Maggi Barnard

Year 4 students at Parkes Public School raised more than $240 in a Dancing Bear Appeal last week. Funds raised will be donated to World Animal Protection, an organisation at the forefront of the fight to free bears from a life of misery. Students first learned of the issue watching a story on Behind the News (BTN) on ABC3. They then studied a book, The Deliverance of Dancing Bears by Elizabeth Stanley. Students were very moved by the story and decided to take action. They first wrote persuasive texts on Why Dancing Bears Must Be Banned! They found that World Animal
Protection (WAP) was the most reputable organisation. Three of the expositions by students of 4R will be displayed on the Supporters Wall of WAP in Sydney.

Class 4R also asked all primary students to bring in a small donation to help the bears and raised much more than expected.

Nominations are open for the 2016 Parkes Shire Sports Awards. To nominate, visit www.parkes.nsw.gov.au, and complete the online form. Nominations close 15th December. The Ron Harrison Memorial Sports Bursary will be
awarded as well and provides financial assistance to sportspersons.

Planning Is The Key To Success
Whether you bought your business or whether you set it up from scratch, no doubt you had a vision. To turn your visions into reality takes hard work and planning. Success does not come overnight.

A small business owner needs to wear many hats: personnel manager, finance manager, information technology manager, inventory manager, and the list goes on. No one can be a master of all these tasks. There are just not enough hours in the day. Whilst running your own business can be a challenge, it can also be very satisfying.
The key is to concentrate on your strengths, and to outsource or delegate the other tasks where possible. If you are lacking a vital skill get someone to teach you. In order to make your vision a reality you need a plan.

A business plan does not have to be a long document. You need to know how your product fills a need, who has that
need, what people are willing to pay for your product, how you are going to deliver your product, how you will finance your business, who you will need to help you and how you can do it better than your competitors.

Your plans need to be flexible; if something isn’t working it needs to be fixed. Problems need to be recognised, sooner rather than later. Following an outdated business plan (or even worse not having a plan), can ruin your chances of succeeding. If you don’t have a plan, you should plan to have one! If you need help, find someone with the skills to help you.

SICK OF CABLES?
If you like a clean and tidy work space, the first thing you try and eliminate are cables. No matter how hard you try, a standard desktop will always have cables going everywhere. With the Lenovo All-In-One S500Z, all you need to plug in is a wireless keyboard and mouse, the power cable and you’re ready to go.

With Core 15 power, 8GB of RAM and a 250GB SSD, it’s ready for anything you can throw at it with no messy cables.
For more info see the team at Leading Edge Computers, Parkes.

Everybody knows the plank exercise, but does performing this type of core stability exercise actually help people with low back pain? Physiotherapists, Professor Peter O’Sullivan from Curtin University and Professor Paul Hodges from The University of Queensland, wrote the book on spinal stability exercises. They did a lot of research into the abdominal muscles in the 1990’s and the focus on Transversus Abdominis came from their work. So what are they saying now?

The plank exercise involves a person on their elbows and toes while holding their body stiff for a period of time. This is not what core stability means, says Professor Hodges. If you think about most functions, we actually need the spine to move. Core stability is about getting the spine to move. Professor O’Sullivan says many people with back pain are already too rigid. Their muscles have already tensed up as a protective mechanism due to pain. Static
exercises like planking can actually be counterproductive. Tensing up a structure that is already tense doesn’t make much sense. Instead we should be relaxing the muscles around our trunk when we have back pain.

So where does that leave us? Should we be telling the gym instructor to take a jump next time they ask for a plank? If we don’t have low back pain planks are fine. Better still are dynamic exercises that require us to naturally activate our core muscles such as squats. If we have low back pain, core activation exercises along with movement and learning to turn off over active muscles beat planks hands down. The spine is designed to move.

“For the fitness of you”
Linda Reilly

When eight policemen in suits knocked on Mel’s front door, she knew it was serious, but when they said her husband had been arrested and shoved a search warrant in her hand, she was completely taken by surprise. “I kept on thinking it had to be a mistake,” Mel Jacob told a good crowd at the Parkes Shire Library last Friday night.

In Sickness, In Health… and In Jail is Mel’s funny, insightful and moving memoirs about what happened to her family when her husband, Patrick, had to go to jail for two years. They were packing to go on holiday, when Patrick said he had to go to his warehouse to sort out something. He had an online business importing archery, camping and
hunting equipment. He never returned. With the Police searching their home, she thought there must have been a problem with customs, as he often had. It was only at his bail hearing she found out he was charged with possession and selling of prohibited weapons – a crossbow, slingshot and unlicenced rifle.

Patrick was released on bail that started a very long and financially costly court case over two years. Despite everyone’s assurances that he would never end up in prison and the fact that he was legally entrapped by a Police sting operation, he was sentenced to 4.5 years in prison. He ended up serving two years. With Patrick in the audience in Parkes, Mel related with many funny anecdotes how they were on a big learning curve during the two years. “At first I was worried people would judge me and our two children, but an incredible thing happened – they were incredibly kind, gracious and supportive.” Mel said she had come to experience the very best of humanity, while sadly Patrick had experienced the absolute worst. “It made it very difficult to understand each other. We had no understanding of what it was like for the other one. When he came out 18 months ago he was not the same person who had left us two years earlier.”

Mel, who is an experienced journalist and scriptwriter, always wanted to write a book. She just never thought it would be about her husband going to jail. She said the stories Patrick told her were just crazy. “It is stuff you could never make up. It had awakened me to a world I had no experience with whatsoever. It also made me think a lot about how we treat the weakest in our society.” Mel said their policy from the start was to be open to the children (who were five and three at the time of Patrick’s arrest) about what had happened, but the experience had opened them up to how complicated life could be at an early age.

For the Jacob family the first line of Mel’s book: “Muuuum, it’s the police!” will always bring back a mixed bag of emotions.

By Maggi Barnard