A man came home and saw his children along with a group
of the neighborhood children gathered around the front steps.  He asked
what it was they were doing. 
"We're playing church." one said.  The puzzled Father inquired further and was told, "Well, we've
already sung, prayed and listened to the sermon. Now, we're all outside
smoking."

Today is Valentine's Day, the day on which we celebrate romantic love. Every February, florists in the United States import several million pounds of roses from South America. About 36 million boxes of chocolate will be given as gifts today (From the Writer's Almanac).

Secret Agent Man by Joyce Sutphen.

You looked so good at the top of the stairs
that I wonder if you might consider

standing at the bus stop near Franklin
and 22nd at about 6:30 AM,

wearing a dark overcoat and a red
scarf, nodding (just slightly) when

I pass, and I wouldn't mind looking
Out my office window at about

10 AM and seeing you (so small I
couldn't be sure) waving from

the far corner of the parking lot,
and then, at lunch, you could be

the mysterious man sitting in the bar,
the one who never turns around until

I am almost out the door with friends
who would have no idea who you are,

and it would be wonderful to see you
disguised as a UPS man, coming in

at 3 PM with a large package
full of various useless things

and a note, telling me exactly
where I could find you later on tonight.

Abraham Lincoln was born on this day near
Hodgenville, Kentucky (1809). Though he's generally considered possibly
the greatest president in our country's history, fairly little is known
about his early life. Unlike most presidents, he never wrote any
memoirs. We know that he was born in a log cabin and had barely a year
of traditional
schooling. His mother died when he was nine, and he spent much of his
adolescence working with an ax. But when he was in his early 20s,
Lincoln apparently decided to make himself into a respectable man.
Residents of the town of New Salem, Illinois, said that they remembered
Lincoln just
appearing in their town one day. People remembered him because he was
one of the tallest people anyone had ever seen, about 6 foot 4, and the
pants that he wore were so short that they didn't even cover his ankles.

As people got to know him, they found he had a wonderful sense of
humor. And he was a hard worker, taking jobs as a miller, storekeeper,
surveyor, and postman. Meanwhile, he joined a debate society, read
books on grammar and rhetoric, and studied to become a lawyer. But he
suffered from wild mood swings. He once became so depressed that he
considered suicide.

Lincoln had grown up at a time when politics seemed like a truly
noble profession, and he thought that maybe he could achieve the
greatness he'd dreamed of as a politician. He served a few terms in the
Illinois State Legislature, and then he was elected to the U.S.
Congress. But
while he was in Washington, he couldn't get a single bill passed. After
two years, he left office, assuming his political career was finished.

So he went back to his law practice and became an enormously
successful lawyer. He handled more than 5,000 cases over the course of
his law career, making him one of the busiest lawyers in the state. And
then, in 1854, he heard about the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, sponsored by
the
senator from Illinois, Stephen Douglas, which would have allowed for
the expansion of slavery into territories in the North. Lincoln hadn't
ever been an abolitionist, but he saw the Kansas-Nebraska Bill as a
great wedge issue that could help him make a real mark in the world.

His campaign for senator of Illinois in 1858 turned him into a
national figure, and though he lost the race, two years later he
managed to maneuver himself into the nomination for president in 1860
and he won. Lincoln spent little more than four years serving as
president,
and for most of those four years, there weren't many people who thought
he was doing a good job. The Civil War went on for longer than most
people thought it would, and it was far more brutal than anyone
expected. Lincoln had a hard time getting his generals to aggressively
pursue the enemy, and
the Confederates came close to capturing Washington, D.C.

It was only in the last few months of his life that it seemed the North
would win the war and the Union would be preserved. In the second week
of April 1865, he received word that that Robert E. Lee had surrendered
his army. On the afternoon of April 14, 1865, Lincoln took a ride in an
open
carriage with his wife, and he was the happiest she'd ever seen him. He
told her, "I consider this
day, the war has come to a close." That same night, he and his wife
went to the theater, and Lincoln was murdered by John Wilkes Booth. - The Writer's Almanac.

It's the birthday of the 40th president of the United States, Ronald Reagan, born in Tampico, Illinois (1911). His father suffered from alcoholism,
and Reagan was only 11 years old when he first came upon his father
drunk and passed out on the front porch. Reagan wrote about the
incident in his 1965 memoir, Where's the Rest of
Me. He
said, "That was my first moment of taking responsibility. ... I bent
over him, smelling the sharp odor of whiskey from the speakeasy. I got
a fistful of his overcoat. Opening the door, I managed to drag him
inside and get him to bed. In a few days, he was the bluff, hearty man
I knew
and loved and will always remember."

