Bums and ballparks are like peas and carrots

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Despite my general disdain for it, I have the unfortunate circumstance to have to drive by Racist ScumTrust Park every now and then.  It’s inevitable, because of where I used to live, highway access or the need to pass becomes somewhat of a necessity from time to time.

Over several of my last few times passing by the ballpark, I noticed something that I had never really noticed in Smyrna/Vinings before: homeless people.  Homeless people wandering the sidewalks near, but not directly on the premises of the hallowed BATtery ATLanta grounds, but doing the usual homeless things; digging through trash cans, camping on park benches, and overall creating the uncomfortable stigmas that their presence tends to do.

Again, this is something that I can’t really say I’ve seen before in the area prior to the arrival of the ballpark.  Sure, it would be likely ignorant to say that no place in America has any homeless people, but prior to the arrival of Racist Park, I honestly can’t say that I’ve ever seen any in this area before.

That being said, it’s hilarious to me to make the asinine assumption that the homeless people came with the ballpark, because if there’s one thing that I’ve noticed about ballparks throughout all of my ballpark travels is that there’s often times homeless people around them.  Sometimes it has to do with the fact that ballparks are often located in the hearts of cities, and homeless people dwell in the hearts of cities, and sometimes it’s because cities are named Detroit or Oakland or Miami, and the lines that separate bums from citizens is a really blurry one and it’s easy to make that mistake.

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What happens when people look for things to be offended about

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

A little bit of research goes a long way: girl looking for something to bitch about on Twitter is triggered by seeing the strikeout counter at a Braves game on television reading “KKK”, immediately voices her outrage in 140 characters or less and is ridiculed for not knowing a standard ballpark tradition

See, this is exactly what happens when people actively seek out things to pretend like they’re offended by, so they can sound like social justice avengers on the internet.  And what happens when you don’t double-check your words or do a little cursory research to see if maybe, somewhere on the internet, the answer to your outrage, might actually exist.

I love the text delivery of

Definitely NOT ok.

With the all-caps NOT and the stern looking period after ok.  I know it’s hard to interpret emotion out of text, but I can only imagine the artificial and determined offense taken by this twerp who had admit to being bored and basically decided to let herself get triggered to help pass the time.

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NXT’s current best talent

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Ever since I’ve started watching NXT with some regularity, I feel like I jumped aboard during a pretty stale period.  Guys like Shinsuke Nakamura, Finn Balor and Samoa Joe have all left at pretty much the same time, and in their place has been a main-event pool of guys that I’m not remotely interested in, such as Bobby Roode, Roderick Strong and Hideo Itami; aside from Roode’s arrogance, there’s literally no intrigue, personality or narrative that anybody brings to the table, creating stories that are hard to get vested in.

As much as I disliked the name “#DIY,” the talent of Johnny Gargano and Tomasso Ciampa shined through, but now they’ve been broken up and taken off television for the time being, and taking their place in the tag team division are a bunch of mammoth hosses like the Authors of Pain and Heavy Machinery, who will undoubtedly have a stinker of a program when they inevitably collide for the belts.

But if there’s been one thing worth tuning into recently, it’s NXT’s women’s champion, Asuka.  Week in and week out, she’s the brightest star in all of NXT, and it’s going to be a dark time for the brand’s women’s division once she gets the demotion to the main roster.  She’s undefeated, and WWE’s even gone as far as to declare that she’s surpassed Bill Goldberg’s old WCW record of 163 wins before first defeat, and given NXT’s women’s talent pool it doesn’t seem likely that it’s going to end that soon, especially with her most recent victory over Nikki Cross in a Last Woman Standing match.

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CNN done fucked up

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

When I was a kid, I was always under the impression that the news was just the news; reporting on facts, with no bias or leanings.  Maybe a little bit of personality from the anchors, and on snow days, waiting for the weather people, otherwise, waiting until the last 5-7 minutes of the show for sports, so I can see which team was the latest to fall to the Chicago Bulls or what Cal Ripken, Jr’s consecutive game streak was at.  But that the FOX5 10 o’clock news was just news, the same as all other news outlets, and really nothing more.

I don’t think it was until the 2000 Presidential election did I realize that news outlets were far more capable of things other than just, the news.  Regardless of what one feels about FOX News, there’s no denying their involvement in the 2000 election, about how they declared a victor a little too precariously early and their overwhelming support for the Republican party.

This experience opened my eyes that news sources were not as neutral and unbiased as I had grown up thinking they were, and that there were most definitely rosters of various sources taking difference sides and positions in political spectrum.

