Tag: cars

Thanksgiving musings and perspectives

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

For the Thanksgiving holiday this year, my house trekked north back up to Virginia to spend some time with my side of the family.  Such was always something I was pretty ambivalent about in the past, but ever since I had kids, I do feel that there is some importance in having them have connection with my side of the family, not to mention try to build relationships with the litany of cousins they have, as I did growing up.

Overall, it was a very good trip, and I’m happy to have spent a good bit of time with my sister, cousins and parents, but most of all, I was happiest that my kids got to spend time with their cousins and my family members and be able to build relationships and connections with family that they don’t get to see too often.  My happiest memories looking back on the trip were seeing my kids playing exuberantly with their cousins, and I’m thankful for my niece, nephew and the kids of my cousins all being so good to my children, and I’m optimistic that they can have a similar upbringing to my own, where the cousins all were pretty tightly knit growing up.

However, an introduction like this doesn’t happen if there weren’t some things that weren’t positive, and unfortunately for this holiday there were some bad things that definitely put a damper on things.

Firstly, to cut to the chase, I hit a deer while driving, and my car suffered a nasty crack on the bumper as well as the headlight assembly.  I was driving along a road that I’d driven thousands of times in my life while living there, and I’d never seen deer on this stretch of road before.  I was probably going no faster than 25-28 mph while accelerating when the deer popped out of a grassy median and it was so bang-bang fast that I was a good 200 feet past and continuing before it really registered what had happened.

The thing is, while on the drive up, I distinctly remembered having a thought about just how many dead deer I had seen on the shoulders all over I-85 in southern Virginia, and how I really should keep my guard up while driving at night on this trip.  But as I said, this was a stretch of road that was long developed, not very close to any real wooded areas where deer might like to reside in, and where I’d never seen deer before in my life.  So my guard was definitely not up at this moment in time, and it just figures that would be when my premonition came to fruition, and I plastered the poor animal.

I replayed the moment in my head countless times at this point and the thing is, I’m not mad at the deer or the species as a whole, like I might’ve been in the past for putting me in this situation.  Northern Virginia is an endlessly developing area, and it’s a no brainer that the constant sprawl and development in Fairfax county and surrounding areas are displacing the wildlife all over, and next thing I know I’m hitting deer in a place where I’d never seen deer before in my life.

What I am thankful for is the fact that nobody in my car was hurt, and to my knowledge nobody behind me appeared to be hurt, as I was the first car in the line of cars turning onto the road, and it looked like there were plenty of braking going on behind me.  My kids were little zombies watching the iPad, so they didn’t notice anything but the sound of impact and the bump of me running it over, and didn’t seem to care because they were too busy watching Little Einsteins.  This wasn’t a conversation that I would’ve wanted to have had, so I take it as a win, on all accounts.

Additionally, despite looking pretty nasty when I originally did stop, when I got to my cousin’s place, we were able to pop the initial dent back out, which was a big victory, as it was pushing the wheel liner into contact with the tire, and there was initial talk about cutting it off in order to remain drivable.  A little duct tape and a few zip ties, and my car was safe enough to have made the return trip to Georgia, to where its repair is now on the table in coming weeks.

Here’s the thing though-as much as something like this probably would have tanked the entire trip for me in the past, I realized that there were so many other victories to be had given the circumstances, that the main L taken that will cost actual money and likely aggravation of playing car Tetris or a rental didn’t seem so bad.  Plus, when I got back to my cousin’s place, dinner was ready, two beers, a fire pit, reminiscing with my cousins while hearing the sound of my kids having a blast with their cousins really rescued the night and I like to think that this was all one of those, you know you’re maturing, kind of scenarios.

Also, waking up to the worst news possible of hearing of a passing of a loved one to my brother’s family really does knock everything else into a genuinely thankful perspective, on Thanksgiving.  Pretty much nothing can top that as far as bad news is concerned, but again, trying to find the silver lining in bad situations, given the circumstances of the departed’s final days, there’s probably a modicum of relief in knowing that they’re no longer in any pain or having to fight the good fight any longer.

As sad and heartbroken I felt for my brother’s family, it really did help put everything else into perspective about the things that myself and everyone else could genuinely be thankful for.  My kids were safe and unaware of the deer situation, most everyone in my family was in good health.  I got to spend some time with my parents with my kids, and I’m glad that my kids have interactions and memories with them, because I can count on one hand how many times I’ve seen a grandfather in my life.

Even the whole car debacle afforded me a bonus good memory, because when I took the car on a shakedown ride to make sure it was safe at highway speeds and cornering, I took the opportunity while I was alone to pop by a close friend’s house to say hi and wish them a happy Thanksgiving.

The drive back was long, and doing Richmond to Atlanta was the longest stretch that my kids had ever had to endure in the car, but equipped with a lot of snacks and an iPad full of downloaded shows, they did great.  My only gripe is the feeling of being a glorified Uber driver, since I have to focus on driving, and none of my adult passengers can get their heads off of their phones to actually converse or be remotely the types of passengers to help a ride not feel so long.

