Back to the Glomerata section, where I share the covers of all of the yearbooks from Auburn, my alma mater. The one I’m showing you here is the 2011 edition. If you click the cover you can see the 2008 Glom.
There is a lot about the oughts that doesn’t make sense to modern sociologists. For the 2007-08 school year Lost was the top television show, Transformers was a top-10 movie, people still thought they liked Chris Brown and Joe the Plumber was somehow a stand-in for us all. George W. Bush was still president, Bob Riley was the governor.
The summer of 2007 ended, and students returned to campus, as 572 people were killed in suicide bombings in Iraq and 512 died in an 8.0 earthquake in Peru. And to really set the tone for the weekend, Russia announced their bombers were set to resume flights for the first time since the Cold War. That fall Marion Jones gave up her five gold medals and Vladimir Putin was named Time’s man of the year. Luciano Pavarotti died, as did Gen. Paul Tibbets — pilot of the Enola Gay — Evel Knievel and Norman Mailer.
In January of 2008 fuel crossed $100/barrel for the first time ever, Fidel Castro finally stepped down in Cuba, surgeons perform the first operations using bionic eyes in London and more than 133,000 were killed by Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar. Edmund Hillary, Heath Ledger, Roy Scheider, Arthur C. Clarke and Charlton Heston also died in the first part of the year.
Also, it was the beginning of the poorly named Great Recession in the United States. A lot of things about the oughts remain baffling indeed.
