Tag: television

Scooby Snacks are obviously a euphemism for crack

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Chalk this up under things you never noticed as a kid but realize when you’re an adult especially a parent reading to your children.  But I’ve been reading my kids stories from 5-Minute Scooby Doo Stories; these 5-minute story books are like the greatest forms of literature that exists for children, because five minutes is about as much of attention span you’re going to get from kids my kids’ ages, and as I’ve been reading them story after story, I can’t help but come to the conclusion that Scooby Snacks have got to be made out of, crack, based on their sheer ability to get Scooby-Doo and Shaggy to do basically anything in the world, no matter how much they initially do not want to.

Hey Scooby and Shaggy, why don’t you guys go into this creepy cave while Fred, Daphne and Velma don’t do shit.  Like, no way man.  What about for a Scooby Snack?  Deal.

Hey Scooby and Shaggy, why don’t you guys go be bait for this creep riding a stampeding buffalo and might trample you to death, while Fred, Daphne and Velma go back to the Mystery Machine to search for clues that obviously won’t be there?  No?  Not even for a Scooby Snack?  Deal.

Hey Scoob and Shaggy . . . you get my point.

Which is that Scooby Snacks are clearly made out of crack, and Fred, Daphne and Velma are some fucked up asshole enablers who repeatedly exploit the addiction of these two poor hapless addicts to do a bunch of things against their will, while they coast and stay out of harm’s way.

All the goons that the Mystery Inc Gang apprehend are minor villains compared to the truly evil diabolical drug lord enablers that Fred, Daphne and Velma are, and pretty messed up how the entire Scooby Doo series is built off of the crack-addled false bravery of Shaggy and his crack-addicted dog.

And this is why it’s not always the best idea for adults to revisit properties of their own childhoods for the sake of their own kids.

Now that’s what I’m talking about

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

ANF: North Carolina man wins $1M from scratcher, has big plans

I’m pretty sure this is the plot to My Name is Earl, where a redneck finds a $20 in the parking lot, parlays it into a scratcher lottery ticket and promptly wins $1M prize.  TBS couldn’t produce something funnier, and they’re the home to All Elite Wrestling.  But congratulations and good on this soon-to-be former master carpenter for pulling off the luck streak of a lifetime.

Makes me think back to when I found a $20 outside the Cheetah; I feel like I should’ve parlayed that stripper $20 into some lottery tickets, instead of adding it to the pot of cash I was saving to get an iPad with, especially since that iPad is long since dead after its screen cracked.

But the best part about this man’s story, and why it’s such a no-brainer to warrant posting about in the brog was pretty obvious, which were his plans upon receiving his payout:

We are going to head straight to Golden Corral and eat everything they’ve got,” Hicks said after claiming his winnings.

It’s a lol quote if there ever was one needed, and I love how the man’s first meal idea after pocketing $425K large is Golden Corral, and he elaborates that he’s going to “eat everything they’ve got,” as if he’s now capable of spending more to get more, at an all-you-can-eat buffet.

Forget about China Star Buffet kids, we going to Golden Coral!  Plus y’all get to have your own plates!

I’ve never been to Banner Elk, North Carolina before, but seeing where it is on the map, not that far from the unfortunately recently destroyed Asheville and surrounding Appalachia, I can’t be too surprised to assume that Golden Corral might be the golden standard for dining out options in that region.

Jokes aside, no shade and beef with Golden Corral; like much on this planet, I am not above it, and I in fact freaking love me some Golden Corral when the opportunity strikes, and frankly as much as I wouldn’t kick it out of bed, $425K isn’t necessarily life-changing money as much as it would be a great big windfall to catch up with, so honestly going with Golden Corral as the celebratory meal isn’t the worst option there could be.

Either way, I am a jealous fatty of this man for all of the above; finding a $20 in the gas station parking lot, winning a $1M lottery, and having the opportunity to celebrate with Golden Corral.  I tip my cap to this gentleman, and wish him good fortune in the wars to come; mostly with the IRS and his digestive system after eating everything at Golden Corral.

Dad Brog (#141): Role reversal

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

There are times in which my kids bring home artwork they create in school, and in the case of #1, budding artistic talent is starting to emerge in the sense that she can now create with a relative objective in mind, and this is a family portrait that she drew, and I’ve been waiting her entire life for the day that she would create something like this.

