Tag: white people

Dad Brog (#154): It kills me to see kids practicing shooter lockdown drills

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I remember watching this episode of Sacha Baron Cohen’s Who Is America, and getting a good chuckle out of the clowning on America’s obsession with firearms to the point where we should start arming our children as early as possible.  But mostly I always love how no matter how much people in Washington have been aware of Sacha Baron Cohen, known bureaucrats still keep falling into his traps of showing up on his shows and conducting rigged interviews, seemingly somehow oblivious to the fact that they are being made fun of for being, well, white guys.

The other night I was looking through some of the photos that #2’s pre-K posts to a private Facebook group for the parents, and there was a picture of the class huddled in a corner of the room, head down, knees up, tucked as tightly as they could.  All families know that the school does conduct routine fire, safety and lockdown drills, but this was the first time that I’ve actually seen any photo evidence of what was obviously the active shooter lockdown drill, and let me tell you how much it kills my soul to see a bunch of 4-5 year olds having to practice defending their lives.

In one hand, it’s better to be safe than sorry, and to have a modicum of idea of what to do in the event that such a scenario were to come to fruition, but in the other hand, it’s depressing and sad to think that kids have to practice this in the first place, because guns are more available than Nintendo Switch 2’s, and school shootings have now achieved a frequency in which it’s long past being not an if, but when, the next one is going to occur.

Regardless, it all amounts to all schools, of children of all ages, now having to spend a chunk of time periodically simulating what they would do in the event of a real active shooter situation, as if, if one were ever to occur, most people wouldn’t just flat out panic and fall back onto running and hiding as best to protect themselves above anyone else over some protocol.

And seeing a photo of #2’s class all huddled in a corner, as far away from the windows as they can be, set me off.  They’re a bunch of pre-K kids aged 4-5 – yes, jokes aside about how they can be obnoxious brats at times, it would take the sickest of fucks to be going after kids this young and still mostly so innocent to the world.

It just fills me with piss and bile at society that this is even a thing and being a parent it’s a hopeless feeling of having no real power beyond just hoping that your kids don’t ever become the unlucky winners any of the next school shooting sweepstakes.

Cracker Barrel’s rebrand: the question stands

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

USA Today: Cracker Barrel unveils a new logo; the internet is unsurprisingly not impressed

When the day is over, I have no skin in the game of the existence of Cracker Barrel.  Full disclosure, I haven’t been to a Cracker Barrel since I lived on the south side of the city, when they opened a brand new Cracker Barrel not far (relatively) from my old place, and upon going there, all the big wigs and managers and trainers were there, so everyone was on their best behavior and it was actually a decent experience.

But no matter if people hate the new logo or people love it, I’m not going to lose any sleep over it one way or the other, and can only really share opinions and thoughts based on the creative direction of it, as well as relish in some of the less tasteful jokes that the internet is particularly known for generating about anything and everything in existence.

But my first blush impression and my knee-jerk reaction upon seeing the new Cracker Barrel logo was that of unsurprise at the fact that they removed both the man and the barrel, and have homogenized it down to an uninspired shape.  However, I am surprised at the fact that they did manage to keep the general wordmark of the text mostly intact, instead of just typing out “cracker barrel” in a variation of Helvetica Neue or Myriad, like so many companies inevitably do, as if they’re determined to not pay anyone for a font, and are completely at peace with just writing it out in system default fonts.

So it’s kind of a push in the sense that they did murder all the character and uniqueness of the logo by removing both the man and the barrel, as well as the unsymmetrical shape in which the wordmark was housed, but still managed to preserve some sense of character, familiarity and recognition by at least keeping the wordmark mostly the same.

A hexagon with rounded corners isn’t a vanilla rhombus or oval like so many brands have boiled down to in this modern business space, and at least they appear to have kept their primary color intact; however, it appears they’ve cheapened up by swapping out their brown for a black, thus making future production simplified in that they technically only need one additional color outside of black and white.

Honestly, the container looks a little too large for the wordmark, and in the event like creating signage and advertising materials, the general proportion of it compared to the Cracker Barrel name is might end up looking comical, or lead to some comically large signs in order to compensate.

