If a tree falls in the forest with no one to hear it, then who will notify the next of kindling?
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There is a two-letter word that perhaps has more meaning than any other two-letter word, and that is "UP."
It's easy to understand UP, meaning toward the sky or at the top of the list, but when we waken in the morning, why do we wake UP?
At a meeting, why does a topic come UP? Why do we speak UP and why are the officers UP for election and why is it UP to the secretary to write UP a report?
We call UP our friends And we use it to brighten UP a room, polish UP the silver, we warm UP the leftovers and clean UP the kitchen. We lock UP the house and some guys fix UP the old car.
At other times the little word has real special meaning. People stir UP trouble, line UP for tickets, work UP an appetite, and think UP excuses.
To be dressed is one thing but to be dressed UP is special.
And this UP is confusing:
A drain must be opened UP because it is stopped UP.
We open UP a store in the morning but we close it UP at night.
We seem to be pretty mixed UP about UP!
To be knowledgeable of the proper uses of UP, look UP the word in the dictionary. In a desk size dictionary, the word up, takes UP almost 1/4th the page and definitions add UP to about thirty.
If you are UP to it, you might try building UP a list of the many ways UP is used. It will take UP a lot of your time, but if you don't give UP, you may wind UP with a hundred or more.
When it threatens to rain, we say it is clouding UP . When the sun comes out we say it is clearing UP.
When it rains, it wets UP the earth. When it doesn't rain for awhile, things dry UP.
One could go on and on, but I'll wrap it UP, for now my time is UP, so.............
President Carter Could Lead U.N. Investigation of Israel [Excerpts]
As Palestinian Arab rockets struck two Israeli towns [November 15, 2006], U.N. bodies prepared to launch no fewer than two overlapping "fact-finding" missions to second-guess Israel's anti-terrorist tactics. President Carter could head one of those missions.
The U.N. General Assembly is expected to convene a special emergency session [November 17, 2006] to deal with the November 8 Israel Defense Force artillery strike on the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanoun, which killed 19 civilians. A draft resolution for the assembly session calls on the U.N. secretary-general to establish a fact-finding mission into the event and requests that he report back to the assembly in a month.
And yesterday in Geneva, the U.N. Human Rights Council, which in its five months of existence has failed to pass one resolution on any country other than Israel, concluded its third emergency session on the Jewish state. In the session's resolution, the council called on its president, Ambassador Alfonso de Alba of Mexico, to establish a fact-finding mission to investigate the incident at Beit Hanoun.
A diplomat in Geneva who requested anonymity said the sponsors of the resolution are planning to ask Mr. Carter to head the investigation. Other candidates include the diplomats Martti Ahtisaari of Finland and Sadako Ogata of Japan.
The proposed resolution for tomorrow's General Assembly session draws most of its language from a Security Council resolution proposal that was vetoed on Friday. In addition to the fact-finding mission, the new proposal calls on "the international community, including the Quartet" -- America, the United Nations, the European Union, and Russia -- to establish "an international mechanism to protect civilians."
(Avni, New York Sun, 11/16/06)
[TBC: This article well illustrates the hypocrisy of the UN and former President Carter. Those who profess to defend civilians are not going to investigate the continual barrage of Arab missiles into Jewish population centers. Following Israel's incursion into Lebanon and the implementation of a truce in name only, other media report continued weapon smuggling and Arab boasts that they now have more missiles than before and will be using them.]
Turkeys will thaw in the morning, then warm in the oven to an afternoon high near 190F. The kitchen will turn hot and humid, and if you bother the cook, be ready for a severe squall or cold shoulder.
During the late afternoon and evening, the cold front of a knife will slice through the turkey, causing an accumulation of one to two inches on plates. Mashed potatoes will drift across one side while cranberry sauce creates slippery spots on the other. Please pass the gravy.
A weight watch and indigestion warning have been issued for the entire area, with increased stuffiness around the beltway. During the evening, the turkey will diminish and taper off to leftovers, dropping to a low of 34F in the refrigerator.
