Tag: food

Bless your heart, Pepsi

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I get the whole “there’s no such thing as bad publicity” adage, and to a degree it’s not wrong.  But one of the more modern trends of today that I think is often times stupid and ultimately pointless, is the ideas of brands using social media to communicate amongst each other as if they were sentient individuals.  Sure, it can be amusing for two seconds to see McDonald’s take swipes at Burger King, Burger King take swipes at Taco Bell and Wendy’s taking swipes at everyone, but when the day is over, it’s still a person behind a keyboard roleplaying as an entire company, trying to get personal with another person roleplaying as another company behind another keyboard somewhere out there.

I accept that this is the world we live in now, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that I have to agree or care about the shenanigans that are necessary in order to justify everything as “advertising.”

In all fairness, there are plenty of examples out there of brands doing good on social media, that are admirable and creative means of utilizing the medium.  However, there are plenty of others, like Pepsi shoe-horning themselves into a lame attempt at a narrative with Coke, while they’re in Atlanta, as the official soft drink sponsor of Super Bowl Leee.

In no world would Coke ever bother trying to do this shit if they ever found themselves in whatever place happens to be the alleged home of Pepsi; they’re so irrelevant that people like me have no idea where that even might be.  They know they’re the top dog globally when it comes to the soda industry, regardless of what the numbers in America might be, Pepsi can’t touch Coke when it comes to the rest of the world as a whole.  And because Coke is the king of the mountain, they know they don’t have to resort to cheese and social media faux-viral fluff in order to get their name out there, because they’re simply in a position to where their name is practically engrained on the lips of everyone on the planet already, as the default software brand everywhere.

When it comes to tactics, Pepsi has evidently resorted to stealth and drive-bys in order to deploy their lame statue for a painfully forced narrative that a truce could possibly exist between the rivals; and I use that phrase loosely since Pepsi is so far beneath Coke, they could hardly be called rivals, but for simply lack of a better term.  There’s no way Coke would even bother doing something like this if the situation were reversed.

The bottom line is that I don’t know why this has triggered me to write at all, because I’m having a hard time formulating words other than “there’s no way Coke would bother with Pepsi if the roles were reversed,” and when the day is over, I don’t really drink much soda anyways.  I’m apt to drink Diet Pepsi in places where I can’t get a Diet Coke and ultimately I don’t care that much.  I guess my beef is with social media in general, and the fact that it Twitter was used as the virtual battlefield for sissies to slap fight, and it just kind of makes me roll my eyes that this is the world we’re living in these days that this isn’t just the norm, but is considered acceptable entertainment.

I don’t even like Clemson, but they deserve better than this

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

However, there’s kind of an appropriate metaphor in the imagery: College Football National Championship winning Clemson Tigers football team goes to the White House, Donald Trump serves them a gargantuan spread… of fast food

I don’t think it’s any new news that I don’t like Clemson.  For nearly the last decade, I don’t remember the last time that Tech has beaten Clemson in football, whether it’s been Tajh Boyd, Deshaun Watson or Kelly Bryant at quarterback.  I’d even root for Duke over them in basketball, and I’ve become way bigger of a supporter of SEC schools simply out of the necessity that someone’s got to be willing and able to stand up to them in their ascent of the college football ranks.

But that being said, champions are still champions, and should be rewarded for their excellence as such.  Now I’ve got plenty of words and opinions to offer about the whole government shutdown, but little good can actually come out of putting any of them in writing, but the fact that as a result of it, the White House basically has no cooks or chefs on site, relegating the champion Clemson football team to have a train cart of McDonalds, Wendy’s, Burger King, Pizza Hut and other fast food options, that’s kind of sad.

Even Clemson deserves better than this kind of spread, in the fucking White House.  But then again, given the current state of the political world, somehow it all seems kind of ironically appropriate, and the imagery that has come from this whole shit show within a shit show, have been nothing short of classic and iconic.

Still though, any team that even accepts an invitation to the White House in the first place, should probably expect some sort of luxury or opulence when visiting the home to basically who’s supposed to be the most powerful person in the world.  Even the Clemson squad that won the National Championship in 2017 had some sort of gourmet barbecue spread, and it occurs to me that Clemson championships have all occurred in years in which a particular guy has been in office, and that they’re both orange as fuck.

