Tag: cars

When a punny headline gives you no choice

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

NO CHOICE: Truck carrying truckload full of cans of nacho cheese spills all over I-30 in Arkansas; news outlets all over quick to bust out headline of “worst queso scenario”

Normally, no matter how tempting it is, I tend to resist glorifying truck spills from places outside of Georgia.  If it didn’t happen on a Georgia road, it doesn’t warrant mention on the brog, although I know I’ve done it a few times with the truly exceptional wrecks.

But when I caught wind of this particular crash in Arkansas, where the reporters couldn’t wait as if they were sitting on this headline, waiting for some cheese-related malady to eventually emerge, and then they all collectively bust out WORST QUESO SCENARIO and you know they were all throwing high fives and doing celebratory fist pumps after hitting publish, I just couldn’t sit on my hands and let this go without mention on the brog.

Talk about amusing this one is, with nacho cheese spilling all over a highway.  Although the likelihood of there being any collateral damage from this, because typically a truck overturning probably doesn’t have a tremendous amount of people thinking they can zip past it like they’re Dominic Toretto after the point of wreckage, but I like to imagine that if there were cars who were unfortunate enough to get caught in the wreckage, there would be a bunch of cars spinning out of control like in Mario Kart when you hit an oil slick.

Complete with the sound effects of getting slick’d.  But hey, better to spin out to a stop than to slide perilously into a costly and dangerous wreck.

Either way, entertaining and amusing is, a truck full of nacho cheese spilling all over the highways.  Even better knowing that nobody was hurt, so I guess it really wasn’t the worst queso scenario after all, but heaven forbid missing an opportunity to bust out that tagline, even if it’s not entirely accurate.

It doesn’t happen often

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

But what we have here is someone who appears to be more egregiously overpaid than a professional athlete: Georgia Department of Transportation commissioner to receive a $100,000 raise, bringing annual salary up to $550,000

Obviously there’s no shortage of crooked government workers in any state, but GDOT’s flagrant doling out of taxpayer dollars to some stooge who doesn’t know how to use the railroad button in Sim City is pretty noteworthy, at least to make it onto the brog, interrupting the fairly droll legion of baseball, professional wrestling and angsty dad brog posts.  At least it gives me the opportunity to blow the dust off of the ohgeorgia tag and utilize it to throw shade at the state’s poorly veiled attempts to pad the pockets of some glorified crooks.

Seriously, I’m hard pressed to think of anyone getting more money for as little justification as possible as this clown of a DOT commissioner.  Even the article itself fails to really come close to justifying why they deserved a 22% raise up to over a half-million dollars cumulatively:

Among achievements Brown cites are McMurry’s management of a series of highway improvement projects, including reconstructions of major interstate junctions in Atlanta, Macon and Savannah.

Reconstruction?  What reconstruction?  I’ve literally driven in all three of these cities within the last six weeks, and there’s been no real construction anywhere.  There have been lots of instances where shoulders are closed, cones are doled out all over the roads, some concrete barriers are erected, and the rando police car with their lights on to try and get the speed demons of Georgia to slow the fuck down, but there sure as shit hasn’t been any construction beyond maybe re-paving of some highways here and there.  Unless we’re awarding raises to people who look like they’re pretending to do work, there’s zero merit to these fake claims that these are actual improvement projects.

Brown also credits McMurry’s leadership for Georgia’s growing transportation budget, and notes praise Georgia has received for its infrastructure during McMurry’s tenure.

Translation: traffic is so epidemically bad once again due to the world seemingly believing the pandemic is completely over and so they’re all hitting the roads again and clogging everything up that Peach Pass registrations and toll payments have gone up, which is where this transportation budget is coming from.  Too bad it’s going directly into the pockets of all these clowns in GDOT and their cronies, because there sure as shit is still no real infrastructure in this entire state to be worthy of any mention.

What’s incredible is that whomever this guy is, he must have incriminating photos of the people who are in charge of giving him raises, because this is far from the first raise he’s gotten for doing absolutely nothing:

McMurry’s pay rose from $250,000 to $350,000 in 2017, then to $450,000 in 2021. The raises, including the latest, will also boost McMurry’s state pension.

