WELCOME!!
to this week's meeting of
The Rotary E-Club of Canada One
For the week beginning August 12, 2024
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Complete the form for a make-up!
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to this week's meeting of
The Rotary E-Club of Canada One
For the week beginning August 12, 2024
Scroll down to enjoy the content!
Complete the form for a make-up!
Rotary International President – Stephanie Urchik
And for our clubs -
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Greeter this week
Rotarian Neil
Rotarian Neil
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Inspirational moment
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Canadiana
Canadian Rotary International Presidents – in the first half of the 20th Century
...from Rotary International Zone 22
Canadian Rotary International Presidents
Introduction: Prepared by PDG Jim Angus
Throughout the first 100 years of Rotary, presidents of Rotary International have come from every corner of the world. Four of the most outstanding have been Canadians, who were elected during the first half of the century, when the vision and objects of the organization were being shaped and expanded.
Leslie Pidgeon, the first Canadian president initiated innumerable new service projects. He used his remarkable financial talents to set up a long-term fiscal plan for the organization.
Crawford McCullough came to be called Rotary’s greatest ambassador. In the 35 years following his presidency, he and his wife travelled effortlessly, visiting Rotary Clubs around the word, preaching brotherhood and arguing that Rotary unity could solve many of the world’s problems.
Internationalist John Nelson travelled the Rotary world promoting fellowship and friendship among peoples.
Arthur Lagueux, the last Canadian president played a prominent role in the general administration of the organization serving on 22 committees between 1943 and 1956.
Listing of Canadian Presidents & Their Rotary Clubs:
1. E. Leslie Pidgeon D.D. (1917-18) Rotary Club of Winnipeg
2. Crawford McCullough (1921-22) Rotary Club of Fort William
3. John Nelson (1933-34) Rotary Club of Montreal
4. Arthur Lagueux (1950-51) Rotary Club of Quebec
Brief biographies of these four remarkable Rotarian leaders follow.
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Comments from our guests and members
Members and guests attending our weekly meetings are very important to us. Based on your comments we are able to produce many more educational, inspiring, and entertaining weekly meetings.
Following are some of the comments we have received. Would you please send us your comments?
July 1. As a Dad of an astrophysicist, I found the June 1 speaker meeting very interesting.
Playing catch-up on my Rotary Meetings this rainy July 1 Canada Day. Today is Memorial Day in Newfoundland. Today Newfoundlanders remember the WW1 battle of Beaumont Hamel in 1916. The Forget Me Not is the flower worn by Newfoundlanders today instead of the Poppy. I witnessed the return of Newfoundland's native "Unknown Solder" and his interment in the National war memorial in St. John’s, NL in celebration of its 100th anniversary.
https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/battle-of-beaumont-hamel
-- Neil Rogers E-Club of Canada One, District 5370
July 2. Love the variety this week – everything from e-foils to bird-friendly cities!
-- Patrick Gibson, E-Club of Canada One, District 5370
Magical Washing Machines. From hand wash to washing machines resulted in more time to read books.
-- Martin Secker, Rotary Club of Kingston, District 7040
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Archived Meetings
- For meetings prior to June 10, 2024, please click here.
- All meetings are archived.
- For meetings starting June 10, 2024, please scroll to the very bottom of this page.
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Announcements
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Click the graphic below to view the August issue of the club’s
Rotary Foundation newsletter.
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Material Suggestions and Greeter Messages Always Needed!
Please feel free to forward an approx. 150 - 200 word message or any material suggestions in an e-mail, or in a Word document, along with a JPeg picture or two, to E-Club Administration Chair, Kitty Bucsko.
We'd love to hear from you!
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Real-time meetings
Each 3rd Tuesday of the month is our Fellowship Assembly, and we often invite interesting speakers or Rotary Leaders for this entertaining, educational fun event. Plan to join us.
Everyone is welcome to attend and we encourage your participation.
Please click our Event Calendar for details and access Link.
For further inquiries or suggestions please contact: info@rotaryeclubcanada.ca
All our videos can be viewed on our YouTube channel.
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How do you support our club?
- The Paypal button on our ClubRunner Home Page
- The donation button on the attendance form, or
- Make an Interac transfer to rotaryeclubcanada1@gmail.com
- Send a cheque to:
The Rotary E-Club of Canada One
10430 135 Street NW
Edmonton, AB
Canada T5N 2C6
(780) 267 4547
Environment
The planet just marked a “shocking” new milestone, enduring 12 consecutive months of unprecedented heat, according to new data from Copernicus, the European Union’s climate monitoring service.
Every single month from June 2023 to May 2024 was the world’s hottest such month on record, Copernicus data showed.
Every single month from June 2023 to May 2024 was the world’s hottest such month on record, Copernicus data showed.
The 12-month heat streak was “shocking but not surprising” given human-caused climate change, said Carlo Buontempo, the director of Copernicus, who warned of worse to come. Unless planet-warming fossil fuel pollution is slashed, “this string of hottest months will be remembered as comparatively cold,” he said.
Copernicus released its data the same day as United Nations Secretary General António Guterres made an impassioned speech in New York about climate change, slamming fossil fuel companies as the “godfathers of climate chaos” and, for the first time, explicitly calling on all countries to ban advertising their fossil fuel products.
Guterres urged world leaders to swiftly take control of the spiraling climate crisis or face dangerous tipping points. “We are playing Russian roulette with our planet,” he said Wednesday. “We need an exit ramp off the highway to climate hell.”
As temperatures surge, global climate commitments are “hanging by a thread,” he warned.
Copernicus’ data showed each month since July 2023 has been at least 1.5 degrees warmer than temperatures before industrialization, when humans started burning large amounts of planet-heating fossil fuels.
