Viral is mixing shit in a rotisserie chicken bag and making it look like vomit

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I mean I don’t know much more succinct I can be about what this post is about.  Perhaps because I like food so much, for whatever reason, the algorithm has seen fit to keep feeding me all these variants of these idiot influencers who are all trying the supposed viral Costco rotisserie chicken bag ‘hack,’ where they chop up a chicken and mix a whole lot of things inside the chicken’s bag itself and call it any form of a palatable meal.

The idea of some of the concoctions seem like they could be good, but the fact that a lot of these dumbasses are insistent and execute them within the confines of a plastic bag, there’s no avoiding that the end result of every single recipe and variant makes it look like people are vomiting into these bags and squirting sriracha and/or kewpie mayonnaise onto them and imbibing on them and overselling how good they are, as if they’re eating Five Guys for the very first time in their life.

Back in my day, doing what these kids are doing now and calling it viral, of mixing a bunch of shit in a bag and eating it straight from there, would be called along the lines of prison food, or walking tacos, with the general perception that comes along with names like those attached to them.  But because the internet continues to make people dumber than they were a day prior, we have a thousand variants of people trying to do this and pyramid piggybacking on a bad idea, for the sake of some cheap views.

The bottom line is that I haven’t seen a single version of this so-called viral rotisserie chicken bag trend that looks remotely appetizing.  Sure, I know taste and satisfaction is supremely more important than aesthetics, but there’s still a minimum viable appearance necessary to make the eater not believe that they’re eating vomit straight out of a bag.

I know I’m occasionally susceptible to wanting to try out a trend, but as far as the viral Costco rotisserie chicken bag ‘hack,’ yeah no, I think I’m good on not wanting to eat food that looks like it’s passed through a digestive track before ending back up inside a bag.

The irony of remote work

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

At the time I’m writing this, pretty much all schools in the Metro Atlanta area have been declared closed on Monday, on account of the arrival of Icepocalypse.  Mythical wife and the girls are excited because it’s now turned into at least a three-day weekend, and therefore will get to spend another day in jammies and not having to leave the house.

However, as for myself, despite the fact that the my office building may be or may not be closed, the fact of the matter is that I will still have to work, because, I can.  Remote work has given everyone the ability to work outside of the workplace, but that also means that all of us capable of remote work are no longer capable of using inclimate weather as an excuse to not come into the office, and thus have a bonus day off, like everyone else in my house can.

I remember like a decade ago when Snowpocalypse ravaged Atlanta with its one inch of city-crippling, debilitating snow, I got like an entire week of work off because of it.  One, because I worked for the government, and government needs absolutely no excuse at all to shut the fuck down and not work, but two, because work then was done solely in the office, and if the office is close and incapable of being gotten to, then there’s no work to do.

Make no mistake, COVID-19 revealing to the world that just about everyone is capable of working remotely was somewhat of a blessing.  Without such, I wouldn’t have gotten nearly the bonus time that I did have to raise my kids at their earliest stages, and I wouldn’t have been able to be nearly as flexible in my job performances without the ability to work from home. 

But in a rare ironic sense, WFH also sucks in the sense that in the onset of shitty winter weather, I won’t be able to phone it in and get a bonus day off like those in particular fields will be getting for at least one or more days, because I’ll simply be able to log in and do my work from afar.

I wouldn’t trade it in for full in-office work for a second, but it’s something to brog about, how ironic it is of one fairly unintentional drawback to remote work.

Dad Brog (#161): they’re feeding themselves now

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Every single day, I’m the first person up in my household, because it’s important to me to be ahead of my kids, so that I can get the day started calmly before they wake up, generally prepare breakfast and try to have it ready for them, and so I can ease myself into the general chaos of life and parenting.  Rarely do I ever have a reprieve from this schedule, and it’s kind of hell on earth on days where I either have a slip up and oversleep, or my kids decide to get up earlier than planned, and I’m put into a position of working from behind instead of in front.

Recently, I left the house at 6:40am in order to go pick up a moving van, in order to transport some larger items to my dad’s new joint down here in Georgia; I’m long past the point in my life where making multiple trips is a viable option, and even if there was a higher cost in renting equipment and driving an unfamiliar vehicle, the end result would be accomplished in one-fell swoop.  Also, with Icepocalypse looming, it was imperative that I moved my dad’s things to his home as soon as possible, so that I could get back home in order to bunker down with my house, so this was actually a do or die kind of day, and I’m fucking over how often these types of days have been popping up in my life.