Seriously, the guy got his foot in the door of a job where he doesn’t do anything, and banks a quarter mil.  For pretty much no reason other than he was too lazy to look for anything else, he ends up doubling his salary over the span of like 6-7 years, and he has accomplished basically nothing.  2-3 of those years were kind of a wash thanks to Coronavirus and people not really going anywhere, and the bozo still got a $100k raise in 2021.

Here’s the kicker too.

The state paid Gov. [Yosemite Sam] $176,250 in 2022.

The governor of the entire state makes less than half of what the GDOT commissioner makes.  Now I don’t like that cocksucker either, but something seems fishy when he’s getting literally lapped salary-wise.

Either way, it’s pretty incredible that there’s actually someone out there that actually makes as much money as a professional athlete and deserves the money even less.  It’s also pretty incredible that I somehow managed to find the time to bang out a brog post about something out of the usual array of fallback topics, but I wouldn’t anticipate it happening again for another minute, but for what it’s worth, it was a little reprieve.

How did the Ford Bronco become such the white peoples’ car?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Over the last few days, I had a pretty white span of existence.  Sure, this doesn’t help detract from the narrative that I’m a Americanized banana of a twinkie kind of Asian person, but as the circumstances have it, my family and I spent a few days on the road, stopping in Savannah and for the first time in my life, visiting Hilton Head Island, which is about one of the whitest places in the country.

Seriously, thinking back to the time spent in HHI, I genuinely can’t recall seeing more than one other person of color, and that person was also Asian which is to say that I don’t remember seeing a single black person while out there.

We stayed at a bougie resort for a few days, and lounged in the pool, went to the beach and even went to the Salty Dog Café, which I’m only aware of its existence because of an old neighbor of mine growing up always seemed to have a lot of Salty Dog Café apparel.  For the record, the dining experience was pleasant on the water of a relaxed beach community, but the food and the prices were not quite as satisfactory and I could be content with the rest of my life if I never experienced them again.

But overall, it was a pleasant trip spent with my family and I got to watch my children have a lot of fun in the pool, in our suite, on the beach and chowing down on all sorts of junk food we typically don’t always make available to them at home, and in spite of the shade I spout about HHI being a really white place, it’s also a really nice place, and I’d definitely be open to going there again in the future, and hopefully for longer.

However, to get to the point of this post, as the subject goes, I’m very curious to how the new Ford Bronco seems to have become the official car of white people across the country now.  When Ford announced that they were reviving the name and creating a new vehicle to resurrect the car, I couldn’t possibly have been more indifferent.  In fact, I was more perplexed and wincing over such news, because to me, the Ford Bronco has forever been tainted and etched with death and scandal since OJ Simpson led the LAPD on the most televised chase in history after he “didn’t” murder his wife.

Apparently such reaction and recollection didn’t resonate with the white people of America, because since they started rolling off the line, Ford Broncos have been snapped up and are being driven like crazy by white people all over the place.  Seriously, I haven’t seen a single Bronco driver on the road that isn’t white, and they’re often times being driven with the arrogant mentality of “I have one and you don’t,” because of the sheer demand for these murderer cars.

And I can’t help but be curious to why the Ford Bronco has caught on with white people with such enthusiasm, when I can’t shake the association of the car’s reputation of being what a tried-but-not-found-guilty murderer drove notoriously.  And then be further curious to what kind of message it sends that not only is the Ford Bronco more popular than it’s ever been in history, it’s apparently solely within the white community itself.

All shade aside, it really is fascinating that it’s so rabidly popular.  Aside from the whole, being OJ Simpson’s car, the Bronco is still a Ford product, and I will probably never not think of all Ford products being cheap, plastic turds with questionable build quality and reliability.  Even when I was on the market for a new car a while back, and told myself to wipe the slate clean with all makes and models, Ford was the first maker to get slapped back onto the blacklist after test-driving the option I had earmarked as a potential car, because it felt cheap, performed like shit, and was blown out of the water by every other option.

