Well, at least it’s no longer called ScumTrust Park

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Shocker of the century: Truist Park becomes the name of the new stadium after the merger between SunTrust and BB&T

Welp, nobody saw that one coming.  And by nobody, I means every single fucking person in Atlanta with a pulse knew that it was going to be Truist Park in the end.

No matter how great it would’ve been if Waffle House swooped in and usurped the naming rights to the stadium, and called it “The Waffle House, home of the Braves.”  Or if the ballpark decided to honor the greatest power hitter of all time and called it like “Hank Aaron Field,” everyone and their mother knew it was going to end up as some soulless, corporate stooge of a name, and once it was announced that the merged bank was going to be called Truist, it was only a matter of time before this obvious news was going to be announced.

The best part is that in spite of the obvious, these corporate stiffs all took the time and resources to make an event of it, justifying the claims of obvious corporate circle jerking.  As if an unveiling was actually needed, anyone with a brain knew the name and what the logo was going to look like before any sort of curtain was ever put on a pedestal.

The sad thing is that no matter all the clowning that Citi Field got when they unveiled, Truist Park is worse.  Sure, the Citi Field logo looked like a Domino’s logo, but at least it was still somewhat attempting to look like base paths and relate to baseball.  Truist Park looks like an Epcot reject with an emblem that looks like the ominous symbol seen on the episode of Black Mirror about the White Bear.

And no clever nickname can be applied to something as lame as “Truist.”  Or ScumTrust for that matter.  Turner Field was often referred to as “the Ted” based on the original ownership, but nothing can really be applied to these bullshit corporate names.

Regardless, in spite of the dunking I want to do about Truist Park, at least when the day is over it’s no longer called SunTrust.  Despite the fact that the bank itself isn’t necessarily dead, the lack of identity helps mask their bullshit, and I can probably stomach actually going to a game in the future once my kid gets here, and daddy wants to take his daughter to her very first baseball game.

The Jeopardy! GOAT: As if it could’ve been anyone else

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It took just four nights out of a possible seven, but the long-awaited answer was finally given its question: the Greatest Of All Time Jeopardy! Contestant?

Who is Ken Jennings?

Ultimately, I’ll admit that I was rooting for Jeopardy James Holzhauer to win it, partially because of likely recency bias, but also because he’s a known baseball stat geek, and he plays the game with such reckless abandon that a known gambler should play, that it’s hard to not become a fan.  But I do also remember the summer of 2004 when Ken Jennings emerged on the scene and it seemed like every single day after work, he was at the podium with a $15,000+ lead.  He would end up winning 74 games in a row and raking in over a million dollars in the process, and I’m pretty sure it was decided then that he was, at least unofficially, the greatest of all time.

But unofficial doesn’t ever count in the grand spectrum of things, plus not to mention that in several of the follow-up specials and tournaments, Jennings often times fell short of winning some major crowns, and was dually humbled when IBM’s Watson AI wiped the floor against him (and Brad Rutter).

Regardless, as most people know the narrative, the emergence of Jeopardy James meant that Jeopardy! finally had a third worthy contender, and with the declining health of legendary host Alex Trebek, there was no better time than the present to embark on the long awaited matchup to decide, who is the GOAT of Jeopardy?

Frankly, with no real disrespect to Brad Rutter, but he didn’t belong in this.  His run as a Jeopardy champ was nearly 20 years ago, and despite the $4 million+ he’s raked in through repeated tournaments and follow-up appearances, there was no way he was going to hold a candle against a savant like Jennings or a gunslinger like Holzhauer.  It was no more evident than through the four episodes of the GOAT shows, where Rutter finished last in every single match, and repeatedly wiped out and finished with 0 points after Final Jeopardy; if he was even allowed to play, as in, not being in the negatives.

Although he was a class act the whole time, gracefully singing the praises of his competition as well as honoring Alex Trebek, when the day was over, his presence made the entire GOAT tournament a two-man race.  I would’ve seen someone like Arthur Chu or Julia Collins in the third spot; I know they don’t stack up in terms of wins or earnings, but based on the way Rutter performed, it’s hard to imagine that they’d have been any less inconsequential.

Continue reading “The Jeopardy! GOAT: As if it could’ve been anyone else” →

Can white folks let the body get cold before they start picking at it???

