HBCU Dutchess Radio, welcome back. Continuing our coverage of distinguished voices within the historically black college and university sector. Today we are deviating slightly from where you have come to expect our coverage into the world of sports, which sometimes as we know transcends a lot of the business and industrial elements of higher education. And tonight is a very special show, a friend of the show, a dear brother of mine who doesn't like the spotlight but thought that this topic was important enough to come on. He is the commissioner of the Southern Athletic and Intercollegiate Athletic Conference, Gregory Moore Esquire. Pleasure to have you on the commissioner. And also the head coach of the men's basketball team at the University of Kentucky, John Calipari. These two gentlemen are working together to give strong footing and foundation to the McClendon Foundation's Minority Leadership Initiative. This is a pipeline and a program that's designed to get minority candidates of high caliber into positions of leadership and influence within the collegiate of sports world. So gentlemen, it is a pleasure to have you on this evening. Hey, thanks for Jared. Pleasure. Hey Jared, brother Jared, I'm recovering lawyer for the record. You're only one step away brother at all times. Yeah, yeah. Let me, let me start with you commissioner. You guys, and I think this needs to be said outright. The SIC has been pioneering since your tenure, certainly over the last several years in talking about acting upon the idea of increasing equity and access within the collegiate ranks. The SIC was the first to put a full crew of women officiating a football, a college football game. You have done wonders with coaching pipelines for former NBA athletes to get coaching positions in the collegiate ranks, several of which in your conference. You've done things to start volleyball programs, a diverse program at HBCUs for sure. With all of these things that you've done, why do you think that it is outside of the division two conversation that the SIC hasn't been out there enough that this minority initiative program wasn't the first thing everybody picked up on and say, yep, that's the SIC. That's what we've come to expect. Why do you think that the conference itself, as pioneering as it's been, has flown in at radar, so to speak? Well, that's a tough question to answer. What I will say is that when I became commissioner, Jared, I tried to align the mission and purpose of our athletic conference office and put in alignment with the parties of our member institution presidents. And you know, Coach Cowell talked about access and opportunities and talking about that for years. You know, Jared, that's really at the core of what our schools have done for one over a hundred years, which is provide access and opportunities. So some of the things we try to do with focus on is there in the sports world, can we leverage athletics to provide more opportunities in terms of the professional development opportunities for African-American sports administrators? And obviously in the context of intercollegiate sports, there is some real pressing challenges in that area. To answer your question with respect to why we're flying under the radar, what I would simply say, and this doesn't just apply to college sports, generally speaking, if you are an African-American professional and you kind of raise these thorny uncomfortable issues, it doesn't win you friends in high places, it's just not a good look for you.  And I appreciate you giving us our presidents and our league that credit, because we've been doing this quietly for 10 years. And now that George Floyd, that's kind of, you know, that issue has kind of, you know, raised awareness of the larger issue of racial justice in the country. Folks are beginning to pay attention, but I'd be remiss, Jared, if I didn't say that we've been flying under the radar in a lot of quarters, but there is a, you know, a very short list of people who kind of paid attention to what we're doing. And Coach Cowell is one of those folks.  So, you know, John Skipper and ESPN.  Unfortunately, those calls are few and far in between, but Coach Cowell is one of the latest folks who, again, Kentucky Wildcat basketball is a whole nother, you know, animal. But he's taking time out to say, hey, what can I do to help? Let's talk about that quickly, Coach, because you've always been outspoken. Anybody who knows sports, period, collegiate or pro or otherwise knows you're an outspoken cat. And you've never been one to shy away from even issues on social justice and equity.  A lot of people do that. But you're specifically saying we got to get more people in the leadership and executive pipelines. What is it about that that stood out to you? Well, let me do this first year. Let me tell you why Greg and I hit it off. Dude's a solution based, solution driven human being. That's what I'm about. When people come in to me with problems, my normal response is, we think I'm not paying attention. I know it's a problem. Give me a solution. Tell me what we're gonna do. And Greg and I, he's got really great ideas and a great picture of where he wants us to go, which is why when I talk to him, we have great conversations. You asked me why this, why now? When everything happened and however you wanna say it, you know, George Floyd murdered in front of our eyes, how can one human being do it to another human being? How can this be in this time and age?  Don't just talk loud. And she said, we owe everything that we have, every success that you've had, everything for our children, because African-American parents have entrusted us with their sons. That's why and you need to speak up. And then it just, my sphere of influence, I know there's problems with police, but that's not my, I don't have influence or the criminal justice system. Come on, we all know it's wrong. We can see it, but I don't have influence. But in access and opportunity, I do. My own staff or athletic departments. And all of a sudden, the idea was to get a group of coaches together to work on their campus inside out. Do your campus. And if we're all doing our campuses, this thing's gonna change. And how do we get the best and the brightest who want to apply? Many don't apply because they'll say, I can't get that job. There's no way. Well, these are minority positions. Now, here's what I would say. You may be out there saying, well, you know, I don't have the connections. Well, you do now. Well, I don't have access and opportunity. You do now. Now, you may look at this and say, this is gonna be hard. It will be hard, because there's only gonna be about 70 jobs this first year. My hope is it goes to 150 and 300 in the next three. But there'll only be about 70, 50 to 70 this year. But here's my point. You still have to go prove yourself. But how many out there say, I will just give me a chance. Let me in the door. I'll prove myself. And I believe what's gonna happen with this. Leadership, it's not just a voice in the room. You have to be in leadership and decision-making positions. And there are many in athletics. But here's what I'll say to you. There's great diversity and minority on the field. There's just not much in the athletic department. And that's the idea. Now, coaches are funding this. The coaches are funding this. I knew Athletic Direct. And Greg and I talked. How do you take away the answer? No, you fund it. You promote it. You come up with how the applications are coming in. How you're filling the job. You give them three candidates for each position on their campus. You take away the ability to say no. And then, I don't wanna say the word pressure, but I don't know what else I can say, which is we're leaning on them to get this done. And then we become mentors. The Athletic Department becomes mentors. And these are stipend paying $2,500 a month. We don't want anybody to have to take a loan.   You're giving real work in a real position. They're for one or two years. And we need, the coaches have committed. This is what's great about it, Jared. The coaches and the schools have committed to multiple years, like four years. We need that time to check the data, to make sure that we're doing right and we're handling things right. So all I can tell you is, Greg, how many times do we talk about this? Three times, four times? Many times. I want all the school, I said, I want your conference in this. But just as important, I want the students from the HBCUs to look at this and say, I'm applying. I deserve this opportunity. This is what I've been looking for. So that's why I said to Greg, how do we do this? How do we get your presidents involved? How do they make recommendations? They don't have to be athletes. They can be the student body president that wants to say, I wanna learn. And lastly, and Greg, I'll let you go with this. We got businesses involved. So part of it is, if you don't get a job with a school this year, you're gonna be in a database. And that database will be a minority database where a company may call and say, hey, I'm looking for a minority in accounting or IT or marketing, whatever. You're in that database. We're trying to look for matching dollars for businesses. So schools that can't, because right now it's about 33,000 per position on a campus that the coaches are being the point of funding. And there are many coaches that can't afford that. So how do we get matching dollars? I want each coach to be invested at some point. You can't, it's not for free. I want you to have to give up something. I want the school to have to give up something. And then we match. But this thing is, if we do this right and we're passionate and we're engaged in it, we don't just say we're starting it and walking away. It's not for optics. This thing is what happens in four to five years, what's it look like?  So let me frame it this way. You've built programs, you've inherited legacy programs and built them to championship caliber. You've been in the NBA. What is the difference when you look at your path from a UMass to Memphis to Kentucky to the league? And you look and you see these operations from top to bottom.  