Tag: comparison

Oh, Georgia #354

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

/stevecarrellwinceface.gif – Cobb County elementary school unveils new logos, immediately likened to Nazi symbolism, results predictable

Seeing as how mythical wife is an educator, I’ve become more familiar and cognizant of many schools in the Metro Atlanta area by osmosis, and I actually know of this particular school in question.  East Side Elementary is right off of GA-120 which is a pretty major thoroughfare, and I pass by it regularly, despite not knowing what the name of said school was until I read about where it was located.

But man, talk about a major, major, major fuck-up from this rebranding.  Whatever designer(s) they utilized to come up with this inflammatory design really needs to be scrutinized from a character standpoint, because either they’re some deep-repressed bigots, bigots that think they can pull the wool over the public, trolls who thought it would be a real gas to sneak in Nazi symbolism, or a little bit of all of the above.  However, seeing as how it was still government work, it can probably be safely assumed that the degree of creativity wasn’t particularly high.

When mythical wife showed me these logos, I immediately recognized the red flag, because when I was a wee lad, I played a lot of Wolfenstein on my 486, because it was about the only game it could handle, and Nazi eagles were all over the place.  Imagine my mortified and amused surprise to see something so close to Nazi symbolism, being used to represent an elementary school.

The best part about the trio of logos that they moved forward with, the only element that remained consistent between them all, was the Nazi eagle in the middle of it.  Complete with a monogram that replaces one of the S’s in SS with an E, to suddenly stand for East Side.  Like they were very insistent that of all the elements to be concrete, it had to be the Nazi eagle.  Font, shape, dynamic, all flexible, but nah dog, we GOT to keep that Nazi eagle intact.

To add insult to this embarrassingly ironic design faux pas is the fact that East Side elementary is literally next door to a synagogue.  Like very literally; not down the street literally, or catty corner literally; the school parking lot, if you go straight out of it, you will run right into a synagogue literally. 

Furthermore, this is about one of the whitest parts of East Cobb there is, and that’s saying something considering just how white East Cobb already is.  The neighborhood has “country club” in the name and is flanked by a golf course, and I’ve driven through and picked up cheap/free shit that rich white people were peddling on Facebook marketplace, so I’ve seen first-hand how elevated white it is compared to the rest of the town.

None of it helps feed the narrative of a lily-white community being so dense and ignorant as to not notice their neighborhood elementary school adopting Nazi imagery to be a part of their logo.  In the end, I don’t think the school or community is really that Nazi, so much as the person(s) who developed these logos, probably have some explaining to do.  But what’s done is done, and the internet never forgets, so it’ll be etched in stone that there was a school in Cobb County that was almost branded with Nazi eagles.  hashtagGeorgia hashtag’Murica

Are my expectations too high or am I employing subpar talent?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I have decided to make a post about this instead of venting further to mythical wife because she’s probably beyond exasperated hearing me gripe, and my friends’ group chat doesn’t seem like the most appropriate place to do it either.  I’m not concerned about my hire ever discovering my brog either because pretty much nobody but me reads the bullshit I write and frankly the worst things that could happen is it might open their eyes to their shortcomings, or prompt them to quit, which in turn would force my hand at finding a replacement that might be better at the job anyway so it’d be a win-win either way.

But long story short is that I am not particularly satisfied with my current nanny situation, and I’m really over in-home child care in general, in spite of the fact that it still beats the alternative, which is putting my children into the petri-dish of daycare where they might get abused.

When it was just one kid, I employed a nanny, because it was still the peak of the pandemic, and our collective maternity/paternity time was coming to an end, and we needed someone to watch #1 during the day while I worked from home.  One adult to one child worked out great and was relatively easy for that duration, but as we all know, #2 came pretty quickly afterward.

There was a lot of time where there was adequate coverage for both kids, between mythical wife’s second maternity leave, my second paternity leave, my mom coming down for a few weeks, but there was a definitive point on the calendar when all the coverage was going to dry up, and it was going to inevitably be the nanny covering both my kids, solo.

