There is many a yarn to be told from each and every one of us, and we had the pleasure of a few from Graeme Kennedy and our President Gerard McNamara.

Graeme indulged us first. He was born in Seddon in Melbourne, and as a young man, whilst working as an Accountant in the Public Service, expressed a vague interest in the Army Reserve.  He spurned their offer when advised that it would involve too much of his spare time. They didn't forget him though and later rang him with an offer he couldn't refuse:
" Cheap Piss, Heaps of Sheilas and we will make you an Officer"

Now didn't this tick all the boxes for a young Aussie bloke? - so he became an esteemed Officer in the Australian Army Reserve (and we have felt all the safer for it!).

Graeme went on to become a partner in Deloitte's and a member of the Williamstown Rotary Club. His other great love, apart from Sandy, are the Williamstown Football Club and the mighty Bulldogs.

Gerard was born up the road from Graeme in Kingsville, and is a Bulldogs supporter.  He too entered the Public Service and found himself in Canberra with Ernst & Young.

He and Katherine were charter members of the Jerrabomberra Rotary Club in 1998.  Whilst there they undertook the refurbishment of a school in Tonga, a RAWCS project in Vanuatu, Rotarians Against Malaria and participated in the Rotary Friendship Exchange (which is like one continuous make-up around the world).

He retired to Torquay in 2011 where his brother lives,  and was surprised to meet Mike Reed again who had visited Jerrabomberra on a business trip. His hobby  as an Amatuer Travel Planner has given them both marvellous holidays, and he volunteers with St Vincents de Paul, Geelong No Interest Loan Scheme, Gardening, is an eclectic reader and of course Rotary.

An attentive reader will have noted the inherited defect of both men - this mad passion for the Footscray football team, but otherwise they appear to be men of good judgement and character.

In October 1914, Jonas Salk was born – a man who would change world history by inventing the first effective vaccine against polio. When the vaccine was introduced in the United States in the 1950s, polls indicated that polio was one of the nation's two greatest fears, second only to the fear of atomic war. And with good reason: In the 1952 U.S. polio epidemic, 58,000 cases were reported, with 3,145 deaths and 21,269 instances of permanent, disabling paralysis. Globally, polio paralyzed or killed up to half a million people every year.

Soon after the Salk vaccine was created, Albert Sabin developed an oral version, allowing tremendous numbers of children to be immunized quickly, safely, and inexpensively. In 1985, Rotary's PolioPlus program was born, with a simple goal: to immunize every child under age five against this crippling disease. Thanks in large part to the initial success of PolioPlus, in 1988 the 166 member states of the World Health Assembly unanimously set the goal of global polio eradication.

At the time, the idea was breathtakingly ambitious, and many called it impossible. Today, we are closer to this goal than ever before, with only a few hundred cases of polio reported per year, and just three remaining endemic countries. We are on track to achieve full eradication by 2018 – if we can keep up the momentum that has brought us this far.

And this month, we will mark World Polio Day on 24 October, and celebrate the 100th anniversary of Dr. Salk's birth.

I ask you all to Light Up Rotary this month by doing whatever you can to shine a spotlight on our efforts to eradicate polio. Call your government officials and let them know that polio eradication matters to you. Go to endpolionow.org for inspiring stories about Rotary's work, and share them on social media. And make the best investment you'll ever make, by donating to polio eradication right on the endpolionow.org website and earning a two-to-one match on your contribution from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

When we eradicate polio – and we will – we'll have brought the world into a better future, and Rotary into a better future as well. We will have proved ourselves, as an organization, capable of great things. And we will have given our children and grandchildren a gift that will endure forever: a polio-free world.

GARY C.K. HUANG

President 2014-15

In an experiment published in the 2006 issue of the journal Pain, Eisenberger used 75 subjects to explore perceptions of physical pain in the context of social situations.

First, researchers identified each person’s unique pain threshold by transmitting varying levels of heat to the forearm. Participants rated pain levels until they reached “very unpleasant.” This provided a baseline for personal pain thresholds under normal conditions.

Participants then participated in a ball-tossing game with three characters on a computer screen. One character represented the participant, and researchers told participants that the other two characters were played by real people, though a computer actually controlled everything. The participant was either socially included (the ball was tossed to their character) or excluded (the ball was never tossed to their character). In the final 30 seconds of the game, a new heat stimulus was applied and subjects again rated the level of pain they felt.

Unsurprisingly, the non-included group reported 67% more social distress on average. More surprisingly, the same people who reported great social distress from the game also reported higher pain ratings at the end of the game—showing a link between social and physical pain.