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An $80,000 Volkswagen Golf LOL

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I’ve always been a fan of the VW Golf, or as the hipster in me still likes to refer to them as Rabbits.  The boy racer that I once pretended like I was loved their versatility, tunability, the hatchback experience, and their general performance for a car that was the slightly more upscale alternative to the Honda fandom.  The only thing that ever prevented me from ever owning my own was simply the fact that I just couldn’t ever afford to get a Volkswagen, because whenever I’d been in the market for a car, they were always at a price point that I didn’t feel comfortable committing to.

And then I read this story about a super-limited edition Golf going to be released, to where only 333 will be produced, a pithy number as if they thought they were Bugatti or Lamborghini or something, will be a sickly-looking greenish yellow and will cost roughly the equivalent of $80,000 USD, and I roll my eyes and come to the conclusion that I will probably never own a Golf in my life, and think about how the car and its branding have seemingly grown a little too big for its britches.

Much like the Honda Civic, the VW Golf has long since strayed from its general position in their respective automotive lineups.  Originally the economical, entry-level compact options for their makers, both of them have grown up substantially with the generations and have turned into ridiculously expensive budget sport cars where honestly, their name is more valuable than the sum of the parts that they’re composed of.

But $80k is absurd.  Asinine.  Completely ridiculous and out of touch.  I wasn’t a fan of Honda finally bringing the Civic Type-R to America, only to turbo charge it and slap a $45k price tag on it, but at least it’s not an $80,000 Golf.

$80K is like Supra territory.  Numerous BMW and Mercedes options.  The price point of importing a R32 Nissan Skyline and taking care of all associated costs and maintenance.  Nearly double of what my car cost for 1/3 of the capacity and utility.  Nearly double the cost of the Audi that I would much rather have.  Hell, it’s nearly double the cost of the R32 Golf which was already the super version of the Golf, and for what?  19 extra horsepower, that most people wouldn’t be able to legally capitalize without breaking the law?

And all for a Volkswagen Golf.  The econobox hatchback that was every person my age’s first car type of car.  No fucking thanks, although I will be interested the kinds of schmucks out there who will inevitably hoover up these 333 krauts.  I can only imagine the wildly varied types of bullshit they’ll tell themselves and others to justify dropping $80k on a gaudy fluffed out Golf.

Observations of doing online food delivery

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

A while back, I came to the conclusion that in spite of the fact that I make more money than I’ve ever made in my career, I basically still have no money when it comes to any sort of leisure or just wanting to treat yo-self on rare instances.  To no surprise, it’s all going towards my children or expenses related to my children, and this is one of those instances where I think about how much simpler life can be for those without kids, not to say I have any regrets at all for having them they’re perfect and I love them until the end of existence.

But I don’t really do well when it comes to financial anxiety, and a lot of my general well-being is often tied to how comfortable I feel about paying bills while staying out of debt, and over the last few months, as much as I loathe and avoid it at all costs, I’ve had to carry partial balances over with my credit cards, simply because my outgoing money was surpassing incoming money, no matter how much I try to avoid it.

In the prior two years, I made a pretty penny on doing online surveys for nickels and dimes, enough to make people take notice in like the ten new wrestling blet replicas I was able to get with all of them, but that well has kind of dried up in the sense that the circumstances in which I was able to do them aren’t really applicable anymore, because my kids command a lot of attention, and I can’t absent mindedly bullshit my way through multiple surveys a day like I used to.

Needless to say, I had this revelation while I was in the car one day, that my household now has a third car that’s kind of dormant, and how it would be an ideal ride if I were to get into online food delivery.  It’s small, gets great mileage and is pretty fun and agile to drive, and it would be getting some use, instead of just sitting around deteriorating in dormancy.  Plus, the take home from doing online food delivery would be exponentially larger than doing online surveys, and it was something that I could do when the girls were down for the night.

And so I signed up for both DoorDash and UberEats, and over the last 6-7 weeks, I’ve embarked on moonlighting as a delivery driver.  Suffice to say, I’ve learned a lot in that span, but overall I can’t say that it’s been that negative of an experience as far as wanting to make some side cash for only as much effort as driving around picking up and dropping off bags of food takes.

It’s also been giving me a lot of perspective of being on the other side of the transaction, and naturally a remark like that isn’t said if it wasn’t to commentate on the sheer lack of respect and consideration customers have for their drivers.  Which is all a more eloquent way of saying that the vast majority of customers are a bunch of cheap motherfuckers who by all right shouldn’t deserve to eat if they’re unwilling to pay the people that bring their food to them.

