Tag: owned

I’m pretty sure basketball is nothing like slavery, bro

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

SI: NBA guard Dennis Schroder, exasperated by how many times he’s been traded in his career, likens the process to ‘modern day slavery’

Fewer things inspire me to get on a keyboard and pound out some words like professional athletes complaining about well, anything, considering the fact that they’re all overgrown man-children who get paid exorbitant amounts of money to play children’s games at an extraordinary level.  And in this case, we have NBA player, Dennis Schroder, whom jaded from witnessing one of the most lopsided and surprising trades in the history of professional sports, decided to air out his frustrations and compare the stress of being traded to being the modern day equivalent to, slavery:

It’s like modern slavery. It’s modern slavery at the end of the day,” Schröder said. “Everybody can decide where you’re going, even if you have a contract.

First, I don’t think Dennis Schroder understands what slavery really is.  As defined by Merriam-Webster, slavery is:

1a: the practice or institution of holding people involuntarily and under threat of violence
1b: the state of a person who is forced usually under threat of violence to labor for the profit of another

Last time I checked, NBA players, like all other professional athletes are usually not under the threat of violence, and furthermore, are actually paid wages in order to perform their trade, which in the case of Dennis Schroder, is to play basketball.

I didn’t know who Dennis Schroder was, and I was tickled by the fact that he actually spent five years in Atlanta.  But I figured that he must be some scrub who has been hanging onto a career in the NBA and has mostly been living on league minimum salaries, which by the way, the NBA absolute league minimum is still $1.1 million dollars, and more for guys who have the years of experience that Schroder has, which is to say that being an NBA player pays at the very least 1.1 million times more than what slaves got when slavery was a thing.

But in fact, Dennis Schroder himself has actually cleared the vaunted $100M mark as far as career earnings go.  In spite of my initial thought that he had to have been some scrub, he’s apparently not a bad player, having averaged 14 points and nearly 5 assists a game as mostly a backup point guard, which are pretty above average numbers in my estimation, and seems worthy of the $100M he’s earned in his career thus far.

But such adds to the absurdity of a guy that’s made this much money to be making the dumb comparison of trading players being akin to slavery, and adds to the narrative of the bullshit tone-deaf chasm between professional athletes and ordinary citizens of the world.

I get that he’s probably frustrated that he’s been traded five times in his career and has had to move now, eleven different times, but that’s all part of the deal of being a professional athlete.  You are nothing but an asset, no matter what management tells you, and when the day is over, you are available to be traded and dumped and moved on a moment’s notice, if the needs of the business outweigh the needs of the asset.

The Luka trade was almost like a league-wide reminder that nobody is untouchable, on top of all other analytical reasons why it’s potentially one of the most lopsided deals in history, but the fact remains nobody is untouchable.  Schroder may be on his eighth NBA team, but there are all sorts of guys way more talented and famous than him that have been bounced around as much as him if not more.

Hall of Famer, Moses Malone has played for nine.  Future Hall of Famer, Vince Carter, played for eight NBA teams in his career.  Apparently, the NBA record is some dude named Ish Smith, who played 14 years in the league, and played for 12 different franchises, having been traded six times.  And even he still cleared $44M in career earnings, galaxies apart from what Kunta Kinte made in Roots.

In all fairness, Schroder quickly realized the colossal fail of what he said, and tried to walk it back some and acknowledge that he makes a lot of money and is blessed to be able to do what he does.  But speech has no undo button, and the media that recorded him will always have on record of him making his completely absurd remarks.  And comparing the woes of being traded as a professional athlete to slavery is about as big of a fuck up as there can be, but he’ll be lucky that the media is still mostly all over the Luka trade to give him any attention beyond the knee-jerk reaction.

Seems appropriate that Zombie Deer have made their way to Georgia

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

WSB: Chronic Wasting Disease, aka the zombie deer disease has started showing up in Georgia

A friend of mine already popped all the actual science behind a lot of this, but imagine how much my imagination exploded upon hearing the words “zombie deer” and “in Georgia.”  The fact that I’m posting about it regardless of the fact that I’ve heard the science that mostly ruins my fantasy that this is the start of the zombie apocalypse goes to show that much like actual zombies, there is life in this topic, even after it it’s dead.

