Tag: wtf

White people know no bounds when it comes to wanting to be mad

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I was at the airport when I saw the yellow official Peachtree Road Race shirt for 2026.  I thought to myself, whoa cool, it’s yellow, seeing as how since Adidas took over the production of the shirts in like 2022, they’ve been peach, blue and red, so there really hasn’t been any hard rule on what color they were supposed to be.  And seeing as how I tend to favor the color yellow, mostly for ironic reasons, I looked forward to when I would get mine, since I’ve since been a mere virtual runner the last six years because no iota of my being wants to get up at 3:30 am to go wait at the Lenox mall parking lot to run the Peachtree in person anymore, when I can do it at my own leisure.

However, over the span of the last 24 hours, I’ve seen at least 5-6 posts fed to me from algorithm, of people I have no idea who they are, as well as local news outlets, all, for lack of a better term, talking or debating the yellow PTRR shirt.  Almost entirely fueled by hatred, by, unsurprisingly, white people who are completely bent out of shape over the fact that the shirt is yellow and not red, white and/or blue, primarily, in honor of the fact that this is the vaunted 250th anniversary of the United States of ‘Murica. 

The news outlets are obviously cleverly feeding off of this reaction, and are simply querying the masses, fully knowing that the negative engagement is still engagement all the same, and the comments sections that I can’t resist looking at, are almost entirely echo chambers of salty white people all saying the same nonsense about how it should be red, white or blue because 250, and a whole lot of people corroborating this opinion because most people with brains know better than to jump into these lions dens of poorly veiled racism and orange fuck supporters.

However, it’s to the point where I can’t just simply chalk it up as white people being salty and actively looking for reasons to be pissed off, but more that the reactions and opinions and choices of words seem to be so uniform, so echoed and so similar that I can’t help but wonder if these are all the actions of bots and AI, deployed by the types of farms that are designed and meant to incite and provoke, knowing that even negative engagement is still engagement, and engagement equals profit somewhere down a line.

All the same, if it really is that all these reactions and posts are genuine human beings, all consistently and collectively being mad over the fact that a run’s shirt is yellow, it goes back to the title of this post that white people truly know no boundaries when it comes to the innate desire to be mad about, anything at all.

It’s funny to me that this reaction did not happen when in 2023 the shirt was said to be peach, but is this weird sickly orange-y color that borderlines pink, but as long as it was called peach, it could be justified, seeing as how the name of the fucking race is called, The Peachtree.  But yellow probably makes the right white immediately think about the evil Chinese since yellow is the negatively connoted color associated to Asian people, despite the fact that yellow variations of popular ‘Murican muscle cars are oft-coveted, but it doesn’t matter because yellow = wrong.

All the same, I dig the yellow shirt, and I look forward to when I get mine.  The Adidas versions of the PTRR shirts over the last few years are all great, because they’re no longer cheap, Gildan-like cotton t-shirts that I wouldn’t really ever wear, but are mesh, workout-caliber shirts, that immediately go into my rotation of workout apparel, and get regularly worn.  The fact that simply wearing them on my own walks and runs is going to incite white people, will only be a cherry on top, aside from just liking the color and design in the first place.

Stay mad, white people, I look forward to observing what pisses y’all off next.

Bobby Bonilla Day presents the 2026 MLB All-Deferred Money Team

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

This year, I actually learned that there was a Bobby Bonilla in history before Bobby Bonilla took the Bobby Bonilla deal that turned every July 1st into Bobby Bonilla Day.

And it was actually a player for the Atlanta Braves, which is astounding seeing as how as a, for lack of a better term, Braves fan, I did not know about this, as well as the fact that the Braves are among the cheapest teams in the galaxy these days, so it’s doubly amazing to see how they were once wrapped up in a Bobby Bonilla-like arrangement, ever.

But in 1984, the Braves signed reliever Bruce Sutter to a six-year, $9.6M contract, with $4.8M of that deferred, at an interest rate of 13%.  And between the years of 1992 and 2022, the Braves paid him $1.12M a year, and I don’t know how and when the interest compounded through the life of repayment, but he was paid $9.1M in 2022, the final installment of the pact; and I don’t know the specific date of the payment, but it should be noted that he also died that same year, and I think it would be ironically funny if the narrative were that he stayed alive long enough to ensure that the cheap-ass Braves paid him his money before he could rest.

Also impressive to me is that within the duration of the repayment plan, the Braves’ ownership had transferred from the free-spending Ted Turner regime, into the stuffy corporate penny-pinching Liberty Media ownership company that as choked the team into this mid-market team, crying poor all the time, caring more about fiscal responsibility to shareholders versus trying to remotely operating a baseball club to victory.

I’m sure Sutter’s contract was an excruciating blight for the Liberty Media bean counters to inherit, and they probably were counting the days of the last 12-13 years of the deal, and probably remains a large part of why the Braves will never play in such deferral tactics, regardless of how effective it is proving to be capable of.

