Tag: nostalgia

Happy Trails, Ted

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

WABE: Ted Turner, unofficial godfather of the City of Atlanta, passes away at the age of 87

As a (for lack of a better term) Atlanta Braves fan, the passing of Ted Turner does mean something to me.  As a professional wrestling fan who witnessed the rise and eventual fall of World Championship Wrestling, the passing of Ted Turner does mean something to me.  As a resident of the Metro Atlanta area for over half of my life, the passing of Ted Turner does mean something to me.

Frankly, whether or not they were fans of the guy, not a fan, or just somewhere in the middle, I feel like it’s accurate to say that if you lived in the Metro Atlanta area, it’s kind of hard to say that Ted Turner, or more accurately, one of his endeavors didn’t affect you in some way, shape, or fashion.

I know that in today’s twisted, demented, politically charged state of America, Ted Turner equals CNN which equals information source for the filthy gross fake news Democrats which equals Ted Turner being trash to an unfortunate majority of the unwashed right-leaning troglodytes of the country, but I would wager that the life and business dealings of Uncle Ted affected even those shitheads in a positive way, whether he provided employment, entertainment, or through some of the many philanthropic endeavors he was a part of, and in spite of the fact that people these days tend to dislike those with wealth, I can’t really run off many scandalous and negative things about Ted Turner off the top of my head.

Personally, it’s one of those things that I never really thought about, as far as whether or not I was a fan of the guy or not.  In one hand, he has money and is rich therefore I should be inclined to lean towards disliking the man, but in the other hand, other than the day he decided to cede control over his own company and sell to AOL Time Warner, which ultimately killed WCW and made the Braves into the soulless corporation it is now, there’s really nothing that I found particularly offensive about the man.

The man put Braves baseball into the national spotlight, force-feeding the country through TBS, contributing almost entirely to why the Braves have such strong brand recognition and pockets of fandom throughout the entire country and beyond.  Ted Turner was one of the only people in the world to really go toe-to-toe with Vince McMahon and not only challenge him in the wrestling industry, but punch him and draw blood, before the pendulum would eventually swing in the other direction, but let the record show Ted Turner’s success.

And of course, like many who live in the Atlanta area, I too had my stint(s) with the Turner company, having worked for Cartoon Network for two of the more noteworthy years of my career, as well stints with Turner Sports as well as NCAA.com.  Many in Atlanta joke about how you can’t really say you’ve ever lived in Atlanta unless you’ve worked for some of the big dawgs of town, like Coca-Cola, Delta, The Home Depot, or Turner, and I remember the feeling of professional pride I had when I was issued my first @turner.com email address when I was brought into Cartoon Network.

Rich as he was, Ted Turner never seemed to be of that devilish, moustache-twirling kind of evil asshole as many rich white guys are often seen.  The man seemed to genuinely care about the City of Atlanta, and dumped tons of money into the arts, culture, city projects, and was always reliable to find a way to get his name on all sorts of charitable causes throughout the city.

Whenever I’d have friends in the car, it was night, and we were headed southbound towards Midtown, I’d always refer to the 17th Street bridge, going under it, and when you emerge and the Atlanta skyline is unveiled to your eyes, as the mouth of Ted Turner, because there’s just something about seeing all the high rises and lit up buildings as you emerge from underneath a bridge that always seems kind of magical when you see it.

I actually saw Ted Turner once, a long time ago, when I was at a Ted’s Montana Grill; naturally I saw a strikingly attractive older woman, but then right behind her was a man with white hair and a white moustache, and it dawned on me that it was Ted Turner.  I remember thinking, man, he’s way shorter than I thought he was, because whenever he was on television, he was always in his power suits and framed real tight to make him look like a massive, giant man, but in reality, Ted couldn’t have been more than like 5’8.  But all the same, for a rich guy that most snarky people would assume would be too good to eat amongst pleebs, even at a joint named after him, it was refreshing to see him actually at one of his own restaurant’s locations.

Unsurprising, there’s not really anything substantial about this post, but I guess what it really all sums up is that Ted Turner was Atlanta, and his passing really means something to Atlanta, whether or not people want to admit it, and I just wanted to share some not-negative words about a guy that had a lot of contributions to things that were important in my life, and that I appreciated who he was, and what he meant to the city I live in.

