Comics and character assassinations

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

When I was growing up and was really getting into comic books, like many of my time, the X-Men were the cream of the crop.  My favorite character was Gambit, and as a young romantic at heart that tried to hide behind a tough adolescent man exterior, I was all aboard the Remy x Rogue ship when reading comic books on my own. 

I would say that the peak of that comic book fandom was probably about 3-4 solid years, between grades 5 through 9, where somewhere in the middle, anime came into the picture and that fandom ramped up, while American comics phased out.  Amidst that period of time however, I enjoyed a lot of major storylines and arcs that really got me entrenched in X-fandom as well as Marvel by proximity.  X-Cutioner’s Song and Fatal Attractions were probably my favorite arcs, but I was all about large-scale crossover events like Infinity War, as well as one of the last things I really remember following, Onslaught.

Throughout all this time, I had lots of solid opinions and my mind waffling around lots of feelings about particular characters, and when it comes to one my life’s beliefs that life is way more relatable to professional wrestling than normies want to admit to, comics and wrestling overlap tremendously more than what comic fans probably want to admit to as well.

However, there was one opinion that did not waver at all, once it came to fruition: Cyclops was a pussy.

It didn’t matter if it were when he was being Cyclops, leader of the X-Men, or when he was just plain Scott Summers, the (in my opinion) unworthy main character level tier white guy with red sunglasses who seemed to always be at the center of attention when it came to a lot of my favorite storylines.

He was a big white guy dork with lame powers who shot lasers from his eyes, Gambit and Wolverine were clearly presented as better fighters, and yet all the hunnies wanted him, having all sorts of complicated romance/lust relationships with sexy telepaths from Jean Grey, Psylocke to even Emma Frost.  Mr. Sinister was obsessed with him, Apocalypse and Stryfe basically made him the center of attention in X-Cutioner’s Song, and for whatever reason, despite being the lamest X-Man of them all, Cyclops was always in the thick of things.

The cartoon didn’t do him any favors, giving him the whitest man’s voice, and presenting him as nothing but this tactical cheeser who just stood from afar using his optic blasts to fight with.  And later on when Capcom got a hold of a partnership with Marvel and Cyclops started appearing in their fighting games, I always raised an eyebrow against Cyclops and took enjoyment in beating him up, regardless if it were a human or an AI opponent.

This was all before I learned and understood what character assassinating was, but once I did, it became apparent that it seemed like few in comic book lore had dealt with such severe character assassinating as much as Cyclops has.

Bring us to present day, and a litany of writers, creators and artists have done yeoman’s work over the last decade or so, repairing a generation’s worth of character assassinating on Scott Summers.  He’s still kind of a square, but they’ve done a pretty impressive job of tightening up his general lore, clarified the specificity of his powers, shown him capable of actual combat beyond spamming optic blasts, and the kicker being that at the time I’m writing this, he’s broken kind of bad, very much coming into his own thoughts and belief systems, instead of just clinging to the dreams and ideologies of Professor X.

If there’s one consistent throughout storytelling, the most compelling antagonist-type characters, are the ones who believe what they’re doing is right, and live in a gray space, instead of just being flagrantly bad for the sake of doing supervillain shit.  I feel that that’s where Cyclops has ended up in current character development, no longer restrained to always let everyone live and save everyone, and isn’t afraid to ramp up the aggression to get shit done.

And it’s pretty great.  I don’t think the appreciation for where Cyclops is ending up today really could happen the way it is happening, if he hadn’t been dragged through the metaphorical mud for decades, and presented as the ultimate boy scout, before turning him heel.

He’s basically the Marvel Comics equivalent of Hulk Hogan turning to the dark side, and in a way, his current iteration of mutants under his charge carrying the X-Men name are kind of like the original nWo, in terms of pecking order.

However, with the rise from the ashes of one character, the scales have to be balanced somewhere, where someone has to be knocked down, and that brings us to Professor Charles Xavier, who seems to be having his character assassinated, both in actual canonical storylines, as well as general fan perception of him from the various mediums he’s portrayed in.

Like in the comics, sure, he basically destroyed the minds of a lot of his opponents, mainly Magneto, and he always does it in the name of saving the world to some capacity, but as time passes, his visions of the world inevitably fail to come to fruition because humankind is a hateful species and resent peace and unity until their dying breaths, people end up growing resentful, impatient and nihilistic when it comes to the hopes for peace by Professor X.

