Tag: observations

Ichiro is going to kill someone someday

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

You heard it here first: Ichiro Suzuki, the baseball player, is going to kill someone.  Be it his wife, his father, his mother, or even himself – there will be death by his hands in some way, shape, or form, one of these days.

ESPN has been getting a lot of praise recently for this story they just dropped about the tumultuous winter of 2017, where the 44-year old Ichiro was not sure whether or not his professional baseball career was over or not.  But because he’s this machine-like creature of habit, trained and conditioned since he was a kid to play baseball, he doesn’t know what else to do, other than train and prepare for the next season, regardless of his employment status or not.  Completely on his own, no less, away from his wife and his parents, whom it’s revealed he has a completely fractured and broken relationship with the dad that put him on the path that made Ichiro into Ichiro.

During the span in which the article is being written, Ichiro is signed by the MLB team in which his career started, the Seattle Mariners, and the prodigal son is returning home, for what is in all likelihood his final season.

But it’s the journey of uncertainty in which Ichiro embarks on that really makes me question his grasp on reality, and paints a picture of a kind of sad existence of a person whom has achieved greatness and immortality in the world of baseball, but is apparently completely out of touch and a total stranger to what the real world outside of baseball is actually like.

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Imagine if I actually got paid to share baseball ideas*

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Not that anyone but me, or any other baseball geek that’s remotely interested in baseball statistics and the Moneyball game of salary management within the sport, would care, but Eric Hosmer just signed a free agent deal with the San Diego Padres.

This is not really major news, even by baseball standards.  Hosmer seems like a pretty good guy, and I’ll always remember how synonymous he was for the leadership he exhibited in 2015, leading the woeful Kansas City Royals to their first World Series championship in like an entire generation.  The team he signed with, the San Diego Padres, haven’t been good nor remotely relevant since Ray Kroc owned the team.  The bottom line is, Eric Hosmer is a pretty low-key baseball star, and the Padres are a very low-key existing baseball team, so the union of them isn’t particularly groundbreaking news, even despite the fact that sheer lack of free agent signings has been a somewhat notable topic throughout this baseball offseason.

However, the thing that’s the most interesting to me is the structure of Hosmer’s deal with the Padres.  The bare bones summary of the contract is that it’s an eight-year deal for $144 million dollars; but it’s not as simple as saying Hosmer will be getting exactly $18 million a year, because rarely will there ever be a long-term deal where a player simply gets the average number between the total amount divided by the length of the contract.

Typically, baseball contracts are often structured in a manner in which a player makes a pretty reasonable amount the first year, but then the annual salary of ensuing years typically ramps upward, and usually the last 2-3 years of a contract are where they peak, and you’ll see players making ludicrous Oprah-rich numbers of like $20-30 million dollars during those later years.

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Exposing convenient revisionist history

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

With Marvel Studio’s Black Panther on the horizon, spouting all sorts of racial rhetoric about it being historic and things other than a comic book movie, Washington Post contributor Sonny Bunch drops Mjolnir on the truth of the matter: before Black Panther, there was Blade.

Obviously, Blade happened way before the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and long before there was an odd existence of Marvel movies between FOX, Sony, and whomever produced the turds of Ben Affleck’s Daredevil, Nicolas Cage’s Ghost Rider, and the poor Jessica Alba Fantastic Fours that I’m too lazy to expend the few seconds to Google.

But for all intents and purposes, Blade is still a Marvel property, and therefore seeing as how the title of the film is named after him, makes him the first ever Marvel production starring a black person in the titular role.  As much as the internet and the rest of the world really want to claim Black Panther is this evolutionary revolutionary, in the grand spectrum of comic book films, it’s really not.  It’s just another addition to a library that’s way bigger than lots of people want to believe, for the sake of pushing a very expensive agenda in order to expedite the recouping of a gargantuan budget.

I love this article because Bunch does a great job of anticipating arguments to his article, and stomps them out before they can even be made, like pointing out all the other films, as small and as obscure as they may have been, being made in ages prior to the current internet, that have long beaten Black Panther to the punch as far as identifying black directors, black soundtracks, and other black things that are especially under the microscope now that we’ve traversed into February, the vaunted Black History Month. 

I hope he dropped a mic after this piece went to publish.

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A free weekend of wrestling

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It doesn’t happen that often, but it turned out that I had an entire weekend free to watch all of the wrestling available for the Royal Rumble weekend.  Weather derailed my hopes of breaking in my new grill with its maiden meats, and all I really wanted to do alternatively was absolutely jack shit other than watching NXT Takeover: Philadelphia and the Royal Rumble.

Surprising no longtime fan or wrestling smark, NXT Takeover was the true gem of the weekend, as just about every single match on the card was pretty good, and I can’t help but wonder what goes through the mind of Vince McMahon sometimes knowing that both his daughter and his son-in-law are basically openly declaring war on his own product with their own personal projects in the women’s evolution and NXT.

