m sure glad I don’t work or really have any business being in the city proper anymore, because I’d sure hate to get in the crossfire of any sort of altercation over shitty fast food.

Are my expectations too high or am I employing subpar talent?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I have decided to make a post about this instead of venting further to mythical wife because she’s probably beyond exasperated hearing me gripe, and my friends’ group chat doesn’t seem like the most appropriate place to do it either.  I’m not concerned about my hire ever discovering my brog either because pretty much nobody but me reads the bullshit I write and frankly the worst things that could happen is it might open their eyes to their shortcomings, or prompt them to quit, which in turn would force my hand at finding a replacement that might be better at the job anyway so it’d be a win-win either way.

But long story short is that I am not particularly satisfied with my current nanny situation, and I’m really over in-home child care in general, in spite of the fact that it still beats the alternative, which is putting my children into the petri-dish of daycare where they might get abused.

When it was just one kid, I employed a nanny, because it was still the peak of the pandemic, and our collective maternity/paternity time was coming to an end, and we needed someone to watch #1 during the day while I worked from home.  One adult to one child worked out great and was relatively easy for that duration, but as we all know, #2 came pretty quickly afterward.

There was a lot of time where there was adequate coverage for both kids, between mythical wife’s second maternity leave, my second paternity leave, my mom coming down for a few weeks, but there was a definitive point on the calendar when all the coverage was going to dry up, and it was going to inevitably be the nanny covering both my kids, solo.

Well, that didn’t last very long at all.  I think, maybe four total days, until they basically had a mental breakdown, ghosted us and then basically quit over the phone with me weeks later.  #2’s challenging sleeping habits basically broke them, putting us in a horrendous situation where we had to scramble to find a new nanny very quickly, in an extremely nanny-favoring market, due to the number of people who are embarking on hybrid or alternative working situations.

Fortunately, we found a new nanny fairly expediently, and they quelled our initial concerns on being able to handle both of my kids, as they have been doing nanny work for well over a decade.  But it came with a catch; they had to be able to bring their own one-year old child with them, which meant they were effectively in charge of not just two kids during the work day, but three.  However, they assured us that it was doable, so we agreed to hire, and it was a brave new world.

At first, things were going pretty good.  In spite of the perceived difficult of wrangling three kids all under two years old, they never seemed to get frazzled, always kept cool, and every time I asked if they were good, if they were okay, it always was.  I admired their ability to keep cool under the pressure of multiple infants and toddlers, and their experience in their careers as well as their own parenthood really showed.

But occasionally, there were some behaviors and actions that were done that made me scrunch my eyebrow, like showing too much initiative, by rearranging my entire kitchen and doing some cleaning, which is kind of outside of their job description, as long as it doesn’t pertain to the kids.  At one point, I got a text message that was all like teehee, I owe you a Diet Coke, and this one bottle of Diet Coke that I’d been sitting on was taken.  I was a little miffed at that one, but this person was taking care of my children, so I could let one stolen soda slide.

Continue reading “Are my expectations too high or am I employing subpar talent?” →

Let’s talk about AEW x NJPW Forbidden Door

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

In spite of the seemingly endless parade of criticism I have for AEW, I was very interested in Forbidden Door, the alleged AEW x NJPW collaborative super show.  Obviously, I use the terminology alleged, because I feel like anyone with a pair of eyes probably might’ve been able to see that it was and was going to be a basically AEW show, featuring some guys who happen to wrestle for New Japan.

And when the dust settled and the show was over, I didn’t have to wait twenty seconds before I exclaimed to my group chat of bros I was watching with, that the show was fairly beneath the perceived expectations, and that this was entirely an AEW show, with some NJPW loaned out to the card.

I mean, the show itself wasn’t terrible.  It was an entertaining show with some good matches, some great performances, and had a lot of things that I was happy to see, like FTR continuing to collect tag titles, winning the IWGP heavyweight tag titles to add to their collection of ROH and AAA, and the return of Cesaro Claudio, which makes me happy as a fan to see a guy I’ve long admired, get back in the ring and shine.  Pac winning the not-intercontinental All-Atlantic championship was something I had predicted and I always like being right, and on that note I also basically predicted to a tee, the very ending to the fatal four-way between Jay White, Kazuchika Okada, Adam Cole and Hangman Adam Page.

