Month: August 2017

A wise man once said

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

– George Santayana

Across the country, statues representative of Confederate history are being defaced, vandalized, toppled or removed outright.  I understand why these particular symbols are being attacked especially in relation to current events; but I don’t agree with it.

Sure, the Confederacy is symbolic of racism, and racism is a never-ending hot topic, but I just think that there’s something inherently risky about the rabid want from the left to have all Confederate statues and monuments removed. 

I don’t like the whole slavery and discrimination representative of the Confederacy as much as the next liberal-thinking individual, but I’m also cognizant of the face that this shit actually happened.  It’s history, these are things that have actually occurred on American soil, and I think that there is something important that we as Americans, should always remember this kind of stuff, whether it is good or bad.

Removing statues, plaques and historical markers doesn’t delete history, but it does serve to assist in the forgetting of it.  And forgetting history leads back to that famous quote that has been paraphrased and misquoted by many, however with the intended meaning never really changing: those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

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What Charlottesville has done to me

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It’s not often I want to go back to a major topical event, but admittedly, I’m having a hard time letting this one go.  It’s on the tongue of every news outlet, and even in the endlessly flowing stream of social media, it’s still a hot topic that is still the talk of the town.  But the emergence of blatant white supremacy, the supposed neo-Nazis, and just plain eruption of bigotry that took America by storm in of all places, Charlottesville, Virginia has been a pretty big story, with some everlasting repercussions and impressions, whether people other than myself want to admit to it or not.

Originally, I assumed it was mostly populated by the degenerate hill tribes of Virginia where the KKK is known to still be around, but it turns out that it was slightly more organized, and comprised of people from all around America.  Why Charlottesville was chosen as their point of conglomeration was a small question I had, but given the obvious answer that such a demonstration would never have been able to fly in Northern Virginia, where they’d have been eaten alive by the vast mixing bowl of the region, with the same sentiment being similar in the Commonwealth’s capital of Richmond. 

My friends and I have laughed about how this would only have ended in tragic-ironic gun violence if it happened in the next largest populace of the Virginia Beach-Tidewater region, which has very large black communities with many notorious gang issues, whom would probably love to band together to oppose a bunch of white supremacists, so it pretty much left Charlottesville, home to the University of Virginia as the only logical place to gather and blather on about white-this and white-that and all their stupid shit that they somehow think is remotely acceptable in 2017.

I can’t get over the irony in that Charlottesville is the place where I learned Korean, a language not belonging to whitey, is also a place where large numbers of angry white bigots gathered to light tiki torches and chant about their supposed dying culture.  Obviously, it’s not so much a reflection of Charlottesville itself, as much as it is the unfortunate choice of gathering of a bunch of racists, but that’s how history works; Charlottesville is a site where hatred gathered, boiled over, and became national news.

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Draconian Punishments: driving with cell phones

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been driven to my wit’s end because of people constantly driving around while distracted by their cell phones.  It doesn’t seem to matter that such behavior is classified as illegal and ticketable by a police officer, but the reality is that there simply aren’t enough cops out there monitoring for this shitty behavior, and they’d most likely be disinterested in ticketing people for cell phone use when there’s speeders and even more reckless drivers on the road to keep vigil for.

At least once a day for the last few weeks, I’ve identified situations where I’ve nearly been merged into, witnessed someone absent-mindedly drive into a potentially harmful situation, or simply not gone on a light-turned green, if not multiple of the above.  My favorite (read: the shit that infuriates me the most) are the people whom you can see their heads dipped down, as the foot comes off the gas when their eyes leave the road, and they slow to dangerously slow speeds while they check something on their phones, and then resume driving like a retard when they realize they need to pay attention to the fucking road again.

Needless to say, I have laid down on my horn on nearly a daily basis, and I’m absolutely sick and tired of people on the roads who can’t seem to get the fuck off their cell phones.  Such doesn’t change much on people outside of their cars, but at least the repercussions of their idiocy aren’t necessarily potentially lethal (as much).

Regardless, the only way that this behavior is ever going to improve is to integrate draconian punishments for those caught violating the rules.  Fear of tickets and fines aren’t good enough, as it feels like 80% of drivers are still content to drive around with their eyes anywhere but the essential view ahead of them, so I think we the world, need to change things up.

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This is precisely why Northern Virginia wants to secede

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I want to do nothing but make fun of the fact that they’re all carrying tiki torches, probably purchased for $3 a pop at their local Walmart or convenience store, and how they probably bitch about how fuel costs more than the hardware itself.  And how it’s hard to really take them seriously because they’re protecting themselves from mosquitos at the same time they’re marching like sheep, preaching bigoted messages of white purity and some other hateful rhetoric.

But it’s because of the bigoted messages of white purity and some other hateful rhetoric that I can’t just laugh at the tiki torches, and instead have to wince and acknowledge that somehow, this is 2017 and not 1917.