What in your mind, what would a candidate or what could a school do to prepare a candidate for that kind of top flight position? And what can a school do to welcome that kind of talent to make them feel most comfortable and ready to succeed under a coach cow? At a UK. Okay, let's start with your second point. The athletic director and the president of whatever university that future leader is on, they have to let everybody know I'm in this and this is important to me. If it's important to the president and the AD, it'll be important to everyone in the athletic department. The coach needs to stay involved to let everybody in the athletic department know this is important. We're gonna have five positions at Kentucky, okay? Once a month, they're gonna be at my house, maybe with my team, maybe with themselves, just by themselves and we're gonna talk leadership. We're gonna have speakers. I've already told Spike Lee, this isn't an ask, it's a tell, just like he did to me when we played Morehouse. I'm not asking you to play, I'm telling you you're playing them and I did. He and I have been friends for a while, but to have Jamie Foxx and different leaders to get on and talk about leadership, talk about making decisions, how to engage everybody, leadership is about serving. It's not just, I've had more players that you would say they knew how to lead when they got there. Well, that born to lead, I don't believe it. I think serving, creating opportunities for others, stepping back and being wrong so someone else can be right, so decisions can be made is so important and they don't know it. Just because you got a great personality and you got some leadership traits doesn't mean you understand how to lead. And so we're trying to do that. And then again, the access, what you're gonna find out, why have we not been as diverse in athletics? Says there hasn't been the access. There hasn't been the connections. And now I'm saying, let's eliminate that. And let's see how these young, talented, driven, wired, just competitive, how they succeed. And I think what you're gonna find out is wherever they go to work, what school, that AD's gonna look and say, we're hiring that person. All right, they're in this position in the Futures Leaders Program in the John McLendon Foundation Leadership Program, but we're hiring him full-time, hiring her full-time. We want this to be both about men and women. And I will tell you, right now in America, and Greg and I've talked about this, we have seven of the major cities have mayors that are African-American women. I mean, they're making strides now. And I'm saying, why not in athletics? Why don't we do the same? And so I'm again, and then the other thing, let me just say this to the listeners. After we came up with this, I was so excited. And I got coaches on board. Not one said, no, because it's right. It's the right thing to do. And it's the right time to do it for, I don't care about crew, and I don't care what they're doing with athletics this year. If we have to work remote, we teach them how to work remote, remotely.  But here's the one question that came to me, kind of made me feel a little uncomfortable. Why didn't I do this 10 years ago? Why now? What was I missing? What wasn't I hearing? What wasn't I seeing that I would wait 10 years that I could have done this 10 years ago? We could have done the same thing. And so, you talk about what we're doing, it takes courage, but this doesn't, this is easier. Now it's hard to grab everybody, get them together. Can you imagine getting 50 coaches to agree to something that are like the big time, I mean, these guys, or whoever they are, it's hard. But if it were 10 years ago, now it takes a little courage. The coaches in the 60s and 70s, I always wonder if I would have courage back then, if you're making a move that could cost you your job, because you're trying to do it right. Would I do what's right? I hope so, but I don't know. I don't know. And I do know, we should have done this earlier, but Greg and I talk, let's just do it now. And let's do it right, and let's have this be something that we all are proud of. Every coach, every commissioner, every college president, we all know we need this. We also wanna include presidents. We want them to say, look, I'll take the future leader, let him shadow me for a day or two. He can be in my meetings, he can see what I'm doing, he can see what the leader of a campus does. I want this to be more, I want every future leader to lead the program and say it was the greatest experience of my life. I can't believe I got this experience. And if that's what they're saying, that means everybody's engaged, everybody's showing how important it is to them personally. And you know what? We're teaching the things that put them in the position that Greg is in to lead and be solution-based and be a guy or a girl, a lady that says, look, we can do this together, we can lead and hear solutions to some of the issues. Let me throw this to both of you, but I'll start with you, commissioner. So with this training program, obviously it's putting minority candidates in good position with strong networks to be seen and be accepted by athletic administration at all levels. But more specifically to the programs which may be included at the HBCUs. Do the candidates have to be trained on some of the unique challenges that black colleges face, particularly in with kind of college sport regulation. And I'm hoping I'm not being a boogeyman of any kind. When I say things like the APR, things like lower resource being punished for not having enough money as Coach Cal said, when you can't do summer school, the APR gets a hit for that. Guaranteed games, how do you navigate around that? What does fundraising look like within that scope? Are there things that this program will develop within the leaders or the leadership pipeline that prepare candidates from all kinds of backgrounds to understand, here's what smaller mid majors and smaller independent schools and what specifically HBCUs have to go through to then give them a greater perspective of what athletic administration really looks like. I think at some point, you know, Jared, yeah, I mean, those things will. So every kid who wants to work in college sports, right? Is it within the loading curve? And at some point, they'll gain the appreciation of some of the things you just outlined. But you look at our league, we have some incredibly rigorous academic institutions. Our presidents and our colleges universities produce very talented, bright young people. I think at the starting point, baseline, we just need smart kids, kids with a passion to work in sports. And I think those kinds of loading curve issues will resolve themselves. Use word pipeline. And that's one of the things that I will say it's been very frustrating for the last 10 years because when you look at the percentage of ethnic minorities who work in college sports, colleges, HBCUs provide the supermajority of ethnic minority professionals and sports administrators across every world in terms of head coaches, football, basketball, coaches, 80s, president. And very often when these discussions are had, we're not really engaged. And the frustrating part about that is that, you know, how can you say you really care about inclusion in college sports? And to some degree, historically black colleges, which is the largest repository of ethnic minority sports talent in the country, they're not really engaged. And to Coach Cal's point, maybe segueing to APR, there are policies in place that actually disadvantage these schools and hurt these schools. So that's really frustrating too in terms of trying to, rather than investing in these guidelines, you know, we're making it more difficult to conduct business at these schools that are creating these counter-piped lines. Greg, let me add one piece to that too. Jared, all of the coaches that are in this, that one comment that came up, it's not just the mid majors, the lower major schools, whoever that future leader is, man or woman, they're gonna have a job that's gonna be like, it's theirs, that they've gotta perform. And they may learn to do two or three things, which is what happens at that level. You're not just this guy, you're this guy, this lady, this lady, you're doing three or four things that I hate to tell you, like I started as a volunteer. And you've got things you've gotta do and things you're responsible for. So that would be good also to have that. And we want this to be a wide breadth of schools. This year, we're trying to keep it to 50 to 60, including football coaches, you know, Lubby Smith, you know, there are coaches that wanna be involved, baseball coaches, women's coaches, but we wanna make sure this first year, and I told Greg this, we gotta get this off the ground and running and running in a great way. Let me ask you both this then, and Commissioner, you said this at the top about, you know, when you're doing what's right and doing what's necessary, it doesn't make you a lot of friends. Is there any concern that this will draw, I don't know if animosity is the right word, but it will draw a certain level of attention that could be counterproductive?  Everybody knows that this is an opportunity to try to do what is right and reverse some things that have worked against African-Americans for a long time. But do you think that you guys' level of investment and you guys' level of passion about this will create some blowback for you in any respect? I do, but you know what? I say I'll be taking arrows, but I've got bazooka holes in my body, so those arrows don't even touch skin. And what I do is I know we are doing right. And here's the difference between putting committees together, talking and action and solutions. And this may not be the best thing, but I haven't heard anything right now. And I also hope this bleeds into business and other areas where people, how about they come in here and we have two or 300 future leaders being trained in a year from three or four years from now and businesses know that and they come in and say, hey, we'd like to look at some of these students, would you be interested in business? How about this one? How about they get the chance to rub shoulders and elbows with people that they would never have an opportunity?   You're coming with me. And now you look and say, how in the world did I get this opportunity? Let me just say this. For me, my career started, I was, you know, I'd say as a player, I was a gym rat. And I say I was small, but I was slow. And, but I was a gym rat and I was into it. And I was a pretty good basketball player, but nothing special. I was a division two. I played division one for a minute at UNC Welmington. But there was a man in the five store basketball camp, Howard Garfinkel, that took a liking to me. I didn't play for, I mean, Kentucky. How did I get here? I didn't play for any of the great name coaches, but I had someone who lit a fire in me and say, you know what? Took a liking to me.   