Despite the fact that many players and perspectives see this as funny, charming, or are able to roll with the punches, I’m definitely in the camp of people, players and perspectives that doesn’t really find it as humorous, except in an ironic metaphorical sense.  I get that elite athletes probably don’t have the opportunity to eat like retards as much as they want, unless they’re linemen, but for those athletic players that actually would like to have a future professionally, a buffet of fast food really isn’t the best idea, even in celebration.

When the day is over, this too, like many other absurd and ludicrous stories that come out of Washington D.C., isn’t really that big of a surprise.  There’s little reason to believe that Clemson won’t get (another) re-do in coming years, and maybe them or Alabama, will be treated to a nicer spread, a little more appropriate for future champions.

I guess all that’s left is, I wonder what the Boston Red Sox’s meal is going to be?  A truck full of Dunkin Donuts maybe?

Everyone could use some emotional support chicken

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Just when you think Popeyes is onto something potentially legendary with their unveiling of Emotional Support Chicken, they have to shoot themselves on the foot and only make it available in a shithole like Philadelphia.  And not just the city itself, but instead the fucking airport, which is already, much like the rest of the city it’s in, one of the biggest blights within the country.

However in spite of my general ambivalence for Philly, I still have to tip my cap to Popeyes for such a hilarious and creative idea, that just tickles my fancy and makes me green with envy that it’s not available everywhere else, or at least Atlanta, so I could get my hands on a box of emotional support chicken as well.

I fly enough to have plenty of aggravation at the current state of the world, where the concept of emotional support animals even exists.  The airline industry has morphed into this hideous symbiotic orgy where the carriers have carte blanche to fuck customers left and right with price gauging, shrinking seats, antiquated boarding procedures and a myriad of things that makes flying amongst the worst occasionally necessary experiences there is, but because there’s an endless demand for travel, passengers are now allowed to get away with shit like emotional support animals, which is basically a bastardized ruse for people to be allowed to fly with their pets.

And frankly, as with most nice things in the world, selfish shitheads ruin and abuse the small pleasures by lying their asses off and proclaiming every Tom, Dick and Harry dog and cat as emotional support animals, or even more offensive, service pets.  There’s no secret that just about anyone can buy on eBay or just make their own service vests for their pets to futilely deceive the world around them that they’re more important than the average pet, and they most certainly capitalize on such inefficient enforcement, by trotting their very-much-not service animals into airports and acting surprised when they defecate in public or on the plane or bite people or attack other fake-ass service animals.

But because the world today sucks, nobody’s really allowed to call out any of these fake fucks, because everyone’s afraid of the one person that actually is legally and medically cleared to have a service animal and their service animal is actually a service animal, and then getting sued, or worse, made viral, because any scene will inevitably be caught by someone’s phone and then put on YouTube.  So despite the fact that there are hundreds of miserable lying fucks, nobody can really stop them.

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Thoughts on a European vacation

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

So for our 2018 vacation, mythical gf future wifey and I went to Europe.  Specifically Munich, Germany, Budapest, Hungary, and Vienna, Austria.  These are all places that I’d never been to before, but such could very easily be said about anywhere on the planet, because in the grand spectrum of things, the world is pretty large.

Needless to say, the trip was pretty much excellent.  All three places were great in their own ways, and I look back fondly to the exploration, food and drinking of each of them.

Munich, completely redeems the entire country of Germany for me.  When I was younger, I’d often said that Germany was a country that I’d most want to visit in my life, because it seemed like the one country where it was a pretty drastic change to everyday life without having to go into the bush.  In 2016, I went to Germany for the first time, but it was to Berlin, which turned out to be a city that embodied hostility, owned their unfriendliness and was just basically an unpleasant place that really made me question my choice of places I wanted to go.  I was as relieved to leave Berlin as much as they probably bid good riddance, and I really debated on whether or not I wanted to ever go to Germany again.

Thankfully, future wifey convinced me that Munich would be different, and our 2018 European vacation would both start and end in Munich, which turned out to be a pretty good thing in the end.  From the very start, arriving in Munich was arriving in a traditionally beautiful city that had classic European architecture all around, and the historic building and landmarks were stuff like cathedrals and monuments, and not just dingy vandalized wall fragments.