Since NXT developed and turned into the officially televised developmental product and started putting on shows since Arrival, they have pretty routinely outperformed the main roster, and just about every single Takeover event has outshined the primary shows that they’re supposed to be the lowly undercard for.

Superstars are given the time and leeway to properly build up their characters, let feuds develop, and are given the latitude and clock in matches to put on actual good matches.  This was no more prevalent than at the last Takeover, where just about every single match on the card had some degree of development behind it, and wasn’t just some fly-by-booking where opponents are pitted against one another without reason.

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I want to enjoy food as much as Kasumi does, someday

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Going down the Netflix rabbit hole, after I finished watching Midnight Diner: Tokyo Stories, the immediate suggestion by the algorithm was a show called Samurai Gourmet.  Upon watching the preview; not like I had any choice, because Netflix forces previews upon you like James Franco’s alleged sexual aggression, I decided to give it a flyer, because I was sad that I had watched all of Midnight Diner and was wanting to get more of that peaceful, slice-of-life feeling that it had provided, and a show about a retired man leisurely seeking food to savor and enjoy seemed like it had some potential.

Now I don’t think it’s as good as Midnight Diner, but Samurai Gourmet has so far been pretty enjoyable as well.  Whereas Midnight Diner was more about a centralized location and the people that gravitated to and around it, Samurai Gourmet is conversely centered around a singular person, freely flowing to different locations.  However, it does manage to capture that light-hearted feeling and emotions of internal thought processes and the enjoyment of comfort foods in perfect circumstances.

I feel like the best analogy for the show is that it’s like Stephen King writing, when he was still in his literary prime.  He’d take something like his protagonist going into the kitchen and doing mundane things, and somehow bilk 5,000 words, mostly adjectives to describe every little activity, before the last two paragraphs in the chapter are loose ties to the inevitable aliens/demons/monsters/spiders that the story is supposed to opposed by.  Except in Samurai Gourmet, there is no supernatural villain to derail Castle Rock, just protagonist Kasumi’s own imagination of his inner samurai dealing with his fairly minor conflicts.

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Content choice paralysis

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I highly doubt it, but I wonder if I’m the only person who goes through this: I sit down to watch some streaming television, and after I open Netflix/Plex/Hulu/WWE Network, I find myself browsing and searching through these gargantuan catalogues of content, and before I know it, 45 minutes have passed, and the time I earmarked to watch some television is mostly gone.  A 60+ minute episode/movie doesn’t really fit into the schedule, and nothing I want to watch is one of those 22 minute shorts.  Ultimately, I end up watching nothing, but have added ten new things to the watchlist that I’ll inevitably ignore in the future and repeat the process all over again.

To say that there’s a wealth of content out there is an understatement.  The catalogues of crap out there are never ending, and the fact that it’s all over the internet reinforces the notion that it can be cycled in and out of circulation at the drop of a hat at any given time of the day, week, month or year.

This is why shows have such short lifespans, because the pressure to immediately succeed is so high, and failing to get an 11 out of 10 often times means cancellation, or falling by the wayside by the next avalanche of programming that’s waiting in the wings at all time. 

Frankly, it’s mind-boggling just how much stuff is out there, and I’m having a really hard time of keeping track of what’s decent, what’s not worth investing time into, and I’m finding that my standards are kind of molding into modern standards, because I’m not giving shows enough time to mature and develop, because they themselves aren’t giving themselves enough time to do such, and begin to suck, and I’m already thinking of what I could be/could have been watching instead.

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The worst part about Black Mirror season 4

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It’s only six episodes, and I am already finished with all of them.  Lord only knows how much longer it’s going to be until there’s another season, and even still, new episodes are going to have to be written and filmed and edited and this is maybe one of the only flaws with entire seasons being dropped on Netflix, when you get engrossed in something and blow through it in just a few sittings, you’re left feeling empty and unsatisfied at the prospect of there being no more on the horizon.

Anyway, I was super excited when I heard that Black Mirror was coming back for a fourth season, so I gave it the excitement treatment: avoiding absolutely anything and everything about it until the date it released, so that I could be completely blind and have zero preconceived notions going into it.  Frankly, I don’t think there’s any way to possibly enjoy things any more than doing that, because just about everything gives way too much information away.

In short, I enjoyed season 4.  The show invariably had the challenge of producing fresh content despite being four seasons in, and I think the challenge proved to be such at times, but overall by the time I had gone through all six episodes, I was left with a feeling that I was sad that there was no more, and wishing that there will be more in the future, sooner rather than later.

I do think the season started off with a bang, with USS Callister, an absolute marvel of an episode that was a spectacular blend of a good story, excellent acting and really stellar visuals, with the definite homage to old episodes of Star Trek.  Contrary to the start of the entire series where there’s a fairly unanimous agreement that The National Anthem was a terrible way to start the series, season 4 definitely hits the nail on the head by starting out with their best episode first.

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