Tag: ohatlanta

Better Drivers. Doesn’t Matter. Papa Atlanta Roads.

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

WSB: Papa Johns semi truck crashes, overturns on I-75, causes massive traffic jams

Not a whole lot to add to this.  It’s been a while since I wrote about a good old fashioned truck crash on the highways, but I’m disappointed to see that it wasn’t one of those catastrophes that ended with pizzas all over the place, scattered all over the highways, and all over the medians and shoulders.

Considering the fact that this happened right at the doorstep of Kennesaw State University, a budding commuter college in the Metro Atlanta area that has slowly been creeping upward over the last few years, probably buoyed by the gradual improvements and successes of their athletic program, there would’ve been an easy joke about how it was probably some broke boy college kids going all Fast & Furious on a pizza truck, hoping to score some free pizza, as if nobody would suspect the nearby college on whom could have done it.

No, I’m actually pretty familiar the location of this particular one, because I’ve had to drive north on I-75 for work related purposes a bunch of times, and there’s a specialist I’ve had to go to a few times in like Acworth, so I know the exact spot where this happened.

Although the lanes do merge up around here from a prior exit as well as being an access point for the toller-coaster Express lanes, everything is pretty straight, which makes it puzzling to how a semi can get into such a catastrophe where they end up overturned and halfway buried into the wall.  Then again, never underestimate the incompetence of the vast majority of people on the roads, because there’s no conditions where someone can’t somehow end up gravely injured or dead, in even the most seemingly safe road conditions.

But really, what spurred this post to fruition is that whenever I hear the name Papa Johns, I think about the photo and ensuing memes that basically murdered his career with the company that was named after him, where he was spotted blitzed drunk out of his mind at a basketball game, and hanging off of two college bros like he were Weekend at Bernie’s.  Even though this happened like an eon ago at this point, some people never forget, and it’s what always comes to mind whenever I think of the brand.

That said, as mentioned before, not a whole lot to add, not a whole lot else to write about this.  Wish there was some more of a catastrophic wreck where cargo was strewn about, but such was unfortunately not the case.

Like sending gorillas to do custodial work

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

That’s the best analogy that comes to mind when I think about the bright idea to send ICE agents to Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson Intergalactic Spaceport, Nail Salon and Chicken Tender Museum in order to assist with crowd control and the nightmare scenario where the vast majority of TSA agents are no-showing because they’re not getting paid.  Sure, they’re marginally capable of perhaps doing some base job functions like staring at people menacingly while behind a gaiter and holding an automatic firearm so that people think twice about trying to cut any lines and shave an hour off their wait, but there’s a higher possibility that these ICE clowns make things worse, escalate a situation, and there’s probably going to be more arrests and possibly deaths, before any progress or civility is restored to the airport.

I’m just really glad that I don’t have any upcoming flight bookings coming up, because I’d probably punt on any airline travel I have coming up if it required me to go through ATL right now, because it doesn’t seem to matter when people are rolling up to the airport these days, the waits just seem to grow commensurate to how early people are showing up.

Mythical wife and I are current with The Pitt, and the most recent episode introduced a sub plot where two ICE agents bring a woman set to be detained to the ER, because she was most likely injured during a raid that they conducted.  And the presence of ICE in at the hospital passively makes all sorts of minority staff, patients and waiting patients to peace the fuck on out of the Pitt.

When Doctor Robbie tells them to stay the fuck to themselves and not be meandering around, they basically roid rage and attempt to interrupt the treatment of their detainee and send her to detention without treatment, with no regard for her injuries, and when an RN intervenes, he gets taken down and arrested as well, and in classic Pitt logic, there is no situation that cannot be made worse, somehow.

I feel like this is exactly what’s going to happen at ATL, with ICE wandering around the airport now.  All sorts of Hispanic and other minority would-be passengers will see them lurking around, and decide it’s not worth getting targeted and possibly detained and shipped off to a concentration camp detention center, and slip on out of the airport and ironically, ICE will have assisted in relieving the congestion of humanity at the airport, slightly, but seeing as how this was probably also the intention of the whole plan, it begins to grow the narrative that airline travel is becoming more of a white privilege than it already is.

