Tag: observations

Better avoid Smithfield meat for a minute

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

KWQC: maintenance worker killed at Smithfield Foods factory in Monmouth, Illinois; cause of death yet unknown, but reported to have been machinery related

Yeaaah see that picture here?  That’s the kind of stuff that Smithfield Foods produces, basically a whole bunch of manufactured meat products.  The kind of things you see in the pre-packaged lunch meat aisle, and if you’re anything like me, are pretty indiscriminate about the brand, and liable to pick up whatever’s cheapest and doesn’t look too sketch.

The fact that it’s been a few days since this was reported, and no specificity on how the worker was unfortunately killed invariably leads to the jumping to the conclusion that man may have fallen into some vat or food processing machine, and that he could possibly end up as byproduct to any one, or multiple of the types of meats shown above.

And no, I’m not above making a tasteless joke in light of another human’s demise, but in this case, I am not joking.  Seldom is there much humor in the loss of another’s life, and it really sucks for the person who died at work, as well as the family that lost them, but the lack of specific details in the matter does genuinely raise concern about the contents of the food that the factory could be producing in coming days and weeks, and it’s going to take some very clear explaining to ensure future consumers that they might not be getting partial flecks of human matter in their kielbasas and bacon in the future.

Also really sucks for the plant workers who weren’t just immediately sent home for the day in light of a fatality at the workplace, and that the facility intended on operating as if nothing had happened.  I unfortunately have experienced a situation where a vendor had a fatal accident at work, and they ceased operations immediately, because that seems like the logical thing to do in order to investigate the matter in as calm as a place you can, as well as give some grieving space to all that were unfortunate to witness the incident.

Think Smithfield Foods better consider putting themselves on the bench, or get ready for a rebranding, because employee fatalities and piss-poor handling of a bad situation is some really bad PR to be farming up in this day and age, and it doesn’t matter how good or not good their product is, they’re in a very crowded food space, and the removal of their existence on account of bad situational management isn’t going to really matter that much.

Who would’ve guessed that foreign travelers don’t want to get gauged either?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

WSB: Atlanta Convention & Visitors Bureau report that hotel bookings did not live up to the impact predictions that the FIFA World Cup would bring

Among some of the great content that came out of the FIFA World Cup, I particularly liked the local Atlanta material, about foreign visitors’ experiences in the Metro.  I really enjoyed videos about witnessing people wandering around in the hoods of College Park, the West End and East Atlanta, looking absolutely petrified at just how hood some of these neighborhoods were capable of being.

It’s obvious that they chose these areas because they were MARTA accessible, and they figured that instead of staying within a mile radius of The Benz and get gauged to death, they’d stay a little bit further out for less, but it’s aight because we got train access.

I’d never seen so many the sax is getting louder memes in such a short time, but they’ve all been entertaining to me, especially when I recognized some of the places of some of the videos.

But getting back to the article here, it brings me great satisfaction to see all the L’s the city is taking in regards to expected hotel occupancy versus what had actually happened.  It’s not that I want to see Atlanta getting laughed at by the rest of the world, but I’m diametrically opposed to flagrant price gauging and any act of trying to turn screws to the people of the world, that I feel like quantifiable evidence of failure like this is necessary in order for any sort of course correction to happen.

It’s pretty great:

FIFA once promised an impact equal to eight Super Bowls.

But then the numbers start coming in, and tax revenue, hotel occupancy and hotel occupancy within a 1-mile radius are all in the negatives, and it’s just one of those smug, gee, tf did you think was going to happen when you ask people to pay thousands of dollars to fly to Atlanta, thousands more dollars to get tickets into the matches, and think that they’d still have thousands of dollars left over to stay in overpriced hotels?

I especially like the Ls that all the nearby hotels took, because firstly, they’re all of the luxury, high-end name brands, of W, the Four Seasons, the Ritz Carlton, and then all the Dragon-con hotels that are all perpetually overpriced all the time.  They should be the least surprised that people who were dumping their life savings into these trips would prioritize lodging the last versus logistics and match tickets.

I am surprised to see that the general, umbrella Metro Atlanta hotel occupancy also remained in the negatives, which means that probably the AirBnB and short-term rental markets probably did gangbusters throughout the World Cup’s tenure in Atlanta, or perhaps people were staying in places like Newnan, Woodstock, Braselton and the way the fuck outskirts that might not fall into the Metro umbrella.

Either way, chalk this up as some satisfying tea to indulge in, because as much as I love sports, the politics that go behind it are as much full of shit as the nonsense that endlessly churns up in Washington DC.

