Tag: observations

CHIDI FOR KANG

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I’ve finally gotten around to starting to catch up to the legion of Marvel films and shows after around the time of like, Ms. Marvel or She Hulk.  Over the last few days, I’ve managed to get through Thor: Love & Thunder, Black Panther 2, and one that I’d earmarked as a source for a future brog post, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. 

With Secret Invasion out, I didn’t want to fall further behind, to the point where I’d abandon ship and not watch any of these things for a few years, and then fall completely out of the loop for when some of the more interesting Marvel properties start releasing, and I’ll have missed out on some backstory from required prerequisite viewing.  Sometimes I hate the feeling of obligation to have to watch some things, but at the same time, I am a Marvel fan, and I often times take enjoyment out of watching all these shows and movies in spite of the general sense of superhero media fatigue the internet likes to claim there is.

But as I alluded to, Quantumania was one that I had specifically earmarked, because one, I like Paul Rudd, his portrayal of Ant-Man, and I thought the movie would be entertaining, regardless of how much the internet seemed to shit all over it not long after it had released.  I take internet reviews with not even the metaphorical grain of salt, and they simply hold zero weight at all when it comes to judging most things, and Ant-Man 3 would be no exception.

But two, also not long after the film had released, it was revealed that the guy playing Kang the Conqueror, Jonathan Majors, had some dirty laundry aired out, with the revelation that he was basically an abuser of women.  And in this day and age, as well as Marvel/Disney always trying to maintain their image, it’s safe to assume that we’ve probably seen the last of Jonathan Majors in the MCU.

The problem is, Majors’ role as Kang is quite large, as he’s basically the next Thanos when it comes to being the big bad that all of the current phase(s) of Marvel film and television are building up towards.  So despite it being the correct and appropriate call to 86 the guy for being an abusive asshole, it’s still egg on Marvel/Disney’s face that they have to figure out what to do to replace him in the future.

Really, it shouldn’t be that difficult, because in the era of the Multiverse where just about anything and everything can be retconned and reimagined at a moment’s notice, replacing a character probably isn’t the most difficult thing to accomplish, and I’m sure that by the time the Kang Dynasty storyline begins wrapping up, most people will have forgotten that Jonathan Majors was even the guy first introduced as the character.

However, and to the point of this whole post, I proposed a much more blunt and easier option: just fucking flat out recast the role.  Just like when Terrence Howard was replaced by Don Cheadle for the role of James Rhodes, nobody said shit, there were no sneaky clever jokes, Iron Man 2 just picked right up with Cheadle playing War Machine like he was there the entire time, and not a single soul sold it at all.  Do the same thing with Kang, and despite the fact that he’s already appeared in Loki, and his face was plastered all over Quantumania, just straight up replace the guy and don’t bother with any re-writes or try to reinvent the wheel at this point.

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Better Call Saul > Breaking Bad

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It’s not often that a spin-off show ends up being better than its predecessor, but having just completed all of Better Call Saul, I have to say that I think it was better than Breaking Bad.  Obviously, Saul Goodman never exists without Breaking Bad, but from a storytelling, character development, pace of the story and general writing are concerned, I think Better Call Saul was better than Breaking Bad as a whole.

It’s almost like Vince Gilligan took all of the criticism and feedback he heard, willingly and unwillingly after the conclusion of Breaking Bad, and took a lot of the more valid critiques in mind and applied them to Better Call Saul, like it was one gigantic redo, a luxury that so many in the industry don’t get to have.

This isn’t to belittle Breaking Bad at all, it’s still one of the all-time best shows that comes to my mind when I think about the best things I’ve watched in my life, but I just thought that Better Call Saul was just a little bit better, and it’s not just recency bias.

Whereas Breaking Bad was mostly the journey of Walter White from mild-mannered chemistry teacher-turned-drug kingpin with some occasional spotlight onto Jesse Pinkman, Better Call Saul’s tandem storylines between Jimmy McGill and Mike Ehrmantraut basically were two shows merged into one showing complex relationships, inner conflicts and ultimate choosings in paths for the characters with the characters entwining sometimes and at other times being completely independent from the other.

There was something inherently beautiful about the storytelling of Saul, where both Jimmy and Mike were basically both headed on the same character development paths, despite having vastly different backgrounds.  And obviously, it was a treat to see the sprinkling of characters from Breaking Bad begin to make their appearances in this prequel timeline, before things started to get really intense and mold the characters closer to their final forms that they would transform into by the time they start appearing in Breaking Bad.