Characters like Cyclops begin to come to their own judgments that Xavier’s visions and hopes are pipe dreams, and after eons after eons of failures, retcons and a sheer lack of progress, eventually they evolve and move on in directions that might yield better proof than constantly being passive and playing defensively throughout life.

Also, the whole Professor X was in love with Jean Grey in spite of their controversial age difference storyline seems like a silver bullet to the heart as far as trying to assassinate his character goes, beyond any of the mind fucking and failure to progress previously mentioned.

The rebooted X-Men ’97 didn’t do him any favors, reminding everyone that he faked his own death to go live in the stars with the Shi’ar Empire, get jiggy with Lilandra and basically hand the keys to mutantkind to his greatest frenemy Magneto, and when he was busted and came back to earth to summon “my X-Men” before Bastion and his Sentinels fuck over the planet, but of course he goes and fucks Magneto in the head again, and on a long enough timeline, I can get why people begin to favor Magneto over Professor X.

The memes are pretty great, like fans pointing out how many times Xavier basically mentally makes Magneto re-live the Holocaust throughout the series, as his go-to move to neutralize Erik, and asking who really is the villain in this situation.  Also pointing out how many other guys he does the same thing, in making them re-live their biggest traumas on the spot as his most effective way of putting an opponent down, and it does seem kind of fucked up as opposed to just beating them up in physical combat, in spite of his handicap.

And kind of unrelated, I was thinking in the car, of just how ironic it is that Professor X has been rendered incapable of walking throughout the entire history of comic books, despite the fact that the Marvel Universe has probably 5-6 actively viable solutions to solve his inability to walk, from like Tony Stark making some sort of robotic replacement legs, to Dr. Strange and the mythical, maybe using Dormammu magic to give him his legs back, to when he had remnants of the Legacy Virus in his system which somehow temporarily gave him the ability to walk.

I get that Professor X is also symbolic of representation in comics, of having an extremely powerful person with a handicap to inspire readers that handicap ≠ incapable, but I don’t know why I didn’t think about it until recently that choosing to not capitalize in a universe where solutions are numerous, just kind of makes him a whiney martyr, just adding to the whole Professor X is actually an asshole narrative.

What it all really boils down to is that in today’s Marvel Comics environment, Cyclops is somehow kind of cool now, and Professor X is basically the biggest villain in the entire universe.  He released Onslaught after mind-fucking Magneto for the fifth time, nearly wiping out the Marvel Universe, and it’s taken several retcons and reboots for the jaded writers of today to run with the whole, maybe Professor X really isn’t that great of a guy narrative, and here we are today.

Funny how on a long enough timeline, the Harvey Dent line of ‘you either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain’ is so applicable to the evolution of many comics out there, with the X-Men being no exception.

Nothing says ‘I still got it’ than pub-stomping some high school girls

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

MLB: 52-year old Ichiro Suzuki twirls a 127-pitch complete game shutout against an all-star team of Japanese high school girls in an exhibition game, striking out 17.  Also collected two hits as a batter, in a 7-0 win

When I saw this news start to pop up on my feeds, I thought that this was an instance of old news coming back to the surface, and was ready to get on the internet offensive and accuse some pleebs of old news, get with the times dork.  But it turns out that this game of mostly old and retired Japanese pro players versus the best girls high school players in the country exhibition actually did happen again, and apparently this is a thing that occurs every two years, and has been the case for a while.

If it’s been going on prior to 2019, I don’t have the slightest clue nor do I care enough to check, but it’s news as of then, solely because of the fact that Ichiro has been participating in these matches since then.  And for the fourth time out of five appearances, Ichiro has thrown a complete game shutout, and nothing is probably more validating to his aging masculinity than taking the pitcher’s mound and suffocating a bunch of teenage girls for a the better part of a decade.

In one hand, it can be said that Ichiro is showing these girls the utmost honor and respect by not pulling any punches and going out and tryharding as much as he and most Japanese workaholics often are capable of doing.  But in the other hand, he may be retired and inactive in Major League Baseball, but Ichiro is still one of the greatest of all time, and probably the greatest of all time to come out of Japan (for the time being), and aging will do way less to his ability to play baseball than it would be like some fat undisciplined flash in the pan like say Prince Fielder, post-career, and even though he’s 52 as of 2026, he’s undoubtedly still better at the game than the best girl high school players in the nation.

Although I highly doubt the overly polite and respectful Japanese would possibly think Ichiro and all the other former MLB/NPB pros stomping high school girls is a dick move, my American brain tends to think that there’s a modicum of dickishness to a bunch of former professionals going out and dropping hammers onto a bunch of girls vastly their juniors.

