A Morbius film sounds pretty bottom of the barrel

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Just a few days ago, I saw Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse.  It was fantastic.  I felt it captured a lot of what the series has been trying to convey over the last decade, that Spider-Man was more of an idea, and not so much exclusively Peter Parker, and that it’s entirely possible for absolutely anyone, regardless of race, gender or any other difference, to be, a Spider-Man (or woman).

Even more amazing was the fact that Into the Spiderverse was a creation under the Sony Pictures banner, with no affiliation whatsoever to the Marvel Cinematic Universe under the Disney overlords; because it was actually good; unlike the Tobey Maguire Spider-Man sequels, and although I have little interest in watching it, I heard Venom was a turd too.  Needless to say, it’s impressive that Sony actually created something of significant quality with the Spider-Man property, because they’ve demonstrated a surprising ineptitude with it previously.

Without question, into the Spiderverse is the crown jewel of Sony’s collection of Marvel films released, and if they’re smart, they really stick with the formula of creating quality animated films.

So with that said, I just found out that Sony is releasing a spinoff film, based on another Spider-Man villain: Morbius the Living Vampire.  Much like the Venom film, it doesn’t seem like there’s any real tie-in to any Spider-Man properties, and honestly, I have no idea what Sony thinks they’re doing by releasing stand-alone films about Spider-Man villains without actually tying them into any Spider-Man storylines.

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This is basically a boss of an overturned truck crash

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It didn’t happen in Georgia, but this is still a nightmare scenario of an overturned truck crash that I feel is worth mentioning, just based on the sheer severity of just how badly it owned everyone involved.  But in North Carolina, a little north of Charlotte, a Harris Teeter truck overturned, and blocked both lanes of I-85 northbound, for numerous hours.  The wreck was so bad, and the cleanup so long, emergency crews had to deliver a portable toilet to the scene of the accident, so that drivers stranded for over five hours could relieve themselves.

Let’s be real here: it’s the part where a port-o-john had to be delivered to the area that really caps this whole thing, and I think this is a good example of a true video game boss of a truck accident, if there ever could be one.  If there’s one thing Atlanta has going on for them, is that their highways always tend to have like 4-6 lanes each way, so even if a truck falls flat, at the most can only really cover up three of them, and drivers can always find ways around.

I’ve driven across this stretch of I-85 numerous times too, so I’m quite familiar with the area.  Frankly, I’m surprised at how anyone can overturn on roads so straight, but further details show that the truck swerved to dodge a disabled vehicle, and considering this stretch of I-85 has been “under construction” as long as it’s taken Northern Virginia to complete the Capital Beltway, there haven’t been shoulders on this expanse in a decade, so if a car is incapacitated, it’s happening pretty much in the middle of traffic.

Honestly though, this is kind of one of my worst driving nightmares, topped only by if I were the one in the wreck.  Being stuck in a wreck so bad, that traffic is completely incapacitated, and not knowing definitively if it’s going to take ten minutes or ten hours to clear, so you’re in a situation where you’re leaving the engine running, burning up finite fuel, and if the urge to have to go to the bathroom starts to emerge, having literally no way to alleviate the situation.

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The fallacy of judging player contracts before they’re finished

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

With the news of Bryce Harper signing the most historic mega-deal in baseball history comes a whole lot of interesting things:

  • All the bitching and moaning coming from MLB (union) players like Justin Verlander, Evan Longoria, Kris Bryant, and Adam Wainwright among others, about how free agency is busted, owners are crooked, and the system being broken have just had all of the wind taken out of their sails; the last week alone has seen Harper sign his historic 13-year/$330 million dollar contract, Manny Machado signing a 10-year/$300 million contract, as well as Nolan Arenado signing an 8-year/$260 million dollar extension. Free agency is not busted, it’s just the financial game within the game has changed, and it’s just taking longer.
  • A whole lot of discussion about Harper’s intentions, considering the fact that despite taking the aforementioned deal from the Phillies, in the process he turned down a ridiculous shorter-term contract from the Dodgers which would have had him making around $45 million a year for four years as well as a 10-year/$300 million offer from his former team, the Nationals, where they would have deferred the last $100 million of the deal, where he would have been getting paid, with interest, until like 2053, which probably would have equated to over $330 million, frankly.
  • Every Nationals fan who had been a Bryce Harper fan over the last seven years has now become massive Bryce Harper haters
  • Every Phillies fan who had hated on Bryce Harper because he played for the division rival Nationals is now the greatest Bryce Harper fans that have ever lived

Amidst all of these things, are and will be many more, articles that will be examining the finer details and the minutiae of Bryce Harper’s deal with the Phillies.  And in a previous time in my life, I probably would be one of them, and be ready to declare it “a bad deal” because of the hypothetical likelihood that by the time Harper is 38 years old and hobbling into the final year of his deal in 2032, he most certainly won’t be playing like a guy that will be getting paid like $28 million dollars, and how long-term free agent deals pretty much always fail, because players rarely contribute the statistics necessary to justify their salaries.

Such could very well become the case by the time 2032 rolls around but the bigger question really boils down to “but did the Phillies win a championship(s) in those 13 years?”

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Not sure how this keeps happening, but I’ll take it

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Of all the strange anomalies to ever occur in sports, I think at this point, it should be worth mentioning Duke’s struggles against Virginia Tech: in basketball.  For the third-straight time while Duke was a top-5 ranked team in the nation, they’ve gone into Blacksburg and left losers. 

In 2011, they were #1 in the nation and lost to the unranked Hokies.  In 2018, they were ranked #5 in the nation, only to get upset again by an unranked Hokies squad.  And then came last night, where the #3 Duke Blue Devils, clearly starving for talent because they only had R.J. Barrett and Cam Reddish but no Zion Williamson, were clearly depleted beyond survival, and did the job to #20 Virginia Tech.