My idea was to pick up van, grab Chick Fil-A on the way home, one, to give myself a reprieve of having to make a breakfast for the kids, and two, to have something ready to eat in the event that the kids were somehow awake and active when I got back home.  I get the Chick Fil-A, and as I’m pulling back to my house, I can see a light on in the upstairs, which means that the kids have definitely woken up and sprung themselves out of their rooms, which wasn’t what I was hoping on, since in good mornings, they sleep closer to 8 am and not 7 am, and it was barely 7:15 at this point.

I walk in through the garage, and there are the girls, sitting at the kitchen table, eating cereal, looking at me.

“Hey girls, where’s mom?”
“She’s sleeping”
“Ohh, is [au pair] with you then?”
“No she’s sleeping too”
“Sooo, you came down and prepared your own breakfast then?”
“Yep”

And there we have it, my kids have demonstrated some self-sufficiency that I didn’t know that they were capable of.  Ages 5 and 4, and they’re already capable of bringing themselves downstairs, using chairs to climb up and grab cereal from the very top shelf of the pantry, and fixing themselves up their own bowls of cereal.

It should worth mentioning that they went straight for my cereal, the Special K with chocolate chunks that I favor above all others that their mother introduced them to, so I can’t even have my own cereal anymore without having to share, but I’m not (that) salty over it, as much as was amused and impressed by my kids’ independence and demonstration of some truly big kid competence.

I did mention that in the future, I’d rather them wake a grown up to help out, because of the risk if they fell out of a chair in the pantry, or if the case where the jug of milk wasn’t only a quarter full, it definitely would have weighed too much for them to pour it, but I told them that I wasn’t mad, and that I was really impressed with their self-sufficiency.

But all in all, I’ve got kids that have given me a glimpse of the ability to fend for themselves, and we’re one small step closer to the point of where they’re not going to need dear ol’ dad and probably be considering putting me into a home one day.

White people can’t admit that kimchi is just good

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Inquirer: US government includes kimchi to America’s list of gut health-friendly foods

Seeing as how I’m the only person in my household that actually likes and eats kimchi, sometimes it’s a struggle to eat all the kimchi in the amounts that they’re sold in.  For most of my life, kimchi was a dish served solely with Korean foods, rices, stews, bbq or anything that would constitute as a ‘Korean meal.’

But one day, I had this idea of just adding some of this aging kimchi to a sandwich.  I didn’t have any mustard, I was out of pepperjack cheese, and my house is generally pretty sparse when it comes to condiments, and turkey, I saw this great meme about how it’s the meat that is the equivalent of a human being who doesn’t drink enough water even though they know they should, and I had this idea of adding kimchi to my sandwich to help elevate a mundane turkey sandwich.

I felt like I had just invented fire, based on the sheer life that it had injected into my entrée.  And then I had one of those moments where I had to stop what I was doing and process the door I had just unlocked and opened up, realizing that I could add kimchi to a whole new world of foods out there to try and enhance them.

Kimchi in sandwiches.  Kimchi in curries.  Kimchi in very specific tacos.  Kimchi on burgers, hot dogs.  Kimchi as a side to steak or chops or fried chicken.  Kimchi no longer needed to be restricted to accompanying solely Korean food, it was a revelation that I had way too late in my life.

The point is, kimchi is a wonderful food, and it’s cringeworthingly bittersweet that the United States government is recognizing it on a federal level.  And it’s clear that it’s a very white people tactic of trying to push kimchi to the American people, by instead of just letting people come to their own conclusions about the food, they wrap it in a cornucopia of science in declaring it a gut health food, so that people might eat it out of health conscientious instead of branching out their tastebuds into food other than chicken tenders or bougie doughnuts.

All the scientific jargon seems legit to me, but aside from it all, kimchi is just a food that tastes great.  And the thing is, like most of the Korean language, the term kimchi is so broad and subjective, and encapsulates a lot varieties other than the napa cabbage version that whitey is probably thinking is the only form of kimchi that exists.

Whatever though, as critical as I may be by the tactic, I always do like when Korean things get recognized on a more global scale.  Except if through its exposure, it causes all of the greedy merchants of the world to see justification to raise their prices and make it less economical for me to get my motherland’s staple.

