Tag: PF

The unintentional greatness of opt-out clauses

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

When the day is over, I’m not really a fan of opt-out clauses in sports contract.  They’re like slimy, sleazy trap doors out of contracts that professionals can claim they’re really going to commit to a team for seven years, but dude-bail after two years or five years, or whenever they’ve negotiated to have an opt-out available to them.  It’s like being in a fucked-up relationship where the dude is allowed to leave after the second year scot-free, but if they pass up on that escape window, then they’re locked in for the long haul.

More often than not, we’ve seen classic examples of guys who sign 7-10 year deals, with opt-out clauses after like three years; where the fans think they’ll have a guy for 7-10 years, they’re all stoked to see him play out of his mind in year three, put up career best numbers, lead their teams deep into playoffs… and then opt the fuck out of their contracts, and then put a gun to their teams’ heads and stick them up for another lucrative long-term contract, lest they become free agents and jump to whomever else would be willing to instead. 

Off the top of my head, Alex Rodriguez and CC Sabathia are prime examples of guys who have successfully parlayed the opt-out clause to perfection and bilked the New York Yankees out of more money than their original Yankee contracts were originally worth.  LeBron James is a perfect recent example of a guy who has not only opted out this year, but has done it twice now, opting out of the contract he had with the Miami Heat to escape back to Cleveland, and then now opting out of his deal with the Cavaliers to go to Los Angeles.

On the flip side, there’s the hilarious example of Dwyane Wade, who opted out of a guaranteed $16 million for one year with the Miami Heat, only to discover that nobody wanted him, and then came crawling back to the Heat, where he had to sign for two more years in order to get than $16 million back.

And that’s where we get a glimpse of the unintentional greatness of the opt-out clause, because every now and then it provides the opportunity for overpaid babies we know as professional athletes to get owned.  And there are fewer things I take a sadistic pleasure out of seeing than professional athletes getting owned financially.

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Office Space-ing

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It’s only been a year and chance since I moved into my house, but I haven’t really done anything with my office.  Sure, I made and installed my wall of belts, and hung a few frames on the walls, in addition to positioning the futon and setting up a space for my computer.  But I still had a lot of boxes sitting in the closet along with general ideas for lots of little trinkets and nerdy figurines that I had imagined displaying in whatever room I’d designate as my office, that I simply never bothered really getting to.

Another thing I decided to do while mythical gf was out of the country was to finally do something with my office space, and get it to a point beyond where it was just a whole bunch of boxes stacked in a corner with just a computer and a wall of wrestling belts.  A few posts ago, I touched on the hanging wall shelves that I had put together, which are in place and I’m generally happy with, even though I underestimated a little bit just how many Rito figures that I had and how much space they’d take up.

So among the things not making the cut of the above picture are two shelves that I purchased and installed; neither are particularly impressive things, but more like essentials in order to get a degree of organization for all my various personal effects.  The obstacle I faced with my primary shelf was that I had some general dimensions that I did not want to exceed in any capacity so that I could retain as much open floor space as possible but still be able to have a place to hold some shit.

At first, I had resigned myself that storage cubes would be the most logical shelving solution for what I had in mind, but after a lot of digging on various sites, it was Amazon of all places where I found this shelf that fit into my dimensional parameters, and definitely looked like it had way more character than the cubes that just about everyone in my generation has from Ikea, Target or Walmart.  Not to mention I loved the faux-incomplete half edges on opposite ends that definitely gives it some personality as well flexibility in case something is a little wider than the surface area.

I only needed one row and the top to display stuff like nice figures and photo frames, and I didn’t have a lot of printed materials that exceeded the smaller shelf spaces, that didn’t quite fit into my library shelf elsewhere, so that left the entire bottom row available for general storage.  I got these storage bins to store shit like camera equipment, electronic peripherals and art supplies, but also looking a little bit nicer than the army of cardboard printer paper boxes they’d all been sitting in previously.

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When in doubt, make it yourself

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

While mythical gf is vacationing out of the country without me because I’m not a teacher and I don’t get entire months off at a time, I decided that I would spend a chunk of my solitude working on my office. 

I mean, after a year of living here, it would only make sense that I would have the room where I do the bulk of my artwork and gaming to a point where I’d be able to sit back in my chair and look around and be somewhat satisfied with my immediate surroundings.  Nah, as is often times the case in my life, when it comes to the intricate things for myself, I have a tendency to slack on them, putting just about everything else first, like responsibilities.

