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WITandWISDOM(tm) - February 12, 2007 ISSN 1538-8794 ~~~~~~~ THOUGHTS: Too many have dispensed with generosity in order to practice charity. - Albert Camus Source: Quotes of the Day, http://www.quotationspage.com/qotd.html ~~~~~~~ SPECIAL THOUGHTS: Just a regular mountain, it seemed. Tall, but not so spectacular as some of its Cascade neighbors. Then one May morning in 1980, Mount St. Helens shuddered awake and blew its top! That volcano belched forth plumes of steam and ash thousands of feet into the sky—an explosion comparable to Vesuvius burying Pompeii. Almost 100 miles downwind in Yakima, Washington, the sun went out at noon, leaving the city in total blackness for several hours. The ash lay ankle deep, as it was in much of eastern Washington. . . . Those who lived around Mount St. Helens had heard the warnings of an imminent eruption. Some listened and escaped. Others delayed. . . . I think of 84-year-old Harry Truman—not the former president, but the owner of the Mount St. Helens Lodge at the edge of Spirit Lake. He had lived safely by the mountain for more than half a century. Nobody was going to tell him what to do. “After all,” he boasted, “No one knows more about this mountain than Harry, and it doesn’t dare blow up on me.” But it did. The overwhelming surprise came with a shattering blast that blew a cubic mile of material into the sky. Poor Harry Truman and dozens of others lay buried beneath tons of volcanic silt. They gambled their lives and lost. They had been warned, but they refused to be saved. Why do we find it so hard to heed warnings? If you have never accepted Jesus’ offer of forgiveness and eternal life, perhaps He is asking you to make that decision right now. There will never be a better time. Just tell Him that you know you are a sinner; tell Him that you believe He came to earth to be your Saviour and that He died for your sins on the cross; then tell Him that you accept the forgiveness He has promised. By George Vandeman and B. Russell Holt Source: Signs of the Times, Copyright (c) August 1989, Pacific Press, http://www.signstimes.com ~~~~~~~ THIS & THAT: The Oddball Wall - Odd Facts Only one fact is true for each item below. Your challenge is to pick out the true one from the ones I made up. 1) Mel Blanc (the voice of Bugs Bunny) was: a. allergic to carrots b. afraid of rabbits c. wore rabbit ears when he did the voice of Bugs 2) The most common name in the world is: a. John b. Wang c. Mohammed 3) The average person falls asleep in: a. 3 minutes b. 7 minutes c. 15 minutes 4) A pregnant goldfish is called a: a. guppy b. twit c. popper 5) The percentage of Americans that prefer their toilet tissue to unwind over the spool, not under it, is: a. 68% b. 42% c. 31% 6) It takes seven muscles to smile, but ___ muscles to frown. a. 15 b. 33 c. 48 7) A sneeze can travel as fast as: a. 25 mph b. 57 mph c. 100 mph 8) World wide, lightning strikes the earth ___ times per second. a. 3 b. 50 c. 100 And now for one that's sure to help you count your blessings... 9) One-fourth of the world's population lives on less than: a. $5,000 a year b. $1,000 a year c. $200 a year Answers below, here's the scoring: 9 correct: Perfection! 7-8 correct: Outstanding 5-6 correct: Very Good 2-4 correct: Fairly Fair 0-1 correct: Turn the TV off Answers: 1) a. Mel Blanc was allergic to carrots. 2) c. Mohammed 3) b. 7 minutes 4) b. twit 5) a. 68% 6) b. 33 7) c. 100 mph 8) c. 100 times per second 9) c. $200 a year Source: Internet Tutor, http://www.gophercentral.com/sub/sub-tutor.html ~~~~~~~ KEEP SMILING: On my four-year-old daughter's first trip to Disneyland, she couldn't wait to get on Mr. Toad's Wild Ride. As the car zoomed through the crazy rooms, into the path of a speeding train, and through walls that fell away at the last second, she clutched the little steering wheel in front of her. When the ride was over, she said to me a little shakily, "Next time, you drive. I didn't know where I was going." Source: The Lame Humor List, http://absoluterobeo.com ~~~~~~~ TRIVIA: Why is normal vision referred to as 20/20? Visual acuity is expressed as a fraction. The top number refers to the distance you stand from the chart. This is usually 20 feet. The bottom number indicates the distance at which a person with normal eyesight could correctly read the line with the smallest letters. Normal vision is considered 20/20. If your vision is 20/40, the line you correctly read at 20 feet could be read by a person with normal vision at 40 feet. Of course, just because 20/20 vision is normal doesn't mean it's perfect. A small percentage of the population is blessed with vision better than 20/20, and just recently researchers unveiled corrective lens that offered vision closer to 20/10. http://www.askfactmaster.com/Visual_perception