Unsurprising, Ichiro dominated the living piss out of the high school girls, again, and the funniest-not-entirely-funniest thing about Ichiro’s participation in this game is that this is now is fifth game where he’s appeared in, all of them as the only pitcher, and he’s now pitched a total of 45 innings, 5 complete games, 4 shutouts, and has an ERA of just 0.06.  He has at least 43 strikeouts, because I can’t find the strikeout totals from 2019 and 2023, but even if he had zero in those two games, his K/9 rate would be close to 10 as it is, which is considered elite.

In one regard, this is probably the honor of a lifetime for all the high school girls, getting to play ball with some of the greatest to ever play for the country, but at the same time, it’s meant to be an exhibition, not taken so seriously, and where they’re getting 9-17 runs hung on them.  Like, if you’re trying to inspire confidence in the youth of tomorrow, clobbering them for 10+ runs in a meaningless game isn’t really going to help.

But in the end, I suppose if eating the lunch of a bunch of high school girls is what Ichiro needs to do in order to remain active in the game, then so be it.  I still maintain that when the day comes when he’s no longer able to be involved in baseball, he’s going to go on a murderous rampage, so anything that keeps him in the stratosphere of the sport, means safety for humanity.  I mean, look at his face from this year’s game when he came to the realization that one girl had collected three hits off of him; when the day comes where Ichiro can’t play anymore, and his murderous intent comes out, the name Rin Fukuda will probably be high on his list of targets, for embarrassing his honor by collecting three hits, and a steal.

Looking forward to the 2028 edition of this game, where a then-54 year old Ichiro will probably still be ready to pitch another complete game shutout, and I can only hope by then, there’ll be some cocky female slugger who’s salivating at the thought of facing Ichiro and is ready to clobber a dinger into the Tokyo Dome rafters, just so we can all see what Ichiro’s reaction is going to be.

Better avoid Smithfield meat for a minute

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

KWQC: maintenance worker killed at Smithfield Foods factory in Monmouth, Illinois; cause of death yet unknown, but reported to have been machinery related

Yeaaah see that picture here?  That’s the kind of stuff that Smithfield Foods produces, basically a whole bunch of manufactured meat products.  The kind of things you see in the pre-packaged lunch meat aisle, and if you’re anything like me, are pretty indiscriminate about the brand, and liable to pick up whatever’s cheapest and doesn’t look too sketch.

The fact that it’s been a few days since this was reported, and no specificity on how the worker was unfortunately killed invariably leads to the jumping to the conclusion that man may have fallen into some vat or food processing machine, and that he could possibly end up as byproduct to any one, or multiple of the types of meats shown above.

And no, I’m not above making a tasteless joke in light of another human’s demise, but in this case, I am not joking.  Seldom is there much humor in the loss of another’s life, and it really sucks for the person who died at work, as well as the family that lost them, but the lack of specific details in the matter does genuinely raise concern about the contents of the food that the factory could be producing in coming days and weeks, and it’s going to take some very clear explaining to ensure future consumers that they might not be getting partial flecks of human matter in their kielbasas and bacon in the future.

Also really sucks for the plant workers who weren’t just immediately sent home for the day in light of a fatality at the workplace, and that the facility intended on operating as if nothing had happened.  I unfortunately have experienced a situation where a vendor had a fatal accident at work, and they ceased operations immediately, because that seems like the logical thing to do in order to investigate the matter in as calm as a place you can, as well as give some grieving space to all that were unfortunate to witness the incident.

Think Smithfield Foods better consider putting themselves on the bench, or get ready for a rebranding, because employee fatalities and piss-poor handling of a bad situation is some really bad PR to be farming up in this day and age, and it doesn’t matter how good or not good their product is, they’re in a very crowded food space, and the removal of their existence on account of bad situational management isn’t going to really matter that much.

Who would’ve guessed that foreign travelers don’t want to get gauged either?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

WSB: Atlanta Convention & Visitors Bureau report that hotel bookings did not live up to the impact predictions that the FIFA World Cup would bring

Among some of the great content that came out of the FIFA World Cup, I particularly liked the local Atlanta material, about foreign visitors’ experiences in the Metro.  I really enjoyed videos about witnessing people wandering around in the hoods of College Park, the West End and East Atlanta, looking absolutely petrified at just how hood some of these neighborhoods were capable of being.

