Meeting Report 03/29/25

At Saturday’s meeting we were delighted to greet a number of guests, including Sally White for the second time; her friend, Rose Ballotta; Becky Zhou, and our old TM friends Chris Ristic and Nilesh Shreedhar. Welcome all! So even though, sadly, we were missing several of our stalwarts–they know who they are–it was a full house and we had a lively time of it.

Going around the table to begin the meeting, a number of us were lamenting the pains of tax season; to be expected, I guess. (We did get some useful advice, though: You can go to UFile.ca for a tax program that collates all the documents the CRA already has on us.) Sarab Sandhu shared that he’s just returned from a pilgrimage to India; we’ll hear more about his trip at our meeting in April, as he’ll be on the agenda. Becky Zhou did us the favour of reminding us that it’s spring, a time of renewal and fresh hopes. (Thanks for that thought, Becky!)

Al Brown delivered the first presentation, sharing his strategies for tracking his expenses during the year. It’s useful to know whether you can really afford that vacation six months from now, or whether you have enough money so you can trade in your old car. He’s shared a spreadsheet template with us that I’ve attached below. As a bonus, he’s written up an explainer with some tips on how to proceed with it. You might want to download these files and see if they’re useful for you.

After our social break the chairperson for the meeting, Phil Nayman, had us playing a game of Pictionary. (If you’re not familiar with it, click on this link.) He had us divided into two teams, and the game, predictably, quickly turned into a pitched battle. (Don’t you find that some people are just too darn competitive?) There must have been some smart people in the room because we were able to pounce upon many of the objects (microwave, train…). Apparently “barbecue” wasn’t a good enough response for one of the challenges. No, we were supposed to say ‘outdoor’ barbecue, so we only got half a point. (I ask you, is that really fair?) We were all stumped by ‘garden gnome’, though. I guess nobody in the group has a garden gnome

Vasu Desikachary then shared with us a presentation titled The Seven Most Impactful Heretics In History. Two different versions of the presentation are attached below, and if you missed the meeting you should definitely take a few minutes to review the information he shared with us. He started with Zoroaster (c. 1500-1000 BCE) and ended with Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677). We need to know a bit about all of them or we can’t call ourselves educated. (A certain Jesus of Nazareth could have been added to the list as well, though.)

We ended the meeting with a review of the Special Interest Groups survey I sent out recently. We had plenty of respondents to the survey and a number of the proposed interest groups will be up and running shortly; we just need to sort out the path forward with those who have volunteered to lead them. More details to follow.

That’s it for now. Our next Wit & Wisdom meeting is scheduled for Saturday, April 26th. We’re planning to stage it as an Open House to promote the club. More details to follow with this as well. I hope to see you there!