Tag: cars

If only I could’ve held out for another year

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I haven’t really paid much attention to cars in a while, especially since I’d just gotten a new one less than a year ago, and that whole having-a-baby thing kind of tends to take mental capacity away from just about everything else in the galaxy for the vast majority of our waking lives.  But my Apple News feed randomly spit out this article about a Nissan electric car with an attractive looking thumbnail so I clicked it, and then I’m staring at my screen with a not bad look on my face at the Nissan Ariya, that’s supposedly going to hit the United States in 2021, and there’s a piece of me thinking damn, if I could’ve only held out for one more year.

And it’s not like I couldn’t have; my old Kia Forte was still running fine, and at “just” 150,000 miles, I probably could’ve easily gone longer, especially with the sheer lack of driving that’s been done during this fucking coronavirus pandemic keeping smart people like me sheltered in place more often than not.  I just simply wanted a new car, and I wanted a bigger car, because a baby was on the way, and it would’ve behooved me to be ready with a larger and more comfortable vehicle for my pregnant wife and then-eventual kid.

But if I were able to hold out for another year, then most definitely the Nissan Ariya would’ve been in the conversation, when I would be looking for a new car.  I used to always be dubious about electric cars, because of their supposed mileage range per charge, but considering my new car now and most Tesla Model 3’s typically range 280-300 miles per charge, and there’s really not a tremendous difference.  The real angst lies in the scenario of taking an electric car out on a road trip, and running out of juice with no idea of where to get more, in the middle of the night.

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Oh, Atlanta #781

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

An acquaintance of mine posted this link to a story about how Atlanta wanted to designate an area for legalized street racing, and all I could do is wince and knee-jerk react about how stupid this idea sounded, without even reading the article or understanding the context behind this thought.  But then I read the article, and its own impetus article, and yep, everything is about as stupid, reckless and a terrible idea as it seems.

For starters, we have this little nugget of information:

On May 14 Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms said the city is looking at a new solution that came as a recommendation from her 18-year-old son.

I have mixed opinions about Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms.  Personally I think she is what a lot of people thought she was, a hand-picked stooge by departing mayor Kasim Reed, who ultimately is in office to pad her pockets as much as she can before departing, and granting favors to all within her circle for them to pad their pockets as much as they can, much like Reed did.  But at the same time, I appreciate her staunch opposition to the current federal administration, and how she often times make a point to hold press conferences to state her intention of doing the opposite of what the Baked Potato in Charge is trying to do, as well as his local butt-buddy, Bubba Kemp, like strongly advising Atlanta residents to stay home and exercise proper social distancing, despite the reopening of the state.

But the fact that Bottoms is even considering this idea on the recommendation from her 18-year old son, this says to me that he himself is probably into street racing, probably partakes in it himself, and Keisha would only try to make it legal, because she doesn’t want her shithead son getting arrested and/or wrecking and hurting innocent people and becoming an embarrassing shit-stain on her career.

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Georgia pushing real hard to take the title from Florida

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

In news that just about anyone probably could have seen coming, Bubba Kemp went ahead and lifted the shelter-in-place order for Georgia, save for the obvious exceptions of people with any sort of immunocompromised circumstances (or the morbidly obese, for some reason).  I’m actually amazed that Bubba has (or more realistically, someone in his office has) enough common sense to have any exceptions at all, since he’s doing his very best to kill as many Georgians as possible, it seems.

In spite of the fact that coronavirus is going absolutely nowhere, hasn’t slowed one bit, and has statistically reached the point where more Americans have died from coronavirus, than Americans killed in the Vietnam War (over 50,000).  Also in spite of the fact that his lord, savior and god-king, the Baked Potato in Charge has publicly lambasted him numerous times by name at this point, I’m getting the sense that Bubba’s good ol’ boy pride is kicking in at this point, and despite the fact that he has no dignity to begin with based on how much teat-suckling he’s done to the Potato administration, I think he’s making a gamble to demonstrate what little cojones he’s got by continuing to double and triple down on his choices to kill Georgians.

The latter is actually very amusing to me, and I love the optics of Bubba acting like a kid who’s mom is pissed at him, and trying so hard to drag in straw men arguments and deflect as much criticism as he possibly can.  All while the Baked Potato in Charge continues to rain haymakers on him from Washington, continuously using his full name to draw emphasis in front of cameras of national networks, deliberately making sure that everyone knows who the country’s biggest clown is right now and how it’s not himself.

I have this escalating fantasy that this pathetic feud is actually making Georgia Republicans disenchanted, or at least very confused on whom to support, between the head cheese of the state, or their god-king in the Baked Potato, and it’s going to be like a lion in a herd of gazelle, where they don’t know who to throw their allegiances to in future elections, become overwhelmed, and then don’t act at all, allowing all the gazelle to escape safely, which in this analogy means defeat for the clowns.  But politics is anything but prone to fantasy, so even in spite of this, I can’t imagine racist Beckys and Trents still won’t vote red just because they don’t know how to do anything else.

