Opinion

By Mike Ruffin

As I write these words about a week before you’re reading them, the Atlanta Braves are seven and a half games ahead of the Philadelphia Phillies in the battle for the National League Eastern Division pennant. The Braves’ magic number (the combination of Braves’ wins and Phillies’ losses that would give the Braves the championship) is 10.
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I visited Chicago once. It was winter. It wasn’t even warm in my hotel room. I was glad to get out of there. Two things come to my mind when I think of Chicago: murder and Lewis Grizzard’s quip that he was “held hostage” there when he went temporarily insane and took a job with the Chicago Tribune.
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By Mike Ruffin

Sometimes before a worship service in which I’m going to preach, I’ll tell the folks staffing the soundboard, “Try to make me sound better than I am.” We share a laugh. But I’m always suspicious that they’re thinking, “We would if we could!”

I don’t really mean it, though. I want my real voice to be heard. I furthermore want my real voice to reflect my real life.
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Our youngest, Livia Lanier, is now a freshman at UGA. She called one day last week to let us know she had gotten her football tickets for all the home games in Athens this fall. She was excited and with good reason.

Kirby Smart has exorcised all that remained from the Mark Richt era of underachievement. We need look no farther than last season when Smart took his team to the national title game in a year most of the pundits thought he would go 8-3 or something like that. [Full Story »] 

By Mike Ruffin

Whenever an election was approaching, my father, the late great Champ Ruffin, would tell me, “If you don’t exercise your right to vote, they’ll take it away someday.” He started telling me that long before I became eligible to vote in 1976.

I figured he was exaggerating to make his point, which was that I should vote. It turns out he wasn’t.
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Suddenly Stacey Abrams is the darling of the main stream media as she mounts her quest to become Georgia’s governor and the first black female governor in U.S. history. She has been endorsed by Barack Obama and Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton along with lesser lights like Kamala Harris.

The Democrat party and its usual minions will pour millions into the Abrams campaign in an effort to push her over the top in the race against Republican Brian Kemp. [Full Story »] 

I used to watch professional wrestling.

There, I said it, and I feel better.

Most of my viewing occurred way back before pro wrestling became the huge entertainment business it is now and before its scripted nature was publicly acknowledged. We’re talking the late 1960s, when I was ten or eleven years old.
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By Walter Geiger

Though August is only just about to begin, we are busy writing about and covering the start of school. Yes, I’m old but I never started a school year until after Labor Day.

In fact, opening day dove shoots on Labor Day weekend were something akin to the end of summer for us. As we cleaned birds, we knew we would be hitting the books soon.
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By Mike Ruffin

I was a professor at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee in the 1990s. We had a university-wide faculty meeting just before the beginning of each new school year. The president of the university would address us.

One year—it was probably 1994 or 1995—he said something like this: “Blockbuster Video is one of the great success stories of our time. And it will be gone in ten years.” He said this would happen because people would get their movies by other means, such as through delivery to their computers. I don’t remember him using the word “streaming,” but that’s what he was talking about.
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Watching the first two episodes of HBO’s ‘Sharp Objects’ has been a true education for me in that I was privy to some of the preparation and location scouting that preceded the filming of the series’ exterior scenes here last summer.

Early in the planning stages, I met with Dodd and Taylor Vickers who were location managers for the project and I saw up close how much work went into set preparation and set dressing. [Full Story »] 

By Mike Ruffin

As the sun arose on Sept. 14, 1814, a man on a ship several miles away from Fort McHenry, which guarded the Baltimore harbor, saw that the American flag still waved over it after many hours of British bombardment. Inspired by the sight, that man, whose name was Francis Scott Key, wrote the first verse of a poem that he later expanded to four verses. And thus was born what we know as “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
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They buried Oscar Wimberly the other day after an elaborate funeral service in which many of those whom he touched over his long athletic and coaching careers shared memories of the man known as Wimp.

Wimp was one of the first people I met when I moved to Barnesville in 1979. Suddenly I found myself writing about high school basketball and he was the master of that domain. I gathered his stats every Monday during the basketball season. Wimp was standoffish at first. It took time for him to warm up to you but when he did you had a friend for life.

I always enjoyed our visits. I was young. Wimp had forgotten more about basketball than I knew but I learned.

I loved the tale his lifelong friend Howard Glover shared at the funeral. Ballard and Hudson high schools in Macon had merged and the two of them were among about 150 boys trying out for the basketball team. There were 16 uniforms awaiting those who made it.
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By Mike Ruffin

Latin terms name the two basic choices we have when discussing, debating or arguing with someone.

We can use ad hominem arguments. Ad hominem literally means “to the man” (we would say “to the person”). Someone using an ad hominem argument attacks the other person rather than discuss the issue.
Our other option is to use ad rem arguments. [Full Story »] 

Though they are in storage now, the little signs that trigger my dismay will be back out soon as the General Primary runoff approaches. The wording on the signs does not approach good grammar.

They read ‘Advanced Voting’ and, yes, we have been through this before in this space. ‘Advanced’ voting would indicate some sort of new form of casting ballots that is in some way ‘advanced’ over the previous method. It could be bigger font sizes on the ballot, new technology or even massage chairs to sit in while casting your vote.
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