Last Minute Christmas Gift?

Have you got all of your

Christmas presents organised?

Could you even imagine

giving just one more gift?

The thought may have sent shudders

down your spine... 

brought you out in a sudden rash

or caused you to faint.

But, it’s possible.

There’s one more gift you could give...

And, it would cost nothing...

Well, maybe a little time.

I’m talking about the red stuff...

Blood

Give Blood

In Australia,

only one in 30 people donate blood...

and yet,

one in three Australians will need blood. 

Some people need regular transfusions

and some people need blood

only after an operation or illness.

So...

Donate

 

Fit? 

Healthy? 

Aged between 16 and 70? 

Weigh more than 45kg?

Ready to drink lots of fluid

the day before the donation – a

nd up to three glasses of water

on the day? 

Willing to eat something

before donating blood?

Bring some ID...

Lay back and watch the red stuff

flow from you,

knowing that you could be saving a life.

You will need to give about

an hour of your time –

allowing for interview time

and the enjoyment of refreshments

as you sit back and rest. 

The actual donation only takes

about 5 – 10 minutes.

Worried about needles –

don’t be... 

all you’ll feel is a small pinch

on the inside of your elbow.

Your body is always discarding blood

and replenishing it,

whether you donate or not,

so you might as well donate blood! 

After donating, your blood volume

is restored within 24-48 hours! 

You’ll be ready to donate

again in 3 months!

Just because it’s Christmas, i

llnesses don’t go away.

Give the ultimate gift...

give blood.

I Believe

So, it’s impossible for Santa to travel the world, dropping presents down chimneys and eating biscuits wherever he lands...

Apparently not!

Cutting-edge science explains how Santa is able to deliver toys to good girls and boys around the world in one night.

If you're sceptical of Santa's abilities to deliver presents to millions of homes and children in just one night, North Carolina State University's Dr. Larry Silverberg, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, can explain the science and engineering principles that allow the Jolly Old Elf to pull off the magical feat year after year.

Santa and his North Pole elves have a lot going on under the funny-looking hats, Silverberg says. Their advanced knowledge of electromagnetic waves, the space/time continuum, nanotechnology, genetic engineering and computer science easily trumps the know-how of contemporary scientists.

Silverberg says that Santa has a personal pipeline to children's thoughts - via a listening antenna that combines technologies currently used in cell phones and EKGs - which informs him that Mary in Kiama hopes for a surfboard, while Michael from Minnamurra wants a snowboard. A sophisticated signal processing system filters the data, giving Santa clues on who wants what, where children live, and even who's been bad or good. Later, all this information will be processed in an onboard sleigh guidance system, which will provide Santa with the most efficient delivery route.

Silverberg adds that letters to Santa via snail mail still get the job done, however.

Silverberg is not so naïve as to think that Santa and his reindeer can travel approximately 200 million square miles - making stops in some 80 million homes - in one night. Instead, he posits that Santa uses his knowledge of the space/time continuum to form what Silverberg calls "relativity clouds."

"Based on his advanced knowledge of the theory of relativity, Santa recognizes that time can be stretched like a rubber band, space can be squeezed like an orange and light can be bent," Silverberg says. "Relativity clouds are controllable domains - rips in time - that allow him months to deliver presents while only a few minutes pass on Earth. The presents are truly delivered in a wink of an eye."

With a detailed route prepared and his list checked twice through the onboard computer on the technologically advanced sleigh, Santa is ready to deliver presents. His reindeer - genetically bred to fly, balance on rooftops and see well in the dark - don't actually pull a sleigh loaded down with toys. Instead, each house becomes Santa's workshop as he utilizes a nano-toymaker to fabricate toys inside the children's homes. The presents are grown on the spot, as the nano-toymaker creates - atom by atom - toys out of snow and soot, much like DNA can command the growth of organic material like tissues and body parts.

And there's really no need for Santa to enter the house via chimney, although Silverberg says he enjoys doing that every so often. Rather, the same relativity cloud that allows Santa to deliver presents in what seems like a wink of an eye is also used to "morph" Santa into people's homes.