Anyway, in news that kind of came out nowhere on the other hand, Bubba Kemp’s office has decided that it’s no longer necessary for teenagers to take road tests anymore in order to acquire their drivers licenses.  Obviously, this is a frightening decision, that further feeds the narrative that Bubba is really trying his best to kill Georgians, because the last thing the state needs on top of coronavirus, are 15 and 16-year olds being given drivers licenses without formal testing, and hitting the roads.

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This car FUCKS

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

A long time ago, there was a guy my then-group of friends knew that got a Subaru Impreza.  He was one of those guys that at the time, nobody really cared a tremendous amount about, but nobody really had the heart to tell him to fuck off.  Plus, as long as he felt included in the group, he could always be relied upon to bring food and/or snacks to any sort of arranged gatherings.

Anyway, aside from the fact that he bought an automatic transmission, we often passive-aggressively clowned on him for his car, because that’s what a bunch of Initial D-inspired auto enthusiasts did amongst each other.  Other points of ridicule were how he got his car literally months before the WRX was unleashed, how he got a huge speeding ticket in Pennsylvania for driving like a retard, and the time he wrecked because he thought AWD made him invincible.

My favorite method of trolling him was that I often times told him that he made a mistake getting an Impreza, and that the real coup of coolness would’ve been if he had gotten a Forester instead; the Impreza’s dorky but more utilitarian older brother.  Sure, the Forester was definitely more of a family car, but it was always fun to glorify the cargo room and the utility of the Forester over his Impreza.

The best was when we discovered the existence of a Forester STI, that Subaru released overseas, which was a jacked-up high-performance variant of the Forester, which not only retained all the utility of the original Forester, but had all sorts of performance upgrades that made it like two classes above what this guy got in his automatic Impreza.  That’s the car he should’ve gotten instead.

Needless to say, since then, I’ve always carried somewhat of a positive connotation with the Forester, even if it stemmed from ironic, griefing purposes.

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No better way to start the new year

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Than with a Pepsi truck crashing on 285, dumping its contents all over the place and tying up traffic for hours.  This wreck actually impacted my commute this morning too, but I’m an early riser and somehow managed to avoid the worst of it; I figured it was just the whole world returning to work at the same time causing logjams.

Frankly, this wreck couldn’t really have been in a worse place at a worse time, considering it happened right at the 285/75 interchange, during the morning rush.  From what vague details there are, it sounds like the driver fell asleep at the wheel and veered off the road; they’re banged up, but fortunately still alive, but it leads me to wonder that this particular trucking company must not be one of those that employs a co-driver, which specifically is meant to prevent incidents like this from possibly occurring.

But whatever, it’s Pepsi, and Pepsi is second-rate, especially here in the land of Coke.  In almost a prideful way, it’s entertaining to see the visuals of a wrecked-up Pepsi truck, as if Pepsi done fucked up and came to the wrong neighborhood and immediately paid for it.  As if they knew that they were in hostile territory, tried to circumvent the city by taking 285, but were too late, and blown off the road barely after getting onto the bypass.

What’s interesting to me is that of the photos I’ve seen, the vast majority of the spilled cargo appears to be Dr. Pepper.  So it’s pretty clear that this is a truck that had no intention of really unloading here, because in Georgia, Dr. Pepper is a Coke product, showing up at all fountains and Freestyles under the Coke umbrella.  It also puts me in a conflicted position, because although it’s fun to dunk on Pepsi, I have no qualms with Dr. Pepper.  So it’s kind of sad to see large portions of Dr. Pepper go down the drain, but fuck them for being in a Pepsi truck.

Either way, this marks the first post of 2020, and in spite of the sentiments of new years and new beginnings, it’s pretty much business as usual at the brog.  Glorifying dumb shit like truck crashes and the hypocrisy of Georgia and other shitheads, that is when I’m not talking about professional wrestling, baseball players getting owned, or TLC programming.

Happy New Year!

How to reflect on a decade

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

This year ending isn’t just an ordinary ending of a year, because it’s also the end of a decade.  Naturally, a sentimental person like me tends to want to reflect on an entire decade, because much like individual years, a decade is a nice round chunk of time that one might think it would be easy to reflect upon, but in the greater spectrum, it’s ten full years we’d be trying to look back onto.  Now I like to think I have a good memory, but even without the aid of my trusty brog, it’s difficult to really look back at an entire decade.

Regardless, that’s not going to stop all the self-important jobbers of the internet who will try their darnedest to speak with authority and copy and paste all the same milestones the major news outlets will when it comes to trying to summarize and reflect upon the entire decade.  The funny thing is that most of the internet savvy generations probably aren’t that much older or younger than I am, which means that in the grand spectrums of our respective lives, we’ve only really lived through 3-4 decades, whereas I’d probably estimate that 1.5-2 of them are pretty invalid, because we’re simply not articulate and/or educated enough to have the capacity to reflect on entire decades.

