Jay GreesonAround these parts we have survived a lot.
Name a type of emotional or physical hurdle, and we have likely cleared it with the ease of bullfrogs bouncing between lily pads.
With that knowledge, will there come a time when we don't freak out about snow?
Seriously.
Why is the Snowmageddon or Snowpocalypse or the Abominable Snow Fall still the weather whisper that drives everyone to Food City for bread and milk and school officials to the auto-dial to cancel everything this side of standardized testing?
But, we are now in the place where the precautionary threat of a snow day moves the powers that be to overreactionary places.
Somehow, it just won't have the same ring when our kids try to tell their kids that they walked 5 miles to school, up a hill both ways, in the threat of snow.
Liability legacy
There are a lot of things that have hindered the development and growth of our society.
They range from the simple connection between the snowflake culture in which everyone gets a trophy to the extreme litigiousness of our society.
Consider the following: A woman in Colorado is suing the restaurant chain Chipotle for taking her picture while she was eating there and using said photo in promotional materials. For that hardship, she is suing them for $2 billion - yes, that's billion with a 'B,' friends.
A family in Texas filed a lawsuit against Apple for not blocking FaceTime technology in the aftermath of a motorist using his cell phone while driving and causing an accident that killed the family's daughter.
If you want more, here are a few of the most frivolous lawsuits filed in 2016, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce: A man sued MasterCard for continuing its "Stand Up to Cancer" fundraising campaign despite already reaching its $4 million goal
PETA sued, asking that animals and pets be entitled to copyright privileges and property rights
Then of course there is DeToya Moody, a Decatur, Ga., woman who was so engrossed in her cell phone that she walked into a lowered basket from a bucket truck outside a Publix grocery store. Despite orange safety cones and parking behind the truck, she was so engrossed in her screen that she did not see the ladder she walked into. (Court records show she was sending a text at the time she walked into the ladder.) She sued Publix over the 2011 incident and cashed a $161,000 check this year.
And friends, while there are plenty of real and deserving lawsuits out there, do not think for a moment that in the end, the cost of these crackpot schemes do not come back to all of us - be it through regulations, legislation crafted to close the loopholes of the scandalously litigious among us, the cost of liability insurance, or the rising prices of goods and services that come from companies that have been sued.
Emojis and gee whiz
The University of Michigan conducted a study trying to determine what was the most popular emoji.
For those of you asking what an emoji is, well, it's the computer- or smart-phone-generated face or symbol depicting the emotion or feeling of the sender of a text, email, tweet or other social media post.
For those of you asking why a prestigious school like the University of Michigan would conduct such a study, well, for that we have no answer. (Although we are less than surprised since on the site Michigandaily.com, where this story was reported, the other headlines included, "University study shows medical marijuana users are more addicted than illicit users" and "New marijuana study shows drug can affect pleasure-related cognition." When we get to the bottom of the marijuana-emoji connection, well, then by golly someone needs to call the Nobel Peace Prize people.)
To be fair, the Michigan researchers worked with some Peking University folks to cut deep into this issue.
And to be frank, if we are going to get the smartest folks in the U.S. and China working together, then we definitely need to get to the heart of this emoji issue.
So for those of you wondering, well, the laughing-so-hard-I'm-cryin' emoji is the most popular among the almost 4 million active social media users in 212 different countries in September 2015. Almost a third of those studied were in the U.S.
Here's another conclusion: There are far too many Americans using emojis as a main form of communication.