Month: August 2023

Revisiting a revisiting post: Stephen Strasburg’s wallet

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Upon hearing the news that Nationals pitcher Stephen Strasburg was planning to retire, it got me thinking about all the times I’ve posted about him, because primarily, I’ve always been fascinated with just how much money the Nationals have been willing to throw at him throughout history.

A really long time ago, I wrote about how the Nationals were taking a big gamble on the big contract they gave to Strasburg, which was a 7-year, $175 million dollar deal, where $45M of it was deferred money, and if there’s one thing that my zero readers know always captures my attention, it’s the topic of deferred money in baseball contracts.  Between the lines, the post was critical and meant to ridicule the Nationals for putting themselves in a situation where they could be paying out the nose for a guy whom might not even be playing for the team at the time, because that’s generally the risky nature of deferred money deals, the potential for embarrassment when a guy takes their talents elsewhere, but you’re still on the hook for their supplementary income.

But then just a long time ago, I revisited that post to eat my crow and admit that the deal actually did pan out, because not only did the Nationals win the World Series that year, Stephen Strasburg himself pitched like a god-killer throughout the playoffs en route to the championship.  I realized that in the crap shoot that is actually winning championships, just about any cost is worth it, if it actually pans out, to which the Nationals enjoyed the spoils of.  And in the case of the Nationals, they paid the fuck out of Strasburg to keep him, and he actually delivered the baseball championship that the Nation’s Capital so greatly wanted.

However, since then, things changed yet again; mostly because I wasn’t really paying attention, nor did I really examine the finer details upon learning of it, but apparently after the 2019 World Series championship, Stephen Strasburg opted out of his original 7/$175M deal, and became a free agent, and the Nationals were quick to snap him back up, but it was going to cost them $245 million for the next seven years, and in typical Nationals fashion, was loaded full of deferred money, that would undoubtedly be due when he was either at the end of his career, or no longer playing.

So for all intents and purposes, the crow I ate for criticizing the original 7/$175M was short-lived, and we were moving onto a clean slate where the Nationals were undertaking another massive gamble where the clock was ticking on a 7-year window with zero World Series championships won.

And this time, it didn’t take long for the wheels to fall off this car, as between the start of the 2020 season to the present, Stephen Strasburg has pitched in just eight games, and completely ineffectively at that, going 1-4 with a 6.89 ERA.  Not that I wish him any ill-will, but the poor guy was absolutely demolished by injuries, to his neck, nerves, wrist and ribs.  Eventually, it turned out that he had thoracic outlet syndrome, and just nothing seemed to be working out in order to get him back into playing shape.

Continue reading “Revisiting a revisiting post: Stephen Strasburg’s wallet” →

Car Week: Why do all EVs have to have stupid looking wheels?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Despite the fact that I switched cars not that long ago, mythical wife getting her Tesla and driving around in that from time to time has kind of made me ponder the possibility of switching cars yet again, and potentially getting myself a Tesla as well, seeing as how the brand as a whole underwent some large price slashes earlier in the year.  With gas prices constantly fluctuating, mostly for the detriment, and seeing the sheer convenience and liberation of not having to pay for gas anymore, gradually chips away at my resolve at considering a switch.

At one point, I walked past a Model 3 in a parking lot, and I noticed that they had two car seats in the back of their car, looking comfortably enough, and I was like hmm. 

I still have a positive equity with my current car, according to my latest Kelley Blue Book estimate, which was a pretty good barometer to what my car could be worth, based on my previous car swap, which even further feeds the itch that perhaps I should swap yet again.

But the reality of my current situation doesn’t seem like it will be likely, considering I barely drive my own car as it is, since it’s the big safe dad car with the kids’ seats already in place, and switching to something like a Model 3 makes no sense at all, especially since I’d be the one driving it the least, which, sorry to sound selfish, but I wouldn’t really want to share that car if I had it.

All the same, the idea of going EV myself isn’t the least appealing idea in the world as it once was, and mythical wife and I talked about how it’s probably best if we still had at least one gas-powered car until the EV market really stabilizes and shows its lasting power.  That being said, I’ve always kind of got my eyes out for other EVs and not just Teslas, in case a viable option that doesn’t cost as much as a Tesla comes into play.

Which (finally) brings us to the topic of this entire post, why do all EVs have to have such stupid looking wheels?  It’s almost as if car designers all got a memo from the god of cars who declared that all EVs need to have these stupid looking futuristic looking wheels to really let consumers know that yes we are electric vehicles, if you couldn’t tell from our spaceship aerodynamics, three badges that announce we are electric and just general knowledge of the market, but we also want to have some wacky looking wheels to drive home the awareness that we are in fact, electric vehicles.

