2 Under 2: the girls’ first blets (#042)

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Until my girls are old enough to make the choice themselves that they want to have their respective blets on their own walls, they will have a forever home on my office wall, alongside my existing collection.  It brings the total blets on the wall up to 20, but the reality is that I hope to someday relinquish these two blets to my daughters one day, and I will be the proudest dad in the world on the day I get to mount these onto the walls of their rooms.

I have to say that up until I received my replicas, I’ve always been kind of lukewarm on the design of the WWE Women’s Tag Team Championship blets.  Seeing them on television, I wasn’t ecstatic about the design, but I knew that after I learned I was going to have a second daughter, that I was going to want replicas of them anyway, because two daughters are a natural tag team, and they need to be recognized as the champions they are inevitably going to be.

But upon receiving the replicas, I’m quite blown away by the quality of them.  I don’t know if the actual blets are like it, but the replicas’ straps are more of a cream color than straight up white as I figured they, and all the other women’s blets in the company were, but it’s such a subtle thing that I really like.  The plates are impeccably crafted, and I’m both sold and thrilled that I have a pair of them to bequeath to my girls when #2 officially arrives.

It’s so lame, it’s so expensive and it’s so frivolous, but I don’t care.  Collecting blets is something that I enjoy and I hope that one day my girls recognize such, and would be willing to indulge their old man and want to carry a piece of his hobbies, at least onto their own walls to maybe show that they love me too, even when they’ll inevitably hate their parents for being squares and out of touch.

2 Under 2: making baby gates (#041)

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As most parents eventually need to do, mythical wife and I have gradually began baby-proofing the home as our first is completely mobile, fast as an Olympian, and is capable of being out of sight and with a dust bunny in her hand headed toward her mouth in the blink of an eye.  And the impending second child will only make the need to cordon off areas of the house that much more imperative, so we made the decision to section off parts of the home, so that we can (hopefully) be able to have to only monitor half of the home at a time instead of all of it.

The problem is, baby gates are ridiculously expensive, and considering we needed multiple gates, it seemed like something that we weren’t particularly interested in spending the money we’re already stretching thin on.  Furthermore, baby gates all have a particular cheap and plasticky look to them, and just because we’re frazzled parents doesn’t mean we have to turn our home into a giant billboard for like Fisher Price.

Mythical wife found this online tutorial from a lady who made her own baby gates from wood and gate parts, and looking through it, I’m thinking “hey I could do this,” so we made the executive decision to make our own gates.

I’m not going to get too granular with all the details, because there’s basically nothing outside of the steps the mommy in the link that I didn’t do, so if you really are curious you could support her and give her traffic, but I’m just going to kind of write out the things I did in the process, and hope that this turns into something of a substantial post that isn’t too boring.

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2 Under 2: The continuation of the new father brogs (#40)

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Seeing as how I’d been deliberating the fact that after a year, I don’t think I can really be called a “new” dad anymore, seeing as how I’ve gone through the initial minefield of trials and tribulations of sleep depravation, diaper blowouts and all sorts of things that are associated with bringing new life into the world.

And since the WWEShop was gracious enough to finally bring the cost of the women’s tag blets I had 100% intention of purchasing for my two daughters down to my target price point, I pulled the trigger, blets were received, this photo was taken, it seemed like now was as good of time as any to officially change over to a different category title for moving forward.

Most people who might be reading this (all zero of y’all) are probably aware that mythical wife is pregnant and that we’re on the path to bringing #2 into the world this summer, and that it is, another daughter.  I’d often had this feeling that I was destined to have at least one daughter, and I’d be lying if I didn’t have this suspicion that it seemed appropriate for someone like me to end up having a second, becoming a bonafide girl-dad twice over.

Regardless, mythical wife and I are on the timeline of having two children under the age of two, to which just about everyone has opined that we are definitely going to be parenting on hard-mode for the indeterminate future, which seems very obvious, but here we are. 