Sure, it is has a 100% kill rate among deer that get infected, which sucks for the deer, and unsurprising, there have been many cases of humans who have already eaten CWD-infected venison.  Yes, there have been deaths in some cases, but as long as the dumbasses aren’t eating The Big Texan slabs of it, it seems to mostly just result in horrific intestinal issues that don’t always kill humans.

Originally, I had all these grand ideas about how Georgia and inevitably the rest of the world were going to be fucked, because relying on the subsect of hunters that fall into categories of being dumb, uneducated, ignorant, some of all of the above if not completely all of the above, to not eat infected venison, allow the disease to mutate and become zootic, leading to the zombie plague for humanity, seemed kind of inevitable.

And how the thought of the zombie apocalypse beginning still seemed preferable to the orange-colored America we were going to be embarking on for the next four years, and I likened it to my version of the choosing the bear meme that women had with a little while ago.

At least in a zombie apocalypse, sure the rate of mortality would probably drop tremendously for humanity as a species, but at least if any zombies threatened me or my family, the opportunity to legally bludgeon and beat the ever-living fuck out of something would be unlocked, and completely in the name of self-defense.  A life-long fantasy of killing zombies seems like a fair trade off, in exchange for getting away from lily-orange America, at least it does in my opinion.

But no, like I said, a friend of mine already burst my bubble by dropping a lot of actual factual science as far as CWD goes which is funny that it’s such an acronym, considering it’s so very close to the popular The Walking Dead TWD acronym.  And most everyone knows that Georgia is basically the zombie capital of America, considering it’s history for being the backdrop for TWD, Zombieland, and all sorts of zombie film and television at this point.  So it seems very appropriate for zombie deer to finally have made their arrival in Georgia, and it’s really a surprise in itself that it didn’t start here in the first place.

Honestly, it would’ve been more surprising had it been unanimous

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Shocker: Ichiro voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, but denied unanimous induction by one anonymous vote; reactions are as expected

Like the subject says, it would’ve been more surprising if Ichiro did get the vaunted unanimous decision and make it into the Hall of Fame with the most noteworthy of honors.  But baseball has a problem in their legacy department, and they don’t seem to be in any rush at all to try and alleviate it.  So unsurprising to just about any baseball fan who knows how the voting process works, Ichiro does make the Hall of Fame, as predicted, but, as many have before him, failed to get 100% unanimity, and the part of the internet that cares about this, goes ballistic.

The funny thing is that I predicted that this was probably going to happen back in 2020, when I went on an identical diatribe about how fucked up it was that a single voter denied Derek Jeter the unanimous entry.  I could just have easily just sticky’d and reposted that old post, copy/pasted the whole thing and just replaced “Derek Jeter” with “Ichiro” and it would’ve translated itself fairly seamlessly, but I’m an old man who clearly likes to talk about the same shit over and over again, and am going through the futile exercise of writing about it again.

So here we are again, where some anonymous voter is getting off at knowing that they alone have sparked the internet hate machine, and have thousands of keyboard warriors who want their head on a spike.  Naturally, they’re content with the chaos that they caused and will have absolutely no intention of revealing themselves, because that would assume a modicum of accountability they want to take, and people these days dodge accountability like they’re agents from The Matrix dodging bullets.

People calling for credentials to be revoked, voting rules to be changed, more accountability and transparency; all logical and pragmatic ideas, but none of them are going to occur.  I surmise the only way a vote is actually revoked is when the presumably old, white, guy croaks and he’s physically unable to return a ballot for multiple years and the old white guys at the BBWAA offices start getting return to sender and get the message that the voter might have died.

Lots of hypothetical guesses that it’s the same guy who didn’t vote for Jeter, and frankly, it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to put them in the same basket as the guys who didn’t vote for Cal Ripken, Jr., Tony Gwynn, Ken Griffey, Jr., Greg Maddux, and Randy Johnson, among other legends of the game where their inductions probably should have been unanimous.

Personally, I’ve been spouting off on random comment threads and accusing Bill Ballou out of Boston, because he’s the dude who went on an arrogant diatribe back in 2019 about how he didn’t vote for Mariano Rivera, but just didn’t turn in his ballot, thus still allowing him to get the only unanimous vote in HOF history, but someone somewhere rebutted to me that his vote this year was made public, and he did actually vote for Ichiro.  Other names of baseball writers I’ve never heard of have been thrown out there, but there are many, and none of them are taking the bait to defend themselves, and actually helping the cause of identifying the lone tryhard, so it’s really all futile all the same.

