Opinion

By Walter Geiger
[email protected]

Sports fishermen and fishing guides who concentrate on inshore or flats fishing don’t care much for celebrity chef/restaurateur Emeril Lagasse. He has done well enough at the celebrity chef business that he is just Emeril - no last name needed. That puts him right up there with Herschel and Elvis, at least in some circles.

With all due respect to the late Julia Child, the first of the genre, I’m not much into cooking shows but I am into eating. One of my favorite dishes is blackened redfish. Emeril introduced that delicacy to the masses and, in just a few short months, the masses fell in love with it. This simple creation put Emeril on the map and blackened redfish began to appear on every upscale - and many low scale - menus around the world.

Suddenly, the lowly redfish, whom many had viewed as a trash fish for generations, was - sorry, Charlie - King of the Sea. Demand for redfish went up.

Commercial fishermen with long lines and nets targeted them in order to cash in on the craze and, you guessed it, redfish populations which had thrived since creation rapidly declined. [Full Story »] 

“The older you get, the colder you get.” Those words of wisdom - the only words of wisdom from him I remember - were imparted to me by Grandaddy Lonnie.

We were living in Ailey, Ga. at the time. We had a burn barrel behind the house for burning trash. It was a cold day and I had trash duty. Once upon a time, trash duty for me led to a wildfire in the adjoining broom sedge field but that is story for another day.
[Full Story »] 

By Mike Ruffin

I don’t remember my first haircut. I don’t know how old I was when it happened, but I have short hair in every picture of little me that exists, so I must have been real young.

I also don’t remember who gave it to me, but it was probably Mr. Spears, whose barbershop was located at the corner of Market Street and the Main Street alley. [Full Story »] 

By Walter Geiger

On one of the first really cold mornings of the winter, I walked out to my Jeep to head to work only to find it would not start. Dead as a doornail a they said back in the day.

I hooked my fancy charge box to the Jeep battery and it immediately took the box from near full charge down to 40%. Despite that power draw, the usually trusty Rubicon still would not start.

I arranged for alternative transportation and called for help. When I returned later in the afternoon, there was a new battery in the Jeep and it started right up so I drove it back to the office that evening. I worked for about 90 minutes before calling it quits. I headed into the cold night and, you guessed it, the new battery was likewise doing its doornail impression.

To paraphrase the shortest verse in the Bible, Walter cursed.
[Full Story »] 

By Mike Ruffin

In a recent service at the First United Methodist Church of Barnesville, Pastor Cyndi McDonald led us to remember our baptism. At the end of the service, she invited us to dip our hands in the water in the baptismal font as a way of doing so.

During her excellent sermon, Pastor Cyndi explained that Methodists baptize in three ways: sprinkling (which requires just a little water), pouring (which requires more water), and immersion (which requires a lot of water).

[Full Story »] 

By Walter Geiger

One day last week, I was performing my morning ritual of getting coffee from a local convenience store to enjoy at my desk while dealing with the daily assault of e-mail - mostly junk. I encountered a woman whom I thought was addressing me.

It turned out she was carrying on a phone conversation through some sort of Bluetooth device though I could see neither phone nor earbuds. She cavorted about the store speaking of things most of us would not think of uttering in public and was apparently oblivious to the fact everyone in the store could hear her. [Full Story »] 

By Mike Ruffin

1968 was a tough year. The Vietnam War was raging. Assassins struck down Dr. King and Sen. Kennedy. Riots tore apart major American cities. The divisions between people were sharp.

But something happened at the end of that year that showed us something we really needed to know. And many of us watched it on television.

I was ten years old, sitting on the floor in front of our nineteen-inch black and white television set in the little den of the little house on Memorial Drive. I joined millions of other people in watching the images of the moon’s surface being beamed to Earth by the astronauts aboard Apollo 8. I listened as the three explorers— Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders—read the opening verses of the creation poem found in the first chapter of the biblical book of Genesis.
[Full Story »] 

By Mike Ruffin

My Good Wife and I like to watch classic Christmas movies. Among our favorites are It’s a Wonderful Life, White Christmas, A Christmas Story, Elf, and National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.

We have a broad definition of “classic.”

The other night we turned our attention to an under-appreciated admittedly non-classic made-for-television film: A Very Brady Christmas (1988). That’s Brady as in The Brady Bunch.
[Full Story »] 

When I think of Christmas Eve, I think of the late Holland and Louise Jackson and the fabulous party they hosted for generations on the night before Christmas at their Thomaston Street home. It was amazing.

In the weeks before the big event, many of us would go help prepare for the party. We would help put up the Christmas tree, decorate it, polish silver and brass and polish off all sorts of other chores. [Full Story »] 

By Mike Ruffin

I remember when I wanted lots of things for Christmas. “How many things?” you might ask. Well, let’s just say that had I sent a letter to Santa, it would have required extra postage.

Somewhere there’s an 8mm film of nine-year-old me monopolizing Santa’s time as I tick off the items on my list while adults in the background laugh. But I wasn’t one to take chances.
[Full Story »] 

This is the best Alabama team ever, they said. That makes it the best college football team ever because Bama is the nation’s elite football school, they said. Tua is the latest incarnation of the greatest player ever, they said. Bama will hang 50 on Georgia, they said.

Alabama did, indeed, defeat Georgia 35-28 in the SEC Championship Game Saturday afternoon in a game they led for exactly one minute and nine seconds. The Dawgs took it to the Tide for much of the game. The Dawgs came to play. The UGA coaching staff - or at least some of them - apparently stayed on the bus.
[Full Story »] 

By Mike Ruffin

I’m grateful that Walter Geiger allows me to occupy this space every other week. I don’t know if he’s grateful that he agreed to our arrangement. I don’t plan to ask him. I figure he’ll let me know if he changes his mind about it.
Sometimes I hear from people who agree with or appreciate what I write. I hear much less often from people who disagree with or don’t appreciate it.

You expect both agreement and disagreement when you write an opinion piece, which is what I do. You know what they say about opinions: everybody has one. Someone’s opinion might line up with mine. Or it might not.

Back when I was a pastor, I’d sometimes say to my congregation, “Sometimes I’m right and you’re wrong, and sometimes you’re wrong and I’m right.” My saying that is #9 on my list of Forty-Seven Reasons I’m No Longer a Pastor.
Here’s the thing, though: I do think I’m right. I do think that my opinions are more correct than the opinions of people who disagree with me.
[Full Story »] 

An outsider looking in may scoff at the notion but America, despite all its flaws, is still the greatest country on God’s good earth. Though they could not have dreamed what the world would look like 240 years hence, the founders of our system of government put together a pretty good framework back in 1776 that has stood the test of time.

Has America made mistakes though the years? Absolutely. So has every other nation and every individual. But no nation has done more to atone for its mistakes than has the USA.

This is a time of deep political division. But there is always an example of reason to offset the rhetoric. There is always an act of kindness to serve as a counterweight for hostility.

Driving, I had just listened to Sen. Kamala Harris compare agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement with hooded, cross-burning members of the Ku Klux Klan. She wants to be president. She has no shot. I turned a corner and came upon a man who had gotten out of his vehicle with a trash bag and was picking up trash that a cold wind had blown off the back of a trash truck that was just down the street. [Full Story »] 

By Mike Ruffin

As our annual day of Thanksgiving approaches, I thought I’d share some of the things for which I’m thankful.

1. I am thankful for people who are self-aware enough to know they’re not self-aware enough, open-minded enough to know they’re not open-minded enough, and well-read enough to know they’re not well-read enough.

2. I am thankful for people who give me hope for the future by doing risky things like getting married and having children.


[Full Story »]