It doesn’t take a genius to realize that I lean left when it comes to most facets of life, and I like to believe I’m a pretty liberal thinker, open-minded to lots of logical things.  That being said, I used to often read the Huffington Post, because I appreciated their want to broadcast positive and uplifting stories, especially in a media-driven world hell-bent on reporting all the stories of violence, hatred, gunfire and war; if it bleeds, it leads, and there’s really only so much of it I can tolerate on a daily basis without feeling like I’m losing my humanity.

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Oh, Georgia #607

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Impetus: Macon gas station runs promotion where cash buyers could get regular unleaded for 99¢ a gallon, resulting in massive lines, long waits, frustrated customers and ultimately police intervention

A few years ago, I went up to visit my parents, and I was driving around running some errands with my dad.  His tank was running low, so he said he needed to get gas, and proceeded to go to a station that he preferred, because it was the cheapest place.  We arrive at the gas station, and it’s an eight-pump station that is in fact ten cents cheaper than everywhere else, but every single pump is occupied, and there were a few other cars precariously circling the premises like a hungry shark stalking an opening.

My dad said that this was the norm.  I said that if he’s really hard up on the dollar he’ll save by going to this station as opposed to the numerous alternatives surrounding the area, I’d be happy to give him a dollar to go somewhere else.  Since I was the one driving anyway, we went to the Shell station down the street that was completely open, filled up, and was right back on track doing our own things, as opposed to joining the feeding frenzy at the cheap station, risking road rage, headache and fender benders all in the sake of saving, a literal dollar for ten gallons of unleaded.

Time, is worth more than money.  Piece of mind, is also worth more than money.  Definitively, for both.  And it astounds me that there are people that don’t seem to understand this.

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The other side of the table

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

As closing day for my new home approached, I knew that I was going to meet the sellers of the place eventually.  There was admittedly a little bit of apprehension in the thought, since these are basically the people that I’d been playing hardball with in negotiating listing prices, how much of the closing costs I wanted them to cover, and the additional costs I made them incur in repairs and requests found through home inspection, and now I was going to have to face them so they could hand the keys of their property over to me.

This was somewhat a new experience to me; the last time I was at the closing table, I was the seller, and the buyer was tremendously low-maintenance, was willing to cover most of the closing costs, and barely asked for any work at all.  And the first time I purchased a home, it was brand new and purchased directly from a builder, so there was nobody on the other side of the table that I had the innate feeling that I was taking something from them, regardless of how legitimate and normal the transaction was.

Furthermore, I had my suspicions initially based on an errant piece of litter on the property that the prior owners may have been Asian, and it was confirmed during the process that despite not being anywhere near Duluth or Suwanee, they were in fact Koreans.  Yeah, I lol’d too at the strange coincidence of it all that I would of course, pick the home of other Koreans to choose to plant my new roots into.  So, I knew going into closing day, that I would be coming face-to-face with other Koreans, after I had kind of put them through a little bit of the ringer, just so they could sell their home.  I wasn’t necessarily scared to face them, but there’s no denying that my requests probably cost them a little bit of money they probably were hoping to not spend.

Regardless, the whole closing process wasn’t at all a bad one; the seller(s) were really nice people, and there was no indication that they were at all sour over the expenditures necessary to make the sale happen.  I was amused by their realization that mother couldn’t speak to daughter discreetly in Korean without me being able to understand it, so most of the correspondence was kept in English, for the sake of the other non-Koreans involved in the process.

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A new chapter

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Obviously, I’m pretty hush-hush when it comes to the process of getting to things like this, but let’s cut right to the chase: I’m a homeowner again.

Apartment life wasn’t terrible, but the reality is that renting always feels like throwing money away, and that the end game is always a home where I can stash all my shit and have a place that I can always call my own, and potentially work it to something that might actually be able to make me money in the future to boot.

I came to a realization not that long ago that I actually managed to amass enough money to where I could actually get back on the path to homeownership, and then once the home-buying bug bit, it was off to the races with trying to find a home that suited a lot of my mental checkboxes.

It all happened pretty quickly and has been quite the whirlwind, and I will say that honestly, this moved rapidly throughout the course of a month.  Yeah, sounds like a lot of major decisions being made in a short amount of time, but I had a particular area in mind where I wanted my next house to be, and that made things a little easy in the sense that I wasn’t going to be searching all around the entire Metro Atlanta area, and had more of a specific zip code in mind to narrow my choices.

So there we have it; I have a house again.  Maybe some of it is sticker shock after dropping a massive sum of money for a downpayment, or maybe it’s the surreal feeling that I’ve already moved onto my second house.  Grown-up adulting may be one of those things I always say is kind of weird to consider, but if I’m already successfully capable of owning my second house, I’m clearly doing something right.

Life is fascinating sometimes, and I look forward to embarking on this new chapter of my life in my new house that will hopefully be full of good memories, lots of growth, and abundant potential for the future.