Los Altos Rotary Club Home of the Annual Rotary Fine Art Show August 22 2013

Going were no man has gone before...

Things went soaringly well today.  Going into Reverse Warp Speed, we had a ten minute talk in twenty minutes; a Red planet becoming a Blue (badge) star, and a trip through the galaxy, only to find out that everything is made from C, N and O. 

Greeters today were CLARI NOLET, GARY BROWN, DUANNI HURD and JULIE ROSE.  Our pledge was lead by PP AL TRAFICANTI. 

FROM THE BRIDGE: PP JOHN SYLVESTER led us in a “snappy” “America.”  BONNIE BURDET Thought for The Day that was a group of “Words to Live By.”

PE KENDRA GJERSETH introduced Visiting Rotarians and Guests.  We had three visiting Rotarians, one from India, and two from far away San Jose.  In addition, we had two guests of the club.

OVER THE PA ANNOUNCEMENTS
President JACK mentioned that today was the late PP BOO BUE’s birthday, and in honor of that was wearing BOO’s Hawaiian shirt.  I guess President JACK was right when he said BOO really did give him the shirt off his back.

Sunshine Chair JUDY OTT passed around a couple of cards.  One was for STEVE WHEELER who recently had back surgery, and the other was for Cliff Dochterman who was Rotary International President 1992-1993.  Dr. Dochterman’s wife, Mary Elena died August 9th.  She was a past club president, and Assistant District Governor.  Our thoughts and prayers go to the Dochterman’s family. 

PAUL SCHUTZ said it is time for our club to choose an “all-hands-on-deck” community service project for this Rotary year. Please send him an email with your ideas of what community service project we could do as a club.

FRANK VERLOT reminded everyone about the standing monthly meeting of World Community Service (WCS) that is held the 4th Tuesday of every month at 8 am at the First Republic Bank, Los Altos.  The next meeting will be held this coming Tuesday 8/27.  They will be discussing new projects proposed for the coming year.

FRANK had a 2nd announcement.  That was a repeat of an announcement in the 8/1 Rotator.  He needs just one more volunteer to host the visiting a female social worker from Moscow. Contact Frank if you have an extra bedroom.  The team will be here studying our child welfare system.
 
JOE EYRE and a whole bevy of Red Badgers announced that on October 10th, the Red Badge Committee will hold an auction.  The proceeds go towards scholarships to Vida Verde, who spoke to our club last March 14th.  They plan to raise $5,000.  So warm up your check books, look for great items to donate and help them in any way you can to meet this challenge. 
KATHY BERRY mentioned the Relay for Life (Los Altos Rotary Team) fundraiser at Maltbys. On Wednesday, August 28th.  Check our website for details. 

CYNTHIA LUEDTKE our current TRF (The Rotary Foundation) chair reminded everyone about the email she sent out last week concerning the upcoming District Governor’s visit to LARC on September 19th,, and how we should consider becoming a Double Sustainer ($200) , Super Sustainer ($500) or Paul Harris Society Member ($1000) donation to the TRF.  She also passed out pledge cards and will (and has) accepted checks for the donations.  Make your tax-deductible check out to The Rotary Foundation (TRF) and bring it to the upcoming Thursday meetings.
President JACK KELLY made two announcements.  One; the Day-At-The-A’s on 9/7 Click here for more information. And, two; The Avenue of Services at the Double Tree in San Jose.  Click here for the District Website, and more information. 

President JACK also had a story about a Rotarian who said she forgot her underwear, but this is G rated newsletter, and all I will say about it is his “Bloomers for Jack” is still going on.  This includes money, underwear and sox for the homeless in our community.  These will be given to our District Governor’s spouse during her visit on September 19th.

JEAN (John) MORDO – Membership Director promoted Red Badger, CAROL GARSTEN to Blue Badge.  Congratulations CAROL.

ANABEL PELHAM then spoke from her seat about several projects PEG (Partners for Elder Generations) is considering.  While she wasn’t too specific, she did mention a program where emergency information is loaded onto a flash drive and carried by the elder to assist identification and care… sounded great to me.  It seems to sort of be natural upgrade to the medical ID bracelet people wear. 

MARV PATTERSON gave his second 10 minute talk.  Skipping a lot of autobiographical stuff he presented in his first one, Marv spent most, well, all of the time talking about his love for flying, and the gazillion air planes he has owned.  His talk was sprinkled with humor, and was replete with pictures of his air planes.  He even had a short video at the end.  His talk, and today’s speaker were certainly geared to encouraging us all to look heavenward. 

PP STEVE ANDERSON’s theme as Finemaster was to whittle out nuggets of information about the late PP President, BOO BUE.  In his effort he got twelve Rotarians (all but one men BTW) to cough up information about BOO.  Probably the best was when JERRY MOISON was asked what was BOO’s favorite fish.  From three choices, JERRY said it was the “Luna Fish”, as opposed to the popular Norwegian Lutefisk, thereby creating a whole new phylum of fish mostly seen in the North Seas. 

The single female was miss-named, as JEAN FRAGUGLIA NEWTON, where as she is properly named, JEAN NEWTON FRAGUGLIA.  But who’s paying attention?

JERRY TOMANEK rose to introduce our speaker today. 
Raja Guha Thakurta, age 35, is an observational astronomer at the UC Observatories/Lick Observatory. He studies faint stars and galaxies, globular clusters, gravitational lensing, new comets and other phenomena.  A frequent user of the W.M. Keck Telescope and the Hubble Space Telescope, Guhathakurta was an assistant astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute before joining the UCSC faculty in 1994. He received his B.S. in physics from St. Xavier's College in Calcutta, India, and his MS and PhD in astrophysics from Princeton University. He held postdoctoral positions at Princeton and the Institute for Advanced Study

His talk was extremely interesting, and I found it very difficult writing, watching the slides on the screen and listening to him at the same time. There wasn’t the usual ‘quiet moment’ where I could catch up with my notes.  But I did get a good sense of his talk into my notes, though not a lot of the facts and big, I mean really big numbers.  He said they feel the universe is about 14 billion years old.  Well, really only 13.7 billion years.  He said that the star light that we are seeing represents the universe as it was about 10 billion years ago, so in essence we are looking back in time, back when the universe was only 3 or 4 billion years old, about a third or a quarter of what it is as of now. 

He also said that all of the stars, all of everything is made up of three main elements:  Carbon, Nitrogen and Oxygen.  Just recently astronomers have discovered this, and realized that our sun (a “normal” star in itself) “has no business with those three elements.”

He said that stars are the “cooks” of the universe, cooking the elements and then spreading them throughout the universe by dying and distributing their mass.  He said that we are literally the ashes of dying stars.  I see a theme here for a great Western song, something like, You are the ashes of my star, burning brightly in the heavens above….”  Well… Maybe not…I’m a few light years ahead with lyrics like this.

While most of us realized it, but it is still interesting to hear, that we can’t take a picture of our Galaxy, the Milky Way.  I have always wondered how they took the picture but then Dr. Guhathakurta said it actually was a picture of the Andromeda Galaxy. Well, talking about busting my bubble!

All in all, it was a very entertaining and enlightening meeting.

This Thursday's Program:

State Senator, Joe Simitian