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TRUE CRIME ISSUE
NOVEMBER 14, 2020
NEWS-NOTES-NONSENSE
MERGER CHATTER
Our program presenter was long time Madison County reporter Charlie Bosworth. He spent almost 30 years reporting for the Metro East Journal and St. Louis Post-Dispatch, mostly as a courts-cops-crime reporter in MadCo. He shared an interesting interview experience he had with a guy involved with "swinging", something about the naked truth. If the names Paula Sims and Karla Brown ring a bell maybe you should check out the books written by Charlie about both of these criminal cases (Precious Victims, Silent Witness). Good reads on a cold winter's night...He's now deep into writing about the the Betsy Faria murder in St. Louis.
We welcomed two ex-Marines, guests of BradL and MarkS. Brad's guest made an inspirational reading about our flag.
Lunch featured sliced roast beast, carrots and peas, broasted taters, salad, rolls, cookies and pie.
Congrats to BradP on his 30th anniversary as a club member!
Prez Chris read a thank you note from the Vintage Voices program. One of our scholarship students volunteered to assist.
MarkV announced that we will be ringing for the Salvation Army on December 12th, from 10-8. Our duty station will be the retail door at the Wood River Wal Mart.
Thursday will be the final opportunity to contribute to our Turkey Fund which is now @ $310. All $$ collected will be given to Operation Blessing to use for Thanksgiving food purchases. If you want to donate via check, make it payable to Operation Blessing. If you prefer to donate via PayPal or Venmo, Rick will accept payment and convert it to cash for the cause. Find him via phone 618.792.0256 or @john-hooks-7 on Venmo or @JrTheChief on PayPal.
Rhonda announced that we raised $353 for the Polio Plus program at JJ's a few weeks back. Well done!
Early arrivals included Allen and Virgil. Rhonda was last in. Rodney joined us via Zoom.
Birthday wishes to Pat on the 15th and Rhonda on the 18th.
Guess what? Football Mania is two weeks old, Lori and ChrisH have won both weeks. Northing new there! $10 each this week.
MarkS reported that the Wood River club has approved the merger. We hope to start meeting as the Riverbend-East club in January. It looks like Lori and MarkS will be our reps for a bylaws rewrite.
Opening duties were handled by Paul, Rhonda, And Allen who gave thanks for our vets.
The $3 jackpot was avoided by our guest speaker and a visiting Marine. Our speaker won $2 on the scratch-off. He observed that $2 and a free lunch now represents his daily rate.
Have a fine and dry weekend, stay safe. Ciao!
SWAPPING TALL TALES
TRIVIA
HAL is the famously malevolent computer in the film "2001: a Space Odyssey. what dfoes the acronym HAL stand for?
A-Heuristically Programmed ALgorithmic Computer
B-Higher Ability Language Synthesizer
C-Hyperintelligent Artificial Logician
D-Helping All Legacy Beings
(Find the answer at the end of the newsletter)
Today is National Pickle Day
Where is the biggest farm in the world?
United States
Brazil
China
Australia
Farming has come a long way over the years and in the 21st century there are two countries where mega-farms dominate the landscape. Australia has its fair share of these huge farming establishments, but the single biggest farm in the world is found in China. The Mudanjiang City Mega Farm in Heilongjiang is an incredible 22,500,000 acres in size. The dairy farm has around 100,000 head of cattle, a number 50 times bigger than anything in Europe, for scale. As if that weren’t impressive enough, the agricultural behemoth is about twice as large as the next biggest farm — which is also located in China.
On This Date-
1851 – Moby-Dick, a novel by Herman Melville, is published in the USA.
1862 – American Civil War: President Abraham Lincoln approves General Ambrose Burnside's plan to capture the Confederate capital at Richmond, Virginia, leading to the Battle of Fredericksburg.
1886 – Friedrich Soennecken first developed the hole puncher, a type of office tool capable of punching small holes in paper.
1889 – Pioneering female journalist Nellie Bly (aka Elizabeth Cochrane) begins a successful attempt to travel around the world in less than 80 days. She completes the trip in 72 days.
1910 – Aviator Eugene Burton Ely performs the first takeoff from a ship in Hampton Roads, Virginia, taking off from a makeshift deck on the USS Birmingham in a Curtiss pusher.
1918 – Czechoslovakia becomes a republic.
1922 – The British Broadcasting Company begins radio service in the United Kingdom.
1952 – The first regular UK Singles Chart published by the New Musical Express.
1967 – American physicist Theodore Maiman is given a patent for his ruby laser systems, the world's first laser.
1969 – Apollo program: NASA launches Apollo 12, the second crewed mission to the surface of the Moon.