Well, that didn’t last very long at all.  I think, maybe four total days, until they basically had a mental breakdown, ghosted us and then basically quit over the phone with me weeks later.  #2’s challenging sleeping habits basically broke them, putting us in a horrendous situation where we had to scramble to find a new nanny very quickly, in an extremely nanny-favoring market, due to the number of people who are embarking on hybrid or alternative working situations.

Fortunately, we found a new nanny fairly expediently, and they quelled our initial concerns on being able to handle both of my kids, as they have been doing nanny work for well over a decade.  But it came with a catch; they had to be able to bring their own one-year old child with them, which meant they were effectively in charge of not just two kids during the work day, but three.  However, they assured us that it was doable, so we agreed to hire, and it was a brave new world.

At first, things were going pretty good.  In spite of the perceived difficult of wrangling three kids all under two years old, they never seemed to get frazzled, always kept cool, and every time I asked if they were good, if they were okay, it always was.  I admired their ability to keep cool under the pressure of multiple infants and toddlers, and their experience in their careers as well as their own parenthood really showed.

But occasionally, there were some behaviors and actions that were done that made me scrunch my eyebrow, like showing too much initiative, by rearranging my entire kitchen and doing some cleaning, which is kind of outside of their job description, as long as it doesn’t pertain to the kids.  At one point, I got a text message that was all like teehee, I owe you a Diet Coke, and this one bottle of Diet Coke that I’d been sitting on was taken.  I was a little miffed at that one, but this person was taking care of my children, so I could let one stolen soda slide.

Continue reading “Are my expectations too high or am I employing subpar talent?” →

Let’s talk about AEW x NJPW Forbidden Door

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

In spite of the seemingly endless parade of criticism I have for AEW, I was very interested in Forbidden Door, the alleged AEW x NJPW collaborative super show.  Obviously, I use the terminology alleged, because I feel like anyone with a pair of eyes probably might’ve been able to see that it was and was going to be a basically AEW show, featuring some guys who happen to wrestle for New Japan.

And when the dust settled and the show was over, I didn’t have to wait twenty seconds before I exclaimed to my group chat of bros I was watching with, that the show was fairly beneath the perceived expectations, and that this was entirely an AEW show, with some NJPW loaned out to the card.

I mean, the show itself wasn’t terrible.  It was an entertaining show with some good matches, some great performances, and had a lot of things that I was happy to see, like FTR continuing to collect tag titles, winning the IWGP heavyweight tag titles to add to their collection of ROH and AAA, and the return of Cesaro Claudio, which makes me happy as a fan to see a guy I’ve long admired, get back in the ring and shine.  Pac winning the not-intercontinental All-Atlantic championship was something I had predicted and I always like being right, and on that note I also basically predicted to a tee, the very ending to the fatal four-way between Jay White, Kazuchika Okada, Adam Cole and Hangman Adam Page.

But from what this show was billed as, built up to be, and what it should have been on paper, Forbidden Door fell way, way, way short of the expectations of everything the fans wanted to see when this ball got rolling.  Sure, there were a fuckton of injuries to AEW’s roster leading up to it, and drama with NJPW involving Kota Ibushi, so there were many notable names that couldn’t even be on the show.  But AEW still has a roster of 4,000 guys, and sometimes all you have to do is put some talented guys together and storyline be damned, let some motherfuckers work.

No Kenny Omega, no Kota Ibushi.  The Young Bucks were smooshed into a multi-man match, and Will Osperay was given Orange Cassidy.  And as much as I’m happy that Claudio is back to work, AEW had no shortage of guys who might’ve been able to step up to Zack Sabre, Jr. but they stuck to existing storylines and kept a lot of the roster tied up to where the only option they really did have was to bring in Claudio, which is also perplexing.

And not to dig up some old dirt, but I couldn’t help but notice that TNT champion Scorpio Sky and TBS champion Jade Cargill were absent from the entire event.  Also Keith Lee, Swerve and Max Caster were all pre-show matches, meaning the entire primary event was completely devoid of black talent.  I mean, I got a lot of enjoyment watching the shitshow grave digging Tony Khan did to himself when Big Swole accused him of being a racist, but you see shit like this, and I can’t help but think that lil’ TK might want to implement a DE&I department on his team or something.

