Tag: ohgeorgia

Only in the south

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

What could possibly go wrong – Georgia senate panel approves legislation that would make it legal to “pull or show” your firearm during a dispute as long as you don’t “aim it offensively” at someone

In other words, Georgia is trying to make it completely legal to show that you have a gun in order to attempt to deescalate a conflict, but not necessarily point it at another human being.

Yeah, that’s really going to go over real well; especially when jobber A flashes that they have a piece during a heated argument over the last $16 waffle maker at Walmart on Black Friday, and then jobber B responds by flashing their larger, more powerful piece.  Surely, the hypothesis is that jobber A will immediately stand down and forfeit the waffle maker to jobber B and then everyone will resume what they’re doing peacefully.

But the reality is that the two of them will eventually reach this uncomfortable and tense stalemate before one of them inevitably breaks the law and flashes it at the other, causing mass hysteria around them, before the highly armed and concealed-carrying rest of Georgia all begin brandishing weapons all around and then Milledgeville ends up on the news for the first time since Ben Roethlistberger raped a chick way back when.

Seriously, this is some only in the south kind of shit logic, and if there were ever any more proof that industries like firearms have their hands in the pockets of old white men in political power, dry rubbing their flaccid old dicks, it’s stories like this, because in no scenario in the world involving people who are not law enforcement, does the introduction of firearms ever have a chance at hell at deescalating anything at all.

Digging deeper, I love how the impetus behind this ridiculous bill is that the previous punishment for brandishing a weapon is a 20-year felony, and a bunch of hicks decided that they shouldn’t have to go to prison for two decades because they have a gun and want to show it off.  So why not just change the fucking law?

Anyway, I look forward to the statistics that will never be published where gun violence actually goes down as a result of laws like this.  Or the amendment where it will not-so subtly exclude black people from this law and in fact make it a 25-year felony for the colored folks for even saying the word “gun” around old white people.

How to reflect on a decade

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

This year ending isn’t just an ordinary ending of a year, because it’s also the end of a decade.  Naturally, a sentimental person like me tends to want to reflect on an entire decade, because much like individual years, a decade is a nice round chunk of time that one might think it would be easy to reflect upon, but in the greater spectrum, it’s ten full years we’d be trying to look back onto.  Now I like to think I have a good memory, but even without the aid of my trusty brog, it’s difficult to really look back at an entire decade.

Regardless, that’s not going to stop all the self-important jobbers of the internet who will try their darnedest to speak with authority and copy and paste all the same milestones the major news outlets will when it comes to trying to summarize and reflect upon the entire decade.  The funny thing is that most of the internet savvy generations probably aren’t that much older or younger than I am, which means that in the grand spectrums of our respective lives, we’ve only really lived through 3-4 decades, whereas I’d probably estimate that 1.5-2 of them are pretty invalid, because we’re simply not articulate and/or educated enough to have the capacity to reflect on entire decades.

So combined with the advent and growth of the internet, and the notion that everyone has a voice, I’d wager this is probably, at the very most, the second real decade of the modern high-speed internet that people really care to really reminisce about; and I’m being generous by calling it the second, because DSLs and cable internet didn’t really flourish until nearly the mid-2000’s; I couldn’t imagine people trying to use streaming, auto-refreshing social media on a 56K modem, so frankly I see this more as the first real decade that everyone and their literal mothers on the internet are going to be writing about.

Anyway, I’m going to attempt to try to recollect from mostly just my own memories, and stick to things that are more relevant to my own little world, and not the big gigantic depressing one we live in.  If I had any readers, they can google any decade in review, and probably find more worldly and probably more high-profile shit than the things I have to say about the things going on in my own little life, like the start and finish of Game of Thrones, Pokemon Go, the sad state of American politics, all the endless mass shootings, and Bill Cosby being outed as a rapist.

And the reason that I disclaim the whole “if I had any readers” because one of the most devastating things that occurred for me is the fact that despite my WordPress going online in 2010, at nearly the very start of the decade, midway through the decade my brog went down indefinitely, when my brother relocated from one part of the country to another.  A lot of hardware changes meant no more place to host my brog, and despite having the supposed backups, I simply haven’t taken the time or allocated the funds necessary to get my site up and running again.

If I were the type to do New Years resolutions anymore, I think I’d resolve to get my site back up and running again in 2020.  TBD on if that will actually occur, and frankly with the things I have on my plate going into the next decade, I don’t want to commit and then fail to deliver.

In spite of the brog blackout, that hasn’t stopped me from writing.  Even to the day my site went down, I have been writing on a fairly regular basis, taking no more than two weeks off before the internal guilt gets my fingers flying across the keys again, and I’ve got at this point, hundreds of folders of dated and timestamped Word docs, all awaiting their day in which they can be posted retroactively to a brog.