Sounds like a way to lose $500 and feed the squatting epidemic

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

WSB: City of Atlanta announces new no-fee microloan program for renters to help avoid evictions during times of duress

Upon reading this, I feel like Mayor Andre Dickens must’ve recently seen Jim Carrey’s Yes Man and was inspired by the scene where JC’s loan officer character, under hypnotic suggestion, said yes to just about every single loan request that came across his desk, with his bank’s branch giving out tremendously more loans than the rest of the company.

When confronted about it by a higher-up who came in to investigate the generosity, the twist was that all the people he was giving loans out to were just so grateful to be having their needs met, that the repayment rate of all his loans was 98%, and the bank was actually turning a profit on the repayments.  Good job, Carl.

Seemingly inspired by a fictional film, Andre Dickens launches the Neighborhood Reinvestment Initiative, where he believes that loaning out $500 at a time to people who might be a little short when the rent is due, will help keep good families secure in their homes, and not be at risk of eviction.

The alleged rationale behind the initiative is altruistic, and I don’t mean to shit on a program that has such altruistic objectives, but there’s zero part of me that believes this has any chance of being like Yes Man, and 98% of these $500 loans will be repaid, much less used in any sort of responsible manner.

First of all, the $500 microloans are no-interest, no-fee, require no collateral.  They will then have 25 weeks to pony up a Jackson at a time, and although I feel fortunate to say that I could probably pay $20 a week, I know a lot of the people this is intended for probably aren’t.  I get that this is all in the name of helping people, but programs require funding to survive, and if they’re not going to make any sort of payment, especially to off-set the extremely high chance that most of these loans aren’t going to get repaid fully, if at all, then may as well not even bother launching it in the first place.

Second, has anyone stopped to look at the eviction rates in Metro Atlanta?  For 2026, one in four renters defaults, and although they may face eviction, the corresponding squatting rates are also so astronomical that this program is basically setting itself up to be a means to give future squatters $500 bones to supplement themselves with before they inevitably start living illegally.

$500 is not an inconsequential amount, but given what the cost of renting is in Metro Atlanta and all around the US these days, it’s barely a drop in the bucket as far as actually being able to help someone out goes.  I have a feeling the people who are struggling with making rent aren’t short by $500 or less each month, and require that difference to be made up somewhere, every single month, and not just have one bad period.

Hypothetically, a responsible borrower gets their $500 loan, staves off defaulting for one month, but then the 30th rolls around four weeks later, they’re short again, but now they are ineligible for another $500 because they received one a month prior, what then?

I can tell you that with my general expenses and costs of supporting my household, $500 vanishes in the blink of an eye, often in a single transaction somewhere, and $500 wouldn’t really help that much in the grand spectrum of the debts that I could incur, and in fact, be worse in the sense that I now owe one more something back.

The idea of this is nice, and if it isn’t just a smoke screen meant for Dickens to operate as his predecessors did (read: stealing taxpayer funds), I would hope that this truly does help a lot of people having a bad month, stay afloat, and pay back responsibly, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.

I look forward to revisiting this topic in a year when I see this post show up on On This Day, and I’ll be curious to Google it to see just what came of the whole thing, but probably find nothing about it because everyone loves to hide their L’s and Dickens was probably using this whole thing to steal money to begin with.

Non-Koreans need not apply

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Sometimes I use my brog to vent out my general frustrations about randos on the internet because I don’t want to comment on social media and possibly risk engaging in interactions I don’t want to get sucked into.

But over the last year or so, there’s a content creator with whom I engage with regularly enough to where theFacebook keeps offering me up a top fan badge which I promptly delete the suggestion because I don’t care nor is it at all important for others to see me as someone who spends more time than is necessary engaging with someone that I don’t know at the end of the day.

I like to keep my interactions generally positive, as this person is also Korean, also a dad, and although I could be jealous of his success at climbing the rope of content creation and the lifestyle it has created for him, I don’t want to be the jealous fatty of Korean person who envies and generally becomes a hater, because I really am happy to see a Korean guy finding success, making wholesome content in such a droll world where everything is an uphill battle.

Mostly I interact with fairly innocuous remarks, primarily positive, but also when he queries other parents, I sometimes share opinions, as another Korean father in America.  But I occasionally sprinkle my commentary with some 한글 every now and then, kind of as a way of directly speaking to him and/or other Korean supporters of his, because sometimes there are just some things in the world that aren’t really relatable to anyone other than to us Korean people.