1970 – Southern Airways Flight 932 crashes in the mountains near Huntington, West Virginia, killing 75, including almost all of the Marshall University football team.
FROM THE ARCHIVES
NOVEMBER 18, 2012
Current members in a leadership position-Rhonda, Lori, Cory, Paul, BradL, Allen and Rick
The program presenter was Kelly Medland, a representative of Well Spring Resources in Alton.
Prez-elect Rhonda took the gavel for the first time and spent some time tuning the bell before leading the pledge before an invisible flag.
With some tickets still out, Chili Chair Roger Werts reported that we had raised $1,360.
BradP told us that there were 12 riders on the Halloween trolley, two were scholarship students.
The Turkey Fund had reached $80.
Lori was celebrating her 30 years of wedded bliss to Rodney.
BradP missed his opportunity at winning the $75 jackpot.
Do you remember Kelli Keller?
JUNE 2017
DATELINE:RI
JUICY APPLE DELIVER END POLIO MESSAGE
By Motoaki Sagara, District 2530 Public Image & IT Committee Chair, Japan
How can we get more people to learn about Rotary’s polio eradication efforts? This is a question my district asked recently. It’s not easy to get the public’s attention. It’s even less so in Japan, where polio has not been circulating in the wild for some time.
Last year, District 2530, Fukushima, sold Fuji apples, a local product of Fukushima, with the word “END POLIO” marked on them. As a result, we were able to raise more than $3,000 for polio eradication. It was an innovative idea. But there was another reason I was interested in this project.
Local apple farmers are still recovering from the impact on their business of the accident at the Fukushima nuclear power plant, as well as the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami disasters. By using apples as a clever means to promote End Polio Now, we were also taking a step to save the apple farmers.
In Japan, apples are often used for celebratory purposes. Letters can be created on the apples through a process that makes the apples brighter red while protecting them against insects. Fewer farmers employ this technique today, but some still do. In the spring, the apples are covered laboriously by hand with paper bags, protecting them from pests and also suppressing the chlorophyll in the apple so that instead of green, it stays a creamy whitish color.
A few months before harvest time, the bags are removed, and the sunlight hitting the apples triggers the anthocyanin turning them red. Picture it this way, painting red over a white surface is going to appear brighter red than painting red over a green surface.
To make letters on the apples, stickers are placed over the apples when they are removed from the bags, and the areas covered by the stickers stay white while the rest is exposed to sunlight and turn red. It’s rare to use this process to create a message for a social cause, but our End Polio Now stickers were a big hit.
We placed our End Polio Now stickers two months before our apple sale, and then let the sun do its job. We set about preparing the boxes that would hold two apples each. It was exciting to think about the looks on the faces of the people who bought the apples when they opened the box and saw the End Polio message.
Everyone was excited on the day of the harvest, which was just around the corner from our district conference. In the morning we gathered in the apple fields to work together with local farmers to harvest the big sweet apples. When I removed a sticker, I found “END POLIO” clearly marked on the apple! We peeled the seals off 600 apples. The orchard was filled with the cheers.
.AND I QUOTE
"Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards."-Seren Kierkegaard
"Just because nobody complains doesn't mean all parachutes are perfect."-Benny Hill
"The difference betweeen golf and government is that in golf you can't improve your lie."-George Deukmejian
"The world is full of willing people, some willing to work, the rest willing to let them."-Robert Frost
SMILE
You need to understand the difference between "want" and "need". Like...I want abs, but I need donuts
If you are paying $3 for a bottle of Smart Water, it isn't working
You never appreciate what you have until it's gone. Toilet paper is a good example
The main function of your little toe is to make sure all the furniture in the house is in the right place
Golf-The adult version of the Easter egg hunt
Try to remember the greener grass across the fence may be due to a septic tank issue
BY THE NUMBERS
From mid-March to mid-September, Americans spent 60 million fewer hours commuting to and from work each day, according to one estimate
Large and midsize farms make up 10% of all U.S. farms, operate 52% of the nations farmland and generate 79% of the value of American agriculture production-U.S. Department of Agriculture
At Visa and Mastercard, U.S. debit-card dollar payment and purchase volume collectively rose 23% year over year in the quarter ended in September, more than double the pre-Covid-19 growth rate; the same measure for credit cards was down 8%.
About one third of US men under 45 said they would consider trying makeup-Morning Consult
A single pair of jeans consumes about 6 miles of cotton yarn
The number of service-based retailers rose 20.5% from 2002 to 2017, totaling 1.2 million spaces-JLL
1937-The Ray-Ban Aviator sunglasses are introduced. Originally dewveloped to protect the eyes of U.S. Air Force pilots while flying
Rotary factoid-As of July 27th the Rotary Foundation had awarded $26 million to support clubs' efforts to respond to COVID-19