I am going to frame it and cherish it forever.

But then there are all the other days in which my kids are absolute terrors, full of screaming, defiance, meltdowns, tantrums and more screaming, and sometimes I have to take a lot of deep breaths to try to not snap back at my children, and I ask mythical wife why we decided to have kids again?

In all fairness, most of the aggravating behavior is coming from #1 these days, and for as seemingly simple the supposed terrible twos were for us, it all seems to have held back until the age of four in this case.  I didn’t read enough dad literature to know if this is normal or not, but having a four and three-year old girls definitely has opened the door to its own unique set of challenges that I’m just guessing are a progression of time and growth.

The funny thing is, as much as #1 has become more obtuse about certain things, #2 has more or less reversed roles and become the chill one between the girls, and as often as #1 melts down, #2 is the one that’s usually cool as a cucumber in comparison and disposition.

Interestingly, and I should say unsurprising, a lot of this seems to stem from how much television we let the kids watch, as the vast majority of meltdowns typically start when it comes time to turn off the television and either take a break from screens, or get ready for bath time and bed, which has stretched even later, getting closer to 8 pm from 7, meaning I have even less time on a nightly basis to turn off dad mode and feel like a normal human being, that is when I’m not burning that time resetting the home every single night.

But when we don’t watch television, there’s no conflict over turning it off, and more often than not, certain triggers can be avoided.  But I’d be lying if that’s easier said than done, because sometimes, like when I need to prepare some meals for the kids, or just need a mental break for myself, an episode or two of a cartoon on Disney+ is just what I need in order to catch my breath, or buy time for something I need to do.

Either way, that’s parenting in a nutshell right now, and as I often stated, I don’t want Dad Brogs to only emerge when things are solely negative and I’m just looking for an outlet to vent since I don’t want to burden my actual human interactions to just spout off at how parenting is.

Things could be better, but they could also be worse; I love my kids the same every day, and for all the times they aggravate me with being kids, they also fill my heart’s bucket on a daily basis by just them being themselves, and occasionally bringing me touching artwork.

Every baseball kid’s dream ending, starring Freddie Freeman

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Bottom of the ninth tenth, down a run, bases loaded, two outs; in the World Series.

The only thing more that there could’ve been was a full-count, but Freddie Freeman had to go ahead and remove that extra drama by instead blasting the first pitch he saw deep into the outfield stands of Dodger Stadium, and just like that, the Dodgers and their $241M payroll burst from the jaws of defeat against the Yankees and their $309M payroll to take the critical first game of the 2024 World Series.

If this game had ended in a similar fashion at the bat of anyone other than Freddie Freeman, this post doesn’t exist.  Especially Shohei Ohtani, and especially Max Muncy whom I think is the living embodiment of the meme of the guy that is part of the group project that gets an A but doesn’t actually do anything but gets to talk about the A like he did.  If Ohtani delivered the game-winning hit, I don’t post.  If it were Muncy, I don’t post.  Even if it were half-Korean Tommy Edman, I still have a literal list of topics that I’d rather spend my time writing about.

But Freddie Freeman is a guy whom it is impossible for a person like me to feel even the slightest amount of malice or disdain for, even if his actions result in outcomes that I did not want, like the Dodgers getting any sort of wins over the Yankees in the World Series.  Dare I say, when he clobbered that first pitch and in that split second where he and only he knew it was gone, and he begun holding his bat up triumphantly like an Olympic torch, only for nanoseconds later the rest of the his teammates and all the fans in Dodger Stadium realized it was headed out and began their approving roaring, I felt happy for him and only him alone, because that’s what Freddie Freeman means to me.

I mean, this is the dream outcome of the dream scenario that every baseball kid dreams about in their backyard, at some points in their lives, and Freddie Freeman just fulfilled it better than anyone could have possibly done.  In a sport that tracks absolutely every single play, instance and scenario, this was literally the only time in the history of the game, where a World Series game had ended in a walk-off grand slam.

Sure, I’m sure there will be lots of challenges and rebuttals that the only thing that tops this is a walk-off grand slam to outright win the World Series or comparing it to Joe Carter’s Series-ending walk-off three-run blast in 1993, but if we could just kick the nerds out of the room for just a second, and simply marvel at the magical moment we just witnessed.