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The snakeheads have invaded Georgia!

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Back in the early 2000s, when I was still living up in Northern Virginia, there was an ecological incident that in all honesty, is still affecting the western hemisphere to this very day.  North America was introduced to the snakehead fish, when some idiot in Maryland or New York decided to release the non-native invasive species into a pond in Maryland.

As they have no natural predators and are omnivorous, they decimated the pond, but it’s their other ability that puts their name on the map, namely the part where they can get out of water and can survive on land for extended periods of time, effectively long enough for them to find other bodies of water, and new environments to dominate.

Despite the best efforts of professional environmentalists, the threat of snakehead fish has never been able to be truly contained, and much like the plot of a horror story, their numbers have grown and the regions in which they’ve been spotted has only grown.  Supposedly, they’ve been seen as far south as Florida, and even spotted in parts of the Mississippi River, among other places, far from their original release point in Maryland.

Well, as of yesterday, they’ve never been reported in Georgia until now.  At least four were caught in a private pond in Gwinnett county, and frankly, it’s probably already too late.  If this is anything like the original incident in Maryland, by the time they’re discovered, they’ve probably already reproduced and they’re already engrained in the ecosystem, that they’ll slowly dominate and take over until they start flopping out onto land and mosey on to other bodies of water that they can then dominate further.

Regardless of the bad news this means for the environments in which they appear, snakehead fish do fascinate me.  I remember being engrossed in all the news back in 2002 about this incredible apex predator of a fish that had no predators and ate everything in sight.  I kind of respected their power, and felt like I needed to catch and eat a snakehead fish myself, to assert my dominance over the species on the global food chain. 

Seeing as how they’ve now made it into Georgia, these feelings are kind of rekindled, and I wish that I had the gear and the know-how to go find them, fish for them, catch one and then eat it, so that I can usurp its powers into myself, and maybe it’ll give me some power.

Gee, I wonder why??

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

About as shocking climate change: bill proposed to the Georgia House, would make it easier for independent and third-party candidates to run for office

It should be no surprise that barely-red state Georgia would want more third-party candidates to clog up the polls in the future; look no further than the last, very public and highly scrutinized race for the vacant governorship of the state.  Yosemite Sam narrowly defeated Stacey Abrams, 1,978,408 votes to 1,923,685, a difference of 54,723 votes.* 

*does not account for all absentee and/or disqualified ballots, the legality of which is another conversation

However, also included in the results was some libertarian schlub, who managed to garner 37,235 votes.  Obviously, in a scenario where there were only two parties available to vote from, it is no guarantee that all 37,235 of those votes would definitively have gone blue, but even if like, 60% of them were to have gone blue, it would have forced the election into a run-off situation.  Sure, there’s no guarantee that even in a re-vote, the results would have changed, but it might have been a wake-up call to ambivalent Georgians to get off their asses and vote, but if anything at all, it would have kept hope alive, which is something that not just Georgia, but the country as a whole is sorely lacking in these days.

The point is, I very much do believe that the Libertarian party kind of fucked Georgia in the last election, and I wish that they had a modicum of ability to read the room and understand the importance of standing down in a very critical scenario.  I seriously don’t believe a single Libertarian candidate over the last two decades have felt that “they’ve got a shot!” when it comes to entering any single political contest, and it was narrow-minded and arrogant, and frankly kind of troll-like for Ted Metz to even bother running in 2018.  In an election that literally came down to the wire, the votes that the Libertarians usurped were all wasted, and could very well have helped swing the state not just blue, but denying a low-life like Yosemite Sam from taking office.

So naturally, it shouldn’t be a surprise at all, that the same people who benefited the most from the presence of a third-party most certainly wants more third-parties to get their feet in the door.  Because until the Democrats of Georgia can amass enough votes and numbers to overcome all the suppression and tampering and still beat out the Republicans, the presence of third-parties will always be working against them, leading to yet another hurdle for them to overcome in order to try and flip the state.

I’m proud of Metro Atlanta

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Considering that at the time I’m writing this, the midterms were ten days ago, and the State of Georgia has still not officially declared a winner for the governor’s race, I was initially going to wait until the result was made official before writing anything about this.  But I’m leaving the country for the next week and change, and I just know I’m not going to want to bother retouching this subject after a long vacation, and frankly the result looks like it’s pretty much in the bag, in spite of the valiant effort put forth by the Democrats, so let’s go ahead and get this shit out of the way.

