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By Invitation Only Guelph Wellington Men’s Club Virtual Club Meeting Tuesday, July 14, 2020 Speakers: Nathanael Willms and Sath Pinikeshi Topic: “U. of G. Students win Gold at International Genetic Engineering Competition, November 2019” Time: You can connect on Tuesday, July 14, 2020 at 9:30 AM. The Meeting will start at 10:00 AM.

Presidents Greeting Good morning gentlemen, welcome to the July edition of the Guelph Wellington Men’s Club bulletin. It has been an interesting and busy month. Firstly, let me wish everyone good health for you and your families. I would like to thank everyone on the Board for their efforts this month. Especially Vice President Jim Sanders who has led us into the 21st century. Jim along with Ross Knechtel and his team in getting us set up and running on Zoom. Our virtual meetings to date have been successful with as many as 139 members logging in. (do not jump on me if that figure is not exact.) We would like to see a few more join us and hopefully Thom Herrmann’s (boy is that ever hard to spell) efforts in getting all members called will have success. And we will have more than the target of 150 members join us. We are getting close to the final changes to our committee structure and the re-write of the blue pages being completed and ready for publishing. - Lots on our plate. I would like to thank Past President Dale Lockie and the awards committee for their work in determining where we will put our Club award this year. The Board is pleased to announce that we agree with Dale and his committee, therefore the Guelph Wellington Men’s club’s award of $1,500.00 will be presented to the Front-line Workers at the Guelph General Hospital. A formal announcement will be given when we actually present the award. That is all for now, so remember to wash your hands constantly, wear a mask at the stores and keep a hockey stick apart. Jim H. Revving up with the Rev When I was thinking about the current time through which we are living, I was reminded of an allegory about being in life together. A mouse looked through the crack in the wall to see the farmer and his wife open a package. ''What food might this contain?'' the mouse wondered. He was devastated to discover it was a mousetrap. Retreating to the farmyard, the mouse proclaimed this warning: ''There's a mousetrap in the house! There's a mousetrap in the house!'' The chicken clucked and scratched, raised her head and said, ''Mr. Mouse, I can tell this is a grave concern to you, but it is of no consequence to me. I cannot be bothered by it.'' The mouse turned to the pig and told him, ''There's a mousetrap in the house! There's a mousetrap in the house!' The pig sympathized, but said, ''I am so very sorry, Mr. Mouse, but there is nothing I can do about it except pray. Be assured you are in my prayers.'' The mouse turned to the cow and said, ''There's a mousetrap in the house! There's a mousetrap in the house!' The cow said, ''Wow, Mr. Mouse. I'm sorry for you, but it's no skin off my nose.'' So, the mouse returned to the house, head down and dejected, to face the farmer's mousetrap...Alone... That very night a sound was heard throughout the house—the sound of a mousetrap catching its prey. The farmer's wife rushed to see what was caught. In the darkness, she did not see that it was a venomous snake whose tail was caught in the trap. The snake bit the farmer's wife. The farmer rushed her to the hospital. When she returned home, she still had a fever. Everyone knows you treat a fever with fresh chicken soup. So, the farmer took his hatchet to the farmyard to get the chicken for the soup's main ingredient. But his wife's sickness continued. Friends and neighbors came to sit with her around the clock. To feed them, the farmer butchered the pig. But, alas, the farmer's wife did not get well. She died. So many people came for her funeral that the farmer had the cow slaughtered to provide enough meat for all of them for the funeral luncheon. The mouse looked upon it all from his crack in the wall with great sadness. The Lesson from the Allegory: The next time I hear someone is facing a problem and I think it doesn't concern me, I need to remember... When one of us is threatened, we are all at risk. We are all involved in this journey called life Each of us is important to the other. Our lives are woven together and each of us is a vital thread in someone else's tapes. Our Men's Club has that kind of symbiotic relationship built into it. And the way members are responding to the virtual meetings through Zoom is further evidence of how we realize our importance to one another. Cheers, guys! Keep smilin'. Tom Watson Passings: The Club notes with regrets the recent passing of Phyllis wife of Paul Dafoe .

