Tag: cars

Things White People Like: the new Ford Broncos

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

The funny thing about Things White People Like is that it’s rarely like a gradual thing.  It’s always, you wake up one morning, and then suddenly white people all over the place are doing/having/partaking in the exact same thing.  Building black and white homes, falling head over heels in love with Major League Soccer, embracing Korean food, etc, etc.

It’s almost like there’s a gigantic group chat for nothing but white people, and they come to consensuses on what things they decide to declare “theirs” and the following day, every single one of them embarks on claiming it, before any other dirty non-white demographic can get their grubby hands on it.

But let’s talk about the new Ford Bronco; and this isn’t the first time I’ve written about the Ford Bronco and in this identical context, but it’s just because it seems like White People have hit another gear in Liking this Thing that it warrants another posting.

Also, I know the car has been out for a while, so it’s not really new anymore per say, but the thing is I call it such out of a lack of wanting to refer to it by its chassis or model year because that would require looking things up and I don’t care about white people enough to want to exert such effort.  But also because by calling it the new Ford Bronco also implies that the old Ford Bronco is a leper of a vehicle and all of them are undoubtedly OJ Simpson cars, and not the Jesus Jeep-replacement that seems to be exclusive to white people only.

And that’s exactly what the new Ford Bronco appears to have become for White People – a Jeep replacement, because Jeeps have become attainable and acceptable to people of all other races and colors, to the point where White People feel the need to flee the Jeep brand and go find something else to claim for themselves.

I went to go visit my brother not long ago, and we’re parking in a parking lot and in front of us is a Korean guy monkeying with the soft-top of his Jeep, clearly getting it lowered so that he can indulge in the beautiful beach town weather that we were at.  I said to my brother, that this guy was an example of why exactly the Ford Bronco has become a de facto White People car, because minorities are progressively getting more and more of their hands on Jeeps, and they can’t stand it.

Fewer things make it more obvious that new Ford Broncos are Jeep replacements than the fact that they’re basically designed to be Jeep clones, but with Ford badges and the little bucking bronco emblem on them.  From color selection, aesthetic trims, and just the overall silhouette of them, they’re basically the Temu version of a Jeep, since Fords in general short of a hand-built GT500 or Shelby Mustang are all cheap adult-sized Tonka toys made out of plastic, zip-ties and minority labor.

One of the kickers though, was this time I saw a new Ford Bronco with a rubber ducky in the windshield, which is a major thing that the Jeep communities does with their whips.  The funny thing is that I saw a photo of a similar vehicle on theFacebook on some Jeep community that I don’t know why I was shown a post from, but the general consensus of that post was that of internet rage, animosity and disdain for a new Ford Bronco owner for ape-ing a very Jeep-ism for their own shitty ride.

Seriously though, I haven’t yet once, seen a single new Ford Bronco, where the driver wasn’t a white person.  Mostly females too, but every single new Ford Bronco driver I’ve seen has been white.  I’ll probably do a double take if the day ever comes that I see a driver that isn’t Ben Affleck.  The funny thing is that there’s actually a home in my community that was completely repainted to be white with black trim and accents; guess what the lady who lives there drives?

Interestingly enough, Ford being Ford, their name does hold enough weight to where despite the fact that they’re a Jeep clone, Hummer appears to be trying to now clone them, with their new Hummer models that are supposedly launching in 2025.  Considering the fact that they look very similar to new Ford Broncos, I feel like these are going to be a strong candidate of White People cars to flood towards if a few minorities manage to get their hands on the keys.  And when it inevitably happens, I guess it’ll be time to add a new entry to the list of Things White People Like.

I like to walk past all the Teslas that use sentry mode

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Something that I’ve enjoyed doing over the last few weeks is that when I’m walking to the office after parking my car, I like to deliberately walk closely past all the Teslas that camp the same EV spots that they’re only supposed to be using for four hours max, all day long, every single work day of the week, and triggering the sentry mode for those of them that have it engaged.

TLDR, sentry mode is kind of what it sounds like – when motion is detected too close to the vehicle, the lights engage, and if you’re in a position to where you can see the screen, an ominous looking red glowing orb like the fucking eye of Sauron appears on the screen to let pleebs know that sentry mode has been activated and presumably the cameras are engaged and sending live video to the owner of the vehicle’s mobile device.

When Teslas were a new hot thing, I get why people might want to keep that on.  Curious pleebs might be getting their grubby paws too close to their Teslas and for lesser pleebs, just the warning of them being monitored might be enough to deter them from lingering around too closely. 