I wanted to be a high school coaching teacher. I didn't want to be a college coach. And then I was a pro coach and then they fired me. But I look at it and I'm telling you that that's what I want this to do. A springboard, light a fire, have belief that you can do whatever you choose. My mother, the greatest gift she gave me growing up, she said, listen, you're not responsible for these surroundings. You were born here. She said, dream beyond your surroundings. And that was the greatest gift that she gave me, that she believed I could be president someday. And I'm like, what?  My grandparents came through Ellis Island. I mean, so you look at this and I say all the time, access and opportunity that I've had, that is white privilege to me. It's not just money. I didn't have any money, but I had white privilege because I had access to stuff. And all of a sudden I had to take advantage. I had to work. There was nothing gonna be given in this. And what we're doing, nothing is gonna be given. But it gives you a chance to earn what you choose to earn. Be who you choose to be. And that's why I say, I want the HBC use involved. I want Greg in this. He's in the middle because I don't think I did one thing that I didn't learn by Greg. Like, tell me if I'm off the mark. Tell me if I'm being tone deaf. Tell me what this is what I wanna do. How do I get you guys involved? How do we do this step by step? And again, I'm trying to get funding so that all the schools can be involved in this. And now, look, learning wherever you learn, you're gonna learn something different. I'll give an example. Jared, if you're an athlete at Kentucky and you won in this program, you're more than welcome. You just can't train at Kentucky. You gotta go somewhere else and train. And then say you go to Conzo Martin and you're at Missouri. And I call Conzo and I go, Conzo, how is she or he? And he says, unbelievable. We are so happy. And I tell my AD, Mitch Barnhart, and say, she's our athlete, hire her back. She's proven herself. She wants to do this, let's go. Because I don't want any athlete thinking, well, you owe me. This isn't about that. This is about here's your opportunity. Take it, grab it, no excuses, go for it. And that's who I want to apply for this. And again, it's gonna be tough. We may have 27, 28-year-olds wanna change professions and do this. We may have people that are out of work right now that have great leadership and they know this is what they can do and they wanna start over. We may, this is gonna be interesting what we're gonna have in candidates. But I'll say this. You know, my hope is if this is done right, we coaches, and I'm calling the other coaches, Tommy Amaker and I, he helped organize. We had to get together and say, Tommy, I can't do this myself, I need you. And Tommy Amaker jumped in and he's done unbelievable work. But the 50, I'm calling him ambassadors, the first-year guys, ambassadors who've committed to multiple years, four years of doing this. I say, well, how about if we can all look back and say in 10 years, forget about national titles, league titles, whatever wins, whatever's happened for us personally, this may be the biggest thing that we've ever been involved in. This may have more of an impact than anything I've done. And again, my goal is to have every one of my players be something more. I know the families are saying to me, look, coach, we're entrusting you with our son.  And then it's, you know, we're entrusting you to coach him, to teach him, to lead him, to love him, to hug him, to tell him when he's wrong and help him become all that he can be. And that's what the parents are telling me. And so now I'm looking at these young people and saying, you know what? How about they get the same opportunity? And that's what this is about. And then tying it all together with Gray, with Spike Lee, with people that are, I know will help with this, Maria Taylor, who's unbelievable with young women that want to get into her field. And she's the ESPN rising star. Matter of fact, she worked with you, didn't she, Gray? She did. She was our sideline with S.I.C. football games on Bounce TV.  I mean, but she is a talent.  And that's the last piece of this. Anyone that leaves this program, when they leave the last thing they're talked to about is, your time now is to mentor somebody else. This has to have a ripple effect. If it has a ripple effect, it'll grow big fast. If it's just everybody worrying about themselves, if we're not doing this for optics, we're not doing this to speak louder than somebody else or say, be proud we're doing something. The only thing we're gonna be proud of is that this works. If the data says, yeah, done good, then we'll be happy. Let me ask that question. This will be the last one for both of you. How will you know in a couple of years that this has worked? What will be the cultural indicators? What will be the data indicators that showed you? Yep, exactly what we set out to do has been done. Is it hiring? Is it influences, is it titles? What will have shown you this was effective? Greg, you tell me what you would say. This is what you see that this would be a success. Yeah, Jared, success for me is providing increased access and opportunities for our kids. And also of getting the corporate community to invest in those pipelines. Folks want the talent that come out of the pipeline, but you don't see as much investment as there should be in the pipelines that produce them. You with me?  And I think it's also important to mention you bring up Maria Taylor.  And she got an opportunity at the SISC. You know, George Lynch went to UNC. So Darrell Walker, who went to Arkansas, he, you know, he had 21 interviews before and he's been very vocal about this. For Clark Atlanta University gave an opportunity. So, you know, the head football coach and at AD at, at Lane College went to Memphis playing the NFL. So I think a lot of the autonomy five folks, I'm not sure they fully appreciate how many of their former student athletes, football players and basketball players become ADs and coaches and football coaches and administrators and sideline reporters. And I think if they had a better awareness of that, they'd understand why it's critically important to invest in those institutions at a greater level.  I would say in 10 years that we look at athletic departments collectively and we say they look different. This looks different. Hooray that different decision makers look different. That in 20 years, instead of having five or six minority ADs, we have 30 to 40 minority ADs or more. And then the other part that would make this a success is that Greg and I are arm and arm saying, we finally got money in the pipeline for our student athletes, so that we can prepare the next wave. So this is the bigger picture that Greg and I really haven't talked about is, all right, we want to be involved, but we need help too. And there's been different companies and I heard somebody, you know, where you heard different athletes or thinking about HBCUs, I love it. And different shoe companies are coming back saying, you know what, how do we get an HBCU in the sweet 16? What would that mean? What would that be like? And you know, you look at the name of this foundation, the John McLendon Foundation. And John McLendon, again, was, before his time, he was absolutely an icon, but he trained under James Naismith and he trained because he wasn't allowed to be on the team, but he trained under him. And then all of a sudden, he is the first African-American, he was a pioneer and a phenomenally white school. He was one national title that Tennessee state. You know, you're talking about the fast break basketball. What did Dean Smith take from him, Greg? Four corners, that's where it was. He took it from him. And now all of a sudden we get to honor John McLendon with this foundation and what we're doing to change college athletics and what it looks like, what could be better? So again- You also spent a couple of years, you also spent a couple of years, coach at Kentucky State of Head coach as well. And he was an administrator, which is how the NACCA people latched on and said, hey man, let's do this in his name. And that program that they have already in place, which is more for postgraduate education, those scholarships have been tremendous and have led to success of Martin Jarmin, who's the AD at UCLA went through that program. So, you know, it's special. Minorityleaders.org. So if you're a business leader that you're interested in supporting this, minorityleaders.org, if you're a candidate, if you're a future leader, if you're looking for how to apply, minorityleaders.org, and I would tell coaches or athletic directors that have an interest in this program, how we can help you forget about money wise, if this is something you wanna do, we will help. Minorityleaders.org. Did I say that, Jared? Minorityleaders.org? You know how to brandy coach minorityleaders.org.


The Cody Firearm Museum is located in the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody. The museum is believed to have the most comprehensive collection of American firearms in the world. As a straight shooter, I think it's fair to say the museum has hit the bullseye in preserving and telling the story of a significant component that aided in the development of the American West. The museum is comprised of more than 20,000 firearms and firearm-related artifacts from across the globe. The core of the museum is the Winchester Collection, which has been a part of the museum for nearly 40 years. No matter your interest in firearms and their history, one is bound to find something that will spark their interest. The collection includes sporting arms, military weapons, Hollywood firearms, and embellished guns, such as the impressive, custom engraved Winchester Model 64 lever action rifle presented to President Ronald Reagan. The Cody Firearms Museum has much more to offer, so put them on your itinerary for your next outing. From the University of Wyoming Extension, I'm Wendy Kelly, Exploring the Nature of Wyoming. Thank you.


A Bemidji woman has now been charged in connection with a recent stabbing. 25-year-old Christina Lindbaum-Pond was arrested on Friday around 2 a.m. in connection to a stabbing and was charged with second-degree assault on Saturday. According to the criminal complaint, officers were called to the 900 block of 26th Street, Northwest, after a witness reported that an adult female had been stabbed. Upon arrival, officers found the victim outside in a chair holding her side with a cloth and covering a one-inch puncture wound. A witness reported the stabbing to police and named Lindbaum-Pond as the stabber. The victim also confirmed what the witness had reported. Lindbaum-Pond is expected to appear in court on Monday.