Furthermore, of all the names that were on the entire card, like two Japanese guys actually got any sort of positive rub, the whole night.  Hiroshi Goto got the pin in the first dark match of the night, Shingo Takagi got to in El Phantasmo, but pretty much all the Japanese guys were jobbing all night long.  This isn’t to say that all NJPW guys were losing, but the only ones to get any notable victories were the very white Jay White and Will Osperay.  I’m just sayin’

But the biggest ding on the show in my opinion was that after the main event was over, and Jon Moxley was crowned (the bullshit interim) AEW champion, instead of there being some sort of positive send off, respect between the two companies, the show comes to a close with Chris Jericho’s stable hitting the ring to attack Moxley and Tanahashi, before Moxley’s stable hits the ring and brawl back, and the announcers are literally talking up the next episode of Dynamite on TBS not TNT.

Immediately I have flashbacks to WCW Sin in like 2000 when the company was so in the shitter at the time, that they were using their PPV to try and hype up the following night’s Monday Nitro, and thinking just how sad and pathetic it was.  Either AEW is already hitting that point in their promotion’s lifetime, or they’re really that disrespectful of NJPW to be disregarding everything they’ve pitched into the show to already be looking ahead to their own promotion’s future television.

But anyway, I’d give the show a solid 6/10.  There were a lot of positives to have come out of the entire night, but I think many wrestling fans would agree that if things were just a little bit different with roster health, no territorial restrictions and less internal drama, Forbidden Door really could’ve had the potential to be a mega show that could change the course of the industry.  Instead, we were all left with just a show, that was okay, but not even close to scratching the potential of what could’ve been.

The AEW All-Atlantic Championship hurts my brain

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

As if AEW needed any more blets to clog up their roster of 189 men and women, they went ahead and introduced a new, not-an-intercontinental championship, called the AEW All-Atlantic Championship.  It’s first title holder will be crowned at the AEW x NJPW Forbidden Door show later in the month, by virtue of a tournament, which I’m sure will be decent, but Tony Khan just can’t stop dipping his fingers into the cake to make everything so convoluted.

The best part about the whole tournament is the fact that of all eight of the guys in it, only two of them, maybe four if you consider Mexico and the Netherlands as actual Atlantic-facing countries, with Rusev Miro, Buddy Murphy Matthews, and two TBD NJPW all coming from the very Atlantic Bulgaria, Australia and most likely Japan.

Interestingly, there are no Americans in this tournament, which is probably Tony Khan’s insistence, to really drive home the fact that this isn’t an intercontinental championship, as if there were something actually wrong with it, considering the IC champs in both WWE and NJPW are usually the best workers of the respective companies. 

But make no mistake, this is very much the AEW equivalent of an intercontinental championship, and it’s fitting that it showed up after Cody Rhodes left the company, because he was always so adamant that there would be no such things as “mid-card” titles in AEW, because they were all important, from the bullshit non-sanctioned FTW championship, and all of the Impact, ROH, IWGP and NWA titles that have gotten screen time on AEW programming.

And it will be vied for by mid-card talents, since the actual AEW World championship is really reserved for those willing to play ball with the Elite, which has remained a very tight-knit circle since the inception of the entire promotion.

As for the design of the blet itself, seeing as how I am an aficionado of professional wrestling blets, it’s pretty mediocre, at best.  The plates are too tall, and anyone who knows anything about blets knows that vertical plates are typically frowned upon, because it makes the blets very difficult to wear, most notably the old ROH Television championship being the prime example; the height of the center plate dug into the abdomen as well as the crotch of anyone who tried to wear it and do any sort of bending at the waist.

I’m very perplexed by the incorporation of the Chinese and Japanese flags, as they are so very much Pacific countries, and what they’re doing on a blet claiming to be All-Atlantic.  And then there’s not one, but two lions from the UK’s royal coat of arms, which is again confusing considering the true crest features one lion and one horse.

The font of “All-Atlantic Championship” is the exact same one used in the old WWE US championship, adding to the irony of how this isn’t supposed to be an intercontinental championship, considering the US championship basically was WCW’s equivalent to the IC title too.  The font selection is also funny, because the V2 of AEW’s Women’s championship used the same font as every IWGP championship blet, adding more fuel to AEW’s blet creator’s lack of imagination.