But from what this show was billed as, built up to be, and what it should have been on paper, Forbidden Door fell way, way, way short of the expectations of everything the fans wanted to see when this ball got rolling.  Sure, there were a fuckton of injuries to AEW’s roster leading up to it, and drama with NJPW involving Kota Ibushi, so there were many notable names that couldn’t even be on the show.  But AEW still has a roster of 4,000 guys, and sometimes all you have to do is put some talented guys together and storyline be damned, let some motherfuckers work.

No Kenny Omega, no Kota Ibushi.  The Young Bucks were smooshed into a multi-man match, and Will Osperay was given Orange Cassidy.  And as much as I’m happy that Claudio is back to work, AEW had no shortage of guys who might’ve been able to step up to Zack Sabre, Jr. but they stuck to existing storylines and kept a lot of the roster tied up to where the only option they really did have was to bring in Claudio, which is also perplexing.

And not to dig up some old dirt, but I couldn’t help but notice that TNT champion Scorpio Sky and TBS champion Jade Cargill were absent from the entire event.  Also Keith Lee, Swerve and Max Caster were all pre-show matches, meaning the entire primary event was completely devoid of black talent.  I mean, I got a lot of enjoyment watching the shitshow grave digging Tony Khan did to himself when Big Swole accused him of being a racist, but you see shit like this, and I can’t help but think that lil’ TK might want to implement a DE&I department on his team or something.

Furthermore, of all the names that were on the entire card, like two Japanese guys actually got any sort of positive rub, the whole night.  Hiroshi Goto got the pin in the first dark match of the night, Shingo Takagi got to in El Phantasmo, but pretty much all the Japanese guys were jobbing all night long.  This isn’t to say that all NJPW guys were losing, but the only ones to get any notable victories were the very white Jay White and Will Osperay.  I’m just sayin’

But the biggest ding on the show in my opinion was that after the main event was over, and Jon Moxley was crowned (the bullshit interim) AEW champion, instead of there being some sort of positive send off, respect between the two companies, the show comes to a close with Chris Jericho’s stable hitting the ring to attack Moxley and Tanahashi, before Moxley’s stable hits the ring and brawl back, and the announcers are literally talking up the next episode of Dynamite on TBS not TNT.

Immediately I have flashbacks to WCW Sin in like 2000 when the company was so in the shitter at the time, that they were using their PPV to try and hype up the following night’s Monday Nitro, and thinking just how sad and pathetic it was.  Either AEW is already hitting that point in their promotion’s lifetime, or they’re really that disrespectful of NJPW to be disregarding everything they’ve pitched into the show to already be looking ahead to their own promotion’s future television.

But anyway, I’d give the show a solid 6/10.  There were a lot of positives to have come out of the entire night, but I think many wrestling fans would agree that if things were just a little bit different with roster health, no territorial restrictions and less internal drama, Forbidden Door really could’ve had the potential to be a mega show that could change the course of the industry.  Instead, we were all left with just a show, that was okay, but not even close to scratching the potential of what could’ve been.

Dad Brog (#089): Father’s Day, for the rest of my life

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

#1 of until the end of my time

A while ago, mythical wife asked what I wanted for Father’s Day.  Usually whenever anyone asks me what I want for my birthday, Christmas, or now that I’m eligible, Father’s Day, I have no idea.  I don’t have a want for things except wrestling blets, and understandably nobody(ies) want to drop $300+ on effectively useless straps of fake leather and metal plates.

However, this year, I had an answer pretty quickly, because I have been thinking of it for a while.  And the best part is that it doesn’t cost a thing, but will still have unlimited value and meaning for me for the rest of my life.

What I wanted for Father’s Day this year, and every single year for the rest of my life, is a photo with my daughters, holding their tag team championship blets.  That’s it.  There’s nothing else I’ll ever need or want more than this every Father’s Day, than this request.

I figure there would be no better opportunity for me to pull this card than Father’s Day, as the my girls grow and get older and intelligent, and inevitably think my blet collection is lame and stupid.  But being Father’s Day, they’ll have to acquiesce to this small and simple request, and I’ll have them right where I want them, next to dad for a yearly photo.

I love time-lapse photography, and what I’m hoping is to one day have an impressively long photo album, built a year at a time, of myself with my daughters as they grow, blossom into the beauties their mom’s genes have set them on the course for, and watch the changing of expressions as they may be excited and exuberant as kids, begrudging and embarrassed as teenagers, but then come around and be happy and accepting of tradition as young adults and maybe one day mature women and maybe mothers in their own right.

Either way, this photo makes me happy, and I’m hoping that this will be the first of many, many years of similar photos, of forcing my children to participate in their lame dad’s hobby.