What's up everybody, Jason here for jasperjasecaserace.com 2022 tops, Gilded Collection Baseball, three box break, random teams number six. And again guys, 30 thoughts. Everybody gets a random team in the MLB. Last three boxes of the case guys. So here we go, dice roll it. We got ourselves a three out of three, six times. Good luck, one, two, three, four, five, six. Six times, Oliver down to Kevin. And six times, one, two, three, four, five, six. Blue jays down to the Yankees. I can explain it right now Charles, let me just do this really quick here. So Oliver in the blue jays, Harry with the pirates, directs, you have the Dodgers, Adam Coverham with the Pogries, Jason with the Mets, Anthony with the Royals, Rob with the Mariners, Michael with the Phillies, Charles with the Rangers. Jason with the Brewers, Jason Griffin that is, last one module. Rob with the Cardinals, Jason with the Braves, Jason W, Braves with the Brazer. Brian Crouch with the Nationals, Josh with the Guardians, Harry with the Marlins, Charles with the Angels, Jason W with the Rockies, Anthony with the Reds, Carlos with the Red Sox, Rob, Giants, White Sox, Jason W with the Diamondbacks, Carlos with the Astros, Brian Crouch with the Cubs, Rob with the Twins, Adam Coverham with the Tigers, Michael with the Rays, Jonathan with the Orioles, Jacob with the A's, and then Kev with the Yankees. So if anybody wants to trade, guys, give you guys a trade window. But it's kind of very easily summed out the way Rex said it, but basically, we have a big Superbowl mixer, right? $1,600, it's expensive. Not everybody could afford that. So what we do is we create mini fillers, mini break raffles, if you want to call it. So each one has a different price point. Each one has X amount of spots. So for the XR one, that one's a little bit more expensive, but you only have 10 spots. So we randomize the 10 names only instead of 30, because it's only 10 spots. And then, of course, you win a spot into the big mixer. But before that, we do a little one box break. So you get three random teams. We showcase the hits. You could potentially get something from the box. If you don't, obviously, everybody's buying into this for the Superbowl mixer. So yeah, basically, you can win one of those $1,600 spots for a lot less and still have a chance to get something nice out of the box as well. So that one's a little bit more expensive because it's only 10 spots. But of course, there's other ones like the Prism one that's sold out. That one's 109, but there's 32 spots we need to sell, giving away two spots. And then, of course, like the Contenders one, that one had 32 spots. It's a lot cheaper at $60, but, like I said, more spots, so odds are a little bit harder there. But basically, the way Rex said it is you have a chance to get a really expensive spot in the Superbowl mixer for a lot cheaper. And basically, what it says in the title is what it does. So one Superbowl mixer giveaway, two Superbowl mixer giveaway, et cetera. All right, guys, so the trade window's open right now. Well, Thomas, sometimes that's just the luck of it, but if you stop trying, yeah, you're never gonna win. Gotta keep trying. A lot of the biggest hits that we've ever pulled here in giveaways have been won through fillers and random number blocks. Connor McDavid I pulled, that was 136,000, was won through a random number block. Joe's LeBron James local man was won through a random number block. All right, so are we doing a trade or what? Sorry, there's a lot of conversations going on. I don't know how I tricked you, Thomas. I think you just needed to read it better knowing that one's a 10-spotter and one's a 32-spotter. Okay, so are we getting a trade in Rex and Oliver or not? What's going on? Blue jays and Nolan, how's that even possible, Oliver? All right, last back here, three. There is a Jackie Robinson cut autograph, Rex. Yes, there is. And there is Jackie bass cards as well. Seth Beard, Tim Adderson, Luke Williams. For the Phillies. And how about a Louise Gill, is that a rose gold or is that red? Wow, that's a red out of five actually. Four out of five. Nice one there for the Yankees going to Kev. Kev got randomized to Yankees, how about that, man? And Jordyn Elver is there. Phillies is Michael. Andre Dawson in 99, Montreux was one of the Washington Nationals, Brian Crouch. All right, first box down. Tim Anderson is to 99, I think? Yeah. So these ones are usually the base ones to 99. The speckles are usually the 50 or the mini diamonds. That's the blue, that's the red. Sometimes I can feel the rose gold though. But to 99. All right, so Lars Neuthvar to 99. Matt Olson to 99. Whoa, Mike Trout. Look at that. Woo, Mike Trout number to 30, 26 of 31 off the Jersey number. Dang. 26 out of 30.  These ones are out of 25 or 10. One's out of 10. Very nice, and that's going to the Angels and Charles. Jim Rice to 25, Boston. That is going to Carlos Showtime. This one also has an extra auto. Showtime to 99. Nice Bobby Witt Jr., who has a rose. Anthony with that one, that one's to 199. We got Brandon Lau, Giancarlo Stanis. Is this another red or is that a rose gold? Juan Yves rose gold to 25. Nice one there for St. Louis. It's going to big dog. And then Ray's is going to Michael. And I think this is like the extended base. Rookies to 199. There's some Showtime right there. Last hit of the break, guys. Last hit of the case. Goose Gossage to 99. 11 out of 99. Yankee's going to Kev. And there you go guys, just like that. We sold a case of Gilded out pretty fast today. But we managed to get some pretty nice hits out of this whole case. And including a big trout in this last break. That one out of five. The very solid stuff here, guys. Like I said, we don't have any more. But again, if Instagram kind of gets stuck on selling some boxes as personal. So if you want to buy a personal box, go to Instagram. If not, you might see those boxes shifted over here later tonight or tomorrow. So I appreciate it, guys. JaspysCaseBrace.com.


Hey there, Chad Bondra here for High University Libraries. I have several hundred students in the College of Business right now who are working on doing a feasibility analysis of opening a fitness center in Indianapolis, Indiana. In order to truly be successful in this project, they want to analyze their local market but also get a good understanding of who their competitors might be by location in Indianapolis using data that looks just like this. This video is going to show you how to use SimplyMap, a market research database to create maps and get data points for the local market, the local fitness market in Indianapolis. What you learn here in this video can also be applied to other consumer markets in the U.S. as well, so here you go. So this is a follow-up from my previous video on how to create data points using the variables in SimplyMap to create a standard report or a ranking. In this case, we're going to be looking at how to create a map around Indianapolis, Indiana, or any location that you choose to visually display percent who are interested in physical activity or in a fitness program on a regular basis. So what we're going to do, we can launch our Map Wizard here if you want to. I'm actually going to start here and do our variables here. I'm actually going to do a Reset because we actually already have some of those variables from our previous search that we did when we did the ranking and the standard report. So we want to just click on Use this Variable and we'll close all that. Now if you don't do anything, it's going to center like on, you know, it's going to say no location found or it's going to center like the center of the map will be somewhere in Iowa. So we're going to do Locations, same sort of thing, do Reset. And then here's Indianapolis, Indiana, and we can use this location there. Either one will do fine. Let's just use this location, Indiana, here. All right, if we close that, it's going to go in and look at, by zip code, Indianapolis, Indiana, percent who are interested or who have done physical activity programs and do a program three or four days a week. And this is done by zip code. So we can actually zoom in if you want to and look at it on by Census Track. If you're going to try to really try to zoom in and try to figure out where you want to, where you want to try to locate your particular business, okay? Now before you do that, you don't want to base your decision solely on this. So what you actually want to do is look and see if there are businesses in the area that might actually be competitors of yours, okay? So you can actually click on Businesses here. All right, and I want to do a, I've already done a search here. I want to show you how to do a new search. I want to create a new business criteria here. And we'll call this Fitness Centers 2. All right, and we're going to select our attribute. And we're going to do the primary NAICS code here. And we're going to click View a List here. And so the NAICS Code for Fitness Center is actually into the 7-1 area for Arts Entertainment. So we click there, and it actually is under the Other Amusement and Recreation Industries. And then you see there's, here's one for Fitness and Recreational Sports Centers. So we want to, we can use this code, and then do Save here, and then we'll use that as our criteria. Oh, sorry, let's do Fitness Centers 2 there. And you can see it actually puts in everywhere on the map that it says that there is a business that has assigned that specific NAICS code for Fitness Centers, okay? And if you hover over them, it'll give you the list of some of the businesses, okay? So you can actually see what some of the businesses are. If you would like to, you can obviously drill down further and get closer. And as you get closer, these numbers will get smaller here. So right now we've got, we're showing seven businesses in the same area. And as you get closer, it's got five and one and one. So it kind of breaks it down that way, okay? So good way to kind of measure not only the interest in physical activity, but also the proximity of that interest to people who actually have access to a fitness center or a gym. So your target market might be to identify places where, you know, there's a high level, right? Maybe there's 24 to 30 percent, and there may be only one fitness center over there. So it might be a good place to look to see if that might be your location for doing your fitness program. If you like, you can actually go over here, and under Actions here, you can actually make a report from all the businesses here and get a list of all the businesses in like a spreadsheet if you want to do that. You can obviously also basically export this map as well. You can export the map image as a JPEG or a PDF or a GIF for your PowerPoint and that sort of thing. Good way to kind of visually look at the Indianapolis area and to see what businesses are there that are already there in an establishment and established by who's potentially using those businesses with who engages in a physical fitness program, you know, several times a week and that sort of thing. In addition to the data that we've already displayed on the map under the Simmons local folder under the variables, there's a physical fitness programs, and you can see where people work out. So if you actually wanted to use something else, if people wanted to percent who work out at home versus people who work out at a private club versus YMCA, let's say if you want to say, well, people, there's gyms in the area that people aren't using them, so maybe you want to start a new gym that would attract those people. You can click use this variable there, and so it's going to do the same sort of search there. It's going to change, it will change our map a little bit by the location. So here we have a percent who work out at home, right, and you can see this is pretty obvious over here. There's only like one gym in the area, or even over here is pretty high number two. So those might be places you want to concentrate on when you're establishing your demand scenario for your potential business. Hope for this video helped you better understand how to use the database and how to better understand the fitness center market. Should you need more help, look for the contact link on the business blog. We'll be glad to help anyway. Can't take care and have a great day.


