Month: July 2022

The most bittersweet bobblehead

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

When I saw this bobblehead on preorder, it was during a time when it was all but assumed that Freddie Freeman was going to re-sign with the Braves.  After all, he helped deliver a World Series, he loved Atlanta, Atlanta loved him, and there was no logical reason why he shouldn’t stay with the team.

The thing is though, I’m really bad at spending money, and I often times don’t pull the trigger on things that I want, despite the fact that I’ll have a tab open for something for eons and refresh it daily, hoping for god knows what, maybe a fucking free button or something.  But more often than not, I wait too long, something goes unavailable, and I’m left wondering why I didn’t just purchase it from the onset.

Such, was the case with this one, and after weeks of looking at it and telling myself that I needed to get it, I didn’t, and then the preorder window closed, and I was left wondering why the fuck I didn’t pull the trigger on something again.

But then a strange thing happened, the Braves traded for Matt Olson, signed him to a massive extension and then Freddie Freeman signed with the Dodgers, shattering hearts all across the state of Georgia.  For some reason, I still hadn’t closed the tab to the Freeman bobblehead, and on one day after the Freeman departure, I refreshed and it looked like preorders were suddenly available again.  Despite the fact that I was sad as hell that Freeman was gone, I still felt that I needed this bobblehead, to cap and commemorate an occasion I had waited my entire Georgia-residing life for.  I might more or less be out of the bobblehead collecting game, but this was still something that I felt I needed for the small collection that I’ve actually kept on display.

And it finally arrived this week, rekindling all of the emotions and thoughts of the whole Braves-Freeman separation.  The Braves are playing pretty well, and the Dodgers are leading their division, with Freeman playing well himself.  It is a distinct reality that the two could end up meeting up in the playoffs again this year, which would be all sorts of a drama bomb if it happened, but I’m in a position in my life where it doesn’t really matter anymore.

But still, as happy as this bobblehead makes me feel, to remember the instance where I finally bore witness to one of my teams winning a championship, it’s still also a reminder of the sad events that occurred afterward that closed the window on what should’ve been a memorable and maybe successful title defense and an open window of Braves success.

Dad Brog (#091): childcare in America sucks

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Over the span of the last five months, I’ve had two nannies quit on my famiry.  I’ll be the first to admit the high level of difficulty in simultaneously overseeing two kids the ages of mine, but the thing is that before anyone gets the idea that my kids were the ones driving them off, it’s just that we’ve just been very unlucky with the people we’ve hired.

The first nanny quit because she basically had a mental breakdown after two days of solo duty, despite having over three months to prepare for it.  And the worst part was that she did it spontaneously by calling out one day and then ghosting us for nearly two weeks before resigning over the phone, after we had already moved on to hire someone else by the time she reached back out.

Unfortunately, that someone else has just given her notice after just barely four months, because her personal life has imploded and she’s decided that it’s just not possible for her to continue nannying for us any further.  I won’t go into specifics, but at least she’s given us the courtesy of some lead time, and mythical wife and I are scrambling to find someone else before we reach her hard stop last day, and that’s if she doesn’t decide to phone it in and peace out before then.

Needless to say, if not for the fact that I was already souring on nanny #2, I’d be apoplectic about the fact that for whatever reason, my famiry just can’t seem to lock down competent, reliable childcare.  I have a lot of mixed feelings about the current scenario, because I was already on the path of looking for a replacement and this saves wifey and I an uncomfortable conversation of having to let someone go, but it doesn’t change the disappointment of having yet another nanny who crumpled to the job, mostly on account of their lives just being another hot mess.

I know my kids won’t really remember much of this in the grand spectrum of things, but I would love for them to have some stability and consistency in their lives.  After nanny #1 peaced out on us, my eldest mentioned them by name a few times when they heard the garage door, thinking that they were coming to see them.  And she’s also cognizant of both nanny #2 and her own son that she brought in daily, but now both of them will be leaving our lives too.

My kids deserve better than what we’ve been giving them.  Unfortunately, it’s been very challenging on our part as parents to find a good nanny, because they all talk a good game to get the job, but we’re 0-fer-2 now at fielding someone that has actually remained up to the task at being able to handle it on a regular basis.