But like I said, when the day is over, I do not care one iota about this rebrand, beyond the obvious joke that was made in the shown screen grab – why DID they get rid of both the cracker and the barrel??  Considering the brand is kind of synonymous for being a white people eatery, not entirely sure why they’d go to the lengths of alienating them by removing paw-paw from the logo, but whatever.  As far a corporate rebrands go, this one is far from the worst, and it’s not going to suddenly make me want to deal with the shitty parking situations enough to want to actually go to a Cracker Barrel again any time soon.

What’s worse: leaving dog poop or leaving dog poop in a bag?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

These are the thoughts that go through my head when I go out for runs.  Because despite the snooty upscale environment my general area pretends like it is, there’s still a lot of white trash behavior underneath the thin skin of it all.  Like people who leave their dog poop, in bags, on the side of walking trails and sidewalks that inevitably never get picked up.  Which got me wondering, the title of this post, what people think is worse between leaving your dog’s poop behind out in the open, or taking the time to pick it up, bag it and then, leaving it behind. 

Saying you’ll come back for it later and most likely not, irrelevant to the query at hand.

And this isn’t even something that’s solely based on a single day’s exploration of the outdoors.  Whenever I’ve hit the Silver Comet Trail, I see bags of poop all over the sides of the trail.  Taking my kids on nature walks and mini-hikes, same deal.  It’s just disheartening to have seen such bullshit behavior now having crept into my own community, where I do my outdoor runs.

This is a case where no answer is right, and no answer is wrong.  Anyone who does absolutely anything other than picking up your dog’s poop, and relocating it into an appropriate receptacle, is frankly a piece of shit and if I were the lord and ruler of the world, this would probably be a three strikes and then the death penalty kind of thing.

Like, people who leave the dog poop are absolute cocksuckers in the sense that the act of them letting their dog poop on someone else’s yard or a public place, and then not picking it up and walking off is a combination of shithead behaviors – negligence, inconsideration, laziness and just plain being a shithead.  Few things get me fired up than finding an errant turd in my yard, because some asshole in my neighborhood was being an asshole, and short of setting up a camera to surveil my yard at all times, I have no idea who it is, no matter how much I want to return the turds to properties of the owners of the dog(s) who left them.

But I actually think people who bag up their dog’s poop but then leave the bags behind, are worse.  Because when they do what they do, they’re not only demonstrating all of the aforementioned shithead behaviors, they’re also adding deceit, lying, delusion and just plain being wrong, in thinking what they’re doing is somehow better than just leaving their dog’s poop out and open.  All topped off with the fact that these cocksuckers+ are making conscientious decisions to bag the poop and then leave the bags behind, where as those who don’t might sometimes actually be able to play negligence because most people who walk their dogs are also phone-addled zombies and may not have noticed a poop, but that’s a different gripe for a different time.

Let’s not even bother deliberating on the whole “I’ll come back for it later” bullshit – I don’t think anyone would believe a single person who claimed that they would come back for them later on the return leg of their walk, and even if there were paragons out there that did such, the world is so full of cocksuckers who don’t that shouldn’t be worth the fact that people are just going to assume you’re a cocksucking liar when you start bagging up your dog’s poop and leave the bag behind, regardless of your intention to, get it later.

At least when a dog turd is left out in the wild, it can and will inevitably break down, decompose, be food for some bugs, and be somewhat of a benefit to nature.  But if it’s left in a bag, maybe the bag itself might be biodegradable, maybe it isn’t, but the point is, the contents of that bag aren’t getting returned to nature any time soon, but the general stinkiness, grossness, and symbolic an asshole left this here message, remain as long as it takes for some superior Samaritan to take the bullet and clean it up.

What it all really boils down to is the fact that if people don’t want to do all the responsibilities that come with dog ownership, they simply shouldn’t have them in the first place.  If I were a dog, and even if my owner gave me steak and chicken tenders, played with me regularly, lavished me with fresh tennis balls, clean beds and all sorts of love and attention, there’d still be a ceiling to how much I could reciprocate my love if I knew that they themselves were still cocksuckers enough to be leaving my poop behind, and worse if it were still bagged up.

