Stroller: Going back in time with capsule, forward with internet | Columnists

MONDAY’S WORD was sardonic. It means disdainfully or ironically humorous. Example: Cheyenne had some friends who adored her, but most people had a hard time getting her sardonic view of things.

It’s not every day that a time capsule will be opened, so a ceremony at the former Piedmont Trust Bank on April 1 will be a treat. The building is now owned by the City of Martinsville, which will hold a ceremony to open the capsule at 11 a.m. The capsule is located near the former entrance to the Mortgage Loan Department.

Who knows what was in that time capsule, or would like to make a guess? Send your guesses to the Stroller.

Easter is just around the corner (April 17), and so is Holy Week which precedes it. The Bulletin is accepting announcements of Easter and Holy Week events and religious observances. To have yours included, email it to accent@martinsvillebulletin.com or mail it to Church News, Bulletin, P.O. Box 3711, Martinsville, Va., 24115.

In fact, the Easter announcements that have been received so far are listed on the Church News column on the Bulletin’s website. They have not been listed on the printed page yet, because of space considerations, but we haven’t run out of room on the internet yet.

In fact, longer versions of a lot of what appears in the newspaper’s print version are posted on www.martinsvillebulletin.com. That definitely is the case with the Calendar. There’s usually space to accommodate about a week’s worth of entries on Page A2, but the same Calendar online goes up through Saturday, Dec. 10 (which, if you’re curious, is the Light up The Night 5K Miles in Martinsville race).

A man uttered a few words in a church and found himself married.

A few years later, he uttered a few words in his sleep and found himself divorced.

MONDAY’S TRIVIA ANSWER: The 1909 D.W. Griffith film “A Corner in Wheat” was an advancement in storytelling techniques through the use of cross-cutting (the splicing of two related images for a fuller, more interesting story) and montage (the pairing of related or unrelated images, in this case, two sets of characters, each living their different ends of an economic matter).

It tells the story of a wheat farmer and town which both face destitution because of a wheat monopoly and doubled prices of wheat, juxtaposed against the life of luxury of the rich city businessman who invested in wheat and raised the prices sky-high. Fittingly, the selfish rich stockholder met his demise by falling into a grain elevator when the grain was loading.

TODAY’S TRIVIA QUESTION: What was the first film made in Hollywood?