I googled my query, and there’s lots of mumbo jumbo about aerodynamics and weight and friction resistance and all that canned corn bullshit, but at the very root of it, nothing is different than the needs of any regular combustion engine.  Furthermore, there’s nothing that stopping the designers of EV wheels and looking at the OEM wheels for a Supra, Integra or Audi TT and making something that doesn’t have to look like a deformed D-pad on a N64 controller.

What really set me off was that I saw an ad for the Mini Cooper EV, and what I really appreciated about it was the fact that it looked just like every other Mini on the road, but then I saw the car come to a stop, and it too, had some goofy looking wheels on it that stood out like a sore thumb in contrast to the rest of the generally traditional Mini aesthetics.

And then I see shit like Polestar and their racist-looking iron cross looking rims, and the Nissan Ariya which I once wished came out when I was originally in the car market, because I really liked the way it looked, but the actual release model now has some doofy-looking Saarlac teeth looking rims on them.  Ironically, the one EV who’s wheels don’t look as stupid as all others, is the one car that seems so characteristically out of place as an EV, which is the Mustang Mach-E.

When mythical wife was shopping for her Tesla, I actually helped steer her away from the standard wheels of her car, because they too looked all goofy and stupid, in comparison to the rest of the car’s aesthetics.  I’m typically of the mindset that the bones matter more than the skin when it comes to certain things like cars, but when you have to look at it everyday, may as well spring extra for the option that won’t make you think “but if I spent a few extra dollars..”

The bottom line is, I don’t understand why all car manufacturers feel the requirement to make EVs with the goofiest, doofiest looking wheels there are.  We all get that they’re EVs and they are different and most likely are the future to become the present, but we don’t need bullshit clown aesthetics to drive home the fact.  Especially if we’re going to be locked into 72+ month agreements to own them when we all inevitably start switching en masse.

Happy Trails, Funker

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

TL;DR: Wrestling legend, Terry Funk passes away at the age of 79

Admittedly, I can’t say that I was really ever that big of a fan of Terry Funk the wrestler, but if ever asked to name my Mt. Rushmore of professional wrestling, I do put Terry Funk on it.  The guy transcended multiple generations of the business, made money and elevated others around him, and did it in every major territory around the globe.  

As much as I wasn’t that big of a fan of his hardcore brawling style, I respect the hell out of his business acumen, and from what I’ve learned throughout the years from his peers and admirers in the industry, he’s always been perceived as a good guy, long before the parade of tributes in his passing started coming out.

And that’s just it, when it comes to the names in the history of the industry that I admire, actual wrestling talent isn’t always the number one criteria.  I like it when guys are respectable, and operate in the manner that puts the business first and understands the importance of elevating everyone around you so that not only you prosper, but everyone prospers, and that’s the kind of performer I’ve always heard Terry Funk always was.

I actually don’t have a tremendous amount of memories when it comes to Terry Funk himself, because almost everything I know about the guy stems from his relationship with Mick Foley, his long-time friend and rival, and almost all of my exposure to his in-ring ability is almost entirely in hindsight, watching videos and highlights in retrospect versus ever seeing anything he’d done in the present, save for some of his later time in ECW and the WWE.

Obviously you can’t talk about Terry Funk and Mick Foley without bringing up the legendary IWA deathmatch in Japan where the two of them basically attempted murder on each other in front of a really paltry crowd, that Foley himself has stated in his books as being really ironic that they had such a legendary match to such a small crowd.  But even then, he was long past his physical prime, but just on grit, old country man strength and the general insanity that he looked like, it was still a grueling and brutal match that was entertaining in its own way.

But as I said, I always had more admiration of the guy that people loved to say was hanging around too long, but even I could tell that sure, he was around long past his physical prime, and he wasn’t doing his body any favors in doing such, but he was always hanging around, to give back, and pretty much nothing else.  No matter the age, his name carried weight, and working with younger guys and be it cutting a promo on them, or taking some ridiculous bumps for them, he was always working his ass off to try and get talent over.

Paul Heyman has been on record reminiscing about how important Funk was to the inception of ECW, and that without his involvement, there would never have been ECW, primarily because of Funk’s willingness to help talent become made, and those are the stories that I always found most endearing about the Funker, regardless of his actual ability in the ring.

All the same, even though it doesn’t seem like I have anything really substantial to say about the passing of Terry Funk, I still wanted to write something about it, because I acknowledge his contributions to the industry I’ve been a lifelong fan to, and I always admired that everyone thought he was such a good guy, which holds a lot of weight in my mind, above all else.  And I genuinely feel like the industry has lost one of the most important icons and cornerstones of it with his passing, and with that, happy trails Terry Funk.  Forever.