Free is a four-letter word

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

And is about as inflammatory and prone to resulting in aggravation, disappointment and general negativity as some of the more notorious four-letter words out there in the common lexicon.

I’ve spent the better part of a week this month at my dad’s old place in Virginia, my old home, cleaning it out, because as he’s no longer living there, the only logical thing to do would be to empty it out and get rid of it.  Of course, that isn’t going to happen on its own, and nobody in my family really seems as eager to not let a valuable asset potential degrade due to neglect as I am, so that has almost entirely fallen on my shoulders to do, despite the fact that I would rather have been doing a hundred other things than driving all the way up there just to clean and struggle to do my job remotely since that home hadn’t had internet access in the last two years.

I had the brilliant analogy that my dad was basically like Wall-E, in the sense that he seemed to collect an inordinate amount of useless and worthless trash and tchotchkes, but he was pretty good at organizing it and making it look fairly orderly within his own home.  However, when it comes to sorting and determining what could be salvaged and what needed to be tossed, it became very, very quickly apparent that the load didn’t jive with the time available, and that pretty much everything needed to be trashed.

It was like an episode of Storage Wars where Dave Hester would always brag about the potential profitability about every single storage unit he won, but that’s because he had a consignment shop where all the bullshit he collected could sit on shelves and make a nickel five months later, as opposed to being moved immediately.  My dad had a lot of stuff that honestly could’ve made a few bucks here and there if time were on our side, but in the span of a week, I wasn’t about to try and organize a last second single home flea market for the legions of crap that my dad had hoarded over the last decade and a half.

Box full of optical mice?  Trash.  Bag full of brand-new commercial painting supplies?  Trash.  Boxes full of partially used duct and electrical tape?  Trash.  Box of tool grade rope?  Crate full of commercial paper towels?  Industrial tubs full of liquid soap?  Trash, trash, trash.

Amidst all the crap were all sorts of personal and family mementos too, stuff that my sister, my mom or myself didn’t take with us when we all inevitably moved out.  And as much as I tend to hesitate when it comes to disposing of anything of such nature, I walked into my week of work with a credo, to harden the heart and let shit go, because otherwise I would accomplish nothing.  If nobody cared about this stuff to take with them when they left, nobody is going to care about it when it’s tossed.

High school yearbooks, shop class projects, little pieces of crap that I may have saved at random points in my life, all part of the trash pile.  I had a moment of quiet shock, when my mom took her wedding photo album and tossed it into a box marked for disposal, but seeing as how they are divorced, it’s understandable, but still no less slightly mortifying as a child of said union.

When my work was done, the house was still in pretty much chaos, but at least it was fairly organized chaos.  Originally, I had planned on just being a repeated shuttle back and forth to the dump to dispose of everything that needed to go, but my aunt and my mom meddled and convinced me to pay for professional disposal.  Having a little experience with it, I knew to expect a bill north of a grand if we were going to go that route, but the thought of saving myself and my car the labor didn’t hurt, so that’s the choice I made, and I made some calls and reached out to a few companies, and landed with one who would come at a later date to come pick up all the trash.

Among all the crap, I had pulled aside some items that even I thought, would go quickly, if offered for free to the community, like some extension ladders, a television, and a weed-wacker.  Long story short, the ladders moved, but with resistance, and I ended up donating the television and the trimmer to Goodwill when neither generated a lick of interest.

Additionally, there were also a lot of furniture that I felt had some value in it, and I figured it shouldn’t be hard to leverage the Salvation Army to come pick up some free furniture that they could then flip at their consignment shops; yes, I’m aware of the general negative reputation the internet has over the SA, but I just wanted to get this house cleared in the most efficient and cost-effective manner possible, and in the past I’ve used them to help clear out my old house, and they seemed like a logical option.

After I had left, and the scheduled day of the SA pickup had passed, I called my mom whom I entrusted to be on site to let the SA guys in, and she told me that they took nothing.  They came into the home, examined all the marked items, deemed them not suitable quality, and refused to move anything that required traveling a flight of stairs.  I knew right away that it wasn’t so much that everything I offered was inadequate, as much as it was around 3:30 pm when they showed up to my place, their truck was probably full, the workers were tired, and they simply did not want to go through the labor of hauling off all the stuff I had asked them to.