Here’s the thing too – I don’t even really like Ichiro, as a person.  In the two World Baseball Classics he participated in, he got a little too uppity nationalistic and made disparaging remarks about Korea, despite Korea holding their own against his Japanese squad, and although the rest of the world’s baseball fandom still idolizes him, I still see him as a bit of an asshole from that angle.  But as a baseball player, there really were few better and consistent and talented as he was, and I respect all of his actual baseball accolades.

Of course he deserved to get in unanimously.  For years, people have been coming up with reasons why he shouldn’t get in, at all or first ballot, and throughout his tenure in MLB, he’s knocked them all down.  People loved to discount the 2,000+ hits he had in Japan, and said it would be cheating for him to add that to his hit total to surpass 3,000, so he just went ahead and notched 3,000+ hits in MLB alone.  Along the way, he surpassed Pete Rose as the all-time leader in cumulative hits.  Won numerous batting titles, gold gloves, and AL Rookie of the Year and MVP at the same time.  Frankly, the only thing that eluded him was a World Series, but frankly that could happen to anyone who’s majority was spent in Seattle.

But unsurprisingly, he was denied.  Another legend, denied the ultimate honor, by a spineless, anonymous, most likely white guy, determined to upstage the whole idea of HOF voting in order to put themselves over.  And the BBWAA as a whole doesn’t seem to care, so it all but assures that this is going to happen continuously in the future.

Which means in 2027 when Albert Pujols shows up on the ballot, he basically already has a 0% chance of being unanimous.  Forget about his multiple World Series rings with the Cardinals, the 700+ home runs, all the MVPs and other hardware.  Forget about his charity, philanthropy and squeaky-clean image that made him look like a Dominican Mr. Clean.  A voter somewhere is going to see 2027 as an opportunity to become the most wanted man on the internet with a 100% success rate of getting away with it, and completely capitalize on it.

The funny thing is that unlike Jeter, Ichiro probably does care that he didn’t get unanimous.  During the press conference, Ichiro basically started off talking about the one vote he didn’t get, inviting the mystery voter out for a drink to have a talk.  American audiences guffawed about that one, but let’s read between the lines here, Ichiro’s Japanese honor code and general psychotic dedication to baseball says that he probably considers his entire baseball career a failure because of this one guy.  And as I predicted a long time ago, I still think the man is going to fucking kill someone, and this mystery voter has probably just climbed the list of people whom might be that someone.

I am in the wrong segment of this industry

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Forbes: Walmart “rebrands” for the first time in nearly 20 years, response is predictable but justifiable

Often times I get pegged of being jaded or pessimistic about the design industry.  Why are you in it then?  If you don’t like it, do something else with your life.  And so on, and so on.

Well, this is a prime example of why I, and other designers end up the way we do, is when we hear about the richest companies on the planet, dumping millions of dollars into rebranding efforts, that in this case are literally taking their old logo and adding 1-2 points of stroke around it, and then calling it rebrand.

By the way, this Sisyphus-ian effort cost $1.25 million dollars.

Honestly, in the history of rebrands, $1.25M isn’t the worst or highest dollar amount sunk into one, but considering the sheer lack of effort that went into this, it’s still pretty noteworthy, and undoubtedly chalks up to be a classic example of egregious corporate waste of money.

For years, I’ve always called the Walmart star “the butthole” because let’s be real here, it basically looked like a little yellow sphincter, and I figured it was apropos that they did that, considering the sheer amounts of fucking they did to the market, economy and small business.  Also, I personally think Walmart sucks ass as a whole, so there’s that association too.

I don’t really know or can fathom why Walmart felt the need to rebrand in the first place, but I guess if those in the world of business feel  if you’re not constantly evolving, you’re dying, shit like redundant, unnecessary and minimal effort rebrands gets accusatory eyes off your nuts for a minute and makes it look like they’re doing something, other than fucking the world of commerce and getting a bunch of old white men richer by the hour.