Despite the fact that it will undoubtedly be excruciatingly difficult at times, and I will probably have like 20 more dad brogs about how much life is hard, I’m sleep deprived, burned out and/or other moments of being stressed out, I still know that at the end of the day, I have loved being a dad to one child and I have all the expectations that I will continue to do so for two, no matter what challenges present themselves to mythical wife and I.

More importantly, since my first daughter will definitively have a natural tag-team-partner-for-life in a sister, it only seemed appropriate that the two of them would have their own blets to commemorate that lifetime partnership.  I imagine there will be plenty of times in which they will team up to the detriment of mythical wife and I, but if they’re working together with success in their mind, there’s only so much ire I could possibly have, and probably smile about the teamwork at a later time.

For now, the girls’ blets will remain in my office along with my collection, because mythical wife absolutely does not want wrestling belts hanging in their respective rooms that she has put a lot of thought into designing.  I acquiesced for the time being, on the condition that if the girls decide on their own that they want them in their rooms in the future, there will be no resistance.

If they are truly my flesh and blood, we all know how this is going to turn out.  But only time will tell on whether or not I’ll experience the next greatest day of my life in the future or not.

Minari: chicken soup for the Korean-American soul

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I finally got around to watching Minari.  I didn’t watch it because of all the Academy Award acclaim it was getting, nor did I watch it solely because it was a film about Koreans, starring Koreans and was produced by mostly Koreans.  I’ve been wanting to watch Minari because based on the premise of the film, it was something that I knew was probably going to hit home to a Korean-American person like me, and I went in knowing that there were probably going to be a lot of moments of reflection, reminiscing, comparing and probably shit that was going to make me cry.

Without giving anything away, the basic plot is a Korean family moves from California to Arkansas, primarily so that dad (Steven Yeun) can chase his dream of starting up a farm.  Naturally, this is a cause of culture shock for Koreans to move into rural middle America, and the struggles and rigors of surviving and adapting at the same time.

What was endlessly amusing to me is that I feel like Steven Yeun, since rising as a star from The Walking Dead, I feel like took his appearance in David Chang’s Ugly Delicious to heart a little bit, where Chang’s circle-jerk of celebrity friends was giving him a little bit of shit for being able to make it as a big-time American star in spite of being Korean, and almost since then, has been doing a lot of roles that inject him into his Korean heritage.  Despite the fact that his Korean sounds a lot like most Korean kids who did a lot of their growing up in America, it’s his attempts to sound like fresh-off-the-boat English that had me cracking up. 

But if there’s anything that was truly right about the entire film, it was undeniably Youn Yuh-Jung’s role in the film, playing grandma Soonja.  Obviously her performance was justly recognized seeing as how she was a shoe-in to win best supporting actress and did such, becoming the first Korean actor or actress to win an Academy Award.  But she shines from the moment she shows up in the film, and it makes me reminisce to my own childhood, where my grandma often stayed at my home to fulfill the same role as Soonja did, being the free babysitter for primarily me since I was the baby of the generation.  My grandma wasn’t nearly as hands-on, or quite nearly as sassy or show as much personality as Soonja did, nor was I nearly the shithead to her as David was to Soonja, but it definitely gets the memories flooding through the gates.

Frankly, there’s a lot of parallels to the film I could feel with my own life, seeing as how both my parents were also chicken sexers growing up, and how my family grew up in rural Virginia, which wasn’t nearly as remote as Arkansas, but was still similar in the sense that there probably were like 15 Koreans in the entire town, with some of them being relatives.  And I imagine just about every Korean family in America could probably feel some sort of kinship to the film as I did, and just about everyone in my own family has stated similar feelings themselves.

There’s a lot of subtle symbolism and interpretation necessary in the plot and its happenings throughout the film, and at first blush I was kind of perplexed at the way the film concluded, but when I lay in bed thinking about it, most of it kind of falls into place, and it makes me admire the film even more than I did while watching it.