Hello, welcome to the next lecture. Last time I gave you an introduction to the course and I provided a bird's eye view which was an overview of the hardware, software and sensation and perception parts of virtual reality. So, during the software part one of the key things that I mentioned was the alternate world generator. So, today I want to go into the basic mathematics the kinds of modeling and transformations that we need to do to set up an alternate world generator. So, today's lectures will be more fundamentally oriented I will say with geometric modeling of alternate worlds. So, the alternate world generator in some sense has to simulate or reconstruct some kind of world right. So, it may be simulating a virtual world that has geometry it has physics and the geometry in physics has to look reasonable to your brain right has to appear reasonable to your brain or to your perception when you use virtual reality when you are in this kind of experience. So, we may be simulating a virtual environment or you may be capturing a real physical environment in some way it could be far away or it could be recorded or both and you are transmitting that through this kind of head mounted display and that provides another example of virtual reality. So, what we have I will say let W be a 3D world right. So, I mean that W is some subset of R 3. So, I will just start doing mathematics in Cartesian coordinates on the reels in three dimensions let me define a coordinate system. So, we will have x going horizontally we will have y axis going upward and we have z coming out of the board done in a way. So, that we have a right handed coordinate system. So, I will prefer and use right handed coordinate systems all the way through in graphics and rendering it is sometimes preferable to use left handed coordinate systems and in direct x if you are doing programming in that it is left handed if you are doing programming in open GL a lot of other systems it is right handed, but most of math and physics is right handed oriented. So, I want to stay in that in that way. Also I will follow the conventions used in the in the game industry and throughout much of graphics which is that the y axis is up throughout most of engineering I think the the z axis is up, but we are going to stay consistent with that. So, that whatever you apply from game engines and related things it ends up being consistent. So, this is a 3 dimensional world and so each point in this world has coordinates x, y, z element of w. So, I would just have I will be describing points with x, y, z coordinates. So, the world has two kinds of models right the first main distinction I want to make here is one we have stationary models. So, this means as the name implies they never move. So, this can correspond to buildings, walls, trees assuming the trees are not swaying in the wind right. So, think about things that when you put them into the world they remain fixed all the time right. That is the simplest case in this case they are described in the world coordinate frame right. So, we can just make up these x, y, z coordinates for whatever points we want to describe for the stationary models and leave them alone the whole time. One thing I should say if you are building a virtual world I highly recommend scaling these axes in a way that corresponds perfectly to the world that you are making. So, I highly recommend for example if you use the metric system then measure out everything in meters or centimeters whatever it is that you would like to use.  Unless you are doing interesting VR experiments where you want to change your scale entirely which is interesting by itself I would rather do that as a as another transformation that you apply to this. It is very nice and helpful to keep the the the numbering in here let us say consistent with measurements in the real world. So, that if you draw a chair for example the chair ends up being the right size if you are trying to capture a chair from the physical world and bring it into the virtual world. You do not have to study it look at it you end up with problems of perception of scale and it gets very difficult. So, it is nice to keep these coordinates like that match them as they would be in the real world. So, two the other kind of model inside of the world are movable models and in this case these models have a space of possible transformations right space of possible transformations you write that down here. So, this may correspond to many moving things it could be the avatars representations of yourself anything else moving around other characters animals moving bullets blowing leaves all sorts of things and usually these are composed of rigid bodies.  So, usually composed of rigid bodies each of which is defined in its own body frame. So, we will not directly use the world coordinate frame, but each body will have its own frame and then we will imagine a movable model as being a collection of one or more rigid bodies. So, they could be attached together just like a human skeleton let us say where we have each rigid body may correspond to a particular link and the links are all joined together by joints and we end up with some kind of movable structure it could just be a single rigid body that simply moves around through the space. Maybe you have a chair that can be moved around. So, it is rigid by itself, but it is a movable body the character may be able to come up grab the chair and move it somewhere. So, in these cases we have to talk about a space of possible transformations that can be applied. In order to do that we start by describing it in the body frame. So, we generally have two modeling choices when we are making geometric models of these bodies that are in the world whether they are stationary or movable whether they are stationary or movable. One choice is to have what is called a solid representation and the second one is it is called a boundary representation. So, in the case of solid representation we have three dimensional primitives right. So, the most basic description unit we have represents some three dimensional chunk of the world or of the body and in the boundary representation case we have 2D primitives. There are lots of details to this lots of interesting technical complications and a lot of trouble comes about based on which representation you choose you solve some problems and then other problems emerge. And I will give you a little bit of a hint to that of that today, but I will not be covering it in full detail. So, one thing to think about with regard to this is think about obstacles and collision detection. In the real world when I walk up to this table my motion is physically obstructed right. So, that is one kind of obstacle. If I put this notebook in front of me I also have some visual obstruction as well right and you could have two these could be independent right I could have some fog that does not obstruct my motion, but it just obstructs my visibility right. I could have what is an example of an obstacle that obstructs my motion, but not visibility glass very good. So, I can look through glass and I get obstructed maybe surprised by that. So, those are two different kinds of obstructions you could model these things and represent them. I have not talked about rendering or graphics yet we will have to get to that part when we talk about drawing the world in a way and presenting it drawing it in a way that is appropriate for your vision sense. We have not gotten to that yet we are just describing the geometry of the world. So, with regard to these two choices having one body let us say represented like this and I have another body that is here and this case I would say they are in collision because they intersect right there is a non empty intersection. Now, if I have a some kind of solid representation I am only drawing this in two dimensions. Hence, the solid representation looks 2D and a boundary representation should look 1D right. So, if I just think about representing these by their boundaries just the outer perimeter of the yellow blob and the white blob then these also intersect at these points here right. So, if I were going to do some kind of intersection test I could look only at the boundary maybe I break this into tiny line segments and I do line segment test or maybe I get a little more clever with the algebra I realize these are circles. So, I could do some circle intersection tests, but what happens when I have this case. So, in this case if I am using a solid representation I may be able to tell very quickly depending on how I have decided to represent it that the yellow disk is in fact in the interior of the white disk, but if I have a boundary representation there is no intersection of the boundaries right. So, it is just something very important to think about there is some kind of meaning behind these representations and it is somewhat implicit and then later as you start developing you realize some of the shortcomings and problems. Let me give you an example it gets a little bit worse it may be that I have a boundary representation and it is has mistakes in it a little bit. So, this is the boundary representation that I have of one object or body and well maybe the other one is fine it looks like that. So, that is the boundary representation of that one and I am still trying to infer whether or not this yellow disk is inside or outside of the white disk and it may be that I have a perfectly defined disk here, but out here because I have these breaks I am not even sure if there is a well defined notion of inside or outside right what does it mean to be inside or outside of this how can you define that if this is a closed curve then by the Jordan curve theorem there is an inside and an outside and that is all there is a very nicely partitions of space into two regions, but when there is this break in here it is not very well defined and you can imagine that the same thing happens in three dimensions and it is much worse and you have to think about where is your model come from. If you are drawing the model yourself maybe using a design tool maybe using Maya or blender and you are making your own models perhaps you can get everything very consistent this is called model coherency where this particular example I have given has a lack of coherency you meant this to be a closed curve, but it ends up getting broken. So, you have to ask yourself what is the coherency or perhaps consistency of the model if you are extracting this model using depth cameras right maybe you have computer vision algorithms running you are also getting depth information you are trying to build some kind of surface description what do you think the chances are that there is going to be little holes in your data right and that is going to make a mess. So, you may have to do a lot of work to build a coherent model you may have to do even more work perhaps to build a nice solid representation of it, but then when you do that then it will be easier to determine collisions. So, these are just some of the kind of difficulties you end up with also because it is difficult to know what side you are on of these boundary pieces it gets sometimes difficult to render surfaces in computer graphics because you are not sure whether the surface normal that you are looking at is pointing outside or inside of the object to be rendered. There is a lot of difficulties with that if you do some rendering on your own it often mistakes come up because the surface normals are pointing in the wrong direction. So, these are some different choices at the highest level I am going to only work with boundary representations even though I think solid representations are cleaner in a lot of ways. One of the reasons why we should talk about boundary representations here is because that is what is done in primarily in game engines all the way down to GPUs. So, the graphical processing units that are that are in our computers are geared for boundary representations and in particular representations that are made of 3D triangles. So, why do we pick the simplest case boundary representations and the 2 dimensional primitives are going to be triangles that sit in 3 dimensional space.  