One of the things I had in mind was that I wanted to have some floating shelves for the vast array of figurines that I’ve amassed throughout the years.  Primarily the League of Legends figures that I’d been collecting since they started producing them.  They’re pretty good quality, and I can appreciate the consistency and cohesiveness of them as a collection, and I wanted to display them.

The thing is, I was having a great deal of difficulty in finding floating shelves that I was satisfied with.  Primarily, I did not want floating shelves with a massive depth, that would fuck with my peripheral vision when I would be sitting at my machine, at the height that I had envisioned setting them up at.  Furthermore, floating shelves seem to be a really in thing when it comes to home decorating these days, so the cost of them are most certainly not as cheap as when the first time I came across them years ago at like either a Target or a Container Store.

To make matters worse, the shelves that I once had on the walls of the old house were nowhere to be found anymore; a simple floating shelf with a minimal depth, that would’ve been perfect for Rito figures.  In their place were an array of shelves with pretentious bevels and faux-trim accents, with shoddy hardware that were most certainly not very cost effective, nor were they remotely long enough to accommodate all the figures that I have.

Over the last year or so, my brother has gotten really into woodworking.  He’s gotten really good at it in that span of time, and he’s made an array of shelves, tables and other practical furniture with his own hands and tools.  Needless to say, as all good big brothers do, it inspired me to want to make some practical shit on my own.  I figure I’m a pretty meticulous person who has zero fear of working with my hands, I know I have the capabilities to do similar stuff to him, except that I don’t have near the hardware he does at his disposal to do the depth of work that he can.

But making floating shelves?  Simple, shallow-depth and of course, simple floating shelves?  Oh yeah, I know I could do this at least.

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O PILSUNG COREA MOTHERFUCKERS

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

On this date, June 27, 2018

South Korea 2, Germany 0

I sat down to watch this game with pretty much no expectations.  With two losses already, South Korea was pretty much done already, but thanks to the low-scoring in the Group of Death™ they were still mathematically alive.  They just needed Mexico to blank Sweden, and to win their third game against Germany; you know, the defending World Cup winners, by at least a two-goal margin, to cover the differential.

Frankly, after their pitiful performance against Sweden, I stated that all I really wanted to see was for Korea to score a single goal, so that they didn’t go home after being blanked the entire time they were in Russia. 

They got their goal against Mexico, but I wasn’t satisfied by it.  It happened in the 93rd minute of the game, when Mexico was already up 2-0, so to me, it’s basically was a meaningless pity-fuck of a goal that happened long after Mexico had already begun the victory party.  However, it turned out to be an important goal nonetheless, because, due to the low-scoring of the group as a whole, goal differential turned out to be a big deal going into the final games of groups.

Basically, Germany wins and they’re in.  However, too many goals by Sweden would make things murky, as would too many goals by Mexico.  And despite the fact that they were dead last in the group, too many goals by Korea would actually have some impact on the standings as well.

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Eleven years later

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

After the Texas Rangers hung five runs on the Colorado Rockies in the first inning, it seemed like the home team would prevail on my first trip to The Ballpark in Arlington, or whatever Globe Life corporate name that’s attached to it now.  However, the Rockies would proceed to answer back immediately scoring six-runs in the second inning to take the lead, and then tack on three more unanswered runs throughout the rest of the game, all while holding the Rangers to effectively a two-hitter the remainder of the way.

I suspect that my divine blessing by visit isn’t going to work this season, and that the Rangers probably won’t make the playoffs in spite of my well-documented history of personally ushering teams into the postseason.  Then again, at the time I’m writing this, the Rangers have won five in a row, and there’s a lot of season left to be played, so who really knows what’s going to happen?

Anyway, the point really is that with my trip to Texas and having seen a Texas Rangers game in their ballpark, I have effectively finished a life’s goal of visiting all 30 Major League Baseball ballparks.  Sure, since the time I started in 2007, several parks have closed and been replaced with ones that I’ve yet to visit, but for all intents and purposes, the goal was really to catch a home game at every team’s park, regardless of which it was when I visited.  I have successfully been to every team’s city, watched baseball, and often times, ate a fuckton of food along the way, sampling the local cuisines all across the country.