Car Week: Is there anything dumber than putting Instagram handles on your car?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Maybe it’s a symptom of getting older, cars coming out of the box better, or a byproduct of where I live these days, but I hardly see any slammed (modified) cars anymore these days.  This isn’t to say they don’t exist anymore, I still see large groups of them every now and then on the roads or in a parking lot, but they’re clearly organized and don’t put themselves in the public eye as perhaps I once recollect, in Northern Virginia, where a stock Honda Civic or Acura Integra was about as rare as seeing a Ferrari in the wild.

But for the few instances where I see a noticeably slammed car on the road, I’ve also observed a trend that these car owners do that I’ve found quite puzzling, which is putting an Instagram handle on their rides.

Now it’s presumptuous to say that all people in slammed, riced-out cars are doing questionable, often times illegal vehicular behaviors, but let’s not kid ourselves either.  Whether it’s speeding, practicing power slides on public streets, burnouts in parking lots to illegal mods, emission-altering exhausts to tinted windows too dark, it’s usually people in slammed, riced-out cars doing it.

That being said, why in the world would people who occasionally exhibit in misdemeanor activity willingly put an additional identifier on their car that they can be possibly tracked down in the event that they’re seen doing dumbass shit?

Like I really don’t understand it; if you’re making videos doing burnouts or street racing or participating in a flash mob of other tricked out cars, and then putting it on your Instagram, doesn’t that make it even easier for cops to track and identify you?  Or say some rando is walking through a parking lot, sees your ‘gram, checks it out, and there’s videos of you racing or practicing donuts in a parking lot; and this rando just so happens to be a police, or reports your shit to the police, and now there’s an APB out for your ride.

Whatever though, even if these clowns had the wherewithal to sign up everything with dummy info, covers their plates before videoing themselves, and have gone through the trouble to minimize prosecution before putting their Instagram handles on their cars, they’re still pathetic in my opinion.  So attention-starved and narcissistic that they willingly go to the trouble to put an Instagram handle on their cars so that random strangers might possibly check them out online.

I’d really love to know the numbers of police busting people for car-related dumbass-ery on account of being able to track them from Instagram handles on their cars, because any number higher than zero validates the notion that it’s not really a particularly smart idea to advertise yourselves on your cars when you’re participating in some questionable public behavior.

Car Week: When did Dodge Ram trucks become the official vehicle of insurrectionists?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Living in Georgia, there are plenty of rednecks around my neck of the woods.  That being said, there are a lot of people who drive around in pickup trucks, because rednecks love driving around in pickup trucks.  So when it comes to observational data, I do feel like I’ve taken in sufficient information over the years I’ve been a Georgia resident, at least to the point where I could make a post like this that does some wide-sweeping branding.

But as the subject says, I have to ask the question, when did Dodge Ram trucks become the official vehicle of insurrectionists?  Serious question.  Because I don’t think it’s really that far off-base to throw it out there that pretty much whenever I see someone driving around in a Dodge Ram truck, it’s always slammed to the gills, often times have some sort of aftermarket lifting to its cabin, and is driven by a white guy that not only looks like voted for the baked potato, but was probably circling around on the Capital Beltway on or around January 6th.

Like, I’m barely even kidding when I say it’s all Dodge Ram trucks.  I’d say that at any given time, eight or nine out of every ten Dodge Ram trucks I see on the road fit this exact description.  Always aggressively driving and giving off that aura that they have a lot of strong opinions about people that are not also white males.

Sure, there are the occasional Ford F-150s or Chevy Silverados that shoehorn their way into these descriptions, but for the most part, Ford F-series trucks are typically driven by people who actually use them for heavy-duty truck use, and Chevys are GMs and GMs also have Cadillac and Cadillacs are loved by black people, so you don’t see nearly as many Chevy or Ford trucks as white-powered up as you see Dodge Rams.

Anyway there’s a reason why this topic sat on the bench, because there’s really not much substance to it as much as it is a wide-sweeping accusational observation.  But I would encourage any of my zero readers to try and keep their eyes peeled on the road for Dodge Ram trucks, and see they get the same vibe I do, or if this is just kind of a Georgia thing, or just spectacular bullshit that only I’m capable of making observation of.

Car Week: New Driver Stickers, is this a thing now?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I keep a notes document of things that I jot down as possible things to write about.  I do a lot of thinking in my car while driving, so it should come as no surprise that a lot of things that end up on this list are often observations made while in the confines of a car, about other cars or just happenings on the roads. 

More often than not though, life tends to get in the way, and I never go back to any of these topics, and the list just gets longer and longer, and adds to my general anxiety that I don’t think I’m writing enough as I’d like to, and sometimes I’ll audit the list, and scrap a ton of topics into a column of dead things that I’d like to remember but doesn’t necessarily warrant a post written about it, and some I’ll keep as something with no real time sensitivity that I could come back and revisit at a later time.