Regardless, it’s just sad, laughable, and endlessly pathetic to see the state of, well, everything these days.  ICE agents trying to do TSA functions is like asking gorillas to do custodial work, at first they’d probably show remote capability of the bases of functions, but ultimately something is going to set them off, and ragey, power-tripping violence is going to be inevitable.

The craziest part about all these airport nightmares is that the guy sitting in the White House was named like 3,000+ times in the Epstein Files.

You can’t spell METALHEAD without ATL

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Fox Atlanta: robot dogs deployed in Castleberry Hill to deter criminal activity

Among my favorite episodes of Black Mirror, METALHEAD is among the tops.  The cinematography, the atmosphere, the clever black and white presentation, but most importantly the plot of sentient evil robot dogs that were absolutely relentless killers of humanity was intriguing as it was terrifying.

Needless to say, if people didn’t have fear of the idea of robotic dogs before watching METALHEAD, they probably will afterward.

And in spite of the oft-utilized plot of robots achieving sentience and then turning on their creators in various books, shows, films and other media, humanity continues to insist that such is just fiction, and continues to solder forward building robots and artificial intelligence, all in the name of fucking themselves in a different manner. 

Out in like Boston, we’ve got robot dogs the size of deer running around already, and they’ve made robots that can basically do ninja warrior courses and moonsaults already.  And they’ve already shown glimpses of hurting humans, with one classic clip of a robot kicking a grown man in the nuggets.

Anyway, apparently in a neighborhood in Downtown Atlanta, they’ve decided to play with fire, and have deployed robot dogs to run security at an apartment complex.  In a way, I get it, Castleberry Hill is a rooouuugh part of town that looks nice in the daytime, but is a pretty statistically high-crime zone once the sun goes down.  And if humans have proven ineffective at providing security solutions in the neighborhood throughout the years, may as well seek alternate options, even if it meant unleashing potentially lethal-when-they’re-activated robot dogs to keep an eye out on the streets.

For the time being, they don’t have the firepower that Metalhead dogs do, and they’re probably not (yet) programmed to do whatever is necessary in order to snuff out human life, like hijacking cars and equipping themselves with kitchen cutlery, but one of two things are going to happen:

  1. Their cameras and surveillance capabilities will do a moderately decent job of deterring criminals, encouraging others throughout Atlanta to get on board with moar robot dogs
  2. Those criminals who are not deterred by robot dogs will open fire on, capture and hack, harm, or hijack them, leading to the manufacturer of these robot dogs to evolve and grow them into more closer to Metalhead dogs, with weapons, defensive capabilities, which could just as easily be construed as offensive capabilities, like being able to hijack cars and equipping themselves with kitchen cutlery, which will then encourage people in Atlanta to get moar robot dogs

What would be cool if they had now, is if like the Metalhead dogs, they had the ability to stick trackers onto crooks, with those little explosives with tracking shrapnel in them, so they could run up to criminals, pop a tracker bomb, and much like Metalhead dogs, get them embedded into perps to where they have no choice but to painfully cut them out or be absolutely boned as far as being able to be hunted down.  Could probably lead to some impressive busts when low-tier perps lead the fuzz back to their superiors.

Ultimately, it becomes this cycle of robot dogs coming, crooks harming them, until we get to #1, and moar and moar of these fucking robot dogs are unleashed all over Atlanta, all in the name of safety and security.  But really we’re all signing our own death warrants because once the signal from SkyNet is broadcast out, and all the robots dogs go all Terminator on humanity, we’re all fucked, and it starts in Atlanta.

I kind of really fucking hate Nike right now

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

When I first heard about the special edition Kirkland x Nike collaboration Dunks, my knee-jerk reaction was along the lines of, lol look at these ultimate dad shoes, followed immediately by, I want them, because I’m a fan of Dunks in general given their visual proximity to Jordan 1’s which are still in my opinion the pinnacle of sneakers in history.