For every generous tip I get from a customer who seems to recognize that I beat the estimated time, took into consideration the swing of their doors when placing their shit so they didn’t hit it, or other little things I do to make sure everything is right, I will have probably like 6-7 cheap motherfuckers who tip the bare minimum it takes for their order to not get outright rejected by all other drivers.  Like in 98%* of instances, I won’t even entertain a request where my take away is $2.75 or less because there’s a 100% chance that $0.00 is a tip and you’ll just be getting the base fare, and these are the shitheads that truly don’t deserve to eat if they’re not willing to pay for any labor.

*why not 100%?  Because sometimes UberEats will do these quests that give you bonus money for completion of trips, regardless of their amount, so if I’m teetering on a quest completion, I’ll take a shit fare if it means getting a bonus afterward

But the majority of tips that I accrue are somewhere in the $2-3 range, and these are orders that looking at the things they’re ordering, are usually well over $20-30, meaning on average, these are barely 10% tips.

The point is, it’s a good thing that I’m doing this as a side hustle and not relying on this to be my primary income, because I think I would go insane by how much passive abuse I’m getting from cheap-ass customers who use the veil of anonymity to justify being cheap assholes to have their shit delivered to their doors.

Another thing I’ve observed is that initially, I thought doing this, I’d be exposed to a lot of new restaurants where I could passively learn about through delivering their stuff.  I mean I’ve found a few places that I wasn’t really aware of, but when it really comes down to it, I’d have to say the majority of the drops that I’m doing are usually delivering someone their fast food, or Chinese food, or chain-establishment pizza, which really befuddles me, because I’m usually passing a number of Chinese or pizza joints on the way to these delivery spots, so I have no idea how these algorithms are when it comes to people and their choice of food.

I’ve learned that chain joints like McDonald’s, Popeyes and other massive chains don’t really give two shits about service time and having an order ready for pickup, because no amount of negative feedback to them is going to really improve their operations, so when I’m able to be picky about things, I try to tell myself to avoid them, because the bane of my existence is waiting for these businesses to prepare orders, and not a single night has gone by where there hasn’t been one pickup that hasn’t made me wait because I’m fast and they’re slow, and as far as I’m concerned, they’re the ones who cost me the chances at getting better tips on account of being extra early.

Favorite words to see: Leave at door
Least favorite words to see: Meet at door
You guys are assholes: Customer PIN required

Overall, the experience hasn’t been that bad.  I’m making some side cash in about 60-90 minutes on the nights I decide to go out, and I can usually do like 2-3 drops whenever I do go out.  It’s a decent way to clear my head and do something mindless, but at least make money in the process, and with these funds, I’ll hopefully be able to supplement my income for the ever-mounting expenditures that seem to be creeping into my life, or maybe even sack some of it away for some me-shit like a new raptop or inevitably, moar wrestling blets.

And to get in front of an inevitable question: yes, I have taken a French fry from a customer’s order before.  They didn’t tip, Chick fil-A didn’t seal the bag, I was hungry, and I didn’t know how to cancel orders yet, so in order to feel like I was getting any sort of retribution to an asshole, I totally took a French fry out of their order.  So the picture of Johnny Lawrence from Cobra Kai isn’t entirely just coincidental.

Oh, Atlanta #428

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

lol’d – drag racers get stuck on railroad tracks while trying to evade police

For every Fast & Furious installment, there are probably about 75,000 clowns who think they have the driving skill to successfully evade the police and maybe 1% of them that actually can.

What the story does not necessarily make clear is if the cars went off-road and ended up on the physical tracks themselves like survivors in The Walking Dead, or if they got stuck on a railroad crossing, because the CSX lines run all through Atlanta, and it really could be either.  I’m assuming that it was the former, and these clowns got off the streets and ended up in the giant rail yard kind of close to the location, where they got stuck because their Chargers or Mustangs aren’t meant for off-roading much less the impact of driving all over rails, but I like to imagine it was the latter situation, and they simply got stuck at an ordinary railroad crossing.

