Tag: comparison

The best advertising, is free

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

That’ll get the brand out there: US border agents uncover $4.6 million dollars’ worth of meth hidden inside of numerous The Home Depot signature buckets

That’s one of the downsides of slapping such prevalent branding onto very useful and utilitarian things like 5-gallon buckets; occasionally, someone’s going to do something bad with them, and next thing you know, your company’s name is being mentioned in the same breath as terms like “methamphetamine” and “cocaine.”  Then there will be all sorts of people who will waltz into a Home Depot over the next few weeks and point and snicker at the stacks of 5-gallon Homer buckets for sale at every store in America and wonder if it comes with any meth.

Forget about the hilariously futile attempt by some shitty drug runners to try and hide 216 lbs. of meth inside of a couple of buckets, because that’s a lot of fucking meth to be hauling inside of a single Ford F-150.  I mean seriously, didn’t they watch Breaking Bad?  Gus Fring barely smuggled like 2 lbs. of meth inside of entire shipping trucks, and that was dunked inside of fry batter and hidden among 100 other buckets inside of a refrigerated truck.

It’s the fact that they used Home Depot’s bright-ass orange buckets and thought nobody would notice these plastic cylinders that are brighter than the fucking sun, and maybe hoped it would be so obvious that nobody would look, but then they tried to smuggle over 200 lbs. of likely shitty pre-Walter White grade meth over the border.

Regardless, I had to smirk and laugh to myself when I saw this story, because inadvertent as it may be, it’s impossible to not disclose The Home Depot’s name when describing this story, and I like to think that somewhere at HQ, sure they’re not worried about it affecting their bottom line, but still wince and cringe at the simple fact that their brand, name and identity is momentarily attached to drug runners, meth and trafficking.

But hey, there’s no such thing as bad advertising, right??

2 Under 2: My child has a more refined palette than Paul Walker (#044)

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

As my child has gradually been climbing up the ladder of solid foods, one of the things that I have held back up to this point has been the crusts of bread.  One of the things that I’ve given her periodically has been toast with cheese melted on it; but minus the crust, as toasted bread crusts are hard, crusty and would be something of a choking hazard if not just a coughing trigger, things that I wanted to avoid while she was still very little.

Recently, I’ve begun feeding her the crust of bread, seeing as how she has several teeth and has become quite the voracious eater, much like her dad, and the risk of choking and weak esophagus have diminished some over the months.  To no surprise, she was able to take her own bites of the crust of bread and eaten it with little complaint.

It was in this moment that I realized that my daughter has a much more sophisticated palette than Paul Walker’s character Brian O’Connor from the greatest movie series of all time, the original The Fast and the Furious (the one with the the’s in the title).  And since characters are often loosely based on the people portraying them, I’m going to guess that tuna on white no crust is probably something that Paul Walker himself fancied, we won’t know definitively rest in peace.

But the fact that my daughter is more than capable and willing to eat the crusts of her bread means that at 14 months old, she has already surpassed the culinary palette of a 28-year old Paul Walker, when his character was shown stepping into the Toretto’s family convenience store to try and get into Mia’s pants by repeatedly ordering tuna sandwiches with no crust.

This might be more brog-worthy than her first steps or the fact that she’s demonstrating her increasing intelligence on a daily basis, but to out-eat Paul Walker, is something a dad should be proud of.

Minari: chicken soup for the Korean-American soul

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I finally got around to watching Minari.  I didn’t watch it because of all the Academy Award acclaim it was getting, nor did I watch it solely because it was a film about Koreans, starring Koreans and was produced by mostly Koreans.  I’ve been wanting to watch Minari because based on the premise of the film, it was something that I knew was probably going to hit home to a Korean-American person like me, and I went in knowing that there were probably going to be a lot of moments of reflection, reminiscing, comparing and probably shit that was going to make me cry.

Without giving anything away, the basic plot is a Korean family moves from California to Arkansas, primarily so that dad (Steven Yeun) can chase his dream of starting up a farm.  Naturally, this is a cause of culture shock for Koreans to move into rural middle America, and the struggles and rigors of surviving and adapting at the same time.

What was endlessly amusing to me is that I feel like Steven Yeun, since rising as a star from The Walking Dead, I feel like took his appearance in David Chang’s Ugly Delicious to heart a little bit, where Chang’s circle-jerk of celebrity friends was giving him a little bit of shit for being able to make it as a big-time American star in spite of being Korean, and almost since then, has been doing a lot of roles that inject him into his Korean heritage.  Despite the fact that his Korean sounds a lot like most Korean kids who did a lot of their growing up in America, it’s his attempts to sound like fresh-off-the-boat English that had me cracking up. 

But if there’s anything that was truly right about the entire film, it was undeniably Youn Yuh-Jung’s role in the film, playing grandma Soonja.  Obviously her performance was justly recognized seeing as how she was a shoe-in to win best supporting actress and did such, becoming the first Korean actor or actress to win an Academy Award.  But she shines from the moment she shows up in the film, and it makes me reminisce to my own childhood, where my grandma often stayed at my home to fulfill the same role as Soonja did, being the free babysitter for primarily me since I was the baby of the generation.  My grandma wasn’t nearly as hands-on, or quite nearly as sassy or show as much personality as Soonja did, nor was I nearly the shithead to her as David was to Soonja, but it definitely gets the memories flooding through the gates.