Current status:

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Normally I try to keep certain aspects of my personal life out of my writing, but I’m at a point where I feel like I can’t really speak to just anyone about the things going on in my head over the span of the last 12+ months and the journey I’ve been enduring, and writing to nobody seems like a better alternative to unloading a metric fuckton of baggage onto just anyone because frankly I don’t know anyone in their right mind who would want to hear it and nobody probably needs to hear some of the negativity that’s manifested in my thoughts.

This includes my own immediate family, my wife and my closest friends, I don’t feel I can really do much beyond vent some surface level things without encroaching into a realm of dark and frustrated thoughts without risking bringing people who don’t really need to be brought down, down.  And although I know many people who have endured their own episodes of family bullshit, there really aren’t that many that I know who are in the entirely relatable situation of dealing with immigrant parents with severe language barriers fucking shit up on top of all the other typical bullshit that dealing with aging parents entails.

I’m not trying to deliberately separate myself from everyone else, or even insinuate that I’m going through a very specific and very unique scenario, obviously there are millions of xennial children of today who are dealing with this exact scenario, it’s just that I don’t really know any whom I can commiserate with.

Real talk is that I’m moving my dad down to Georgia, so he can come live out the remainder of his life, closer to one of his kids, instead of being on an island up in Virginia, where he basically has no real friends, and the military buddies he has don’t really include him in anything anymore these days on account of his rapidly declining mobility and basically inability to transport himself to wherever they gather and fraternize.  So he’s basically been living a life of solitary confinement for the better part of the last few years, and it’s doing no favors to his general state of mental wellbeing, and his memory has started to rapidly decline and whether it’s early onset dementia or Alzheimer’s I don’t fucking know, but it’s wreaking havoc on, life, as a whole.  His, mine, my sister’s, and by proxy the ones in our individual lives, because I have family obligation to give a shit about my dad’s well-being.

However, it’s been a colossal pain in the ass, because my dad has been indecisive and has numerously changed his mind on relocating or staying, with it becoming more and more frustrating each ensuing time.  I got him to come down for Thanksgiving to try out the home I found for him, and in typical fashion, he didn’t hate it, but he also was in no rush to move.  Unfortunately, shortly after Thanksgiving, his cognitive abilities began falling off of a cliff and my sister and I were rudely awakened to the fact that he seemingly couldn’t recall that he had any grandchildren, and that I even lived in Georgia.  Our spouses were completely forgotten, and if not for the fact that he has family photos in his home, he wouldn’t know that we were both parents in our own right.

Such really chaps my ass, because we’re at the stage of where my sister and I are basically flexing our power of attorney over our dad and low-key forcing him to relocate now, as opposed to him coming on his own volition, no matter just how much sense we were trying to talk into him.  Nobody can make another person do something they’re not willing to do without things getting uncomfortable in some manner.  Had he transitioned a year ago when I first found the home, or even six, eight or ten months ago, when his wits and memory weren’t an issue, he could already have had one foot in the door and begun his twilight years cognitively competent, and not basically being moved for no other reason than his own safety and need to be close to one of this kids because we’re the only people on the planet who give a fuck about him.

It goes without saying that I’m full of resentment and frustration with my dad for not fucking listening to me, or my sister, about relocating sooner.  He can’t live alone anymore, and shouldn’t really have been over the last year and change, but neither of us could make him help himself without his willingness to be on board with changes, and now we’ve crossed the point where it’s not a choice based on logic and mutual acceptance, but one out of necessity and for the sake of safety.

After basically flexing power of attorney on him, I deliberately left two weeks on the clock, so we could have a little buffer for any last minute issues that may or may not come up, as well as to arrange travel without having to rush or pay for rush charges.  Unsurprisingly, the last two weeks have been agonizing from the standpoint that my dad’s been blowing up my phone on a daily basis, having forgotten everything we talked about the day previously, requiring me to say the same shit and explain the exact same stuff that I’d been discussing with him for multiple days at this point.  No amount of demanding he write shit down works, because he’s either lying or being lazy or both, because if he were, then he wouldn’t be needing to call me six times every fucking day.

I snapped at my dad, telling him how frustrated I was that I had to keep doing this, and he uncharacteristically grew a little defensive and clapped back a little bit, citing that if he couldn’t ask questions to his own children, then who could he ask questions to?  I explained that he’s forgetting things on a daily basis and to write things down to a degree where he wouldn’t have to ask the same questions every day, and that he needed to also consider my position of where I have to say the same crap every single day because he won’t help me help himself by writing down the important things. 