Finally, many people wonder how Santa and the reindeer can eat all the food left out for them. Silverberg says they take just a nibble at each house. The remainder is either left in the house or placed in the sleigh's built-in food dehydrator, where it is preserved for future consumption. It takes a long time to deliver all those presents, after all.

"This is our vision of Santa's delivery method, given the human, physical and engineering constraints we face today," Silverberg says. "Children shouldn't put too much credence in the opinions of those who say it's not possible to deliver presents all over the world in one night. It is possible, and it's based on plausible science."

Wow.  I believe.

Aussie Jingle Bells

I’m dreaming of a white Christmas…

With chestnuts roasting on an open fire…

With icicles hanging from the roof and

snowmen sitting in the front yard.

Dreaming is right!

In Australia –

people are roasting in the summer heat

And the grass in the lawn is crunchy

and brown from the sun’s heat

Here’s a Jingle Bells song… Aussie style

Dashing through the bush
In a rusty Holden Ute
Kicking up the dust
Esky in the boot
Kelpie by my side
Singing Christmas songs
It’s summer time and I am in
My singlet, shorts & thongs

OH, JINGLE BELLS, JINGLE BELLS
JINGLE ALL THE WAY
CHRISTMAS IN AUSTRALIA
ON A SCORCHING SUMMER’S DAY
JINGLE BELLS, JINGLE BELLS
CHRISTMAS TIME IS BEAUT
OH WHAT FUN IT IS TO RIDE
IN A RUSTY HOLDEN UTE

Engine’s getting hot
Dodge the kangaroos
Swaggy climbs aboard
He is welcome too
All the family is there
Sitting by the pool
Christmas day, the Aussie way
By the barbecue!

OH, JINGLE BELLS, JINGLE BELLS…

Come the afternoon
Grandpa has a doze
The kids and uncle Bruce
Are swimming in their clothes
The time comes round to go
We take a family snap
Then pack the car and all shoot through
Before the washing up

OH, JINGLE BELLS, JINGLE BELLS…

 

 So, Santa ditches the sleigh for the Aussie ute…

He ditches the reindeer for the kelpie dog. 

He’s dashing down the country roads

with an esky/cooler of beer

in the boot/trunk of the car.

Santa ditches that heavy red coat

for an Aussie singlet and some shorts.

He ditches the black boots for some rubber thongs.

Being a caring guy, he picks up the swaggie –

a term relating way back to the 1930’s Depression –

but today’s long-term,

scruffy backpacker would be the same thing.

Before long, an uncle has pushed some kid

into the pool – resulting in a few other

people being tossed into the pool

– clothes and all.

Knowing they won’t get together for a while,

the family huddles into a group –

smiles and photos are taken…

And then

It’s time…

The kitchen is roasting with the

heat of the day

and the crazy tradition

of roasting meat for hours. 

Dishes, plates, cups and cutlery

fill every surface of the kitchen…

leading to the sneaky – but crucial…

Shooting through before the washing up

(but possibly after a few feeble

offers to do the dishes!)

Happy Christmas – Aussie Style

Surfing Santa

Santa @ Uluru

Bursting Balloons

How exciting...

It's Santa time!

Imagine it... the elves are packing the sleigh... 

Mrs Claus fusses with Santa's red coat

and the reindeer are all stamping behing Rudolph...

ready to take off into the magical night.

Here's the sceptic's view of Santa's trip:

 According to calculations made at the Massachusetts institute of Technology, Santa has 91.8m homes to visit around the world each Christmas night, which works out as 822.6 visits per second.

That is to say, for every Christian household with good children, Santa has 1/1000th of a second to park, hop out of the sleigh, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever delicacies have been left out for him, struggle back up the chimney, into the sleigh, and then move on to the next house.

Assuming that each of these 91.8 million stops are evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false, but for the purposes of our argument will accept) we are now talking about .78 miles per household: a total trip of 75.5 million miles, not counting stops. "This means that Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second, 3,000 times the speed of sound. For the purposes of comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle on earth, the Ulysses space probe, moves a t a poky 27.4 miles per second; a conventional reindeer can run at 15 miles per hour."