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It wasn’t even a month ago when I saw Bong Joon-ho’s coup de grace, Parasite.  It was one of the best movies I’d seen in a long time, and I say that not just because I want to support films made in the Motherland, but because it was also just a good movie.  The plot was fairly simply and linear, the acting was superb, and I’m no cinematography buff, but the visual storytelling was at times, breathtaking.

If white people weren’t so fucking white, then there’s an off-chance that Parasite should win the Oscar for Best Picture, but let’s be real here; it’ll probably go to Marriage Story or The Irishman, because they’re in English, and all of Hollywood is trying to get in bed with Netflix these days.

But speaking of white people, one of the more infuriating pieces of news I’ve heard lately was that the rights to an adaptation of Parasite were won by HBO.

And let’s be real here, the phrase “adaptation” is a gentler, whiter way of saying “replace all the gooks with American-speaking whiteys”

All I know is that I lost my shit when I read this article about Parasite already being prepared for adaptation.  And knee-jerk reactions is probably about 75% of the shit I write about on my brog in the first place, but they’re usually coming from the most passionate, heart-felt emotions.

Continue reading “Can white folks let the body get cold before they start picking at it???” →

Not really much of a punishment

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

When the revelation broke out that the Houston Astros had developed a method to steal signs over the last few years, capitalizing on them en route to a period of great success, including one World Series championship, I figured nothing substantial was really going to come from it.  The evidence was pretty substantial and the fact that an active player snitched, it was a pretty foregone conclusion that the Astros were going to be busted for “cheating.”

Now I say cheating with quotes, because when the day is over, I don’t particularly think of stealing signs as cheating.  It’s a part of every day baseball, except the Astros just took it a little bit further with technology; it’s still a collaborative effort for players to identify and decipher signs, and then figure out ways to relay information without the opposition realizing it.  Yes, the Astros went a little bit further, utilizing a discreet live-feed camera and people banging on a trash can in the dugout tunnel, but I don’t really think it’s that much different than a baserunner on second relaying to the batter that a changeup is coming by pretending to yawn or scratch his junk.

Regardless, because baseball, among many other entities, has a revolving door of a moral compass, it was inevitable that the Astros were going to get punished for their perceived misgivings.  But the thing about punishments in professional sports, is that they never really amount to anything that would stop anyone from doing them again.  When the New England Patriots were accused of utilizing deflated footballs, or video taping the opposition’s sidelines, they got some fines and were penalized some draft picks; a few players like Tom Brady were suspended for a few games.  But no Super Bowls were rescinded, and nothing happened to strip the Patriots of any of the six championships they’d won.

There was little reason to believe that something similar wouldn’t happen to the Astros, and just like that, such was the precise punishment: a $5 million dollar fine, which they try and make sound severe, but in an industry that rakes in billions, is a drop in the bucket for any MLB franchise.  They make 8-12 times that from profit sharing alone.  Plus they were penalized a few draft picks, which were inevitably going to be poor ones, because of their success over the last few years.

The 2017 World Series remains completely intact, and the Astros will always be recognized as those champions until the end of time, regardless of the fact that there were probably trash cans banged on when the Astros slugged five homers in game 5, which was one of the most exciting baseball games I’d ever seen in my life but that’s besides the point.  The bottom line is that in spite of the cheating allegations, the Astros are charged some fine that’s basically pennies to them, docked some draft picks that have a way higher chance of flaming out and then going to go work for Lowe’s than making it to the big leagues; but the championship they won that coincided with the supposed cheating, well that’s fine.

Continue reading “Not really much of a punishment” →

Tonight, a La Parka died in the ring

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

(spoken in the same manner in which Rorschach says “tonight, a Comedian died in New York”)

I have mixed feelings about this whole situation.  A La Parka died in the ring tonight, but it was confirmed to not be the La Parka that made me a La Parka fan in the first place.  It was in fact La Parka II who dove out of the ring at an AAA show in Mexico, crashed in the guardrail, broke his neck and later died. 

No loss of life is ever not tragic, but at the same time, it wasn’t necessarily the death of the guy that I was actually a fan of, which puts me in this awkward emotional state of where I hear news that “La Parka died,” but there’s always that explanation that it wasn’t the original La Parka that I really loved.