Needless to say, I’m not sure how accurate the math is, since deferred monies have a tendency to be invisible in online payroll records, but Sutter managed to parlay $4.8M into at least $41.58M through a Bobby Bonilla-like payment plan, and seeing as how there was a twelve-year overlap between when Sutter’s payments and the Bonilla’s started, I’m surprised the whole thing didn’t meme out to be Bruce Sutter Day instead.

That’s the strength of the whole LOL Mets meme, I suppose.

Anyway, it’s July 1st, so that obviously means it’s that time of the year again, where a 63-year old Bobby Bonilla receives a $1,193,248 paycheck from the New York Mets because they didn’t want to pay him $5M in 2000 after 141 horrible plate appearances in 1999, and decided that it was more preferable to pay him nearly $36M over 30 years starting a decade later.

And in honor of Bobby Bonilla Day, I take my yearly deep dive into the state of the MLB to try and construct a hypothetical roster of players receiving deferred money, share some stats about them, as well as share all sorts of shade about the practice, the cheapness of the Braves, and other opinionated takes.

Continue reading “Bobby Bonilla Day presents the 2026 MLB All-Deferred Money Team” →

Running it back to #TRYHARDSZN

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

WSB: Henry County teenager accepted into 264 colleges, amassing allegedly over $17M in scholarship dollars

I’ll be the first to admit that I kind of shot myself in the foot when I decided to chronicle what I would coin as #TRYHARDSZN, where high school students from across the world but somehow mostly from Georgia and not just because I live here and they’re the news that’s spoon-fed to me the most, embark on this ridiculous rat race of applying to as many colleges as possible, and then silently competing against one another with how many acceptances, scholarship dollars, Ivies, or whatever cherry-picked convenient criteria they all want to flex in order to, well flex.

Because sure, going to college is a goal, but it’s become pretty apparent that it’s not the goal, when it comes all the kids that embark on this journey, and for jaded skeptics like me, it doesn’t so much impress or inspire me, so much as it rolls my eyes, raises questions, and wonder if anyone else sees just how misguided and missing the point the pursuit of college is, beyond trying to outdo one another at how much insufferable humblebragging they’ve earned the right to do.

The main question that usually comes top of mind to me is, what about the application fees? to which seems pretty obvious that all these #TRYHARDS are more than likely not paying any, because if any of them had to pay the $75-100 per I had to pay in 1999, which would probably be twice that today with inflation and white man greed, then they wouldn’t be applying to 270 schools.

But then I came across this story, about a #TRYHARD that wasn’t just the average run of the mill overachiever that applied to 75, got into 50, and amassed a respectable $3M and settled on an HBCU willing to give a completely free and clear ride.  No, this is a #TRYHARD that saw the bar, wanted to beat the bar, and embarked on a mission to do it, and then succeeded.

The article makes it pretty clear that the pursuit of college wasn’t so much the objective as much as it was to surpass the previous national record of college acceptances of 231, naturally set by a fellow Georgian, based on all the quips and observations made about this legendary-tier #TRYHARD, who applied to 270, and got accepted into 264 of them, amassing allegedly over $17M in scholarships.

Now I don’t know where $17M ranks in cumulative scholarship dollars, but 264 acceptances is quoted as being a national record, breaking the previous mark of 231 acceptances set by a girl from Georgia in 2024.  And it was a mark that this #TRYHARD was aware of:

(Their) initial goal was to reach 100 college acceptances. However, after reading about [previous #TRYHARD], a 2024 graduate of Liberty County High School who was believed to hold a national record of 231 college acceptances, [current #TRYHARD] decided to break the record.

So this kid decided to apply to nearly 200 more schools, all with the objective of breaking a meaningless record, probably unaware of the fact that the time in which they were accepted at a school and not making a decision so they can parade around humblebragging about their acceptances, kids that are waitlisted have to sit there with their dicks in their hands, waiting, while some insufferable asshole boasts about how many other schools they were accepted into alternatively.

Frankly, I’m curious about the six schools that this #TRYHARD didn’t get into.  My knee-jerk reaction is that they must have been Ivy League schools, because they’re still for lack of a better term, considered the cream of the crop as far as collegiate learning is concerned, but the fact that they are left unmentioned leaves a lot of room to assume that they could be any other school from MIT, William and Mary to University of Idaho or University of American-Samoa.

And considering their “overwhelming” academic credentials of 3.8 GPA and a 1200 SAT, I’m inclined to believe it’s more likely the latter.  Don’t get me wrong, I had a 3.8 GPA and a 1310 SAT, but I didn’t run track or do any internships, and everyone knows Asian folks get the hard-mode handicap that probably turned my credentials into like 2.9 GPA and 990 SAT and that I got into Virginia Tech because it was still pre-Michael Vick putting the school into the national spotlight.