Seriously though, there’s really not as much to rant about as I felt there could’ve been; that’s just how little effort that Walmart put into this rebrand.  They literally just pressed increase stroke around both the butthole as well as the wordmark, and the end result is a bolder wordmark, and a butthole that has appeared to have gotten a little more clenched.

There’s an easy joke about the shitshow that 2025 and beyond seems like it’s going to be, leading to clenched anoos-es throughout ‘Murica, but I don’t get the impression that Walmart as a company isn’t necessarily in opposition to the parties that might be leading to these tighter assholes, so I don’t think it really works.

Perhaps it’s more representative to how the company is a bunch of tightwad fucks who sinch and clench and choke out small businesses throughout the world, squeezing all the way to their assholes, which is ultimately what the butthole represents.

Either way, I don’t shop there, and I actively go out of my way to typically avoid them when I can.  I like protecting my butthole literally and metaphorically, and don’t wish to support companies that go out their way to raze the buttholes of the people; as well as put out shitty creative and branding.

Does anyone else think this is kind of fucked up?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

In light of the recent meme-ization of Hulk Hogan getting boo’d the fuck out of the debut of RAW is Netflix, one of my boys shared with the brochat that the Iron Sheik was jumping on the dog pile of shitting on the Hulkster.

Entertaining as the thought of such is, one prevalent thought quickly rose to the top of mind – The Iron Sheik is dead, and has been since 2023. 

Most fans of his colorful Twitter account learned that it was one of his nephews that ran the account, but by and large it was safe to assume that the opinions and general vibe of it was still fairly reflective of the opinions of the actual Iron Sheik.

But the fact that whomever was in charge of it, is still running the account, effectively LARPing as the Iron Sheik now?  Nephew or any other family member or not, something about this just doesn’t seem right.

Am I the only one who thinks this is kind of fucked up?

I know I’m missing a lot of context to why this is occurring, perhaps Sheik still has a lot of debts, as many older wrestlers from the 80s were prone to getting themselves into, and maybe Sheik’s old Twitter account is still monetized or still capable of generating some degree of income and it’s going toward that.  Or maybe it’s just the nephew who’s pocketing the money, or maybe there’s no money at all and he just likes the attention that running the account and mouthing off in the voice of his dead uncle is how he gets his jollies. 

But all the same, it just seems fucked up to me that someone, regardless of whom, is still operating the account and continuing to blast off on topical matters in the voice of the late Iron Sheik.  I know it’s probably hard to want to walk away from a popular device as such, but the man endured the pro-wrestling business in the 70s and 80s, let him rest and not be used as a means to get cheap attention.

How have the Mariners sucked so historically?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I was seeing some news about the 2025 baseball hall of fame ballot, and the only sure-fire, slam dunk guarantee on it is Ichiro, and the real question is if he’s going to get a unanimous induction, or if this will be another year where some anonymous BBWAA tryhard deliberately doesn’t vote for him for the sanctity of the Hall of Fame, and then goes into hiding so they don’t have to take any criticism for their, most likely in the case of Ichiro, racism because there’s absolutely no metric or no logical rationale why he isn’t worthy of unanimous induction.

I don’t particularly care for the overly-nationalistic disparaging remarks he’s made about Korean baseball throughout his career, but there’s absolutely no way to deny the fact that he’s was a legendary player, but I digress and will save these bullets for the midseason for when he inevitably gets 99.76% of the vote and one voter who will successfully remain anonymous, goes into hiding afterward.

But Felix Hernandez is also on the ballot for the first time, and I think he’s up for debate on whether he’s Hall-worthy or not; the man has a Cy Young and pitched a perfect game.  He doesn’t have the 3,000+ strikeouts, and he started his decline phase at around 32, but at the same time, his major league career started when he was 19, so he still enjoyed over a decade in the big leagues.

He also didn’t win a World Series, but the thing is, and the impetus of this entire post, neither has anyone else in Mariners history, no matter how talented or legendary of players have played for the team. 

It really got me thinking, how have the Seattle Mariners sucked so much throughout history?  Sure, they’ve only been around since 1977, way younger than teams like the Braves, Phillies, Reds, Yankees and Red Sox, but still, in the team’s entire history, they’ve only made the playoffs five times, and have collectively gone 15-22 in those appearances.  They’ve never made it to the World Series, and there was one year in which they set the modern record for regular season wins, winning an astonishing 116 games, only to get bounced out of the playoffs unceremoniously by the Yankees in the ALCS.