So, it is a 2D primitive. So, let us use a triangle triangle primitives. So, in order to describe a triangle we may mean well we generally mean this 2 dimensional surface it is assumed to be linear it is just part of a plane and. So, all you need to define are the vertices of the triangle x 1 y 1 z 1 x 2 y 2 z 2 x 3 y 3 z 3 right. So, I can start defining triangles like this if I put them into the world I define them in the world coordinate frame for stationary models and again if they are movable models then we define them in the body frame and then I am going to say what to do later on how to transform those. There is also some common tricks for gluing triangles together in order to save space and to make more efficient data structures to access all of the triangles in a quick manner and one thing that may happen is the triangles may be glued together to form strips. So, you could have a strip of triangles do operations on that more generally you may find the triangles are put together in some kind of mesh and there are all sorts of interesting issues in terms of what kind of property should we maintain in that mesh in order to make the computations that we perform later if we are studying or let us say solving problems of rendering to determine what the lighting should be across the surface we would like to have not too many triangles we would also like to represent the surface very well if it has a lot of curvature we might need to make the triangle smaller we would also like to avoid having very very thin triangles if we captured a surface from a depth camera how do we build a nice representation of this and there are a lot of algorithms from the field of computational geometry you can study these people are very interested in starting from raw data and then building nice surface representations like this boundary representations especially not having incorrect holes in the data. So, when you put these together when you make strips or mesh if the model is coherent then many of the vertices are shared. So, that reduces the overall amount of data storage and there are very clearly defined adjacencies here between triangles and. So, you can make data structures with pointers that move around one example is a doubly connected edge list which the computational geometries have developed or you can very quickly move across and propagate computations across these surfaces that you might need to do. So, that is about all I will say about basic modeling and primitives are there any questions about that.


Welcome to Monet Café. I'm artist Susan Jenkins and I am so happy to bring you this free pastel painting course that should benefit artists of every level and get you on your journey towards pastel painting. In part one we'll talk about the birth of a painting and why a value sketch is so important. Good paintings don't happen by accident and take planning and preparation. In part two called crucial first steps we'll discuss the planning stage and we will complete a painting on unsanded paper to further develop our composition color palette and gestural quality. Part three is what lies beneath and no it's not the scary movie of the same title but the concept of an underpainting and why a proper underpainting can bring life and energy to your painting. Part four is called a painting comes to life. This is where all of the principles are pulled together and your preparation and hard work pays off. With a painting that is no longer haphazard rushed or frustrating this process will cause your art to become more enjoyable as you approach the final with confidence. And now it's time to get started with part one in the series called The Birth of a Painting. And if you haven't yet subscribed to this channel I hope you will click that bell icon to be notified of future videos. Also this free four part mini course is brought to you because of the faithful support of my patrons on my Patreon page. It's a place where you can support this channel to keep the free videos coming and get extra content. As a patron you also gain access to many of my private sharing platforms where I can see your work and we can all learn and grow together as artists. Welcome to Monet Cafe. I'm artist Susan Jenkins and if you're a beginner and you want things a little bit more simplified and broken down to begin your painting journey then this is going to be the video for you. Now I also believe which is why I'm doing this myself that no matter what level you are as an artist it's always good to go back to the basics. Sometimes we lose some of those foundational principles that make art art and beautiful. So let's dive right into part one The Birth of a Painting and I'll be sharing with you why simplifying your image with value sketches also called notans is so crucial to good painting. Early on many artists including myself produce artwork that suffers from TMI too much information so how can we solve this problem and produce artwork that has harmony and beauty. One way is to simplify your composition that's where a notan or value study comes into play. This will help you to identify a more clear focal point and reduce the tendency to have too much information in your paintings resulting in a painting that has a more clear direction simplified value structure and focal point. As we observe the typical landscape our brains don't have any problem interpreting the information however it takes a certain skill to be able to translate this information and reduce the complexity into a more visually pleasing image composed of simplified shapes and that is where the power of the notan comes into play as a simple and yet powerful beginning to your painting. And what about this word notan or notan? It's basically the Japanese design concept of the play between light and dark elements in a composition and now let's talk about why at the beginning stages of a painting seeing less is actually more. Here are a few tips to keep in mind as we begin this lesson. How do we simplify? We want to reduce the color of the image and simplify the big shapes. One way to do that is to squint your eyes. We're literally taking light away and light is the source of color. If you don't believe that try turning the lights out. Also you can use low lighting. I often like to paint in low lighting but really at beginning stages it's a good idea to be able to see the values. Also you can work from a small thumbnail. I often say we can see more from a small image with regards to composition than a large one. Another convenient trick is to simply convert your color image to black and white. And finally you can use a really handy app. It's called the Value Study app. It's free on iPhone. I'm not sure about Android so let's talk about that. It's real easy to use. When you open the app you are going to be presented with the ability to either take a photo or choose an image. I'll be choosing images from my phone. The first image will be just a simple pear shape. In the squares at the bottom you'll first see black and white with the ability to use the plus or minus to add values. Here there are three values. You can add a fourth value and thus changing the image. A true notan is only black and white but these are called levels. Different levels of values. Now let's move on to another image. Oh I have so many in my phone. Let's do my granddaughter, my son and daughter-in-law's dog Lola. Here it has multiple levels and I'll be reducing them. Therefore showing the darks and the lights. Now you can tweak this as you want but it is important to be able to see just the darks and the lights at the beginning stages. And you most certainly don't have to have this app to be able to simplify values. Once again you can simply squint your eyes. And here's some good news. The supplies are simple and very affordable. I like to use index cards that I keep in this little index card holder. I've recently started labeling them and saving them all in these little tabs or categories. And the neat thing is you can use these value studies over and over again with different color palettes and you'll definitely find ones that are your favorites to use over and over again. Some more good news is that you don't need expensive supplies. I often just use charcoal pencils. I also love these Tombow dual brush markers that come in different values of gray. And for the next few value study exercises I'll be using some of these, not all of these, Arteza gray scale markers or gray tones markers. And they're hanging out with me is Bob Ross and Leonardo. They're often practicing their karate moves together. Now I won't be using all of these like I said. I do love this set. I like working sometimes in the value scale of warm tones, sometimes cooler tones, but usually only three values. Now let me talk a little bit about this because Arteza is so great. Sometimes they send me products to review. And like I said there's 36 of them and Arteza's packaging is always top notch. I love this container. It has a little magnetic tab there for opening and it's really really nice and substantial. I also love the fact that you don't have to try to reach your neck over and crane to look at the numbers. You can flip the back over and actually lay the whole box down so you can very easily see all of the markers. Now as I said before, this is not to overwhelm you. I just liked the set, but you only need three values. Even if you just use a charcoal pencil, you can get the charcoal pencils that are dark, medium and light or you can just apply pressure, heavier, medium and light. Here are the three values I'll be using. I'm sorry, I can't even see the numbers there, but basically dark, medium and light. And now an image I'll be using is one I took out at my parents property. It was some beautiful trees and a field. And as I've said before, there was a lot of information going on there. So when you convert it, I think in this particular one, I didn't use the value app I had mentioned before. There's another free app called the Notanizer. I think that's the one I used here. But again, you can squint. That's typically what I do just so you know this looks all fancy what I'm doing here. I usually just squint my eyes, dim the lights and I can see the big shapes and the darkest values. Often I like to identify the really dark values first, but lately I've also been kind of working middle and then dark and light. So I find people have their own unique ways of doing this. But one of my main strategies is to reproduce what I saw as beautiful in the actual image. And it was totally these clouds reaching up and the trees almost like they were observers of this beautiful day. I also liked there was some lines in that field. It wasn't a road, but I kind of created it to be more like a road. And so this looks pretty simple and perhaps even a little childish and you can create more complicated value studies, trust me. But I find as beginner artists, just to break these shapes down to simplified forms and basic values is so crucial and it's so easy. Isn't that good news? I continued with the looseness and did some fun color studies. Another thing to really simplify your image is to do a monochromatic color palette. That's basically different values within the same color family. You can see these are all like in the teal or aqua color family. And I did four of those and it really helps me to explore the direction that I want to go with my painting. And we'll talk more about that in part three of this course as we explore different color strategies for under paintings. And now as a precursor to part two, we're actually going to create a little painting study. Now I've got my index card here and I've got my little image that I've converted to a value scale.  