And speaking of the AEW Women’s championship, it’s hard to not notice that the All-Atlantic is kind of a larger scale of it, primarily because of the large four circles at the corners of the center plate, as well as the overly tall plates in general.  Granted, it’s a large improvement over the original Women’s championship, but now it’s starting to look like AEW’s blet maker has created a template in which all future AEW blets will be based on, so when they inevitably introduced the Trios championship they keep churning the rumor mill about, I’m sure it’ll be a derivative of these two.

Overall, everything about AEW’s All-Atlantic championship is about as sloppy and poorly thought out as much of the promotion’s general booking.  It’s kind of a perfect metaphor for the promotion itself; kind of borrowing a lot from rivals and predecessors while trying too hard to be unique but making a lot of embarrassing mistakes in the process.  But the blet is shiny and new, and much like Chris Jericho once said about Ultimate Warrior promos, it (looks) cool, so… yaaaayy will be the general feedback from casual fans and AEW diehards.

As for predicting the title’s first holder, of the eight men vying for it, I think it’s ultimately Neville Pac’s to lose, and he’ll defeat one of the mystery NJPW guys for it.  Although it would tickle me pink if an actual Japanese guy from NJPW were the first guy to hold a new AEW championship, and it’s not an outlandish outcome, considering the working relationship between the promotions, it would be a good time for AEW to scratch NJPW’s back for a change and let them walk off with one of their blets, considering how strong NJPW has been booking AEW talents over the years.  But it would be funny if a Japanese guy were to be the first holder of an All-Atlantic blet.

Frankly though, I feel like there is a possibility that MJF is walking out with the All-Atlantic.  As murky as they’re trying to make the waters with MJF’s nuclear promos, I still think it’s a work, and somehow and some way, MJF is walking out of Forbidden Door with a championship.  He’ll be “fired” by AEW for his recent worked shoot conduct, and then immediately “hired” by NJPW and enters the All-Atlantic tournament under their banner, and does his usual schtick of using the Dynamite Diamond ring to cheat to win the All-Atlantic blet, where he can rub it in AEW’s face for being the first holder of it.  He also strikes me as a guy who was probably fan of all the intercontinental champions of history, and would love nothing more than to build his own legacy with AEW’s own intercontinental blet.

Not a bad place to start while he bides time for his contract to end so that he can go be a jobber in New York.

One step closer to Demolition Man

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Impetus: Taco Bell opens a state-of-the-art, two story Taco Bell restaurant in Minnesota that prioritizes app and mobile pickup via drive thru lanes

And just like that, we’re one step closer to entering the world of Demolition Man.  The world is already full of pussies, the police are pretty ineffective at their jobs, and although not contained to one singular Simon Phoenix, there are insane sociopaths that run rampant who never seem to be brought to justice.  It only seems fitting that the time has come for Taco Bell to execute a preemptive strike at fulfilling their destiny of surviving the franchise wars, thus making all restaurants in the world, Taco Bell.

I eat way more fast food than I care to admit.  My excuse is that it really can’t be helped, because I’m still very much in daily survival mode with my two kid girls running rampant in my life, and by the time they’re fed, bathed and in bed, it’s already getting late, I’m hangry, and I just want something fast and delicious, regardless of the health detriment fast food is known to be.  All the same, I know what I like, and I would say that I know my way around the players in the franchise wars pretty decently.

I love Bojangles, I think Chick Fil-A’s app is the gold standard, and Zaxby’s is always a good way to break up the monotony.  Freddy’s has entered the market around here, and I hear that a Whataburger has opened up near Kennesaw State University, which isn’t an unreasonable drive if I actually had the time and patience to go there.  Wendy’s and Taco Bell are also welcome options, but with more of a gambler’s mentality, because you just don’t know when one of them will light a stick of dynamite in your digestive system, as satisfyingly delicious they reliably are.  I have no qualms with McDonald’s, and for whatever reason, Burger King doesn’t seem to do to well in the Atlanta market, but I’d consider them if there were one within a reasonable distance.

