Photos: A day in Phoenix, Arizona, visiting Chase Field

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

[2020 note]: This is more or less lost content that is retroactively posted, a photo dump of my brief day trip to Phoenix, Arizona, so I could catch at a game at Chase Field, the home of the Arizona Diamondbacks, as well as being MLB ballpark 29 out of 30, on my ongoing quest to visit all 30 Major League Baseball cities.

Maybe after I retroactively get all of my posts up, I can revisit my old ballparks site, and flesh out something more relevant to ballparks, but until then, a photo dump that really nobody but me is going to care about, will have to do.

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This is probably going to be a thing

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Do you know what professional athletes like aside from money?  Attention.

Sure, there’s a correlation between attention and earning money, but when the day is over, professional athletes still love to gain attention, whether it is good or bad.  It’s why you hear of former pros doing random things when their playing careers are over, presumably just to see their names get published somewhere for some reason.

One of the easiest ways to gain attention for professional athletes is to do things that other professional athletes don’t do.  And when professional athletes left and right are flaunting their wealth, and boasting their ridiculous homes, expensive accessories and overpriced cars, it’s easy to get noticed when you go against such a common grain.

So when top QB draft pick Mitchell Trubisky, rolled into the Chicago Bears minicamp in an old 1997 Toyota Camry, people did notice.  That tends to happen when a guy makes it into the NFL and is expected to immediately cash in their signing bonuses and get themselves a six-figure vehicle, because let’s be real here, like 99%* of top-10 draft picks tend to do that.

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A completely different meaning for wrestling fans

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Over the last few weeks, I’ve heard a radio spot for this employment app called Jobber.  Supposedly, it’s this comprehensive all-in-one employer app that can do everything from asset management, payroll, hiring, and all the other bullshit nuances that go into day-to-day business operations.  Honestly, it seems kind of cool, and like the perfect kind of tool for inexperienced business operators to get their feet wet in the world of commerce.

However, what I can’t get around is their name.  Jobber.

I would wager money that I’m not the only person in the world in their car or listening to Sirius radio elsewhere that heard this radio spot and immediately had their wrestling fan senses triggered by name Jobber and started thinking about constant losers like Heath Slater, the Brooklyn Brawler, Alex Wright, Tommy Dreamer and Crash Holly, among countless others.

To people like us, the phrase “jobber” will never be synonymous with a potentially useful employment application; jobber will first and foremost always be a phrase used to describe a professional loser, who shows up to work, gets their ass kicked, loses a wrestling match, but then gets paid at the end of the day, they go home, and the cycle repeats itself for however long as they are needed to do so.  Jobber isn’t just a noun, the act of jobbing is also a clearly defined verb, and it’s pretty efficient at being an adjective as well.

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Who knew how loudly money spoke?

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Shocker of the year: I-85 announced to be opening Monday morning, tremendously ahead of schedule

Funny how predictable things become once money is introduced into the equation.  Back when the bridge originally collapsed, there were rumblings about how it would take until Thanksgiving to repair.  Eventually people realized that cities can’t necessarily operate efficiently with a massive chasm in the road, so the timeline to repair was suddenly bumped to early June. 

And then the Georgia Department of Transportation put a big fat $3.1 million dollar incentive reward in play if the contractors responsible for the bridge repair could finish before Memorial Day weekend, May 26-29.

A surprise to nobody at all, the bridge repairs are not only going to beat the Memorial Day reward deadline, they’re going to beat it by nearly two full weeks.  How interesting that a potential reward has sufficiently motivated people to do their jobs.

Whatever though, regardless of the pathetic display of greed exhibited by this whole debacle, I’m just glad that I-85 is going to be repaired sooner rather than later.  I know other people have had it way worse than I have, but it’s definitely made some trips way more tedious and time-consuming than they should be if GDOT weren’t such irresponsible slugs leaving their flammable shit underneath bridges with the crackheads.

NBA: National Bitches Association

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Prior to reading this, I implore my six readers to press play and listen to the theme of when the NBA was truly golden, and basketball was a respectable sport rife with athletes playing against other athletes in the game of basketball, and news was limited to solely basketball-related stories.