Basically, I just taped it up to my iPad here. This could be a printout as well. I take a ruler and I put it from corner to corner of the reference image, not the index card. Then I just make a little mark at where the ruler hits the index card. You can see kind of like it about 16, where it says 16 inches on my ruler. That's kind of where it met. Now if I simply cut off the bottom at this point, my index card will be the same proportions as my reference image. So I'll be doing this again later in the video and you can probably get a better idea of it. And here I'm choosing three different values, dark, medium, and light. And with these I did see the numbers. It's the cool grays 01, 05, and 08. And here I'm giving just a little example of each of the values. So you can have an idea whether you're using different products. Basically, you know, pretty simple dark, medium, and light. My light actually could have been a little bit darker. Really for you guys to see it as well. So now I'm working with the middle gray marker. And I'm just getting in the basics of this composition. The reference image is actually another image from my parent's property, a beautiful lake behind their home. And I have converted it using the value app to get a more simplified value structure to work from. And by the way, if you're a patron of mine from my Patreon page in this mini course, all four lessons, you will be receiving a downloadable JPEG of all of my reference images. So just one of the perks for being a patron of mine. And I am speeding up this portion a little bit here. But there is going to be some real time after this. I just wanted to talk through this. And once again, stress the importance of this first step. It may just seem basic. And I know we all just want to jump right into painting and into color. But what I believe is one of the most important things for me when I do these, always, I can tell you 100% of the time my final painting comes out better when I take this step or do this value study ahead of time. But of course, we are establishing our values. We're getting a better idea of our composition. We can tweak things before committing to the painting. But what I find is one of the most beneficial aspects of this exercise is the fact that I feel I establish and generate more life into my value study sketch and thus my final painting when I take this step. I can feel when I work small like this, I can feel what I liked about the original image better and represent it more clearly. And now to take our little value study and create a little painting study. This is part two, which is actually putting this value study to work using color. And in this second step, I find it's again always a way that helps my final painting. And I'm showing you once again how to mark your drawing surface or painting surface the same as your image. Once again, you saw me put up the image on top of my paper, do a diagonal of the image, mark it on my surface, resulting in a painting surface that's the same size as my reference. Here's my setup.  I have my little hyalmin box. This is the mini hyalmin box. A few videos back on Monet Cafe, I did a little review of this box actually show you how I packed it and give you a whole lot of information on it. And now I'll be choosing my color palette. I want to talk about the surface a little bit though. The surface I'm using here that kind of tan paper you see is a piece of sanded, it's like sandpaper, but a professional quality pastel paper. And this one is called Sennelier Pastel Le Carte. Pastel card, that's a long name. It's made by a French company Sennelier. It's a pretty coarse sanded paper. So if you're just starting with pastels, you will see in part two of this video where I do the second stage on just regular drawing paper. So don't think you have to have these expensive pastel papers to begin with. I just wanted to have a little fun with color and I found this piece that was almost the size of my value study anyway. In part two in this course, I'm going to talk a little bit more about color strategies and picking out a color palette. But basically for this little study, I wanted to choose like autumn colors. Kind of have a nice warm feel, but have some blues in there as well. The pastels to the right there are my darks. You definitely want to have darks. You can see in my little value study where the darks are. And in part two, I'm going to go into good placement of darks, lights and middle values and where they typically are in a landscape and where they typically are with regards to subject matter as well.  It's really not as hard as a lot of people think. It might seem like a lot of information at first. But again, once you learn some simple rules, you are ready to go. And here's my little color palette. Again, darks to the right, sky colors to the left, some various colors in the middle. And it's a good idea to convert your pastel palette to black and white if you're having a hard time determining what values are light, medium and dark. I often like to make a little mark of my colors on the surface that I'll be painting on, basically because the colors can look very different from what's in your hand and what is actually on the surface, especially if you're working on a colored surface like this. I'm using now, this is a harder pastel. It's still considered soft pastels, but it's harder, it's more dense. And it's a pastel made by Prismacolor. Prismacolor new pastels spelled N-U, not any W, new pastels. It's a great set. I have the whole 96 set, but this color is really great for sketching. It's called Spruce Blue. And I just find it's a nice little way to sketch out your composition. And here's a reason you want to use a product that works with pastels. If you use pencil, I found this out early on when I was painting, I would use a pencil to sketch my basic beginning sketch. And pastels don't apply very well over pencil. So it's best to use either a charcoal pencil or something in the pastel product family like this Prismacolor new pastel. And in this beginning stage, I'm going to be talking more about this in parts, I believe three and four, about capturing the energy in your reference image. Most likely, I would say always, you choose an image because something about it excited you and you felt it was beautiful. And so in these beginning stages, even before doing your little value study, it's a good idea to remember, make a little note about what it was about that image that drew you to it originally. And for me, it was the energy of these clouds radiating or actually coming forward from a far perspective in the back, coming forward overhead, also the energy in the reflection and that foreground coming forward. So I imagined the harmony of those two elements, one's going in with the values decreasing, and one's coming from behind with the values increasing with the clouds overhead. So that is just a little suggestion that's actually not little. It's actually a very important suggestion for the initial stages of your painting. And once again, the point of this video is about simplifying. We have so much information in front of us in a landscape. We want to simplify it. That doesn't just mean the elements of the painting, the values of the painting and the colors of the painting. It also means the energy, the life of the painting, and your concept of the painting. We need to simplify that. In other words, we don't need to say, oh, the trees are important and I want to accentuate the reflection and I want to accentuate the clouds and the foreground. I mean, that is just going to make your painting, your final, very busy and leaving the viewer with no clear indication as to what you're trying to represent.  What were you passionate about regarding the image and reduce your goal to that element alone? And the other elements in your painting should serve as supporting characters, enhancing what drew you to the painting in the first place and giving the viewer a clear idea of your focal interest and passion for the image. And now I'll speed this up only slightly while I finish the rest of this little color study. And I'll also add some music for your listening pleasure. And notice as I work that my effort is to keep my original passion about those clouds and the water. And I use directional strokes to pull the viewer in and bring those clouds forward as well. So enjoy and don't go anywhere because I will be back at the end. I'll talk a little bit more about part two coming up and more. By the way, this song is called Waterfall by Akash Gandhi. And it's from the YouTube audio library. I hope you've enjoyed part one in this four part mini course offered on Monet Cafe for free. And I am just overjoyed at all of the responses I get from you, my subscribers. If you haven't subscribed, please subscribe to this channel. It's a lot of fun.  You're the reason I'm able to bring these things on Monet Cafe. It really is because of the support from my patrons. So part two, we're going to have some exciting learning where I'll be sharing some of those simple concepts I mentioned before about values and the structure of where they are and when to apply them in a painting. Also, we're going to talk about creating that energy within your work. So get excited about that. That should be coming soon. And once all four videos have been created and uploaded, I will have a playlist where you can watch them all in succession. All right, guys. Happy painting. God bless you all. And thank you for being part of the Monet Cafe family.


