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Opinion - Topics from January, 2020

Tall tales and memes

Posted by
Walter Geiger
in Opinion
Wednesday, January 29. 2020
With the growth and expansion of social media, memes have become more and more popular. Though there are serious memes, most are humorous and it dawned on me the other day they are the modern version of the tall tales of yesteryear.

Memes are everywhere - Facebook, Twitter and on various message boards. When a good one pops up, it spreads fast. Facebook is the birthplace of many memes though, like everything else there, they are full of poor grammar and pitiful spelling.

People routinely text or e-mail me memes they consider funny. One recently made me laugh out loud. It arrived the morning after an American drone took out Iranian terror leader Qassem Soleimani. It bore a picture of the general with the words ‘Last week nobody knew who he was. Got famous fast. Blew up overnight’.
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Wars and rumors of war

Posted by
Walter Geiger
in Opinion
Friday, January 24. 2020
By Mike Ruffin

War… What is it good for? Absolutely nothing!

Some of you will recognize those words, written by Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong,
from Edwin Starr’s 1970 hit single “War.” Released while the war in Vietnam was still raging, it was a bold anti-war statement.

Maybe we need to listen to it again.

I was twelve years old in 1970 when the song was blasting from radios and jukeboxes, so the possibility of my being drafted was six years away, which at that age seemed so far in the future that I could scarcely imagine it. As things turned out, by the time I turned eighteen, the draft had been abolished. In fact, I didn’t even have to register for the draft, as no men born between March 29, 1957 and December 31, 1959 were required to do so.
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Our Christmas miracle and the sweatshirt reminder

Posted by
Walter Geiger
in Opinion
Wednesday, January 15. 2020
By Laura Geiger

It’s every parent’s nightmare. Our daughter Livia had just called to tell me she was leaving Athens for Christmas break after a grueling week of final exams at the University of Georgia. “Be careful, the weather is terrible,” I said.

Thirty minutes later I got another phone call from her. She was crying. “Mama, I’m okay but I’ve been in a wreck – it wasn’t my fault – but my car is really messed up.”

“I’m on the way. Where are you?” She was outside Madison. It was Friday, Dec. 13 and it had been raining for days, saturating the roads and obscuring driving conditions.
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Possibilities

Posted by
Walter Geiger
in Opinion
Thursday, January 9. 2020
By Mike Ruffin

I was sitting in a classroom at Gordon Grammar School in the late 1960s, reading an article in my Weekly Reader about the future of space travel.

My fellow students and I were living through the era of pretty regular space missions. Our teacher would sometimes turn on the classroom’s big black-and-white television that sat atop the big stand that always looked to me as if it were ready to tip over from top heaviness so we could watch a rocket launch.

If I’m remembering the context correctly—it was a long time ago in a Barnesville far, far away, after all—I was reading the article at about the time of the Apollo 11 landing on the moon.

But this article was about what might come next, and what it suggested might come next was a program that would involve spacecraft that could go into space, come back to Earth, and then do it again. In fact, the article said, these vessels would be used over and over. Plans to develop such a craft, one main purpose of which would be to transport personnel to and from a planned permanent space station, were underway.
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