Month: February 2018

Suck it, nerds

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

This couldn’t have been scripted any better: Jeopardy! contestants struggle to answer rudimentary trivia about football, ironic hilarity and passive-aggressive bullying from Alex Trebek ensues

Seriously, this couldn’t possibly have occurred better even if it were scripted by Seth Rogen or Sarah Silverman.  The desperate avoidance of the category, from all three contestants until it was absolutely the last thing left on the board, and then the defeated resignation from all three that their scores were condemned to be final where they were, seeing as how none of them thought they had a cake’s chance at a buffet of getting any of them right.

And then to make matters worse, not only was the studio audience beginning to laugh track at their pathetic lack of knowledge of the country’s most rabidly popular professional spectator sport, they began to start getting lip from the biggest dweeb of them all, Alex Trebek.  Who completely abused the fact that he had the answers right in front of him and could easily pretend like these were basic, easy questions, regardless of if he knew the answers to them or not.

Seriously, it never fails to astound me that Jeopardy! contestants can rapidly nail the correct questions to shit like “Philippe Cozette and Graham Fagg had a handshake in this location” or “Alfred Dreyfus was among the thousands who marched through the streets of Paris during this 1902 funeral procession,” but they don’t know what a fair catch is?

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Exposing convenient revisionist history

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

With Marvel Studio’s Black Panther on the horizon, spouting all sorts of racial rhetoric about it being historic and things other than a comic book movie, Washington Post contributor Sonny Bunch drops Mjolnir on the truth of the matter: before Black Panther, there was Blade.

Obviously, Blade happened way before the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and long before there was an odd existence of Marvel movies between FOX, Sony, and whomever produced the turds of Ben Affleck’s Daredevil, Nicolas Cage’s Ghost Rider, and the poor Jessica Alba Fantastic Fours that I’m too lazy to expend the few seconds to Google.

But for all intents and purposes, Blade is still a Marvel property, and therefore seeing as how the title of the film is named after him, makes him the first ever Marvel production starring a black person in the titular role.  As much as the internet and the rest of the world really want to claim Black Panther is this evolutionary revolutionary, in the grand spectrum of comic book films, it’s really not.  It’s just another addition to a library that’s way bigger than lots of people want to believe, for the sake of pushing a very expensive agenda in order to expedite the recouping of a gargantuan budget.

I love this article because Bunch does a great job of anticipating arguments to his article, and stomps them out before they can even be made, like pointing out all the other films, as small and as obscure as they may have been, being made in ages prior to the current internet, that have long beaten Black Panther to the punch as far as identifying black directors, black soundtracks, and other black things that are especially under the microscope now that we’ve traversed into February, the vaunted Black History Month. 

I hope he dropped a mic after this piece went to publish.

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A glimmer of hope

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I read this story* about a local man in-College Park, Georgia-who heroically cockblocked the issuance of bonds on a technicality and successfully stalled the procedures that would have begun the motion of a sporting arena being built, so that the Atlanta Hawks could have a local developmental team. 

In College Park, Georgia.  One of the most dangerous cities in the entire state.

*This is unfortunately behind the AJC’s pitiful paywall, but frankly you can just hit the stop button as soon as the page opens to dead stop the script that tries to tell you that it’s paid content, and usually the essential text has already loaded by then

As much as I admire the moxie of this individual, he’s unfortunately simply prolonging the inevitable, and delaying yet another sporting venue that the city doesn’t need, because Atlanta is obsessed with sporting facilities and will stop at nothing to have arenas soon for cricket, eSports, and another popular local activity, urban ATV riders running from the police.

But he did buy some time in which even the dimwits at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution could even think that maybe, just maybe, building an arena in College Park, for the Atlanta Hawks, just might not be the best idea in the world.  Or at least putting into words the very obvious revelation that stadiums and monstrous convention centers are not at all profitable and ultimately end up hurting the people they’re built near, but obviously not the investors and corporations who came up with the ideas to build them in the first place.

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