It’s gotten to a point where I realized that I had enough car-centric topics to where I could literally dedicate an entire work week of posts about cars, and I figured this is probably an effective and efficient way for me to tackle some of the things that I’ve observed, and not spend too much time on each, because I think I’m getting to the point again where every post needs to be a Broadway play, when I really have no rules to brogging and sometimes need to remind myself that shorter posts are okay.

Anyway, to kick off car week, I’m going to bring up the topic of stickers or signs affixed to people’s cars that denote that there is the possibility that the driver of the car is new.  I’ve been seeing these more and more throughout the last 2-3 years especially, and at first, I thought much of it had to do with the idiotic laws that Georgia passed where something along the lines where teen drivers no longer had to do any formalized behind-the-wheel training as long as a parent could vouch for them that they’ve got like 40 hours of driving experience under their belts.

I mean that alone is completely asinine and puts the fear of god into me when driving around, knowing that some shithead 17-year old whose parents just want them out of their hair and gave them the permission to get a drivers license are on the roads at the same time I am.  I’m not sure that putting new driver stickers on their cars is going really help when they’re driving like imbeciles in the first place.

But here’s the real observation that put this post into motion – people who put new driver stickers on expensive, fast, or expensive and fast cars, and are most likely not at all new drivers at all.  Like, in my office alone, I can think of several cars that fit the description I’m aiming for, that are very fast cars, well maintained and obviously cared for, but I have a hard time believing that the people driving them, are at all new drivers.

There’s one specific one that I see daily, because they have vanity tags, always back into their spot, which takes a modicum of talent that usually accrued by, experience, the opposite of a new driver.  I’ve also seen them drive off, to the capabilities of their car, which is fast, aggressive and like a dick.  They’ve also been present as long as I’ve been coming into the office, which at this point is over a year, to which, not really a new driver anymore there.

There are countless other examples that I’ve seen that served as the impetus to this post, but the bottom line is that I’m wondering if this is a thing now or something.  Much like how in the past, people would drive around with the thin blue line stickers on their cars, because there was this belief that having them on your car meant you were an ally of police, and therefore less likely to get pulled over by real police.

I feel like there are people out there who think that putting new driver paraphernalia on their cars gets them a little leeway from police and that randos on the road will give them a little bit of leniency when it comes to them driving around like assholes, or is like some sort of really bad and lame smokescreen to the rest of the road to where they can drive like dicks and it’s okay because they’re “new drivers.”

Either way, I think it’s a lame attempt for people to try and have an excuse to drive like shitheads, and I don’t believe anyone is a new driver, when they’re putting stickers on fast and/or expensive cars, as if anyone would give a genuinely inexperienced driver the keys to Chargers, Teslas and Mercedes.

Welp, we’re screwed

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Better update my will: relative to the giant Asian murder-death-kill hornet discovered in Georgia

I like how the news is trying to low-key downplay the nightmare scenario we’re about to embark on by saying that it’s just the relative to the Asian genocide hornet, the yellow-legged hornet.  It’s kind of like saying Hitler’s brother who also hates Jews has shown up, but it’s okay because it’s not Adolf. 

Make no mistake, if the yellow-legged hornets have already made it to Georgia, it’s either a matter of time, or they haven’t yet been sighted, that the actual Nazi Axis of Evil hornets are going to be here eventually.  Like the old African killer bees, or even COVID for that matter, in the world we live in, once something becomes a problem in one place, it’s only a matter of time before it becomes a problem globally.

“The plan will begin with trapping, and APHIS and GDA will set out traps and survey for this pest to determine if additional yellow-legged hornets are in the area,” a release said. “If a colony is discovered through reporting, trapping, or tracking, the colony will be eradicated.

Begin with trapping?  How about begin with eradicating?  I know science is all about exploration and learning, but we’re dealing with a species of bug that is related to legitimate murderers that can dissolve human flesh with their stings.  We’re talking about like, poison frog darts that can think on their own, fly, strategize, organize and dominate, and we’ve got fucking scientists wanting to study this bullshit?  Oh no, not the smartest move here, that’s some Netflix Resident Evil Jade Wesker-level dumbass decision making.

Like why wait until a colony is discovered before deciding to pull some fucking triggers?  Fuck up the hornets on an individual basis, and hope that if their cohorts are around, they saw what happened, and report back to the colony that rednecks in Georgia are not to be fucked around with.  And then email or text their big ass cousins and tell them to stay away from America lest they get fucked up too, and hope it does its job at deterring the actual Hitler hornets from coming stateside; if they already aren’t here yet.

Which I’m pretty sure they are, because I went down a little bit of a rabbit hole, and it sounds like actual BMF hornets have been found in the Pacific-Northwest, which means after they colonize in some bag of Sumatran coffee beans in the Starbucks factory, they’re a FedEx plane from being shipped all over the country so they can begin their domination of the West, before polishing off the rest of the world.

All the same, looks like we’re all fooked boys and girls.