It’s obvious that they chose these areas because they were MARTA accessible, and they figured that instead of staying within a mile radius of The Benz and get gauged to death, they’d stay a little bit further out for less, but it’s aight because we got train access.

I’d never seen so many the sax is getting louder memes in such a short time, but they’ve all been entertaining to me, especially when I recognized some of the places of some of the videos.

But getting back to the article here, it brings me great satisfaction to see all the L’s the city is taking in regards to expected hotel occupancy versus what had actually happened.  It’s not that I want to see Atlanta getting laughed at by the rest of the world, but I’m diametrically opposed to flagrant price gauging and any act of trying to turn screws to the people of the world, that I feel like quantifiable evidence of failure like this is necessary in order for any sort of course correction to happen.

It’s pretty great:

FIFA once promised an impact equal to eight Super Bowls.

But then the numbers start coming in, and tax revenue, hotel occupancy and hotel occupancy within a 1-mile radius are all in the negatives, and it’s just one of those smug, gee, tf did you think was going to happen when you ask people to pay thousands of dollars to fly to Atlanta, thousands more dollars to get tickets into the matches, and think that they’d still have thousands of dollars left over to stay in overpriced hotels?

I especially like the Ls that all the nearby hotels took, because firstly, they’re all of the luxury, high-end name brands, of W, the Four Seasons, the Ritz Carlton, and then all the Dragon-con hotels that are all perpetually overpriced all the time.  They should be the least surprised that people who were dumping their life savings into these trips would prioritize lodging the last versus logistics and match tickets.

I am surprised to see that the general, umbrella Metro Atlanta hotel occupancy also remained in the negatives, which means that probably the AirBnB and short-term rental markets probably did gangbusters throughout the World Cup’s tenure in Atlanta, or perhaps people were staying in places like Newnan, Woodstock, Braselton and the way the fuck outskirts that might not fall into the Metro umbrella.

Either way, chalk this up as some satisfying tea to indulge in, because as much as I love sports, the politics that go behind it are as much full of shit as the nonsense that endlessly churns up in Washington DC.

Sounds like a way to lose $500 and feed the squatting epidemic

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

WSB: City of Atlanta announces new no-fee microloan program for renters to help avoid evictions during times of duress

Upon reading this, I feel like Mayor Andre Dickens must’ve recently seen Jim Carrey’s Yes Man and was inspired by the scene where JC’s loan officer character, under hypnotic suggestion, said yes to just about every single loan request that came across his desk, with his bank’s branch giving out tremendously more loans than the rest of the company.

When confronted about it by a higher-up who came in to investigate the generosity, the twist was that all the people he was giving loans out to were just so grateful to be having their needs met, that the repayment rate of all his loans was 98%, and the bank was actually turning a profit on the repayments.  Good job, Carl.

Seemingly inspired by a fictional film, Andre Dickens launches the Neighborhood Reinvestment Initiative, where he believes that loaning out $500 at a time to people who might be a little short when the rent is due, will help keep good families secure in their homes, and not be at risk of eviction.

The alleged rationale behind the initiative is altruistic, and I don’t mean to shit on a program that has such altruistic objectives, but there’s zero part of me that believes this has any chance of being like Yes Man, and 98% of these $500 loans will be repaid, much less used in any sort of responsible manner.

First of all, the $500 microloans are no-interest, no-fee, require no collateral.  They will then have 25 weeks to pony up a Jackson at a time, and although I feel fortunate to say that I could probably pay $20 a week, I know a lot of the people this is intended for probably aren’t.  I get that this is all in the name of helping people, but programs require funding to survive, and if they’re not going to make any sort of payment, especially to off-set the extremely high chance that most of these loans aren’t going to get repaid fully, if at all, then may as well not even bother launching it in the first place.

Second, has anyone stopped to look at the eviction rates in Metro Atlanta?  For 2026, one in four renters defaults, and although they may face eviction, the corresponding squatting rates are also so astronomical that this program is basically setting itself up to be a means to give future squatters $500 bones to supplement themselves with before they inevitably start living illegally.

$500 is not an inconsequential amount, but given what the cost of renting is in Metro Atlanta and all around the US these days, it’s barely a drop in the bucket as far as actually being able to help someone out goes.  I have a feeling the people who are struggling with making rent aren’t short by $500 or less each month, and require that difference to be made up somewhere, every single month, and not just have one bad period.

Hypothetically, a responsible borrower gets their $500 loan, staves off defaulting for one month, but then the 30th rolls around four weeks later, they’re short again, but now they are ineligible for another $500 because they received one a month prior, what then?

