Barking For a Cause
In honour of Guide Dog Day, Guide Dogs Australia is hosting a Zoom meeting full of furry friends. On April 29 screens were taken over by Labradors!
In Labradorable fashion, fully-fledged guide dogs who are companions to people with blindness and impaired vision hanged out on their first Zoom session ever while audiences learned about the special role they play in the lives of their owners, as well as the process they go through. Of course the real start of the show was a three-week-old Labrador puppy and Guide Dog in training Zoom taking centre stage.
Meet the Guide Dogs here.
Australian Innovation Amid Pandemic
Costing just a tenth of the price of existing models, the Aussie made OzVader ventilator has been brought to life in just four weeks resulting of a partnership between engineers, Brisbane-based manufacturing company Olitek, intensive care specialists and the Medical Engineering Research Facility (MERF) at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT). Although awaiting the approval of the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA), the company behind the OzVader believe it would be ready to deploy the machine within weeks.
The rapid manufacture of cheaper equipment would make ICU care accessible to more patients and locally made products funded by the government – a silver lining amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
Sam Neill brightens our feeds with his new talents
Right now, actor and winemaker Sam Neill should be in London filming Jurassic World: Dominion. Instead, he is stuck at home like the rest of us and is passing the time in the best way possible.
His Twitter bio proudly reads ‘In the cheering-up business since 1993’, and it seems Sam has now brought this business online – providing us all with some much-needed entertainment while we pass the time in isolation. Brightening up our newsfeeds with his whimsical posts, Sam plays Radiohead and Randy Newman songs on the ukulele, reads poems and children’s books, displays his dubious paintings, and makes short films with his actor friends.
“I’m hopeless on the ukulele. I can’t paint for nuts. I certainly can’t write poetry, but I’m giving them all a go” he says – which makes it all the better…