The scientists calculate the weight of the sleigh, assuming that each deserving child gets a present weighing about as much as a medium-sized box of lego, 2lbs. This would add up to 321,300 tons, not counting Santa himself.

Assume that the flying reindeer are 10 times as strong as conventional reindeer; such a weight of presents would need 214,200 flying reindeer to pull at the necessary speed. That, in turn, increases the payload of the sleigh to 353,430 tons (not counting Santa, who is always described as overweight).

And here the analysis reaches its tragic point. For 353,000 tons travelling at 650 miles per second through the earth's atmosphere creates enormous air resistance. The reindeer will start to glow like a spacecraft or a meteor entering the earth's atmosphere. But they will not glow for long, for within fractions of a second they will burst into flame with a tremendous sonic boom, exposing the pair behind them, who in turn will vaporize in a flash, exposing the next pair in line - and within .00426 of a second the whole team, the sleigh, and Santa too will have vanished in a tremendous flash and bang from contact with the earth's atmosphere.

Trumpets & Trunks

  

I said goodbye to the class
on Friday.

They ran,

yelling and screaming from the room...

celebrating the holidays.

(No... I'm tough enough

that they left calmly,

 after a final "Be Safe

and Look After Yourselves"

warning!)

These elephants were our last real

art lesson together.

They no longer want me to give detailed lessons on how to create their masterpiece...

They believe in their artistic ability now.

One of the boys copied

my drawing to create

a very talented piece

of his own.

And this was our final

Artist of the Week.

Eureka!

In Australia, in 1851 men left their homes and families and headed into the bush.  They went willingly... eagerly.

There was a Gold Rush on and they all wanted to get rich.

But, life on the gold fields was not easy.

They had to walk to the fields, carrying their belongings.  If they were lucky, they had a wheelbarrow.  The richest men had camels or horses to carry their loads for them.

On the fields, they lived in tents.  Campfire smoke filled the air as the men boiled billies for tea and cooked damper.

 

There was limited water as the men muddied the streams in their search for gold.

The food on the fields was never good.  By the time it was carried to the goldfields, it was already rotting.

The cost of the miner’s licence was high... very high and the work they needed to do was difficult.  Toothache, broken bones and other injuries were common.

If they found gold, they sold it to the Assay Officer.  The Assay Officer stole specks of their gold.  How?  They had long fingernails and scooped gold specks into them.  They ran fingers through greasy hair – then through the miner’s gold (where it stuck to his fingers) and they then ran their fingers through their hair again (trapping the gold specks in the greasy hair) and the Assay Officer greased the sides of the weighing dishes, causing specks of gold to stick to the sides of the dish.

With the arrival of a new governor (Charles Hotham) the miners hoped that their conditions would improve... but they didn’t.  Hotham doubled the frequency of the dreaded licence checks.  He also increased the number of troopers to complete these tasks.  The troopers were often cruel and dishonest.

As many disgruntled Australian men would, the miners turned to alcohol.

There was a fight and James Scobie was killed at the Eureka Hotel.  James Bentley, the hotel manager, was arrested but later released.  Apparently, he was friends with the judge.  Not surprisingly, the miners were angry about this and the hotel was burned to the ground.

Three miners were arrested.

By November 1854, extra troopers were sent to watch over the miners.  The miners were becoming angrier and angrier.

On the 29^th of November, the miners met at Bakers Hill.  Many of the men burned their dreaded Miner’s Licence.  Peter Lalor led the men in their protests.  The Eureka flag was flown for the first time. 

Lalor encouraged the men to build a stockade – using any scraps of timber they could find.  The stockade was built to protect the men as they protested.  By the 1^st of December, over 1000 men had gathered.  Some had guns, others made weapons.  During the night of the 2^nd of December, most of the men had returned to their tents.  About 150 men remained.  By 4am on the 3^rd of December the military attacked.  30 miners were killed.  5 military men were killed.  The “battle” took 15 minutes.  Lalor was trapped under fallen timbers and the troopers could not find him.  The miner’s hid him.  Lalor lost an arm in the battle.  While the miners lost the battle at Eureka, they won the bigger battle.  Hotham and his rules were overthrown, conditions improved remarkably and Lalor went on to become a parliamentarian... they even named a Melbourne suburb after him.