Here’s the thing – I am a native Virginian.  I was born in Virginia, and spent 21 years of my life in Virginia.  Seeing shit like large, organized white supremacy groups marching down the campus of the University of Virginia is something that I never thought I would really see in my lifetime, and really, really makes me glad that I don’t live in Virginia anymore.  It makes me ashamed of the state I was born in and grew up in, and I wish I could deny my Virginia origins.

This isn’t a post about a topic because it’s topical, it’s a post because there is a part of me that has some relation to the situation in the fact that this shit is happening not that far from where I grew up.

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Now this is a tragic spill

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Unfortunately, it didn’t happen in Georgia, so it can’t be the mother of food payload spills, but it still warrants a few words, just because of how tragic it is.  But a truck full of DiGiorno and Tombstone frozen pizzas tipping over and spilling its delicious cargo all over the highway?  That’s a god damn shame.

Seriously though, I’ve often waxed poetic about the sequence of trucks spilling on Georgia highways making some sort of mythical banquet, but just about every combination of things from Georgia’s list would pale in comparison to a gigantic, Cici’s Buffet-caliber buffet of frozen pizzas.

Because pizzas are among the world’s most perfect foods, encapsulating everything into a fairly compact and often well-combined entrée, and considering no utensils are necessary, once you get the pizzas, all you really need are occasional beverages.

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When kids make grown-up money

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

When I was in the fifth grade, I was a huge Mighty Morphin Power Rangers fan.  This was one of those things that publicly amongst my school peers, I kept under wraps because that shit was for kid-kids, i.e., the ones in the third grade or younger.  Yet I was still captured by the campy acting, bad voiceovers and the fight footage more sliced and spliced together than a Kardashian.

I even learned how to program my VCR timer because of Power Rangers, because the show always came on at 2:30 when I didn’t get home from school until like 3:45.  That’s how much I grew to love Power Rangers, that I forced myself to learn things in order to enjoy a mindless and stupid kids show.

That particular winter, when Power Rangers really began merchandising, I decided that I really wanted a MegaZord and/or a DragonZord.  I wasn’t necessarily a Transformers or Voltron fan, but I loved the Transformers/Voltron-like manner in which the Zords transformed and connected together, and I really, really, really wanted some Zord toys of my own.

Unfortunately, this winter was the winter when Power Rangers toys were the hot item for the holiday season.  The equivalent of Tickle Me Elmo, Furbies, hoverboards, NES Classics, or whatever that one thing is during each holiday season in which there aren’t ever enough of, and the demand becomes so great, it achieves a modicum of mainstream attention at just how hard it is to get them, perpetuating the cycle of unavailability to the next level. 

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The wrestling belt display rail

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

This is a wall in my office.  It makes me tremendously happy whenever I look at it.  Fewer things I’ve created in my life give me the amount of satisfaction that an eight-foot plank of wood with some boat snaps in it does currently.  Mostly because it was an idea that came to me that executed nearly as accurately to its concept as I had imagined it, and there’s seldom better feelings than when a plan goes according to plan.

While I was living in an apartment during the transitional phase between homes, my treasured wrestling belts had all sat in storage.  I always knew and treated the apartment like the transitional domicile, and put little effort into doing much decoration or adorning it with much of my own personal effects.  The belts remained in storage because I didn’t feel like unpacking them, I didn’t want to bother re-packing them, and frankly they’ve always been something of a challenge to display without consuming too much space.

When I moved into my new house where the whole world of home living was full of possibilities, I actually didn’t have much clue on what I was going to do with my belts.  I knew that I had dedicated one bedroom to become my personal office space, and that’s where I wanted to have my belts, but the question was always how I was going to display them.

My old corner shelf was no longer an option, because it only had five shelves and I now had ten belts, and being the stickler for symmetry, refused to have half my belts displayed in one fashion, and the other five displayed alternatively. 

I didn’t want to go the route of a glass display cases, because wrestling belts are no small things, and with ten of them, I would require a lot of glass display, which would also have been very costly, and frankly space consuming.  I know a new, larger house has lots of extra space to accommodate things, but I’m also kind of minimalist and don’t like too many bulky things to make me feel claustrophobic.

I liked the idea of hanging my belts off the wall, because being on the wall would mean they wouldn’t be on the floor, and not being on the floor would mean they weren’t necessarily cluttering up my place.  But I was really very much against the idea of affixing them to the wall like the Miz does, because he’s actually drilling screws through the physical belts themselves; I know he’s a professional wrestler who probably gets his replicas for cheap if not free, but I don’t, and I care for my belts a little bit more to where I don’t want to physically add any holes that I don’t feel needed to be added.

My thought was, why not use hardware that already existed?  As in the snaps on the belt themselves?  But wouldn’t affixing snaps be perilous and risk coming undone, especially under the weight of belts, which can weigh anywhere from 8-13 lbs. each?

But then a cursory search revealed the existence of screwable marine snaps, which would be the perfect things to bore into a plank of wood, to which I could then paint to match my wall and hang up to hold my belt collection.  And then the idea was underway.

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