Back to reality though, nothing changes with the fact that I still want the Yankees to win it, for the sake of my wife and her family, and the put a damper on Ohtanimania, and this heartbreaking L belongs to nobody but Yankee skipper Aaron Boone.  Why he trotted out a cold and rusty Nestor Cortes to face three-straight MVPs in extra innings is a decision that I already question, and imagine armchair baseball strategists and Yankee fans all around also question.

Aside from the fact that Cortes was colder than a pint of Häagen-Dazs buried at the bottom of a chest freezer in the garage, having not pitched since September, he’s a junk ball starting pitcher that relies on deception and trickery over having sheer, stuff, to get batters out, much less three straight MVPs in Ohtani, Mookie Betts and Freeman. 

Personally, I have this belief that starting pitchers are not ideal candidates to come out in relief, especially in extra innings, because pitchers are often neurotic creatures optimally comfortable in defined roles, and a guy like Cortes has been a starter for most of his Yankee career, and starting pitchers are mentally okay with an occasional hit and an occasional run, because as starters, they have the cushion of knowing they’ve got several innings behind and beyond them for the team to battle on their behalf.  All that cushion vanishes in late and extra innings, and more often than not, starting pitchers don’t fare well in those scenarios.

In all fairness, Cortes did manage to get demi-god Ohtani out, thanks to the gutsy selfless crashing into the stands catch by Alex Verdugo, but when I heard that Mookie was getting the intentional walk so that they could go lefty-vs-lefty with Freeman, my face literally made the wince emoji .

Now Aaron Boone has been applauded before in understanding modern baseball strategy, but going Cortes vs. Freeman will be one that I’m sure many will be questioning for a long time, especially if the Dodgers outright win the World Series.  Freddie Freeman is a career .273 hitter against lefties with an .804 OPS which is nerd speak for he hits left-handed pitching very well.  Conversely, Mookie Betts has never recorded a hit off of Nestor Cortes; granted, both sample sizes are extremely small, limited to a single game earlier in the season, but when it comes down to it, I would rather have taken my chances on Betts than Freeman, but I guess it doesn’t matter anymore.

It’s a shame too, because a lot of standout Yankee performances are wiped out in this loss; Gerrit Cole’s six innings because apparently 5-6 innings is applause worthy in today’s baseball, the aforementioned Alex Verdugo catch into the stands, Giancarlo Stanton continuing his torrid postseason run with another home run, and for me, Jazz Chisholm Jr.’s bonkers baserunning in the tenth that gave the Yankees their one-run lead going into the final frame is a shame to have wiped by Boone’s questionable management.

Make no mistake though; in order for this moment to be preserved in immortality, the Dodgers must win outright.  Much like Chisholm Jr.’s baserunning will be forgotten in the loss, Freddie Freeman’s walk-off grand slam will be reduced to a statistical anomaly if the Dodgers don’t win the whole thing.  And as much as I have genuine love in my heart for the man, I’m still pulling for the Yankees, and hope that this one magic moment is the extent of Freeman’s contributions to the Dodgers’ cause.

FOX’s Shohei Ohtani coverage is out of control

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Let’s get one thing out of the way – I have no dislike for Shohei Ohtani.  Even if he is Japanese and the world has basically fetishized him into oblivion, I don’t have any beef with the guy.  He legitimately is basically the greatest player to have played the game of baseball at this point and seems like a pretty humble and level-headed human being.

But the way FOX and the rest of the media world has continuously forced him down the throats of every baseball fan, sports fan or just television watcher, is definitely making me sour on the concept of Shohei Ohtani, and it goes without saying, is among the chief reasons why not one iota of my being won’t be rooting for the Dodgers to take the L in the World Series.

Nobody likes being told what to do.  I don’t like being told what to do.  I definitely don’t like being told what I need to like, and the way FOX has gone so ridiculously out of the way to put Ohtani on this pedestal has been ridiculous and embarrassing frankly, and not even being teammates with Freddie Freeman, whom I will always be a fan of, and would ordinarily be okay with him winning another World Series with someone else as long as it weren’t with the Dodgers.

The “X Time Away from Shohei Ohtani” was mortifying to discover that FOX was doing, and I’m glad to have been watching more AL playoffs as opposed to the NL, because it seemed inevitable that the Dodgers were going to win the pennant after vanquishing of the Padres, and although I didn’t witness any of these obnoxious bumpers myself, I saw plenty of screen caps and memes enough to know just how much I hated them.