June/July Birthdays and Anniversaries: Go Here…..

Zooming Join Us At 9:30 AM Each Tuesday You will have received or will shortly be sent an “Electronic Invitation” to our Club meeting. Although the meeting will begin sharp at 10 AM, you will be able to log on any time after 9:30. Just click on “Join Zoom Meeting”. If you are using a land line, the same Invitation will include detailed instructions. To provide the best sound quality, everyone except the person speaking will be muted. There will be an opportunity to ask our guest speaker questions using the “Chat” function. President Jim looks forward to welcoming you to these historic events. Not Spam We have become aware that a number of you have found the meeting Zoom Invitation in your Email Spam Box. This sometimes happens when an email message is sent to a large number of recipients which is the case with our club mailings. Please check your Spam or Junk email folder sometime each Monday afternoon. By searching for "Guelph Wellington Men's Club", you will be able to determine if you have or have not received the Virtual Meeting Invitation. If you would like to ensure that the message does not wind up in Junk or Spam in the future, you can do the following: simply "Right-Click" (click the right button on your mouse) the message and select "not spam" or "mark as not junk". There may be some similar words when you right-click on the message." The Future “Like sailors on a becalmed sea, we feel the stirrings of a breeze” ― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: Human Future in Space For the first time in our club’s history our speakers are coming to us long distance. By the time you receive this bulletin, our speaker on the 23rd June, History Prof. Leonard Friesen in Kitchener (well that’s not so far away) will have discussed his conversations with Vladimir Putin, but our speaker on July 28th will be calling in from 13,000 kms away, speaking to us from Cape Town in South Africa! First vice-president Jim Sanders was the first to observe that we can now recruit speakers from around the world. We can learn from people on the spot who are coping with current issues in real time. Zoom makes the world our oyster. Jim inspired the recruitment of Cape Town South Africa town councillor Dr. Zahid Badroodien who recently achieved national and perhaps international prominence when he met with South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa and members of his cabinet to map out the response to covid-19 in the informal settlements around Cape Town. These settlements are representative of the living conditions of billions of citizens worldwide, places where the battle against the virus is likely to be won or lost, and the outcome of which will affect us deeply. We can now bring the mountain to Muhammad In March this year our GWMC speaker program was thrown into disarray. We accepted Zoom meetings reluctantly, a poor substitute for our physical meetings in the ICC. We would not have countenanced a different way of meeting—or explored new technology—but for the lockdown. Thanks however to our monthly program coordinators’ embrace of the new technology we are in fine shape going forward, with the promise of more to come, and a smorgasbord of speakers who will direct our attention to issues that are immediate and pressing. Online meetings will never replace the friendly banter and camaraderie we share when meeting in the ICC. And virtual cups of coffee and tea make a poor substitute for the aroma that we’ve come to enjoy through our hospitality committee. But there are compensations. We are discovering the advantages of joining meetings right in our living rooms. Members whose physical limitations have rendered Men’s Club meetings physically challenging can continue to attend; members rendered immobile by the lockdown in assisted living institutions can join us through Zoom; computerised microphones enable us to set sound levels to suit personal hearing challenges; our “Snowbird” members will have no excuse for missing meetings come winter; and we can even follow meetings through landline telephones without a computer. Who would have thought of a new use for landlines that many of us have abandoned? We can learn to enjoy the proceedings even though we cannot see them. As we are discovering, video-conferencing allows us to hear from speakers who were out of reach while we restricted our meetings to the confines of the ICC. We shall meet again in our traditional home, as the late Dame Vera Lynn reminds us, yet the technology is here to stay. We will no doubt still benefit from it long after the lockdown is over: It holds the promise of a rich new chapter for our club. Graham Ford Speakers’ Program Committee

Here is the link to the July 7th Virtual GWMC Meeting. Go HERE - Speaker: The Honourable Rob Black It will be live until next Monday, July 13th at 09.30 AM.