Tag: observations

Thoughts about Great White Flights

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

When I was sitting at a table waiting for my breakfast in Jacksonville, I was looking through some visitor guides, and the local weekly rags.  As nerdy as it sounds, this is something that I don’t mind doing, because it kind of gives me a little feel of what kind of community I’m in, and occasional good ideas of things I could do, especially in areas where I have no idea of what to do.

It didn’t take long for me to realize that anything that looked remotely appealing to me, whether it was a show, an event, or a restaurant, always had the same conclusion: go to some place not in Jacksonville.

Whether it was one of the numerous beaches that are due east of the city of Jacksonville, or frequently otherwise St. Augustine which is supposedly 45 minutes south of Jacksonville, just about anything that seemed hip or interesting was outside of Jacksonville itself.

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Is there any worse loser than Serena Williams?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Occasionally, I like to watch tennis.  I think it’s an often underrated sport because it’s not as popular as football or basketball, but on any given day, I’ll easily argue that it’s the most physically demanding sport on the planet.  Watching tennis while I’m running on the treadmill sometimes makes me feel like running in place is nothing, in comparison to what these guys are doing, running back and forth and swinging a racket while trying to place the ball in precise spots at speeds of over 100 mph.  So whenever there’s a televised Grand Slam event going on, I always find it convenient when it happens to be airing while I’m at the gym.

Today, while Andy Murray was having a match with some guy from Russia, I noticed on the ticker that Serena Williams had been defeated.  That in itself is always newsworthy, because Serena Williams is pretty much the best female tennis player in the game right now, and she doesn’t lose often.  Apparently, she had won like 34 matches in a row prior to this defeat, so it’s safe to say that this was most certainly a monumental upset.  But then something appeared at the corner of the screen, saying SERENA WILLIAMS PRESS CONFERENCE AT 11AM.  I looked at the clock and it was 10:56am.  I’m thinking, “what about this match I’m watching now?”  And the answer came at 11am, when the match stopped airing, and I was suddenly subject to seeing a distraught looking Serena Williams sitting at a press meeting.

It was at this moment, I turned off the television.

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Daniel Bryan and taking good back

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

6/24/13, Daniel Bryan vs. Randy Orton – Match of the Year

Obviously this is subjective, since I’m kind of more of a casual viewer than I once was, but it’s also worth noting that this is probably the longest stretch that I’ve been paying attention to wrestling in quite some time. Typically over the last few years, the pattern is that I start tuning again in around November when the baseball season is completely done with, all the way to around Wrestlemania which oftentimes coincides with the start of the next baseball season, and despite my intent to keep tuned in through the baseball season, I typically wane until the pattern repeats itself. That hasn’t really happened this year; whether it’s baseball’s importance to me drifting off, or the quality of WWE programming to keep me tuned in, I’ve still been capable of paying attention and staying somewhat on top of current storylines and happenings. I like to think it’s the latter.

Regardless, I still rarely watch any episodes of RAW or Smackdown live. I DVR both programs, and watch them at my own convenience; I’ve gotten pretty good at utilizing the +30 seconds button on the remote to fly through commercials, John Cena promos, and matches that don’t seem worth the time, and am capable of condensing a three-hour RAW down to about a little over an hour.

But anyway, as I was catching up this past Monday’s RAW, I found myself eagerly awaiting the main event between Daniel Bryan and Randy Orton. They’ve been running a program over the last month or so, where Orton has often been getting the better of through a series of lame-duck endings, while Daniel Bryan has been portraying an inferiority complex gimmick, which is getting massively, wildly over with the WWE fans, to a point where even management realizes that they have to do something about it.

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If ignorance is strength

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Then I must be a pretty strong motherfucker.

Like, this week, there’ve been a lot of pretty major notable events in the world that people are talking about.  Which is another way of saying that’s what people on my limited Facebook news feed are going on about, that I’ve got little to no clue to what it really is.  It’s not that I don’t care about all these things, but if it doesn’t affect my course of daily life, then I can’t really say that I’d be paying attention to it in the first place.

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The FrankenChipper Bobblehead

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

As I’ve already admit to, I traveled all the way to Hickory, North Carolina, so I could get a Chipper Jones bobblehead. Nevermind the fact that logically, there was absolutely no reason for a Texas Rangers affiliate, or a team that Chipper Jones hasn’t ever played for to be giving away a Chipper Jones bobblehead, when they announced that they were giving away a Chipper Jones bobblehead, I knew that I had to have it.

Thanks to myself for having way too much free time on my hands, and thank to my brother who graciously went to Hickory with me, I got the bobblehead, and it makes me happy.

But here’s the funny thing about the bobblehead; when I saw a picture of it on the Hickory team’s website, I thought to myself that it looked kind of familiar. That didn’t/wasn’t going to stop me from making the play for it, but I couldn’t help but feel like this rare minor league ballpark giveaway was going to be as rare as people like me were thinking it was going to be.

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Grant Hill probably wants to kill Jason Kidd

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

No seriously, I wouldn’t be surprised that behind that cool, calm and collected demeanor that Grant Hill always displays to the public, that there is a demon inside of him.  And that’s not a reference to his fancy white-collar Duke education and that he was also a Blue Devil back in those days, but more of a metaphorical devil of jealousy or resentment – towards the existence of Jason Kidd.

From the day they broke into the NBA in the same year, to just weeks ago when both had declared their retirement after 18 seasons, so often was the case was whenever Grant Hill’s name was mentioned, it wasn’t long afterward that Jason Kidd was brought up.  It’s fun for me to theorize by claiming it, and it’s most certainly realistically not deliberate, but as far as I see it, Jason Kidd has spent his entire career essentially, ruining Grant Hill’s career.

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I never knew that they were that cool

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I can’t remember when exactly it was, but I’m going to have to say that it was between the grades of either 5-7, in which I had to do a report on the peregrine falcon.  Now that I’m dwelling back on it, I’m pretty sure it was when I was in the seventh grade, because my science class was first period, and I had this teacher that was kind of racist in the fact that she was over-the-top nice to the world, but always pushed her veiled black power agenda on the rest of the class (aka replacing the name “Wite OutTM to Black Out”) but that’s beside the point.  When I was in the seventh grade I did a report on the peregrine falcon.

Obviously the subject matter was endangered species, and I was assigned the peregrine falcon.  I don’t remember a whole lot about the report other than the fact that peregrine falcons were in fact, endangered species, and how all publications back then were leaned towards blaming human beings for being the cause of all the destruction of nature, and subsequently the reduction in peregrine falcon numbers throughout the years.

I also remember that this was one of those scenarios in which being an artist was completely beneficial to my success, because like one of my friends back in the day, we both kind of last-second jobbed our reports.  The difference was that I presented mine way better, and with an artistic flair, and I probably managed to hide the fact that I was probably beneath the required word count, but damn did my presentation look cool in the end.  I vaguely remember getting a B or something, while he did not, and had a talkin’ to after class, about how obvious it was that he had half-assed it at the last second.

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