He forgets, I can’t.  No matter how much I’d love to, and then chalk everything up to being forgetful.  My angst, frustration and pain compounds daily, while he gets to forget about it, and ask the same bullshit questions that could’ve been avoided two, four, six or twelve fucking months ago had he just listened to his own goddamn kids.

And on top of it all is the motherfucking language barrier that eternally exists between us.  And I will never not resent my parents for not learning more English after 50 years in this country, or pushing me to become more proficient in Korean.  It takes a difficult situation and ramps the difficulty up tenfold, with neither of us really being able to say the things we really want to say, and actually have the other fully understand it. 

I’m sick of having to sit in front of my computer with Google Translate open, or having to say hold on, while I swipe out of the phone and into a browser so I can do the same thing.

I swear on my life that I will never put my kids in this situation that my parents put me in.  We will never have a language barrier between us, and I hope everyone out there who doesn’t have one with their parents know just how fucking lucky they are, especially those of immigrants, who ended up on the same page to have a common tongue between parents and children.

To top things off, is this rumbling of the blizzard of the century that’s supposedly about to bombard the east coast.  My dad’s official travel day to Georgia is coming up, and I’m going to go apoplectic if the weather comes into play and completely cockblocks everything.  It buys time for my dad to try to back out yet again, and frankly the waiting for moving day has been way too long as it is, and I just want it to be here, so I can get him settled and hopefully started on a better life where he’s closer to me, will be surrounded by other human beings, and perhaps get the mental stimulation that he’s sorely needed.

Of all the things I don’t need, is the weather to come into play and ruin our plans.*  But considering the general nature of bad luck, fortunate and everything else that has delayed things to this point, I feel like it’s kind of a lock to happen.

*actually came up with an adult idea and paid to moved up his arrival date as to avoid the proposed start time of the so called blizzard of the century

The point of all this rambling is that I may not talk about it a lot in my writing, or even in person, but I am going through a metric fuck ton of stuff right now.  My life is pretty overloaded with parenting, a really currently mid-feeling job that has me churning a lot, being the general hard carry of my home, and then I have all of my dad’s bullshit that I’m having to run point on because nobody else is willing or able to do so, and I’m in a pretty precarious state of being.

Once my dad is settled and hopefully on the right track of existence, I need a fucking break.**

**I put this in writing a few times a year, but it basically never actually happens

I also need everyone to respect my time.

I also need people to stop questioning everything I do.

I also need everyone to stop being so reliant on me.

I also need to not have to be the hard carry in every facet of my life.

I guess OnlyFans wasn’t as lucrative as she had hoped

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

There’s a lot of turnover in the professional wrestling industry.  Budget cuts on account of oversaturation, poor television ratings, general societal changes where the industry just isn’t as hot as it once was, etcetera, etcetera.  However, I have this belief in wrestling that even if a talent is released, they are always one idea and a phone call away from being brought back into the business.  Over the years, we the fans have witnessed such revivals countless times, and as long as a released talent doesn’t go out of their way to scorch earth and set fire to any bridges they used, there’s always the possibility that they will be back, and hopefully to more success in the future.

Well, when the WWE released Cora Jade, she didn’t take it particularly well.  From the moment she was released, she was up on social media taking shots at the company, vaguebooking over some of the colleagues and personnel she wasn’t a fan of, and after the initial shock and resentment period that most people whom might have been fired from their jobs might harbor, Cora Jade didn’t really stop.  Seemingly at times, she would go out of her way, or inject herself into debates and discussions about the business in order to keep taking digs at the WWE, and how she didn’t need them, and how her future endeavors would definitely be more lucrative or make her more famous and in demand than if she had remained a WWE superstar.

Needless to say, it’s apparent that nobody in her personal life had ever told her the importance of not burning bridges, and that there is definitely a time and place for popping off, but it’s really generally not wise most of the time.

Regardless, with her bridge particularly singed, she embarked on an endeavor that would mostly ensure her being able to generate income utilizing one of her more prominent wrestling attributes: her body, and starting up an OnlyFans account.

Of course, she went way out of her way to put over OnlyFans while still taking digs at the WWE, as if she were trying to convince herself on top of all of her social followers that OnlyFans wasn’t something to be ashamed about.  Unsurprisingly, she seemed to be shot out of a cannon when she started, because of course she was quick to boast about her earnings by making a post about the luxury car that she was now capable of affording.

I mean, Toni Storm and Jordynne Grace both made gobs of money when they were on the platform, however, neither of them were shitting on the business while they were doing it, they were just capitalizing on a money-making venture while they awaited their next opportunity, which inevitably came, since the two of them were way better wrestlers than Cora Jade was, and they actually had something to offer their respective companies.

