There was one sleek, black '66 Mustang at an antique auto show. It had a flawless exterior and a rich interior. The hood was open so you could look at the horsepower underneath, and sitting on the engine block was a thick book of photos. At the beginning of the photo album, there were "before" pictures of the car. The car started as garbage; the first pictures showed a rusted, wrecked, banged-up Mustang. Throughout the book, you could see how the car was slowly transformed step-by-step. It took months, maybe even years of the owner patiently working to end up with this beautiful classic. When the owner saw that wreck, he saw something others didn't see.

If you are a Yankees fan, you are usually not a Toronto Blue Jays fan. There is usually a good pennant race going on between them. The rivalry is okay, but at one particular game that rivalry went too far.

If you shoot a gun or a bow, you know what you want to hit. You want to hit the bull's-eye. If you're in a battle, it isn't quite as easy to know where the bull's-eye is. Well, Daniel Morgan knew. Daniel Morgan commanded a unit called Morgan's Raiders on the colonists' side during the Revolutionary War. He made a decisive difference, especially at the battle of Saratoga, which many scholars say was the turning point of the Revolutionary War.

The garage sale syndrome. Suddenly, one day this urge hits you. "There's entirely too much stuff in this house. We're going to have a garage sale." Everybody is dispatched to their corner of the house to figure out their contribution. You set up shop, pray for a nice day, and then somebody comes along, likes the price, buys your stuff, and it becomes their stuff. Now might be a great time to look at the accumulation around you and do something about it!

When I was on a mission in England and Ireland, I had a day to spend in the historic English city of York. What a place! Surrounded by a medieval wall, it is dominated by a cathedral that might be second only to Westminster Abbey in London. There was an unusual scene out in front - an artist on his knees, painstakingly working on a chalk drawing on the sidewalk in front of the cathedral. When I moved closer and took a look at it, I saw it was the Mona Lisa. He must have been working on it all day. It was beautifully done. As I went inside a restaurant, I noticed the artist had left. Within minutes, a little boy came up, intentionally ran over the artwork, then stomped back and forth and made footprints all over it. Other kids followed him and did the same thing. They trampled all over an artist's hard work. It hurt to see someone doing that.

The night before the Desert Storm troops were to begin their land invasion, trying to liberate Kuwait from Saddam Hussein, a supernatural intervention took place that the troops will never forget. That night there was a sudden shift in the wind.

Have you ever tried a soap sandwich? If so, it was probably when you were little after you said some words you weren't supposed to say. It seems logical that your parents would want to clean out your mouth after saying words like that. Right? Well, that is a punishment that does motivate you to not want to say that particular thing again, but there are some words far dirtier than the words that had us eating soap. They are dirty because they deeply hurt many people. Prepare yourself for some dirty words.

I love to spend a couple of days in Ocean City, New Jersey, right along the Atlantic Coast. Maybe it's because I grew up in the middle of the country, where I never knew what an ocean was. We like to rent bikes and ride the long boardwalk there at Ocean City very early in the morning, when hardly anybody else is around. At one end is this white building with the initials O.C.B.P., which stand for Ocean City Beach Patrol. Occasionally, you'll see the lifeguards meeting there early in the morning, discussing their day's assignments. If you're at the beach, you don't want them meeting in their little building in the afternoon. Mr. Lifeguard is up where he's supposed to be - in his high chair - and he's focused on the people in the water. That's how one of them, several years ago when I was there, spotted three children who were in trouble - perhaps about to drown. He cleared the beach, got the other lifeguards, plunged in, and saved those kids. It's a good thing they weren't having a lifeguard meeting up on the boardwalk.

Sports give us a lot of thrills and also occasional tragedies, like the death of the captain of the Boston Celtics basketball team, Reggie Lewis. After he collapsed in a basketball playoff game, a team of doctors said he had a potentially dangerous heart condition, and he couldn't play anymore. He went for a second opinion, and those doctors said he had a much less serious condition and could gradually return to playing. Well, he died doing some practice shooting in a gym a few months later.

When a little boy wants to play with his daddy, he can be pretty persistent. Billy was being persistent when his dad was trying to read the newspaper.