The thing is, at this current juncture of my life, and well fuck, at any juncture of my life, I tend to favor convenience and ease of getting my food, and hoping it’s accurate, above all else.  I know there are many who don’t like Chick Fil-A because of the original owning family’s religious anti-gay believing, but goddamn is their app good, and their restaurants loaded with hard-working brainwashed teenagers who get shit done fast, well, and like efficient machines.  So I go there above all else, because they’re reliable to get shit fast and consistent.  Bojangles and Wendy’s are like playing craps, because there’s like a 1/3 chance that the drive-thru line will be not be shitty.

But if this two-story Taco Bell in Minnesota goes gangbusters and inspires all Taco Bells around the country to adopt, that would be a game changer in like two seconds.  As efficient as all the Chick Fil-As are, their Achilles is usually the limitations of the sizes of their lots, and there are often times more cars hogging up space there than can be handled, so even if some of them have adopted app-only lines, if cars can’t get to them, they’re not really any better.

It looks like Taco Bell Defy’s saving grace is the fact that the mobile-only lines have independent entrances, and the most intriguing things are the way that the restaurant is literally built above the pickup area, so people are basically getting their food from a teller tube.  It does sound a little outlandish, but you know it has the capability of working miracles, and this is why that a Defy store is being tested in the first place.

What I’m really getting to is the fact that if Taco Bell Defy restaurants start popping up in other places, I have no doubt in my mind that they would rise up in my rankings if they were anywhere convenient.  As much of a luddite I can be sometimes, if there’s one thing about modern technology that I do love, it’s mobile food ordering, and I very much favor those companies that adopt it in well-functioning, logical and efficient manners.

I’m really rooting for this Defy, to defy the odds of surviving in the food industry, to where this can be somewhat of a standard throughout the world.  It would definitely inspire me to go to Taco Bell more, as long as they didn’t liquify my insides with their squirrel meat too frequently.  And then it would force other competitors to start trying to compete and copy, and hopefully we can embark in a world where more fast food joints are two stories and have mobile-priority lines for us gluttons who need our shit quick and efficiently.

The forced watching of Doctor Strange 2

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

The worst part about big blockbuster and/or Marvel films is the feeling that if you don’t see it immediately, as in opening night immediately, you will inevitably get spoiled in some capacity within the next 24 hours.  Be it some passing graphic on social media, a news feed analyzing a massive spoiling plot point, or some rando internet friend who thinks they’re way more clever than they actually are and giving away something critical, if you don’t watch the film with some sense of urgency, you will without uncertainty, have something ruined for you.

Ironically, I’m not even really that big of a fan of Doctor Strange.  I wasn’t ever a fan of his in the actual comic books, despite knowing he was something of a big deal considering just how many crossovers he ended up in.  The MCU, as it has demonstrated on numerous occasions, made him somewhat cool and digestible, and I think Benedict Cumberbatch has breathed adequate life into the character. 

The first film, I didn’t even see in a theater and instead watched it on an international flight, since I had 8-13 hours to kill in the air, which wasn’t too bad.  The funny thing is that he’s way more interesting in other characters’ films than his own, but obviously for the sake of moving the entire MCU phase plot along, of course he’s going to get his own film(s) from time to time.

Spider-Man: No Way Home was a no-brainer of a film that had to have been seen with urgency and I’m glad that I did.  And Doctor Strange was pretty good in that film as well as an extremely critical player in the grand spectrum of the plot.  But ultimately, it ended up being more obnoxious and feeling like a sense of inconvenience that I had to put forth the same effort in order to see Doctor Strange 2, even if it seemed like this was going to be a critical film in the overarching MCU phase storyline; it’s still Doctor Strange, a character that I’ve always been kind of ambivalent about, in general.

Regardless, mythical wife and I made a point and made some arrangements to where we were actually able to go out for a night and watch Doctor Strange 2: The Multiverse of Madness.  My general theater experience was tarnished by the shitty quality of service we had and I never got my actual fucking entrée and they had the audacity to try and get me to pay for it, but as far as the film itself went, it wasn’t that bad.

Cumberbatch once again makes Doctor Strange not so much of a square, and injects some actual personality into the character.  And I suppose it’s not too much of a spoiler to say that the film basically ends up becoming the film sequel to WandaVision, seeing as the Scarlet Witch was primarily featured in the post-credit preview of the film after Spider-Man, not to mention Elizabeth Olsen is very predominantly featured on all film advertising.