What’s interesting but unsurprising is the fact that in the end, despite the fact that their herculean scores would have qualified them for basically a free ride at Georgia, or any other public college or university, #TRYHARD has decided to attend Knox College and actually pay money:

a private liberal arts college in Galesburg, Illinois. He has received a scholarship package worth about $260,000, meaning he owes about $5000 per term.

This typically deviates from the usual #TRYHARD journeys of people really phishing for where they could get the most free education as possible, but perhaps this one is just really eager to get the fuck out of the state.  In some regard, I can relate.

But Galesburg??  I do know of Galesburg, because it’s the home of one of the best social game restaurants I’ve seen in the past decade, as well as where Chelsea and Yamir from 90 Day Fiancé live(d?), but the reality is that it doesn’t change the fact that it seems like a shitty suburb close enough to Chicago for residents to try and claim being from there, but far enough where Metro Chicago snobs want nothing to do with Galesburg.

Whatever though.  This kind of #TRYHARDing was #TRYHARD enough to get me to actually feel the compulsion to address it, in spite of my general exhaustion of writing about them from last #SZN.  And unless anyone comes out of the woodwork this late in the #SZN, hopefully I won’t have to touch on this hashtag ever again for the rest of the year.

Anytime I read about the environmental effects of AI

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I think about this snippet from the epilogue of The Big Short detailing Michael Burry’s lone investing focus.  Back in 2015 when the film was released, I didn’t really think about what was really implied by Burry’s decision to start betting on water, but I could imagine reasons similar to what happened in Flint, Michigan, or the fact that in spite of the world being like 90% water, I don’t imagine even close to a tenth of that is drinkable water, and clean water is probably going to be a bigger commodity in the future than it really sounds like it should be.

But with all the chatter about the growth of AI, and how a single ChatGPT query results in the consumption of energy that is capable of requiring like a gallon of water to cool down some servers in a data center in the middle of bumfuck flyover America, this is what makes me wonder if Burry knew something was on the horizon or something a decade ago.

Either way, every time something comes out about the environmental ravaging AI is capable of, this is the image that comes directly to mind, and I find myself thinking about this more and more as AI is blabbed about more and moar.

The whitest problem since desegregation

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

WSB: City of Alpharetta proposing ordinance to provide residents relief from pickleball noise

Imagine the shit-eating grin on my face when I read just the headline of this article, and immediately trying to think of the words to best ironically describe the inhumanity of pickleball noise, ruining the lives of residents in Alpharetta, a lily-white suburb 30-80 minutes away from actual City of Atlanta, depending on the traffic.

I mean, there’s really not much to add, the headline does a pretty succinct job of painting the picture of the problem that is about as peak white people problems since Bad Bunny performing at the halftime show at the Super Bowl.

This isn’t the first time that I’ve posted specifically about Alpharetta; a few years back, there was a situation where residents got really salty about a change in policy that meant that they weren’t allowed to fly Confederate flags during a Veteran’s Day Parade, so the city opted to just cancel the parade outright.

Even in the year, two thousand and twenty-six, shit like this actually is, written and reported on.

Still though, it’s entertaining to me that pickleball is about as white people sport as lacrosse and calling cops on colored folks, but it’s gotten so overly popular to the point where the goofy-ass sounds of pickleballs getting whacked have turned heel on the people that brought them into existence, and instead of trying to fix the game, white people are doing what white people do best – try and transmogrify the laws to where they can deal with the issue while avoiding any conflict at all.

It’s basically Atlanta’s version of The Grudge

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Not that any loss of life is any laughing matter, within the span of the last month, there have been two incidents that have resulted in a dead bodies being involved.  The thing is, both of them happened to happen at different Kroger grocery store locations within the Metro Atlanta area, and for those of us that live in the Metro area, whenever there’s news of death and Kroger being in the same sentence, the first thing that pops up in the minds of most of us is, Murder Kroger.

Now for those who don’t know, Murder Kroger was a specific Kroger located very central to the City of Atlanta proper, off of Ponce de Leon Ave, right between where Downtown and Midtown are divided.  It gained its unfortunate nickname, based on the fact that there were multiple incidents on the premises that resulted in people getting killed, or dead bodies being discovered.

In 2016, the physical location of Murder Kroger was torn down, and replaced with a state-of-the-art new Kroger, tied to the Jesus sidewalk ITP and ITB snobs know as the Atlanta Beltline.  Reconstruction seems to have done the trick at exorcising the demons that kept murders from happening at 725 Ponce, seeing as how there have been no (reported) deaths there since its rebirth as ‘Beltline Kroger.’