Full disclosure: I didn’t even watch the game.  I knew it was on, I like college hoops well enough, but Duke is Duke, and Tech is still Tech, even if college basketball is very much their secondary sport.  I figured it would be just another L, which would likely bounce Tech out of the top-25.  Lo and behold, I glance at my news feed in the evening, only to see headlines about how #20 Virginia Tech upsets #3 Duke in Blacksburg, again, and suddenly I’m laughing aloud in my recliner.

Not only will Virginia Tech not be bounced from the top-25, a win against Duke will likely shoot them up a few positions, while Duke will undoubtedly drop, again, hopefully out of the top-5.  This reiterates the sad notion of just how much Duke has put all their eggs into the Zion basket, and despite the fact that they still have two of the top recruits in the nation playing their asses off, it’s like the rest of the entire program has thrown in the towel because Zion’s not there. 

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I was hoping it would smell delicious outside

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Unfortunately, it did not, even with forty thousand pounds of chicken on fire not that far from where the office is.

It’s been a while since there’s been a good story of food getting spilled onto Atlanta highways.  I think the last time I wrote anything about the subject, it was the kind of self-conflicted incident where cows got loose on I-285 and I-75 where at first I wanted to make jokes about how there was free beef on the roads, but felt sad and empathetic for the actual living cows that were probably just scared beyond measure, wandering wildly around in search of safety.

In this time, it’s not a new realization, but I’ve found plenty of evidence that I’m far from the only person fascinated by the topic of trucks overturning on roads, spilling their cargo all over the place, although I try to keep it mostly local to Atlanta or just Georgia if I can.  I don’t have my own (still defunct) site to refer to for stories about trucks overturning, as much as I’d like to be an authority on the topic.

But this also isn’t the first time that chicken has been on the menu on the roads of Georgia.  However, this is still somewhat fascinating in the simple fact that there was just so much of it.  I mean, 40,000 lbs. of frozen chicken – that’s a whole lot of god damn chicken.  I can’t imagine the sheer number of chickens necessary to get 40,000 lbs. of it, much less the fact that that’s probably factoring in the lack of weight from the parts that aren’t meant for average consumption.

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Thoughts on True Detective S3

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

*There will likely be spoilers mentioned in this post, not that it matters considering the whole “I’m still offline” thing

Now that the third season of HBO’s True Detective is now in the books, I feel the compulsion to write some words about it.

Firstly, the show has completely redeemed itself from the terrible celebrity circle-jerk known as the second season of True Detective.  Although this line was pretty classic, there’s no mistaking that it was an utter bomb, especially in comparison to the first season.  I can’t really take Vince Vaughn seriously, and there’s no doubt he always has to try to get in some wisecrack into whatever role he’s doing, no matter if he’s supposed to be a cold and callous hustler.

Frankly, when I saw the initial teasers for season three, and how it only seemed to have the star power of just Mahershala Ali, I thought to myself that this might have some promise.  I’d been high on Ali after how much screen presence he demanded in Luke Cage and House of Cards, and I figured he seemed like the just right balance of recognizable actor without making himself bigger than the show itself.

Overall, I will say that S3 of True Detective was pretty outstanding.  Considering the plot of the show was basically three different timelines, several of the show’s actors like Ali and Stephen Dorff were playing triple-time, and really flexing their acting chops portraying their characters in three different decades.  For me, their scenes together really capture the bond between two men who have served, been partners, and lifelong friends on top of it all, and I felt that the show’s strongest moments often involved the two of them having intense and meaningful discussions.

The story did an excellent job of slow-releasing the characters and the revelations of the multiple plots going on throughout three different decades, all trying to solve the same murder/disappearance case, and at the end of every episode, I would always proclaim that “all the pieces of the puzzle haven’t been revealed yet!”  And despite the fact that the series took place in three different eras, all the clues were still drawling a pretty linear path towards the same goal.

However, as much as I enjoyed the season as a whole, it wasn’t without flaws; obviously this is talking about the ending of the series that left me about as satisfied as eating 95% of a Willy’s burrito – the show never really finished, because there were some pretty large things left unexplained!

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UNC-Duke, and the sad state of the future of basketball

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Fact: #8 North Carolina defeats #1 Duke in the latest edition of the so-called greatest rivalry in all of sports

Fiction: #8 North Carolina defeats #1 Duke in the latest edition of the so-called greatest rivalry in all of sports solely because super-prospect Zion Williamson went down with a knee injury 30 seconds into the game when his foot exploded out of his shoe when trying to pivot

There’s a lot to talk about when it came to last night’s UNC-Duke matchup; it was the hottest ticket in all of sports, with tickets costing only second to the Superb Owl, the fact that among the litany of celebrities present for it was previous president Barack Obama, that it was the first time of the year where Duke’s super squad would be meeting arch-rival North Carolina for the first time, among other things.

But when the hoopla all died down and the final horn blew, it was #8 North Carolina cruising to an easy victory against the #1 ranked Duke squad on the road, where the Tar Heels scored the first basket of the game and never looked back the whole rest of the way.

The thing is, as the game chugged along with Duke being completely incapable of closing the margin to under seven points, the ESPN analysts began preemptively apologizing for the anticlimactic and completely uncompetitive contest, and were making all the excuses in the world that Duke was “devastated’ and “shell shocked” over the loss of their superstar (and likely one-and-done-er) Zion Williamson, after his shoe blew up on him 30 seconds into the game, leading to, a knee sprain.

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