So honestly, it was a little surprising to see Cora Jade emerge back in TNA, under her old name, Elayna Black.  She had made such a big deal about how much she was over the professional wrestling industry, that even if she really didn’t want to step away, many in the business might be turned off by her general lack of appreciation for the industry, but here we are anyway.

The funny thing is that over the last few months before the return of Black, I actually hadn’t heard much from her, as far as the algorithm went at feeding me content.  And considering that she came crawling back to the industry that she said she didn’t need anymore, it leads me to believe that perhaps the OnlyFans train wasn’t doing as well as she had thought it was going to do, and that perhaps it might not be a bad idea to remain in the pro-wrestling space.

Either way, it must kind of suck to be Elayna Black/Cora Jade.  She had a great big Gen-Z crashout after she lost her job, and made herself look like an idiot with all of her bridge burning on social media.  Relegated herself to selling risque pictures of herself to creeps, but when that well seemingly began to dry up, she came crawling back to the business she had spent the last year trying to bury.

Owned.

Xaivian Lee’s parents must be so disappointed

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

SI: Xaivian Lee’s late three-pointer secure’s Florida’s upset against #10 Vanderbilt

In other news, I learned of Xaivian Lee’s existence and upon a cursory fact check, yes he is Korean.  Which means that there is a Korean hooper out there outside of Korea, that is actively playing for a North American D-I program.

Color me surprised and fascinated.

Granted, according to his wiki, boy is from Toronto, and is about as white-washed as I am, especially based on the fact that his name is “Xaivian,” and based on his general physical appearance and the fact that he cleared 6’0, I’d really be curious to what his 23 and Me looks like, but for all intents and purposes, he’s of enough Korean descent for this post to manifest.

My knee-jerk reaction to seeing that he had transferred out of Princeton to go to UF was that his parents must have been apoplectic at the notion of him leaving an Ivy to go to an SEC school, but I saw that he was at Princeton for four years, which leads to the assumption that he had to have graduated, which is the absolute bare minimum of acceptance for Korean parents.  I’d guess that they let him chase his dream of moar hooping contingent of graduation from an Ivy League school although they probably would have preferred if he went to Harvard or Yale instead of Princeton.

Initially, I was ready to make all the bad jokes in the world about own disappointed his parents must’ve been that he went from Princeton to Florida.  But the more I read and learn about his general bio, the more my thoughts and opinions alter, since I’m kind of writing this off the cuff and learning while I write as opposed to doing my research in advance and coming up with a general basis before writing out.

Seeing as how ol’ Xaivian finished his time at Princeton, and his numbers scream out, nowhere close to good enough for the NBA much less should he even want to go considering the absolute racist gate he would be inevitable to slam into, he’s a perfect case for the college player to bilk as much eligibility and NIL money as humanly possible, and a move to UF was probably a great idea. 

And therein lies some of the effects of the NIL pendulum swung so hard to the opposite end of the spectrum, where fringe and no-chance-at-pro caliber players are clinging to dear life at college eligibility and are looking like a bunch of Van Wilders staying at school at 24+ years of age.  But for every Asian athlete that literally has no shot at North American pros, there are probably like 3-4 non-Asians who might be, but know they can still bilk more from NIL versus being a practice squad or development prospect at the pro level, and these guys can eat dicks and gtfo out of the NCAA.

I saw some shit recently about how there were like over 3,000 players currently in the transfer portal currently; that’s almost like 60-70 entire teams’ worth of players.  This is what’s making college sports so crazy right now, is that the entire collegiate level is jam packed full of all these kids bouncing around all over the place trying to sniff out as much NIL money as they can.  And among them are all these 23+ year old graduates enrolling in patsy graduate programs in order to keep playing college sports against other Van Wilders or literal teenagers.

But I’m straying off topic here, the point of this post was to acknowledge the existence of Xaivian Lee, an actual Korean hooper playing for a noteworthy NCAA program, and being good enough to be hitting game winning threes and getting a little bit of spotlight from North American sport media.  He may have already graduated from Princeton and is doing a little bit of Van Wilder-ing because he knows he has no shot at the NBA, but there’s no doubt in my mind that his parents are probably still disappointed in him, even if he is pulling in a million bucks in NIL.  They probably think he could’ve already been making four times that had he traded up to Harvard or Yale and become a doctor or lawyer instead.