Good Morning:  It's Friday March 23, 2001!
Today is "Near Miss Day".  In 1989 an asteroid passed within a half million miles of Earth, a very near miss by cosmic standards.  NASA estimated that had it collided with the planet, it would have released the energy of 40,000 bombs.
BIRTHDAYS:  Joan Crawford, 1908; Roger Bannister, 1929; Yvette Marie Stevens (Chaka Khan), 1953; Moses Malone, 1954; Teresa Ganzel, 1957.
THIS DAY IN HISTORY:
On this date in 1940 the first dated edition of Maimonides' MISHNA TORAH was published.
On this date in 1775 Patrick Henry gave his "Give Me Liberty Or Give Me Death" speech.  Henry was a happy man, as eventually he got both...
On this date in 1942 the U.S. Army moved Japanese-Americans to interment camps because, it was said, people feared a potential conspiracy on the part of ethnic peoples...
On this date in 1964 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., said:  "We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools."
On this date in 1978 the U.S. Senate raised the retirement age to seventy.
MEANINGLESS FACTS:  "Spats" is short for spatterdashes... The act of snapping your fingers is called "fillip"... A philobat is a lover of roller coasters.
TRIVIA:  For what is the abbreviation "Mrs." short?
     The late Redd Foxx helped put some of the craze for health foods etc. into perspective when he said:  "Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in hospitals dying of nothing."  I do believe that some people chase immortality in this life a bit too much...  Anyway, on to the real stuff:
*******************************************************
Thanks to DS:  You Might Be A Preacher If...
1. You might be a preacher if people leave while you are talking.
3. You might be a preacher if you’ve ever wanted to wish the people a "Merry Christmas" on Easter, because that is the next time you will see them.
4. You might be a preacher is you’ve ever wanted to fire the church and form a congregational search committee.
5. You might be a preacher if you scan the help-wanted ads and resign in your mind on Monday mornings.
6. You might be a preacher if you’d rather talk to people with every head bowed and every eye closed.
7. You might be a preacher if your boss won’t give you Sundays off.
8. You might be a preacher if you have ever had a personality conflict with an elder – you had one and he didn’t.
9. You might be a preacher if you heard one of your elders praying, "Lord, you keep him humble and we will keep him poor."
10. You might be a preacher if you have ever received an anonymous phone call.
11. You might be a preacher if you have never been ashamed of the Gospel, but have been occasionally of your church.
12. You might be a preacher if your phone occasionally rings at 3 or 4 AM in the morning.
13. You might be a preacher if everyone expects perfection out of you, when they know themselves that no human is perfect.
14. You might be a preacher if you get blamed for anything that goes wrong in the church.
15. You may be a preacher if when you have given a stinging rebuke at sin, the person involved begins to look at the ceiling, the floor, or else try to "stare you down."
*******************************************************
Thanks to GB:  Definitions
ADULT: A person who has stopped growing at both ends and is now growing in the middle.
BEAUTY PARLOR: A place where women curl up and dye.
CANNIBAL: Someone who is fed up with people.
CHICKENS: The only animals you eat before they are born and after they are dead.
COMMITTEE: A body that keeps minutes and wastes hours.
DUST: Mud with the juice squeezed out.
EGOTIST: Someone who is usually me-deep in conversation.
GOSSIP: A person who will never tell a lie if the truth will do more damage.
HANDKERCHIEF: Cold Storage.
INFLATION: Cutting money in half without damaging the paper.
MYTH: A female moth.
MOSQUITO: An insect that makes you like flies better.
RAISIN: Grape with a sunburn.
SECRET: Something you tell to one person at a time.
SKELETON: A bunch of bones with the person scraped off.
TOOTHACHE: The pain that drives you to extraction.
TOMORROW: One of the greatest labor saving devices of today.
YAWN: An honest opinion openly expressed.
WRINKLES: Something other people have. You have character lines.
*******************************************************
From a friend:  The Little Boy
A little boy wanted $100 badly and prayed for two weeks, but nothing happened. Then he decided to write a letter to the Lord requesting the $100.
When the postal authorities received the letter addressed to the Lord, USA, they decided to send it to President Bush.
The President was so impressed, touched, and amused that he instructed his secretary to send the little boy a $5.00 bill. President Bush thought this would appear to be a lot of money to a little boy. The little boy was delighted with the $5.00 and sat down to write a thank you note to the Lord, which read:
Dear Lord,
Thank you very much for sending me the money. However, I noticed that for some reason you had to send it through Washington D.C. and, as usual, they deducted $95....
*******************************************************
Thanks to LBS for this one:  BAD DAYS
THE NEXT TIME YOU THINK YOU ARE HAVING A BAD DAY.
Fire authorities in California found a corpse in a burned out section of forest while assessing the damage done by a forest fire. The deceased male was dressed in a full wet suit, complete with scuba tanks on his back, flippers, and facemask.
A post-mortem revealed that the person died not from burns, but from massive internal injuries.  Dental records provided a positive identification. Investigators then set about to determine how a fully clad diver ended up in the middle of a forest fire.
It was revealed that on the day of the fire, the person went for a diving trip off the coast some 20 miles from the forest.
The fire-fighters, seeking to control the fire as quickly as possible, called  in a fleet of helicopters with very large dip buckets.  Water was dipped from the ocean and then  flown to the forest fire and emptied.
You guessed it.......
One minute our diver was making like Flipper in the Pacific, the next he was doing the breast stroke in a fire dip bucket 300 feet in the air. Apparently he extinguished exactly 5'10" of the fire.
Some days it just doesn't pay to get out of bed.
This article was taken from the California Examiner
STILL THINK YOU ARE HAVING A BAD DAY?
A man was working on his motorcycle on his patio and his wife was in the kitchen.  The man was racing the engine on the motorcycle when it accidentally slipped into gear. The man, still holding onto the handlebars, was dragged through the glass patio doors and along with the motorcycle dumped onto the floor inside the house.
The wife, hearing the crash, ran into the dining room and found her husband lying on the floor, cut and bleeding, the motorcycle lying next to him and the shattered patio door. The wife ran to the phone and summoned the ambulance.
Because they lived on a fairly large hill, the wife went down the several flights of stairs to the street to escort the paramedics to her husband.  After the ambulance arrived and transported the man to the hospital, the wife uprighted the motorcycle and pushed it outside.  Seeing that gas was spilled on the floor, the wife got some paper towels, blotted up the gasoline, and threw the towels in the toilet.
The man was treated and released to come home. Upon arriving home, he looked at the shattered patio door and the damage done to his motorcycle.  He became despondent, went to the bathroom, sat down on the toilet and smoked a cigarette.  After finishing the cigarette, he flipped it into the toilet bowl while seated.  The wife, who was in the kitchen, heard the loud explosion and her husband screaming. She ran into the bathroom and found her husband lying on the floor. His trousers had been blown away and he was suffering burns on the buttocks, the back of his legs, and his groin. The wife again ran to the phone to call the ambulance.
The very same paramedic crew was dispatched and the wife met them at the street. The paramedics loaded the husband on to the stretcher and began carrying him to the street. While they were going down the stairs to the street accompanied by the wife, one of the paramedics asked the wife how the husband had burned himself.
She told them and the paramedics started laughing so hard, one of them slipped and tipped the stretcher, dumping the husband out.  He fell down the remaining stairs and broke his arm.
Taken from a Florida Newspaper.
*******************************************************
ANSWER:  Actually, it's not really an abbreviation at all because it can't be written out as a complete word.  Long ago, it was short for mistress, but not anymore.
*******************************************************
Hosted by www.Geocities.ws

1