But for long time Atlantans, it’ll always still be known as Murder Kroger.  It’s the joke that won’t . . . DIE, and for those of us who were around when people were getting dropped there, it’s just easiest to always know it as Murder Kroger, even if there haven’t been any murders there in a decade.

However, despite the fact that Murder Kroger physically seems to no longer exist, the spirit of it appears to not be entirely gone yet, and seemingly through the network of Kroger locations, it appears to have decided to go mobile, instead of remaining at one stationary location.

I mean really, this story that came out earlier in the month, about a woman who was killed when a runaway car struck a parked car which then struck her, almost seems like some Final Destination kind of shit.  And considering it turned out the woman was a relative to two active Atlanta Falcons players, who’s to say that there wasn’t some modicum of foul play in play.

Naturally, one incident is a freak accident, a coincidence, but I’d be lying if I didn’t mouth the words ‘Murder Kroger’ when I heard that this had taken place on the property of a Kroger location.

But then this second story dropped recently, where a fucking dead body was discovered inside of a closed down Kroger location, that started making all the armchair comedians of the internet saying it together, Murder Kroger appears to be back, and taking its act on the road.

And it really sucks for Kroger in the second instance, because it was at a former location, no longer actively belonging to Kroger, but because it was such a large space, and there’s nothing to refer to it as other than its previous tenant, Kroger’s name gets dragged through the cemetery all over again, and now we’ve got Murder Kroger jokes all over the place.

The thing is, and it’s what really inspired me to write about this, is that I feel like I came up with a homerun of an analogy, that, at least I feel, is too good to not gatekeep and share, which is that this is all kind of like the plot of The Grudge, more specifically The Grudge 2, where the white girl in Japan who encounters the haunting spirits and basically gets marked, she moves away back to America, probably thinking that she can escape the curse of the grudge.

Instead, and spoiler alert for a 20 (!!) year old film, of course she can’t escape The Grudge, and not only is she not free from it, it has followed her all the way back to fucking Chicago, and basically has planted its cursed self into the entire apartment complex, fucking with all of the residents.

Murder Kroger may have been torn down and redeveloped, but the curse of Murder Kroger seems to still be very much alive, and has decided to start poking its head out, and is testing the water in other locations, delivering death and chaos to other Kroger locations around the Metro area.  It’s basically the Atlanta version of The Grudge, and only subject to Kroger grocery stores, and if I’ve never felt any reason to stop going to Kroger stores now, I think the fear of getting infected with The Grudge seems as good as reason as any to do so.

I bet this never happens at a Canadian Timmy’s

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

NYPost: altercation at an Indiana Tim Horton’s over an argument about a drive-thru order results in a 75-year old woman dead

I’d be curious to know what exactly happened in this scenario to where things escalated to physical violence.  I’ve had my share of fast food fuckups, and even if I cared enough to expend the effort to try and get it rectified, I can’t say I’ve had a low success rate at some sort of resolution.

It’s like, just remaining calm and not being a dick seems to a good enough strategy at achieving some sort of recompense, so I can’t help but wonder what happened at this Indiana Tim Horton’s, where an irate 75-year old woman marched into the restaurant, got in the grill of a 17-year old drive thru worker before their 20-year old manager intervened, to where things escalated even further, to where it became physical.

Tim Horton’s iced capps are definitely on my Rushmore of fast food items, but fuck if I’m going to risk my life if someone there possibly fucked up my order.

Watching the video, it’s scary and unfortunate to see the escalation of a conflict get physical, and to the point where death entered the chat, because there is seldom anything funny about the loss of life.

In one hand, I can’t help but feel inclined to side with the restaurant, because the elderly woman did march in there and seem to aggress with minimal restraint.  And when things get physical, people have the right to defend themselves.  But in the other hand, it was a 75-year old woman; obviously most of us probably aren’t experts at hand-to-hand combat with 75-year olds, but how hard could she have hit to incense a 20-year old to fight back with such fierceness?

Either way, it’s a scenario where everyone involved loses.  A woman lost her life, the employee that fought her will probably need therapy for the rest of their life knowing that their actions contributed towards it, and Tim Horton’s name gets dragged down into the muck by having a customer death controversy tied to their brand.

Plus, the daughter of the deceased takes some shrapnel for getting quoted sounding like a dumbass:

You should not enter a coffee shop for a coffee and a doughnut and come out unalived. That is diabolical,”

Really, unalived?  I’d ask, what are they, 13?  But it’s the daughter of a 75-year old, so presumably someone closer to my age than someone who probably actually thinks unalived is a real word.

Like the title of this post says, I can’t imagine something like this ever happening up in Canada, because Canadians are typically way more well-mannered and not as violent as their southern neighbors, and hopefully incidents like this doesn’t inhibit the expansion of Timmy’s in the US, because we’ve finally got remotely accessible locations in Georgia, and I hope to always be able to get iced capps when I really am in the mood for them.