Tag: white people

When did Annandale become a giant PF Changs?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Over the weekend, mythical wife and I went up to Virginia to visit my family, as we had some pretty important news to tell them.  Since good Korean food outside of the litany of all-you-can-eat KBBQs are pretty few and far between without having to drive some distance, we decided to meet up with my family at a Korean restaurant in Annandale, which anyone with any knowledge of Northern Virginia is astutely aware is very much, the Korean part of town.

Or so I thought.

Clearly, things have changed a great deal throughout the years, most notably the fact that Korean food is very much en vogue and extremely popular these days.  The restaurant that my family and I went to was slam packed when we got there, and the vast majority of the diners in the restaurant were very much not Korean.

I had fond memories of this place from when I was younger and still living at home; for one, my parents were still together, but I remember how the place was much smaller, very much more rustic, with a décor that was definitely trying to lean old country, with rice papered walls.  Everyone in the restaurant was Korean, and the atmosphere and ambiance was much more relaxed and slow paced, and the soondooboo jjigae was scalding hot, and the absolute most perfect food on the planet to eat on a winter’s night.

When I suggested the restaurant, my mom questioned me if I was sure if this was the place I wanted to go, saying it was always slammed, and that there always a wait.  I didn’t realize we were talking about the same place, but clearly as she still lives in the area, has witnessed the PF Chang-ification of not just this particular restaurant, but presumably the rest of Annandale, as Korean food began to catch the imaginations of all sorts of white people who love to claim to be adventurous eaters, and relished at the thought of being the pioneers amongst their peers to delve into the worlds of all this oriental food.

Needless to say, when we pulled up to the restaurant, I was at first a little surprised at how the place was now substantially larger than it was the last time I was there, and the parking lot was three times larger, and just about every single spot was taken.  It’s actually amazing that the two cars we had were able to find spaces.  But upon going inside, it was another surprise to me to see just how slam packed the place was, and with the vast majority of diners, most definitely not Korean.  This was very much a shocking contrast to my last memories of this place.

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MLS is clearly the preferred white people sport

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Driving around Atlanta, there are often a lot of tells on peoples’ cars that indicate the race of the people driving them.  Some are pretty blatant, like how white people all love to have shit like stick figure family stickers, black people have big flashy rims or the content of Africa silhouetted in some way shape or form, or Hispanics having pictures of their trucks airbrushed onto their trucks, while being looked over upon by the Virgin Mary.

However, some tells are more subtle, but no less obvious to those who see them.  Like blackout license covers or (likely) illegal shades of tint or a box of Kleenex wrapped in an ornate satin box cover sitting in the back window.  But there’s no more obvious tell that a car belongs to a white person in Atlanta, than an Atlanta United sticker or emblem on it.  Because there’s nothing short of Ponce City Market and talking about gentrification and urbanism that white people in Atlanta like more than Atlanta United soccer.

And then it got me thinking beyond just Atlanta United, and about soccer in general, specifically MLS.  And how it really seems like MLS has become the de facto preferred spectator sport of choice for white people, even above the NFL, NBA and MLB.  The more cursory internet glancing I do, I’m seeing that in major cities like Toronto, Seattle, Portland and Philadelphia, if you take snapshots of the crowds, they’re unmistakably overwhelmingly white.  It doesn’t seem like a lot, but that’s really all the justification I need to make my snap judgments; I’ve been to enough cities to watch sports, and despite being in different states, they really aren’t that much different from one another.

Ultimately, I think white people loving MLS really boils down to two very obvious white people traits: racism and a lack of commitment.  A low-key third would be the fact that so many are hipsters, so naturally, they gravitate towards a lower-tier popularity sport, especially if it meant that there were fewer minority fans to have to mingle with.

But frankly, upon thinking about it, it kind of makes perfect sense why white people love MLS so much. Go to any NFL or NBA game, and it’s abundantly clear that black people love football and basketball.  And the average white person is often times afraid of the average black person, so it stands to believe that white people don’t like going to these sporting events, because it puts them in too close proximity with those that intimidate them.  When the home team does well and the black people get excited, it scares the white people.  But when the home team loses and the black people get butthurt, it scares the white people then too.  This isn’t to say that white people avoid these sporting events outright, but typically they tend to go when they have privileges like corporate box seats, or are in large enough numbers to where they manage to feel safe, but even still it’s not the same white safety as an MLS game would be.

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Man, fuck NCR

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

In short: stuffy Fortune 500 company NCR settles agreement with neighboring longstanding mainstay gentlemen’s club The Cheetah, to remove their iconic rotating sign, presumably so it wasn’t so obvious that their fancy Midtown offices wasn’t practically right next to, a strip club

NCR is a company in which just hearing the name would probably elicit crickets from most people.  But NCR is also the company that makes products that all around the world, people have seen their products: card readers, ATM components, and all sorts of POS equipment.  Yeah, NCR is vastly responsible for the majority of that crap all across the globe.

They’re also a company that I have personally dealt with at a previous place I worked, and they were what I would describe as a problem child of a business to work with.  Nitpicky as all hell, demanding, inconsiderate of both time and resources, I spent many extra hours of my life working on their shit, and with each round of corrections, they demanded fresh hard copies of their training materials to review, no matter how small or inconsequential the changes were. 

No lie, I must’ve used at least two boxes of letter paper for just their training manuals alone, and that was just to develop them.  I can’t imagine how many trees had to die for these fucks to actually produce them after they were finalized and approved to send to the printer.

Frankly, I have no love lost for NCR.  I resent them as a company and I can’t help but twitch when I use a card somewhere and I catch a glimpse of their logo on the POS equipment that I have to use in order to finish a transaction.

But that was just how they affected me; and now they’re affecting the landscapes of our fair city, Atlanta?  By forcibly having removed, one of icons of the city, that was here long before they even had any consideration of coming into Atlanta?

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Tidying Up with Marie Kondo is the whitest show ever

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Prior to her show on Netflix, I’d heard of Marie Kondo.  Her book about tidying up and minimalism sparked a little bit of a firestorm from the literary world, citing inspiration to people to basically purge all the unnecessary shit they’ve hoarded over their lives, but from a holistic, Japanese approach; and if there’s one thing white people love, it’s exotic lines of thinking from the wise and progressive Orient.

Now, I use the phrase white and white people ironically, if that’s not obvious; the actual color of the people is widely irrelevant, as the mentality to rely on books and television to serve as inspiration to seek out enlightenment and happiness is a pretty white people thing, regardless of what color a person actually is.

And Netflix has clearly gone through the effort to make sure that the spectrum of people that Marie Kondo helps in her series Tidying Up with Marie Kondo, checks all the boxes of diversity, from the aforementioned whiteys, a black family, a gay couple, some ambiguously possibly Asian people, Hispanics, and then more white people in each respective episode.

I used to think that the shows on HGTV of a bunch of white people looking for real estate in South American countries were the whitest shows on television, but that was before I watched Tidying Up.  The HGTV shows are all about affluent rich white people, to which doesn’t actually apply to all white people; but the people all featured on Tidying Up are peak white people (again, regardless of actual race), in the sense that they’re all fairly upper-middle class households with the very relatable scenarios of just having way too much shit, and feeling overwhelmed and stressed out about, clutter.

They’re not worrying about jobs, income inequality, bills, or whether or not their next meal is guaranteed.  They’re worrying about the fact that they’ve accumulated a lot of material shit in their homes, and it’s stressing them out.

Peak white people problems.

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