So combined with the advent and growth of the internet, and the notion that everyone has a voice, I’d wager this is probably, at the very most, the second real decade of the modern high-speed internet that people really care to really reminisce about; and I’m being generous by calling it the second, because DSLs and cable internet didn’t really flourish until nearly the mid-2000’s; I couldn’t imagine people trying to use streaming, auto-refreshing social media on a 56K modem, so frankly I see this more as the first real decade that everyone and their literal mothers on the internet are going to be writing about.

Anyway, I’m going to attempt to try to recollect from mostly just my own memories, and stick to things that are more relevant to my own little world, and not the big gigantic depressing one we live in.  If I had any readers, they can google any decade in review, and probably find more worldly and probably more high-profile shit than the things I have to say about the things going on in my own little life, like the start and finish of Game of Thrones, Pokemon Go, the sad state of American politics, all the endless mass shootings, and Bill Cosby being outed as a rapist.

And the reason that I disclaim the whole “if I had any readers” because one of the most devastating things that occurred for me is the fact that despite my WordPress going online in 2010, at nearly the very start of the decade, midway through the decade my brog went down indefinitely, when my brother relocated from one part of the country to another.  A lot of hardware changes meant no more place to host my brog, and despite having the supposed backups, I simply haven’t taken the time or allocated the funds necessary to get my site up and running again.

If I were the type to do New Years resolutions anymore, I think I’d resolve to get my site back up and running again in 2020.  TBD on if that will actually occur, and frankly with the things I have on my plate going into the next decade, I don’t want to commit and then fail to deliver.

In spite of the brog blackout, that hasn’t stopped me from writing.  Even to the day my site went down, I have been writing on a fairly regular basis, taking no more than two weeks off before the internal guilt gets my fingers flying across the keys again, and I’ve got at this point, hundreds of folders of dated and timestamped Word docs, all awaiting their day in which they can be posted retroactively to a brog.

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I guess someone had to jump off the cliff to pioneer some change

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I’m at the gym and in between some dumbbell presses, I look up at the television and see a headline scroll across saying “Tesla Truck Breaks the Internet.”  And then suddenly, this thing shows up on screen, and my knee-jerk reaction is something that looks like a cross between the Pyramid Head helmet with wheels, and one of the numerous one-trick wedge-shaped robots from Robot Wars that won matches solely by wedging themselves under the competition and upending them.

But ultimately, my eyebrow scrunched and I mouthed “what the fuck” at what I was seeing, because it was without question the most radically designed automobile that I’ve seen designed that wasn’t CG from Test Track in Disney World.

Look, I get that I often fall into the category of being reluctant to accept change, and I often police myself to try and be open-minded to new and radical things that come to fruition these days.  But seriously, Tesla’s Cybertruck is pushing the boundaries of accepting change for the sake of change, or because they really think that they’re making something that is going to make a difference in the long run.

I mean, as an automobile manufacturer, I think Tesla is really cool.  My wife wants a Tesla Model 3/S/X like nobody else’s business, and from an environmental standpoint, it’s incredible that there’s a car that’s 100% electric, produces zero emissions, AND doesn’t look like a glorified Mario Kart, AND gets outstanding performance.

But the Cybertruck takes a lot of that equity and flushes it down the toilet.  Although the internet wasted zero time at all making the comparison, it really does feel like that episode of The Simpsons where Homer finds out he has a long-lost brother Herb, who’s a successful automotive mogul, but then entrusts Homer with designing the car of the future, which results in this abomination, and to make matters worse the production costs of it ended up bankrupting the company.  It’s like Elon Musk entrusted his long-lost American brother Jimbo Musk to create the pickup truck that Americans wanted, and they ended up with the Cybertruck.

Seriously, “special” is really the only way to describe the Cybertruck, but now without one of those pregnant hesitations before saying the word special, as if to imply that what you’re really trying to say is retarded, but can’t because it’s politically incorrect to be using the R-word these days.  Based on how difficult it is to delineate what side is front and which side is the back, it reminds me of the Tyco Rebound RC cars that could go in either direction and could even flip upside down and still function.

The bottom line is that I understand that someone needs to be the first, when it comes to attempting to break new ground, but I would’ve thought Tesla would’ve been a little more conservative when it came to trying to make waves than this.  The Cybertruck not only doesn’t even look like a truck, but instead it looks like the kind of imaginative fantasy vehicles that children draw on construction paper with crayons.  But actually rendered and built in reality, it’s a cringey abomination of a turd on wheels that really makes me wonder what Tesla’s strategy is; no press is bad press, or do they actually think this actually has a chance of exploding in the market?