So frankly, I think it’s worse to be the assholes who bag the pool and leave it behind, versus those who don’t.  But make no mistake, anyone who does either, if it were up to me, I’d implement the death penalty for all y’all motherfuckers.  It’s not hard at all to bag up a turd to where the smell is minimal, and not so uncomfortable that it can’t be held until proper disposal.

Wouldn’t it be funny if

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

NPR: America Online to discontinue dial-up internet service which is still miraculously still available in the year 2025

Frankly, I’m astonished that AOL is even still in existence, much less their very specific dial-up internet service.  After Instant Messenger had the plug pulled from it back in like 2017, I wouldn’t have imagined that AOL had any product or asset at all remotely capable of keeping them afloat as a business, but here we are in the year 2025 where they’re not only still alive, but about to pull the plug on the very thing that put them on the map in the first place.

I mean, who among my general age range, didn’t ever have AOL?  It’s basically a rite of passage for elder xennials like myself, and probably most everyone could probably remember their very first @aol.com screen name slash email address.  And everyone was innately aware of the free trial CDs that were just about everywhere, and looking back at it, it worked in the sense that they saturated the playing field so heavily that for a while, internet access = America Online, much like soda became synonymous with Coca-Cola.

But before I can go down the rabbit hole of nostalgia and wax poetic all day about stories involving AOL, I’m just going to get back to the point of this whole post, and finally wrap up the title of this post because I don’t write as often as I want to lately and I can’t get myself sucked into my own vortexes of words instead of getting to the point of the things that I actually do want to write about.

But anyway, wouldn’t it be funny if, with the elimination of AOL dial-up service, it completely turns the tide of the political battlefield in America?  With the obvious implication that GOP supporters are mostly a bunch of antiquated olds who only have their internet access via AOL dial-up, and when the service is taken away from them, they lose their umbilical cord to the modern world, and either shrivel up and die sooner from boredom, or without the bullshit they currently imbibe on, on the regular, their minds actually clear up and break free from the brainwashing they’ve all been subject to over the span of the last few decades.

Like I kind of write this partially in jest, but at the same time, there’s a shred of hope of believing that this might actually come into play in the future.  The numbers (well maybe not necessarily) don’t lie, GOP voters are on average 726 years old, and short of having shitty brainwashed tech-savvier children setting up their internet, I have to make the assumption that there’s a tremendous overlap between Republican voters and AOL dial-up users. 

And since neglecting the elderly knows no political affiliation, there’s no guarantee that when AOL dial-up goes offline in September, there’s actually going to be people readily available to swap these geriatrics onto any form of higher-speed internet, and thus begins the prophetic disconnection with the modern world for these demographics, and it lowers their chances to be auto-right voters come the next election.

Yes, there are a ton of holes in this logic, but all I’m saying is that it would be real humorous to me that come 2028, the next election is seemingly way less dramatic and there’s a surreptitiously noticeable reduction in Republican voters, from a very specific demographic, and I for one will immediately point to this specific news story about how AOL killed their dial-up, and inadvertently changed the fate of the entire country in the process.

/goodbye.wav

Las Vegas sucks now, plain and simple

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Every time I come across posts or articles about the general downward trends of Las Vegas tourism, I just scoff and remind myself to hold my tongue and save it for the brog, because I think I’m in the minority now about my feelings and attitude about Las Vegas.

But as the subject of this post says, Las Vegas sucks now, and is a far cry from the place that I used to go to multiple times a year, and it makes me sad to see just how much it’s changed and how I just now have absolutely no desire to go back any time soon.  And like I said, I think I’m in the minority here, especially among my friends who all seem to think the place is still good, regardless of if they acknowledge the changes or not, and as to not be the Debbie Downer, I more often than not, keep my feelings unspoken since I don’t want to be accused of peeing in the pool.

But yeah, Las Vegas sucks now, and I fully understand why their tourism and revenues are trending downwards, and feel little opinion other than the euphemism that this is the bed they made, and they have to lay in it.