I can tell you that with my general expenses and costs of supporting my household, $500 vanishes in the blink of an eye, often in a single transaction somewhere, and $500 wouldn’t really help that much in the grand spectrum of the debts that I could incur, and in fact, be worse in the sense that I now owe one more something back.

The idea of this is nice, and if it isn’t just a smoke screen meant for Dickens to operate as his predecessors did (read: stealing taxpayer funds), I would hope that this truly does help a lot of people having a bad month, stay afloat, and pay back responsibly, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.

I look forward to revisiting this topic in a year when I see this post show up on On This Day, and I’ll be curious to Google it to see just what came of the whole thing, but probably find nothing about it because everyone loves to hide their L’s and Dickens was probably using this whole thing to steal money to begin with.

Non-Koreans need not apply

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Sometimes I use my brog to vent out my general frustrations about randos on the internet because I don’t want to comment on social media and possibly risk engaging in interactions I don’t want to get sucked into.

But over the last year or so, there’s a content creator with whom I engage with regularly enough to where theFacebook keeps offering me up a top fan badge which I promptly delete the suggestion because I don’t care nor is it at all important for others to see me as someone who spends more time than is necessary engaging with someone that I don’t know at the end of the day.

I like to keep my interactions generally positive, as this person is also Korean, also a dad, and although I could be jealous of his success at climbing the rope of content creation and the lifestyle it has created for him, I don’t want to be the jealous fatty of Korean person who envies and generally becomes a hater, because I really am happy to see a Korean guy finding success, making wholesome content in such a droll world where everything is an uphill battle.

Mostly I interact with fairly innocuous remarks, primarily positive, but also when he queries other parents, I sometimes share opinions, as another Korean father in America.  But I occasionally sprinkle my commentary with some 한글 every now and then, kind of as a way of directly speaking to him and/or other Korean supporters of his, because sometimes there are just some things in the world that aren’t really relatable to anyone other than to us Korean people.

However, being public forum, this means that the rest of the non-Korean pleebs of the world can see what I’m saying, and worst of all, have the capability to comment and respond when they feel necessary, which is unfortunately to say way more often than I’d like it to be.  Mostly because the overwhelming majority of people in the world are incapable of initiating, which includes on the internet where nobody has the balls to make their own comments but have zero qualms with rebutting and contradicting when they feel the urge (that nobody asked for) to say something.

A lot of the time, my remarks get the “this doesn’t apply to just Koreans” or “I’m also X Asian/minority class and this tracks for us” counters, which in some cases might not be completely invalid.  But my favorites are the responses I get from what are obviously white people who feel that they have absolutely anything to add in any sort of matter that pertains to me pointing out -isms of Koreans and other Asian tropes.

Like the impetus of this post stems from this content creator low-key flexing his pockets by showing an itemized e-receipt of some ingredients purchased for a future video.  But instead of being a hater and acknowledging and calling out the humblebrag, I remarked about imagining his or the hypothetical Korean parent seeing this receipt and it’s exorbitant cost, and how they’d probably imagine it would be cheaper to travel to [foreign location] to [acquire] the ingredient, and ignore the whole time and labor cost, in the name of saving money, because the trope is that Koreans are eternally cost-conscious and the only things that matter are those bottom lines.

I get some Chad Borowski responding to me that time and labor is free to one’s self, and that they can get memories and experience out of the hypothetical journey to [foreign location].  Some hippie-dippy white person bullshit, injecting their belief system to a culture that couldn’t give a shit less about such things versus the objective of not paying exorbitant costs for anything.  And then it’s topped off with an umbrella sermon about how Chad wished more people were capable of doing things for themselves and enjoy the process.

 

Normally I don’t re-engage, but this one made me roll my eyes so hard, by the time my eyeballs returned to their sockets, I had already hit send on a response, facetiously saying his remark was cute but [due to his obvious lack of knowledge of Korean parents on account of not being fucking Korean] that the only experience and memories a Korean parent wants to get out of such a hypothetical journey is the ability to humblebrag to their group chat about how much money they saved, and have an unsmiling selfie at the location to prove it.  Because that’s entirely what hypothetical Korean parents of this specified generation are entirely all about, and the exact course of action that would take place.

But my bad for re-engagement, because later in the day, Chad rebuts again because white people are about as other classes when it comes the need to get the last word in, and they accused me of being miserable with a sour world view, which isn’t entirely incorrect, but in the context of this conversation, is completely putting words in my mouth.