Looking ahead to Friday and Saturday, high pressure to eat sandwiches will be established. Flurries of leftovers can be expected both days with a 50 percent chance of scattered soup late in the day. We expect a warming trend where soup develops. By early next week, eating pressure will be low as the only wish left will be the bone.
With solid majorities in both House and Senate, Republicans failed to take advantage of their numbers and pass legislation that would satisfy "values voters," Dr. James Dobson told Larry King.
Appearing Wednesday night on "Larry King Live," Dobson said that "Republican were given a marvelous opportunity, they had a 10-vote margin in the Senate - that's about as good as it gets - and a 29-vote margin in the House, and they essentially did very little that so-called values voters care about. I think people remembered."
Dobson, who heads the powerful Colorado Springs-based Focus on the Family, added that was that this was not the "only reason that Republicans lost. There are lot of other reasons."
When King raised the issue of the Iraq war and asked if it bothered him, Dobson said: "Of course. It's a horrible mess. I don't believe it was a mistake. If you go back to World War II, people have been very critical of [President Franklin] Roosevelt for not responding earlier to the Holocaust that was going on. In fact he was tone-deaf to that misery."
The same kind of thing was happening in Iraq, when "Saddam Hussein killed at least a million people, murdered them in cold blood," Dobson said, explaining that his was part of the reason the U.S. attacked Saddam's regime. "I think that what the president did that was right and correct. ... Now we're in a mess," he admitted, adding however that "Democrats have no quick answer to this."
Later, he warned that as a result of the Islamic jihad, U.S. sovereignty is in danger.
Speaking of former White House aide David Kuo, who has written a book claiming that the White House privately had nothing but disdain for Christian activists voters, King asked Dobson if Kuo's charges that White House aides laughed at Christian activists behind their backs bothered him.
Said Dobson: "I don't think that David Kuo knows what he's talking about - he was out there over in the office of Faith Based Initiatives not even in the West Wing of the White House. How does he know what my relationships or the relationships of others to senior people in the White House were? I met that man one time for about 10 or 15 minutes and now he's saying that we were taken for granted. He said we were only given 'trinkets.'
"What were those trinkets? The president has vetoed [embryonic] stem cell research, he has passed or signed a ban on partial-birth abortions, he has been the most consistent pro-life president in our history, twice he supported the marriage protection amendment. He's given us two absolutely wonderful justices on the Supreme Court - or it looks that way. He's done an awful lot of what we care about, and Kuo calls that 'trinkets.' The man doesn't know what he's talking about.
"And finally, what does he do? He says that values voters should take two years off. To whom would you say that, other than to evangelical voters? Would you say that to homosexuals? Would you say that to feminists? Would you say that to Jews? Would you say that to African-Americans? ... That is nonsense."
When King raised the question of the bad blood between Dobson and former GOP House Majority Leader Dick Armey, who has called him a "thug," Dobson explained that "It goes back to 1994, because at that time 9 million new conservative voters came out and put the Republicans in power. And Dick Armey was one of them. And then, as they have done in this term, they essentially sat on it - they did very little. By 1996 and 1997 a lot of us were frustrated by that.
"Dick Armey is an economic conservative, he's is not a social conservative. He doesn't like to talk about marriage and about the unborn child, the sanctity of life and things like that. He wants to talk about smaller government. We believe in smaller government, too. We're economic conservatives, too, but we're also social conservatives, and he's not."
Dobson recalled that he gave a speech in 1998 that he said got a tremendous amount of play - "it was covered by the New York Times before that day was over," he said. The speech, he said, was given at the Council for National Policy and he recalled that at the beginning of that speech he emphasized that he was talking for himself and not for Focus on the Family, which he explained is a non-profit organization.
"In that speech I criticized Republicans for not keeping their word - for not doing what they said they were going to do. I also said that if this continued I would not vote for Republicans. That offended Dick Armey, and since then he's called me a "thug."
Dobson also defended the actions Congress took in trying to save the life of the late Teri Schiavo, who he said was not terminally ill but only severely handicapped. Saying he was not either politically or morally wrong about the Teri Schiavo case, he asked, "Since when do we kill people who have a handicap?"