However, being public forum, this means that the rest of the non-Korean pleebs of the world can see what I’m saying, and worst of all, have the capability to comment and respond when they feel necessary, which is unfortunately to say way more often than I’d like it to be.  Mostly because the overwhelming majority of people in the world are incapable of initiating, which includes on the internet where nobody has the balls to make their own comments but have zero qualms with rebutting and contradicting when they feel the urge (that nobody asked for) to say something.

A lot of the time, my remarks get the “this doesn’t apply to just Koreans” or “I’m also X Asian/minority class and this tracks for us” counters, which in some cases might not be completely invalid.  But my favorites are the responses I get from what are obviously white people who feel that they have absolutely anything to add in any sort of matter that pertains to me pointing out -isms of Koreans and other Asian tropes.

Like the impetus of this post stems from this content creator low-key flexing his pockets by showing an itemized e-receipt of some ingredients purchased for a future video.  But instead of being a hater and acknowledging and calling out the humblebrag, I remarked about imagining his or the hypothetical Korean parent seeing this receipt and it’s exorbitant cost, and how they’d probably imagine it would be cheaper to travel to [foreign location] to [acquire] the ingredient, and ignore the whole time and labor cost, in the name of saving money, because the trope is that Koreans are eternally cost-conscious and the only things that matter are those bottom lines.

I get some Chad Borowski responding to me that time and labor is free to one’s self, and that they can get memories and experience out of the hypothetical journey to [foreign location].  Some hippie-dippy white person bullshit, injecting their belief system to a culture that couldn’t give a shit less about such things versus the objective of not paying exorbitant costs for anything.  And then it’s topped off with an umbrella sermon about how Chad wished more people were capable of doing things for themselves and enjoy the process.

 

Normally I don’t re-engage, but this one made me roll my eyes so hard, by the time my eyeballs returned to their sockets, I had already hit send on a response, facetiously saying his remark was cute but [due to his obvious lack of knowledge of Korean parents on account of not being fucking Korean] that the only experience and memories a Korean parent wants to get out of such a hypothetical journey is the ability to humblebrag to their group chat about how much money they saved, and have an unsmiling selfie at the location to prove it.  Because that’s entirely what hypothetical Korean parents of this specified generation are entirely all about, and the exact course of action that would take place.

But my bad for re-engagement, because later in the day, Chad rebuts again because white people are about as other classes when it comes the need to get the last word in, and they accused me of being miserable with a sour world view, which isn’t entirely incorrect, but in the context of this conversation, is completely putting words in my mouth.

I didn’t bother responding again because I had already broken one of my general rules of social media of commenting on comments, and I feel no need to get the last word, but the point of all this is that Chad here, or any other white person need not bother getting involved in this observation that has nothing to do with them.

Unfortunately, I know that tons of white guys out there in the world are incapable of receiving such a memo, so this won’t be the last time Ben Affleck or Jillian Michaels is going to interfere with my knowing commentary of Koreans to another Korean.  But hopefully, it won’t pique my nerves to the point where I feel the need to burn a brog post about it again.

I suppose when you’re about to be euthanized, no-caffeine may let you live three more seconds

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

ANF: Georgia death-row inmate selects last meal, set for execution on September 16th
Let’s just cut to the chase:

For his last meal, prison officials said Humphreys requested barbecue beef brisket, pork ribs, a bacon double cheeseburger with fries, buffalo wings, a meat lovers pan pizza and two caffeine-free sodas. For dessert, he chose butter pecan ice cream and peach ice cream.

Honestly, take the whole murdering of two real estate agents out of the equation and journey to death row, and this sounds like an absolute banger of a big back meal, that would be like a final boss-caliber cheat day of eating.

The funny thing to me about final meal requests is that these inmates always ask for enough food for entire families, more than likely knowing that they have no chance at finishing everything, and the crazier thing is that the institutions of incarceration always seem to honor them.

As far as final meals go, this one does seem kind of tame.  Man is basically asking for the entire menu at like Buffalo Wild Wings, with all the barbecue items he’s requesting, as well as cheeseburgers and pizza.  About a decade ago, also here in Georgia, there was a woman on death row who requested a ton of things that seemed to have a common thread, of buttermilk and eggs, and it seemed to me that she was planning on making herself into a human atomic bomb of toxic gas, fully anticipating that once she died, and believing that the body’s functions cease and evacuate, to make the absolutely most trainwreck of a mess as possible on the way out.

This guy isn’t really going that route, even if it is the only real chance that any accused has to get the last word in with their jailers, man just wants a solid Roy Hobbs Day on the way out.