Originally, they were slated to have been released “Holiday 2025,” is what sneaker news cited, and I remember thinking that there couldn’t be a more perfect thing to redeem the $180~ cashback certificate I had been sitting on all through 2025.  That is, if I could even get a fighting chance to get my hands on a pair, because according to sneakerhead culture, these were picking up heat at potentially being the most demanded shoe in history, depending on whom you asked, but the point remained that the demand for these was going to be really high, and therefore, difficult to get.

I was hoping that my one saving grace was that being a Costco Executive member, the early hour perk could be my only chance at being able to get a shot at these.  But as Holiday 2025 approached, came, and then went, without there being any news of these moving forward, it became apparent and then confirmed that the Kirkland Dunks were a no-go, and that there was no clue to when they were going to drop, if they ever were.

And then of course, without any warning, they suddenly dropped, but in like, seven Costcos in the nation, most of them being on the west coast.  Naturally, once word got around, they were all gone, and are already up on resale sites for 3-4x the MSRP of $134.  Of course, Atlanta was not included in this initial drop, but scuttlebutt left it vague enough that these could potentially start rolling out in other Costcos across the nation, and my hope that Atlanta being a large enough market to be one of these supposed future drop locations could be there began rising again.

Over the span of the last week, I’d actually been checking the Costco not too far from my office right at 9 am on a daily basis, which might actually be the closest one to City of Atlanta proper, hoping to be lucky enough to luck into one of these purported “shock drops” which is a term I’m beginning to loathe considering the ambiguous and unpredictable chance that I’d even get to have a fighting chance at acquiring the ultimate dad shoes, and despite the fact that I still want a pair, underneath it all, I’m really fucking hating Nike as a company for these bullshit tactics, obviously deliberately done for absolutely no other reason than to create buzz, demand and all sorts of other intangible bullshit reasons that would be completely useless in a post-apocalyptic world once the zombie virus ravages humanity.

It’s frustrating, because they’re oft-called dad shoes, but any dad in my circumstances has almost no chance at getting them.  I’d frankly pay a higher MSRP if there was a chance that I could lock in a pair, or there were at least some concrete fucking information on when these would be available and I could have a fighting chance, but it’s the ambiguity and lack of information and transparency that’s been the killer of this whole debacle.

But all the same, I still want them.  And the thing is, it’s not even really so much that I want them as dad shoes that I can make beaters, these things have gotten to the point of where if I were to successfully nab a pair, I’m not even sure I’d even wear them given their increasing status as some kind of rare loot drop.  But I just want to feel a win, at succeeding at some small lottery type of victory, because my life has been pretty devoid of those over the last few years, and I think it would do my personal morale some good to feel special and lucky in any manner that doesn’t come from my children.

On that same token, on the very high likelihood that I do not succeed, it’s just going to make me really more resentful towards Nike as a company, which won’t necessarily cause me to full boycott, seeing as how I have a few pairs of J’s that I still enjoy, but still curse their existence whenever the topic of sneakers comes into play, although I wouldn’t rule out purchasing future product if they fit my fancy.

The irony of remote work

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

At the time I’m writing this, pretty much all schools in the Metro Atlanta area have been declared closed on Monday, on account of the arrival of Icepocalypse.  Mythical wife and the girls are excited because it’s now turned into at least a three-day weekend, and therefore will get to spend another day in jammies and not having to leave the house.

However, as for myself, despite the fact that the my office building may be or may not be closed, the fact of the matter is that I will still have to work, because, I can.  Remote work has given everyone the ability to work outside of the workplace, but that also means that all of us capable of remote work are no longer capable of using inclimate weather as an excuse to not come into the office, and thus have a bonus day off, like everyone else in my house can.

I remember like a decade ago when Snowpocalypse ravaged Atlanta with its one inch of city-crippling, debilitating snow, I got like an entire week of work off because of it.  One, because I worked for the government, and government needs absolutely no excuse at all to shut the fuck down and not work, but two, because work then was done solely in the office, and if the office is close and incapable of being gotten to, then there’s no work to do.