Bottom line is that the film really is like chicken soup for the Korean-American soul, and although it’s nowhere near as critically acclaimed or attention-getting as Crazy Rich Asians or Parasite, but in my opinion, is still a tremendously important film for Korean or other Asian cultures to try and watch sometime.

S9: My 600 Lb. No-hitter

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Finally caught up with all of season 9 of My 600 Lb. Life.  As much as I love the show, as well as other TLC stalwarts like 90 Day Fiancé, the fact that all their episodes are like 90+ minutes apiece, makes it really hard to commit to the time investment that every single episode takes to watch.  As truly great as the shows are, there are often times more important things I could be doing in 90 minutes than watching garbage, albeit it’s garbage that I love.

As I touched on in a prior post, we the TLC viewers were treading into uncharted territory as far as My 600 Lb. Life was concerned, as season 9 was batting a cool .000 as far as people getting onto the surgery table and getting bariatric surgery in order to lose weight.  Sure, coronavirus had a tremendous amount to do with that, seeing as how there were 3-4 subjects that qualified for weight-loss surgery, but were unable to actually get it within the episode due to coronavirus.  All the same, I count those as failures too, because after 13 episodes, the season ended with not a single person getting weight loss surgery, with the vast majority of them outright failing, because they’re just trainwrecks to begin with.

Going into episode 13, I thought TLC would be saving the best for last, and much like an actual baseball no-hitter, it had to get busted up in the final inning.  Certainly, Chrystal would be the person to get her shit together, lose the requisite weight in order to qualify for weight-loss surgery, get on the table, and I could laugh about how the show plans their Dr. Now voiceovers to poorly link to another prerecorded segment where he talks about the benefits of bariatric surgery.

Welp, surgery didn’t happen, in spite of Chrystal’s eventual success at losing the prerequisite weight in order to qualify.  But I can’t say that TLC didn’t save the best for last, because in this final episode of the season, not only did we witness a moment where a subject stepped onto an elevator, and made it lurch downward from the weight, causing her to lose her shit in the hallway of whatever econo-motel she and her posse were staying at.

We also had a short but no-less scathing moment of where Dr. Now clinically told the person that she smelled.  I’ve watched just about every episode of this show and it’s no secret that these large individuals have hygiene issues a lot of the times, but at no point has Dr. Now ever straight up told a person that they smelled before.  Obviously, he didn’t use those exact words, but he also didn’t mince the ones he did when he insinuated that their girth clearly had something to do with the fact that he was smelling something rather unpleasant.

Either way, season 9 is in the books.  Blame coronavirus, or blame the format of the show in that they clearly have the spin-off My 600 Lb. Life: Where Are They Now? to hold back pertinent points like successful surgery, but as far as My 600 Lb. Prime goes, we just had an entire season where every single trainwreck in the season, failed. 

A real-life, televised no-hitter thrown by TLC, congratulations.

Clearly school is not hard enough

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I came across this story of some 12-year old kid in North Carolina who was set to graduate from both high school and college simultaneously, and the first emotion that emerged from my brain as if it were a slot machine, was annoyance.  I don’t know why, but stories of overachieving little kids don’t really impress me so much as I question the difficulty of contemporary education in America, and wonder if we’re collectively lowering the bar of intelligence on a societal level if kids whose balls haven’t even dropped are becoming capable of tackling collegiate level coursework.

Sure, it’s just an associate’s degree, and pretty much anyone can get an associate’s degree, but it doesn’t change the fact that the narrative doesn’t change that a 12-year old went to, and got a college degree.  There is a possibility that this kid might be somewhat of a genius, but at the same time there’s also a possibility that the level of education in Salisbury, North Carolina might be questionably low.