But why this is a post on the brog is that the devil is in the details, and it’s some of the details that pique my interest and inspire me to put down some words.

First, is the fact that he specifically asked for a meat lovers pan pizza, and not a whole-ass Pizza Hut Big New Yorker with every single meat option slathered on it.  I get that there is a culinary difference between the two, what with the pan pizza having those crispy edges that might be a personal preference, but if I’m on my way out, feel any sort of malice or resentment to my jailers or the state of Georgia, and know that the taxpayers are on the hook for feeding my ass one last time, I might pick the more expensive option, knowing that I probably won’t finish it anyway, taking any sort of pyrrhic victories as I can.

Instead, this dude is being quite modest with his request of a diminutive pan pizza, almost as if it were meant to be a dainty side dish to accompany his barbecue train he’s going to run.

Next we have the two caffeine-free sodas that he’s requested; I’m going to assume they’re along the lines of a cola or of the dark colored variety, and not like a Crush or Mountain Dew.  It’s funny in the sense that he specifically asked for two, and not an entire six or 12-pack, because short of going to a gas station or a Dollar Tree, I don’t even know where you can even get individual cans of soda.  More than likely, whomever is in charge of fulfilling this meal request will be stuck with leftover sodas in their possession, knowing that the missing cans were meant for a dead guy.

But the coup de grace is the fact that for whatever reason, it was specified that he wanted caffeine-free sodas.  Man is about to be put to eternal sleep, and he’s sweating having sodas that have caffeine in it before he’s put to death.  And just two – clearly trying to watch his weight and sodium intake, in spite of the 8,000mg of sodium he’ll already be taking in with his requested final meal.

When I was a kid, I was so hooked on soda, and in spite of my mom’s general aversion to supporting such a habit, occasionally I could talk her into picking up a case of sodas, provided it were caffeine-free Diet Coke.  It’s like being the absolute least offensive of the cola family made it somewhat palatable for my mom to purchase.  Plus, the gold cans are kind of baller, and it’s almost a shame that the color gold is treated as like fourth tier in the Coca-Cola hierarchy.

I suppose he’s being cognizant of the risk of elevated heart rate that caffeine has on the human body, and seeing as how he’s going to be put down via lethal injection, I suppose keeping his heart rate as low as possible when getting the needle, he might be able to prolong his life by like maybe, three more seconds. 

And if he has any inkling of wanting to remain among the living, I suppose every second counts.

We all know that college football is mostly rigged, but goddamn

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

ICYMI: #16 ranked University of Michigan avoids getting upset by unheralded Western Michigan by virtue of refs allowing them to have a second chance at a Hail Mary in spite of them running out of time on the final play of the game

Throughout the history of sport, most sports fans have seen their share of bullshit finishes in just about every sport that they follow.  Questionable calls on hits or pitches, foot on the line in basketball, blatantly missed call in football, a phantom offsides in futbol or hockey, it really doesn’t matter.  If there’s any form of competition, there will inevitably be a controversial finish every now and then.

But this game, between Michigan and Western Michigan, is definitely up there as one of the more notable instances in modern history, because it’s not often that we see on a such a national level, flagrant favoritism and game-rigging, with their absurd ruling to finish out the game.

The television clock, the scoreboard clock, and even the clock shown on the camera operators all showed that time had expired, when Michigan failed to convert their initial Hail Mary game winner, which for all intents and purposes would have meant WMU defeated Michigan, and we’d have the upset of the year on Week 1 of the CFB season, calling back to about 20 years ago when Michigan lost to Appalachian State on the opening week of the season.

But instead, we witnessed one of the most blatant cases of game-rigging in the history of sport when the referees spun a masterclass of bullshit, citing all sorts of moonspeak about clock accuracy, some sort of grid, global time and space continuum and other nonsense, but the conclusion was that there was actually still one second left in the game, repeat second down.

In all fairness, Michigan did have to convert the Hail Mary, but given a second chance, QB Bryce Underwood clearly recalibrated his throw, and didn’t overshoot the end zone, and the Michigan receiver was able to haul it in, for the game-winner, but the obvious reality is that this attempt should never have been allowed to take place, without the obvious fixing of the game to ensure that Michigan was supposed to win.

I have no doubt in my mind that if Michigan failed to convert on their second attempt, there would’ve been a late flag thrown, probably for a phantom pass interference, and they would’ve gotten a third attempt, but 15 yards closer, since games cannot end on penalties, and probably a fourth attempt and a fifth attempt, and so forth, until the desired outcome was reached.