One of these days, I’ll have a baseball park site up again in some way shape or form, so I’m not going to straight up review Globe Life Park outright here, but I have to say that I’m very excited and left in a state of disbelief that I’m actually finished with the journey.  I mean, after 11 years, it felt like one of those things that never felt like it was ever going to end, despite there being a very finite number of 30 teams to visit, and that I was gradually chipping away at the remaining total.

Although it averages to like three parks a year, the fact of the matter is that my general fandom, despite still loving the game itself, I’ve just grown less gung-ho of feeling the necessity to be physically at games these days.  And it’s never been more evident in the fact that the last few parks have been some of the only games I’ve been to over the last few seasons, and I’ve literally hit Texas, Arizona and Cleveland solely in the span of the last three seasons.

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I wish I could have Seoul searched in Seoul

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Until it streams online, it’s new to me.  I just recently watched on Netflix, the film Seoul Searching, apparently released back in 2015.  Long story short, it’s basically Breakfast Club for Koreans, and there’s no mistaking the immense John Hughes influences throughout the entire film.

Instead of in-school Saturday suspension, the story takes place in 1986, where a bunch of Korean teenagers who grew up outside of Korea are brought to Seoul to participate in a government-sponsored summer camp where foreign-born Koreans have the opportunity to learn about the cultures of their parents’ native land.  The tropes are broad and prevalent, but there’s still a diverse cast of characters from the misfits, the jarhead, the adoptee, the tomboy, and the most mind-blowing to me, the Koreans from countries such as Mexico and Germany.

Now I know that quite a few of them exist in the world, but it really isn’t until you hear the accents and behaviors does it really sink in that Koreans did in fact immigrate to countries other than America, seeing Koreans ripping perfect German or Spanish with names like Sergio and Klaus.

Ultimately, it’s a film that obviously hits home pretty hard for me, given my circumstances as an American-born Korean.  I feel like if when I was a teenager, I probably would have rolled my eyes and loathed the opportunity to go to Korea to learn about my heritage, much like most of the characters of this film were like.  But as an adult, it’s all too easy for me to say that I wished that such a government-sanctioned and probably extremely affordable opportunity to go visit Korea still existed, for adults, like me, and that I wouldn’t hesitate for a moment to be all over it. 

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If the John Cena-Nikki Bella split isn’t a work, it should be

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I have to admit that I’m a little surprised at how much mainstream media coverage the breakup between John Cena and Nikki Bella has been, because no matter how big or small wrestling gets, performers in the industry seldom make any mainstream media unless it involves them dying or they’re The Rock.

I can’t say that I’m the least bit surprised that this happened because ultimately I don’t believe that people are really capable of change without some traumatic or life-altering instances happening in their lives, and considering John Cena’s life and career has been mostly the same over the last decade, I’m pretty sure that regardless of what ear candy he’s said about having changed towards the ideas of marriage and children, he really hasn’t.  As much as sucks for Nikki Bella or any person who has to endure a breakup with a long-term love, it’s hard to say that John Cena wasn’t being transparent about his attitudes towards certain things, for quite some time now.

Sure, it’s probably a dick move that he proposed and let this roller coaster ascend to the heights it did mostly because of the fact that Cena is a moment-junkie, in the sense that he’s completely sold on the notion that Wrestlemania is where “moments are made,” and he probably went a little too far in the pursuit of a moment and proposed marriage despite the fact that he was against marriage, but frankly as much as it sucks right now, it’s probably for the best that they ended things now instead of after being married and possibly with kids that also Cena would have been against in the first place.  Sure, Cena would have obviously protected himself with a pre-nuptual, because he wouldn’t even let Nikki move in without any sort of contract, much less married her, but divorce regardless is undoubtedly messier than a breakup between non-spouses.

At first blush, my knee-jerk reaction to this news was that it was the seeds to what could possibly be the first real swerve towards an audience beyond just the wrestling fanbase, considering that both John Cena and Nikki Bella have transcended the wrestling industry with movies and their reality television shows.  If the WWE played their cards right, it would be a golden opportunity to get people outside of wrestling fans to possibly tune into flagship programming and/or tie themselves into WWE Network subscriptions, because they’re drama junkies eager to see the blurred reality of the fallout of their breakup – but in the ring.

Now more level-headed thinking probably understands that this is probably more on the side of reality, since despite his in-ring persona, John Cena is barely anything other than a robotic tool, moldable to promotion and malleable to anything that can continue to make him look like a superstar, and getting married and being strong-armed into having kids would definitely compromise his stardom potential.

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