As predicted, the film does kind of blow open the MCU in general, and between this film, the events from the Loki television series, and a lot of the shit alluded to in No Way Home, it’s almost brain-bending on how Marvel is even going to proceed from here, not to mention they’ve unlocked the ultimate plot devices that effectively allows any and all properties to be retconned and revised at a moment’s notice.

But as a standalone film, I’d say that DS2 is about a 6-7 out of ten.  A lot of crowd-popping cameos and ah-ha moments don’t really mask that the core plot of the film was a little on the weaker side of things, and there’s some pretty big plot holes that are poked open in WandaVision that beg to be asked.  The film effectively acts more like a vehicle to the overarching phase and tends to lose track of the fact that it’s still supposed to be about Doctor Strange, but all in all, I was still entertained and walked out of the theater ready to discuss and try to suppress excessively mansplaining anything that mythical wife might not have been familiar with.

However, back to the original hypothetical, on whether or not Doctor Strange 2 is worthy of being a must-see on an opening day?  I wouldn’t say so.  But solely because of the fact that I didn’t want to be spoiled to any MCU-isms and ah-has, I still felt like I was forced to do so, which makes me feel a little bit resentful of the way social media and the internet has created such a dynamic.  Fuckin’ ruins everything.

In praise of Miguel Cabrera’s quietly good career

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Hearing about Miguel Cabrera’s closing in on 3,000 hits, my mind at first was a little surprised that he was at that stage of his career, seeing as how I still feel like it was yesterday that this spry thin third baseman for the then-Florida Marlins was showing off impressive power for his age.  But when I actually put more than five minutes of thought behind it, I realize that it’s really of no surprise at all that he’s at this stage of his career, because basically there’s never been any season where Miguel Cabrera has played where he has been an ineffective hitter.

Even way back, I always had pegged Miggy as a guy that would probably be an MVP-caliber guy, seeing as how he broke into the majors at like 20 years old.  But the thing is, he showed up at a time where guys like Albert Pujols and Alex Rodriguez were the marquee hitters of MLB, and sluggers like Barry Bonds, Vladimir Guerrero and Frank Thomas were still around.  It was easy for a guy like Miguel Cabrera to kind of get lost in the shuffle.

But nearly 20 years later, most of those guys are gone, be it through retirement, collusion, age, degradation of skills or any combination of the above.  Albert Pujols is the only guy still active, and he’s at the twilight of his career where he’s doing his farewell tour for the team that brought him into the world, after a pretty unimpressive contract with the Angels.

And Miguel Cabrera is still around; although age is catching up to him, taking some power away, he’s still hitting the ball for a decent average in a period of the game where batting averages are bordering on historically bad.  Honestly, my knee-jerk thoughts were wondering on where Cabrera stood on possibly being the greatest of all-time, or just the best player for a generation, but clearly I’ve been not paying enough attention to the numbers or the game in general, and upon a closer examination, the last few years haven’t been as kind to him as I thought they might have been.

All the same, I felt like writing some words in appreciation of Miguel Cabrera.  Father Time might have grabbed him by the scruff five years ago, but up to that point, the guy was probably on track to be as good as Hank Aaron from a consistently great standpoint.  And I think it’s still safe to put Miggy on the pedestal of possibly being the greatest player of his generation, because when you look at his personal accomplishments throughout his career, there’s only some really snug and exclusive company in numerous categories: Hank Aaron, Willie Mays, and Albert Pujols.

But when you factor in the fact that Miguel Cabrera has hit for the triple-crown (traditional and the geeky sabermetric) on top of everything else, that literally puts him in a category of his own; Triple-crown winner, MVP, 3,000 hits and 500 home runs. 

Statisticians tend to poorly favor those who decline quickly, like Cabrera has been over the last five years, which will likely take him out of the GOAT debates, but there’s no mistaking that with his body of work and all his achievements throughout his career, Miggy’s name definitely deserves to be mentioned frequently as one of the GOATs.  It’s just hard to imagine that in a game rich with history and numbers, that my generation would be one to have been able to witness and watch one of them rise, thrive and produce throughout his career.