But if I really had to pinpoint where I thought Better Call Saul really trumped Breaking Bad, it really could be narrowed down to a singular character: Lalo.  My biggest gripe in the world with Breaking Bad was just how shitty it was that the last boss of the series was more or less, a bunch of fairly generic white supremacists.  Uncle Jack and his white supremacist group seemed like such a colossal step down after Walt had been entangled with Gus Fring for the previous seasons, and it just left a sour aftertaste in my mouth to have gone from such brilliance with Gus to some really lame bad guys to end the series with.

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The MLB All-Deferred Money Team 2023 presented by Bobby Bonilla

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

In honor of Bobby Bonilla Day, I took it upon myself to compile a list of all the baseball players earning deferred money for the 2023 season, and if possible, put together a lineup that could hypothetically have competed in an actual baseball game.

In total, there were 22 players making deferred money from 12 different teams according to Spotrac’s records, totally roughly $75M which is equal to the Pittsburgh Pirates and higher than the Baltimore Orioles and Oakland Athletics.

Seven players are still active, with six of them making money from their former teams while getting paid by their current teams.

Of teams to NOT have any players with deferred salaries, the two surprises are the Los Angeles Dodgers and the New York Yankees, two teams typically with the biggest pockets in the game.  The Dodgers lucked into not having the embarrassment of having any deferred payments this year, as they have been known to employ the tactic in the past, but the Yankees, much like House Lannister clearly believe in paying their debts and not getting themselves into any deals that involve paying for guys once they’re gone.

The team that was most surprising to see with a deferred salary was the Oakland A’s, the de facto cheapest team in baseball, with $5M still committed to pitcher Trevor Rosenthal, whom hasn’t played a game since 2020.  This accounts for nearly 1/12 of their dead-last $60M payroll.

The teams with the highest deferred monies are the Washington Nationals and Baltimore Orioles with $23.5M and $15.7M tied up to guys retired or not on their teams anymore.  These numbers account for 25% and 24% of their respective payrolls.

And of course, we can’t have a discussion about deferred money deals without bringing up the guy that relatively made the whole thing famous, Bobby Bonilla.  By now, most people are aware of the hilarious $1.2M he is paid by the Mets every single July 1, seemingly until the end of time, or at least it feels like it, but not as many people are aware that he’s also getting an annual $500K stipend from the Orioles as well.  That being said, Bobby Bo might not be the highest deferred payment on the list, but he definitely is the only guy to show up twice.

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Oh, to be 39 again

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I had no idea this was even a thing: South Korea to abandon their own age-counting systems and standardize to the rest of the world

In all fairness, it sounds like most of Korea was already in line with the rest of the world, but it’s funny to think that there are segments of the culture that still used the antiquated counting systems of olden times, and are retroactively going back in age 1-2 years. 

I had no idea these alternate ideologies of counting age even existed in Korea or anywhere else, but the whole idea of gaining a year solely for the sake of hitting January 1 for the first time in their life is pretty hilarious.  By that logic, since my sister has a December birthday, she’d have been two years old after like days of existence outside of the womb.

Obviously, it’s very easy to see why the country is abandoning it across the board now, because it really does seem absurd in those select cases.  But it’s still funny to imagine the reality that around the country, there are legitimately people who are being able to proclaim that they’re suddenly up to two years younger.

I imagine most of those people are probably of older generations and higher ages, but it’s funny to imagine that if it were still in play for some of the younger demographics, and the repercussions of being rewound.  Like being 19 and able to drink, to suddenly being corrected back to 17 and you’re now a minor and can’t legally drink anymore.

But the more impactful scenario are the men who are in the 28-29 age range and have been avoiding enlisting for their mandatory two years of military service.  People can now postpone 1-2 more years and maybe dodgers who are 30 and 31 and did some jail time for it, are suddenly back to being 28-29 and eligible to enlist, would they receive any sort of pardon or reparation?

K-Pop stars and athletes and eSports stars are suddenly younger out of the blue, and in great examples of mind over matter, the former prodigies that are now “old” at 17 are suddenly 15 again, and are considered high-ceiling prospects, but unable to recapture the talent of their pre-teen ages, because they’ve already mentally resigned themselves to being old.

And then there’s me, oh how I’d love to be able to proclaim being two years younger, just to be able to say that I’m not in my 40s again.  But then again, I wouldn’t be able to make the same age jokes between mythical wife and myself, and I’d have to go through the torment and turmoil of coming to grips that I’m entering my 40s for the second time now.  I may even cross the line of definition between an elder millennial and a plain regular pleeb one, depending on interpretation.

But at least for a year and change, I could say that I was back in my 30s, and although it wouldn’t change anything really for me, it’d be nice to know that I had successfully and legitimately turned the clock back.  Might make for interesting brog content potentially.