Sure, COVID had a lot to do with their state of collapse, as a city so reliant on tourism was absolutely decimated when the whole world was encouraged to stay put, but the whole city didn’t do themselves any favors once things started to return to normalcy.  It’s like the whole place went into this determined recoup-mode, and decided to up the cost of just about everything in sight in order to make up for lost dollars from the pandemic, and as often the case whenever any business raises costs to justify something, once that something has been justified, they grow so used the revenues that they make no attempt to revert or reduce, and as is the case with Vegas, they actually doubled down and kept increasing the cost of everything to further push people to see how much they can get away with.

See, the Vegas I remember and loved, it wasn’t $Fuck you.99 per night to stay anywhere on the Strip, and there weren’t Ticketmaster-amounts of resort fees every night.  Parking was often free, which justified getting a rental car so we didn’t have to get taxis everywhere, and could occasionally explore the city beyond the Strip.  Food, sure, had its upscale joints where you could feel like a baller, but there were also plenty of options where you could get a cheap meal or just enough to satiate hunger, and it not be an automatic $100+ bill.

Every resort had a buffet, and I can say that I’d been to almost all of them at various points of my life, from the Riviera’s, Aladdin’s, MGM’s, Mandalay Bay’s, and my guiltiest of pleasures was the Rio’s Carnival World Buffet, where on two different times, separated by years, I managed to get the same server who had this creepy, Igor-like demeanor, but was still nice and did his job well.  But, they’re all gone now, with to my knowledge, the only ones truly left and worth a damn, being like Caesar’s Palace, Bellagio and Cosmopolitan.

Drinks were plentiful, and thankfully is still the case, free as long as you’re gambling, but for when you weren’t blowing all your money away, a domestic beer didn’t cost $20 plus a tip.

Which brings us to gambling, where across the board, the cost to play has risen to where the last two times I went to Vegas, I was basically done after a single day’s gambling.  I used to be able to bring $500 in cash, and manage to have a pretty fun long weekend; I could be lucky enough to play with some house case from time to time, and when the trips were over, be able to come back with a little left.  Now, $500 can’t get me through a single day, which was almost literal when my last trip was just 24-hours, with gambling time being less than four of those hours.

Casinos hardly bother with fluctuating table minimums anymore, and the lowest on the Strip is like $15, which is a perfectly uneven number to where anyone who wants to play a hundo, has almost no possibly way of playing an exact amount at $15 a hand or spin of anything without having an embarrassing remainder, or need to buy back in, and it makes me think of the New York MTA and how their fares are mathematically strategized so that it’s almost impossible to zero out a fare card, and the city rakes in millions a year on forfeited remainders.

The bottom line is that Las Vegas has completely abandoned even remotely trying to cater to anyone that isn’t at the very least, upper class, or can at least pretend to be for the duration of a trip.  Middle-class and lower schmucks like me can no longer afford to go there comfortably, much less have a good time, when we’re being gauged left and right, having the city wishing they could charge us to breathe.

I’m of the belief that there’s way more money to be made in catering to everyone, and my favorite stories in business are always ones where companies have embarked on such strategies and have found immense amounts of success in doing such, like sports teams that lower their tickets, concessions and accessibility and then they make record profits.  Apps that are released for free, but then rake in millions on ad revenue and in-game micro-transactions.  Look at Wal-Mart, whose last time I checked was #1 on the Fortune 500 for the last 30 years, because they cater to the lower class, and they make fuck numbers of profits every year in doing so.

And Las Vegas turning their back to those under the upper class line, screams of elitism, catering to the wealthy and those arrogant enough to demand exclusivity, I enjoy reading and seeing things about how their numbers aren’t doing as hot as they probably wish they were doing.  I love reading comments full of shade and criticisms from people who feel similarly to how I do, abandoned and resentful, and pining for a Las Vegas that they once loved so much, they used to “joke” with their friends about exploring looking for a rental property.