So I basically got exactly what I had paid for – zero.

There’s the popular adage that people should never stop learning, and it was at this moment that I decided that I have fully learned an important lesson that I will try to implement into my remaining life, and that free, is bullshit, and to look at anything in life that claims to be free, with the skepticism that I would look at anyone proclaiming to be a Nigerian prince.

Free, always sounds awesome, but free comes with a whole slew of conditionals that are mitigated when there’s some form of transactional currency.  And the drawback to free always seems to be at the extreme risk of something often times more valuable than any form of currency, which is time, because with the case of the Salvation Army, their refusal to do their job because their service was free, still cost me a great deal of time, as I did not have a fallback plan, because they did me right in my own previous experience, which was a fallacy in its own right that I need to be mindful of in the future as well.

But I think about all the times in my life where something has been free, whether it’s been me trying to get something, or me trying to give shit away, and almost all of the instances, have involved aggravation, regret, and questioning why I did in the first place.

It’s like the IHOP fallacy, whenever they do like their free pancake day or whatever, you see on the news people who wait hours for a free short stack of pancakes, when that same short stack would’ve cost like $7 and get it immediately if you paid for it, making those who think about it realize that paying > free.

I’ve gone through great lengths in the past to get free bobbleheads at ballparks, and looking back at all those instances, I can count on one hand where it’s actually been worth it, and I actually applaud myself in any instance where I may have self-policed my time versus free scale and altered my choices in the past.

I also think about the sheer aggravation of trying to give stuff away on stuff like Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace, because it seems like something that should be layups, but the flake rate for free shit is so astronomically high, so often times I just end up throwing perfectly good shit away, because I simply grew exasperated with trying to not be wasteful and giving away perfectly good goods, because I’m just tired of people.

The point of all this is that I have, I truly have, learned, that the word free is not necessarily a good word anymore, and is instead a loaded word, full of conditionals and rules and invisible clauses, that one really needs to understand the risks when they inevitably grow tempted by it, solely because of the potential end result of a transaction with nothing exchanged.

So many times in life, it’s simply better to just grow up, pay up, and get shit done, without any of the bullshit that free entails.

If not to tease with, then why??

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

The Autopian: there exists a single Honda Odyssey Type-R minivan, and it has 550 horsepower, turbo charged, and a six-speed manual transmission

I’ve said it before, I have no qualms with minivans.  They’re spacious, versatile, provide tremendous utility and purpose, and I couldn’t give two shits less about the reputation that comes with being a parent driving around in one.  The only reasons why I don’t have one today is that the industry clearly knows the value of their utility, and when I was car shopping, none of them seemed remotely available south of $60,000, and the fact that mythical wife absolutely abhors them, and feels tremendously stronger about reputation than I could.

Needless to say, when I saw the words “Honda Odyssey Type-R,” it did elicit a jaw drop of the smallest sense, because it was the amalgamation of two things that pique my interest; the adult parent appeal of minivans, clashing with my boyhood fandom to Honda’s Type-R performance division, to create this wholly unnecessary, nobody-asked-for-this soccer rocket of a ride, that has garnered enough intrigue to where it’s becoming a brog post.

Everything about it is just so laughable, from the aggressive Type-R styling hints, from the grill, red H emblem, accents, to the more obvious things, like the quad pipe exhaust, aggressive as hell rims, and the hood air intake.  As much as I want to lament about how unnecessary this is, the fact of the matter is that this is the only one in existence, a one-of-one, the chic IT phrase of today to denote its exclusivity and rarity, and I think most everyone can agree that in spite of its existence, the chances of this, or anything closer to this seeing the light of day commercial remains pretty slim.

The go-parts of it are especially entertaining, considering most of minivans are hauling so much weight, there’s almost little logic to running anything other than a V6 motor of some sort, but in true Honda and true Type-R logic, they’ve smashed in a turbo-charged inline-four, from the Civic Type-R into this minivan, and are alleging a horsepower of 550 hp.  And paired to it, is a six-speed manual transmission, and the best part is that it’s coming out of the dash like the random Civic Si from the mid-2000s that most car heads agreed was kind of a flop; but it kind of makes sense in the context of a minivan.