Last week was the anniversary of the Eureka Stockade.



Foot and Mouth

Have you ever tried to paint a picture?

With your foot?

I have. 

I made a group of kids do it once. 

I joined them. 

While the smell of foot odour

hung in the air, we painted...

and complained! 

My muscles were aching

before I'd really even started... 

I had no control...

my toes - which are very good

at pinching and grabbing -

became sore and tired...

In Australia in 1956,

an international for-profit association

 fully owned and run

by disabled artists was formed. 

Mouth And Foot Painting Artists (MFPA)

supports disabled artists. 

The members paint

with their mouth or feet.

Bill Mooney was born in 1942. 

At 16, Bill dived into shallow water

and became paralyzed

from the shoulders down. 

Since then, he has been

confined to a wheelchair.

By 1960, Bill was painting

and joined MFPA in 1963. 

His paintings have been sold

internationally and usually represent

the Australian landscapes and seascapes. 

He is married with three children. 

Bill’s piece is titled:

Red Western Australia.



Beryl became interested

in art as a young child. 

Her cerebral palsy

limited her ability to use her hands,

so Beryl paints with her mouth! 

She has been a member of the

Mouth and Foot Painting Artists (MFPA)

since 1979. 

This is one of her pieces,

titled: The Old Shed.

Reverend Glenn Barnett also

had a diving accident.

At the age of 15, he was

confined to a wheelchair.

Two years later,

a boy asked him to draw a picture

and his artist days began.

His work was first published in 1971.

This was also the year he married.

In 1974 he became a member of MFPA.

The dry Australian landscape

is Barnett’s favourite subject,

but he sometimes does face-painting

at fetes and shows.

Barnett’s work here is titled:

Magestic Bush.

 The next two pictures

are some of my favourites

from the

Mouth And Foot Painting Artists

website.

Bruce Peardon - Broken Tusk elephant

Wayne Te Rangi - Misty Gully

Abled by our Abilities

Today is International Day

of People with a Disability.

A South African sprinter

Oscar Pistorius once said:

“You’re not disabled by

the disabilities you have,

you are able

by the abilities you have.”

So.. who’s Oscar and

why does his opinion count so much? 

Oscar was born in 1986 without a fibula.  (That’s one of the bones in our legs.)  Doctors and his parents finally made the decision to amputate both of Oscar’s legs below the knee.  They did this while he was still young – before he could learn to walk.  Within days of receiving his first prosthetic legs, he had mastered them.

Oscar knew no different to his “new” legs. He was an active sportsman all through school.  He especially enjoyed water-polo and rugby, but also played cricket and tennis, competed in triathlons and boxed.

During a rugby game,

he shattered his knee and
thought his sporting career was over. 

He was only 16.

A doctor suggested he take up running, to rehabilitate his leg.  Before long, he had won a 100 metre school race.  His father realised that his time was faster than the existing Paralympic world record.

Coming home from his first Olympics, he carried a Gold medal for the 200m (with a world record time) and a bronze medal for the 100m race.

Wanting to push himself even further, Oscar competed against able bodied athletes and came 6^th in a 400m final event.

He was performing so well that examinations of his running were scheduled.  Findings reported that Oscar was able to run as fast as able bodied athletes, without using as much energy as them... his prosthetic limbs were helping too much!

Oscar challenged this – no one had considered the disadvantages he faced at the start of races and while slowing down for corners.

Back at the Olympics, Oscar was very success in Beijing.  He was the first athlete in history to win gold in the 100m. 200 and 400m events (including a new world record).

In 2009, a boating accident left Oscar with serious facial and head injuries.  This couldn’t stop him and before long... he was back, breaking more records.

Being born without two very important bones... and wearing prosthetic limbs from a very young age could be reason enough for taking life easily.

Oscar didn’t.

Most people with a disability don’t.

There are so many incredibly adventurous people who simply overcome whatever blows they were dealt...

They fight...

They adapt...

and they succeed,

especially if the people around them

believe in them, too.

“You’re not disabled by the disabilities

you have,

you are able

by the abilities you have.”

(Oscar Pistorius)