It’s like whenever we all take driver’s ed at some point, there’s always a small section about railroad crossing safety, and it’s always about if your car gets stuck on the rails, don’t stay in your car, etc, etc, with the very obvious consequence being getting plowed by a train.  Now I may be tempting fate and Murphy’s Law by writing this out, but I’ve always been more curious on how people manage to get so perfectly stuck on a railroad crossing in the first place?

Like, even if you noticed that your car was stalling out or dying as you’re approaching the tracks, surely momentum of a 2,500+ lb. vehicle should roll you over the crossing, or perhaps you might not be so braindead as to apply the brakes and come to a stop before even approaching them?

But assuming such would be giving too much credit to the clowns that actively partake in the Atlanta street racing scene in the first place.  Firstly, they decided to do their bullshit drag racing and burnouts on a dead-end road, so when the cops did show up, they were probably boxed in, and they had no choice but to flee off-road.  But to anyone who’s ever been on this street, perhaps to go to an Atlanta Brewing Company happy hour or booze cruise maybe, might have noticed the massive amounts of tire marks on it in the first place, from countless bozo predecessors.  Clearly APD eventually realized the layup it would be to simply stake out the street and eventually some clowns would show up to be clowns, and sure enough they did.

But I still like to think that all the events happened kind of in slow motion, and that the perps in question were able to evade the cops for a short period and get around their road block.  But then they go to the simple railroad crossing on Collier an inexplicably went from 65 mph to 0 and stuck right on the middle of the tracks, to where the fuzz caught up to them and immediately apprehended them.

Now that’s the kind of shit I’d like to see on the TikToks and Instagram handles all these attention-starved hoons plaster all over their rides.  Got to work in that social commentary shade without having to dedicate an entire post to it, bonus!

Behavioral observations as a new Tesla driver

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

To cut to the chase, I bought a Tesla.  Okay, it’s really my wife’s car and she’ll be the one making the payments on it, but on paper, I’m the purchaser, since I don’t have student loans and my credit was more optimal to get the financing done.  But we have a Tesla, and I get to drive it around every now and then.

It hasn’t been long, but it’s definitely a fun new toy to drive around in.  There’s definitely an adjustment period getting used to regenerative braking, and how you can literally drive with your foot on a single pedal.  The feeling of there being no gears shifting at all as you accelerate, and the sheer lack of sound of motors or smells of exhaust definitely makes you feel like you’re driving a spaceship.

Without question, there’s still a treasure chest worth of experience yet to be tapped as far as diving deeper into ownership of our Tesla, and I’m sure weeks, months and maybe years down the line, there will be functions and features that we’ll still be discovering, and hopefully none that will have been gamechangers early in our ownership.

But the point of this post is about behavioral observations that I’ve had, now that I’ve been driving around in the Tesla myself for a few weeks now.  I didn’t really think much about it after experiencing some observations, I guess I can kind of understand what’s going on around me whenever I, or my wife are riding around in the Tesla.

  1. Surrounding drivers are more aggressive. This is really the big thing that I’ve noticed the most when driving around myself.  Turning on a turn signal to initiate a lane change, way more frequently than I’ve noticed in any other car I’ve been in or driven, results in adjacent drivers stepping on the gas to forcibly deny me entry.  If at a merge point, surrounding drivers are noticeably more aggressive and out to make sure they get ahead of me, regardless of our spatial positioning.  At stop lights, in just the last two weeks, I’ve had more people act like they’re Brian O’Connor on me, and turn a green light into an impromptu drag race, and seemingly make a point of getting in front of me like they just won the le Mans.  I’m all like, buddy, I’m still trying to learn the pedal of this car, I’m definitely not trying to get in any races here.  Plus, I’m 40 with kids, I’m long past caring about 95% of red light matchups.

    Don’t get me wrong, I’ve pushed the pedal a few times, and the acceleration is staggering.  In most cases, I probably could smoke a lot of the cars that have gone Dom Toretto on me, but just because I could doesn’t mean that I am, especially where I’m still new to this and learning about the car.

    But I don’t know if it’s the color of the car, or the notion that all Tesla drivers must be rich assholes, but it’s pretty undeniable that drivers all around me, when I’m in the Tesla, have their aggression ramped up like that one cheat code in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City where you can make everyone super aggressive.

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