The people of Munich were also way friendlier, spoke more English, which is another thing that I don’t take for granted when traveling abroad, because I’m always impressed and grateful as hell whenever I go to other countries, and there are always people who can speak English as opposed to how it’s like in America where so few people speak anything otherwise.

And the trains in Munich, they actually worked, unlike Berlin, where they were always broken, closed for maintenance, and made absolutely no sense to where they actually went.  Much of our time in Munich was spent walking around from tourist destinations to bier hauses, and in a country where beer is pretty much the same cost as water, needless to say, we did a good bit of bier drinking.  Hofbrauhaus was a fun tourist destination, but Paulaner was definitely of superior quality in food and beer, but if any one place is worth remembering, it’s the literal cave like cellar of Augustiner, which turned out to be a really cool place in the end.

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Pretty sure we’ve done this before

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Add it to the list… or not?  Truck overturns on I-285 ramp to I-20, spilling eggs everywhere

I’m fairly certain this exact scenario has happened before.  Same location, same contents, same results.  Without an operational site, I can’t run a query to find out, but I’m like 90% sure that this isn’t the first time that a truck has overturned in Metro Atlanta, spilling eggs all over the place. [2020 note: it did]

If that is genuinely the case, get your shit together, Atlanta.  Start spilling some more unique things on the road, and not a rerun of something that happened in the past.

If I’m wrong, then I genuinely apologize for not glamorizing this incident as I would have done for things I definitively knew were brand new incident types, like when entire hams were tossed all over I-85 south.  But like I said, I’m pretty sure eggs have been done before.

Ultimately, the bigger issue is that truck drivers feel like Atlanta highways are their own personal Gran Turismos, and such assessments continuously bite them in the ass, based on the frequency in which trucks keep tipping over, regardless of what happens to their cargo, food or not.

This specific location where I-285 and I-20 meet on the east end of the perimeter has been the place where the vast majority of these maladies have occurred, and it makes me wonder if the Georgia Department of Transportation is going to consider any sort of action to reduce all these costly and wasteful mistakes, or if the onus really does remain on all these dumbass truck drivers who keep going too fast and crashing their shit all over the place.

Either way, try again trucks.  I demand some new shit to be spilled on the roads, like a Breyers truck, or maybe some Coca-Cola trucks, for the non-drinkers to have something to drink that isn’t one of the numerous times beer trucks have crashed on Atlanta roads.

Of course only for China

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Look at these Oreos.  At first glance, they look like they would be like.. pumpkin spice Oreos and green tea matcha latte Oreos, or some other flavors that white people go bonkers over.  The point is, they would be flavors best categorized in the sweet column, because Oreos are cookies and cookies are sweet snacks.

But they’re not pumpkin spice or green tea matcha.  They’re not even food colored regular Oreo icing to match some seasonal variant.  In fact, they’re not even sweet flavored cream to begin with.  They’re actually hot chicken wing and wasabi flavored Oreos respectively which begs the question, who in the fuck would want to eat Oreos of such devastatingly different and not-sweet flavors?

The answer is actually quite simple: China.  These Oreos are thankfully not available in America and only available in China.  This is where I’d say that I hope that they stay there, but we all know the gluttons and sadists of the world will all be curious and through like third-party overcharging services, people traveling abroad and other means, this shit will infiltrate all other parts of the world, and it’s going to pique a lot of curiosities globally of what they might actually taste like.

Frankly, I want to say that I’d hope to never know what either of these would taste like, but I’d be lying that I wouldn’t give it a whirl if one or both of these were presented in front of me.  I can’t imagine that either of them actually tastes any good, especially the hot chicken wing flavor, but damn would I be curious to find out for myself definitively.

Really, the bigger questions are why such horrid abominations must exist in the first place.  For a country that has so many refined ideas for cuisine, they sure have some wacked out ideas of what good junk food is supposed to consist of.  I mean come on, chicken and chocolate cookies?  The fuck is that idea, and what kind of opium-induced hallucinogenic lunacy created that idea to come to fruition in the first place?

Only in China, apparently.