‘Ball don’t lie’ is a fate-based phenomenon where whenever a bullshit call occurs, an equally improbable occurrence happens not long afterward to rectify the imbalance of fairness; but is still dependent on there being game time available in order for the scales to balance.  In a perfect world, WMU immediately picks off Underwood and returns it for a pick-six to close out the game, but I think the situation was so egregious that even the mythical gods of sport were too busy cleaning out their ears and glasses to realize that Michigan had capitalized on their second chance before they could do something about it.

Unsurprising, the Big-10 and the NCAA have tripled down on their stance, absolutely denying all accusations of game-fixing, and have been trotting out all sorts of supposed experts and league officials and technology talking heads to try and explain to the rest of us peons why there was absolutely, irrefutably one second left in the game, in spite of just about every official clock in existence saying otherwise.  The masterclass of attempted gaslighting is crazy and impressive, and later on in the season, fans are just going to hit a point where they’re just going to say that nobody’s going to be mad, we just want to hear someone admit that the shit was fixed.

And to think I thought week 1 of this CFB season was a snoozefest with absolutely no upsets, with all the notable teams just blowing out scrubs by Madden scores.  Even the James Franklin era beginning for Virginia Tech where they hung 70 points on VMI was so boring I went to bed early, and have little to say about it except I was disappointed that they still allowed three points.

Hopefully, the Ball Don’t Lie gods are quite disappointed in this situation, and we see Michigan falter to some unheralded team later this season, because WMU was screwed and Ball demands the scales be balanced.  Would be funny if Michigan gets bounced by like UTEP or Rutgers as retribution for this farce, but with the higher powers clearly on their side, it’ll take some Herculean scoring and evidence to make sure they’re irrefutable.

X-Men ’97 S2: the speedrun continues

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

As part of my holiday weekend, I had the luxury of being able to do something I hadn’t really done in a long time, which was to sit down and simply shotgun a show.  I had X-Men ’97 season 2 on my list of things to watch, and I admittedly drug my feet a little starting it, mostly because I had such questionable feelings about the first season of the reboot.

Primarily the fact that the pace of the show moved at a breakneck speed, rushing through a number of arcs that in the comics would’ve been 5-9 months worth of storylines, somehow condensed and absolutely blown through in a single episode, and sometimes two, when they’re rushing right into the next one without any sort of pallet cleansing.

So after sitting down and watching all of S2 of X97, I can say that nothing changed, and the show picked right up going 280 mph, and covering at least five notable arcs and touching on at least two others, within the span of nine 30-minute episodes, which seeing that in writing is absolutely bonkers.  To my recollection, they dealt with Days of Future Past, X-Cutioner’s Song, X-Tinction Agenda, Fatal Attractions, that one arc surrounding the Brood, and a couple of other arcs that I don’t remember the names to and can’t really reference the plot without giving things away.

The series moves so fast between everything that it’s difficult to breathe, and I admittedly like to glance at my phone sometimes when I’m lazily imbibing in television, but I can’t really do that with X97 because they’re cramming so much context into every second of the episodes, that I found myself having to constantly rewind 10-20 seconds to figure out what’s going on before punting on multitasking.

It actually becomes comical just how fast they’re moving, because there are events that happened in the last episode of season 1, and they come full circle in 4-5 episodes in season 2, which was funny to me, because it took nearly three years in the comic books from event A and event B occurring, with a tremendous amount of fleshing out and making some interesting storylines in between.

The Brood are basically reduced to a single episode, and Apocalypse’s Horseman of Death is limited to the final 2.5 episodes of the season, and the crazy thing is that by this point, I became very casual with my following of X-Men comics, and even still I think that these were rushed to the moon and I can’t believe just how rapid-fire the series executes.

That being said, I’m not sure I’m going to continue watching future seasons should there be more coming.  It’s absolutely nothing like the FOX Kids cartoon from the actual 90s, that gave episodes time to breathe, and for viewers to develop rapport and attachment to characters.  I know all the players, but the show doesn’t really ever stop to let viewers care about anyone that the show isn’t intending on you to focus on.  It’s clear the show has a real big hard-on for Rogue, and Gambit by proxy, and they spent a lot of time on Professor X, and feeding into the current narrative of his general slow burn character assassination of today, seeing as how Charles’ go-to attack tactic is to make his opponents re-live traumatic moments in their lives.

It’s ADHD pace makes me less inclined to want to continue watching it, and seeing as how the show is close to having caught up to as far as in the general X-Men comic arcs that I actually followed, it might not be a bad place for me to bail on the show, seeing as how I’d be missing things that I hadn’t even known existed, so out of sight, out of mind.