Tag: cars

Quite possibly the most useless vehicle ever conceived

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Mercedes-Benz getting into the pickup truck market serves about as much purpose as Victoria’s Secret getting into power tool production.

But before I can really dial up the snark about how yuppies would love this vehicle for hauling groceries back from Whole Foods or how it’s so luxurious, they wouldn’t let day laborers from The Home Depot parking lot ride in the bed, and other inevitable privileged American misnomers, it turns out that Mercedes-Benz doesn’t plan on selling it in America – yet.

I equate the deliberate denial as something of an attempted power move, for Mercedes-Benz to exclude the one country in the world that loves pickup trucks, especially ones that are kind of useless for actual utilitarian purposes.  Try to get Americans to be envious and drum up demand for a giant status symbol with wheels, but it has a truck bed, so it would be perfect to haul paint quarts, samples of crown moulding, and meticulously reconstituted wood.  Or a litany of yoga equipment from Lululemon.

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(Forced) Changing perspective

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Lately, I’ve been feeling the financial crunch of a lot of expenses and debt that I’m accruing, on my own accord, and it’s admittedly got me feeling a little more anxious than I would typically prefer to feel on a regular basis.  Typically, I like to live my life a quarter mile at a time with fairly substantial cushions, so when I fret over money, it’s not necessarily always because I have no safety net, it’s because my safety net is growing uncomfortably small.  No safety net would probably have a way different tone; probably even discernable through my choice of words.

But as stated, this current round of fretting is really nobody’s doing but my own; I didn’t really have to schedule two, two-week vacations, two weeks apart from one another.  I don’t have to go to Disney, or Worlds.  There are a lot of things that I’m doing that aren’t really necessary to the survival of life, but things that I want to do, feel that I should do, and will try to have few regrets doing on account of how much they’re costing me.  Easier written than done.

I’ve been trying to tell myself that things are going to be fine, and in all likelihood, they will be.  It’s just a lot of my savings will be pretty depleted, and I’ll have a tremendous balance on my credit card when it’s all said and done.  I can’t speak for the future, but I’ll probably be back to, or remain anxious about such circumstances then, but I’m trying my best to keep my wits about me until we get to that point.

And when it rains, it tends to pour, but in an odd twist of irony, it’s through such downpour do I kind of find a little bit of perspective that, kind of helps, in spite of the poorly timed, certainly unwanted $600 expense.

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The most NOVA story ever

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Short story shorter: woman in smarmy Mercedes-Benz somehow manages to not just crash, but wedge her car stuck onto the bumper of a smarmier $300,000 Ferrari

Watching the corresponding video to this tragic story, all I could think about was the issues that fictional Eagletonians dealt with in fictional Parks and Recreation; shit like not enough lobster at the soiree, or the mineral water content in the urinals being not up to par.

But this is pretty much the most Northern Virginia story ever to happen.  A WASP pretending like they’re rich and white privileged, somehow managing to not just hit, but basically run over and get stuck on top of an extremely overpriced and expensive status symbol with wheels; owned by another WASP.  Not to mention the Benz had a vanity plate reading “DER BNZ” because nothing is WASPier than needing to let everyone know that your car is definitely of a German manufacturer.

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Rare Pikachu: A smart NFL player

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I love this story: RB Alfred Morris signs a 2-year/$3.5M contract with the Dallas Cowboys, but still drives and loves his 1991 Mazda 626 that he purchased for $2 dollars.

Now this is what it means to love a car.  I’d like to believe that if I came into millions of fuck you money, I’d still continue to drive my existing car until it became a good idea to perhaps purchase something else.  And even then, I can’t imagine that I’d go nuts and get an Aston Martin or some other pointless supercar.

But I’m all about Alfred Morris’s love for his ‘Bentley,’ and the obvious notion that he’s a pretty level-headed guy that might just be aware of how volatile a career as an NFL fringe player, and that it might be a good idea to be smart with his money.  I respect a guy who doesn’t go crazy when he comes into pro-athlete money, and even more so when he loves his old beater of a car and refuses to propagate stereotypes.  One thing the country doesn’t need more of is broke, dumb former athletes who burden taxpayers with bankruptcy and their lack of contributions to normal society.

Despite the fact that a Mazda dealership back from his days on the Redskins refurbished his car to near-new condition, it’s refreshing to read a story about an NFL player that still manages to appreciate and enjoy the little things, like his first ride.

Still trying to figure this out

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

As is often times the natural state of rest in the City of Atlanta, I was sitting in some catastrophic traffic, and I noticed this on the minivan in front of me.  Now I think I’m pretty open-minded about the construction of family units, and I have no qualms with a mom and dad, two moms or two dads, or whatever; as long as any kids aren’t raised to become shitheads, if it works, it works.

However, it doesn’t mean I’m not going to question something if it seems unorthodox to me; like a family decal that appears to look like two dads, a mom, three children and one poop emoji with arms and legs.  Now the poop emoji might just possibly be a baby, as indicative by the baby on board placard, but I’m admittedly puzzled by the presence of three parents.  Hey, if it works, it works, but it’s still out of the ordinary by traditional standards.

Like, are they polygamists?  Swingers?  I mean, in some way all polygamists are kind of swingers.  I guess there are just more questions than anything else for me, like if there are four kids in the equation, like, are they all from the decal-ed mom?  All from one of the dads?  Or a mixture of fathers?  I’m okay with the idea of it, but it does make me cringe a little bit to think of the four kids being like two from one dad, two from the other; this, I cannot help, because I don’t imagine I would like sharing my spouse, much less for procreation purposes, but, if it works for them, it works.

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So owned

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I enjoyed this too much: woman tailgates motorist, motorist taps brakes to try and get tailgater to back off, tailgater instead slams their own brakes, loses control, and spins out into the median.

Bonus:

The Fox Valley Metro Police Department told the paper that she was cited.

Bitch didn’t only get what she deserved for being an aggressive tailgater, she also got her well-deserved citation.

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Irony is

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Slapping a Confederate stars & bars sticker on your Japanese Acura CL family sedan.

bahahaha.

I saw this while I was coming home from work.  I was expecting to have a fairly unpleasant slog through a route of traffic that I knew that I would be facing regularly from now on, but I have to admit that seeing this amusing unity of conflicting automotive elements made the drive a little more tolerable, as I found myself laughing over this several times over throughout the crawl.

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