Also applicable if the Tesla happened to live in a suspect and/or hood area, the added security might provide some piece of mind, despite the fact that if someone really wanted to fuck with your ride, they’re going to fuck with your ride and short of being ten or less feet away there’s probably nothing that could be done about it if it happened.

However, despite the fact that I own a Tesla myself, there’s no denying the fact that Teslas are basically a dime a dozen these days.  Low-end Model 3s are about as common as Kia Optimas or Honda Accords these days, and there’s very little special about them.  I kind of prefer it this way, because my mentality has always been not wanting to stand out too much from the pack because little good can come from being too conspicuous in most cases, and with that in mind, I’ve never really felt the need to bother with using sentry mode in my own Tesla.

As for the people at my office, I would say two out of every three Teslas that jockey for the EV spaces in the parking lot have sentry mode active in their rides.  Not that there’s anything wrong with treasuring your rides, but I do beef with the fact that all these Tesla drivers are utilizing the EV parking as unofficial assigned parking spaces, and preventing people whom might actually need to charge their vehicles, the ability to do so. 

Therefore, I feel justified in fucking with them a little bit by regularly walking too close to their rides and triggering their sentry modes, with the hopes that they’re getting pinged on their phones where they frantically check the app just to see the same person “innocuously” walking past their cars, multiple times a day.  Of course what I’m doing is completely harmless, but I like to imagine that their paranoia gets the better of them, and they still check every time it happens, only to see that it’s just little ol’ me, making my way to and from the building.

Perhaps if they weren’t so selfish and insistent on camping the EV spots every single day, I wouldn’t trigger their pleeb detectors, but as long as I recognize the same daily campers, I’m going to make a point to closely walk around their rides and trigger their inherent fears of someone fucking with their whips.

The lights engaging make me feel like Derek Zoolander, walking down the runway.

The Ford F-250 Super Chief sounds kind of racist

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I was driving to work, stuck behind a parade of slow moving commuters as is the usual, but I couldn’t help but notice the behemoth Ford truck that began tailgating me, as if they felt that I was personally responsible for the logjam of cars on the single-lane road we were all headed down.  The third car that I use as my daily commuter is quite small, and the truck plastered on my asshole as if I could shit gold like a Lannister was rather massive and I obviously was not particularly pleased being tailgated so aggressively.

However, I know the capabilities of the car I’m driving, and I’m not at the point of my life where every single interaction on the road needs to result into a street race like Tokyo Midnight Racer, so when the road expanded to a second lane, I stayed put and let the douchebag with the tiny peepee whip around me as soon as they could and take off; it wasn’t worth allowing my blood pressure to elevate just because some fuckhead was riding my ass.

Naturally, the truck did just that, and I noticed the words “Super Chief” on the vehicle, and my brow did a little scrunch – was this the actual name of a level of trim, or was the driver of this car perhaps of indigenous heritage and really wanted the world around him to know that they were of American Indian lineage?  The back window also had a subtle black-on-black decal of an American Indian that kind of looked like the old Washington Redskins logo on it, and I’m thinking to myself that there’s no way this combination of shit came straight out of the factory.

At the next red light, I googled “Ford F150 super chief” and lo and behold, this is actually a legitimate thing, except that it’s an F-250 and not the pleeb-ey little brudder F-150 as I thought it was.  But yeah, the Ford F-250 Super Chief is an actual Ford product, and I can’t help but ponder that it sounds kind of racist, in the sense that we live in a world where the Washington Redskins and Cleveland Indians were taken to the shed and beaten into submission within the span of the last decade, because of their names, and yet here’s Ford, one of the largest auto manufacturers on the planet, naming one of their signature trucks “Super Chief.”

Yes, the word “chief” is not exclusive to Native American culture, but it is prevalent enough in it, to where people like me immediately pull indigenous culture to the forefront when hearing the word, and I can’t help but feel like there’s some racist-sounding undertones with Ford naming a big ass truck “super chief.”

Not just any old chief, but fucking super chief, like it’s the Kryptonian Superman of Native Americans.  Like in Native culture, there are chiefs, but then there’s a level above all the other chiefs, that is the super chief.

Digging a little further, I can’t seem to find any pictures of an F-250 Super Chief with any window stickers of the Washington Redskins chief on it.  So that part of the douchey small peepee truck driver that was riding my ass, had to have been custom to that driver.  I didn’t get a look at the driver themselves, but I sure hope that with brandishing a decal like that, that the driver was actually of Native American culture, and not like one of those white cocksuckers who claim 3/47th Cherokee or some bullshit so that they can try and get a slice of indigenous benefits.  Otherwise, then the Super Chief is being kind of racist, if it’s some white guy driving around in it with that big ass Native sticker on his window.