I didn’t bother responding again because I had already broken one of my general rules of social media of commenting on comments, and I feel no need to get the last word, but the point of all this is that Chad here, or any other white person need not bother getting involved in this observation that has nothing to do with them.

Unfortunately, I know that tons of white guys out there in the world are incapable of receiving such a memo, so this won’t be the last time Ben Affleck or Jillian Michaels is going to interfere with my knowing commentary of Koreans to another Korean.  But hopefully, it won’t pique my nerves to the point where I feel the need to burn a brog post about it again.

I suppose when you’re about to be euthanized, no-caffeine may let you live three more seconds

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

ANF: Georgia death-row inmate selects last meal, set for execution on September 16th
Let’s just cut to the chase:

For his last meal, prison officials said Humphreys requested barbecue beef brisket, pork ribs, a bacon double cheeseburger with fries, buffalo wings, a meat lovers pan pizza and two caffeine-free sodas. For dessert, he chose butter pecan ice cream and peach ice cream.

Honestly, take the whole murdering of two real estate agents out of the equation and journey to death row, and this sounds like an absolute banger of a big back meal, that would be like a final boss-caliber cheat day of eating.

The funny thing to me about final meal requests is that these inmates always ask for enough food for entire families, more than likely knowing that they have no chance at finishing everything, and the crazier thing is that the institutions of incarceration always seem to honor them.

As far as final meals go, this one does seem kind of tame.  Man is basically asking for the entire menu at like Buffalo Wild Wings, with all the barbecue items he’s requesting, as well as cheeseburgers and pizza.  About a decade ago, also here in Georgia, there was a woman on death row who requested a ton of things that seemed to have a common thread, of buttermilk and eggs, and it seemed to me that she was planning on making herself into a human atomic bomb of toxic gas, fully anticipating that once she died, and believing that the body’s functions cease and evacuate, to make the absolutely most trainwreck of a mess as possible on the way out.

This guy isn’t really going that route, even if it is the only real chance that any accused has to get the last word in with their jailers, man just wants a solid Roy Hobbs Day on the way out.

But why this is a post on the brog is that the devil is in the details, and it’s some of the details that pique my interest and inspire me to put down some words.

First, is the fact that he specifically asked for a meat lovers pan pizza, and not a whole-ass Pizza Hut Big New Yorker with every single meat option slathered on it.  I get that there is a culinary difference between the two, what with the pan pizza having those crispy edges that might be a personal preference, but if I’m on my way out, feel any sort of malice or resentment to my jailers or the state of Georgia, and know that the taxpayers are on the hook for feeding my ass one last time, I might pick the more expensive option, knowing that I probably won’t finish it anyway, taking any sort of pyrrhic victories as I can.

Instead, this dude is being quite modest with his request of a diminutive pan pizza, almost as if it were meant to be a dainty side dish to accompany his barbecue train he’s going to run.

Next we have the two caffeine-free sodas that he’s requested; I’m going to assume they’re along the lines of a cola or of the dark colored variety, and not like a Crush or Mountain Dew.  It’s funny in the sense that he specifically asked for two, and not an entire six or 12-pack, because short of going to a gas station or a Dollar Tree, I don’t even know where you can even get individual cans of soda.  More than likely, whomever is in charge of fulfilling this meal request will be stuck with leftover sodas in their possession, knowing that the missing cans were meant for a dead guy.

But the coup de grace is the fact that for whatever reason, it was specified that he wanted caffeine-free sodas.  Man is about to be put to eternal sleep, and he’s sweating having sodas that have caffeine in it before he’s put to death.  And just two – clearly trying to watch his weight and sodium intake, in spite of the 8,000mg of sodium he’ll already be taking in with his requested final meal.

When I was a kid, I was so hooked on soda, and in spite of my mom’s general aversion to supporting such a habit, occasionally I could talk her into picking up a case of sodas, provided it were caffeine-free Diet Coke.  It’s like being the absolute least offensive of the cola family made it somewhat palatable for my mom to purchase.  Plus, the gold cans are kind of baller, and it’s almost a shame that the color gold is treated as like fourth tier in the Coca-Cola hierarchy.

I suppose he’s being cognizant of the risk of elevated heart rate that caffeine has on the human body, and seeing as how he’s going to be put down via lethal injection, I suppose keeping his heart rate as low as possible when getting the needle, he might be able to prolong his life by like maybe, three more seconds. 

And if he has any inkling of wanting to remain among the living, I suppose every second counts.