Day: November 12, 2018

Happy trails, Stan Lee

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

For all the years that I’d attended Dragon*Con, I always said that I needed to just bite the bullet and pay for a meet and greet with Stan Lee.  I’d shared elevators with him, and once was next to him while we, and a bunch of other onlookers watched as Marriott security tackled a drunk guy dressed as Captain Jack Sparrow as he was trying to elude them; he made a wisecrack about how he must’ve had too much rum, before walking off.

But I still wanted to get an actual good picture and a few seconds to meet one of the true godfathers of the comic book industry, a man that is unquestionably on the Rushmore of Comics.  And as a fan that favored Marvel over all others, there was really no greater name in the existence of comic books other than Stan Lee.

Over the last few years, as the passage of time aged Stan into his 90s, I proclaimed more often about the closing window of how I should do the meet and greet.  And then when Stan’s wife Joan passed in 2017, a little bit of urgency crept in.  Every nerd and/or comic fan on the planet knew that Stan Lee was not going to live forever, but considering he himself was in his 90s and that his wife had passed, that window was closing just a little bit more quickly than we’d all hoped.

Then there was the health scare not long afterward, and then the formal announcement that after the year, he would no longer be doing any more conventions or shows in general, and we all as fans definitively knew that the window was closing, and fast.  I knew immediately that Dragon*Con 2017 was my absolute last chance to try to meet the legend.

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Pretty sure we’ve done this before

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Add it to the list… or not?  Truck overturns on I-285 ramp to I-20, spilling eggs everywhere

I’m fairly certain this exact scenario has happened before.  Same location, same contents, same results.  Without an operational site, I can’t run a query to find out, but I’m like 90% sure that this isn’t the first time that a truck has overturned in Metro Atlanta, spilling eggs all over the place. [2020 note: it did]

If that is genuinely the case, get your shit together, Atlanta.  Start spilling some more unique things on the road, and not a rerun of something that happened in the past.

If I’m wrong, then I genuinely apologize for not glamorizing this incident as I would have done for things I definitively knew were brand new incident types, like when entire hams were tossed all over I-85 south.  But like I said, I’m pretty sure eggs have been done before.

Ultimately, the bigger issue is that truck drivers feel like Atlanta highways are their own personal Gran Turismos, and such assessments continuously bite them in the ass, based on the frequency in which trucks keep tipping over, regardless of what happens to their cargo, food or not.

This specific location where I-285 and I-20 meet on the east end of the perimeter has been the place where the vast majority of these maladies have occurred, and it makes me wonder if the Georgia Department of Transportation is going to consider any sort of action to reduce all these costly and wasteful mistakes, or if the onus really does remain on all these dumbass truck drivers who keep going too fast and crashing their shit all over the place.

Either way, try again trucks.  I demand some new shit to be spilled on the roads, like a Breyers truck, or maybe some Coca-Cola trucks, for the non-drinkers to have something to drink that isn’t one of the numerous times beer trucks have crashed on Atlanta roads.