Rotary Club of Marana We began the meeting with a big "Welcome Back" for John Zwick who then led us in The Pledge. Quickly following the pledge was a mediocre rendition of Happy Birthday for President Jo Holt led by Lynne. It is apparent that singing only every other month is taking its toll IMHO. Jo waited until Javier was out of the room to announce she is now receiving Medicare and saving $400 a month. Hopefully Javier reads these minutes. Quoting Play Dough, or is it Plato, President Jo reminded us to be kind to everyone as all are fighting battles with which we are not aware. Mirabel our Exchange Student once again attended our meeting. By the way, 80% attendance this morning. Congratulations! Our one day a month Picture Rocks Food Bank assistance program is a week from tomorrow. Denise West has volunteered with possible attendees John, Mary,and Jo. We will have a hospitality room co-sponsored with Dove Mountain at the District 5500 Conference 10/13/2017. Still time to sign up. Come see the Big Picture. You can pick and choose what to attend during the three day event. There will be a board meeting this Thursday at 6pm. Consider attending. There will be a board meeting 10/23/2017 when we meet with District Governor Joe Hentges. DG Joe will attend our 10/24/2017 meeting. October 31st i the 5th Tuesday of the month as well as All Hallows Eve. Sounds like a theme possibly? Honorary Member Kathleen Nabors, Tortolita Middle School Teacher and leader of our Club's Interact program, will soon be holding an induction ceremony. Please try to attend. Tony Hunter gave brief update on Corn Hole Tournament. Still appears to be a small signup. Randy shared some of the winners names on the weekly football pool. Happiness shared from Richie, Lynne ( much groaning following All Nighter bathroom joke), Mary ( happy to the point of tears but I have no idea why), Denise told a Dolly Parton joke that did not involve bosoms, Maeve took it to a new level of groaning with a less than polished delivery of an algebra joke. That Eskimo Pi joke from last week sure was good. President Jo drew the Queen of Hearts.  Guest Speaker was our own Silver Bullet owner and pilot, Bob Bishop. Bob gave us an overview of how his smallest human piloted jet in the world has been used since 2005 by the US military. The radar profile of his jet simulates one of a Cruise missile. Bob saved the military millions of dollars when he replaced the $200,000 per flight target vehicles that cost 3/4 of a million if they crashed. Mr. Bishop does not charge if his jet crashes. We were provided a little background of the use of cruise missiles. They were fired 5 times during the Iraq War and none were detected. Cruise Missiles can be launched from cargo ships. The Russian STYX missile was improved upon by the Chinese and its' range was doubled. Bob's jets have the only Type One ranking for the simulation of a cruise missile. All branches of the military use his product as well as a very big customer NORAD. Data obtained from the use of the SMART small jet enabled the development of JLENS a high altitude tethered blimp for reconnaissance purposes. This massive blimp, many times larger than the Goodyear blimp that Bob has piloted, is tethered with an 86,000 pound tensile strength cable. The electronics aboard can detect cruise missiles and forward the what, where and when information to the nearest ship to the missile. Bob shared with us his great disappointment, if not anger, over the Congressional action to kill the 2 billion dollar funding of this missile defense system. We finished with the El Tour de Tucson Burma Shave winners. Need to pee? Need to poo? Stop here next And use our loo. What a great meeting. Hope to see the missing 20% of our members next week. |