But as a whole, I still look back at Thanksgiving positively.  My kids had a great time with my family, and I was happy to catch up with everyone who came to dinner, and I can only hope that future family gatherings in the future will be as good as this one was, but hopefully with no more deer incidents.

Strange, but not entirely unsurprising

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

There’s this house I sometimes pass on my way to work, if I decide to take a certain route.  I’ve always noticed it for a variety of reasons; it was clearly a home where the property was purchased, and a lot of money was sunk into changing the landscaping of the property tremendously, as well as some modifications to the home itself.  In short, the landscaping of the property, behind the metal picket fence, is very ornate and kind of looks like Mr. Miyagi designed the property, based on the lush greenery and non-traditional (read: not white people) aesthetics.

There was one day I drove past, and the garage was open, and I noticed that they had a red NSX, which aren’t necessarily my favorite cars, but they are pretty rare in this day and age, so the fact that they had one, which looked to be in pretty immaculate state is still noteworthy and memorable.  Furthermore, they also had a Kei-truck, which I’ve heard are no longer legally approved to be imported to Georgia anymore, not sure how that goes, but again, having one of those also makes a property stand out. 

Because they’re clearly a giant weeb.

So color me a little surprised that one day driving by this home, and there’s a Trump/Vance sign in front of their house, also surreptitiously planted after the election.  It’s just like a, strange juxtaposition of personal interests and political preferences, to see a home clearly resided by a giant weeb who’s all into Japanese automotive, Japanese landscaping and architecture, but then is also into right-wing bigot ideology.

I actually don’t know the nationality of the person who lives in this property, but I have to assume it’s a white guy based on the sign alone, but I also wouldn’t be surprised if it were an actual Japanese-American, probably of the older variety who immigrated legally in ancient times and harbors a lot of angst towards illegal immigrants and is drunk on the kool aid. 

But really, I’m thinking it’s probably just some white jarhead who is probably a veteran, lived in Japan for a little while, fell in love with stuff like their cars, aesthetics, but eventually came back to America, got drunk on the orange kool aid, but was still all into Japanese shit, not grasping the irony of their preferences versus their political brainwashing.

Either way, I figured the person living there was just a dorky weeb, but now I definitively know that the person living there is bigot, on top of being a dorky weeb.  Hashtag ‘murica.

Jaguar’s new logo = Publix Supermarkets

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Trent Crimm, The Independent: Jaguar unveils new branding and logo and the crowd goes mild but eventually more into ire

I don’t particularly care much for Jaguar as far as cars go, they’ve always been a little pretentious and overrated as far as my tastes are concerned, but I also wouldn’t put them in the category of cars that I wouldn’t ever get if I had the means necessary.  Their aesthetics aren’t really my cup of tea, but I can like what I see on a paper when it comes to performance specs.

That being said, put me in the camp of people whose interest in the car company most definitely trended downward upon seeing their rebranding.  Jaguar becoming JaGUar, with this absolute masterclass of horseshit spinning from their corresponding press release:

seamlessly blended upper and lower case characters in visual harmony”

Nah, of course it’s not as cerebral as that.  The designer, and I use that term loosely, didn’t like the way the lowercase G looked and didn’t like the extra stroke that the lower case U had and went with upper case variants which looked more seamless; and then the right VPs, with their wealth of artistic credibility, happened to like the way it looked, gave it the green light, and away we go.

Looking at it made me immediately think about Publix Supermarkets’ logo and possibly the Beats by Dre identity,* but mostly Publix, and it always amazes me when the brand designers of the world don’t really take any time to research the logos of the world and take a modicum of effort to not look like someone else’s identity.  Because then rogue designers like me can’t clown on them and make the easy swap of logo into what they really look like, and if I’m someone with any clout, or at least tempted to try and engage Publix on social media and post this graphic just to see their reaction.

*also there’s this regional adult store chain that also utilizes a similar typeface that I always see billboards for while driving to Disney World that is somewhat related to the jaguar animal kekeke

All the same, it’s kind of sad.  I might not have been that high on Jaguar as a brand, but their identity was pretty unmistakable, with the silhouette of the jaguar leaping over a fairly nondescript bold all-caps wordmark.  But there’s this overarching cry in the design community, that modern branding is all metamorphosizing into a very diluted pool of vanilla “safe” logos that are all looking the same and homogenized into these blobs of non-personality.  Serifs and symbols have become enemies, variations of Helvetica Neue and Gotham are overtaking visual identities everywhere, and with JaGUar’s rebranding, another long-standing reputable brand has deliberately chosen to converge with the masses and adopt a boring, vanilla, forgettable identity, once the initial reactions and internet ridicule all die down.

That being said, I think it’s only a matter of time before JaGUar releases some turd on wheels that’s a hybrid crossover CUV that looks just like a Corolla Cross or a Buick Encore, and then we will truly know that JaGUar has really given up on trying to compete in the market as much as they’re just trying to blend in and hide in plain sight.

I mean with a logo that looks like this, they’re already halfway there.

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.