Like I said, this is the bed that they made, and it’s what they have to lay in, and I hope that one day, Las Vegas can get back to closer to being the city I once loved and hopefully in time for me to have some more memorable trips with my friends and my family.

Look out, tough guy Bryce Harper

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

ESPN: Philadelphia Phillies’ Bryce Harper ‘cusses out’ MLB commissioner Rob Manfred in regard to the topic of a salary cap

When I came across this story over feeds fed to me over social media, I had some knee-jerk reactions that I debated on commenting in some of the communities in which I saw them.  But over the passage of time, I’ve learned to be mindful of audiences, specifically understanding that certain sources have certain readers who tend to get hivemind-ey about their opinions, and daring to say anything challenging to the collective results in unproductive, attack-oriented rebuttals.

Frankly, it always serves as a reminder to why I have a brog in the first place whenever I get shitpost rebuttals from internet trogdolytes who have zero ability to make their own thoughts and exist solely to respond in the contrary to the original thoughts of others.

I have a lot of thoughts about this story about Bryce Harper vs. Rob Manfred, but mostly I have a hard time getting over the whole part of the story where a 32-year old Bryce Harper got way up into the grill of a 66-year old Rob Manfred, in an obvious act of attempted intimidation, going nose-to-nose with a man over twice his age, and thinking it was a good idea in the first place.

Admittedly, I’ve had some back-and-forth opinion about Harper throughout the years, he’s an unbelievably good baseball player, and I can admire the amount of passion he demonstrated with embarking on a mission to bring championship success to Philadelphia, despite the fact that I am rooting against such.  But that passion also goes both ways, where at times he comes off as a completely unhinged hothead, prone to enraged outbursts, sometimes justifiable, but still a bad look to be seen screaming obscenities and throwing equipment around, really leaning into that hard-nosed archetype that Philadelphians tend to really love.

But the first thoughts that ran through my head upon reading about Harper’s aggressive approach with Rob Manfred was whoa, tough guy here, getting into the grill of a 66-year old man.  Dropping f-bombs from the onset and telling him to get the fuck out of their clubhouse for daring to float the idea of a salary cap. 

And the best part was that the 66-year old Manfred reportedly responded that he would not, get the fuck out of here, and stood his ground against Harper, before another player’s cooler head prevailed and attempted to diffuse the situation by chiming in himself with questions of his own.  So, so much for Harper’s attempt to intimidate an old man, which is pretty hilarious as far as tragic failures go.

Continue reading “Look out, tough guy Bryce Harper” →

Professional athlete problems

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Newsweek: Pittsburgh Pirates outfielder reveals having a very specific no-trade clause; refusing to go to the Yankees, Mets, Blue Jays, Dodgers, Giants or Padres

Call me naïve, but I’ve always had the belief that it’s probably in our best interests to not put our employability at any sort of disadvantage, by doing things like putting in legal writing, refusal to go work for specific employers.  I have a wife and kids, and when the day is over, my obligations is to provide and support and I don’t really think I’m above any particular task or duty in order to accomplish such. 

Sure, there are lots of things I’d rather not do, or places or companies that I’d probably hope to have a superior alternative to, but when push comes to shove, I’ll shovel shit eight hours a day if it meant being able to provide for my family, and do my best to be the absolute best at it.

Then again, I am not a professional athlete, paid exorbitant amounts of money to play sports originating from children’s games.  I have not lost touch with poverty, living paycheck to paycheck, and the constant vigilance of every penny spent.

I am not Pittsburgh Pirates outfielder, Bryan Reynolds, who for whatever reason is very adamant about not wanting to play for a specific list of teams, effectively implying to 1/5 of Major League Baseball that he’d rather be unemployed than play for any of them.  Which to someone like me, is mind-blowing that any player would have no-trade clauses in the first place, because unless they’re true MVP-caliber talent (which Reynolds is not), they’re not going to be endearing themselves to organizations by being inflexible.

What the internet is fascinated by is the list of teams; typically lots of guys who have had no-trade clauses in the past, they typically tend to list off teams generally perceived negatively by the masses; be it that they’re cheap teams, not good teams, in smaller markets, or any combination of the above.  After all, professional athletes play to win, to make money, enjoy their lives, or, any combination of the above.