There was a stretch in time where the Mariners had a prime Ken Griffey, Jr., a Cy Young winning Randy Johnson, and even a young and rapidly rising Alex Rodriguez.  All were gone by 2001, but then there was a stretch when Ichiro came to the United States, and by 2005, Felix Hernandez arrived and was routinely one of the best pitchers in the game.  In between these eras was Edgar Martinez, who is a Hall of Famer in his own right, and was beloved in Seattle that the street near their ballpark is named after him.

Like, with all the talent that has been in Seattle for long swaths of time, really begs the question, how have the Mariners actually sucked?

Yes, no single player can carry entire teams, but that logic is nowhere less than it is in baseball, where single players have managed to carry entire teams on their backs for small stretches of time, and usually talented players often inspire other talented players to want to come play with them, making the teams richer in talent when it happens.

It’s just incredible to think that even with such legendary talents such as Griffey and Ichiro, Johnson and Martinez, and even A-Rod and King Felix, the Mariners just could never put things together and see any success.  Like, after the 2001 season where they won 116 games, the franchise went 20 years before they saw the playoffs again, and frankly that’s mostly on account of the fact that they added an extra round which let a non-division winner like the 2022 squad even have chance.

As good as Ichiro was, after his mind-blowing rookie season where he won RoY and MVP, 2001 was the only time he ever saw the playoffs as a Mariner.  Felix Hernandez, as good as he was, never pitched a single post-season game in his entire career.  Griffey and Randy Johnson played in two of the Mariners’ five playoff appearances, Alex Rodriguez played in three, and Edgar Martinez played in four of them, since he played until he was 62 years old.

Things don’t really look like they’re going to get any better any time soon, especially in today’s MLB ecosystem, but I’d have to wager that after all this time, the Seattle Mariners franchise’s perception has become reality – they’re simply a squad that will never win, no matter how talented of players emerge and play for them, they either fizzle their careers out in Seattle, or they go to other places and win championships, like Alex Rodriguez and Randy Johnson did, Kyle Seager very recently, and even old vets like Jamie Moyer and Freddy Garcia.

Because when some of the greatest players in history couldn’t do it while they were there, sometimes concurrently, then I’m not going to wager that anyone will.  Most know that there’s no crapshoot like there is in baseball, but the Mariners are plagued with something completely else.

Thoughts on the RAW is Netflix debut

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I was looking forward to the debut of RAW on Netflix, because I hadn’t seen an episode of RAW in close to almost a decade, since my house had long since cut the cables, and I could usually keep up with the product solely on YouTube highlights or just catching the PPVs PLEs.  Furthermore, being a monumental debut class of episode, I had expectations that the WWE was going to put their best foot forward and have a loaded show.  If the Saturday Night’s Main Event revival they had a month ago was any indication to how they were going to treat special events, I thought the E was ready to pop off, and I was excited to see what was going to happen.

And of course, there was the whole curiosity of what the E was going to do on Netflix, as far as the freedom to push boundaries were going to be, since this isn’t cable television and they aren’t beholden to the television rating standards, I was curious to see what, if any, behavioral changes that were going to take place.  However, they are still a publicly traded company, with collaborative programming still on cable television, so it wasn’t any surprise that they still kept it fairly PG, aside from The Rock saying ‘bullshit’ at one point.

Overall, the show was decent, but I’d be lying if I didn’t have all sorts of opinions and criticisms for it, mostly the fact that the episode was a little bit drowned in the pomp and celebration of the move to Netflix, with all sorts of appearances, cameos and segments that chewed up time, drug on a little bit, and most importantly, got in the way of actual wrestling product.  The three-hour show had a total of four matches, and on paper they sounded good, but I don’t know what it was, but they were all pretty underwhelming in the grand spectrum of things.

The matches were sloppy and got sloppier as the night progressed, and honestly a Seth Rollins vs. CM Punk match could have been on a Wrestlemania card without anyone  questioning it, but as far as I’m concerned it was the worst match of the night for the RAW is Netflix debut.  I don’t know whether their personal beefs interfered with their ability to do business, or if there were any subtle instances of trying to sabotage one another, but the whole match was kind of clunky, and I felt like it was a good example of two talented guys that just didn’t click in the ring.