Frankly, and this is where I’m getting up on my old man soap box, I just think American childcare sucks.  All these nannies are mentally soft, have no work ethic, are susceptible to complacency and laziness.  They have little respect for my wife and I’s jobs and the jeopardy they put us in when they phone it in and call out with bullshit excuses like migraines and car troubles and forget that if we lose our jobs, they lose theirs.

The thing is, I think we pay fairly well; substantially better than some of the wages I’ve seen others in my community offer up.  And yet, it’s like in order to attract higher quality talent that might not be so flaky, I’d have to go up even more, and I’m already struggling to keep up with nanny wages as it is.

So it really does just boil down to the fact that childcare in America sucks.  Either people are lazy and untalented, or they’re priced too high for the middle class to be able to regularly afford.

Liv Morgan and what I still enjoy about wrestling

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

For the first time in my life, I went to an Impact! Wrestling show, as they had dates in Atlanta, and were also taping out of Center Stage, which is a fantastic venue to watch wrestling, and has a lot of history within the industry.  The tickets were cheap, and I was able to get seats basically three rows behind the ring, so it was a no-brainer to go see what is basically the #3 promotion in America.

And it was a pretty decent show, all things considered.  I got to see a lot of guys I’d mostly just heard of or seen just clips of, like Josh Alexander, Mike “Speedball” Bailey, Chris Bey and Ace Austin, and there was no shortage of names that I already knew from their days in old TNA or former WWE talents, like the Motor City Machine Guns, Mike Bennett, Eric Young, the Good Brothers and Mickie James.  Despite the general lack of respect Impact! gets, the promotion has a degree of polish that is missing from a lot of the lesser-known indy shows I’d been getting into over the last few years, and when the night was over, I was very pleased with my evening and money well spent.

I came home that evening and remembered that the WWE had a, well, pay-per-view event the same night, and considering the ease of being able to watch a replay on Peacock, I figured I’d try and watch at least the Money in the Bank ladder matches, while I still had no idea who won them yet, and before the internet would spoil the fuck out of them if I went on any social media channel.

Despite the feeling that I had a prediction that she would win, like my old Wrestling Oracle™ days, I was still very pleased to see that Liv Morgan won the women’s ladder match.  Admittedly, I bought into the Liv Morgan story of the diminutive underdog who has persevered throughout the years, and in spite of the support of the fans, just couldn’t quite reach the top of the mountain.  And by virtue of winning the Money in the Bank briefcase, Morgan was basically a shoo-in to eventually become a women’s champion, as the women’s short history of the briefcase has yet to have a single failure.

A little surprising to me, was the fact that WWE Creative didn’t wait long with Liv, and had her cashing in immediately, the same night.  I say I was surprised, because just the way Morgan had been established, I didn’t think there would be any real hope for her to have any chance of beating either Bianca Belair or Ronda Rousey, seeing as how she’s undersized and overwhelmingly out-powered by both of them.  But I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised, seeing as how women’s MITB winners have held the contract collectively maybe a total of like, three days over the last four winners.  And despite my skepticism of how Liv Morgan would topple either champion, I was still very pleased and happy to see her pin Ronda Rousey and become the new Smackdown Women’s champion.

And thinking about this moment, and some other isolated moments within the last year, made me come to the realization of why I still enjoy watching wrestling, even though it probably seems like I have an endless amount of criticism and complaining to do about the business: I really enjoy seeing when wrestlers I respect, and have admiration for their work ethic, actually succeed and get the hard-earned spotlight.

Continue reading “Liv Morgan and what I still enjoy about wrestling” →

I think this takes the cake

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

The ad on the left is the July 4th ad that my former team and I produced for the 2021 year.  The ad on the right is the July 4th ad that was produced by my former employer for the 2022 year.

Now I understand that there’s little sexy and glamorous about newsprint, especially considering the world has such a collective boner about digital-this, omnichannel-that, social, influencers and other forms of marketing approaches that constant insists that the print medium is dying or already dead, but I will fight you if you tell me this to my face.