But the teams Reynolds listed: the Yankees, Mets, Blue Jays, Dodgers, Giants and Padres – very few of the negatives really apply to them, and very much of the positives do.  Currently, all of them are either division leaders or are very much in the postseason picture, and they’re all squads based out of major New York and California markets or Toronto.  All of these teams are very liberal with their spending and all have budgets north of the median MLB payroll.

The immediate joke was that Bryan Reynolds has no actual desire to win, or be a part of a championship squad, seeing as how he plays for the perpetually middling Pittsburgh Pirates, and seems to only refuse to go to squads known for contending.  And the funniest thing is that when called out for such, by once-peers, Reynolds has gone out of his way to defend himself on the internet, validating the idea that he does in fact pay attention to the internet and what others might be saying about him, thus making him owned, but that’s beside the point.

Nerds on the internet were quick to point out that the list of teams Reynolds refuses accept trades to, correlates with high income tax rates, which New York and California do have, and Toronto being in Canada, is subject to massive taxation, which I guess does suck for an American paying Canadian taxes and getting no benefits for it.

However, Bryan Reynolds is a professional athlete, making professional athlete money, netting $12.25M this season and will continue to make more, over the next five years, as he signed an eight-year, $108M deal back in 2023.  Yes, it sucks to know that 40-50% of your income is immediately lost to Uncle Sam, but when the day is over, he’s still pulling in $6M+ a year after that motherfucker takes his pound of flesh.  

It’s hard to feel much empathy for any professional athlete making millions of dollars to play children’s games, and it’s extra puzzling how stingy it would be if income taxes really were the reason why he would block a trade to six of the upper tier of MLB franchises, where he would not only continue to make the contractually obligated millions he’s owed, but he could improve his general brand and parlay it into higher earning opportunities in stronger markets.

What’s funny to me however, is the fact that I don’t know if it’s ignorance or maybe he only does want to play for non-contending losers, but the Oakland Las Vegas Sacramento The A’s are not on his list.  The Dodgers, Padres and Giants being on it makes it sound like he’s avoiding California, but for the next three years, the A’s are still in the state, playing in a very fitting minor league ballpark, considering how the franchise is operated, and it would be hilarious if Bryan Reynolds were to get shipped out there, and his no-trade clause wouldn’t be able to prevent it from happening.  He would then be subject to California’s 13.3% income tax rate, and he’d be playing in a minor league ballpark, for a glorified minor league franchise.

Furthermore, I knew nothing about the guy before finding out about this story, but it’s interesting to deduce his journey through his statistics alone.  He debuted in 2019, had three well above average seasons with one injury-marred flop in the middle, but impressive enough to make the Pirates offer him a huge nine-figure deal to buy out his arbitration seasons and secure him for the next eight.  And in classic, got-the-bag player performance, he has two okay seasons but aren’t even close to the heights he reached in his 6.0 bWAR 2021 season, but apparently the man has fallen off a cliff in this 2025 season, already worth a horrendous -0.7 bWAR at the time I’m writing this.

He’s still going to be due nearly $75M over the next six seasons, and considering the downward trend he’s headed now, it’ll probably be the last big money he’s going to make in his career, so I suppose he should be trying his best to avoid getting shipped off to somewhere where nearly half of it is going to be assimilated by the IRS.

Either way, my final word on Bryan Reynolds is that man be dumb, blacklisting some of the richest and contending teams in the league.  There’s nothing inherently wrong with being in it just to make money, but me personally, anyone who doesn’t want to win while getting rich is missing something, and I’d rather them get the fuck out and make way for someone who wants everything including the bag.

When the Pirates do inevitably move him, because he still fits the mold of a good trade chip, I hope he gets shipped off to The A’s, Rockies, White Sox, Marlins or some other shitty mid franchise who have no desire to win.  To which, at this point in time, the Braves would actually be a club that might work with him, but here’s hoping that doesn’t happen, because I sure as fuck don’t want a dork like him.