It’s like the talent caved into the magnitude of the scenario, which is funny considering all of these specific performers have worked multiple Wrestlemanias among other big shows at this point, and those shows are usually two to three times the size of this episode of RAW.

But the biggest thing in my opinion was the fact that the crowd was absolutely dead as fuck.  This was something my bros and I discussed in our group chat during the show, but my consensus was that the crowd was a dead crowd, and I always believe that performers really can feed off of the fans, and hot crowds can really inspire stalwart performances, and since the RAW is Netflix show was held in Los Angeles, primarily full of people who just wanted to there for the hot ticket, but not really because they’re actual wrestling fans, it led to an arena that was full, but full of mostly casuals who don’t know the nuances of a show, intricacies of existing storylines, or have any genuine fandom for any of the workers.  This was an event, and casuals want to be seen at events, and actual wrestling fans that feed a show their energy, weren’t there, be it being priced out or simply incapable of getting in because of the fairweather scenesters were boxing them all out.

Sure, guys like The Rock and John Cena got some big reactions.  Roman Reigns got a decent pop, as did Rhea Ripley, Seth Rollins and CM Punk.  Jey Uso didn’t get the raucous reaction that he normally has been getting, as the most over guy in the company currently.  Dominic Mysterio and the New Day, who have been getting absolutely drowned out by boos and heat in the last few months, I’m convinced had to have boos piped into the arena because of how lukewarm the dead crowd was.

It’s like the people in attendance had it in them to have initial reactions to everything they saw, but by and large were sitting on their hands for the remainder of every segment, reacting to big spots and probably whatever the actual fans dispersed throughout the arena were reacting to and going along with it.  It was almost like watching a New Japan show, by how non-plussed the fans were, except whereas the Japanese chalk it up to cultural meekness and lack of expression, the LA scenesters were dead because they’re not really wrestling fans as much as they wanted to be at a big event so they could boast about it on social media.

I get it, it was important for the E to put their best foot forward, have it in LA and pack it with as many execs, celebrities and people who might actually gain more exposure, but in the process, they priced and pushed out actual fans from attending and it led to a dead crowd that didn’t help the general uninspired performing from the workers on the card.  Wrestlemanias and big shows get away with celeb-stacking and posturing, because they’re held at giant venues where the majority of the audience can still be actual fans, but the dinky Intuit Dome with their capacity of like 16,000, had the majority of the attendance being casuals and/or scenesters, and it was painfully obvious.

However, if there was one segment where the crowd woke up and came to life that truly stood out, was when Hulk Hogan made his appearance and was absolutely booed the fuck out of the building.  It was like the fans were told that they had a finite amount of booing that they were allowed to do, and they passed on using any of it on Dom Mysterio or The New Day and absolutely unloaded on Hulk Hogan.  Unsurprisingly, this was my most notable and entertaining moment of the evening where the most emotion was elicited from me, in the form of laughter.

The funniest part about it all was that how out of touch Hulk Hogan is with the world and the current state of the industry, is that he stood there, somehow surprised that a California crowd was booing him into oblivion when just less than three months ago, he was ripping his shirt and cutting a cringeworthy promo in support of the orange turd prior to the election.  Poor Jimmy Hart standing there with his longtime friend, waving Old Glory, complicit by association, taking tons of shrapnel.  And then Hogan just goes straight into his babyface promo, putting over Netflix, putting over his beer company, and putting over the company, while everyone is still just booing the fuck out of him.

The power of a crowd when they get hot!

Take all the pomp and circumstance, and the whole Netflix narrative out of the night, and this was an extremely mediocre show.  The matches were average at best, the crowd was dead as fuck, and not even all the special appearances did much for me.  A tremendous amount of time was spent on showing off celebrities and speaking segments, and in true first-world wrestling smark problems, the lack of formal commercial breaks really cramped my style of multitasking while watching wrestling like I used to.

The good news is that whether it was intentional or not, the RAW on Netflix bar has been set at not a tremendously high level, and the brand can only go upward from here, and the sky’s the limit.  I’m sure once the novelty of being on Netflix wears out, and regular fans are allowed to start going back to the shows, business will get back to normal, and as far as the E is concerned, that’s probably exactly where they want to be.