Month: January 2013

Man, What A Stupid Commercial #007

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Now when it comes to food, I don’t have any problem with Subway generally. Sure, their meat is all pre-sliced, processed, and kind of rubbery in consistency, but when you’re feeling lazy but at the same time you don’t want to eat too much like a slob, Subway is that sort of happy compromise of quick food that’s not completely abysmal to your health. Sure, in the end, Subway for me is like the popular joke about Chinese food and I’m often hungry again in an hour, but for those 59 minutes prior, I’m typically satisfied, and not completely guilty.

Granted, the Subway closest to my house is staffed by a bunch of hoods that once tried to swindle me, and actually thought I was gullible enough to believe that subs for three people would equate to $22 but that’s another story for another time.

But this Subway commercial is pretty stupid, as just about the vast majority of commercials typically are. But it’s at the 0:13 second mark where the commercial goes from typically stupid to especially stupid, when they show a bunch of overenthusiastic teenagers dressed to the nines on what appears to be the night of the prom – going to Subway for dinner.

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What the fuck is wrong with the Japanese?

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A French restaurant in Tokyo is essentially serving dirt. And charging upwards of the equivalent of $110 to do so!  What the fuck is wrong with Japanese people?

Seriously, it’s hard to imagine that this is like one of those situations like lobsters, where lobsters were once the food of the poor, but then was turned into the epitome of high-class dining by some talented chefs.  It’s fucking dirt.  You know what people eat in North Korea because their dictatorship hoards all the edible food for the regime?  DIRT.  It doesn’t matter how much they describe it as “natural and pure,” it’s still shit from the ground that’s part volcanic ash, part excrement, part decayed organic matter, and all well, DIRT.  There’s no lower denigrating terms to describe than what it already is, it’s fucking dirt.

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I JUST WANT A BANANA SPLIT

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Atlanta’s food scene is sometimes aggravating.  I can tell you about thirty different places where you could get an interesting taco or some barbecue, or where to get more tacos.  Tacos are very popular for some reason, which I can’t really complain about because I do like tacos too.  But the bottom line is that I know Atlanta has some pretty good eateries, the variety sometimes feels lacking; I have no idea where to go if I wanted a massively stuffed pastrami sandwich like what would be available at a classic New York Jewish deli.

But of all the recent food trends, the one that currently has my ire is the very much now overkill trend of frozen yogurt shops.  Specifically the ones that label themselves as “Fro Yo” because people are too fucking stupid to actually verbalize the words “frozen” and “yogurt.”  And I especially dislike the ones where customers have to serve themselves, with bucket-sized cups, soft-serve machines, and toppings where most fat people are too indulgent to show any restraint and end up spending $7+ on a bucket of frozen garbage.  When I go into an eatery, I’m paying money for people to do the fucking work for me, to serve me; not make me down my own fucking work.  And how stingy has the world become to where food is literally measured on a scale and charged by the ounce?  Eyeballing it, human error, and the honor system used to be sufficient, but now these fucking FroYo joints want to charge you every single penny including the weight of the cup for every transaction made at these shitty business models.

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How much the WWE has changed

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

If anyone were to ask me who I thought was going to win between CM Punk and The Rock, I would have said CM Punk every time.  It’s no secret that The Rock is a part-time wrestler, and there would be absolutely no point in giving the WWE World Title to a part-time wrestler who is only biding his time until his next movie role begins filming.  So color me surprised that the WWE went ahead and put the World Title on The Rock at the Royal Rumble.

Obviously, this makes things pretty crystal clear of what is going to transpire over the next three months of WWE programming; with John Cena being the winner of the Royal Rumble and can choose which championship he wants to go for, there’s no question he’s going after The Rock, and at the same time, hope to avenge his loss at last year’s Wrestlemania, as well as win the World Title.  Cena will win this year, as The Rock will no doubt have some movie obligation to do by April.  This subsequently sets up an instant Punk/Cena feud, where Punk can cite that Cena has never beaten him for the title, and that he wants it back.

But what the point of writing about wrestling today isn’t so much current events as much as it is just musing about how much the WWE has changed in recent times.  I used to believe, and justifiably, by these rules when it came to watching WWE programming:

  • Part-time wrestlers never beat full-time wrestlers
  • You never win in your hometown
  • The business always comes out on top

It’s occurred to me that just about all of these are hardly the case anymore, and that more or less the company has done a complete 180 in regards to how these things are handled.  I can’t necessarily say I agree with the choices the WWE makes, but seeing as how they’re as strong as ever and are the ever-adapting entertainment machine it really doesn’t matter in the end.

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Photos: Allison’s Rockin’ 60’s Murder Mystery

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In honor of Allison’s birthday, instead of an ordinary shindig, it was an evening of 1960’s retro and MURDER.  A whole bunch of us partook in a groovy 60’s themed Murder Mystery Dinner Party, revolving around the far out murderous occurrences that happened on the night of the party for Nutmeg Vant’s safe return from being shipwrecked for several months.

In other words, a great big elaborate dorky LARP, but it was a ton of fun, and it was quite enjoyable seeing everyone get involved and put forth such great efforts into getting into their characters, and acting out our parts as best as we could.

Much to the chagrin of some, taking pictures during the evening would have been odd and out-of-character from being the greatest baseball player that ever lived, so all the goofy pictures had to wait until afterwards.

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Final Fantasy really is going downhill, fast

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Earlier in the week, I was reading this article about the supposed slow dying of the Final Fantasy franchise, and it made me think about my own fandom in the series as I was growing up.  For the most part, I agree that the franchise as a whole is a shell of its former self, and I’m not going to pretend like I was nearly a vested fan to care so much about the writers, producers, directors, or whatever positions people held that made the old games great that when they left or moved on, yeah I guess I should have been concerned about the direction of the future games, but I didn’t.

If I were asked to pinpoint the precise spot where the series began its gradual turn downhill, I would say it was from the moment that Final Fantasy X-2 was conceived.  It was at this point did the series break a two-decade old tradition of never making a direct sequel to any one particular game, despite the potential that any one of them may have had.  Not only did FFX2 break the tradition, it ended up being a pretty shitty game by all popularly reviewed standards.  This commenter seems to have nailed how I thought about it:

But FFX-2 was where it became clear to me that Final Fantasy was dead. It was an insipid, grindy package of fan-service that not only insulted fans of the classic Final Fantasy games, but also fans of the original FFX, completely undercutting the original story by bastardizing its own characters and ruining the (ostensibly) tragic sacrifice of Tidus at the end of FFX. That’s when I really woke up and realized that the series I had fallen in love with was gone, turned into a shambling, undead mockery of itself.

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#9

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Yeah, that lasted what, two weeks?  Despite my declaration that I wouldn’t get any more belts, I actually did happen to stumble upon the last belt that I was remotely interested in.  And much like the Big Gold Belt, it was priced for more than I would be normally willing to pay for it, but it had the option for a Best Offer, and floated a lowball offer that required very little negotiating over ten bucks to come to a selling price.  And here we stand: championship belt number nine.

It’s the ECW Television Championship belt, which was made famous when Rob Van Dam won it from Bam Bam Bigelow, and held it for just under two straight years.  He never actually lost the belt, and it was stripped from him when he suffered a legitimate broken ankle, and it was apparent that the company couldn’t afford to keep the title off of television when there were storylines to be moved along.  But it was 23 months of mostly excellent Rob Van Dam matches of him in his prime, having classic bouts with guys like Jerry Lynn, Lance Storm, Sabu and each of the Dudley Boyz, giving some good legitimacy to it.

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