But either way, now that I know that this is an actual thing, my personal conclusion is that it does seem a little bit racist.  ‘Murica doesn’t seem at all that concerned about that kind of stuff anymore these days, so I guess that it shouldn’t be a surprise.

Is this anyone else’s experience or just mine?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Obviously, it’s arrogant of me to assume that I’m the only person in the world who deals with this on a regular basis, but who really knows; I might be the only one who thinks about it to length enough to blab about it in a brog that nobody reads.  The point remains however, that this is still a phenomenon that I deal with on a daily basis, and I’m curious to know just how much this is the case in places all around the country and the rest of the world.

But I can’t help but feel like this is a behavior that spawned from life after the murderous peak of COVID.  I’ve said it many times, that I kind of miss the COVID era, minus all the senseless death and tragedies to people who really didn’t deserve it, but if there was one thing that was really nice about the whole pandemic is that it sure as hell made the roads really, really nice to drive around on.

I never really minded the early onset of return to office, because I quickly learned how much more efficiently I worked when I was in the office setting, plus it gave me the opportunity to formally return to a gym regimen.  But the commutes to and from the office were that of dreams, being able to leave the house at 8:45 and make it to the office at 8:57, almost nobody else walking into the building, almost always having an elevator to myself.

Now, I’m fucked if I leave the house at anything after 8:35, and I usually get to the parking lot at 8:55 if I’m lucky, and there’s always a ton of other people headed into the building at the same time, and I often have to get into an elevator with 2-4 other people where inevitably someone will be coughing, peaking my anxiety about getting sick because we’re long past the days of masks in public.

And in the midst of my obnoxious commute, is a whole fucking lot of this bullshit behavior; people camping the left lanes way long in advance, because they need to get ready to get on the highway, a lightyear away.

I really feel like this really started happening after COVID, because during COVID, driving behaviors in general kind of reset all over the place, and lots of common sense behavior and tendencies were forgotten all over the place.  Left is the fast lane, right for slower drivers, right-of-way rules, all of that shit seems to have been forgotten, as lots of olds have died off and stopped driving outright, and there was even a point where dumbass 17-year olds didn’t even have to take behind-the-wheel training in order to get a license.

But left lane camping, as what I like to call it, seems to have gone way the fuck up since COVID restrictions and return-to-office mandates have come into play.  There are two major left turns that I have to make on my morning commute, and it’s ridiculous the amount of camping that goes on, every single morning, by people who want to get in their lane that inevitably takes them to the left-turn lane they eventually need to be in, as early as humanly possible, regardless of how many other motorists might need to be in them, get into them, for them to make sooner left turns than they do.

There’s a stretch that’s jump into every morning where it’s around four miles until you get to the highway; every single morning, commuters pile into the one lane that inevitably dead-ends into the left turn lane of said intersection as early as humanly possible.  It doesn’t matter how empty the adjacent lane is, people will fight gangbusters in order to get into this particular lane so they don’t have to worry about switching again for the next four miles.

And not only do they give no fucks about getting passed or how much they’re inconveniencing motorists who need to turn in one mile, two miles or three miles, nobody is going to move them out of their lane to where they might actually have to put some effort into driving.

Heaven forbid you try to squeeze in at any point, because once these types of drivers get into their desired lane, they will defend their spot like they’re a Spartan warrior against the forces of Xerxes.

Naturally, the second major left turn that I need to make every day is the one that takes me to my office building.  The thing is, there are three different ways I can enter, but they all require a left turn to get in; my preferred one is the last one, as it is the closest to my actual building, but I’m not picky, if I see that the first or the second one has a green light, I’ll do it, just so I can get out of the petty rat race of left lane campers who will trudge along in a voluminous lane, because they need to get onto the highway that’s five miles away.

And honestly, it’s getting worse; since the school year started, and commuters are in an adjustment phase to their daily routes, to account for school buses and elevated traffic, I’m finding that on my route home, there are tons of people now camping the left lanes on my way home, where this was not the case just a few weeks ago.

It’s among my biggest pet peeves now when it comes to observing the behavior of the drivers all around me, and it’s times like these when I’m stuck behind a bullshit line of cars in a left lane, while everyone in the adjacent and right-er lanes are flying by, I begin to pine for the days of coronavirus, when so many of these shitheads were simply off the roads altogether.