Make no mistake, COVID-19 revealing to the world that just about everyone is capable of working remotely was somewhat of a blessing.  Without such, I wouldn’t have gotten nearly the bonus time that I did have to raise my kids at their earliest stages, and I wouldn’t have been able to be nearly as flexible in my job performances without the ability to work from home. 

But in a rare ironic sense, WFH also sucks in the sense that in the onset of shitty winter weather, I won’t be able to phone it in and get a bonus day off like those in particular fields will be getting for at least one or more days, because I’ll simply be able to log in and do my work from afar.

I wouldn’t trade it in for full in-office work for a second, but it’s something to brog about, how ironic it is of one fairly unintentional drawback to remote work.

This guy would make a killing in Atlanta, or be killed

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

The Sun: Bay Area man, proclaiming to be a ‘squatter remover’ uses swords among other forceful tactics to help clients evict squatters

Back when I lived on the south side of town, there were a ton of homes that were foreclosed on in my neighborhood, resulting a tremendous amount of abandoned properties all through the subdivision.  It was harrowing going onto Zillow and seeing just how many red dots that were all over my entire community signifying all the available properties, where clicking on any of them made it pretty clear that almost all of them were available on account of foreclosures.

However, the problem became when the properties stopped being vacant, and people started moving into them – and in most cases, not legally.  Even one of the homes adjacent to me, suddenly had people I didn’t recognize going in and out of the home, at odd hours of the day, and one of the weirder behaviors I noticed was one guy sitting in the backyard with a laptop, and looking back at this if I had to guess was probably because the inside of the house had no power or air conditioning or something, or maybe they were trying to leech off of my wi-fi.

Squatters probably occupied more of the neighborhood than legitimate residents at one point, and was/is probably the primary reason why the entire neighborhood went to shit as rapidly as it did.  I remember doing some Zillow-hunting on the aforementioned adjacent property to mind, and found out that it was owned by a bank or some investment company, with an address not even close to being in Georgia, which made it fairly obvious that I had squatters living next door to me.

Ordinarily I really wouldn’t care if they were discreet and kept to themselves, but unfortunately there was no discretion from those who lived there, and they would have like four cars crammed into the driveway with another two parked on the street, and trash strewn all over the yard.  If not for the fact that our houses were on a hill, with me having the higher ground, their shit would have undoubtedly blew onto my property which would have been more problematic than they already were, but the point was that it sucked having squatters next door.

Cursory research will show that squatters have an extremely inordinate amount of rights and protections throughout the country as it pertains to legally removing them properties that they illegally began occupying in the first place.  It has nothing to do with being left or right leaning, for whatever reasons, squatters basically have some of the most ridiculously concrete iron-clad rights there are, and it’s fucked up that legal owners of properties have literally no other choice but to acquiesce to squatter rights lest they risk crossing legal lines and committing crimes, in spite of the fact that they’re just trying to solve situations cause by other people committing crimes.

Really, the only (legal) options are grind out the legal process and eventually get the law to demand that they vacate the property, lest they be charged with criminal trespass, they leave on their own volition, but usually not before they trash the place to oblivion, or they are, coerced, to vacate the property, and the owner(s) or their proxies can secure it upon exit.

This is where the Bay Area squatter remover guy comes in – I have to say I love the story of this guy, and I wish more people like him existed and provided services all throughout the country, because squatting is something that I imagine is a very rampant problem across the nation and not just exclusively limited to major metropolitan areas like San Francisco or Atlanta.

And it’s just riotous that it’s apparent that his personal signature is the fact that he goes around with a real katana, and claims that it’s actually used in his line of work, and I like to imagine a guy who clearly has seen The Matrix five too many times confronting a squatter with live steel, brandishing and waving it around like a Mortal Kombat character, threatening some crooks to get the fuck out of the home they’re squatting in.

The guy boasts a 95% success rate, so it’s funny that he clearly manages to infiltrate these squatter homes, and by virtue of waving around his katana at people, he’s getting them to vacate the premises at a high clip and helping property owners reclaim their rightful properties.