I recognize the names of Salisbury and Rowan-Cabarrus, because their names are on signs that I blow past going 80 mph on I-85 while traversing through North Carolina, between the greater Charlotte and Greensboro regions.  Needless to say, it’s in the middle of fucking nowhere, which leads me to believe what mastery of counting pine cones and the velocity of a NASCAR on a windy day can translate into a 5.45 GPA.  Seriously, what the fuck kind of grading rubrics exist now to where kids don’t just get 4.0s but seem to routinely exceed the royal fucking A into these ridiculous 4+ GPAs?

Either way, I don’t know why, but tryhard kids just kind of bother me.  It has nothing to do with the fact that as a father myself, these are ridiculous bars to hope my own children can strive for, as much as I feel at the root of all these stories is some very passive-aggressive humblebragging by either the kids or their likely insufferable parents, who eat up the notion that their children are making the news.  This kid is right up there with one of those overachieving tryhard high school seniors who applies to every Ivy League and blue blood school and gets in.  It’s just annoying to me.

Clearly, school is not hard enough these days, because when I was 12, all I cared about was Power Rangers and Final Fantasy IV, much less having any aspirations of any sort of education past the sixth grade.  Sure there’s an easy joke about how nothing seems to have really changed nearly three decades later, but we also didn’t have a pandemic that gave all children basically unlimited time to see just how high they could tryhard.

Kenny Omega: The Blet Collector(?)

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

As much as I clown on AEW, I have to say that one of the things they’re doing that actually has me pretty fascinated is the way they’re booking Kenny Omega.  Which shouldn’t really be surprise that he’s got a compelling storyline, seeing as how he’s one of the VPs of AEW as well as one of the foundation blocks in which the promotion was built on.  But with his cross-promotional victory over Rich Swann of TNA/Impact, Omega adds two more blets to his expanding collection of championships, adding the TNA and Impact unified world titles to the AEW championship as well as the AAA (Mexico) championship, which basically says he is the top guy for three different promotions.

I’ve always been fascinated by belt collector storylines, because historically it’s so rarely done, primarily because more often than not, it requires a degree of cross-promotion, which is a lot like asking a Klansman to partner up with a Black Panther to save the planet.  It’s been attempted within a single promotion a handful of times, with Lance Storm coming to mind with his torrid 2000 run collecting the WCW United States, Cruiserweight and Hardcore titles in quick succession.  And as much as I liked the Miz’s run in 2010 where he was toting around three blets, the tags were unified and kind of count as one.

TNA tried to kind of run a blet collector in like 2015 when they had Kurt Angle win every single blet within the company as well as the IWGP World Championship, but so often times is the case with TNA, nobody noticed, nobody cared, and it fell flat pretty quickly when he started rapidly shedding blets, and New Japan doesn’t officially recognize the reign with the IWGP championship because of one of the many spats they had with Antonio Inoki over it.

One of the most famous blet collectors of all time was Ultimo Dragon, who once held a mind-blowing ten blets at one time, thanks to the infamous J-Crown tournament in 1996, where it was a tournament held in Japan where all participants were respective champions from varying promotions, where every blet was on the line and as participants advanced through the tournament, they would collect the championships of everyone they defeated.  In the end, the Great Sasuke would win the tournament, collecting eight blets in the process, but in a return match against Ultimo, who went in as the WCW Cruiserweight and NWA Middleweight champion, would lose, giving him ten blets in total.

In more recent years, Austin Aries became a blet collector, in a more traditional way, in the sense that throughout 2018, he actually did bounce around the indies and beat champions and eventually made his way to Impact, where he collected two blets from them, meaning as big league as TNA/Impact thinks they might be, their titles have on multiple occasions, been gathered by guys outside of their promotion.  But at the peak, Aries collected a total of six blets, and as is often the case with Aries’ career, he took himself too seriously, and kind of sabotaged his own career.

Needless to say, the blet collector doesn’t happen often, and when it does, it typically tends to sour pretty quickly and to disastrous result.  However in spite of the history of the gimmick, AEW is taking a stab at it with Kenny Omega, but in spite of my oft-criticisms of the promotion, I actually wonder if they might be able to do better with it than all preceding attempts?

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