There’s still that emotional surprise of seeing the words that La Parka died, but when I read the explanation that it was actually La Parka II and not the chairman of WCW, and there’s this almost guilty feeling of relief that it wasn’t original La Parka.

I actually didn’t know that there were two La Parkas out there, and this kind of goes back to this joke my friends and I had in high school of how there were always myths that there were multiple Ultimate Warriors, and that they came from a Mayan temple in Parts Unknown that whenever one warrior died, another would remove his robes and sprint out of the temple and begin his own reign as the next Ultimate Warrior.

The difference is that there actually were two La Parkas, and it was a little fascinating reading about how it came to be, primarily stemming from a disagreement between wrestler and promoter, and then the promoter realizing just how easy it is to replace a masked wrestler in the first place.

Either way, I’m still sad that a La Parka died at all, even if it wasn’t the La Parka that would definitely warrant a longer eulogy in the brog.  In a way, La Parka is more than just an ordinary man, proven by two different men who took the mantle and were stars simultaneously, in different parts of the world.  And it’s only a matter of time before an el Hijo de La Parka shows up and starts blending the lucha flying of La Parka II with bashing guys with chairs from the original La Parka, and sets the wrestling world on fire.

This car FUCKS

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

A long time ago, there was a guy my then-group of friends knew that got a Subaru Impreza.  He was one of those guys that at the time, nobody really cared a tremendous amount about, but nobody really had the heart to tell him to fuck off.  Plus, as long as he felt included in the group, he could always be relied upon to bring food and/or snacks to any sort of arranged gatherings.

Anyway, aside from the fact that he bought an automatic transmission, we often passive-aggressively clowned on him for his car, because that’s what a bunch of Initial D-inspired auto enthusiasts did amongst each other.  Other points of ridicule were how he got his car literally months before the WRX was unleashed, how he got a huge speeding ticket in Pennsylvania for driving like a retard, and the time he wrecked because he thought AWD made him invincible.

My favorite method of trolling him was that I often times told him that he made a mistake getting an Impreza, and that the real coup of coolness would’ve been if he had gotten a Forester instead; the Impreza’s dorky but more utilitarian older brother.  Sure, the Forester was definitely more of a family car, but it was always fun to glorify the cargo room and the utility of the Forester over his Impreza.

The best was when we discovered the existence of a Forester STI, that Subaru released overseas, which was a jacked-up high-performance variant of the Forester, which not only retained all the utility of the original Forester, but had all sorts of performance upgrades that made it like two classes above what this guy got in his automatic Impreza.  That’s the car he should’ve gotten instead.

Needless to say, since then, I’ve always carried somewhat of a positive connotation with the Forester, even if it stemmed from ironic, griefing purposes.

Continue reading “This car FUCKS” →

lol good riddance

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

In short: SunTrust Park begins removing all traces of SunTrust identity on account of merger with BB&T and the re-naming of the company

I know that at the root of it, ScumTrust is not truly dead, but still in existence under a different name, merged with another company, but damn does it feel nice to know that the logo that I was so familiar with during my tenure and eventual layoff with ScumTrust is being wiped from existence.  Especially from the ballpark, of my preferred team, that I was so diametrically opposed to from the onset, for a variety of reasons, including the fact that they were named “ScumTrust Park.”

Despite the fact that ScumTrust isn’t truly dead, the fact that they’ve completely lost their identity and headquarters, ScumTrust is pretty much dead.  In short time, few people will remember the ScumTrust identity, and only the corporate stooges who have to take an orientation class will actually ever hear of the name ScumTrust in the future.  Even shorter will be the time it takes before cranky customers bitch about how shitty of a bank Truist is, and then it’s only a matter of time before Bank of America or Wells Fargo consumes them too.

I think my favorite part about the whole saga is that it wasn’t that long ago in 2014 in which ScumTrust signed a 25-year contract to the naming rights of the ballpark that would soon become ScumTrust Park.  Six years, in a 25-year contract, and although the terms of the contract have not been necessarily severed, the fact that ScumTrust’s name is coming off of the entire property might as well be the same thing as the whole contract being dead in the water.

Continue reading “lol good riddance” →