It’s pretty much a foregone conclusion at this point that Brian Kemp is going to be the new governor of Georgia, much to my dismay.  Color me part-mortified that the guy I ridiculed months ago for having a campaign ad where he’s basically holding a shotgun to a teenager is going to be rising to amongst the highest offices in the state, but at the same time, I can’t say that I’m the least bit surprised in this day and age; especially if you stop and think about who’s in charge of the United States at this current juncture.

I have several mixed feelings about the whole clusterfuck that ended up being the governor’s race, but I think the one that bubbles up to the very top of them all is simply put, fuck the Libertarian party.  Given the extreme narrow margin of victory that Yosemite Sam had over Stacey Abrams, I have this opinion that the presence of a Libertarian candidate on the ticket basically usurped votes that could have either solidified a Republican win, or swung the entire race in favor of the Democrats.  Considering the general ideals of the traditional Libertarian versus the perceived extremes between the Repubs and Dems, I feel like if a gun were to the head of a Libertarian, they’d probably swimg Democratic, and we’d have a completely different story on our hands right now.

I feel that the Libertarian party in this instance were being selfish and incapable of reading the room, and even they had to realize that Babytrump couldn’t possibly be in the best interests of Georgia.  And with that in mind, why would they bother to interlope in a critical election that was already expected to be razor thin from the onset, and usurp essential votes that could very well have changed history at this time?

Frankly, the Libertarian party disgusts me currently, and I kind of fucking hate their existence right now.  I’m not saying that their votes would have definitively all swung blue, but in a hypothetical, majority blue scenario, they’d not only have led the election to a run-off but probably a Democratic win.  And maybe with some modicum of change achieved, maybe they’d have a better chance for notoriety running in a not-red state.

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Why are drivers with religious vanity plates the biggest assholes on the roads?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I feel like this is kind of a redundant question, and there’s a possibility that I’ve touched on this topic before.  Regardless, Georgia has no shortage of people who have vanity license plates on their car with subtle-to-overt religious messages on them, such as DOUPRAY, SING2HM, PRAY2HM, F8THFUL and so forth.  However, there is a correlation that I’ve noticed where the cars with the pious vanity plates are often the ones being driven by aggressive assholes and/or people with all sorts of uncharacteristically suspect accessories on their cars, from blackout plate covers, suspiciously dark tint, or any other things people put on their cars that one might not expect from drivers so god-fearing, they proclaim their piousness on their vanity plates.

And if they’re not driving like they’ve got something to hide, they’re usually the most aggressive and self-centered drivers on the road.  I really should keep a running document of ones that I’ve seen, and also notate which ones are being driven by assholes and/or equipped with less-than-reputable aftermarket accessories.

Just the other day, DOUPRAY was riding my ass hole on I-285 during horrendous rush hour traffic, as if it were me personally who were impeding their ability to get to Point B in their respective destination.  When traffic eased up after passing I-20 like usual, it took less than a second before the car whipped out of my peripheral vision into the just equally as newly vacated right lane, and blew past me going warp speed in order to pass me, and every other car that was still holed up in the left lanes.  It was here where I saw DOUPRAY on the license plate, and if their windows weren’t tinted darker than Wesley Snipes, I probably would have seen the face of some irate driver glaring daggers at me as if it were my personal fault they were stuck in traffic.

That’s where I re-realized the correlation between asshole drivers and those with religious vanity plates, and the revisiting of the question of why such is the case.  Is it because god-fearing religious people are all assholes?  Or is it because aggressive drivers believe their aggression is less suspect if they’re driving cars that have vanity plates that might make them appear more docile and religious AKA non-threatening?

All that it’s accomplishing in my eyes is that cars that I see on the road with religious-intonating vanity plates are automatically becoming perceived as combatant drivers who will probably be aggressive and inconsiderate the first chance they get, and it would probably behoove me to make the first moves and get in front of them, before their reckless nature puts my well-being in jeopardy.  Because when it comes to my own want to get from point A to point B, these religious assholes can worship their god plenty, behind me.

$100k worth of noodles, 250 billion grams of sodium

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Pretty sure the container was more valuable than the cargo: truck containing allegedly $100,000 worth of ramen noodles stolen from rural Georgia gas station overnight parking

I know the article states that it was a semi-truck, but I have a hard time believing that something the size of a semi could actually contain $100k worth of ramen noodles.  Especially if they were actually like the cheap shit Maru-chan noodles that are like 10¢ a package, but the article doesn’t actually specify the brand of noodles taken.

Instead, I imagine that the only thing remotely capable of hauling $100k worth of ramen noodles would have to be one of those land train trucks that’s basically a semi hauling 3-4 cargo containers in succession, like the one in Fast & Furious 4 that Vin Diesel stole one of the tankers of gas from.  Maybe, only maybe, would a truck hauling four containers worth of ramen noodles actually amount to close to $100k.

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