This is stock number 11358. We are here at Summit Automotive in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. You're new and used heavy-duty truck and RAM headquarters. Today we are checking out this super clean 2016 RAM 2500 crew cab long box With the Laramie package this truck has the 6.7 liter Cummins diesel It has been fully safety and inspected by our service shop has a fresh oil and filter change all the fluids Have been checked and tapped off and this truck is 100% Ready to go bright white is the color we shoot all of our videos in 1080p 60 frames per second So if you have HD capabilities on your computer tablet or smartphone device Turn them on right now because it is definitely your best way to check out the quality and condition of the vehicle before seeing it in Person and if you'd like to check out all the photos on this truck in the upper right hand part of your screen is a link To our website click that and check us out there comes with the 20 inch painted alloy rims with the chrome pockets Has firestone transforcel T285 60R 20 tires and these tires have I'd say 80 to 90 percent of the tread left on them And it's like that all the way around the truck on those tires and the frame and underbody is in really nice shape on here This truck came out of Oregon Front fenders in excellent shape get the projector lamp headlamps LED running lights factory fog lights front bumpers in pretty nice shape Does have the front bumper parking sensors Maybe one little ding on the front there, but nothing too Noticeable Hood is in nice condition. Do you get the chrome trimmed grill and the front passenger fender is in excellent shape as well Passengers side rim no scuffs or scrapes and as you go down this side of the truck take note of how clean the body is how Reflective and mirror like that paint is we take these HD videos So if you are far away or even if you're close by Just can't make the trip down, but you're still interested in purchasing the vehicle You can see the truck hear the truck and have confidence in the vehicle that you're looking at Before you even get here so that when you do get here There's absolutely no surprises and that's why we offer the summit auto fast-pass option in the upper right hand party screen A link right to our website where you can apply for financing get pre-approved See a payment quote even appraise the trade off from the comfort of your own home So when you get here all you have to do is drive the truck love it and you'll be all set to go Back tires have just as much tread as the front tires This one does have rear airbag suspension Right there, and it's got a controller for that suspension in the back And you can see that the frame and underbody is in excellent shape has all the remaining factory exhausts as well And as we go down this side No denser dings in the box very nice rear bumper is in excellent condition No dense or dings on that does have the full towing package Which includes the receiver hitch four pin and seven pin wiring and the tailgate is in really nice shape as well I didn't see any dense or dings on there. It does have the backup camera locking tailgate But it's got a couple little scuffs and scrapes, but light-duty usage for sure and In pretty nice condition it does have the cargo cam up there as well, which I'll show you in just a little bit How that looks? inside the truck As a good on the driver's side just as clean as that passenger side No denser dings in the box. You do get the fender flares with the Laramie package and for full disclosure this back rim is in excellent condition as well Down the rest of the side of the truck looks really good Didn't see any major dense or dings in the doors And it does have the heated fold up tow mirrors They also fold in and they have built-in directional signals and lights Entering go system on here. Just have to have your key in your pocket Put your hand in there. It'll automatically unlock you to get the Laramie package with the black leather seats Laramie and Boston to the back rest no rips or tears on those seats. They look really nice Both these seats are heated and cooled in the front and you do get the 40 20 40 split by the seating Memory driver seat lumbar. We have some max liner all-weather floor mats in this truck auto headlamps Power pedals audio controls in the back of the steering wheel and you do get power windows power locks and power mirrors These mirrors also power fold in. I always like showing both sides so that you know all the options are working on the truck We'll hop inside here and check out ignition miles and radio Get the Laramie animation at the beginning of there and you can see that this one is 44,998 Miles you do get the digital speedometer compass outside temp display and the instrument cluster is nice and clean You do get the leather wrapped heated steering wheel cruise controls on the right Bluetooth and information center controls on the left and there's no rips or tears on that steering wheel This one does come with the eight point four three C radio Which gives you a MFM and serious XM radio capabilities It also has the factory navigation system on it you get the six-speed automatic transmission with the optional tap shift and you also have the Different audio controls for a MFM and serious You also have your heated seats cooled seats and heated steering wheel buttons there and you can check out your backup cam as Well as your cargo cam So that goes over the bed so you can see what's going on back there Say if you're on the highway and something gets loose you want to see what's going on you can do that So pretty cool stuff there You can also do your climate controls here including your dual climate controls If you don't like doing the climate controls up there Don't worry you can have the more tactile buttons down here as well as a volume and tune control Turned out four-wheel drive factory brake controller Then you get more tactile heated and heated and cooled seat buttons stability control tow haul factory exhaust brake and your parking sensors You can turn those off and on you do get a hundred fifteen volt hundred fifty watt plug-in. This one does have the Alpine premium sound system passenger side floor mat and seat are an excellent conditional rips or chairs on them and the Headliners in really nice shape you do get those speakers in the ceiling part of that Alpine sound system Map lights power sign rear window button and then your homelink buttons for your garage door security systems and lighting systems Assist and 911 buttons in the rear view mirror.  They got that woodgrain trim as well And you do get the child safety locks on the back doors as well Bottoms of the doors all look really good We'll start it up. Take a quick look under the hood Starts right up We'll take a quick look under the hood. We have a six point seven-liter Comments diesel engine days very clean and very smooth Once again, this truck has been fully safe eat and inspect by a service shop as a fresh oil and filter change All the fruits have been checked and topped off in this truck is 100% Ready to go. I would highly recommend this truck from a quality and condition standpoint and to see more pictures of this truck One of our other 450 new and used cars trucks SUVs minivans Wranglers half tons three-quarter tons one tons You name it. We got it go our website right there www.summitauto.com Full pictures and descriptions of every single vehicle from two locations all at summit auto.com And if you like to check out more HD videos, you can go to youtube.com slash summit auto Remember to like subscribe and share on this video and all the videos that you see there Fact that he's second and you'll see a link to subscribe to our YouTube channel on your left It links more ram 2500 truck videos like this one and right you have not been to our website on the bottom link to this Vehicle on our website click those check us out And we really look forward to help you with this super clean 2016 ram 2500 crew cab long box Cummins diesel and bright white. Thanks again for checking out the video


And then you guys pwned in spaces and Rizzo with a two-out to run single. Yeah, I was fired up. I mean, I was kind of kicking myself for the pitch I threw Suzuki there. Just the slider got up on me a little bit and gave him an opportunity to get the barrel to it. So I was pretty sick about that. But yeah, our guys pressured their reliever to throw strikes. And we were patient and we waited them out. And then Rizzo coming up with a huge hit there. It just felt like one of those nights where we were going to make it happen. But glad that we were able to grind that out there in the eighth. Your thoughts on sweeping the double header and sweeping the series? Yeah, it's hard to win two in the same day. So I'll definitely take it. We're playing well and we can win in a lot of different ways. Pitching, defense hitting, our bullpen's nasty. So we've kind of showcased a lot of different things we can do. And I thought today was kind of the same strong starting pitching. Good defense, timely hitting. It was definitely a good day. The weather report did not look like this game was even going to happen. Can you just tell me through sort of what the lead up to first pitch was like for you? Yeah, I was looking at the radar all day. I played in the NL Central for a while. So I've dealt with rain and rainouts and delays and all that. So yeah, early in the day the radar wasn't looking good. And we were even kind of talking with the pitching coach and stuff about if we get rained out tonight, what day would I prefer pitching and stuff like that, but obviously I had to stay ready and prepared. And then towards the middle of the day the radar cleared up and I came to the park and knew that we were going to play. So yeah, it's definitely different. Doubleheader already made it different. And the threat of rain made it different, the rain delay and stuff.  How is that now? Are you at all concerned over? Yeah, it's good. I'm not concerned about it. I just kind of got like a zinger. I hit the base pretty hard and like twisted my foot a little bit. So the foot feels super stable and strong, but it's still one of those things like it doesn't feel completely normal, like my left ankle. So felt fine getting over there and then just hit the base pretty hard because I wanted that out pretty bad. So just kind of shot like a little zinger at my leg and then completely fine now. Yeah, kind of the opposite because of the score of the game. I was kind of telling myself like no matter what, don't make a mistake in the middle to these guys. Let's pitch to the edges. Let's keep making our pitches. You know, I've never been in that situation in the eighth inning before or anything or even the seventh. But the fact that the game was so close and obviously for us like winning really matters here. So I was really not pitching to preserve a perfect game or a no hitter. I was pitching to win. So definitely didn't want to walk guys, but also didn't want to make a mistake in the middle to any of those guys. I was OK staying away from the slug if I had to give up a single or if I had to walk a guy, I was willing to do it.