Frankly, there’s a lot of parallels to the film I could feel with my own life, seeing as how both my parents were also chicken sexers growing up, and how my family grew up in rural Virginia, which wasn’t nearly as remote as Arkansas, but was still similar in the sense that there probably were like 15 Koreans in the entire town, with some of them being relatives.  And I imagine just about every Korean family in America could probably feel some sort of kinship to the film as I did, and just about everyone in my own family has stated similar feelings themselves.

There’s a lot of subtle symbolism and interpretation necessary in the plot and its happenings throughout the film, and at first blush I was kind of perplexed at the way the film concluded, but when I lay in bed thinking about it, most of it kind of falls into place, and it makes me admire the film even more than I did while watching it.

Bottom line is that the film really is like chicken soup for the Korean-American soul, and although it’s nowhere near as critically acclaimed or attention-getting as Crazy Rich Asians or Parasite, but in my opinion, is still a tremendously important film for Korean or other Asian cultures to try and watch sometime.

Clearly school is not hard enough

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I came across this story of some 12-year old kid in North Carolina who was set to graduate from both high school and college simultaneously, and the first emotion that emerged from my brain as if it were a slot machine, was annoyance.  I don’t know why, but stories of overachieving little kids don’t really impress me so much as I question the difficulty of contemporary education in America, and wonder if we’re collectively lowering the bar of intelligence on a societal level if kids whose balls haven’t even dropped are becoming capable of tackling collegiate level coursework.

Sure, it’s just an associate’s degree, and pretty much anyone can get an associate’s degree, but it doesn’t change the fact that the narrative doesn’t change that a 12-year old went to, and got a college degree.  There is a possibility that this kid might be somewhat of a genius, but at the same time there’s also a possibility that the level of education in Salisbury, North Carolina might be questionably low.

I recognize the names of Salisbury and Rowan-Cabarrus, because their names are on signs that I blow past going 80 mph on I-85 while traversing through North Carolina, between the greater Charlotte and Greensboro regions.  Needless to say, it’s in the middle of fucking nowhere, which leads me to believe what mastery of counting pine cones and the velocity of a NASCAR on a windy day can translate into a 5.45 GPA.  Seriously, what the fuck kind of grading rubrics exist now to where kids don’t just get 4.0s but seem to routinely exceed the royal fucking A into these ridiculous 4+ GPAs?

Either way, I don’t know why, but tryhard kids just kind of bother me.  It has nothing to do with the fact that as a father myself, these are ridiculous bars to hope my own children can strive for, as much as I feel at the root of all these stories is some very passive-aggressive humblebragging by either the kids or their likely insufferable parents, who eat up the notion that their children are making the news.  This kid is right up there with one of those overachieving tryhard high school seniors who applies to every Ivy League and blue blood school and gets in.  It’s just annoying to me.

Clearly, school is not hard enough these days, because when I was 12, all I cared about was Power Rangers and Final Fantasy IV, much less having any aspirations of any sort of education past the sixth grade.  Sure there’s an easy joke about how nothing seems to have really changed nearly three decades later, but we also didn’t have a pandemic that gave all children basically unlimited time to see just how high they could tryhard.

We were there first

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I think?  Who really knows when this show was actually filmed, and whether or not it happened before my wedding.

Anyway, just finished watching The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.  At first, I thought it was just okay, and that it felt more like a transitional Marvel property show, that helped tie up a lot of loose ends throughout Phase One, as opposed to something that was sowing seeds for future potential phases.  Like WandaVision laid down a lot of groundwork for future plots, and I had expected similarly from the adventures of Sam and Bucky, and what I would expect from most other future Marvel television shows on Disney+.

But then the fifth episode happens, and shit suddenly gets very real, the plots get very deep very quickly, and by the time I finished the sixth and final episode of the series, I’m thinking, damn, this show was really god damn good.

Anyway, if I keep trying to write about the show, I’ll inevitably end up spoiling something, so I’ll refrain from going on about the show, except for the fact that it was really good, I enjoyed it, and it was yet another outstanding edition to Marvel’s screen adaptation equity.

I don’t think it’s a spoiler, but the above image is a scene from one of the episodes, that looked just a teensy-bit familiar to me.  Had to rewind, pause, and summon mythical wife to come take a look too.

But adding to the list of Georgia locations that are filmed and delivered as somewhere else, the Historic DeKalb Courthouse where I got married, was used as, well, a courthouse of some sorts, for a government hearing in the Falcon and the Winter Soldier.  At least it was actually used as its historic roots once were.  But it tickled me all the same, to see a place I’m quite familiar with, being used in an outstanding piece of television.  Multiple times.

How about y’all just get better at baseball instead?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I don’t pay a tremendous amount of attention to baseball anymore these days, but I came across this particular article in Sports Illustrated about how recently retired Jay Bruce basically retired because the shift killed his career, and how they opined that shifting should be made illegal in baseball.