What good is your digital medium if the internet goes down?  Or you can’t connect to the wi-fi and your 5G can’t make it through the concrete and medal coliseums of the stores you’re in, needing to access the internet?  Or you catch me on a bad day and I slap your phone out of your hand and break your phone for telling me that my occupation is obsolete?  Alright then

I’ll be the first to admit that the 2021 ad isn’t necessarily mind-blowing, or remotely close to the best work that my team has ever produced.  We were still amidst pandemic-this and supply chain-that, not to mention that my team was forced to work in a program that was the equivalent of a Chevy Cavalier trying to compete with NASCARs on the track.  But compared to the ad on the right?  Suddenly the 2021 Cavalier looks like a spaceship compared to the stone and chisel produced ad in 2022.

In short, my old team was completely gutted, laid off and the company’s newsprint was outsourced to an agency in Austin, Texas; literally a week after I had my final day with the company.  I was pretty upset about it despite having dodged a massive bullet, because I still had and have a tremendous amount of care and shits to give about all the people on my old team, because there’s a ton of talent and good people there who were put into a horrible situation.

Fortunately, almost all of them have landed on their feet since, but the point remains that the old newsprint team was effectively killed, with our primary task being outsourced; in my opinion, one of the biggest professional insults to anyone who’s ever taken pride in what they do for a living.

I blame my old boss for all of this.  I’ve made no secret of the disdain, contempt and general hate I have for her, and how they were easily the #1 factor for why I decided to leave the company.  I could list of numerous things I hated about being under their thumb, but I’d be better off saving those 50,000 words for November and completing NaNoWriMo with them instead.  However, of all of the horrible shit she said, did and behaved to me that made her a horrible Bronn of a boss, I genuinely think this is the worst thing she ever did; as the title of this post says, I think this takes the cake.

This piece of outsourced shit,  the July 4th ad for 2022, is a goddamn joke.  The photo does no justice to how poor the entire ad is, because all throughout the circular are errors, alignment and consistency issues, bad crops, obviously distorted images, and zero quality control.  A hundred things I caught in a hundred seconds of scanning through it, that would never have made it past mine or any of my team’s eyes on our numerous proofing rounds.  Ancient Egyptians pounding hieroglyphics on reeds had better brand standards than this sad circular.

She killed our medium.  No matter how hard my team pushed back against evolving trends and proved our positive ROI year after year, she came in and killed us, because no team in the world can survive in the league when their own coach is deliberately and determined to kill them.

Continue reading “I think this takes the cake” →

The best day of the year

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

For Bobby Bonilla, that is.  The day in which the New York Mets pay him his annual installment of $1.2M dollars, as part of a legendary deferment plan back established in 2000, where the Mets would be absolved of paying $5.9M then, but agreed to pay $1.2M every single year for twenty-five years starting in 2011.  Obviously it doesn’t take a math genius to know that $1.2M x 25 is substantially larger than $5.9M, and that baseball organizations clearly play by a different set of rules to where somehow this is a justifiable and acceptable alternative to paying money owed in the present.

I’ve posted about this day numerous times on my brog or social media, so I’ll save myself the trouble of re-writing something I’ve taken amusement for a day of every summer since 2011, and just cut to the chase to really the impetus of this post coming to fruition in the first place: the collision of fandoms, where pondering the coming of this year’s Bobby Bonilla Day, as well as recently watching wrestling where Miro, formerly known as Rusev, and thinking about his old gimmick that he miraculously got over with the fans, Happy Rusev Day, and merging it with Bobby Bonilla, and how to him, Bobby Bonilla Day must be the greatest day of his year, every year.

The idea to remake the old Happy Rusev Day in the image of Bobby Bonilla took off pretty quickly to the point where I actually expended a little bit of energy and time to make the above graphic; obviously it is fake, but I bet I could manage to move a few of these if I actually produced and sold them, but I don’t feel like dealing with any C&Ds from the Mets or the WWE.

But here we have it, the graphic, on the shirt, of the greatest day of the year, for Bobby Bonilla.  I like to imagine that he’s one of those degenerate former professional athletes who has no idea how to use or manage his money, and is basically broke by October, and is counting down the days until the next July, to when his next $1.2M paycheck will be coming from the Mets.

For the record, despite not having played a game in like 15-16 years, Bobby Bonilla is getting paid more than eight current active players on the Mets, and countless other players in Major League Baseball who are on league-minimum deals or anything resulting in under $1.2M bones.

And this is going to continue to be the case for 13 more years.  God bless the Mets and their silly business practices, and Happy Bobby Bonilla Day for another year!