Oh, Decatur, #35

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I’m sure this will have no negative effects: City of Decatur launches “pace car” program to try to slow down motorists and reduce accidents

Let my start off by saying that I’m a fan of Decatur.  Decatur is the small town in the big city that has lots of character, good bars and restaurants.  The Your Dekalb Farmer’s Market.

More importantly, Decatur will always have a permanent impact on my life, as it is where I got married, at our courthouse wedding.

Needless to say, the City of Decatur will always hold a special place in my heart, regardless of the words that are going to come flying out of my fingertips in the ensuing paragraphs.

Although good intentioned, I can’t imagine any reality where Decatur’s pace car program isn’t going to be met with massive resistance, ridicule, and a general sentiment of resentment.  Cars being driven by people who are declaring their intention of doing one of the few things every motorist on the planet doesn’t like, in slowing them down, there’s no way that this goes in the direction that the city really hopes it will go in.

As much as I do love Decatur, the reality remains that the whole place really is a nightmare region to drive around in.  Whether it’s on Ponce, Candler, Dekalb, Scott Blvd., or any of the other main thoroughfares through the city, the roads and lanes are narrow, there’s large swaths of street with crumbled, dirt or just plain no sidewalks, and the quality of said roads and sidewalks are often as deteriorated as if the taxes were drained from their funds in Sim City, so they just start falling apart.

Combine perilous infrastructure with the general aggressive nature of Atlanta drivers, and you have the recipe that makes driving around in Decatur as generally risky to the point where they’re always looking for ways to improve safety around the roads of the city, whether from the city itself, or citizens who are trying to take matters into their own hands.

I mean, it’s really kind of their own sword that they’re falling on; as much as I like Decatur, the people within the city are this eclectic mass that takes a tremendous amount of pride in their small town feel, but want to enjoy all the luxuries and benefits that come with living close to a massive market like Atlanta, and there’s a large sense of resentment and us versus everyone from those who live there.

Getting back to the original point of this post, I can’t imagine that people who are taking it upon themselves to be the enforcers of the road; going exactly the speed limit, stopping at yellow lights, coming to complete stops and looking all directions at stop signs, aren’t going to regret it in time.  As much as Decatur-ites might not like day-traders and tourists, their little hamlet goes broke in ten seconds without their money.  Drivers from Fulton, Gwinnett, Cobb, Tucker, Stone Mountain and Conyers are going to be going to or through Decatur, and there’s little anyone there can do about it.

I imagine that aggro driver A will be aggro-ing down Ponce, and they see the car in front of them with a pace car sticker on their windshield; they now have visual confirmation of a car that must be passed, and has pledged to go the speed limit or less to the griefing of others, and they are undoubtedly going to exorcise their ability to do so.

Road rager B is having a bad day, and they’re sitting through three cycles of lights at Scott and Claremont, and they inch their way up to find out that some dork with a pace car sticker is the one not taking the right on red, and they go ballistic at seeing someone whom they believe is really just using the pace car designation as a means to troll others on the road.  Words are exchanged, and because Georgia has looser gun rights than abortion rights, ammunition is exchanged next, and we’ve got our top story on My Fox 5 Atlanta for the evening.

Or my favorite hypothetical, Decatur White Knight C pledges to the pace car program, and although they do god’s work while within city proper, once they’re outside of Decatur, they themselves are driving around like a dick, unleashing all the aggression they suppress while cockblocking motorists on their home turf.  Be it through getting into an altercation on their own, or pissed off rager D sees a pace car outside of Decatur and wants to start shit, they get in a massive accident, footage of a demolished car on I-285 is on WSB-TV, but with the City of Decatur pace car sticker still intact and in plain sight.

The point is, Decatur-ites who think it’s their place to be heroes and saviors and enforcers of their fair city’s streets, really are putting their own lives at risk.  It’s pretty bold of the city to be willing to throw their own citizens into the fire by basically allowing anyone to volunteer, and I just don’t see a long game where this turns out to be successful.

The intentions are good, but the program doesn’t seem to have been well thought out thoroughly enough, and I don’t have a lot of high hopes for this program not blowing up their face in some fashion(s).  And for that, I simply say, oh Decatur.

Oh, Atlanta #285

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

WSB-TV: Georgia Department of Transportation wants to hear from the pleebs about something that they’re probably 20% already initiated into the project, adding express (read: pay) lanes to the top half of I-285

Shade aside, if there’s one thing that I’ve learned about the way the world works, is that when a big entity, be it a company, agency or local or even national government tries to look democratic and get feedback from the people in regards to a proposed project, it’s all just a formality and done for optics, photo-ops and public appearance.  I’d say probably 80% of the time, the projects are already underway, and the public is being tapped to hopefully identify and shortcomings or oversights, but with the guise of pretending like they care about the opinions of the rest of the poors.

