GOOD MORNING FRANKLIN COUNTY

By Staff
Today is Friday, March 25, 2005. Today is Good Friday! Expect partly cloudy skies this afternoon with a high of around 70 degrees. On this day in history:
1882 – A New York City department store gives America a first-ever look at the art of pancake making.
1916 – Women are allowed to attend a boxing match for the first time.
1939 – Billboard Magazine introduces country music to its charts for the first time. Actually, they called it hillbilly music.
1942 – Aretha Franklin is born on this date.
1954 – RCA manufactures the first color television set. The 12 inch screen cost $1,000.
1967 – "Happy Together" by the Turtles is the country's number one song.
1991 – Braveheart wins the Oscar for Best Picture.
1996 – The US Treasury issues the newly designed one hundred dollar bill.
BLAST FROM THE PAST
Back in my younger days I used to love to watch Art Linkletter on television. His interviews with children on the show House Party were classics and led to his popular book, "Kids Say the Darndest Things." I saw Art Linkletter on a religious program last week. He is now 93 years old and gets around as well as anyone. He and his wife have been married for seventy years.
Art Linkletter said he once asked a group of children in a Sunday School class if any of them wanted to go to heaven. Everyone raised their hand except for one little boy. "Tommy," Linkletter said, "Do you not want to go to heaven one day?" "Oh, one day," Tommy said, "I thought you were getting up a group to go now."
TRY, TRY AGAIN
Back on February 5, Richard Arredondo and two friends got lost while mountain biking in California's San Bernardino National Forest and had to be rescued by the sheriff's department. The next day they went back to find their expensive bikes, got lost again, and had to be rescued for a second time.
CUT AND PASTE
The University of Wisconsin Oshkosh has a Writing Center Web Site that has a lot of information on how students can avoid the pitfalls of plagiarism. It turns out that most of the material on the web site was taken word-for-word from Purdue University's web site on plagiarism. Is it possible to plagiarize material on plagiarism?
THIS CRAZY WORLD
A man in Fort Worth, Texas, pleaded guilty to shooting his estranged wife to death then shooting and wounding her boyfriend. Are you ready for the sentencing? Jimmy Dean Watkins was given FOUR MONTHS for killing his former wife and FIFTEEN YEARS for wounding the boyfriend. The jury's explanation was that the murder was fueled by the understandable crime of "sudden passion" while the other shooting was simply malicious.
PARTING SHOTS
On this day in 1968 the final episode, number 249, of "The Andy Griffith Show" aired on CBS television, ending the show's illustrious eight-year run. Do you remember that final episode? "A Girl for Goober," was the story of Goober Pyle finding a girl through a computer dating service.
ALLELUIA
Church bells will be ringing all across the world this Sunday as Christians celebrate Easter and the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
I leave you this week with the words of the Apostle Paul from 1 Corinthians 15:14:
Richard Parker is Minister of Students and Education at First Baptist Church in Russellville. You can e-mail him your comments at RParker@russellvilleFBC.org.