This is a topic that’s been on my head for quite some time, but never really chose to run with it, because quite frankly the world is full of way more interesting stories, or things that I’d rather write about, like overturned tractor trailers, or conspiracy theories about MARTA.  But then I saw this article about Ray Allen being a bitch because all his former Celtics teammates had a championship team reunion and didn’t invite him, because they are all bitches as well.

This story follows a week that also saw DeMar DeRozan of the Toronto Raptors whining about how his team would have advanced in the playoffs if they had LeBron James; like a sore loser, or, like a bitch. 

And speaking of LeBron James, earlier in the season, he had an altercation with a teammate, but instead of going Old Testament on him and kicking his ass in the locker room or throwing him under the bus to the media, instead he, the guy who brought glory back to Cleveland, won numerous championships and has nothing left to prove, assumes blame, takes responsibility for the altercation and apologizes to the jobber teammate, the fans and the organization.

Like a bitch.

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I did nothing but pretty much watch television all weekend

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And it was everything I thought it could be.  No really, for the vast majority of my weekend, I watched television primarily, and for the first time in a while feel like I actually had a nice relaxing weekend.

Prior to this past weekend, I’ve had to go into work at least once per, in four out of the last five weekends, and was just coming off a stretch where I’d gone into the office twelve straight days.  Working overtime for the betterment of the team, keeping shit on schedule and because the season occasionally dictates it isn’t really that big of a problem, but the sheer volume of my work compounded by a faulty machine that failed more frequently than a Volkswagen was putting me into a situation of rapid burnout, and this past weekend wasn’t so much of a deserved weekend off, it was absolutely necessary.

Needless to say, I slept in both days, which relatively speaking, means I slept like eight hours, instead of like six.  Granted, my body is so accustomed to waking up at like 6:30 a.m., I hit points where I always wake up between 6:30 and 7:30, panic about having overslept before realizing that it’s the weekend and then crawl back into bed with tremendous relief and try to go back to sleep and hope the animals didn’t hear any commotion and start trying to wake me up.

And when you’re feeling rested and caught up on sleep, everything afterward feels leisurely and relaxed.  Coffee tastes better.  Going to the gym for a run felt pleasant and not like a nuisance chore.  Taking the dogs out is more leisurely without a clock over your head on when it’s time to head to work.  Going out to hang with friends is more enjoyable when you know that there’s no drop dead cutoff time to get back home and get to sleep in order to get enough rest.

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This is the plot of Resident Evil 4

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Las Plagas came into play in a similar fashion: as the fable of climate change miraculously becomes reality, bacteria and viruses long-trapped in ice, are coming back to life as they are being melted free

Now I don’t want to get too political and be all like see, this is why climate change is a real thing, but this is pretty much the plot to Resident Evil 4, and all subsequent Resident Evil games that utilized Las Plagas.  But instead of evil Umbrella/whatever evil corporation actively digging and seeking out long-dormant bacteria and viruses, in this case it’s kind of scarier in the sense that it’s not being controlled by man, but are kind of unveiling themselves discreetly and unaccounted for on their own by virtue of being melted out of whatever frozen confinement that had been keeping them locked away for however long they’ve been out of play.

Sure, it’s starting with strains of anthrax, smallpox and the Spanish flu revealing themselves from melted graves, but at this rate, one of these days it’s only a matter of time when the real Las Plagas parasites melt their way out of rural Spain and begin infesting in modern humanity leading to the eventual downfall of mankind.  The difference is that Leon Kennedy, Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine don’t actually exist, but there are very much crooked corporations like Umbrella out there that would gladly nefariously try to weaponize and control such terrible things.

I’m just saying, this is pretty much the backstory to the plot of Resident Evil 4, and if Ivanka goes missing while on a humanitarian appearance/fashion show out in Europe, then fiction will have a pretty scary time becoming an action-packed reality.  The real-life Leon Kennedy better start training up for his eventual mission of saving the world.