High Gear for March 9, 2015 reported by Dennis Zell

The meeting was called to order at 12:18 p.m.

 

After the Pledge of Allegiance, Rosemary Rayburn gave the invocation.

 

Alden Cunningham was introduced as a visiting Rotarian, but objected to the characterization. He is a Burlingame Rotarian & he don’t need no stinkin’ badge.

 

Mario Flaheraty attended as a guest of the club. Mario is the new General Manager of the tennis center which was recently built along Highway 101 in Northern Burlingame. It is a community based facility with no membership.

 

Jean Berube joined us from Community Gatepath as the guest of past-president Cheryl Young.

Jim Shypertt reported that the club is full of S*******. You know, SUNSHINE! Yep, we are all well. Jim faked a telephone call from the Almighty when giving his report. Or was it His report? This reporter would investigate, but is afraid of lightening strikes.

 

It was announced that our website needs a FAQ page. Anyone who has any questions about Rotary, submit your questions to the website committee. My question is, "Who is on the website committee?

 

The Kentucky Derby fund-raising event organizers need auction items. How about an autographed copy of this High Gear? Oh, what’s that? Nevermind. Apparently the auction items need to have some VALUE. Anyway, bring your items to Jennifer Pence.

 

Burlingame Rotary is also participating in an exchange student program with a Japanese club. Maki, Bob D., Kelvin, John D., and Rosemary are all involved. They are hoping to raise funds and need sponsors for the visiting students. The student participants from here are going to be taking lessons about Japanese "culture and manners." Meanwhile, the Japanese exchange students will presumably take lessons about how to survive in a place that has neither.

Francis announced the Borneo project has raised $29,400.

 

The Burlingame Community for Education Foundation is selling tickets to their BCE Goes Hollywood fund-raising event. Hmmm. Somehow sounds familiar. . . Anyway, tickets can be purchased on-line: http://www.bcefoundation.org/dinner-dance-and-auction/

 

Marc Friedman stood up to provide comic relief and proved once and for all that the newscast has gone to the dogs. Indeed, Marc had the whole club laughing at various jokes involving our canine friends. There was one about a dog who jumped through a hoop and out the window ala There’s Something About Mary as well as one about a talking dog who used to work for the CIA—or did he? Marc even provided definitions from the doggy dictionary, including a big laugh about a Jewish dog known as the "Goldman Retriever." You had to be there.

Our speaker was famed Burlingame attorney Joseph Cotchett of Whereishe, Pitre & McCarthy, LLP. Besides being renowned as one of the top trial attorneys in California, Joe apparently is also an amateur magician. For a spectacular introduction, he purportedly attempted to magically appear out of thin air at the podium at exactly 1:00 p.m. Unfortunately, there was an unanticipated occurrence in the netherworld (i.e. the murky place where trial lawyers reside) that prevented his appearance.

Joe is famous for fighting for Consumer Rights. Ironically, the Consumers Legal Remedies Act lists many unfair and deceptive acts such as "Advertising goods or services with intent not to sell them as advertised." (Civil Code section 1770, subdivision (a)(9).)

By the way, the program committee is currently looking for a lawyer to take the case. Word is, about a half-dozen former defense attorneys who lost cases against Joe are lining up to take the matter on contingency. The program committee has promised these eager barristers 40% of the speaker’s fee that was paid to Joe. Fortunately, since they are all former "big law" lawyers and are therefore not very good with numbers that are not divided in one-tenth of an hour increments (Pierre, that’s a "billable hour" joke) none of them know that 40% of nothing is nothing.

 

With luck (i.e. if no-one shares this High Gear) we can reschedule Joe down the road. He is a dynamic speaker and was missed.

In his stead, the program committee played old episodes from the Scott McGrew show Press Here about drones and A.I. In America (unlike the rest of the civilized world) there are currently very few laws regulating drones, and Google has recently bought-out many companies developing A.I. (Pierre, drones are little remote controlled helicopters with video cameras on them and A.I. is an abbreviation for "artificial intelligence" and Google is—oh, forget it my fingers are getting tired typing.)

THE END