That being said, nobody’s going to convince me that GDOT hasn’t already gotten the ball rolling in regards to adding Peach Pass lanes to the top half of 285, and that they’re tapping into the public at this juncture just to get a feel for public sentiment, with the idea of pivoting or adjusting the direction of the new lanes based on public opinion.

I’m just curious to know where the fuck these magical extra lanes are going to be built, or if they’ll just cannibalize the far-left lanes of existing I-285 and make them Peach Pass only.  It doesn’t take a genius to identify that there’s basically zero space in between the two directions of I-285, so adding extra lanes on the left doesn’t really seem realistic, unless they add them onto the right, and shift everything down, but that would basically necessitate colossal road work to probably 34 miles worth of highway, feeding the narrative that GDOT is completely incapable of leaving well enough alone, and is always working on something at any given time to all but guarantee that Atlanta’s traffic is among the worst in the nation.

Either way, regardless of if the project is or isn’t actually already started, it’s definitely going to happen if it’s already gotten this far, to ask for public opinion, and I think it’s a dumb one all the same.  It’s like city planners or GDOT schmucks have never played an iteration of Sim City at any point in their careers, and never learned that adding moar lanes of roads is never the solution, and only investing in rail or alternative means of infrastructure do cities really grow, flourish and liberate themselves from the rat race of cars and roads.

Besides, even if and when moar Peach Pass lanes are added, it’s not like the city will actually do anything about the inevitable legions of violators that use them without tags.  Last time I heard about the problem with violators is that there were well over six figures worth of violations that were left unpaid, and that was many moons ago, so I would wager that there are probably well over a million dollars by now in Peach Pass violations that will go uncollected.  So that’s kind of like a double fail that will result if and when Peach Pass lanes are added to I-285, but hey, maybe one more lane is what the City of Atlanta really needs in order to unlock the gridlock that many of us suffer on a regular basis.

Zuck may be a tool, but I respect what he’s doing with his physical life

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I don’t know where or why I was shown it, but I saw a picture of Zuck without a shirt on at some MMA event, and I had a wtf moment at just how jacked the dorky motherfucker now is.  Whenever his name pops up somewhere, my mind automatically fills in the visual of Jesse Eisenberg’s portrayal of him in The Social Network, but with his doofy looking head with his buggy-looking eyes instead.

But in reality now, we’ve got a pretty athletic looking guy with budding muscle definition and a growing amount of jiu-jitsu training, because from what I understand it’s pretty much the only thing he does when he’s not being a corporate stooge these days.  Zuck is absolutely becoming a problem in that he’s a rich go-zillionaire, but is also developing the physique and the skillset to be able to fight, and that automatically knocks about 85% of the people who hate him for being who is off their pedestals of wishing they could bully him or intimidate him in a real-life fantasy altercation.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t particularly care much for the guy, but I will freely admit that I respect what he’s doing with his body.  Think about all the billionaires and millionaires out there that are fat, soft and doughy, and all shaped like pears.  Because of their wealth, they’ve simply given up on trying at all when it comes to their bodies, because they can just continuously throw money at things until they get a positive result.

But Zuck, it’s like he revolves his day around his working out and BJJ training, and that running theFacebook or Meta or whatever the fuck company is making him infinite money is basically a nuisance of a day job that is interfering with his ability to train.  When he’s not practicing grappling, he’s most definitely got a nutritionist and personal trainers who ensure that his body becomes sculpted and is in optimal shape, and I have to give props that the man is actually investing a little bit of his wealth into his own physical well-being, because there are so many in similar positions to him that absolutely do not.

I mean, it’s exactly what I would do if I were infinitely rich and didn’t have to work anymore.  I’d have both a personal chef as well as a personal trainer to make sure I got adequate exercise with physical goals in mind, as well as being fed healthy food that doesn’t suck or get exhausted with.

And then I’d get hardcore into wood working or restoring cars, and building my Nissan Sil-Eighty because that is still something that I really would like to do in my life, and when I hit the points of progress where I can humblebrag about the things I’m working on, I won’t look like a fat fucking slob that people would look at and overshadow the quality of my work because they’re too busy laughing at me.  I guarantee, that the more jacked and competent that Zuck gets with his training, the less fuel the troglodytes of the internet have to clown on him whenever his name pops up in the future.