I would’ve loved to have seen this guy in action in my old hood, and if the owners of the properties even cared about their investments, they would’ve just sent this guy on endless loops around the neighborhood, evicting deadbeat squatters left and right.  But at the same token, I’d imagine Atlanta to be a vastly more dangerous part of the country than the pussy Bay Area is, and he’d probably be up against way more heavily armed squatters, and willing to put up way more resistance.

As the subject says, katana guy would either make a real killing out in Atlanta, or just end straight up killed, but either way I love this guy’s idea and entrepreneurial spirit at putting in the work of evicting squatters on his own shoulders.

Oh, Atlanta #897

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Urbanize Atlanta: legendary gentleman’s club/piece of iconic real estate aka The Cheetah to become lame student housing for Georgia Tech

A long time ago, when I moved back out to the ‘burbs, I had a moment of feeling that I would miss living and/or working within the city.  There was a piece of me that felt some sort of importance to have proximity to the city in order to have a feel for the pulse of it, and that residing outside of it would make me lose touch with all the news and happenings within Atlanta city proper.

Sure, it is accurate to say that I’ve lost touch with the general, boots-on-the-ground minutiae of the city, but it’s still entirely possible to keep up with the general main happenings in and around the city by virtue of, the internet.  There are plenty of sites and outlets that do a good job of keeping me abreast to stuff like restaurants and events, not that I have a tenth of the extroverted desires to go out in the world anymore for the most part.

But when the day is over, I just don’t really give a shit anymore about needing to know much about what’s going on in the city like I used to.  I don’t miss going into the city, and I feel no real need to have a finger on the pulse of it anymore.  The pandemic only accelerated this detachment from things, but it’s like every time I do go into the city, I’m always surprised to see new things, and alterations to the general city skyline, primarily within a 2-mile radius around Georgia Tech; encapsulating Midtown, and the at some point-christened West Midtown neighborhoods.

In the past, I used to work pretty much right next to The Cheetah, right in Tech Square.  There was a break room that I used to sit in to eat my lunch that had a window that looked right out onto Spring Street, and The Cheetah, and not much else, because at the time there was only a giant-ass dead lot that was used for pay parking.

I’ve never really been one for strip clubs, since there’s little more of a turn off knowing that the broads prancing around trying to separate you from your cash, resent your existence by being there, and a headcase like me needs to have some degree of emotional connection in order for my wires to heat up.  But all the same, I always respected the existence of The Cheetah, as it was kind of an icon of the city, often in the same breath as other notorious locations in the city like The Clermont Lounge, Murder Kroger, Center Stage, Little Five Points, etc.

Plus, I really enjoyed it when I found a random $20 bill on the sidewalk while I was passing by, and it helped contribute to my very first iPad acquisition way back in the day.

But in spite of my general ambivalence for strip clubs, it did give me a case of meh-face when I learned that The Cheetah was next on the city’s chopping block in order to make room for more lame student housing.  Like, there are so many other dilapidated and/or useless plots of land remotely close to Georgia Tech that could make for land for student housing as opposed to sacrificing The Cheetah.  And it’s not like over the span of the last decade there aren’t like 5-6 other new student housing buildings that have popped up to house all these Georgia Tech nerds.

I dunno, it just leaves me feeling sour, knowing that Atlanta seems to slowly be sacrificing all of the little quirks and idiosyncrasies that made Atlanta, Atlanta, the way they keep cannibalizing shit with character for boring ass shit like moar student housing, egregiously priced condominiums, or corporate headquarters.  It’s like they’re going to run out of insufferably elevated words and names to use for all these soulless towers at the rate they’re going, and the last time I was in the city, for a wrestling show at Center Stage, there were literally two new apartment towers that had sprouted up that weren’t there just months prior.

When the day is over, I’m not going to lose any sleep over the demise of The Cheetah.  But it’s stuff like this that makes it easier to reinforce the notion that I don’t miss being in the city or needing to be close to the city, at all.  Almost all of the restaurants I used to like to go to are all gone, and little landmarks that I could always give people ten-cent tours over are all being razed for boring shit.  It makes me sad knowing that the city that I do rep is voluntarily forfeiting their character and charm, over the need for a bunch of useless and aesthetically soulless real estate that contributes very little to the long-term life of Atlanta.