So yeah, six-speed manual Honda Odyssey pushing 500hp+.  I’m surprised the Type-R badge on the back of it isn’t bigger, and frankly isn’t just the entire sides of the ride, like a Fast & Furious Team Toretto graphic, because if something is going to remain a 1-of-1, it needs to shout it from the rooftops a little better.

It’s like whomever designed this, they like the idea of being a sleeper car, unsuspecting and inconspicuous, but while they were putting it together, whether Honda superiors or their own arrogance started to intervene, and hints of obvious aggression and performance began to permeate the overall package of it.  It’s white and ordinary looking from the onset, but then there’s the rims, and when you see the back of the ride, window covered with more stickers than a Takahashi brother from Initial D, huge exhaust pipes that look more suited for an insurrectionist’s Dodge pickup, by the time you notice the tiny-ass Type-R emblem on the back, the jig is already up that this is no ordinary children hauler.

And not to go unnoticed was that the driver’s side was on the left, which is to say that this was clearly designed with teasing Americans in mind.  Minivans don’t really have the purpose in the world than they do in America, other than kidnapping in Taken-like films, and this would be too conspicuous for crime.  But it seems obvious that this was meant to tease and tantalize the American market, and I would have to acquiesce that it’s working, because I would probably trade in my car and our third car to get my hands on one of these, without even considering the consequence of being short one car for my household of three drivers.

Which leads me to wonder what the point of this thing coming to fruition even is, because like in the linked article above, minivans now are already costly expenses as they currently are, but then adding the cost of what a Type-R designation does to it, I can’t imagine that there are a lot of families out there willing to drop what I’d guess would be between $80-90k for a fucking minivan, even if that Type-R badge tickles the tits of all sorts of boyhood dreams of once-boys-now-dads out there.

All the same, consider me thoroughly entertained by the creation of a Honda Odyssey Type-R, even if there’s only going to ever be the one in existence.  My 18-year old self can get together with my 40+ year old self in my brain and lament on how great it would be to finally own anything with a Type-R badge on it.

It’s the Four Loko that makes this amusing to me

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

WSB: Hall County sheriff busted for DUI after blowing a 0.212, revealed that he had been drinking Four Lokos since 6 a.m.

Under normal circumstances, a story like this would roll off my back, perhaps get an eye roll out of me, knowing that police protect their own, and that regardless of how egregiously drunk the guy was, while in his county-issued vehicle, it’s safe to assume that he’s not going to be getting close to the same kind of punishment that us normal citizens would receive under similar conditions.

He may lose his job, but considering he’s out there drinking while on duty, he probably doesn’t care in the first place, and he’s most likely not going to be doing any time, or have a suspended license, or be on probation on account of the oft-cliched professional courtesy.

But what caught my attention and why this is ending up as brog-worthy is the clarity in the headline that this particular pig in question, hadn’t just been drinking since six in the morning, but he had been drinking Four Lokos in his cop car:

Couch told investigators that he had been drinking several Four Lokos since 6 a.m. that morning. Investigators also found two open cans of Bahama Mama that had spilled in his car.

The devil is in the details, and now we’re talking. 

Obviously, anyone who’s ever known me might recall my own fascination with Four Loko back over a decade ago.  I was mystified by the fact that these shitty, $4 tall boys of nuclear race piss were actually killing college bros, dumb enough to be drinking more than like, one, at a time.  When the government declared banishment on the drinks, for whatever reason, I felt the compulsion to seek out some of these awful drinks, and managed to procure several cans of various flavors.

Over the next years, I would bust them out at social gatherings or Dragon*Cons as my drink of choice in order to get a healthy buzz going, and make no mistake, one can of any Four Loko was instant drunk, and anything beyond that was playing with fire.

Eventually, I would steer away from this dumbass behavior, and the remainder of my hoarded cans would remain ironic collector’s items, that is, until for whatever reason, some of them would spontaneously eat their own cans, leading to some obnoxious messes that I had to clean and eventually realized that I should just chuck them out, thus closing the book on my keepsake cans of Four Loko.

Back to the present, Four Loko survived government intervention, but they apparently changed the formula somewhat to be less lethal when drank in stupid amounts, and they’re still available at gas stations and wherever shitty booze is sold.  And apparently for one Hall County sheriff, it was his go-to drink for when he wanted to get smashed on the job.

