It’s not like they had a few years to prepare

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About as shocking as political corruption: some MARTA employees believe they’re not ready for the Super Bowl

When it was announced that Atlanta was going to get the Super Bowl in 2019, I remember telling myself to absolutely avoid going anywhere remotely near the city at any time remotely near then.  Not that I have nearly as much business inside city proper anymore these days, but in case I want to go to some restaurant in town or someone might be visiting, I just need to remind myself to stay the fuck away that entire week and especially day of game.

But yeah back to MARTA being ill-prepared for the Super Bowl – is this really any surprise?  Like really, is absolutely anyone on the planet surprised by these anonymous admissions from inside?  MARTA is about as reliable as a fat person at Golden Corral, or my dog left unattended in the kitchen; put them in circumstances where failure is inevitable, and failure is a sure bet to happen.

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Henry Golding, the gateway Bsian

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Impetus: GQ Magazine names Henry Golding as one of their men (and women) of 2018

I think I’ve made it pretty clear that I’ve got this love/hate idea of Henry Golding.  I love that he’s helping debunk the crippling stereotype that Asian men are the neutered weaklings of the gender by association of their ethnicity; but I hate that it’s a guy that barely is/looks a quarter Asian that is usurping all the credit in the world for advancing perception of Asians.

It’s not at all surprising, given how flagrantly and blatantly racist Hollywood is, and of course baby steps and all that rhetoric.  But why couldn’t it be a guy like Daniel Dae Kim, or like BD Wong, Asian men who are fearless pioneers amongst Asian actors, to get any sort of national nod above a practically white guy like Henry Golding?  Kim stuck to his convictions and walked away from a fairly successful show because he was getting financially stiffed.  Wong is openly gay, plays some of the most flamboyantly outrageous roles out there, and is still thriving in spite of having two less-than-socially-accepted-by-white-America strikes against him. 

What the fuck has a guy that looks like a bug-eyed Pierce Brosnan with gapped teeth done remotely in comparison?  Just be lucky enough to have grabbed the fascination of some producers to get spoon-fed the role of an Asian guy in a social commentary of a blockbuster film, and now he’s being credited by circle-jerk Hollywood of being some sort of groundbreaking talent? 

Frankly, if there’s absolutely anyone from Crazy Rich Asians who should be getting this kind of praise, it’s Constance Wu, the obvious hard carry of the entire film.  GQ could have made bigger waves had they actually strived for any sort of equality, and gone 2-and-2 with men and women as “men of the year” and had Wu take Golding’s place, and had her stand along with Serena Williams as women of the year.

But ultimately, I’m criticizing GQ.  They’ve been as relevant in the publication industry as like, MySpace during the era of Facebook, or HD DVDs in the world of Bluray.  A garbage rag like them picking a tool like Henry Golding is pretty much pathetic attempts to garner cheap pops from the lower-standards Asian community who are so desperate for any accolades to an Asian guy, that they’d even settle for a plant like him.

This wouldn’t fly the other way around

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Somehow this is okay: Detroit Lions cornerback proclaims “never saw a white guy” like Carolina Panthers running back Christian McCaffrey

Double standards are fun!  Imagine if the situation were reversed, and a white player were talking about a black player excelling at a role that black players weren’t necessarily known for playing.  Imagine if Eli Manning praised a black placekicker:

“Ah’ve never seen a black guy…” and then he would get his ass kicked by every black guy in the locker room before he could even finish the statement, because that’s just how things are in this day and age.  Or, he’d get the entire statement of praise out, and despite being phrase, Stephen A. Smith would absolutely blast him on The Ocho, calling him a racist, the Giants would suspend him, and the NFL would make him have to take sensitivity training.

The point is, even using the word “black” piques ears and interest like prairie dogs, regardless of what follows it, just in case it’s in reference to race, but applied the other way around, and it’s completely acceptable and okay.

I get that Darius Slay is really trying to praise Christian McCaffrey, but what does race have anything to do with it?  McCaffrey is an incredible running back regardless of if the color of his skin were white, black, green or Kree blue.  But nope, gotta get that white guy commentary in there, because black folks are allowed to do that.  And not just to white people, but all races, because society has been so whipped into feeling guilty for the treatment of blacks in history that they’re entirely given a free pass to make racist remarks without any repercussion.

I can’t wait for one of the numerous Korean placekickers in college and free agency gets singled out for being great kickers… for a Chinese guy.  If you think there’s vitriol in this post, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

I’m proud of Metro Atlanta

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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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Did Atlanta really lose the HQ2 sweepstakes?

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In case you missed it, Amazon finally ended their year-long goose chase of deciding on what city was going to win the privilege and exalted honor of being home to HQ2.  And because contests don’t really need to have rules or hold true initial claims anymore, not just one city, but two, were picked to split HQ2 into what I guess might be HQ2 and HQ2-2 or HQ3 or whatever they choose to call it, but the bottom line is that there wasn’t just one winner, but two co-winners: Crystal City in Virginia, and Long Island City in New York.

Admittedly, in the start of the whole HQ2 saga, I was actually hopeful that Atlanta would end up being the winner, especially after it made it past the first few rounds of cuts, and bettors were actually placing odds on the whole thing, placing Atlanta along with Austin, Texas, as the odds-on favorites to be where Amazon decided to go.

I think a part of that was just kind of the sports fan in me, that is pretty eager to see Atlanta, or the state of Georgia get any sort of win, that even a competition like where a major corporation is deciding to go, would’ve been sufficient enough to be able to declare that Atlanta came out with a major win.  And the knee-jerk thoughts of what a company like Amazon would be capable of doing with its arrival, like jettisoning property values, infusing the city with fresh new people that might be able to break the norm and shape something new, and the outlandish thought that being home to HQ2 might just supercharge Prime deliveries for the hometown immediately came to mind.

But then as time passed, and the saga drug on and on and on, with more cuts and more bullshit happening, where Atlanta kept moving on, but kept dumping more and more money into trying to impress Jeff Bezos and Co. to come to Atlanta, it began to get old hat really fast.  Skeptics were quick to point out that a place in the DC/VA/MD would have the inside track, since Bezos owned the Washington Post, and why wouldn’t he want to base his primary business near the major media outlet he owned?

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Happy trails, Stan Lee

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For all the years that I’d attended Dragon*Con, I always said that I needed to just bite the bullet and pay for a meet and greet with Stan Lee.  I’d shared elevators with him, and once was next to him while we, and a bunch of other onlookers watched as Marriott security tackled a drunk guy dressed as Captain Jack Sparrow as he was trying to elude them; he made a wisecrack about how he must’ve had too much rum, before walking off.

But I still wanted to get an actual good picture and a few seconds to meet one of the true godfathers of the comic book industry, a man that is unquestionably on the Rushmore of Comics.  And as a fan that favored Marvel over all others, there was really no greater name in the existence of comic books other than Stan Lee.

Over the last few years, as the passage of time aged Stan into his 90s, I proclaimed more often about the closing window of how I should do the meet and greet.  And then when Stan’s wife Joan passed in 2017, a little bit of urgency crept in.  Every nerd and/or comic fan on the planet knew that Stan Lee was not going to live forever, but considering he himself was in his 90s and that his wife had passed, that window was closing just a little bit more quickly than we’d all hoped.

Then there was the health scare not long afterward, and then the formal announcement that after the year, he would no longer be doing any more conventions or shows in general, and we all as fans definitively knew that the window was closing, and fast.  I knew immediately that Dragon*Con 2017 was my absolute last chance to try to meet the legend.

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Pretty sure we’ve done this before

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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.