Let’s talk about Black Mirror S6

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Lately, I’ve been taking a break from doing deliveries and using the time to completely unwind and watch television in my evenings, catching up on several shows that have been on my endless notepad document list of things I want to watch.  Where with every series that I catch up on, three more are added to the list, and it’ll probably never come close to being finished.

Regardless, I’m of the type that doesn’t really like to bounce around too much, and once I get locked into a specific series, I pretty much spend every available minute watching that series if I can help it.  I’m currently going through Better Call Saul (fantastic show, btw), but when I got wind that Black Mirror was going to be dropping season 6 soon, I knew that they were going to be an exception that got to jump the queue and interrupt my nightly binges of Saul Goodman.

The good part about seasons of Black Mirror is that they’re short, so there’s not a tremendous time commitment that needs to go to them.  It’s easy to finish a season in a week, over a binge-y weekend, or for those who have little else in terms of responsibilities, in a night if you’re ambitious.

The bad part about seasons of Black Mirror is that they’re short, and if you’re really enjoying all of the stories, it’s over in the blink of an eye, and just like that you’re back to the same place you were last week; in a world where there’s no upcoming new season of Black Mirror and wondering when it is until the next one.

At five episodes in total, it’s up to quality to determine how good of a season S6 was going to be, and when it comes to Black Mirror, I typically judge them on a three-part criteria, where the overall grade is mostly determined on the aggregate.  I judge each episode on: technology, writing and artistry, where the best episodes excel at all of them, where other episodes throughout the series have been up and down in some but not all.

So with all that in mind, let’s talk about Black Mirror S6, and there will probably be spoilers in this diatribe so be warned for all zero people who read my shit.

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Home Groanership

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Good news/bad news: the bad news is that pretty much my #1 worst nightmare involving my property happened; a tree fell over during a seemingly spontaneous storm with very forceful rain and wind for like an hour.

The good news is that it was not one of the trees in the back of my property that I always fear will fall onto one of my girls’ bedrooms and hurt them.  It was a tree in my front yard, and it fell in a pretty precise manner in which nobody was hurt, it did not hit my home, and it did not hit my neighbor’s home either.

The point remains however, a tree fell down on my property, and I didn’t really know what the fuck to do.  It’s not exactly something that I ever anticipated would happen, but then again I did have suspicions that this particular tree wasn’t optimally healthy based on the fact that mushrooms were growing out of one side of it.  But it was still sprouting leaves and growing branches, so I didn’t suspect that it was really dying beyond survival through a storm.

I did remain calm and rational and figured out what my next steps would be, but I also went ahead and threw out a query to my community’s Facebook page to see if anyone could recommend a tree removal service that didn’t have a completely booty experience.  One of my neighbors chimed in and stated that because the tree had already fallen, it shouldn’t be difficult for him to break it down, and he volunteered to assist.  And seeing as how raising children stretches my finances into frequent discomfort, this type of assistance was extremely welcome.

My priority was that I wanted to clear as much of the tree off of my neighbor’s property as soon as possible.  I know that legally, even though the tree originated on my property, most states’ laws say that the owner of the property where it lands is still the one liable for it’s removal.  Sure, it would be easy to shirk the responsibility but such truths don’t sit well with me, and the last thing I ever want would be to have beef with my next door neighbor, with whom we have a normal, neighborly, friendly relationship with.

But after putting the girls down for the night, I could already hear that work had already begun on the tree, and by the time I came outside to get to work myself, several of my neighbors were already hard at work, and moving branches and cutting down the trunk, and nearly halfway through with breaking it down.  Needless to say, I was quite floored by the immense generosity of time, labor and camaraderie spared by my neighbors, and it’s hard to put in words just how grateful I am for the help.

I’d say it took maybe another 90 minutes before we wrapped up, with not a single scrap of fallen tree left where it had dropped in sight, with only a smattering of wood chips and a jagged stump to indicate that the tree was even there in the first place.

I really need to make sure to compensate my neighbors with some form of food, treats or drinks, because I can’t even fathom just how incredible they were in assisting getting this tree off the property.  I’ve lived in so many places where everyone is just so insulated and keeps to themselves that I’ve practically forgotten what it’s like to have neighbors who care and are willing to help out and it makes me want to be a better neighbor and pay forward the generosity of effort to those whom might need it in the future.

However, as positive as the tree issue is, it’s unfortunately not the only thing to have happened, to warrant the snarky post title of home groanership.

Apparently, I’m having some plumbing issues in my home, to the effect of realizing that there’s a leak in one of the ceilings of my lower level.  It doesn’t take a physics genius to realize the correlation between when the dripping began with the bathroom right above it, and what we’ve got is a scenario of a mystery leak that’s most likely hidden behind the walls and will require some cutting into drywall to identify.

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