Like I said, if it were just a story of a cop who got blasted on the clock, I probably wouldn’t have given it a second thought beyond knee-jerk disgust and disappointment in the system.  But finding out that he had been getting smashed on Four Loko since six in the morning, and he was discovered obliterated five and a half hours later, man clearly had some serious demons in his closet for all this to be transpiring.

And that 0.212% BAC is pretty frightening, because to my understanding that’s basically saying that over 20% of the blood in his body was tainted with alcohol.  I’ve gotten drunk off of Four Loko before (always under slightly more responsible, non-driving conditions), but I have come down from the buzz pretty normally, so I doubt that I was ever remotely close to a 0.212% BAC, so I’m curious to how many cans of the jet fuel he consumed, and let’s not ignore the fact that he had several open cans of Bahama Mama, which is another fruity, race piss-like canned booze, so clearly this hick sheriff was having a one-man party in his cruiser.

Either way, I’m amused by the brief resurrection of Four Loko into the public lexicon, and the ironic and pathetic circumstances in which they did so.  In a way, there isn’t a better way for it to have happened, and 16 years later, Four Loko is running it back with inebriated chaos like it’s 2010 all over again.

Is there a more perfect show than Batman the Animated Series?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

This is more of a rhetorical question because the answer is no, there really isn’t.  Obviously this is subject to personal preference, but I can’t imagine that I’m the only one out there who has this particular opinion.

I had finished watching WWE Elimination Chamber, and it was a pretty mediocre show overall; although the men’s and women’s chamber matches had outcomes that I didn’t get right, the Becky vs. AJ and the Balor vs. Punk matches were very obviously predictable.  Danhausen being the mystery crate reveal made me feel like the whole buildup is this generation’s Gobbledy Gooker, but probably more accurately the WWE’s need for a wacky character they can push towards the younger audiences and kids to help move merch and gain wider appeal.

But the overall feeling I had once the show was over was general disappointment and apathy, but mostly disappointment that mythical wife had actually paid real money for ESPN Unlimited so that I could watch PLEs, and it just so happens that the first one I come across is a relative clunker.  I think it might be a safe bet that once Wrestlemania passes, to pull the plug on the service since we already have like four other services we’re subscribed to.

Anyway, seeing as how the night wasn’t quite too late even though I would benefit from getting more sleep than I do on the regular, I felt like I didn’t want to end my television watching experience with an underwhelming wrestling show, so I switched to HBO Max where I knew that they had the entire library of Batman the Animated Series, and where I’d been watching an episode here or there, because it was perfect in the sense that it was high quality content that I’d already seen a million times and could multitask during, and the episodes are just 22 minutes, which means they’re no major time commitment.

It was while watching the episode of Clayface’s debut, it dawned on me that the reason why I seem to feel that Batman TAS has become somewhat of a default fallback, is because of what I just said, that it was the perfect show.  Not just for the aforementioned reasons, but holistically, the show is just perfect, in just about every other way as well.

Art direction, execution, writing, music, an entry of DC comics storytelling, light years ahead of its time, parading around as a kid’s show.  Believe me, I have seen every single episode of the show, and I’m having a really difficult time at thinking of any episodes that are actual 100% clunkers, with no redeemable quality to them, and by that criteria, I can’t say there are really any.  Sure, there are some episodes that I may want to skim or possibly skip, like the one where Batman is gassed by the Penguin, and he has to be saved by some kids, but by and large, I anticipate myself going to really enjoy the steady, gradual and methodical rewatch of Batman TAS with an episode or two every now and then.

And anyone who knows me knows that I almost never rewatch anything, because there’s so much content out in the world, lots of which I want to watch, that I very seldom go back and rewatch anything, because that time could be spent imbibing on something I haven’t seen before.

But Batman TAS?  It’s perfect in just about every subjective and measurable metric, and the most important thing is that it’s extraordinary ability to chase any shitty example of viewing media and bring me back believing that there’s good television out there, and that there’s really no bad time to catch an episode of the TAS.

It’s always going to be Springfield Mall

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

NBC Washington: non-fatal shooting incident occurs at Springfield Town Center between teenagers arguing about something reportedly nothing and inconsequential

It’s not that often that I think much about my old stomping grounds, and it’s been over a decade since the topic of Springfield Town Center Mall has been in the brog, but here we are, thanks to an eerily accurate feeding from the algorithm to me, letting me know about a shooting incident in the shopping mall that I’d wasted endless amounts of hours of my life at.