Now as far as sports columnists go, I actually really like Tom Verducci.  He’s a well-versed guy who has good insight, adapts to the times, and has always had a fairly pleasant, readable tone in his writing throughout all the years that I’ve known of his existence, but I have to say that his opinion that the shift should be made illegal is one of the dumbest things that I’ve ever read.

In short, the shift is when baseball fielders position themselves heavily on one side of the field, because a batter might have a very predictable tendency to hit to that side of the field, thus optimizing their chances at being able to field a hit ball and get them out.  Good examples of the shift in action are this fictional instance known as the DeVanzo Shift from Artie Lange’s Beer League, and this hilariously similar but actually real instance known as the Joey Gallo Shift from the Houston Astros.

There is absolutely nothing illegal about teams shifting their fielders, and as a result over the last decade, the strategy has been adopted all over the league and employed on a countless number of mostly-left hand hitters, although there is no shortage of righties that hard shifts work on as well.  And as the number of teams employing shifts has gone up, the careers of many pull-happy hitters have gradually begun plunging down metaphorical toilets all over.

So instead of suggesting a not-illegal tactic be made illegal, here’s a wild and crazy suggestion for baseball players being victimized into retirement by the shift: get fucking better at baseball.

Learn to hit the other way.  Learn to drop a good bunt down the opposite field.  Pop your hips early and hit the ball where they ain’t; accept singles as not making outs instead of looking like a fucking idiot swinging for the fences, but then hitting a hard grounder to a shortstop playing in shallow right field 75 feet away from they’d normally be positioned.

Verducci suggesting MLB ban shifting is a sad pro-players suggestion that shields a league full of overrated assholes who get paid millions to play a kids game so that the league can make billions to exploit broadcast it.  Seriously, the league minimum last I checked was a hair under $500,000 a year, so even the shittiest 26th man on the roster is still making half a million dollars, but still can’t hit the ball to the opposite field, so the league should just change the rules?  Fuck that shit.

Players who can’t adapt to defensive strategies all deserve to have their stats and value plummet, because as often times as baseball can metaphorically be compared to life, it really is a story of adapt or die.  It’s ironic too, because so many baseball players get to the biggest league in the world, because at some point, they’re taught and demonstrated good hitting acumen, which usually involves being able to hit baseballs to various parts of the field except pull-side, but somewhere along the path of the majors, whether it’s poor coaching or aspiration of greed, guys end up these pull hitters who are eaten alive by shifts.

Guys like Pete Rose and Ichiro Suzuki are the greatest all-time hitters and played for eons respectively, because they were guys who could always hit to all parts of the field, even if they weren’t putting up gaudy home run numbers.  Meanwhile jobbers like Jay Bruce are calling it quits because they can’t produce because the shift is killing them, and all I can think of how sad and pathetic it is that there are guys that would rather quit, instead of perhaps going back to the cage and breaking the rust off of the ability to possibly hit the other way instead.

Like I said, I typically enjoy Verducci’s writing and opinions, but this one was a total stinker.  Instead of banning the shift, how about baseball players collectively just get better at playing baseball, and learning to hit baseballs to more parts of the field except their pull side?  That, right there, would be some real Moneyball shit, in the sense of it being an underutilized strategy to exploit.  

I’d love to see an MLB squad rebuild, with a mentality of building a team of good spray hitters, and then when the stars align, they go on a 98-win season, dinky-hitting all their opponents to death and march through the playoffs and bust open the World Series with all sorts of drag bunts, opposite field singles and triples down the line.  And after a few years of other teams copying that game-breaking strategy, maybe Verducci will write an article about how opposite-field hitting should be outlawed.

90 Day Fiancé season 8 thoughts

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It’s been a while since I wrote about 90 Day Fiancé, but then again it’s also been a while since I’ve actually watched an entire season from start to finish.  It’s not that I haven’t watched almost every season that’s been produced, it’s just that so often times, I fall off the wagon at some point, be it my life being busy, or the episodes aren’t always available on Plex or the TLCgo app when I’m ready to watch, but I haven’t watched a season from start to finish in a while until now.

Including the uncomfortable and cringey Tell All episodes, to which I have decided to spent a little bit of time to write about season 8, because seeing as how I actually watched it all, might as well share some thoughts about yet another successful season of one of the true anchors of TLC.

I think one of the most miraculous things about season 8 is that all across the board, the show actually managed to make ALL of the Americans and their friends and family seem like the assholes among each couple, while the mail-order spouses all somehow seem like the people us viewers end up feeling sympathy for throughout the season.

Usually in seasons past, there’s always one or two mail-order spouses who are clearly in the game for a green card, and/or are insufferable demons who make viewers scream at their screens at why some pathetic American schlub is putting up with it, and that they need to flex their leverage at the fact that they control the citizenship routes.  Like Mohamed or Anfisa, people who come from other countries who are miserable and easy to dislike.

But season 8 actually manages to execute, where all the Americans look like assholes or are the worse of each couple, and I’m left hoping that some of these people actually throw their hands up and go back to their home countries.  I’ll try to break it down by each couple, and maybe power rank by trainwreck-ability or something.

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