Reagan went into broadcasting and then got a job as an actor in B
movies. He loved acting because, he said, "So much of our profession is
taken up with pretending, with the interpretation of never-never roles,
that an actor must spend at least half his waking hours in fantasy."
But by the mid-1950s, Reagan's career as an actor had stalled. He spent
eight years as the host of a TV show called "General Electric Theater."
But he was slowly growing more interested in politics. He became a
Republican in 1962, and in 1964 the Republican Party asked him to give
a half-hour
address at the convention to nominate Barry Goldwater. The speech was
so good that a group of Republicans got together and persuaded Reagan
to run for governor of California, and that was the beginning of his
political career.  (From "The Writer's Almanac.")

????  Thank God we live in America

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia (Associated Press) - A Saudi Arabian judge sentenced 20 foreigners to receive lashes and spend several months in prison after convicting them of attending a party where alcohol was served and men and women danced, a newspaper reported Sunday.

It's the birthday of the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, (books by this author) born in Breslau, Prussia (1906). He came from a family of Lutheran theologians and pastors and decided when he was 16 that he wanted to study for the ministry. He chose to study at the Union Theological Seminary in New York City. He had a maverick professor there who taught theology by way of the Harlem Renaissance, assigning books by Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois, and James Weldon Johnson. Bonhoeffer was inspired to start attending a black church in Harlem, where he began to teach Sunday school, and he also witnessed his church's struggle against racism.

In 1931, when Bonhoeffer returned to Berlin, he suddenly saw the anti-Semitism that had been brewing in his county with a new clarity. When Hitler took power in 1933, other pastors and theologians in Germany chose to ignore it, but Bonhoeffer joined a plot to assassinate Hitler. The assassination plot was a failure, and Bonhoeffer was arrested by the Gestapo in 1943.

He spent his last months in prison writing letters to his fiancée, a young woman named Maria von Wedemeyer. The correspondence between the two was collected in the book Love Letters From Cell 92 (1994). - From "The Writer's Almanac."

I am including a couple of interesting birthdays from "The Writer's Almanac" because the authors are some of your and my favorites.

Kit

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It's the birthday of the artist and illustrator Norman Rockwell, born in New York City (1894). He loved drawing from an early age, and studied at the National Academy of Design. He wanted to go into the advertising business, but he had a hard time drawing beautiful women. He said, "No matter how much I tried to make them look sexy, they always ended up looking ... like somebody's mother." So he focused on the Boy Scout magazine, Boy's Life, and went on to paint covers for The Saturday Evening Post.

Norman Rockwell said, "The commonplaces of America are to me the richest subjects in art. Boys battling flies on vacant lots; little girls playing jacks on the front steps; old men plodding home at twilight."

It's the birthday of the novelist James A. Michener, born in Doylestown, Pennsylvania (1907). His parents abandoned him when he was a very young boy, and he was adopted by a poor young widow named Mabel Michener. He joined the Navy during World War II. It was in a Quonset hut that he began writing his first book, Tales of the South Pacific, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1948. It was turned into the Broadway musical South Pacific, and the proceeds from the musical let him devote his life to writing.

He went on to write a series of big historical novels, most of them about places, including Hawaii (1959), Chesapeake (1978), Texas (1985) and Alaska (1988). He filled his books with historical and geographical details. His books sold more than 75 million copies, but even though he made a great deal of money, he lived an extremely frugal life, and gave most of his money away. Over his lifetime, he donated 117 million dollars to various institutions, including the University of Texas.

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Wooooha!  Take a look at this - Dave Letterman talks to kids in San Francisco, CA!

http://www.cbs.com/latenight/lateshow/dave_tv/comedyclips/index/php/comedyclips.phtml

Poem: "The Past Is Still There" by Deborah Garrison, from The Second Child. © Random House.

The Past Is Still There

I've forgotten so much.
What it felt like back then,
what we said to each other.

But sometimes when I'm standing
at the kitchen counter after dinner
and I look out the window at the dark

thinking of nothing,
something swims up.
Tonight this:

your laughing into my mouth
as you were trying
to kiss me.

***********************
I have been trying something new in my life, very radical - morning. I am not a morning person however I'm giving it a go.  Morning does have some privileges - coffee.  I think I'll get some.
- Kit
***********************
Ok, one joke before coffee.  But just for you.

Lena and Sven were in a motel room when there came a knock on the door.
Lena looked through the peep-hole and exclaimed, "Oh my gosh, it is my
husband Ole, jump out da window!" Sven replied, "I can't jump out da
winda, we are on the 13th floor!" Lena replied, "Fool, this is no time
to be
superstitious!"