As I opined in a comment on social media, they can change the name of the joint, and they can change all the stores inside the place, but Springfield Mall will always be Springfield Mall, a place cursed and destined to be a place of underlying danger and the uneasy feeling shoppers will always have that no matter what things appear around them, they’re not entirely safe.  MS-13 beheadings and 9/11 hijacker presence have a tendency to leave their bad juju on a place, kind of like the premise of The Grudge.

Thinking back to this assessment, it’s almost a miracle that I’m alive, considering the massive amounts of danger commensurate to how much time I spent there probably having increased my mortality rate throughout my teenage years.

It’s the least surprising thing in the world to hear news of spontaneous violence erupting within the walls of Springfield Town Center considering the bones and likely jerry-rigged graves in which the place was built onto, and watching the video of the incident, it doesn’t look like much has changed over the last 10+ years of Springfield Mall’s final days and Town Center’s day-to-day operations.

Shithead teenagers loitering around the place, manifesting beefs out of absolutely nothing, and ultimately erupting into gun violence, what I saw in the video looked like it could’ve been straight out of 1999, minus the taste in fashion, and the presence of bystanders all brandishing smart phones trying to video the incident instead of you know, calling 9-1-1.

Then again, it’s no secret that among the things that carried over from the old days into the current is the physical Fairfax County Police precinct in the mall itself, because nothing says ‘we’re [not] a safe place’ than having to have local cops ready at the helm, within ear shot at any given time.

The point remains, as unfortunate it is to ever hear of gun violence in any way shape or form, it’s good that nobody was killed and the offending parties were apprehended.  But I still admit to being amused at the ironic reality that no matter how much time has passed, no matter that the name of the joint has changed, and no matter how much the insides of the shopping center has changed, nothing will ever, ever change the fact that 6500 Springfield will always be, Springfield Mall.

Shitty Toy Alert for Parents #3: ReCreate sets from Lego

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

For the record, I adore Lego.  Loved them as a kid growing up, loved playing with them with my nephew while he was growing up, and I still love them now.  I have several of the Fast and Furious large sets, and I jumped all over the $375 Goonies pirate ship set that dropped upon hearing about it. 

Few things bring me joy than my kids developing an enjoyment of Lego as well, and it was one of the major themes of this past Christmas with most everyone gifting them numerous Lego sets, but now gradually graduating from Duplos into actual big kid Legos.  Even though they are more and more gravitating towards screen entertainment, good books and Legos still bring them away from them, and I’ve found myself on the carpet with my kids over the last few weeks and months, putting together various Disney Princess™ and Lego Friends™ sets.

As stocking stuffers for my kids, I got them each one of these Lego ReCreate sets, because I liked the premise of them, how they are some random parts, but with some themed idea cards, that is meant to challenge the builder to use their imagination and interpretation to make them come to life.

Little did I realize that these things are basically Lego’s extra parts scrap bin, sealed into plastic bags with vague, interpretive instructions and a fancy schmancy premise, packaged more or less to sell you their scraps.

Yes, I know they say random, but I didn’t realize that it would be random to the point where you’re getting a fuck ton of scrap pieces with none of them being more than a 1×4 brick, and a whole lot of loose parts, that when poured out onto a surface, looks 0% different than the spare parts that are left behind after putting together a 300+ piece set; I would know this very well, because after all the actual sets that my daughters and I had been putting together, I have a Ziploc bag full of all their loose parts, and it looks absolutely nothing different than what was inside the ReCreate boxes that each of my kids got.

In one regard, I have to credit the people at Lego for coming up with such an idea that probably fleeced way more parents than myself with nothing more than abstract suggestions, clean packaging and spare parts.  It would be like bread companies took stale crumbs out of the crumb catchers of toasters all across the world and repackaged them and sold them as artisan bread flakes or some shit like that.

But on the other hand, fuck Lego for this bullshit low-hanging fruit effort of selling people their leftover parts and calling it imagination play.  Shit cost like $10 a box, and contained maybe 69¢ worth of actual Lego pieces.