This is the kind of thing that would make me hope for failure and ineffective at-bats, but because he really is that incredible of a baseball player, of course he delivered in many of these long-called for at-bats, which added to the e-bile I felt in my thoughts about the Shohei Ohtani coverage.

Like, whether it’s on television, or on various social media platforms, or ESPN or any other sports sites, one of my go-to snarky remarks is that I can hear the Oriental gong going off whenever Shohei Ohtani is being discussed, because that’s just how much he has caught the imagination of the collective world with his baseball talents.  It’s almost obnoxious to know that he’s actually a pretty decent dude, notwithstanding the potential gambling problem/scandal from the start of the season which was kind of refreshing to think that amid all of his Mr. Perfect-isms, he was flawed too like the rest of us.

Either way, I thought that I would have more to say about the subject than this, but I basically got my point across.  Enough with the Shohei Ohtani coverage, and at this point, him winning the World Series with the also-insufferable Dodgers is the absolute worst-case scenario there is as far as baseball is concerned.  It validates flagrant spending, egregious marketing of Japanese superstars, and makes a whole lot of obnoxious front-running Dodgers fans happy, which I can’t abide for.  I’d rather side with the devils I know, and actively root for the Yankees, if for nothing at all, would make mythical wife and my mother-in-law really pleased to see the Commissioner’s Trophy being hoisted in the Bronx.

But my parting thought, as insufferably obnoxious the Shohei Ohtani coverage and the Japan fetish has been these playoffs and this season, shoutout to Tommy Edman for being the NLCS MVP; that’s right, a half-KOREAN guy being the best player on the Dodgers for going 11-for-27 with an OPS of 1.023 and a home run.

Suck it, weebs

Stop trying to make Saudi Arabia happen

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

One of the best parts about the largely mid Bad Blood PPV PLE was when Triple H came out to make an announcement, which turned out to be about one of the Saudi Arabia shows that pretty much nobody in the Western Hemisphere gives two shits about let alone recognizes as being remotely canonical in the WWE storyline ecosystem, and there were noticeable boos coming from the crowd.

Atlanta, it’s times like these in which I am proud to be one of us.

Seriously though, to top it all off, they unveiled a brand new blet, dubbed the Crown Jewel Championship, that would be awarded to the winners of the respective champion vs. champion matches between the men’s champions and the inferior gender Arabs hate but pretend to tolerate and give rights to in order to futilely gain acceptance from the rest of the world women’s champions.

And of course, I fucking hate them, as much as I fucking hate the Saudi Arabian shows that the WWE continuously forces down the throats of its viewers like they have the ability to single-handedly erase centuries of primitive cultural behavior.  Notice that unveiled was only a men’s variant of the Crown Jewel blet, contrary to the week prior where they unveiled a men’s and women’s rebranded NXT championships.

Honestly, I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if there were no actual women’s Crown Jewel blet created, but Hunter going on live television and proclaiming that there would be one, forces the Royal Family to shell out a small mint to create a women’s variant of it, lest the almighty accusations of false advertising and poor optics ding their already-fragile reputation to places outside of the Middle East.

On paper, Cody Rhodes vs. Gunther should be a pretty good match, but as is often the case at these Saudi shows, it’s like the talent knows they don’t have to push the gas all the way down, not to mention that they’ll probably be in like Jeddah or Riyadh where it’ll be 104F outside, so they’ll err on the side of caution, and the match will feel neutered and nowhere near as good as people know it could be, if it were at like Wrestlemania or SummerSlam.

But Liv Morgan vs. Nia Jax for the women’s Crown Jewel blet?  I enjoy Liv, appreciate her love for the business not to mention the snack she is to eyes like mine, but there’s no way she’s going to defeat Nia Jax, without a tremendous amount of monkey business from maybe the recently returned Raquel Rodriguez.  Even if Tiffany Stratton cashes in and steals the title away from Nia before the event, Liv vs. Tiffy doesn’t sound as good to me either, because as high as I am on Stratton, she’s still green and I’d rather her first championship reign come when she’s a little bit more ready for it than I think she is now.

So once again, Nia will probably come out on top at a Saudi show, but in a different perspective, I guess it’s good that the E utilizes Crown Jewel to be the place to burn a stinker of a program, so that it doesn’t have to be run in a place that might actually appreciate it.