The average global temperature over the past 12 months was 1.63 degrees above these pre-industrial levels.
Under the Paris Agreement in 2015, countries agreed to limit global heating to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels. While this aim refers to warming over decades, rather than a single month or year, scientists say this breach is an alarming signal.
“This is a harbinger of progressively more dangerous climate impacts close on the horizon,” said Richard Allan, a climate professor at the University of Reading in the UK.
The news comes as the western US is experiencing its first heat wave so far this summer with temperatures soaring into the triple digits. But unprecedented heat has already left a trail of death and destruction across the planet this spring.
Dozens have died in India over the past few weeks as temperatures pushed toward 50 degrees Celsius (122 Fahrenheit); brutal temperatures in Southeast Asia have caused deaths, school closures and shriveled crops; and as heat surged in Mexico, howler monkeys dropped dead from trees.
Hotter air and oceans also fuel heavier rainfall and destructive storms like those that have battered the United States, Brazil, Kenya and the United Arab Emirates, among other nations, this year.
The recent heat offers “a window into the future with extreme heat that challenges the limits of human survivability,” said Ben Clarke, a researcher at Imperial College London’s Grantham Institute. “It is vital people understand that every tenth of a degree of warming exposes more people to dangerous and potentially deadly heat,” he told CNN.
Extreme events turbocharged by climate chaos are piling up, destroying lives, pummeling economies and hammering health,” Gutteres said.
Humanity is having an outsized impact on the world, he said, likening it to the meteor that began the process of wiping out dinosaurs 66 million years ago.
“In the case of climate, we are not the dinosaurs,” Guterres said. “We are the meteor. We are not only in danger. We are the danger.”
Humour
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New members' corner
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Rotary minute
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Food for thought
The US standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. That's an exceedingly odd number. Why was that gauge used?
Well, because that's the way they built them in England, and English engineers designed the first US railroads. Why did the English build them like that?
Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the wagon tramways, and that's the gauge they used. So, why did 'they' use that gauge then?
Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they had used for building wagons, which used that same wheel spacing. Why did the wagons have that particular odd wheel spacing?
Well, if they tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels would break more often on some of the old, long-distance roads in England . You see, that's the spacing of the wheel ruts. So who built those old rutted roads?
Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe (including England ) for their legions. Those roads have been used ever since.
And what about the ruts in the roads?
Roman war chariots formed the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match or run the risk of destroying their wagon wheels. Since the chariots were made for Imperial Rome , they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing. Therefore the United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is derived from the original specifications for an Imperial Roman war chariot. Bureaucracies live forever.
So the next time you are handed a specification/procedure/process and wonder 'What horse's ass came up with this?', you may be exactly right. Imperial Roman army chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the rear ends of two war horses. (Two horses' asses.)
Now, the twist to the story:
When you see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. The SRBs are made by Thiokol at their factory in Utah.
The engineers who designed the SRBs would have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site. The railroad line from the factory happens to run through a tunnel in the mountains, and the SRBs had to fit through that tunnel.
The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track, as you now know, is about as wide as two horses' behinds.
So, a major Space Shuttle design feature, of what is arguably the world's most advanced transportation system, was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of a horse's ass.
And you thought being a horse's ass wasn't important? Ancient horses' asses control almost everything.
Well, because that's the way they built them in England, and English engineers designed the first US railroads. Why did the English build them like that?
Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they had used for building wagons, which used that same wheel spacing. Why did the wagons have that particular odd wheel spacing?
Well, if they tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels would break more often on some of the old, long-distance roads in England . You see, that's the spacing of the wheel ruts. So who built those old rutted roads?
Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe (including England ) for their legions. Those roads have been used ever since.
And what about the ruts in the roads?
Roman war chariots formed the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match or run the risk of destroying their wagon wheels. Since the chariots were made for Imperial Rome , they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing. Therefore the United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is derived from the original specifications for an Imperial Roman war chariot. Bureaucracies live forever.
So the next time you are handed a specification/procedure/process and wonder 'What horse's ass came up with this?', you may be exactly right. Imperial Roman army chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the rear ends of two war horses. (Two horses' asses.)
Now, the twist to the story:
When you see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. The SRBs are made by Thiokol at their factory in Utah.
The engineers who designed the SRBs would have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site. The railroad line from the factory happens to run through a tunnel in the mountains, and the SRBs had to fit through that tunnel.
The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track, as you now know, is about as wide as two horses' behinds.
So, a major Space Shuttle design feature, of what is arguably the world's most advanced transportation system, was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of a horse's ass.
And you thought being a horse's ass wasn't important? Ancient horses' asses control almost everything.
...contributed by Rotarian Vicki
...and for those who want to know if this tale is fact or fiction, click here. click here. Perhaps this story could be considered just humour!
Rotary Jukebox
For a small donation, your favorite musician will be featured on one of our next e-meetings for everyone to enjoy.
Every week we'll have a draw and the lucky person will see their song featured!
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The Four-way Test
To close the meeting, Rotarian Angel recites the Four-Way Test of the things that Rotarians think, say, or do.
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Program Donations
Our E-Club is a dynamic club comprised of ordinary working and retired people who acknowledge that Rotarians are people who are generous with their time and their resources.
Our club and the program you have just enjoyed, either as a member or a visitor, is funded only by donations.
We are developing ideas for fundraising with our members who are scattered across Canada, USA, Central America, and Europe, but we do need your help.
As you have not had to buy lunch or travel to attend this program, please make a donation of a minimum of $10.00, considering you're saving in time and cost in appreciation for the experience you have enjoyed.
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