I’d really love to see both Liv and Nia come out in boring, sterile putty patrol-gray outfits with no personalities, as sort of a protest for the gross second-rate Sharia law bullshit they have to adhere to.  And also, after Nia defeats Liv, she gets blind-sided by Raquel and then Tiffy comes out, cashes in, and basically walks out with two blets, with the Women’s championship as well as the bullshit Crown Jewel blet.

No matter though, I don’t really care who wins what at this bullshit show, because I’m long past over the E tryna make Saudi Arabia a thing.  There’s no way in hell I’ll be able to watch it live, even if I wanted to, in my dad schedule, and if I’m not watching something live, I’m inevitably going to skip through 80% of the show when I watch the replay later, because ain’t nobody got time to watch every single minute when the finishes are just a few clicks away.

Also, what does this new blet mean for Braun Strowman’s ugly-ass Saudi blet he won at the “Greatest” Royal Rumble?  Does this replace it?  Is it a separate title?  Does it matter?  Does anyone actually care?  Nah.

NXT’s new blets are a let down

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

In case you missed it, as part of the show’s official launching on theCW Network, NXT has rebranded and as a part of the rebranding, have unveiled new and updated championship blets.

In one hand, this should’ve been predictable if I were to even think of the possibility of redesign, seeing as how for the last few years, through NXT 2.0, and whatever the gold logo’d variant after it was called, the title blets had remained almost entirely the same from their last versions from the Triple H black and gold branded NXT; most identifiable by the giant X’s in the middle of the logo on all titles in circulation.

But on the other hand, I’m very unimpressed by the new blet designs for their top men’s and women’s titles, and I can only imagine how vanilla and boring the tag team blets are going to be, and possibly the North American blets if they choose to redesign considering how little the NXT logos were on those.

Renderings of the blets outside of the shiny television lights don’t do them any favors, and you can see how generally lacking in thought and design there is behind the new blets.  They’re regurgitating the straps from the black and gold era which is clearly dictating the design of the plates as a whole, and there’s really not a whole lot of innovation with these updated designs.

NXT grew to a point where NXT championship reigns were being widely accepted as world title reigns for superstars fortunate enough to get to that level, but with the blets looking like this, I’m thinking that they’re reverting back to looking like developmental champions rather than actual world title caliber.

Art nerd philosophy [one] is that fewer things are indicative of mediocrity than constantly rebranding and changing the aesthetics, because changes are only being made at a superficial level, and not necessarily to the more important functional and systemic ones.  NXT 2.0 was a pretty comprehensive rebrand from top to bottom, all the way to execution, but it really wasn’t when 2.0 ended, and other than moving networks, I can’t really imagine what functional and systemic changes they have in store for theCW-NXT (CWNXT?).

But as observed above, they’d been operating NXT 2.0 with even older NXT title blets for so long, that by now a full comprehensive rebranding isn’t necessarily a bad idea either, it’s just that I don’t care much for the “design” of the identity or the blets themselves because of:

Art nerd philosophy [two] is that on a long enough timeline, everyone’s logo and identity seems to inevitably turn into one of being in Arial/Helvetica, specifically a variant of Helvetica Neue.  There are countless examples out there of notable companies and corporations that have rebranded for almost no justifiable reasons, but always tend to take a timeless classic logo, and make an updated version where any script or character is stripped and is usually replaced by some boring, soulless, vanilla sans-serif font, usually wrapped in some rhombus.

NXT is no exception to this rule, with the new logomark being literally the letters in Helvetica Neue 95 Black with a little bit of manual kerning to have the characters butt into each other, but is otherwise another example of a boring, vanilla and soulless rebranding.

Why companies are so hell bent to not go back to logos that worked is beyond me, Burger King has reverted back to an old iteration of their older logos, why can’t NXT go back in time and revert back to the Hunter-era of NXT’s branding?  Then the blets wouldn’t have had to have been re-designed and recreated, but typing that out I’m reminded of the fact that the goal is to push and sell merchandise, so I supposed going back in time is kind of counterproductive to that objective.

Either way, even if I had the fluid disposable income to get more blets for the collection I can’t display, I have zero interest or desire to pick up a replica of this new CWNXT championship blet.  My NXT collection is already well-represented with a Hunter-era NXT championship and North American championship, and I don’t see any need to add to it from a mediocre pool.